The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
July 28, 2010
Fadel Zeidan, Susan K. Johnson, Nakia S. Gordon et al.
323 citations
Three days of brief mindfulness meditation training (one hour total) reduced negative mood, depression, fatigue, confusion, and heart rate in 82 undergraduates with no prior meditation experience, compared to both a sham meditation group and a control group. The improvements exceeded those attributable to demand characteristics, indicating genuine beneficial effects of brief meditation on mood and cardiovascular variables.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Fadel Zeidan, David R. Vago
304 citations
Treating chronic pain is challenging and costly because pain involves interacting sensory, cognitive, and affective factors. The opioid epidemic, driven by widespread opioid use for pain, underscores the need for fast-acting nonpharmacological alternatives. Mindfulness meditation significantly reduces pain in experimental and clinical settings through multiple, unique mechanisms, offering a narcotic-free, self-facilitated option for chronic pain patients.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
April 24, 2013
Fadel Zeidan, Katherine T. Martucci, Robert Kraft et al.
196 citations
Mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety by engaging brain regions that regulate emotion and self-referential thought. In fifteen healthy novice meditators, four days of training lowered state anxiety during meditation sessions but not during a simple breath-attention task. Anxiety relief correlated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula. Greater default-mode activity in the posterior cingulate cortex during meditation was linked to higher anxiety, suggesting difficulty controlling self-referential thoughts. The findings indicate that mindfulness meditation attenuates anxiety through mechanisms involved in regulating self-referential thought processes.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
David R. Vago, Fadel Zeidan
165 citations
Mind wandering and mindfulness are often seen as opposite mental states, with mind wandering linked to negative self-reflection and task disruption, and mindfulness linked to present-focused awareness and reduced stress. However, this article argues that the relationship is more nuanced, involving a skillful toggling between conceptual and nonconceptual processes to meet situational demands. The authors present a theoretical neurocognitive framework of the restful mind, drawing on literature about intrinsic network activity, meditation, and nonduality, to clarify adaptive contributions of both states. A neurophenomenological approach is proposed for probing concentration and nonconceptual awareness to better understand the resting state.
Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
May 4, 2020
Joel Castellanos, C. Leonard Woolley, Kelly Bruno et al.
118 citations
Chronic pain develops through complex mechanisms involving strengthened neural circuitry from repeated pain signals, leading to peripheral and central sensitization. Psychedelics, through serotonin 2A receptor agonism, may 'reset' brain functional connectivity involved in central neuropathic pain. They have a favorable safety profile compared to opioid analgesics. Clinical evidence for chronic pain is limited, but studies over 50 years show potential benefit for cancer pain, phantom limb pain, and cluster headache. The mechanisms are unclear but may involve similarities between psychedelic activation pathways and nociceptive modulation. Functional connectivity changes from psychedelics could help reverse neural changes in chronic pain. Further research is needed given the opioid epidemic and limited non-opioid options.
PLoS One
July 19, 2019
Jordan T. Quaglia, Fadel Zeidan, Peter G. Grossenbacher et al.
64 citations
Mindfulness training improves cognitive control in social situations by enhancing early top-down attention. In a randomized controlled study, participants who completed four brief mindfulness sessions showed better discrimination of facial expressions and more efficient cognitive control compared to a control group. Those with poorer baseline performance benefited most. Mindfulness also improved conflict monitoring of behavioral tendencies, as shown by larger No-Go N200 brain responses. These results suggest mindfulness helps people manage the unique demands of social contexts, particularly for those with greater room for improvement, and that early attention deployment may be a key mechanism behind mindfulness's regulatory benefits.
Pain
July 7, 2022
Gabriel Riegner, Grace Posey, Valeria Oliva et al.
41 citations
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain by weakening the connection between brain regions that process self-referential thoughts and those that process nociceptive signals. In a clinical trial, 40 participants were randomized to either a 4-session mindfulness meditation or a book-listening regimen. Functional MRI and noxious heat (49°C) applied to the right calf showed that mindfulness meditation significantly reduced both behavioral and neural pain responses compared to controls. The analgesia was linked to greater decoupling between the thalamus and precuneus, and deactivation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, suggesting a self-referential nociceptive gating mechanism.
Social Psychological and Personality Science
November 18, 2021
Daniel R. Berry, Catherine S. J. Wall, Justin D. Tubbs et al.
29 citations
A randomized controlled trial tested whether a 4-day mindfulness training, compared to a sham meditation training, increased helping behaviors toward racial outgroup members. People with higher baseline trait mindfulness showed more helping behavior before the intervention. Mindfulness training increased interracial helping in a lab simulation. Among participants with lower baseline trait mindfulness, mindfulness training predicted more real-world helping behavior reported via ecological momentary assessment. However, neither training condition reduced the tendency to preferentially help racial ingroup members. The findings suggest mindfulness fosters helping toward strangers regardless of race, but does not eliminate ingroup bias.
The journal of pain
July 1, 2024
Patrick H. Finan, Carly Hunt, Michael L. Keaser et al.
18 citations
A pilot mechanistic randomized controlled trial tested a positive emotion-enhancing intervention called Savoring Meditation against a Slow Breathing control in 44 patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Savoring significantly reduced experimental pain intensity ratings relative to rest and increased cerebral blood flow in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as well as connectivity between that region and the caudate during painful stimulation. Participants in the Savoring condition also reported significantly increased positive emotions and reduced anhedonic symptoms from pre- to post-intervention. The findings suggest that Savoring recruits reward-enhancing corticostriatal circuits in the face of pain, warranting future work on clinical pain outcomes.
Mindfulness
January 1, 2023
Eric L Garland, R Lynae Roberts, Adam W. Hanley et al.
14 citations
A new measure, the Mindful Reappraisal of Pain Sensations Scale (MRPS), was developed and validated across multiple studies. The scale captures how mindfulness helps people shift from catastrophic pain appraisals to viewing pain as a harmless sensory signal. In samples of opioid-treated chronic pain patients, the MRPS showed a single-factor structure and good convergent and divergent validity. Mindfulness training via Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) increased MRPS scores more than supportive psychotherapy. Changes in MRPS scores statistically mediated the effect of MORE on reducing chronic pain severity through 9-month follow-up, indicating the MRPS measures a key analgesic mechanism involving attentional disengagement and interoceptive exposure.
Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
June 1, 2024
Lora Khatib, Jon G Dean, Valeria Oliva et al.
9 citations
Mindfulness meditation directly reduces evoked chronic low back pain through non-opioidergic processes, not by activating the body's opioid system. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial with a drug crossover design, 59 individuals with chronic low back pain completed a four-session mindfulness or sham mindfulness-meditation intervention. During intravenous naloxone (an opioid blocker) or saline infusion, both mindfulness and sham mindfulness groups showed significant pain reductions during meditation compared to rest. However, the mindfulness group reported significantly lower pain than the sham group, and its effects were more pronounced, suggesting unique benefits from non-reactive appraisal processes. Pain severity and interference scores also decreased.
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Saampras Ganesan, Fernando A Barrios, Ishaan Batta et al.
6 citations
Meditation practices, which have shown therapeutic benefits for conditions like depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety, have been studied with neuroimaging over the past decade. However, existing neuroscientific models are based on small, heterogeneous datasets, limiting generalizability and replicability. The ENIGMA-Meditation consortium is the first worldwide collaborative effort to conduct systematic meta- and mega-analyses of globally distributed neuroimaging data using standardized methods. This framework aims to improve statistical power and address multidomain heterogeneity in meditation practice types, experience, and experimental design. The consortium will generate rigorous neuroscientific insights into the mechanisms underlying meditation's therapeutic effects on psychological and cognitive attributes.
medRxiv
September 8, 2023
Patrick H. Finan, Carly Hunt, Michael L. Keaser et al.
6 citations
preprint
A brief Savoring Meditation intervention, compared to Slow Breathing, reduced experimental pain intensity ratings in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It increased cerebral blood flow in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and connectivity between that region and the caudate during painful thermal stimulation. Participants also reported increased positive emotions and reduced anhedonic symptoms from before to after the intervention. These results suggest that Savoring Meditation engages reward-related brain circuits during pain, which may inform future work on clinical pain outcomes.
Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland)
January 1, 2023
Ramakrishnan Mani, Divya Bharatkumar Adhia, Sharon Awatere et al.
3 citations
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic pain condition linked to altered brain activity. Self-regulation training, such as mindfulness meditation (MM) and electroencephalography neurofeedback (EEG-NF), may reduce pain. This double-blind, three-arm randomized controlled feasibility trial will compare MM plus usual care, EEG-NF plus usual care, and usual care alone. Participants with knee OA will be recruited from the community and healthcare practices; interventions involve 20-minute sessions, four times weekly for three weeks. Feasibility measures include recruitment, adherence, retention, and safety. Secondary outcomes are assessed at baseline, immediately post-intervention, and at three months. Qualitative interviews will explore participants' experiences, barriers, facilitators, and acceptability, including Māori perspectives. Results will inform a full randomized controlled trial.
April 8, 2024
Saampras Ganesan, Aki Tsuchiyagaito, Greg J Siegle et al.
2 citations
preprint
Meditation practices, which have been adapted into manualized interventions for conditions like depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety, show therapeutic promise, but their neuroscientific basis remains unclear. Current neuroimaging studies rely on small, heterogeneous datasets that vary in practice types, participant experience, clinical targets, and imaging methods, limiting generalizability and replicability. To address this, the ENIGMA-Meditation consortium was formed as a global collaboration to conduct systematic meta- and mega-analyses of distributed neuroimaging data using standardized methods. This framework aims to improve statistical power and rigorously characterize the neural mechanisms underlying meditation's effects on psychological and cognitive attributes, advancing the field of contemplative neuroscience.
Contemporary clinical trials communications
June 1, 2026
Anne Malaktaris, Niloofar Afari, Pollyanna Casmar et al.
A randomized clinical trial will compare Cognitively-Based Compassion Training for Chronic Pain with Psychological Comorbidity (CBCT-CP+) to a health education control (H.E.L.P.) among 142 Veterans who have chronic pain along with PTSD and/or depression. Both groups will attend 10 weekly 90-minute virtual sessions. The primary aims are to reduce pain interference and the severity of comorbid psychopathology. The authors hypothesize that CBCT-CP+ will lead to larger reductions in these co-primary outcomes and greater improvements in life satisfaction and quality of life. If effective, the intervention could improve treatment outcomes for this population.
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.
Biological Psychiatry
January 1, 2025
Gabriel Riegner, Jon G Dean, Tor D Wager et al.
Pain is shaped by experience, thoughts, and expectations rather than being a direct readout of injury. The placebo effect reduces pain through mechanisms shared with active treatments, and some have assumed mindfulness meditation works the same way. Using brain-based multivariate pattern analysis across two clinical trials with 115 healthy participants, mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater reductions in pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings, and lowered nociceptive-specific and negative affective brain signatures, compared to placebo cream, sham mindfulness, and a control. Placebo cream specifically lowered the placebo-based signature. The results show mindfulness and placebo engage distinct neural pain signatures to reduce pain.
Current Pain and Headache Reports
August 17, 2020
Alex Jinich-Diamant, Eric L Garland, Jennifer Baumgartner et al.
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain through brain processes that differ from placebo and vary with meditative training. Neuroimaging and randomized controlled studies show that mindfulness-based therapies reliably lower both experimentally induced and clinical pain by engaging multiple, unique, non-opioidergic mechanisms. These effects occur across a spectrum of chronic pain conditions and involve psychological, physiological, and neural modulation of how sensory events are evaluated and appraised. The findings highlight the potential of mindfulness-based approaches for producing long-lasting improvements in pain-related symptoms.
The journal of pain
June 1, 2019
Richard Harrison, Fadel Zeidan, George Kitsaras et al.
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.
Pain
December 1, 2018
Fadel Zeidan, Tim V Salomons, Suzan R Farris et al.
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.