Pain threshold

What is a pain threshold?

A pain threshold is the point at which a stimulus becomes pain for you. In everyday use the word often also covers the point where you no longer want to endure it, which the pain literature calls the pain tolerance level. Both points can be measured, and both shift by the day and by the moment.

How a pain threshold is measured

With a little stamp on your arm and a scale that climbs until you say “now”.

A pressure gauge is a blunt button on a spring. Whoever works it presses slowly harder, until the other person signals that pressure is turning into pain. That number is the pain threshold. Pressing on until someone says it has been enough gives the second number: the tolerance.

That is what R. Defrin and colleagues did in the European Journal of Pain. Seventeen people who play masochistically on a regular basis, seventeen who do not, two spots on the body. The pressure-pain threshold lay significantly higher in the first group, and the more often someone played, the higher that number lay.

In a bedroom nobody measures in kilos. There you see the same thing in another form: the first slap that is no longer called “slap” but “ow”, and forty slaps later the moment your hand goes up. Two points, with a whole region in between where the pain is there and is welcome.

Why a pain threshold moves

Because both points are no property of your skin but of your whole situation.

The International Association for the Study of Pain, the body that fixes the technical language around pain, puts that movement into the definition itself. The tolerance level is there called the highest intensity someone is willing to accept in a given situation. Willing to: no capacity, but a decision. And that same body pointedly calls the threshold an experience of the person, not a property of the stimulus.

Within a session that movement has been measured. Elise Wuyts and Manuel Morrens write in their systematic review in The Journal of Sexual Medicine that pain thresholds lie higher in submissive participants than in others, and that a BDSM interaction can make them rise further. What that looks like in the first ten minutes is on warm-up.

Over months it moves too. In Defrin’s study the threshold was linked to how often someone played, though the researchers leave open what is cause and what is effect there.

What it gets you to know your pain threshold

Room to try something without having to ambush yourself.

• For you it becomes a scale instead of a switch. If you know where the pain begins and where it stops being welcome, you can settle halfway instead of choosing between nothing and too much.
• For whoever gives the blows your pain threshold is the only steering there is. Where it lies today sets the pace of the whole evening.
• For the two of you together the biggest source of misunderstanding disappears: most evenings go wrong not because someone hits too hard, but because two people meant a different point by the same word.

What it does not get you: less pain in the rest of your life. In the same study by Defrin the masochistic participants rated everyday pain as intense and as unpleasant as the control group. A high pain threshold in a session makes no gentler dentist and no lighter migraine.

How people seek out their pain threshold

From the bottom up, in small steps, with a word to stop.

The usual order is to build up in pace instead of in force, to start with the bare hand, and to reach for a tool only when the skin is already warm. Anyone who does it carefully asks for a number along the way. “Where are you now, from one to ten.” That number is a compass, not a score.

What marks the sloppy version is not hardness but haste: starting straight in with a flogger, or pushing on because last time it was fine. That last time says little. A bad night’s sleep, one glass of wine too many, a week of tension at work: it all counts. A stop word is there precisely for the evenings when it turns out differently than expected.

What a pain threshold is not

“A high pain threshold means you can take more.” No. A pain threshold says what you feel and accept, not what your tissue endures. Kidneys and tailbone do not rise with the threshold; that is why bruising has its own story.

“Whoever likes pain feels less pain.” Only within play. Defrin and colleagues found higher thresholds in masochists and an equally negative judgment of ordinary pain. The difference is in what the pain means, not in what comes in.

“A pain threshold is a kind of hard limit.” The other way around, really. A hard limit is an agreement that nothing changes. A pain threshold is a perception that turns out differently every moment, and that is exactly why it should be discussed out loud and not guessed at.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years into BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. I rarely get asked where someone’s pain threshold lies. I get asked whether hers is high enough.

That is the reversal that strikes me most. Women who email me think a norm exists and that they fall below it. There is no norm. There is a number that lies differently today than tomorrow, and that goes up on the evening itself anyway.

And the mistake I most often see beginners make: taking one evening as the yardstick. I start over from the bottom every time, even with someone I know. That costs ten minutes and it saves an evening.

What you can do yourself

• Say which of the two points you mean when you talk about your pain threshold: where it becomes pain, or where you want it to stop.
• Agree on a number scale beforehand, from one to ten, so you can say something along the way without breaking the mood.
• Let go of the pain threshold from a previous time. Start each session again at zero and build up in pace, not in force.
• Choose your stop word at the second point, not the first. Feeling pain is the play; not wanting more is the end.
• Don’t count the rise during the scene. Where you say yes halfway is not where your body will be glad about tomorrow; skin and joint do not rise with it.
• Do nothing with pain on an evening when you want to prove something to yourself. Then the tolerance becomes a decision instead of a perception.

More reading on the pain threshold

Within this glossary, warm-up explains how the threshold rises in the first ten minutes, impact play describes the family where this comes up most, and masochism is about why pain can be pleasant. On the blog, the difference between hard and soft pain lays out how differently two kinds of pain press on the same limit.

Beyond that, the IASP terminology list keeps the two concepts officially apart, and Defrin and colleagues show what happens when you measure them in masochists.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to find out where your pain threshold lies without having to guard the build-up yourself, the page about the BDSM date explains how such an evening goes and what is agreed on beforehand.

Sources

• Terminology. International Association for the Study of Pain, revised list, consulted 2026. The body that sets the international technical language around pain and thus the designated source for these two concepts. Gives the definition of pain threshold as “the minimum intensity of a stimulus that is perceived as painful”, the note that the threshold is the experience of the person and not the measured stimulus, the psychophysical convention that a threshold is the level at which half of the stimuli are recognized as painful, and the definition of pain tolerance level as “the maximum intensity of a pain-producing stimulus that a subject is willing to accept in a given situation”.
• Attitudes and emotions towards pain and sensitivity to painful stimuli among people routinely engaging in masochistic behaviour. R. Defrin, M. Arad, M.P. Ben-Sasson & K. Ginzburg, European Journal of Pain 19(9), 1321–1330, 2015 (DOI 10.1002/ejp.662). The only study that has measured pressure-pain thresholds in masochists alongside a control group. The full text is behind a paywall; what is used here is stated literally in the abstract: seventeen participants who play masochistically on a routine basis against seventeen control participants, pressure-pain thresholds on two body areas, a significantly higher threshold in the first group that correlated positively with how often someone played, less catastrophizing about pain, a positive link between experienced pleasure and pain intensity during play, and the finding that the same participants rated everyday pain as intense and as unpleasant as the control group. The authors expressly leave open whether the play raises the threshold or whether an existing disposition makes the play possible.
• The Biology of BDSM: A Systematic Review. Elise Wuyts & Manuel Morrens, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 19(1), 144–157, 2022 (DOI 10.1016/j.jsxm.2021.11.002). Systematic review of ten studies into the biology of BDSM. Gives the finding that pain thresholds turn out higher in submissive participants and that a BDSM interaction can make those thresholds rise further in them.
• pijngrens. Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. The dictionary of present-day Dutch. The entry exists, but carries the note that there is not yet a meaning profile: recorded are only the grammatical data, including that pijngrens is a compound of pijn and grens without a linking sound, a de-word with plural pijngrenzen.

Related terms

• Semenawa. The rope form in which this limit counts most heavily.

A pain threshold is the only limit in this list that changes place during play itself, and that makes it a different kind of agreement from the rest.

• Boundary. The broader family, and the difference from a limit that is fixed.
• Hard limit. The opposite pole: an agreement that nothing shifts.
• Warm-up. The phase in which the pain threshold measurably rises.
• Impact play. The practice in which this limit is most often sought out.
• Masochism. Why pain can be pleasant within a context and not outside it.
• Algolagnia. The old word for arousal through pain, with a history of its own.
• Bruising. What happens to the tissue while the threshold rises.
• Endorphin. The substance said to be behind it, and what has been measured of that.
• Pain play. The play in which this limit is sought out, with the theory behind it.