New research has found that a 30-minute introduction to mindfulness can significantly reduce negative emotions and relieve physical pain, even for those who have never practiced the technique before.
Research has shown that mindfulness and full acceptance have multiple benefits for physical and emotional health.
Medical Pharma News has covered studies that show the many benefits of mindfulness, from lowering blood pressure to coping with phobias.
There are two other areas where mindfulness can be helpful: pain and the regulation of emotions.
Neuroscientific experiments have found that participants felt less physical pain as a result of practicing mindfulness, and researchers have suggested that this may have implications for controlling chronic pain.
Other studies using brain scans have shown that mindfulness helps control emotions, which can help people overcome addiction or reduce their stress levels.
But is it possible that someone who has never meditated before can reap these benefits? This is what a group of researchers, led by Hedy Kober, an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University in New Haven, CT, set out to examine.
Specifically, Kober and his colleagues wanted to see if people with no previous experience in mindfulness could benefit from a 30-minute introduction to the technique.
The results, now featured in the journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, seem to suggest that a brief introduction to mindfulness can help relieve pain and reduce negative emotions.
The 30-minute effect of mindfulness
The experiments revealed that participants reported less physical pain and negative emotions in the mindfulness condition.
This coincided with changes in their brains. According to the study authors, “the regulation of emotion through conscious acceptance was associated with reductions in informed pain and negative affection, amygdala responses reduced to negative images, and heat-evoked responses in the systems of medial and lateral pain.”
Referring to physical pain experiments, Kober explains, “It’s like the brain is responding at a warm temperature, not a very high heat.”
Kober continues to comment on the clinical importance of the findings:
“The ability to stay in time when you experience pain or negative emotions suggests that the practice of mindfulness can also have clinical benefits under chronic conditions, even without a prolonged practice of meditation.”
Hedy Kober
