Andy’s Quick Hits (251): How Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Pain

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be beneficial for many things such as lowering stress, increasing wellbeing, making fewer mistakes, but also making better decisions and being less biased. Not bad.

However, some of these are attentional topics and the question a group of researchers from the University of California wanted to answer is how much and, how can mindfulness influence pain.

For this Riegner et al. recruited 40 participants all who had no experience of meditation. First their brain responses to pain were measured by being scanned while painful heat was applied to their legs. They were then split into two groups.

One group underwent four twenty-minute mindfulness training sessions where they were encouraged to focus on their breath and reduce self-referential processing by first acknowledging their thoughts, sensations and emotions but then letting them go without judging or reacting to them. The other group, the control group, listened to an audio book for their twenty-minute sessions.

They were then brought back to have their brains scanned again with the same painful heat stimulus. However, the meditation group was asked to meditate during this process while the control group just rested with their eyes shut.