Mindfulness can help you deal with negative emotions and physical pain

Sometimes a joyride and sometimes not that much—yes, that’s life for you! Almost everyone has his/her own share of ups and downs in life. While going through negative emotions and physical pain can be tough to get handle, it is an inevitable part of our lives.

All we can do from our end is to take a few measures to be at our positive best. And according to the findings of a latest study, published in the journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, merely a brief introduction to mindfulness helps people deal with physical pain and negative emotions with much better effectiveness.

The effect of mindfulness was so pronounced that researchers from Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth found, that even when participants were subjected to high heat on their forearm, their brain responded as if it was experiencing normal temperature. 

Mindfulness has previously been shown to have benefits in treating many conditions such as anxiety and depression, but the experts wanted to know whether people with no formal training in meditation and mindfulness might benefit from a brief 20-minute introduction into mindfulness concepts.

“It’s as if the brain was responding to warm temperature, not very high heat,” pointed out Yale’s Hedy Kober, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology and corresponding author of the study.

For the study, the participants were tested in two contexts while undergoing brain imaging scans—one for assessing response to physical pain induced by applying high heat to the forearm and another for gauging their response when presented with negative images.

In both contexts, researchers found significant differences in brain signalling pathways when participants were asked to employ mindfulness techniques compared to when they were asked to respond as they normally would.

Other than this, participants reported less pain and negative emotions when employing mindfulness techniques, and at the same time, their brains showed significant reductions in activity associated with pain and negative emotions.

“The ability to stay in the moment when experiencing pain or negative emotions suggests there may be clinical benefits to mindfulness practice in chronic conditions as well—even without long meditation practice,” Kober said.