Focus on your breathing. As thoughts and emotions come to you, simply observe without judgment and dismiss them, as if they were just passing by outside your car window. Return to the sensations of air passing in through your nostrils, down your trachea and filling your lungs...
Sound like a yoga class? Hypnosis? Close, but even better. It's a trick you can keep up your sleeve to pull out the next time your body screams "Ouch!" And it works, according to a study published in the April, 2011 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. (https://cuvpn.colorado.edu/content/31/14/,DanaInfo=www.jneurosci.org+5540.full.pdf+html)
Researchers took 15 young healthy volunteers, and applied a painful stimulus to their calves for about 6 minutes while instructing them to simply pay "attention to breath." Brain activity was recorded using fMRI before and during the noxious stimulus. Afterwards, the subjects also rated their subjective pain intensity and pain unpleasantness on a standard visual analog scale.
Subjects were then given instruction in Shamatha, a type of "mindfulness meditation" that involves focused attention on the sensations of the breath, while disengaging from intrusive thoughts or emotions. Subjects spent merely 20 minutes a day, for 4 days, learning the technique. The fMRI sequences were then repeated, with the subjects meditating as taught during the application of noxious stimulus.
Meditation has long been thought to modify our sensory experiences, but the specific brain mechanisms were mysterious. As expected by the researchers, the subjects' ratings of pain intensity and pain unpleasantness were lower during meditation than before the training. In fact, subjects rated their pain lower by 40% and 57% respectively!
New information also emerged. Several different brain mechanisms seemed to be working at once. fMRI showed that distinct brain regions were significantly more active during meditation, some of them associated with the cognitive modulation of pain; some related to emotion regulation; some tasked with reframing the contextual evaluation of sensory events; and others involved in interoceptive awareness (attention to sensations inside the body). Additionally, some areas such as the thalamus were deactivated during meditation, acting as a sort of gatekeeper for afferent nociceptive signals.
Thanks to these brain mechanisms, you can handle the pain - if you make friends with Shamatha. For a relatively small time investment (just 20 minutes a day for 4 days), you can acquire a skill that will last you a lifetime, and hone it with practice. By extension, the pain-reducing benefits of Shamatha could be used to brave a variety of "painful" circumstances, like speaking in front of a crowd or meeting your boyfriend's parents. Further, a host of other benefits of increased interoceptive awareness await, like "trusting your gut" or knowing when you need some exercise, or knowing when you've had enough pizza.
Try it; it can't hurt.
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NRSC 4132 BlogA GROUP WEBLOG FOR NEUROPHARMACOLOGY NRSC 4132
September 12, 2011
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