Can meditation help with pain?

When your pain has not subsided, you can think of meditation. When your chronic pain persists after you've tried conventional treatments, you should consider meditation. Even if you are skeptical, you can find a type of meditation that works for you. Whether meditation works for chronic pain relief has had mixed results. Read on to learn more about the scientific evidence on chronic pain and meditation and how to incorporate different meditation techniques.

Meditation is an ancient practice with roots in Buddhism and other Eastern religions. It begins with focusing your attention on the present moment and not judging your thoughts in the process.

Meditation uses different brain pathways to deal with pain from pathways used by other pain treatments. Over time, meditation can change the structure of your brain to better deal with pain.
Meditation, mindfulness and the brain show that in the long run, meditation can change the structure of your brain. The result is a change in cortical thickness in certain areas of the brain that makes you less sensitive to pain. Meditation promotes cognitive release and enhanced sensory processing of actual pain.
One study used the opioid blocker naloxone or a placebo and a study on pain relief by meditation. The placebo group experienced significantly more pain relief than the opioid blocker group.

In recent years, research on meditation and chronic pain has expanded greatly. Studies are looking at what works for different types of chronic pain, such as back pain or chronic illnesses.
There are many types of meditation techniques and many tools to help you get started. Here are a few examples: books, meditation apps, podcasts, online videos, classes, personal instructors.
Some people use more than one type of meditation and many tutorials to get started are free. Unlike other pain relief methods, when you meditate, you focus on the pain, rather than away from it, to find relief. Before and after mindfulness meditation training, brain activity was measured using a special type of magnetic resonance imaging to record longer brain processes, such as meditation, better than an MRI. standard.

Mindfulness meditation can help you manage stress, pain, and anxiety.
You can do it yourself or ask a guide. Essentially, you quietly focus on your thoughts without judging them. This is also the most studied type of meditation over the years.

Breathing meditation involves using a type of breathing exercise to change breathing patterns and relax the mind. It is sometimes used with mindfulness meditation to help you focus.

In body scan meditation, you focus your mind on the body from top to bottom. The goal is to notice everything about your body, relaxing each part of your body as you scan. You can practice this scanning meditation while sitting or lying down.

Mindfulness meditation-based interventions improve pain symptoms across a range of pain-related disorders, including fibromyalgia, migraine, chronic pelvic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and other disorders. other status. Given that chronic low back pain is the most common clinical pain condition, there is a need to better determine whether and how mindfulness meditation affects chronic low back pain.
The 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program is one of the most researched and validated approaches to the treatment of chronic low back pain. Chronic pain patients reported improvements in pain symptoms and quality of life after mindfulness meditation, and the improvements were maintained at 3 years.
Relatively brief mindfulness meditation can significantly reduce symptoms of chronic low back pain. However, the specific pain-relieving neural mechanisms that demonstrate how mindfulness meditation interventions induce chronic pain have not been identified, which represents an important step in enhancing the clinical value of the technique. this ancient.

Reference source: webmd.com