A Short Meditation Course Can Reduce Pain

Extensive meditation training has long been shown to reduce someone’s awareness and sensitivity to pain, but the effort involved, the time taken, and the expense makes this treatment impracticable for most patients.  Now brief, simple mindfulness meditation training has been tested on electric shock pain in healthy volunteers.  The study, conducted at North Carolina University, is reported in the Journal of Pain.

There were 3 separate experiments: response to pain before and after meditation; response before and after, or during, relaxation or a math exercise distraction; and comparison of the effects of meditation and relation or a math exercise on the response.  In each experiment the perception of pain (i.e. the sensitivity to pain) was measured (the point at which increasing shocks were felt) and the perceived severity of the pain.

The distracting math activity was effective in reducing the severity of pain, but the effect of meditation was even stronger, and had the added effect of reducing the apparent sensitivity to pain.

The effectiveness of the mindfulness meditation program in this experimental setup was impressive.  It comprised a single hour of training spread out over a 3-day period.  Clearly shorter and less expensive than other meditation training programs, the next step for this ‘short program’ is testing against pain in a variety of clinical situations.