A new study says that the meditative practice of mindfulness can increase tolerance to pain.
Mindfulness — a meditative practice that focusses on paying attention
to the present moment — can increase person’s tolerance to pain, a
study has found. Researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine in the
US analysed data obtained from a study published in 2015 that compared
mindfulness meditation to placebo analgesia.
They sought to
determine if dispositional mindfulness, an individual’s innate or
natural level of mindfulness, was associated with lower pain
sensitivity, and to identify what brain mechanisms were involved.
“Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too
much emotional reaction or judgment,” said Fadel Zeidan, assistant
professor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
“We now know that some
people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel
less pain,” said Zeidan, lead author of the study published in the
journal Pain.
In the study, 76 healthy volunteers who had never
meditated first completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a clinical
measurement of mindfulness, to determine their baseline levels. While
undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, they were administered
painful heat stimulation.
Whole brain analyses revealed that
higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with
greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate
cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in
those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this
critically important brain region.
“The results from our study
showed that mindful individuals are seemingly less caught up in the
experience of pain, which was associated with lower pain reports,”
Zeidan said. “Now we have some new ammunition to target this brain
region in the development of effective pain therapies,” he said.
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