How Meditation Changes Your Relationship To Pain
Ouch! That hurt! Pain is a difficult topic. We all experience it, and avoid it at all costs.
But it’s there. We can run away from it, but eventually, we are bound to stub our toe or hit our head against the wall. Have you ever wondered what you could do to experience less pain? Or, better yet, change your relationship to pain?
Various techniques have been shown to change our relationship with pain. We can impact the intensity with which we feel pain and how long we can withstand it. You might have noticed that when you were distracted and enthralled in a conversation or a game, your experience with pain was lesser. Well, that is backed by science. Distraction is one way we can decrease pain intensity.(1) So maybe playing Tetris while someone gets a splinter out of your toe is not such a bad idea after all…
However, even better than distraction is meditation. Mindfulness and meditation have been shown to help with pain symptoms. Experienced meditators have less pain unpleasantness and less anticipatory anxiety towards a painful stimulus.(2) Even with just a quick 15-minute training, mindfulness and meditation were able to improve paint tolerance.(3)
And this lessened pain sensitivity that meditators experience is not just anecdotal. There’s evidence to show a correlation between the gray matter of brain areas associated with pain sensitivity and emotions in meditators, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula.(4)
The moral of the story: your meditation practice might not just be reducing stress and helping you sleep- it can actually change your relationship to pain. Next time you experience a toe-jab, take moment, dive into your breathing or your meditative practice, and know you’re giving yourself the ability to better withstand it.
Laia alonso
Verhoeven, Katrien & Goubert, Liesbet & Jaaniste, Tiina & Ryckeghem, Dimitri & Crombez, Geert. (2012). Pain catastrophizing influences the use and the effectiveness of distraction in schoolchildren. European journal of pain (London, England). 16. 25667. 10.1016/j.ejpain.2011.06.015.
Gard, T., Hölzel, B. K., Sack, A. T., Hempel, H., Lazar, S. W., Vaitl, D., & Ott, U. (2012). Pain attenuation through mindfulness is associated with decreased cognitive control and increased sensory processing in the brain. Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y.: 1991), 22(11), 2692–2702. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhr352
Gard, T., Hölzel, B. K., Sack, A. T., Hempel, H., Lazar, S. W., Vaitl, D., & Ott, U. (2012). Pain attenuation through mindfulness is associated with decreased cognitive control and increased sensory processing in the brain. Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y.: 1991), 22(11), 2692–2702. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhr352
Grant, J. A., Courtemanche, J., Duerden, E. G., Duncan, G. H., & Rainville, P. (2010). Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10(1), 43–53. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018334
