If you’ve spent time learning about pain, you may have come across Lorimer Moseley, a well-known pain researcher from Australia. His work is widely recommended in pain education programs, and you can explore some of it on the Learn About Pain page of my website.

Moseley is now applying what we’ve learned about pain to a broader group of conditions he calls the “Five Big Protective Disorders”: pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. When chronic, he suggests that all of these conditions may be protective responses that have become overprotective and persistent. Here’s a quick overview of how these responses can be protective:

• Pain – Pain captures our attention so we can protect a potentially injured or threatened body part. It motivates action to increase safety.
• Fatigue – Fatigue helps conserve energy, promote recovery, and encourage rest when the system perceives depletion or threat.
• Anxiety – Anxiety increases vigilance and prepares us to detect and avoid potential danger.
• Low mood/depression – Low mood can reduce activity, risk-taking, and effort during times of loss, significant stress, or overwhelm.
• Post-traumatic stress – After a threatening or overwhelming experience, the nervous system may stay on high alert. Hypervigilance, avoidance, and strong emotional reactions are all ways the body tries to prevent future harm.

Recovery as relearning

When we think about these conditions as persistent overprotection, recovery begins to look different. Rather than focusing solely on symptom reduction or tissue repair, recovery becomes about learning—helping the brain and nervous system update outdated predictions about danger and safety. In other words, recovery becomes less about “fixing what is broken” and more about retraining a system that has tried so hard to keep us safe that it has learned to protect too much.

Danger learning and safety learning

It can be helpful to frame this retraining as danger learning and safety learning. Danger learning occurs when the brain learns to perceive something as a threat. Danger learning happens quickly, promoting immediate survival by creating strong, fast-acting fear responses.

In contrast, safety learning is slower, requiring repeated experiences to teach the brain that a situation is no longer hazardous, effectively inhibiting fear responses over time. It involves helping the brain and nervous system update their predictions by learning, “This is safe—I don’t need this level of protection here.” The goal is not to eliminate protection, but to help the system respond more accurately, reserving protective responses for genuine danger rather than learned or outdated threats.

Explicit learning and implicit learning

It’s also helpful to distinguish between two different ways of learning: explicit learning and implicit learning.

Explicit learning is conscious, verbal, and logical. It’s the kind of learning where you can say, “I know this,” or “I understand this.”

Implicit learning is unconscious, emotional, sensory, and experiential. It shapes gut reactions, habits, conditioned responses, and automatic feelings of safety or danger—often outside conscious awareness. It’s learning that comes through experience.

Understanding these two ways of learning matters because many chronic protective responses are rooted in implicit danger learning. We might not think we are in danger, and in fact, we might know that we are safe. But, on an unconscious, implicit level, our nervous system is still predicting danger. Lasting change often requires implicit safety learning—new lived experiences that help the nervous system genuinely update how it identifies and predicts threat.

A note on embodiment and learning

Embodiment is the experience of being connected to and aware of your body, emotions, sensations, and internal experience—and allowing that experience to inform how you relate to yourself and the world around you. Many people learn to disconnect from aspects of their bodily and emotional experience as a way of surviving difficult or overwhelming experiences, especially early in life. This disconnection is often adaptive and protective.

Explaining embodiment fully deserves its own post, but it’s important to briefly mention here because embodiment can help bridge explicit and implicit learning. When we are more connected to our internal experience, intellectual understanding is more likely to become felt and integrated—not just something we think, but something the nervous system begins to experience as true. This is part of why practices that support embodiment—such as therapy, mindfulness, somatic work, and other mind-body approaches—can play such an important role in healing.

More about danger learning

While we often think of more obvious dangers as threats (things like physical injury or unsafe situations), the brain can also learn to interpret a remarkably wide range of experiences as threatening. Below, I’ve listed examples of common places (with a few examples of each) to find danger learning.

• Movement: specific movements (bending, lifting, twisting), general activities (walking), repetitive tasks (sitting to standing)
• Body sensations: tightness, tingling, fatigue, dizziness, heart rate changes, gut sensations
• Contexts or environments: driving, workplaces, social situations, medical settings, crowds
• Emotions: stress, anger, sadness, grief, overwhelm
• Thoughts: “I can’t do this,” “This is getting worse,” “I won’t be able to cope,” “What’s the point?”
• Time-based patterns: time of day, duration of activity, anticipated crashes or flare-ups
• Social and relational experiences: conflict, feeling misunderstood, encountering or being around certain people, asking for help, feeling judged
• Sensory input: light, sound, smell, temperature
• Food: specific foods, hydration, meal timing, portion size
• Sleep: difficulty falling asleep, waking during the night, poor sleep quality
• Medical: diagnoses, imaging findings, practitioner language, previous medical trauma

The brain can learn to associate almost anything with danger. In Lorimer Moseley’s framework, these learned danger cues are called DIMs, which stands for danger-in-me. Because many DIMs are learned implicitly through past experiences, we can be completely unaware of them. Some are obvious, while others can be surprisingly subtle and tricky to find.

Mapping your own danger learning

Pain is not a direct measure of tissue damage. Rather, pain is a protective alarm that sounds when the brain perceives that the body might be in danger. This means that understanding what your brain has learned to associate with danger can be an essential part of recovery—not just for chronic pain, but for many persistent protective symptoms. 

A helpful starting point is to gently begin identifying your own DIMs. This is not about judging whether your brain’s associations are rational or accurate. It’s simply about understanding the protective patterns your system has learned. Awareness creates the foundation for change.

More about safety learning

We can use safety learning to retrain a system that has become overprotective, and it is important to think about learning safety both explicitly and implicitly.

Explicit safety learning

Explicit safety learning involves conscious, cognitive understanding. This kind of learning can happen through books, courses, podcasts, therapy, or educational conversations. In the context of chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety, or other protective symptoms, learning about the neuroscience behind these conditions and about how these protective systems work can reduce fear, create hope, and begin shifting harmful beliefs. Reading this blog post is an example of explicit safety learning.

Implicit safety learning

You may consciously know you are safe, but deeper parts of your nervous system may still respond as though danger is present. The brain’s protective systems are most powerfully updated through repeated, credible experiences of safety rather than from information alone. In other words, recovery often requires helping the body and nervous system experience safety often enough that protection no longer feels necessary.

This helps explain why insight alone may not fully resolve chronic symptoms. You can understand pain science, believe in mind-body recovery, and yet still experience symptoms if your implicit protective system has not yet updated.

How implicit safety learning happens

Safety learning often involves intentionally creating experiences that provide the brain with new evidence: evidence that movement, sensations, emotions, or situations may be safer than previously predicted. Safety learning is most effective when experiences are tolerable, believable, and repeatable. Too much too fast may reinforce danger. A helpful idea for this work is: go slow to go fast. Safety learning may be supported by:

• Graded exposure
• Somatic tracking
• Emotional exposure
• Corrective experiences
• Play
• Pleasure
• Self-compassion
• Nervous system regulation
• Graded activity
• Connection

We want to give our nervous systems repeated experiences that contradict danger predictions. In other words, we want to experience safety repeatedly until the nervous system updates. Over time, we will increase our safety cues, or what Lorimer Moseley refers to as SIMs—safety-in-me. And when our brain perceives there to be more credible evidence of safety than of danger, the protective responses will no longer be needed.

How therapy can support safety learning

Therapy can support both explicit and implicit safety learning, and it can also help uncover danger learning that is more difficult to recognize on our own. Put simply, therapy can help make the implicit more explicit—bringing automatic or outside-of-awareness patterns into awareness.

On an explicit level, therapy can help people make sense of their symptoms through a new lens: learning about protective responses, danger learning, and the ways the nervous system adapts through experience.

Fully explaining how therapy supports implicit learning would require another lengthy post. But, in short, experiential approaches to therapy help bring older protective patterns into awareness while creating new experiences that gently challenge and update them. This can be especially important for people with histories of relational trauma. Over time, the therapeutic relationship itself can become a place where vulnerability feels safer and connection becomes possible without as much protection.

As this happens, emotions that once felt overwhelming may become more tolerable, and body sensations may feel less threatening. Rather than simply trying to eliminate symptoms, therapy can support the gradual retraining of a system that has learned to expect danger—helping the brain and body rediscover safety, flexibility, and trust through lived experience.