Even a brief introduction to meditation can ease pain
New research has found that a 30-minute introduction to mindfulness can significantly reduce negative emotions and ease physical pain even for those who have never practiced the technique before
Islamabad (Pakistan Point News / Online - 27th February, 2020) New research has found that a 30-minute introduction to mindfulness can significantly reduce negative emotions and ease physical pain even for those who have never practiced the technique before.
Even people new to mindfulness meditation can reap the benefits after only a short introduction.Research has shown that mindfulness and mindful acceptance have multiple benefits for physical and emotional health.
Neuroscientific experiments have found that participants felt less physical pain as a result of practicing mindfulness, and researchers have suggested that this may have implications for managing chronic pain.
However, is it possible that someone who has never meditated before can reap these benefits? This is what a group of researchers led by Hedy Kober, an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University in New Haven, CT has set out to examine.
Mindfulness, pain, and negative emotionsKober and team tested 17 "meditation-na�ve" participants, aged 18-45, under two experimental conditions.
In one condition, the participants had to look at 30 negative images vs.
30 neutral images. In the other, they experienced painful vs. warm temperature stimuli 30 times each.During this time, the researchers instructed the participants to "react naturally, whatever [their] response might be" in the control condition, so that the scientists could establish a baseline measure of emotional response.
The researchers achieved this by performing brain imaging scans of the participants as they were completing the tasks.The effect of 30 minutes of mindfulnessThis coincided with changes in their brains.
According to the study authors, "Emotion regulation using mindful acceptance was associated with reductions in reported pain and negative affect, reduced amygdala responses to negative images, and reduced heat-evoked responses in medial and lateral pain systems."