Can meditation help you feel less pain?
What if one week of short meditation classes could change the way your brain perceives pain?
Fadel Zeidan, PhD, and his colleagues at Wake Forest University wanted to find out how mindfulness meditation affects pain reception.
Specifically, they looked the areas of the brain responsible for constructing the experience of pain, such as the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula.
Researchers performed MRI exams, asking 18 subjects to lie still in an MRI chamber while they applied a series of neutral and painful stimuli. They then asked subjects to focus on the sensations of their breath while applying the stimuli again.
Upon exiting the MRI, subjects rated the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain.
Next, researchers put participants through a four-day mindfulness meditation training, involving four sessions of 20 minutes each. The training emphasized acknowledgment of sensations without reacting to them emotionally.
Following the training, participants went through the whole process again – MRI exams and pain stimuli in two stages, first lying still and then actively meditating.
Here’s what they found.
Before they received meditation training, subjects showed no difference in the way they rated the pain, whether they were focused on their breath or not.
But after the training, subjects reported a 40% decrease in pain intensity between resting and breath-focusing.
Also, looking at the MRI data – meditation seemed to reduce pain-related processing.
The major difference was in the primary somatosensory cortex, a region associated with sensory-discriminative processing of information.
They also found an association between decreased pain magnitude and activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and the right anterior insular cortex.
This is important because these two areas are presumed to play a role in the evaluation of pain.
Taken together, these findings suggest that meditation may work in two ways. First, by allowing patients to better focus on neutral stimuli like their breath, meditation helps patients reduce the importance of painful stimuli. Second, by focusing on the present moment and reducing the expectation of future events, meditation may help patients reduce the anticipation of pain.
In general, I think research is stronger when it measures real phenomena in the brain – not just self-reports. From that perspective, this experiment is a good start.
However, this particular study is limited because the sample size was so small and because it wasn’t randomized and controlled. Without these methodological improvements, we don’t necessarily know that the meditation training in particular helped change the way patients’ brains worked.
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By the way, if you’d like to read the full study, it’s available in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Do you use brain science to introduce the topic of mindfulness? A lot of practitioners have been reporting that discussing brain changes with patients can be an excellent way to introduce mindfulness. Please share what you do below.
I have found that hypnotherapy extremely successfull , which affects the sub-conscious .Quite apart from everything else,accepting ones self and feeling more empowered in the right manner,possitive thoughts and hopefully becoming more conscious in every way…suddenly one day i noticed my nails had grown long, long enough to put nail varnish on!.. for the very FIRST time in my 66years of life.!! I had not had the slightest thought about my nails,so i was amazed and very pleased for it meant there had been some internal shift in myself for the possitive. Sounds a bit funny but there it is. Great stuff.I love all this mindfullness.
All the best Sandi
Your statement, “In general, I think research is stronger when it measures real phenomena in the brain – not just self-reports.” reminds me that in many MRIs in which one would expect the individual to be experiencing back pain, the individual was reporting no pain. If we are looking at an FMRI that says there is pain and the self report is that there is no pain, isn’t the latter more important? A problem may be that we are working with a population reporting pain but not looking at FMRI’s of a population who do not report pain. Perhaps we would be surprised if non reporting people would show up “as if” they had pain An example occurred when a physical therapist was treating a patient who reported he had never had back pain before a recent auto accident. While looking at the MRI the PT remarked that because of the degeneration of the spine he was surprised the man wasn’t in extreme pain years before the accident. I wonder what an FMRI would have shown before the accident and after.
I see we do not have many pain therapists on this board. Knowing how mindfulness works with pain can enhance any therapy or the power of our mind.
Thank you for this summary ! I also integrate mindfulness and yoga practice in my work with people who experience PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, chronic medical conditions and binge eating. It’s a pleasure to see how much better most people feel when they have something they can actively do on their own to take care of themselves in the face of overwhelming experiences. Sometimes the brain science is less important to my clients as long as they notice that mindful awareness and yoga based practices are helpful to them. The science certainly allows me to feel more and more confident in what I do and how I’ve practiced for many years ! I’m really grateful for all of the current research showing us that that even short term interventions can have such an impact on the brain and our experience. I’m delighted in general that science is supporting practices that so many people and clinicians have found intuitively and clinically helpful in recent decades !
I have chronic pain from a pro baseball career and a disabling triple rollover a decade ago. pain and the mind have a precarious relationship. here is what I found out about my pain.
Chronic pain is a warning signal for us. Pain has to reach a certain level that becomes unbearable to influence my mind now. The pain is always there in some intensity, it is a partner of sorts.
Any attention helps pain grow. Fear of my pain would make me a victim and try to escape from it. fear is another subject. Stress escalates pain as does any other emotion felt because of it. Now, I acknowledge themin is there and let it go. I do not fear it or need to react to it. it gets little attention and no concern.
Mindfully, I went out for power walks with music. When my pain intensified I would focus on. Y breath, turn the music up and place all my focus on the pain. I was in the middle of my pain area, between my shoulder blades and with my breath. I would move my legs for another twenty minutes.
You have to move, take action or pain will over power you, in my opinion. I was in a pain group for a year. I was bringing out my own endorphins and moving and winning as pain tried to make me stop.
After a while my pain sort of condensed with practice and mindfulness. Now I do not use my morphine or Norco but exercise and use my mind to live happily.
I have chronic pain and C-PTSD, I do not suffer. I am active and encourage others to take action, mental and physical whether it be pain, trauma or depression.
Fear of chronic pain will not let you to master the space. fear has no fear inside the emotion itself. fear is a warning sign also for me now. fear is a warning signal for the defense mechanism. We can use fear to heal and serve us with practice. My mind is a beach compared to pieces of sand represented by fear, pain or the ego.
What part of the mind is subconscious and what part cognitive?
Where is the vastness, unlimited potential of the mind, right or left?
As a psychiatrist who treats mainly anxiety and depression as well as doing couple counseling and marriage therapy i introduce the concept of the capacity of our mind and our conscious intention to create changes in our brain structure to every client. I explain that therapy changes the mind as well as the brain and I quote many of the current research topics that I find here (thanks !) and have them available as handouts in the waiting room.
Explaining to a person that science is demonstrating an individuals capacity to cause actual structural changes in their brains is empowering to anyone suffering with anxiety,depression, or even couple or marriage problems.
Larry Drell, MD
counselingandtherapydc.com/info
for info on anxiety,depression, couple counseling and marriage therapy using these discoveries.
Thank you for keeping this information available.