Tips on Pain management:

Crossing your fingers can dull physical pain, study finds
Confuse your brain and dull the pain. Thanks, science!

Crossing your fingers confuses your brain long enough to mess with feelings of hot, cold, and pain, a new study has found, offering a brief respite if you happen to sustain a physical injury in the area.
The study makes use of a classic pain experiment called the thermal grill illusion, which involves subjecting the index and ring fingers to heat (40°C/104°F) while applying a cold sensation (20°C/68°F) to the middle finger using special thermal pads.
In the experiment, if a person just touches the hot or cold thermal pads, they will feel only hot or cold sensations respectively. But touching them together creates the illusion of burning heat, as Hannah Devlin explains at The Guardian:
"The illusion works because the hot sensation in the outer two fingers blocks the activity in a certain cooling receptor under the skin and this "inhibition" spills out to the surrounding area of the hand.
Activity in the cooling receptors in turn normally blocks the activity of pain receptors that are sensitive to extreme cold. As a result only mild cold is now needed to produce a painful burning sensation in the middle finger - hence the illusion."
So effectively, the simultaneous heating and cooling creates an illusion because the brain is trying to reconcile a three-way interaction between the nerve pathways that are trying to send it signals about warmth, cold and pain, all at once.
The thermal grill illusion is the perfect solution for scientists wanting to experiment with and research pain sensations in humans, because it creates the feeling without causing any lasting physical damage.
So could people with chronic pain learn to use simple positioning and carefully applied stimuli to dull painful sensations and help them to better live through debilitating disorders? That’s what they are going to try and figure out now. In the meantime,The Guardian has got some great advice to get you through your next barefoot LEGO encounter:
"Previously, scientists have shown that swearing when you hurt yourself is not only a vocal expression of agony, but that it also reduces pain. The study, by the University of Keele, found that when people were free to let rip verbally, they could cope with mild pain for nearly 50 percent longer than those who said neutral words, such as 'table'."
Cursing is the best medicine, apparently.