When one meditates, they are mindful of their breathing, and nothing else exists. Studies have shown that mindful acceptance and mindfulness have multiple benefits for emotional and physical health. Other research revealed mindfulness lowered blood pressure and helped cope with phobias, with pain, and with emotion regulation.
Scientists conducted neuroscientific experiments and found that participants felt less physical pain after practicing mindfulness. Further tests using brain scans revealed that mindfulness helps control emotion, which may be helpful for people trying to overcome addiction or at least lower their stress levels.
A team of researchers led by Hedy Kober, of Yale University in New Haven, set out to find out whether an individual who has never meditated before can also reap these benefits from a 30-minute introduction. The results, which were published in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, suggest that a brief introduction to mindful meditation can help reduce negative emotions and ease pain.
The Study
The team picked out 17 participants, aged 18-45, all of whom were naive to meditation. They conducted two experiments. In one, participants looked at 30 neutral images vs. 30 negative images. In the other, they experienced warm temperature vs. painful stimuli 30 times each.
The participants were trained, before the experiments, on mindfulness and how to accomplish the task for up to 30 minutes. During this time, the team told the participants to “act naturally” in the control condition; this provides the scientists with a baseline measure of emotional response. As the participants were completing the tasks, the researchers performed brain imaging scans.
The participants were then asked “to attend to and accept their experience as it is,” which was the mindful acceptance mindset. This mindset consisted of two components: “non-judgmental acceptance of the sensation as it is, allowing it to exist without trying to avoid it or react to it” and “attention to present moment sensation.”
An example of this is seen in one of the experiments that involved the physical application of heat to the forearms of the participant. In essence, they were instructed to accept the sensation in a non-judgmental way.
The authors of the study explain, “Participants were told ‘if you feel a sensation of warmth on your forearm, you should simply attend to what is felt, without making any judgment of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of that sensation.”
Conclusion
The tests revealed that the participants reported fewer negative emotions and physical pain in the mindfulness condition. “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,” wrote the study’s authors.
Kober commented, “The ability to stay in the moment when experiencing pain or negative emotions suggests there may be clinical benefits to mindfulness practice in chronic conditions as well—even without long meditation practice.”
Would you try to meditate for 30 minutes a day if it could relieve your stress and pain? What do you think about mindful meditation?
