The Science-Backed, No-Prescription-Needed Way to Reduce Pain
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If the mental benefits of meditation (Adios, anxiety and depression!) haven’t been enough to get you on the “Breathe in, breathe out” bandwagon, this just might do the trick: A recent study, to be published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that meditation significantly reduced participants’ levels of both emotional pain and physical pain, TIME reports. So listen up, everyone whose whole body is still killing them after this week’s BeWOW workout!
For the study, done by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, first, researchers inflicted some serious pain on the 75 healthy, pain-free study participants with a 120-degree thermal probe (ouch), scanning their brains with an MRI throughout to see how they were experiencing the pain. After what I’m sure was a traumatizing few minutes, the participants were broken into four groups: The first group was given a placebo cream (really just petroleum jelly) that they were told would reduce their pain; the second group was taught a faux-meditation technique, where they were just told to breathe deeply for 20 minutes; the third group was taught actual mindfulness meditation techniques — to sit upright with their eyes closed and breathe, following their breath with the mind’s eye as it traveled through their body; and the fourth group, a control group, listened to 20 minutes of a boring book on tape.
All of the groups were told what they were doing would lessen their pain the next time they were subjected to the heat probe. (Mean, I know.) Then, after a few days of “training” with their specific techniques, they braved the 120-degree probe again. This time, they were told to employ the technique they were given to reduce their pain. And here’s why you should get your meditation game up, folks: The people who were in the mindfulness meditation group seriously benefitted from the technique. The intensity of their physical pain dropped by 27 percent and their emotional pain (so how unpleasant being scalded with a hot probe was for them on an emotional level) dropped by a whopping 44 percent.
These declines in pain were much steeper than they were for any of the other three groups in the study. And to give you some perspective, as TIME says, past research has shown morphine reduces pain by 22 percent — so employing mindfulness meditation, in this study, worked better than the prescription stuff. What the whaaaat?
So while more research is needed to figure out how meditation works to reduce pain, researchers on the study say it’s clear that it does. And there you have it, folks: A new, prescription-free painkiller to store in your mental medicine cabinet.
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