Can mindfulness meditation actually relieve pain, or is it just a placebo effect?
To find out, researchers recruited 115 healthy people and randomly assigned them to four treatment interventions: an actual mindfulness meditation practice; a sham meditation practice; a placebo cream that patients were told will reduce pain; and a control group that listened to an audiobook.
Researchers applied a very painful but harmless heat stimulus to the back of the leg of the participants and scanned their brains both before and after the interventions.
While placebo cream and the sham meditation practice also lowered pain, mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective at reducing pain. It considerably reduced pain intensity and pain unpleasantness and also reduced brain activity patterns associated with pain and negative emotions.
Mindfulness meditation engaged separate neural pathways compared with pain responses that are driven by the placebo effect.
Mindfulness meditation reduced synchronisation between brain areas involved in introspection, self-awareness and emotional regulation. But placebo response engaged entirely separate brain mechanisms with little overlap.
“By separating pain from the self and relinquishing evaluative judgment, mindfulness meditation is able to directly modify how we experience pain in a way that uses no drugs, costs nothing and can be practised anywhere,” the lead researcher said.
The findings were published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
