Mindfulness meditation reduces pain better than slow breathing alone
I recommend meditation to almost all of my migraine and headache patients. Some people tell me that they have difficulty meditating, I reply that those for whom meditation is easy, don’t need it. If they really having trouble meditating, I tell them to try breathing exercises.
A new study published in the journal PAIN by Dr. A. Amorim and her colleagues at the University of California San Diego examined how mindfulness meditation reduces pain. The findings help clarify whether mindfulness meditation is more effective than simple slow breathing for pain relief.
The study pooled data from five separate randomized controlled trials involving 245 healthy, pain-free people who had never practiced meditation. All participants received painful heat stimulation (49°Capplied to the right calf) before and after their assigned intervention. They were divided into three groups: mindfulness meditation (113 people),sham-mindfulness meditation consisting of slow breathing alone (73 people), and a control group that listened to an audiobook (60 people).
Mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater pain relief than either slow breathing alone or the control condition. Both meditation techniques also considerably reduced anxiety, but this anxiety improvement was not translated into pain relief.
The researchers found that slower breathing rate partially mediated the pain-relieving effects for both types of meditation compared to controls. However, mindfulness meditation still outperformed slow breathing, suggesting that mindfulness involves additional pain-relieving mechanisms beyond simply slowing respiration.
This was a large study with rigorous methodology. Previous studies with smaller numbers of participants had produced mixed results about whether mindfulness was more effective than slow breathing alone. By combining data from multiple trials using identical methods, the researchers were able to definitively show that mindfulness meditation is superior to slow breathing for acute pain relief.
While slow breathing does help reduce pain, mindfulness meditation appears to provide additional benefit. The researchers speculate that mindfulness may reduce pain by deactivating the thalamus, abrain region that acts as a gateway for sensory information. By essentially closing this gate, mindfulness meditation may prevent pain signals fromreaching higher brain centers. However, it's important to note that this study examined acute pain induced in healthy volunteers, not chronic pain conditions like migraines.
For headache and migraine sufferers, this research reinforces what many have discovered through personal experience, myself included: meditation can be a powerful tool for pain management. The study suggests that even brief periods of practice - the participants in these trials received only four 20-minute daily sessions - can produce meaningful pain relief. My migraines stopped when I increased the duration of meditation sessions to 30-40 minutes a day.
