Where do the two questions lead?
Ask “how do we get less pain?” and the logic follows naturally: quieten the signal, settle the part that hurts, get through the week. There is nothing wrong with that question, sometimes it is exactly the right one, and modern medicine answers it better than any generation in history has been able to. Notice where the question ends: at zero. Its best possible outcome is the absence of something.
Ask “how do we get more life?” and everything changes: what you measure, what you do, and what counts as success. Now the work is to strengthen the whole rather than silence the part: wake the body up rather than put it to sleep, reduce the cause rather than manage the effect, build capacity rather than subtract symptoms. Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, the standard reference of medical language, draws the same distinction: health is “a state of optimal physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.” Most of what we call healthcare works on the second half of that sentence. Very little works on the first.
What is the science of the second question?
The second question has a scientific tradition of its own. The medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky called it salutogenesis: the study of the origins of health, as distinct from pathogenesis, the study of the origins of disease. His point was simple and radical: understanding what breaks people does not automatically teach you what builds them. Strengthening a person’s capacity to adapt is its own discipline, with its own methods, and it is the discipline Diskin Life is built on.
How does your chemistry know which question you’re living?
The two directions are not just philosophy. They are two different chemistries, and your body brews one or the other all day long. In a state of safety, connection and enjoyment, the signalling runs toward growth and repair: dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, the bonding and reward molecules, alongside growth-supportive hormones. Karolinska research on oxytocin and Nature Neuroscience work on bonding describe this as the physiology of connection: blood pressure settles, the stress axis quietens, the body invests in maintenance.
In a state of threat, the same body changes suppliers: cortisol, norepinephrine, inflammatory cytokines, histamine, superb chemistry for surviving the next five minutes, corrosive chemistry for living the next five years. Rockefeller University’s Bruce McEwen, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed how the same stress mediators that protect us acutely become damaging when they never switch off. And Stanford immunology confirms the immune side: short stress sharpens defences; sustained stress dysregulates them.
Cell biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, whose research and teaching have long resonated with Dr Ari’s own understanding of health, distils this into a single sentence: a cell, and a person, cannot be in growth and protection at the same time. The chemistry of fear and the chemistry of love are both real, both measurable, and to a remarkable degree, we get a say in which one runs.
What does pain actually measure?
Less than most of us assume, and something more interesting than we were taught. For a long time pain was understood as a readout, a signal proportional to tissue damage, travelling up from the injured part like a reading from a gauge. Decades of pain science have dismantled that picture. Australian pain researcher Lorimer Moseley, reviewing fifteen years of the field in the Journal of Pain, describes pain instead as an output: something the brain produces, drawing on signals from the body but also on context, history, expectation and perceived threat, in order to protect you.
This is not a claim that pain is imaginary, quite the reverse. It is a claim that pain is a judgement about danger rather than a measurement of damage, which explains a great deal that a gauge model cannot: why the same injury hurts differently on different days, why a soldier can walk on a broken bone, why anxiety amplifies an ache, and why a paper cut on a finger can outshout something far more serious elsewhere.
What do scans of people with no pain show?
The most bracing evidence comes from imaging people who feel completely fine. Mayo Clinic researchers pooled thirty-three studies of more than three thousand adults with no back pain at all, and reported the findings in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. Among symptom-free twenty-year-olds, thirty-seven per cent already had disc degeneration and thirty per cent had a disc bulge. Among symptom-free eighty-year-olds, ninety-six per cent had degeneration and eighty-four per cent had a bulge.
None of these people had any complaint. The changes were, in the authors’ framing, part of normal ageing rather than evidence of a problem, grey hair for the spine. Which cuts both ways, and both ways matter. A frightening-sounding report does not automatically explain a person’s pain. And a clean report does not mean a system is thriving.
Why is zero a poor finish line?
Put those two findings together and the limitation of the first question becomes concrete. If pain is a protective judgement rather than a damage meter, then its absence is not proof that all is well: only that the system is not currently issuing a warning. Silence is not a report of health. It is the absence of a report.
Everyone knows this intuitively in other domains. Nobody believes their car is in excellent condition solely because no light is on. Nobody concludes their finances are strong because the bank has not rung. In every other part of life we distinguish between no bad news and good news. Health is the one place we routinely confuse the two, largely because the whole apparatus we have built is designed to detect bad news, and simply has no instrument pointed at the other direction.
This is the practical reason the two questions lead to different places. Aim at less pain and you will stop when it stops hurting, which for most people is the moment before the interesting part begins. Aim at more life and the absence of pain is where you start, the floor, not the ceiling.
Does this mean pain should be ignored?
Emphatically not, and it would be a serious misreading of everything above. Pain is information, and some of it is urgent.
Pain that is new, severe or unexplained deserves proper attention. So does pain following significant injury; pain with fever or unexplained weight loss; night pain that wakes you; weakness or numbness that is spreading; any change in bladder or bowel control; or pain that has changed its character. These are matters for a medical doctor, promptly, and nothing in the second question replaces that.
The argument here is not that pain is unimportant. It is that pain is a poor instrument for measuring how well you are, too easily silent while things decline, too easily loud when nothing serious is wrong. Both of those are reasons to take it seriously, and reasons not to make it your only instrument.
What does this look like in practice?
At Diskin Life the two-arrows philosophy is not a slogan; it is the design of the care. We adjust rather than mask, gentle Nervous System Adjustments directed at how your Master Regulator is functioning, not at chasing the loudest symptom. We assess the whole person, because a part never tells the whole story. We work to wake the body’s own regulation up, the Salutogenic direction, and we put education alongside care, through the 13 Vitality By Design presentations, so the lifestyle that surrounds the care points the same way the care does.
Our 4 Levels of Spiraling Health map the two questions precisely. Getting back to zero, up to the waterline, where nothing hurts, is where the first question ends. The levels above the waterline are where the second one begins: energy that outlasts the day, a system that recovers quickly, capacity you can spend on the life you actually want. That is also why the Life Assessment measures how your nervous system is functioning rather than only asking where it hurts, you cannot build above the waterline from a symptom checklist.
None of this replaces medicine, and it is not meant to. When “less pain” is the urgent question, medicine answers it well, and we are glad it exists. Our work simply answers the other question, the one that begins where zero ends: how much life can this body support?
General information only, not a diagnosis or personal health advice. For questions about your health, please also speak with your GP.