To be unable to watch videos where someone gets (even slightly) hurt?

[ColdCashDivine]

Every now and again I'll scroll past a 'funny' video of someone getting hurt, nothing serious just things like falling over. It makes me wince and I can feel almost feel it. They go viral with people saying how funny it is, and I just wonder if my reaction is a bit odd?

It's even worse in real life, even with minor things like if I see someone has cut their hand I get shooting pains in my hand going down to my feet.

I studied a medical-y subject at university and we would do patient case studies and I would physically feel the symptoms. There was one patient case study about someone with a bad knee and my knee ached as I did that assignment. Cardiovascular patients would make my chest ache.

Does anyone else experience this? I think it's normal, but the reaction of people to those kinds of videos makes me question it?

(Not trying to sound holier than thou, I'm so delicate and empathetic and sensitive blah blah blah. Just genuinely curious)

I've read that this has to do with motor neurons - that a weird quirk of the brain's pattern recognition and empathy trying to simulate how someone else would feel can at times be strong enough for some people to cause discomfort when they see certain things.

There are a bunch of names for it like secondary pain or secondary embarrassment, pain empathy.

When watching a screen or reading, I tend to get it more with embarrassment, but in person, I get it more with pain - like I prefer to watch when I'm getting an injection or blood draw, but there is part of me that always looks away and gets uncomfortable watching it happen to someone else, it's like I feel far more pain seeing it happen to someone else.

I get an odd prickly sensation on the back of my neck and in my palms in these situations. Doesn't even have to be a real incidence - fictional stuff in films has the same effect. When I was a child I used to faint regularly at school at any discussion of bodily stuff. Didn't have to be blood involved. Just discussion of anything medical. I also fainted at discussion of treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. (In my defence the teacher went into an utterly inappropriate level of detail for an 11 year old audience.)

I think I have a vivid imagination and a hyper level of sensitivity/empathy about this stuff. Although weirdly I'm less worried about my own body. Am not needle-phobic, or scared of dentists, have been through childbirth etc.

When I was about 7 my mum saw me limping into the house and asked what I’d done. When I told her it still hurt from when my friend fell off her bike earlier she had a few things to say.