The Parable of the Second Arrow: Discovering the Difference Between Pain and Suffering

By Shamash Alidina · Updated 20 July 2026

The short version: the first arrow is the pain itself — the headache, the loss, the rejection. The second arrow is what your mind does next: why me? I should have known better. What if this gets worse? The first arrow is often unavoidable. The second one, with practice, becomes optional.

Below is the parable, a very ordinary example from my own week, and what actually helps — including what modern pain research calls the same thing.

The Parable of the Second Arrow

I want to share a story with you and it’s the story of the two arrows. This is a story originally from Buddhism, and is often used in mindfulness and also in ACT as well.

So the story goes like this:

You are walking in the woods and suddenly you get struck by an arrow (someone fires an arrow at you) and it hits your arm and it really, really hurts - it’s very painful and you feel that physical pain in your arm, and it’s bleeding. And then immediately your mind starts to think - “Oh my god, what’s gonna happen? What if I bleed to death? What if this is infected and I can’t walk back properly? Or I lose energy and I can’t get back to my family? What’s gonna happen to my family? What’s gonna be happening to my husband / my wife / my children? What’s gonna happen to me or what’s going to happen to their future, how will they be doing?”

The Buddha describes the first arrow as the physical pain and the second arrow is what your mind does - it starts thinking about the worst scenario that can happen. And he says “be warned of the second arrow.”

The first arrow represents the pain - the actual physical pain, and the second arrow represents what you call suffering. So we distinguish between pain and suffering.

Understanding the Second Arrow Story

There’s a sense of resistance to it - not accepting it, not allowing it to be there and accepting the reality of the situation. We fight with the reality of the way things are right now and so we turn the pain into suffering or we add suffering on top.

There’s an equation that’s often used in ACT which is:

Pain x Resistance = Suffering

The more that you resist or deny or fight or argue with the pain- which is already there, the more suffering you experience.

What the second arrow looked like for me last week

Let me give you a completely unglamorous example, because I think the parable can sound rather grand and the reality usually isn’t.

I woke up with a headache.

That was the first arrow. Just the pain of a headache — unpleasant, but simple enough.

Then the second arrow arrived, and it took a few different forms.

First the why thoughts. Why this? Why me? Why is this happening to me today of all days?

Then the should thoughts, which are my personal speciality:

I should have drunk more water.
I should have gone to bed earlier.
I should have spent less time on screens.
I should have gone for a walk.
I should have eaten more healthily.

Now here’s the thing. All of those may well be true. They’re not irrational. Any doctor would nod along.

But in that particular moment — with a headache already present, already happening — I’m honestly not sure any of them were helpful. I couldn’t go back and drink more water yesterday. All the thoughts did was add a layer of blame on top of a head that already hurt.

That’s the second arrow. Not the headache. The commentary about the headache.

And then the third arrow, and the fourth

Here’s the part I’ve come to think matters most, and it took me a long time to see.

If you start fighting your second arrows, you get more arrows.

You notice the “I should have gone to bed earlier” thought, and you argue with it — stop being so hard on yourself, that’s not helpful thinking, you know better than this, you teach this for a living. And now there’s a third arrow. Then you feel bad about feeling bad about feeling bad, and there’s a fourth.

They keep layering up. I’ve watched this happen in myself and in a great many clients over the years. The struggle against the second arrow is simply a more sophisticated way of firing arrows at yourself.

So what actually helps? Stop, notice, choose, act

What works best for me — and for the people I work with — isn’t fighting those thoughts at all. It’s something much less dramatic:

1. Stop. Just briefly. Nothing clever.

2. Notice what’s arrived. I say to myself, almost lightly: ah, there’s the second arrow. Or simply, I notice I’m having the thought that I should have gone to bed earlier. That small phrase — I notice I’m having the thought that — does a surprising amount of work. It puts a little space, a little distance, between me and the thought. In ACT this is called defusion, or unhooking. I’ve written about four strange ways to defuse your thinking if you’d like the practical version.

3. Make a mindful choice. Then I ask myself one of two questions:

How can I best take care of myself right now? What valued action can I take, right now, with this headache present?

4. Take the action. For me that morning it was unremarkable: a shower, a glass of water, a gentle walk, and a bit of rest. Nothing profound. But notice what’s different — those are things I did for myself, rather than things I said at myself.

The headache, incidentally, was still there for a while. That’s rather the point. Acceptance isn’t a technique for removing the first arrow. It’s what stops you firing the second.

What modern pain research calls the same thing

Here’s something I find genuinely striking: psychology has, quite independently, measured the second arrow.

It’s called pain catastrophising, and it’s assessed with the Pain Catastrophizing Scale, developed by Michael Sullivan and Scott Bishop at Dalhousie University in 1995. It’s a 13-item scale with three subscales — rumination, magnification and helplessness.

Look at those three again and compare them with my morning. Rumination is why me, why today. Magnification is what if this gets worse. Helplessness is I should have, and now it’s too late. Twenty-five-hundred-year-old parable, meet the modern questionnaire.

And the finding that matters most: in patients with soft-tissue injuries, how much someone catastrophised predicted their disability over and above the pain itself (Sullivan et al., Pain, 1998). It also predicted disability independently of depression and anxiety.

Read that again, because it’s the parable stated in clinical language: the second arrow was doing damage the first arrow didn’t account for. The scale has since been translated into 27 languages and built into pain clinics worldwide.

One honest caveat: this research is about chronic and injury-related pain, and it’s correlational — it doesn’t prove that changing your thinking cures pain. It also isn’t a substitute for medical care. But it does suggest the Buddha noticed something real.

Three more ways to reduce the suffering

That’s a useful story to remember whenever you have any kind of difficult situation. It could be difficult internal experiences - there could be difficult emotions like sadness, anxiety, frustration, or anger, or it could be to do with difficult thoughts; it could be difficult sensations like literal physical pain or chronic pain.

How do you reduce that suffering? Here are some ideas:

Just remembering that story is a good start to reflect on how your actions, your behaviour, and the way you’re thinking about it may be actually leading to more suffering than you need to actually experience.
Meeting the feeling of pain with self-compassion and kindness. Place your hand gently wherever you feel the pain, and see if you can make space for it. (Here’s a five-minute self-compassion meditation if that’s the bit you find hard.)
Rate your level of acceptance of the pain. Is it 1/10 or 5/10 for example? Then ask yourself ‘how can I gently increase how much I’m accepting this difficult experience right now, as it’s already here?’

That’s the story of the second arrow - it’s there to help you distinguish the difference between pain and suffering.

Frequently asked questions

What is the parable of the second arrow? A Buddhist teaching in which being struck by an arrow represents unavoidable pain, and the mind’s reaction — the worry, blame and catastrophising that follows — is a second arrow you fire at yourself.

What’s the difference between pain and suffering? Pain is the raw experience: the headache, the grief, the injury. Suffering is what gets added by resisting it. In ACT it’s sometimes written as Pain × Resistance = Suffering.

Is the second arrow the same as overthinking? They overlap. The second arrow is specifically the layer of commentary, blame and worst-case forecasting added on top of something painful that’s already happening.

How do I stop firing the second arrow? Not by arguing with the thoughts — that tends to produce a third and fourth arrow. Notice the thought, name it (“I notice I’m having the thought that…”), and then ask what valued action you can take right now.

Does the second arrow apply to emotional pain too? Very much so. Rejection, grief, embarrassment and anxiety all have a first arrow and an optional second one.

Second Arrow Story - Original Sutta

If you’re looking for the original version of the tale of the second arrow, you can read the second arrow sutta here.

And here’s a pdf download of the original second arrow story.

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