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Struggling With Pain? Study Says Mindfulness Meditation Could Help
If you're among the 21% of U.S. adults1 who struggle with chronic pain, you likely already know there are a number of interventions you can take to help manage it. But did you ever consider mindfulness meditation? According to new research published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, it might address pain better than you'd think.
Here's what they found.
Studying the effects of mindfulness meditation
For this study, researchers placed 115 participants in four separate groups to assess the efficacy of mindfulness meditation on pain management.
One group did a guided mindfulness meditation, another did a fake mindfulness meditation that just consisted of deep breathing, while the third group used a placebo cream, and the control group listened to an audiobook.
Using a painful heat stimulus, the researchers scanned the participants' brains while they were in pain, before and after the mindfulness/control interventions.
Sure enough, the researchers observed that mindfulness meditation showed significant reductions in both pain intensity and unpleasantness. It even reduced the brain activity patterns associated with pain and negative emotions.
And while the placebo cream and phony mindfulness meditation did lower pain, mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective when compared to the placebo, the phony mindfulness meditation, and the control group.
How to get started yourself
With the promise of these findings and the potential to reduce chronic pain yourself, you might be wondering how to get started with mindfulness meditation.
The good news, as study co-author Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., explains in a news release, is that mindfulness meditation is able to "directly modify how we experience pain in a way that uses no drugs, costs nothing, and can be practiced anywhere."
From taking a slow, mindful walk, to sipping your cup of tea with more presence in the morning, there are so many ways to incorporate mindfulness into your life—you don't always have to sit down for 20 minutes.
In fact, here's our complete guide to how to be more mindful every day, plus our tips for starting a meditation practice that lasts.
The takeaway
Mindfulness is simply about slowing down, being more present, and getting into the habit of being aware, as opposed to on autopilot. It comes with plenty of benefits, and according to this study, it might just help you manage chronic pain too.
As Zeidan says, "Millions of people are living with chronic pain every day, and there may be more these people can do to reduce their pain and improve their quality of life than we previously understood."
