Practicing mindfulness relieves pain, according to a study.

Mindfulness has been shown to reduce pain. A recent study explored the neurological underpinnings of this phenomenon.

Mindfulness, or mindfulness meditation, can be an effective way to alleviate chronic pain, according to recent research published in the journal PAIN. In this sense, several researches had already found that practicing mindfulness relieves pain. For example, a study published in the journal JAMA found that mindfulness can alleviate chronic pain, specifically low back pain, even more effectively than standard treatments.

Another study published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology also found that mindfulness meditation helps injured athletes improve awareness and pain tolerance.

Another study also found that people suffering from chronic inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease, in which psychological stress plays an important role, can benefit from mindfulness meditation techniques.

However, what brain mechanisms are responsible for this analgesic effect? This question is addressed by new research led by Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Mindfulness and pain.

Zeidan explains that mindfulness meditation is about being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment. Some people are more aware than others, and these people seem to experience less pain.

What the researchers wanted to see was whether people's innate and individual predisposition to mindfulness was correlated with less sensitivity to pain and, if so, what brain mechanisms were at work.

To find out, the researchers studied 76 people who had never meditated before. Their mindfulness levels were assessed using the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. This test assesses non-identification with thoughts and feelings, acceptance, openness, non-reactivity, understanding of mental processes and observation of the present moment.

Subsequently, the researchers administered painful heat stimulation and painless stimulation to the participants, using a functional MRI scan to study their brain activities. The researchers hypothesized that the “mindfulness trait” – or a person's predisposition to be conscious – would correlate with less pain sensitivity and less activation of a brain circuit called the pattern-mode network.

The default mode network comprises several areas of the brain that are interconnected and active in the resting state. That is, when a person does not pay attention to the external world, which stimulates attention, he focuses on his internal states. Some key areas of the brain that make up this network include the posterior cingulate cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the angular gyrus.

Meditation and the network by default.

It is known that meditation involves an exercise of attention to the immediate experience, moving away from distractions such as self-referential thinking and wandering mind.

According to this view, meditation has been associated with relatively reduced activity in a network of brain regions involved in self-referential processing known as the default mode network or DMN (default mode network) in experienced meditators compared to with non-meditators.

Likewise, wandering mind has been linked to activity in DMN. In turn, reduced DMN activity during meditation has been associated with better sustained attention off the exam. Previous research suggests that meditation plays an important role in reducing network processing to a default mode while performing the exercise.

Why does mindfulness alleviate pain?

The new study found that greater conscious attention to features correlated with less activation of the posterior cingulate cortex. On the other hand, people who reported feeling more pain also showed greater activity in this area. Zeidan explains this by saying that default mode is disabled when performing any kind of task, such as reading or writing.

Furthermore, he says, the default mode network is reactivated whenever the individual fails to perform a task and returns to thoughts, feelings and emotions related to himself.

“The results of our study showed that conscious individuals seem to be less locked into the experience of pain, which was associated with fewer reports of pain,” says Zeidan. He adds: "We now have new ammunition to target this region of the brain in the development of effective pain therapies."

Researchers hope the findings will help provide relief for people suffering from chronic pain. "Based on our previous research, we know that we can increase attention for relatively short periods of mindful meditation training so that it can become an effective way to relieve the pain of millions of people suffering from chronic pain."

Now that you know that mindfulness relieves pain, what are you waiting for to include this practice in your daily life?

Sources:

Effect of Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) in increasing pain tolerance and improving the mental health.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00722/full

A comparison of Mindfulness-based stress reduction and an active control in modulation of neurogenic inflammation .

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159112004758?via%3Dihub

Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529365/