Now you can add pain reduction to the list of benefits that meditating can bring. A new study has found that mindfulness meditation—the Buddhist-inspired practice, which involves sitting comfortably, focusing on your breathing, and bringing your attention to the present moment—helps to ease physical pain. And what’s interesting is that it doesn’t have to employ the body’s endogenous opioid system—the process used by opioid drugs—to do so.
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This could be huge for chronic pain sufferers looking for non-opiate pain therapy.
For the study, 78 volunteers who did not suffer with pain issues were split into four groups: meditation plus naloxone (a drug that blocks the effects of opioid drugs and commonly given to people who are overdosing on heroin); non-meditation plus naloxone; meditation plus saline placebo; or non-meditation plus saline placebo. The seemingly sadistic researchers then induced pain in the volunteers by prodding them on a small area on the back of the leg with a thermal heat probe with a level of heat they said most people find very painful. The volunteers then rated their pain.
In the meditation group that received the naloxone, the participants’ pain ratings were reduced by 24% compared to their baseline measurements. Pain ratings were also reduced by 21% in the meditation group that received the placebo-saline injection. In contrast, the non-meditation control groups reported increases in pain regardless of whether or not they received the naloxone or placebo-saline injection.
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These results are interesting because they show that even when the body’s own opioid receptors are chemically blocked by the naloxone, meditation is still able to diminish pain using a different pathway.
Because mindfulness or meditation allows people to live in the moment and not really think of the future or the past, researchers say that by doing that through meditation, it allows for a higher threshold of pain.
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Affordable and easy to learn (YouTube videos, and reading material abound), other studies have shown that meditation offers other benefits including decreased stress; decreased depression; anxiety; insomnia; and an increased quality of life; and it could have positive effects on heart health. So even if you’re not suffering from chronic pain, meditation might be something you want to consider for other health benefits.
Curated article from:
CBS News
