The less the ‘default network’ is activated, the less pain people felt, the study showed.
People who are more mindful feel less pain.
Brain scans showed that people who stay in the moment without judging it have lower activation in areas linked to the self and emotions.
Mindful people do not focus so heavily on the experience of pain, rather they allow it to flow away from them.
Acceptance may be key to the benefits of mindfulness, previous research suggests.
Dr Fadel Zeidan, the study’s first author, explained:
“Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment.
We now know that some people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel less pain.”
For the study, people were given heat stimulation while their brains were scanned.
People who were more mindful had lower activation in two critical areas: the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.
Together these form part of what psychologists call ‘the default network’.
Dr Zeidan explained its relevance:
“As soon as you start performing a task, the connection between these two brain regions in the default mode network disengages and the brain allocates information and processes to other neural areas
Default mode deactivates whenever you are performing any kind of task, such as reading or writing.
Default mode network is reactivated whenever the individual stops performing a task and reverts to self-related thoughts, feelings and emotions.
The results from our study showed that mindful individuals are seemingly less caught up in the experience of pain, which was associated with lower pain reports.”
The more the ‘default network’ is activated, the more pain people felt, the study showed.
Dr Zeidan said:
“Now we have some new ammunition to target this brain region in the development of effective pain therapies.
Importantly this work shows that we should consider one’s level of mindfulness when calculating why and how one feels less or more pain.
Based on our earlier research, we know we can increase mindfulness through relatively short periods of mindfulness meditation training, so this may prove to be an effective way to provide pain relief for the millions of people suffering from chronic pain.”
Related
The study was published in the journal PAIN (Zeidan et al., 2018).
