Mindfulness appears to sever the connection between pain perception and sense of self, with analgesic effect.
Adherents of mindfulness meditation will ascribe to it many a miracle, among them pain relief.
It’s hard to know how objective such folk can be about their experiences, given the huge potential placebo effect, as well as the sunk cost factor after spending weeks on retreat and the thick clouds of smugness that the practice generates.
Now a team out of UC San Diego has stripped away that interference with an experiment on 40 subjects. They applied a painful heat stimulus to the subjects’ calves and measured their baseline response using MRI and pain scales.
Half the group were then trained in mindfulness meditation, in which they were instructed to focus on their breathing, and to observe their thoughts and feelings and let them go without judgment or reaction. The control group listened to audiobooks.
The next day they repeated the pain stimulus, scans and ratings, and found pain intensity and unpleasantness were reduced by about one-third in the meditation group.
The brain scans revealed the potential mechanisms, showing more “decoupling” during meditation between the thalamus, which relays sensory information to other brain areas, and the precuneus, part of the brain’s default mode network, which is active when you’re thinking about yourself. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is active while processing risk and fear, was also more deactivated in the meditation group.
Senior author, associate professor of anaesthesiology Fadel Zeidan, said that for many people suffering from chronic pain, it’s the mental burden more than the pain itself that destroys their quality of life.
“Their pain becomes a part of who they are as individuals – something they can’t escape – and this exacerbates their suffering,” he told the university press.
“We were really excited to confirm that you don’t have to be an expert meditator to experience these analgesic effects. This is a really important finding for the millions of people looking for a fast-acting and non-pharmacological treatment for pain.”
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