New research has found that mindfulness meditation reduces pain by engaging a distinct brain pathway, separate from the pathway activated by a placebo. The standalone analgesic effect that mindfulness produces could be leveraged to help people living with painful conditions.
Being mindful is all about living in the present moment. Mindfulness meditation teaches a person to examine their thoughts and emotions objectively, without judgment or interpretation. It’s claimed that mindfulness reduces stress, anxiety, and depression and helps with physical problems like high blood pressure and chronic pain.
While some might consider these claims to be a bit ‘woo-woo,’ advocates of mindfulness meditation can now point to a new study by researchers at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) School of Medicine that gives credence to the power of the practice when it comes to reducing pain.
“The mind is extremely powerful, and we’re still working to understand how it can be harnessed for pain management,” said Fadel Zeidan, professor of anesthesiology and the study’s corresponding author. “By separating pain from the self and relinquishing evaluative judgment, 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.”
It’s been assumed that mindfulness meditation reduces pain because of the placebo effect, the fascinating phenomenon in which a ‘fake’ or inactive treatment causes improvement in a person’s physical or mental health. Although scientists are still not completely sure how the brain facilitates the placebo effect, it remains a well-known example of how expectations can significantly alter experiences.
To see whether this was the case, the researchers recruited 115 healthy participants who were randomly placed into groups given four interventions: a guided mindfulness meditation, a sham mindfulness meditation (deep breathing only), a placebo cream (petroleum jelly) they were told reduced pain and a control group who listened to an audiobook. A painful but harmless heat stimulus was applied to the participant’s calves, and their brains were scanned using functional MRI (fMRI) before and after the interventions.
The researchers used a novel approach called multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to analyze the participant’s brain activity from their fMRI images. MVPA uses supervised machine learning to isolate and identify the specific brain systems engaged when pain relief was associated with mindfulness meditation compared to pain relief associated with the placebo.
They found that while the placebo cream and sham mindfulness meditation lowered pain, mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater reductions in the participant’s pain intensity and pain unpleasantness ratings compared to all of the other interventions. From the MVPA, they also found that mindfulness and placebo engaged distinct neural ‘pain signatures’ to produce their respective pain-reducing effects.
“It has long been assumed that the placebo effect overlaps with brain mechanisms triggered by active treatments, but these results suggest that when it comes to pain, this may not be the case,” Zeidan said. “Instead, these two brain responses are completely distinct, which supports the use of mindfulness meditation as a direct intervention for chronic pain rather than as a way to engage the placebo effect.”
The researchers hope that their findings will lead to more effective mindfulness-based interventions for people in need of pain relief.
“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,” said Zeidan. “We are excited to continue exploring the neurobiology of mindfulness and how we can leverage this ancient practice in the clinic.”
The study was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
Source: UC San Diego