How does meditation change our pain perception?
This is my first blog post since 2019. I lost all my documents around 2020, so my early precious blog posts are gone. In this substack, I aim to post 4-minute readings about state-of-the-art research articles about psychology, technology, and business. I want to focus on insights that are easily relatable and applicable to our daily lives (well, my life mostly.)
I was writing a blog about the minimum meditation time required to see its benefits. Apparently, there is a very easy & brief meditation method, if you do it for 4-8 weeks, you’ll see immediate benefits to your body and mind. While I was researching this topic, I remembered that I had already done some research on meditation. I wanted to share a part of the review paper I wrote a couple of months ago. Before giving insights on hard-to-believe meditation effects, here is a 5-8 minute reading on how meditation can literally change our brains to feel less pain:
A Short Intro to Meditation
Meditation practices have been used to treat pain by cultures or religions over thousands of years, originating from ancient Buddhist traditions around the 4th century BCE [1]. These practices involve deliberate attempts to alternate states of consciousness to enhance the life experience or better deal with adverse outcomes, such as stress or pain [1]. Examples of such meditation practices are mindfulness or heartfulness meditations.
Having many descriptions for detail, many mindfulness techniques include focused attention and open monitoring [2]. Focused attention involves training the mind to stay vigilant on a designated object, and open monitoring is the practice of maintaining focus on the current event without any judgment [2]. Heartfulness meditation incorporates several techniques, including the purification of chakras by turning one’s focus inward to feel compassion and love [3].
Does Meditation Affect Pain Perception?
Wells and his team decided to investigate this phenomenon by conducting a randomized clinical trial on people suffering from chronic pain from migraines [4]. The first group was given training on mindfulness techniques and asked to practice them regularly in a controlled environment. The second group was only given a general education on headaches. They hypothesized that the first group would have fewer migraines, better quality of life, and improved affective functions, including reduced depression, and increased self-efficacy. Their results showed that although both groups had statistically similar drops in migraine frequency, the group who meditated showed significantly better results on depression, life quality, self-efficacy, pain intensity, and pain unpleasantness [4].
In another study, Lutz and his team also demonstrated that life-long meditation experts have less difficulty with pain than people who don’t meditate [5]. They hypothesized that expert meditators would exhibit reduced activity in brain structures associated with pain and anxiety. Thus, expert meditators should have improved pain tolerance, increased pain endurance, reduced anxiety related to pain anticipation, higher pain threshold, and a decrease in unpleasant feelings during pain. Indeed, their hypothesis was supported by the results. Despite no significant difference in pain intensity, individuals with life-long meditation practice showed reduced amygdala activity – associated with anxiety—before experiencing pain. Moreover, they demonstrated accelerated neural habituation in the mid-cingulate cortex, a region linked to the processing and perception of pain [5].
So?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves by trying to become a meditation expert. In short, meditation can affect some of the structures in our brain, resulting in increased pain tolerance. It is good to know that this tolerance works for both physical pains and emotional pains. In the end, it is a good idea to give it a shot. Just pick a meditation style you’d think is enjoyable and stick to it for at least 6 weeks. Another research shows that you’ll see the benefits of meditation in 4-8 weeks.
In the upcoming posts, I’ll also share some guides to particular meditation practices, so that you can choose whichever suits you. I am in the process of learning myself. I’m particularly focusing on a traditional Indian practice called Ayurveda.
See you next week.
References
[1] Cheng, F. K. (2017). Cancer-Induced bone pain management through Buddhist beliefs. Journal of Religion & Health, 56(6), 2251–2266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-017-0401-5
[2] Zeidan, F., & Vago, D. R. (2016). Mindfulness meditation–based pain relief: a mechanistic account. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), 114–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13153
[3] Westeinde, A. V., & Patel, K. D. (2022). Heartfulness Meditation: a yogic and neuroscientific perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.806131
[4] Wells, R. E., O’Connell, N. S., Pierce, C. R., Estave, P. M., Penzien, D., Loder, E., Zeidan, F., & Houle, T. T. (2021b). Effectiveness of Mindfulness Meditation vs Headache Education for Adults With Migraine. JAMA Internal Medicine, 181(3), 317. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.7090
[5] Lutz, A., McFarlin, D. R., Perlman, D., Salomons, T. V., & Davidson, R. J. (2013b). Altered anterior insula activation during anticipation and experience of painful stimuli in expert meditators. NeuroImage, 64, 538–546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.09.030
