Meditating this long per day could drastically reduce pain

The positive effects that people notice when taking placebo drugs have been studied and studied, showing that when the brain truly believes that a certain drug or pill will have a certain side effect, it manifests on its own without the help of the drug. The most common placebo pill is mostly sugar, meaning that it pretty much has no effect on a human being whatsoever, but when people are told it’s going to make their cold go away, that cold might just end up going away because they believed it would.

There’s new evidence being presented by the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center that shows that mindfulness meditation can reduce pain even more than a placebo. Using pain ratings and brain imaging techniques, they tested four different groups: mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation, placebo analgesic cream (petroleum jelly) and the control.

What they found completely shocked them. Believing that they would likely find overlap in the brain regions between meditation and placebo, they discovered that mindfulness meditation relieves pain “in a unique fashion.” The study involved heating a specific point of the person’s body using a thermal probe, increasing the intensity to a level that most people would find very painful. Their brains were scanned during the process to measure activity and participants were asked to rated the pain intensity and unpleasantness. The mindfulness meditation group reported a decrease in pain intensity (physical) by 27% and a decrease in unpleasantness (emotional) by 44%, compared to the placebo cream which had reductions of 11% physical and 13% emotional.

Additionally, during mindful meditation they discovered the thalamus actually deactivated, causing pain signals to simply fade away. This region of the brain was active for all other groups except for the mindful meditation group. So if you have chronic pain or illness, four 20-minute daily sessions of mindful meditation per day could greatly improve treatment or therapy.

(h/t Science Daily)