Everyone knows that tripping or falling hurts. What stops us from feeling pain is basically the body’s main pain-blocking process: the natural production of opioids.
What if we use meditation to reduce that pain?
In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience , a team of scientists led by Fadel Zeidan, professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the W ake Forest Baptist Medical Center (USA), state that this is the case, but the cause is unknown. The reason is that it does not appear to use the human body’s opioid system.
“Our finding was surprising and could be important to the millions of chronic pain sufferers seeking fast-acting, non-opioid-based therapy to relieve their pain,” says Zeidan.
To determine whether meditation uses the body’s opioids to reduce pain, the researchers involved 78 healthy volunteers who were divided into two groups; The first group was given a drug called naloxone, which blocks the pain-reducing effects of opioids, and the second group, a saline placebo.
All participants were encouraged to meditate for at least 20 minutes a day for the four days that the study lasted. To add the pain component, the experts used a probe heated to 49 degrees Celsius at a level considered very painful. After this, the participants had to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much pain they had felt.
The results revealed that people who meditated and who also received the dose of naloxen reported a 24% reduction in pain , showing that, even without this natural system, meditation can have an analgesic effect after a short period of training, This could also help people who are tolerant to opiates and who need higher doses for pain relief.
