# Book Review: My Bodyguard Brain – How Your Brain Uses Pain to Protect You

## TL;DR

This book review explains how a child-friendly resource helps children and parents understand the brain's role in pain and its impact on daily life.

## Contribution

The book introduces a child-friendly explanation of how the brain uses pain as a protective mechanism and addresses its social and emotional triggers.

## Key findings

- Ongoing pain affects 25-33% of children and adolescents.
- Chronic pain in children often leads to reduced school, sports, and social activities.
- Over half of children with pain become adults with pain, and 50% have a parent with chronic pain.

## Abstract

Review of a practical resource providing children with ongoing pain (and their parents) information of the neurobiology of pain. The book ‘My Bodyguard Brain – How your brain uses pain to protect you’ explains why we feel pain. The brain makes pain when it notices any sort of danger. Pain is associated with acute injury but it can also be evoked by social interaction and unpleasant emotion that children don’t know how to deal with. The text and drawings explain in a child-friendly way how your ‘Bodyguard’ brain wants to look after you, and how it sometimes gets a bit ‘too good’ at that job. It is a book I would recommend for teachers and clinicians dealing with children experiencing chronic pain. Ongoing pain in children is a huge problem in society. Paediatric pain should matter to everyone. It affects approximately one quarter to one third of all children and adolescents. Children with chronic pain have often cut back all their normal activities like school, sports, social life and sleep. Almost 60% of these children become adults experiencing pain and 50% of the children with pain has a parent suffering from chronic pain. Understanding what you feel will turn the oversensitive alarm down and is the first step to improve the lives of children and adolescents with pain.