Here's why soothing sounds might calm more than your mind.
Healthcare practitioners and even beauty professionals, this one’s a heads-up for you: a new study is highlighting how hearing unpleasantries when an individual is already in pain can make the experience all the more excruciating.
A February 2026 study was published in Annals of Neurology, led by neurology and public health researchers at Germany’s University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, as well as U.S.-based Dartmouth University and the University of Colorado. They posited that “heightened sensitivity to noxious stimulation is a hallmark of chronic pain,” and they investigated specifically how auditory exposure—also known as sound—might affect this.
They compared 142 adults with chronic back pain against 51 pain-free individuals, measuring both their individual reactions to loud sounds and physical pressure, while monitoring their brain activity via MRI while the participants underwent exposure to those stimuli.
Chronic back pain patients found both the sounds and the pressure significantly more unpleasant than pain-free participants did. The MRIs showed this wasn’t imagined: their brains showed distinct patterns of overactivity and underactivity in regions involved in processing sensation and regulating emotional responses.
Importantly, the brain patterns seen among the chronic back pain patients closely resembled those seen in fibromyalgia patients, suggesting these conditions may share a common underlying mechanism of generalized sensory overload—sometimes called “central sensitization.”
The study also tested a psychological treatment called Pain Reprocessing Therapy, which is designed to help patients reframe how their brain interprets pain signals. It produced modest reductions in sound sensitivity alongside changes in brain activity.
The big takeaway is that chronic back pain appears to be a whole-brain, whole-body sensitivity disorder—not just localized to one physical site—and that psychological treatments targeting the brain’s interpretation of sensation may help dial down that systemic hypersensitivity.
If you’ve ever gone in for a back or neck adjustment, body waxing service, pedicure, or another treatment that might involve pain, maybe you already know: pleasant sights and sounds help. And now this research shows that the professional who vents really can make it all the more painful.
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