In Georges St-Pierre's work The Way of the Fight, he notes an interesting and comedic line about how pain is impacted by mood:
It's bizarre, a punch in the face hurts less when you win than when you lose.
That line is a great one which really takes you to the essence of the idea that the mind can really enhance and lessen the amount of pain one feels. How you view something, your mental state and overall mood can have an immense impact on the pain you feel. An article from Science Daily touches on this concept:
Dr. Chantal Berna and colleagues used brain imaging to see how healthy volunteers responded to pain while feeling low. Their findings revealed that inducing depressed mood disrupted a portion of the participants' neurocircuitry that regulates emotion, causing an enhanced perception of pain. In other words, as explained by Dr. Berna, "when the healthy people were made sad by negative thoughts and depressing music, we found that their brains processed pain more emotionally, which lead to them finding the pain more unpleasant."
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