Mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than slow-breathing meditation: the mediating role of respiration.
Pain March 1, 2026 Anita B Amorim, Morgan Gianola, Daniel Barrows et al.
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than slow breathing alone or a control condition. Pooling data from 5 randomized controlled trials with 245 healthy, pain-free, meditation-naïve adults, noxious heat was applied to the right calf to test whether changes in respiration and state anxiety mediate pain relief. Mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater analgesia compared with sham-mindfulness meditation (slow breathing) and a book-listening control. Slower respiration rate partially mediated analgesia for both mindfulness and sham-mindfulness meditation relative to controls. Both techniques lowered anxiety, but these reductions did not mediate pain relief. The findings demonstrate that mindfulness meditation outperforms slow breathing alone for reducing pain and highlight slower breathing's role in directly modulating acute pain.