Zen mantras are not just for yoga class and memes. Doctors are turning to meditation and mindful activities as a treatment for people suffering from chronic pain. Meditation enhances not only how the brain functions but also how people are able to process and cope with pain. Meditation comes with all of the feel-good physiological aspects, it also shows unlimited potential for transforming the healing process across a variety of pain categories.
Researchers have found that mindfulness positively affects brain activity and cognition, including body awareness, pain tolerance, emotion regulation, introspection, complex thinking and sense of self. Now there is, even more, to suggest that the brain has the ability to change and positively respond to an integrated approach.
An Enhanced Approach to Pain Management
In August 2019, Dr. A. Vania Apkarian, who manages a pain clinic at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, published research around chronic pain as a mental and emotional construct. Dr. Apkarian’s team worked with a test group of chronic back pain patients to evaluate a patient’s likelihood of developing chronic pain based on personality and brain activity. “The more pain you have, the more anxiety you have, the more pain you have, the more depression, the more catastrophizing, the more fear. All of those things sort of cluster together,” said Dr. Apkarian.
Patient’s responses to chronic pain suffering, amplified because the brain becomes almost hardwired with the memory of pain, some patients responded by creating positive thoughts and actions around pain, which in turn improved their response to placebo treatments and accelerated their healing.
Changing patterns and belief systems is where meditation becomes an effective behavioral therapy. In “The Science of Yoga and Mindfulness for Pain” podcast episode, Dr. Sara Lazar, associate researcher in the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School shares what they observed when people were meditating: changes in the hippocampus (an area of learning and memory), the PCC (self-reference area), and an area of the brainstem that releases neurotransmitters and is associated with a sense of well-being.
“People reported being happier if that region (in the brainstem) changed. Then the last region we found was the amygdala, it got smaller. The amygdala is all about fight or flight and fear and stress. As that got smaller, people reported less stress,” said Dr. Lazar. “These changes are consistent with the self-report and what people are talking about and how it’s impacting them.”
Even in other pain categories, such as nociceptive, inflammatory or acute pain, meditation has proven to be an incredibly effective approach for controlling and heightening pain thresholds. Patients suffering from chronic pain experience success through individualized treatment plans and a focus on integrated medicine in-tandem with mindful activities, such as meditation, yoga, and/or acupuncture. The exciting aspects of mindfulness are that it could hold the key to unlocking more improved pain treatment plans, circumventing the vicious cycle of pain, depression, and anxiety.
