How to be thankful during moments of pain?

Typically many of us distract or dissociate ourselves into a mental idea of gratitude to avoid the experience of pain to look tough or pretend to be alright or whatever...  

So instead, we need to view pain as an alarm system, like if you have a dog which disturbs your sleep by barking out loud to alert you in case some thief try to enter your house, you don't try to silence the dog rather appraise the dog for alerting you and take the action against the thief ... Same is the function of the pain in the body, it alerts us to take corrective action, its an alarm system which need not be shut down, it's a signal for us to respond to the disturbance in our system. The pain thus serves an important purpose, for which we need to be thankful ... 

There are no false alarms in our body, we just fail to understand the source of the pain, particularly emotional pain ...

Secondly, pain makes us ask for help, particularly from Allah s.w.t. We need to know the limits of our ability, for example, how much activity on a cellular level we can control in the healing process of a cut in our hand. Allah s.w.t designed this system of healing, and we need to give up to the system during the moments of pain, and be thankful for its autonomous activity to restore order in our bodies. 

The moment we realize the extent to which we can control the system to recover from the injury, its the moment when we move into the state of vulnerability. In this moment of vulnerability we can cry for help from Allah s.w.t., and be thankful for the opportunity for that purpose ... 

The sooner we notice pain and surrender to the process (after taking any action which we possibly can) the sooner the Divine system of healing can be activated ... while we wait for the Divine system to do its thing we can be thankful for the past experiences of healing, and be thankful for the outcome of healing in advance ...