Defeating physical pain without drugs and in an absolutely natural way? With meditation you can! According to research by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center of North Carolina (USA), published in the Journal of Neuroscience this month, meditation - in addition to producing beneficial effects on the mind and body, reducing the stress and tensions of the daily routine - contributes to diminish the sensations of physical pain.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerous
Defeat physical pain without drugs and in an absolutely natural way? With meditation you can! According to a research by the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center of North Carolina (USA), published in the Journal of Neuroscience of this month, meditation - in addition to producing beneficial effects on the mind and body, reducing the stress and tensions of the daily routine - helps to weaken the sensations of physical pain.
How? With simple exercises! Thanks to some relaxation and concentration techniques in fact, our body can get to perceive pain in a more attenuated wayjust like when taking anti-inflammatory drugs. And sometimes it has even better results than drugs.
American researchers carried out a test on 15 volunteers, who had never had any meditation experience. The tested subjects were first subjected to pain induction through a 50-degree thermal probe and then constantly monitored thanks to magnetic resonance imaging.
Once the full pain stage was reached, the test subjects followed suit 4 meditation lessons of 20 minutes each, during which they practiced concentration techniques focused on thoughts, emotions, situations and breath.
How did it turn out?
After the short meditation course, the pain of the 15 volunteers decreased from 11% to 91%. In short, in some cases the pain has almost practically disappeared without resorting to classic medicines.
To highlight the change in pain perception is the somatosensory cortex, that before the meditation it was in full activity, while afterwards it suffered a clear reduction.
"One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain," said Fadel Zeidan, lead author of the study, "is that it did not work in one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of pain. processing".
In short, before stuffing ourselves with drugs ... meditate people, meditate ...!
Verdiana Amorosi
Read all of our articles on meditation
For the research abstract click here
