For centuries, people have been using mindfulness meditation to try to relieve their pain, but neuroscientists have only recently been able to test if and how this actually works.
Scientists from the University of California San Diego measured the effects of mindfulness on pain perception and brain activity.
They found that mindfulness meditation reduces pain by separating it from the self.
They showed that mindfulness meditation interrupted the communication between brain areas involved in pain sensation and those that produce the sense of self.
In the proposed mechanism, pain signals still move from the body to the brain, but the individual does not feel as much ownership over those pain sensations, so their pain and suffering are reduced.
The research is published in Pain and was conducted by Fadel Zeidan et al.
In the study, the team tested 40 people who had their brains scanned while painful heat was applied to their legs. After experiencing a series of these heat stimuli, participants had to rate their average pain levels during the experiment.
Participants were then split into two groups. Members of the mindfulness group completed four separate 20-minute mindfulness training sessions.
During these visits, they were instructed to focus on their breath and reduce self-referential processing by first acknowledging their thoughts, sensations and emotions but then letting them go without judging or reacting to them.
Members of the control group spent their four sessions listening to an audiobook.
On the final day of the study, both groups had their brain activity measured again, but participants in the mindfulness group were now instructed to meditate during the painful heat, while the control group rested with their eyes closed.
The researchers found that participants who were actively meditating reported a 32 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 33 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.
When the team analyzed participants’ brain activity during the task, they found that mindfulness-induced pain relief was linked to reduced synchronization between the thalamus (a brain area that relays incoming sensory information to the rest of the brain) and parts of the default mode network (a collection of brain areas most active while a person is mind-wandering or processing their own thoughts and feelings as opposed to the outside world).
One of these default mode regions is the precuneus, a brain area involved in fundamental features of self-awareness, and one of the first regions to go offline when a person loses consciousness.
Another is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which includes several sub regions that work together to process how you relate to or place value on your experiences.
The more these areas were decoupled or deactivated, the more pain relief the participant reported.
The team says by relinquishing the self-referential appraisal of pain, mindfulness meditation may provide a new method for pain treatment. Mindfulness meditation is also free and can be practiced anywhere.
If you care about pain, please read studies about flower that could advance the treatment of chronic pain, and this pain reliever linked to hip fracture in old people.
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