Ice Cube Pain Threshold Test

Hi there

I realise this is not very scientific and may be total hogwash but I'm interested to see if anyone tried it before going into labour and whether it was an indicator of how they dealt with the pain.

Basically, a relative told me that in an old childbirth book they found something that said you can find out your pain threshold by holding an ice cube in your hand and seeing how long you can hold on. So they both did it and the woman could hold on to the ice cube much longer than her hubbie.

I've tried it too and found the first 20 seconds bad, bad, bad then started trying to concentrate on Midsomer Murders on TV and ended up holding on to it until it melted. So moral of the story is to make sure I'm watching some crappy murder mystery when I go into labour!

Has anyone else tried it and what did they think?

Wow - I've never heard of it, but it's interesting! I'm tempted to go & try but I might find that my threshold is lower than I thought... :redface:

In one of my antenatal classes, the presenter told us to hold on to an icecube for 1 minute to get an idea of how contractions would be. HAH! Totally misleading! My contractions were around 1,000 times more painful!! Having said that, I was induced, and they do say that induced labours are more painful. But I'm not at all convinced by the icecube test!

Hi Firstkid

Sorry I didn't mean to say that holding an ice cube was comparable to contraction pain (I'm sure as you said that the latter is much, much more painful) just that perhaps it could be an indication of the variability in people's pain thresholds and perhaps those who can hold on to the ice cube for longer find labour 'easier' than those who can't. For instance, my brother-in-law could only hold on for 20 seconds whereas his wife did well over a minute.

For me it was quite useful (even if not totally realistic) as it gave me a chance to see how I would react and what worked best at getting my mind off it. At 15 seconds I was ready to give up but made myself relax and think about something else and after that it was much more bearable so I was quite chuffed in the end. I think it was good 'practice' as it's hard in everyday life to actually put yourself in painful situations just to see how you're going to react.

Hi Fionas,

Sorry - I wasn't clear. I knew you weren't comparing the icecube to labour - it just reminded me of the antenatal class, and how it gave me the completely wrong idea of what to expect!!

I think you're right, though. The icecube thing does give you practice in taking your mind off discomfort. As I've just written in another post, the most valuable strategy for me in labour was to get in "the zone" - accept the pain and try not to tense up, as that makes things even harder. You could definitely practice this with an icecube. Maybe that's what my antenatal teacher was getting at, and it was just wishful thinking on my part that labour would be something similar!!

Yep, totally agree Firstkid. I've been reading Juju Sundin's book and the main thing I've taken from that so far is as you've said, to try really hard not to tense up, accept it as 'good pain' and do anything you can to relax. So it was good to be able to practice that with the ice cube. Reluctant to do it again though incase the second time around I'm not as 'good'!

Was gonna go give it ago Fiona... but then i thought i'd probably drop the ice cube straight away and then scare myself. Teeheehe...

We did this in our antenatal classes. They got us to hold the ice cude for a minute and be silent. Then they got us to hold another ice cube for a minute but have a conversation with our partner. When we were talking it seemed like a shorter amount of time holding the ice, even though it ws the same. The idea of it was basically to tell us to do stuff to distract us from the pain in labour, but to be honest, once I was in full on labour, I forgot all about distracting myself and just went into my own world nd wasnt interested in talking to anyone.

I'm a little bit unsure about the idea of ice-cubes, pinching the inner thigh, chinese burns etc as a way of finding out about one's pain tolerance. I've seen that in books and heard about in in some ante-natal classes. When I was first pregnant, I heard people talking about birth in terms of enduring and toughing out the pain. One friend told me her plan was to turn up her music really loud and just scream as much as she wanted to.

But in the end, a totally different way of looking at things is what helped me the most. I changed from regarding the pain of birth as something to either avoid or something to somehow endure. Hoping that I could somehow just be tough enough to just put up with it. Any way I looked at it, I was still focussing on The Pain. Figuring how to cheat it.

I'm rambling here a bit as I think out loud. I hope it's not too annoying LOL!

Reading Ina May Gaskin's "Spiritual Midwifery" and a few books by Sheila Kitzinger is what started the shift in my thinking. By the time I'd read those books I was starting to regard my up-coming birth experience as something to almost jealously treasure. I wanted the full experience. I was sparked to a kind of envy by the stories in those books and by the stories some birth veterans told me. I started to look forward to the intensity and the adventure. I've done the same when I've seen people doing Adventure Racing on TV. My body itches and my mind yearns to be allowed to have a go - but I know that if I did, I would surely experience intense pain, suffering and discomfort - but that would be part of the achievment and part of the experience.

So I began to prepare for birth in terms of the whole experience, not just in terms of How To Survive the Pain. It helped me see the pain as just a normal part of the effort and the exertion - the same as any "extreme" sport! Whether it's roller-skating, bike riding, pilates, dance, running - whatever, intense physical sensations accompany intense effort. If you're a wuss like me, absolute agony accompanies intense effort! Learning to yield to that, to accept it and develop the mental toughness to persevere and keep going even when it's not fun or easy any more is the thing that prepared me for the rigors of birth the most. It hurts. I hate it. Do I quit? No. Keep going. But it hurts. I hate it. Do I quit? No. Keep going. Ad nauseum, ad infinitum!

Despite the agony, athletes actually look forward to etheir event. I think we can do the same - we know it's going to take everything we've got to give, but we can actually look forward to the high adventure of giving birth. Not just to getting the sweet little baby - but the actual drama of being in labour and giving birth. Putting the pain in the context of this huge peak experience helped me extract some of the fear and apprehension about the pain. I think we tolerate pain in our working arm and leg muscles more than we tolerate pain from a working uterus and stretching cervix partly because one kind of pain is familar to us, and fear of the unknown is a factor - and fear exacerbates pain. In some cultures, women don't fear labour pain any more than they fear the pain of carrying 10 gallons of water on their head for three miles.

A week before I had the baby, an Irish mam said to me in the street, "And are ye lookin' forward to yer labour?" I realised, with suprise, that I actually was.

One of my doula clients totally blew me away when she told me how at a dinner party, a total stranger came up and started lecturing her on how she should have all the drugs - pethidine, epidural etc. She tried to protest and said, "But I want the pain. I want to feel. I embrace the pain." The woman looked at her like she was nuts and said to her partner, "Make sure she has everything!!"

This blew me away because although I'd gotten to the point where I could accept the pain was going to accompany the effort, for her to say, "I embrace the pain" I thought was huge! Sure enough, she managed her first labour beautifully with this mental attitude, even though her baby was presenting with a slightly askew angle.

Karina, that going deep into your own world is wonderful. The birth hormones help you do that, it's the best thing - some people call it "the zone", some people call in "labour land". When you're in that state, hormones are flowing to make your labour more efficient (oxytocin) and pain-killing hormones are flowing at optimum levels, too (endorphins). So we try to do things that assist a woman to drift away into that state, and try not to distract her in any way. Talking to a woman who is in this place is not recommended. As Sarah Buckley puts it, 'your hormones are your helpers'.

Happy birthing everyone.

Hello, very interesting idea, however for me contraction pain is so wildly different to any other sort of pain I'm not sure this theory holds. For example, I recently had oral surgery to remove a wisdom tooth that involved a sizeable piece of jaw coming out and tolerated the after effects quite well. Likewise managed to still walk on a broken toe (where the two pieces of bone had come apart and one had rotated) but contraction pain is so much more overwhelming, and no doubt involves a different blend of neurochemicals affecting pain receptors differently.

I must say I always wonder about pain thresholds when I see the rugby guys running around throwing themselves around, breaking noses and toes and fingers and seeming reasonably unaffected - maybe they just chew down handfuls of drugs then get back on with it?

Nice party trick to try out on one's husband though (bearing in mind they had much thicker skin on their hands - better trick would be to try it under your arm or somewhere similarly sensitive...)!