Take a look at any magazine and you'll find out that being mindful of one's surroundings and self has definitely gained more attention lately. Studies are also being conducted on anything researchers and scientists can think of. From eating habits to how people bounce back after a crisis, you can be sure to find a plethora of these studies online and offline. This time, the study focuses on how people who meditate respond to pain which will soon be published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Dr. Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has studied carefulness for over 15 years and has seen a lot of improvement in health outcomes as a result. He started to wonder what if all the findings he observed were only placebo, though. He started to think, what if people are only stated improvements in their health and a significant decrease in pain just because meditation has a reputation of being a healthy practice. He wanted to know more about it, so he made trials that involved a placebo group.
For the real intervention, people sat for 20 minutes with straight posture, closed their eyes and listened to specific instructions about where to focus one's attention and how to let thoughts and emotions pass without judgment. "Our subjects are taught to focus on the changing sensations of breath and to follow the breath with the mind's eye as it goes down the chest and abdomen," Zeidan says.
After four days, everyone from the placebo group re-entered the MRI machine and experienced the same amount of pain from the 120-degree probe. They were told to use their training, like breathing deeply, deeply meditating or the cream. They used a pedal to mark the physical intensity and emotional nastiness of the pain.
They figured that people in all of the groups felt a significantly low pain level than the control group. The placebo that was used to the group reduced the sensation of pain by about 11% and emotional discomfort of pain by 13%. For the bogus mindfulness group, those numbers were 9% and 24%. However, the mindfulness meditation group beat them all. This group's pain intensity was reduced by 27% and emotional pain decreased by 44%.
That surprised Zeidan. Research in the past has revealed that the opioid morphine lowers physical pain by 22% and meditation had even exceeded that. The MRI results, which revealed how pain was recorded in their brains, surprised him even more. People who did mindfulness meditation looked like they were using different brain regions than the other groups to lower their pain level down.
