Mindfulness Relieves Pain

According to research published recently in the journal PAIN , mindfulness, or meditation in full consciousness, may prove to be an effective strategy for relieving chronic pain. Several researches had already shown that practicing mindfulness relieves pain.

A study published in the journal JAMA found that mindfulness relieves chronic pain , especially lower back pain, even more effectively than ordinary therapies.

Another study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that practicing mindfulness can help even injured athletes to better tolerate pain and increase their awareness.

A further study found that individuals with chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease, in which psychological stress plays an important role, can also benefit from mindfulness techniques.

However, what are the brain mechanisms responsible for this analgesic effect? The new research conducted by Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, seeks to answer this question.

Mindfulness relieves pain

Zeidan explains that mindfulness allows you to be aware of the moment you are living without exaggerated emotional reactions or judgments. Some people are more aware than others, and the latter seem to feel less pain.

The researchers therefore wanted to find out if the innate individual predisposition to full awareness had a correlation with a lower sensitivity to pain and in the event of a positive response, what were the brain mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon.

To find an answer, they analyzed a sample of 76 people who had never practiced meditation. Their attention levels were analyzed using the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory . This test evaluates the lack of identification with thoughts and feelings, acceptance, openness, absence of reactivity, understanding of mental processes and observation of the present.

Next, the researchers subjected the participants to painful and non-painful heat stimulation, during which they studied brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers started from the hypothesis that mindfulness – or a person’s predisposition to awareness – would be linked to less sensitivity to pain and less activation of a brain circuit called the Default Mode Network (DMN).

The Default Mode Network includes various interconnected areas of the brain that are activated during rest.  That is to say, when a person does not pay attention to the external world, which stimulates attention, but focuses on his own interiority. Some brain areas that are part of this “network” are the posterior cingulate cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the angular gyrus.

The Default Mode network and meditation

It is well known that meditation requires an exercise of attention to immediate experience and the removal from distractions, such as self-referential thinking and “mind wandering”.

In the name of the above, meditation has been associated with relatively small activity in a network of brain areas involved in self-referential processing, known as the Default Mode Network ( DMN ). People who meditate have a lower level of activity than those who don’t.

At the same time,  mind wandering has been associated with high levels of DMN activity, while reduced DMN activity during meditation has been associated with increased and longer-lasting attention in daily life.

Previous studies also show that meditation plays an important role in reducing DMN processes.

Why does mindfulness relieve pain?

A recent study showed that increased awareness of what is happening around us may be linked to greater activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. Conversely, people who reported experiencing more pain also had a higher level of activity in this brain area. Zeidan explains this by stating that the “default mode” is deactivated when we carry out any activity such as reading or writing.

He also adds that the Default Mode Network is reactivated every time the individual stops carrying out an activity and re-dedicates himself to his thoughts, feelings and emotions, linked to his own interiority.

“The results of our study showed that conscious individuals appear to be less affected by the experience of pain and their reports of pain have been scarce,” says Zeidan. And he adds: “We now have new tools to act on this area of ​​the brain in order to develop effective pain therapies.”

Scholars hope their findings will help relieve people suffering from chronic pain. “In light of our previous research, we are aware that we can increase attention through relatively short periods of mindfulness training, so it can prove to be an effective tool for millions of individuals suffering from chronic pain ,” they conclude.