Pain can be regulated through different cognitive mechanisms. Two meditation practices were compared during noxious heat: Focused Attention, which may regulate negative affect via sensory gating, and Open Monitoring, which may regulate negative affect through nonjudgmental awareness. Long-term meditators, compared to novices, reported significantly less unpleasantness, but not intensity, of pain while practicing Open Monitoring. No significant effects were found for Focused Attention. This finding highlights a possible regulatory mechanism underlying meditation-based clinical interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
Higher trait mindfulness—the tendency to be mindful without formal training—is linked to greater pain tolerance and less pain catastrophizing. In 40 healthy volunteers naive to meditation, those scoring higher on trait mindfulness showed higher pain thresholds and lower pain catastrophizing. Brain scans revealed that trait mindfulness was associated with reduced connectivity within the default mode network, a set of brain regions tied to self-focused thought and rumination, and increased connectivity between that network and somatosensory areas that process bodily sensations. These neural patterns mirror those seen after formal mindfulness training, suggesting that even without practice, natural variations in mindfulness help people cope with pain by shifting brain activity toward sensory experience and away from emotional elaboration.
People who naturally have higher trait mindfulness—the ability to nonreactively pay attention to the present moment—report lower pain intensity and unpleasantness when exposed to noxious heat. In 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated, higher scores on the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory were linked to less pain. Brain scans showed that more mindful individuals had greater deactivation of a region from the precuneus to posterior cingulate cortex during pain, areas involved in sensory, cognitive, and emotional processing. These results suggest that dispositional mindfulness reduces pain through specific neural mechanisms, pointing to mindfulness and the posterior cingulate cortex as potential targets for pain therapies.
Expert meditators with over 10,000 hours of practice experience pain as intensely as novices but find it less unpleasant. Brain imaging during a mindfulness-like meditation showed that experts had enhanced activity in the dorsal anterior insula and anterior mid-cingulate cortex—part of the salience network—during pain, alongside lower baseline activity in these regions and the amygdala before pain. This pattern was linked to faster neural habituation in pain-related areas. The findings suggest that cultivating experiential openness reduces anticipatory responses to aversive events and increases attentional engagement during pain, leading to quicker habituation.