When it comes to meditation for pain relief, the following is useful information that everyone should know. Having what to specifically focus on while meditating, how the body reacts to the pain and how you eventually feel during and after meditating are all important things to understand. Once you understand how they relate, meditation will be an important aspect of pain relief whenever you find yourself experiencing pain. In this article, you will learn about the possibility of overcoming chronic pain with meditation and you will also learn about studies for meditation and pain management.
Is It Possible to Overcome Debilitating Pain with Meditation?
If you have any form of debilitating pain, you will find that the pain can increase over time without showing signs of improvement. People who suffer debilitating pain are subject to depression because the pain will not only make you extremely uncomfortable, it can also effect your sleep. This can lead to even more complications if the painful situation is not addressed as fast as possible. Luckily enough, meditation is a great tool to help you overcome debilitating pain.
The best way to meditate in this case is to have an object of focus. This may be your breath, a mantra, an object such as candle light or flower, a guided meditation or even a highly colored symmetrical painting like the mandala. When you focus on something else, your mind will gradually shift away from your pain. A meditative state will allow your brainwaves to be in the alpha mode. In this mode, your brain produces large quantities of pleasure-causing neuro-chemicals (called endorphins) which will make the whole experience pleasurable and will give you an overall feeling of well-being.
Scientists have proven that once a stage is attained where a pleasurable experience is stimulated in the brain, the brain will automatically inhibit any physical distractions such as chronic pain. This is why meditation is a powerful option in overcoming pain. Let’s find out more about studies for meditation and pain management.
Are There Studies for Meditation and Pain Management?
Meditation plays a very important role in pain management and studies have proved this to be true. To do this, researchers link a certain type of meditation to a particular type of pain. The best way the various experiments are carried out is to induce the same kind of pain in two different groups of people. One group will be made up of people who don’t meditate while the other will normally be seasoned meditators like Buddhists or monks. An example of this kind of research is one that was recently carried out at the Université de Montréal by researchers.
For this study, the scientists recruited 13 Zen meditators with a minimum of 1,000 hours of practice to undergo a pain test and contrasted their reaction with 13 non-meditators. Subjects included 10 women and 16 men between the ages of 22 to 56. A thermal heat source, a computer controlled heating plate, was pressed against the calves of subjects intermittently at varying temperatures. Heat levels began at 43 degrees Celsius and went to a maximum of 53 degrees Celsius depending on each participant’s sensitivity.
The final result was that all seasoned meditators endured the pain to the highest temperature of 53 degrees Celsius while none of the control group reached the maximum temperature. A study like this clearly proves that meditation can be used for pain management.
Meditation has a lot to do with pain management. Once you select a type of meditation and select an object of focus, you can meditate away your pain by influencing the brain to ignore the pain and make you calm. Studies have proven that this fact is true. You can use what you have read to help manage your pain successfully from now on.