I only smoked weed when I was young, but it would generally make it worse (and would sometimes add nausea). I have some pretty good pain management techniques I use, and I think being high just takes my focus off them. I also can’t stand the dopey feeling and won’t even take opioids unless I really need to. I broke my leg a while ago and limped home on it thinking I’d just sprained it, eventually went to the ER and it took about 18 hours after the accident until I gave up and asked for some tramadol. The downside is, if I tell a nurse or doctor that I’m in extreme pain, they tend to not fully believe me because I’ll look quite calm.
Mostly slow deep breathing and focusing on relaxing and trying to lower your heart rate, basically just trying to calm down. Pain is just signals in your brain like any other though or feeling. I’m pretty convinced you can exert a reasonable amount of control over it. I’m no expert on the subject and I haven’t trained to do it or anything, I’ve just injured myself a lot and that’s what has worked for me. It’s gotten me through a fair amount of serious injuries without much stress, the only trouble I’ve found is that I need to continually focus on doing it, and if I’ve been up in the hospital all night, I’ll eventually get worn out and exhausted, and it won’t work quite as well.
I don’t think there’s any limit to how proficient you can get at it. I think about that Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire and managed to calmly sit through burning to death, there’s no way anybody could do that without having total control over their pain response. I’ve obviously never experienced anything that traumatic, but I have been in situations where I felt the symptoms of shock setting in and managed to calm myself down enough to get on with things.
