Meditation and Pain

Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “This is the first study to show that just a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said lead researcher Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D.

“We found a big effect - about a 40% reduction in pain intensity and a 57% reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25%,” said Zeidan.

Scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant’s pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11% to 93%. At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is.

The scans taken before meditation training showed activity in this area was very high. However, when participants were meditating activity in this important pain-processing region could not be detected.