What if you could reduce pain yourself, without drugs? (For real! And it's not just a mind trick)
A new mindfulness study gives hope for chronic pain treatment
We are only just beginning to understand how our mind and body work together to create what we experience on a day to day basis. For millions of people around the world, daily life is experienced as pain: debilitating pain that interferes with normal activity and rapidly erodes quality of life. Pain they would do anything to avoid.
If you’ve experienced an episode of lasting pain, then you know what I mean. It can be challenging to find your way forward.
The over-prescription of opioids to treat severe pain has contributed to the global opioid crisis. According to a 2023 Lancet report, over 60 million people struggle with opioid addiction and more than 100,000 die each year world wide by opioid overdose.
Those numbers are staggering. And while pain isn’t the only contributing factor to the crisis, pain management is often a gateway into the world of opioid addiction.
We need alternative pain management strategies that work!
The search for new and effective ways to treat pain has lead to some interesting discoveries that take us back to ancient practices involving the mind-body connection. Mindfulness has just gotten an image make-over thanks to some new research looking into pain management.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a set of meditation practices that bring you into the present moment and allow you to experience your thoughts and feelings without judgement. Given some persistent practice over time, a person can drop into a mindful state quickly and easily. Methods include breathing patterns, self meditation, body scanning, mindful walking, visualization and guided meditation. Yoga and Tai Chi are often considered to be “mindfulness in motion” practices as well.
Many of the benefits of mindfulness have been focused on the positive psychological and mental health aspects which can include:
reduced repetitive thinking and rumination
acceptance
self-compassion
body awareness
relaxation, and
reduced stress, anxiety and depression.
Until recently, the impact of mindfulness on the experience of pain was thought to be similar to the placebo effect.
A placebo effect is when a person’s mental or physical state seems to improve after taking a treatment they believe will help them, but that treatment is actually fake. The classic example is how patients may show signs of improvement after taking a pill for their condition, except the pill provided was a sugar pill instead of medication.
As many as 50% of people may improve on the basis of the placebo effect. This can make it hard to distinguish what interventions are having lasting positive results.
Is mindfulness just a placebo effect?
Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine (in press, August 29, 2024, Biological Psychiatry) created a randomized trial of 115 healthy participants using 4 pain-reducing interventions for an induced pain stimulus. They compared guided meditation, deep breathing, a placebo cream that patients believed would reduce their pain, and a control group who listened to an audiobook.
Participants were tested for their preliminary pain response, and their response after the intervention, using fMRI brain scans. An AI machine-learning process capable of distinguishing subtle differences in brain response helped to identify the patterns resulting from the different treatments.
While all three treatments reduced pain to some extent compared to the control, only the guided meditation treatment showed significantly lowered pain intensity and lower patient ratings of unpleasantness, than either the breathing or the placebo cream.
What’s more, the fMRI scans showed that the guided meditation treatment reduced synchronization between the three parts of the brain that are known to produce the neural pain signal.
The neural pain signal (NPS) is a pattern of brain activity that has been documented to be common to most individual’s pain experience. In contrast, the placebo cream and breathing did not show a significant change from the control (audio book) in the neural pain signal regions of the brain.
In other words, this research has shown that the pain reduction effect of guided meditation vs the placebo effect are taking place in two different parts of the brain.
Guided meditation is more powerful than the placebo effect and works directly on pain pathways! This opens the door for further research to develop more effective and accessible guided meditation practices specifically for pain.
Mindfulness Meditation To Reduce Pain Isn't A Placebo Effect
Thus this ancient practice of mindfulness, at times dismissed as nothing but placebo, has come full circle back into the realm of medical intervention for pain.
The more we learn about our mind-body connection, the more powerful (and nearly magical) the power of our mind becomes. Just imagine what we can do as we better understand how our minds heal our bodies!
What can you do?
First, before you dismiss breathing patterns as nothing but placebo, remember that this study was focused on interventions for pain specifically. Breathing patterns have been shown in other studies to effectively reduce anxiety and stress. This is a case of different approaches for different problems with different brain chemicals and mechanisms in play, so don’t get confused. The researchers even refer to the breathing treatment as the “sham”-meditation, meaning it was set up to be an intermediate level between the placebo and the guided meditation treatments.
Second, I don’t know about you, but for me, the idea that I can access pain relief any time, anywhere, by engaging in guided meditation is a pretty awesome result.
And while the guided mediations you can access online or through a therapist might not be exactly equivalent to taking a drug, they don’t carry any of the side-effects that ALL pain-killing drugs have. Anything that can reduce the use of opioids and other addictive drugs is a step in the right direction for people’s mental and physical wellbeing. We need more alternative treatments, not less.
Exploring meditation as part of an effective pain-relief strategy just became a whole lot more scientific. That bodes well for the development of future effective treatments for pain.
Also, keep in mind (lol - no pun intended!) that mindfulness is not a one-size fits all deal. There are as many styles and potential variations of mindfulness as there are people.
That means you don’t have to spend hours sitting cross-legged in a candle lit room unless that’s your spin. Many of the techniques for calming your mind, coming into the present, regulating your breathing, accepting your feelings, and developing non-judgmental self-awareness can be done quickly and effectively anywhere.
My journey into mindfulness started with simple breathing patterns, and learning to become aware of my thoughts as being separate from me (as the person having the thoughts). It was challenging at first, but now it is second nature.
I can now quickly bring myself into the present, into mind and body awareness. When I ‘clear my head’ so to speak, I am able to create better focus, reduce my anxiety, work through challenging problems, and bring myself back into joy with relative ease. I’ve never felt stronger or more capable than I do now. And interestingly, I suffer from significantly less chronic pain now, than ever before. Anecdotal, but interesting.
There are plenty of resources online for those just getting started with mindfulness. But it’s hard to go wrong with a coach or therapist to get you on the right path. There’s no wrong choice here, and lots of options. The only thing you have to lose is pain.
Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried any mindfulness techniques and which ones have been most effective for you.
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