How is it even possible that endorphins are released during pain ? This is going over my head. Does it depend on the magnitude of pain ? Higher the pain , higher the release? In that case people would be choosing all the painful methods out there to ctb. I have been through physical pain and never felt happy about it. In fact pain is so trauma inducing that , I sometimes panic even if the real pain has not started.
When you are in pain, your pituitary gland releases endorphins in order to block the nerve cells that recieve pain signals. These endorphins help to make pain more manageable and can help with stress. They are also why some people may enjoy feeling certain levels of pain during sex (e.g, spanking and biting).
When people self harm, they are essentially getting high on these endorphins. Over time, you eventually start to crave more of them and thus you start self-harming more and more and to more extreme extents to in order to get said high.
Also, you need to take into consideration the fact that this pain is self inflicted. When I cut myself on purpose, I am able to anticipate said pain and mentally prepare myself for it. If I cut myself on accident, I am not. It's kind of like picking up something that is hot. If you know it is going to be hot then you can mentally prepare yourself for and while it would hurt it doesn't feel the same as when you pick up something that is hot without knowing.
Along with that, self-harm is usually done as means of externalizng emotional pain by making it physical. Non-suicidal self injury or NSSI also has nothing to do with suicide. It's an emotional coping mechanism. There is a huge difference between harming yourself to cope with emotions and killing yourself. When I self-harm I have control over how much pain I am going to feel. Violent suicide methods don't allow for that control and usually come with severe consequences if you end up failing.
The only somewhat violent (but not really) suicide method I can think of that is an exception to this is cutting an artery, particularly around your arms or legs. It's probably one of the most common methods that newcomers come on here to talk about and it's pretty popular within a lot of self-harm spaces online. However, once people find out about how ineffective it is, most end up switching to more peaceful options, since none of the other violent ones are really going to feel similar to SHing (that being in the case of cutters, of course).
I think part of why you are having such a hard time understanding SH is because you are thinking about it from your perspective as someone who has never self-harmed before, rather than trying to put yourself into the shoes of a SHer. I'll try to use my experience from when I first started SHing to explain it.
Long story short, my mom couldn't find her keys, blamed me, threatened me if I didn't find them before she got home, I looked everywhere and could find them, I began to panic and couldn't calm down, I marched into the kitchen, got a knife, and started cutting my wrist. The endorphins helped with the stress I was feeling and the pain made it feel as though I was being punished which is what I felt as though I deserved in that moment. Thus, by SHing, I felt as though I was able to gain back some control over myself.
A lot of people SH for a variety of reasons, from self punishment, stress relief, control, to cope with feelings of numbness, etc. I understand that SHing seems weird to those who've never done it before but just like how a bird will pull out its own feathers when stressed, a person may hurt them self in order to deal with their stress and emotional challenges.
