'Mindful People' Feel Less Pain, Study Finds (medicalxpress.com) 101
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers -- mindfulness. The researchers analyzed data obtained from a study published in 2015 that compared mindfulness meditation to placebo analgesia. In this follow-up study, Zeidan sought to determine if dispositional mindfulness, an individual's innate or natural level of mindfulness, was associated with lower pain sensitivity, and to identify what brain mechanisms were involved. In the study, 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated first completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness, to determine their baseline levels. Then, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, they were administered painful heat stimulation.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region. The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering. The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.
"Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:3)
In this context, Mindfulness is an oxymoron, where to become mindful is to remove oneself from one's own mind. It's the application of adding a level of indirection (*) to every variable. For myself, I've rather make everything inline and register variables.
Re:"Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:5, Informative)
In this context, Mindfulness is an oxymoron, where to become mindful is to remove oneself from one's own mind. It's the application of adding a level of indirection (*) to every variable.
Mindfulness in this context is just a measure of how people score on a straightforward practical questionnaire. The questions are practical, so there's no oxymoron. The only oxymoron comes from your own putative definition "remove oneself from one's own mind" which isn't what was used in the study. Here are some of the questions in the questionnaire, on a scale from Rarely to Almost Always:
Q. I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning or talking.
Q. I am able to appreciate myself.
Q. I pay attention to what’s behind my actions.
Q. I am friendly to myself when things go wrong.
Q. I am impatient with myself and with others.
Note that the "mindfulness" used in this context doesn't require you to semantically analyze the questions for what you believe to be contradictions or oddities or the logic of the questions; it's merely an observation of how people respond to it, correlated with population observations of how other people respond to it.
I think your analogy of "adding a level of indirection" isn't the right one. These questions make it sound like mindfulness is more like executing the code under a debugger, and being in the habit of pausing it in tough situations or just periodically, and inspecting the values of local variables so as to have a better idea of what's going on. The alternative would be to only figure out what's going on by looking at the output values of all functions, or what's printed to stdout.
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The questions are practical, so
No, they're not. They're both highly subjective and open to interpretations.
Q. I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning or talking.
Q. I am able to appreciate myself.
Q. I pay attention to whatâ(TM)s behind my actions.
Q. I am friendly to myself when things go wrong.
Q. I am impatient with myself and with others.
How do you define "sense my body"? Any part of it, or all parts of it? Consciously or just an awareness?
How do you define "pay attention" and "behind"?
What is meant by "friendly to myself"? And "things go wrong"?
What is meant by "impatient with myself and with others"?
This is mumbo-jumbo questions. There's no way to measure the objectivity of the answers, nor even define what they bloody mean.
If they measure something, it's not
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They make sense if you practise mindfullness.
They are basic questions taugh when starting out as a newcomer to mindfulness practise.
Sense my body whether eating, cooking, cleaning, or talking.
- Do you have the kinestetic sense of the body's orientation, the weight bearing on the muscles, the force of gravity
- While performing these other actions, do you maintain the awareness of the body -- most people completely disconnect from their body and have no awareness of it all.
- To have aw
Re:"Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
They make sense if you practise mindfullness.
Ah, much as like religion makes sense if you practice the religion, then. Not at all from an objective perspective, because it must be a subjective experience. In other words: BS
It is true what you are saying, in that there is a big difference between objective data and subjective expression. And we should not pretend that this is like measuring something objective. Having said that, subjective experience is not BS. If your partner says "I love you and want to have babies and start a family and grow old together", that is all subjective, yet, people have to base the biggest decisions in their lives on whether they intuit that their partner is being sincere, or whether they think their partner is lying, either to them or to themselves.
Objective science is amazing, and there is the rest of life where no, you cannot be objective, but you cannot just ignore subjectivity and intuition and interpretation and sincerity either, because you'd not be able to function.
And if you go to a doctor and complain that it hurts, but the doc says they can't find anything wrong with you, too often there are cases where yes there really is something wrong with you, but all you know is how you feel. Ie. "subjective BS".
But yes, pretty much all of "mindfulness" is a phenomenology, not an objective science. Which is why trying to correlate it with brain activity is interesting.
What the earlier poster refers to though is something that tends to be heard in mindfulness and meditation circles. And yes it is subjective, but "suffering" is a subjective experience, and we can't tell people who are suffering, because they just lost their job, that they should quit whining because it is "all in their head". As humans we are similar and there are phenomenological experiences which most of us would agree are "suffering". Likewise, as a collection of humans who practice mindfulness, we can compare and talk about whether it seems to reduce suffering.
And of course a group of people can delude themselves just as a group of scientists peer reviewing each others' clique of speciality can all delude themselves with group think.
So by all means take that study with a large pinch of salt.
Mindfulness is simply about noticing that when a bad feeling or bad situation comes up, those events are a bit like a drama on a TV show and you are watching the TV show. The TV is like your consciousness, a screen on which or within which, the image is manifesting, and the TV does not get upset about the drama, the drama is merely a function of what the TV is supposed to be doing naturally.
So there is a sort of "feeling lighter" and from there you then participate in, and accept more, the drama, and out of that, you probably find answers better. Mindfulness is like, the opposite of running away from problems.
In Buddhism I gather there is the story of a guy who is shot by an arrow and is obviously in pain, but rather that accept the situation and deal with it, he is very upset that he is shot by an arrow, ie. he is mentally in a state of rejection of the situation, he hates it, and that adds another layer of upset and suffering, in that he just hates the situation, and so he experiences even more pain. "I can't stand it!!" Subjectively he has added additional layers of suffering and pain, to the original "arrow stuck in leg" pain.
So maybe there is something about whether a stimulus in one part of the brain gets relayed or not, to other parts of the brain, and as your brain is the physical side of your mind, if you alter your mind with a practice of accepting, maybe your brain does rewire, given the material assumption that everything you experience is created by the brain, or could not happen unless the brain itself was doing it.
If in your mind you have loosened the connections between phenomena so that a pain is more in isolation, more localised, then maybe the brain is also loosening the connections between centres and allowing that is happening in one centre to have less influence on the other centres.
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They make sense if you practise mindfullness.
Bollocks. 'Sense my body' could be interpreted a number of ways, many of which are utter bollocks.
Consciously aware of muscle loads and gravity is a more useful description, it's tangible and easier to answer. But am I mindful when dancing and mindless when using a computer? Or am I not mindful when I'm dancing because I didn't know that's what you meant by 'sense of body', because the question was bollocks.
All of the questions are bollocks. "Are you a zen master, able to levitate and bend others to your wi
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It took a while, digging through a few websites, but I finally found something that describes what "mindfulness" actually means. The OP's summary doesn't describe what the main subject matter actully means, which is a signifcant deficiency in any cited article or /. topic.
https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
Short answer: it basically means meditation, whether structured or just self-evolved (ie you do it "naturally" as part of your personality or learned behaviour).
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Their definition of mindfulness is "characterized as the innate capacity to non-reactively sustain attention to the present moment,"
Ability to focus when in pain....
Study size: 76.
"Higher FMI ratings were associated with lower pain intensity (p =.005) and pain unpleasantness ratings (p =.005)"
Minimal difference when averaged...
Looks like BS to me.
Re: "Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:1)
Yes probably won't replicate
Re:"Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the internet, the reason that the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory supporters keep repeating this odd and out-of-place claim that their technique is "a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness" is that there is continued professional skepticism about the reliability and clinical utility of the system.
The research available is hilariously funny to read. For example: https://freidok.uni-freiburg.d... [uni-freiburg.de]
Compared to the waitlist group, the intervention group showed significantly higher levels of
self-reported mindfulness after the intervention. While no other variables changed
significantly in the overall population, effects in the individual schools indicate relative
benefits with respect to stress and social-emotional competencies. Qualitative results confirm
these benefits and reveal awareness processes, distancing, presence as well as acceptance,
nonjudgement and self-compassion as central mechanisms of change.
*roflcopter*
But even just in the acknowledgments, there is the claim:
I was exceedingly fortunate to encounter mindfulness at the hands of our extraordinary
teachers, [names]; no amount
of research could have conveyed to me the wealth of nuances and implications of practice that
they embody so effortlessly. For that, and for the true privilege of meeting and working with
them, I am especially thankful.
(Emphasis added) :)
Yeah. OK. At least we're on the same page about how your research sits relative to knowledge that can be conveyed through research.
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Ah, yes...the delicate science of Tautology.
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But even just in the acknowledgments, there is the claim:
I was exceedingly fortunate to encounter mindfulness at the hands of our extraordinary
teachers, [names]; no amount
of research could have conveyed to me the wealth of nuances and implications of practice that
they embody so effortlessly. For that, and for the true privilege of meeting and working with
them, I am especially thankful.
(Emphasis added)
Yeah. OK. At least we're on the same page about how your research sits relative to knowledge that can be conveyed through research. :)
I'd never heard of the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory before today, so I'm not in a position to comment on the consistency or otherwise of it, or the validity of their claims for it, but I'm not sure I see why you single out that quote, other than flippancy. The obvious meaning is akin to the distinction between reading about something and experiencing that same thing in person. For many things in life (going parachuting, eating a fine meal, having sex, coming face to face with an angry grizzly bear, etc.)
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For many things in life (going parachuting, eating a fine meal, having sex, coming face to face with an angry grizzly bear, etc.) the two are not even remotely comparable.
Right, right, right, which of those things are science?
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What does "removing oneself from one's own mind" even mean? How would that even be possible? This is just a straw man you've constructed with an equivocating interpretation of the word "mindful".
Mindfulness in this context is simply a conscious awareness of your own bodily and mental processes.
When I was younger I was a fairly serious martial artist, and the training involved frequent exposure to pain. The process of becoming inured to the pain of a punch or a joint lock isn't what you'd think. The pain do
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I am a different poster, jumping in.
I would like to answer your question "What does "removing oneself from one's own mind" even mean?"
What the poster is *probably* talking about is a specific experience that is commonly reported by, and significantly influences, religious traditions that include the practice of meditation.
Put simply: your ordinary sense of being a singular entity that is distinct from the rest of the word is, in and of itself, a complex neurological process that operates more-or-less consta
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Well, I can't answer to drugs generally, but I think the meditative "ego death" might well be like looking at a picture so close it breaks into pixels. The "self" after all is a story the brain constructs. It is an actor in a predictive model of the world. But if you look closely at it, either subjectively through meditation or objectively through neurological research, it looks less fundamental than it does from the inside.
Re: "Mindfulness" obviously an oxymoron (Score:2)
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Mindfulness in this context is simply a conscious awareness of your own bodily and mental processes.
Very few have that. The awareness of how biological processes work is rather low, and what they (and presumably you) mean certainly has nothing to do with understanding oligodentrycytes, but is wishy-washy mumbo-jumbo language like when new age followers talk about "energy".
"Administered painful heat simulation"? (Score:5, Funny)
I saw that movie!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
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Entrope pointed out:
I saw that movie!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
If I had mod points, this comment would definitely get a +1 Funny.
(Your username deserves one, too, btw ...)
Keep up the good work!
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The books are a lot better, and at under 2500 pages the original series is much shorter than contemporary sci-fi epics, so it's an easy read.
I use this trick to disassociate pain (Score:5, Interesting)
This study resonates with my personal experience. Say I'm in pain at the dentist's, or an insect bite, or fatigue from endurance exercise. I could drop straight into the normal instinctual fight-or-flight emotional response to the pain. But instead I get my mind to observe the pain as a detached analytical observer -- to try to document the sensations of the pain in all their aspects, like a scientist would. I pretend there's no axiom that says "this sensorial experience implies that emotional response". And, hey presto, there the emotional response just doesn't happen.
Re: I use this trick to disassociate pain (Score:3, Insightful)
For short term pain, endorphins play a major role, as does the perception of how much you expect something to hurt. For example, most piercings don't really hurt (until well afterwards), but most people believe that they do and so "feel" pain. However, having had to cope with severe chronic pain lasting 7 years in the past, I can assure you that any such detachment and ability to cope quickly evaporates. It's the difference between playing in the mud knowing you've got a warm shower waiting for you, and pla
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For short term pain, endorphins play a major role, as does the perception of how much you expect something to hurt. For example, most piercings don't really hurt (until well afterwards), but most people believe that they do and so "feel" pain. However, having had to cope with severe chronic pain lasting 7 years.
When playing in the mud endorphins play a major role. When hit by a car it's adrenaline. With chronic pain none of these helps.
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Coping with pain isnt macho, heroic or sexy.
No, but it lets you get your shit together and move on with your life.
And I say this as someone who walloped in self-pity and pain medication for a while until I realized that the pain wasn't going anywhere, and the best thing to do was to man up, grin and bear it, and get on with my life. I still wake up half a dozen times a night from terrible pain, but guess what? It's just fucking pain. Pain is a warning, not the actual disaster itself. If you can't deal with pain, you'll lose.
Re: I use this trick to disassociate pain (Score:2)
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No. I don't. Screw self-awareness. Go for sisu. It's better to stumble across the finish line than not reach it because you're too busy worrying about how to place your feet.
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Uh huh. Try getting a severe burn and see how much that helps. I know everyone is a special snowflake, but pain is pain. Insect bites are hardly real pain.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Is it that there exists a pain for which the technique doesn't apply, and therefore you say the technique doesn't apply to any cases of pain (a logical fallacy)? Or are you trying to define a concept of "true pain" for which the concept doesn't apply and then maybe attempt to correlate your definition of "true pain" with some other observed MRI response?
I mentioned insect bites because (1) the itch sensation is conveyed by C fibers, the same ones that carry pai
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I have a nest of hornets who will gladly test your hypothesis. Repeatedly. They don't even need asking because they're naturally generous on giving their time for the scientific method.
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I've fractured 2 orbitals, a hand, a foot, my nose twice, toes a dozen times, and so on. I've had 3 hernia repairs, teeth removed, an appendectomy, half a dozen eye surgeries, had a tooth drilled without any numbing agents, and so on.
God, that must have been pretty busy day!
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Oh, absolutely. It is easy to test, and the subjective results should be pretty obvious.
Even if it "didn't work," it would work a lot better than nothing, because the placebo effect is real, and nothing doesn't provide it. But, it does appear to be a stronger effect than placebo.
However, that does not imply that people should be credulous of the claim that they've found an objective measurement for mindfulness.
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This study resonates with my personal experience. Say I'm in pain at the dentist's, or an insect bite, or fatigue from endurance exercise.
I’ve found it much more satisfying to just punch the dentist in the nuts.
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Some of our ancestors tried that. Observe the lion chewing on your extremities as a detached analytical observer. The survivors ran like hell, thereby reinforcing that particular genetic branch.
Effect size? (Score:3)
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Unless the pain is so extreme that it would cause heart failure or something like that, then it is pretty obvious that you can decide to "care less" about the fact that your body is in pain, and that meditation techniques help people who are committed to this endeavor.
You're not going to "replace painkillers," which are a medicine, with philosophy that has to be understood, believed, and adopted, and then followed by disciplined action including refusing the painkillers. Totally different things. Most peopl
What a bunch of boloney! (Score:1)
Was the pain measured objectively or subjectively?
In my opinion... (Score:4, Informative)
Mindfulness is the new religion of modern medicine. What exactly is it? No one can clearly explain. How is it achieved? Well, opinions differ. How can it be objectively measured? Yeah, that's what I thought.
But yet we have oh so many "studies" showing mindfulness purported to effective, of course always for conditions like pain or depression/anxiety that they lack good and/or safe treatment for. But substitute "mindfulness" with "prayer" (which itself could be seen as a form of mindfulness), would the study be taken seriously by the medical community? Yet I fail to see any significant difference between the two.
And hey, if it works for you, great! However, it's insulting when a practitioner of supposedly science-based medicine starts touting ill-defined magical solutions as if they were science.
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Unrepentant hippies now infest every area of human endeavor.
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Mindfulness is the new religion of modern medicine. What exactly is it? No one can clearly explain. How is it achieved? Well, opinions differ. How can it be objectively measured?
The definition used in this study is "mindfulness is the self-reported score on the Frieburg Mindfulness Inventory". That's exactly what it is, and how it's objectively measured (by asking people to self-report it). Yes that is an objective measure even though it's an objective report of a self-reported subjective thing, just like "QRDeNameland likes vanilla ice-cream" is an objective report of your self-reported subjective preference.
Anyway, the news in this study is that there's a statistical correlation
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The only thing the FMI measures is response to the FMI, answers to 14 vag
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To quote the summary:
the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness
Reliable according to...? Oh, the people behind the study...
Color me somewhat skeptical.
And "clinical" means something different in this context, apparently, because it's based on self-reporting. That's not what we normally call "clinical".
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But substitute "mindfulness" with "prayer" (which itself could be seen as a form of mindfulness), would the study be taken seriously by the medical community?
It might
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Mindless people (Score:2)
Mindless people, on the other hand, feel no pain at all... they just inflict it on the rest of us.
Self-absorbed=high endorphins (Score:2, Interesting)
Ask an Endocrinologist. They will explain the interaction. This is just plain ole self-hypnosis...
You don't have to dig very far to see the self-hypnotic aspect of these psychological claims. It's in the language. To infer anything is 'mindful' is some intellectual neer-do-well attempt to call normal behavior 'mindless'. Use negation to understand this one. The same is true of 'positive psychology' or what they consider 'cognition'.
In any case, you have psychological and actual problems if your soluti
Got my mind on my pain and my pain on my mind (Score:2)
Blogspam (Score:4, Informative)
My personal experience syncs with this.
I recently completed a 10-day Vipassana course meditation course. ~10 hours of seated meditation per day, quite a struggle at first. Midway through the course, you are tasked with sitting for an hour straight without moving, 3 times per day. At first I thought this task impossible, as after 10 minutes my knees and ankles would start hurting terribly from sitting in the lotus position.
However, with practice over just a few sessions, I learned to observe the pain with equanimity, and my obsession with the pain dissipated. The pain was very much still there, but it didn't both me. It was an incredible experience.
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The experience of pain is definitely something one can practice to deal with. I've been operated several times in my youth due to cerebral palsy and a couple of those surgeries were quite extensive and had a long recovery process which wasn't completely painless. I learned rather quickly that trying to ignore the pain will make it feel worse, whereas acknowledg
I don't feel less pain (Score:1)
Dumb people are pussies, study finds (Score:1)
Here, I filtered out the smooth talk for you!
Completed that headline for you (Score:2)
"Mindful people" feel less pain, cause more in those hearing their Lululemon'ed asses preach.
Less pain ... (Score:2)
Jargon in public (Score:2)
This sounds like the use of a dialect of jargon, in a public setting. That is Not a Good Thing.
It seems very different from the jargon we use in tech, but the same problems can occur. Using "made up" languages in public cause confusion. (And are even used intentionally to cause confusion.)
Failure to translate jargon to standard, will certainly cause things that you don't want. Remember this article, the next time you communicate with people that are not in your work group! 8-)
Mindfulness is not a self-defining term (Score:1)
Some of the comments suggest that "mindfulness" is in fact a clinical term of art - but to most people it's a woo-woo term of (pseudo-)spirituality and in the same general space as astrology and homeopathic medicine. So what are we really talking about here?