Fibromyalgia can significantly alter a person’s pain threshold. People with fibromyalgia often experience central sensitization, a condition where the central nervous system becomes hyper-reactive to pain signals. This means their threshold for perceiving pain is lower, and sensations that might not typically be painful—like light touch, mild pressure, or temperature changes—can cause significant discomfort. Sending gentle hugs.

I’ve had fibromyalgia since 2012 but before that I knew I had high pain tolerance already. I remember when I was younger I accidentally fell on a grill and cut my arm but I was not aware until somebody told me that my arm was dripping with blood. Fast forward 20 years later, just few days ago, I acciddentally kneeled on a blade from a food processor that fell from the kitchen cabinet. It ripped my pants and cut near my knee. I thought I just banged my knee, but then I felt this wet stuff flowing from my leg and didn’t realized that I had a big cut. Thankfully, my husband took me to the ER and I got stitches. So I think my pain tolerance is still high. My doctor said that it’s actually higher now because of the pain I deal with everyday with Fibromyalgia.

I think a little bit of both can be true, depends on how you look at it. Maybe it is the difference between a mental and physical tolerance.

I experience heightened pain signals to certain stimuli that indicate a very low physical threshold.

But the fact that I’ve experienced chronic pain for as long as I have has definitely heightened that mental threshold or tolerance to coping with pain.

Also, for those still menstruating, our pain threshold lowers during the luteal phase and raises during the other phases. I imagine this continues in some way after menopause, but I couldn’t speak to it.

Yes,I agree with all of you, I was diagnosed with both fibro and chronic fatigue in 2016 after I had radiation treatments to get rid of the cancer in my uterus and was successful, thankfully, I didn't have to have chemo too. It does seem like my fibro and CFS is getting worse. Some days are worse than others though, for me it depends on how our weather is, lately, we have been getting a lot of snow and cold weather but that is normal for us living in SE Michigan, but then it also depends on what my stress level is and how busy I was.

Yes it makes sense