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Meditation can help cope with pain

Living with pain is stressful, but a bit of mental training can help you cope. A new study has found that short and simple meditation training can improve pain management.

University of North Carolina-Charlotte (UNC-C) researchers have shown that a single hour of training spread out over a three-day period can produce analgesic effect regarding pain.
"This study is the first to demonstrate the efficacy of such a brief intervention on the perception of pain," noted Fadel Zeidan, doctoral candidate in psychology at UNC-C, who led the study.
"Not only did the meditation subjects feel less pain than the control group while meditating but they also experienced less pain sensitivity while not meditating."
Over the course of three experiments employing harmless electrical shocks, they measured the effect of brief sessions of mindfulness meditation training on pain awareness measuring responses.
Subjects who received the meditation training were compared to controls and to groups using relaxation and distraction techniques, said a release of UNC-C.
"We knew already that meditation has significant effects on pain perception in long-term practitioners whose brains seem to have been completely changed-we didn't know that you could do this in just three days, with just 20 minutes a day," Zeidan said.