You might think that the amount of pain you feel is beyond your conscious control. Not so. Although you can’t influence your physiological pain responses to things like an injury or illness, there are ways to reduce the amount of pain you perceive.
When Pavel Goldstein’s wife was giving birth to their first child, she opted not to take any painkilling drugs. “We had a really long delivery – around 32 hours,” he says, “and she asked me to hold her hand.” Goldstein, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, noticed that this seemed to help his wife cope with the pain. This led him to conduct a series of studies in his lab. After he inflicted pain by heating volunteers’ forearms, they reported that being touched by a stranger did nothing to reduce their discomfort, whereas . And the more empathic the partner, the bigger the effect. “We already know that touch can communicate different emotions, for example, sadness and happiness. Perhaps we can also transfer our empathy through touch, resulting in analgesia,” says Goldstein.
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Pain is particularly susceptible to influence because it’s not always helpful to feel it, says sensory neuroscientist Giandomenico Iannetti at University College London. As a result, we have ways to modulate pain, such as by the release of the body’s own painkillers. “Generally, you feel what it is useful to feel,” he says. But it is also possible to trick the brain into feeling less.
Another way to do this was discovered by Maria Sanchez-Vives at the Cortical Networks and Virtual Environments in Neuroscience Research Lab in Barcelona, Spain, and her colleagues. Their studies show that if people can take “ownership” of a virtual reality arm – feeling that it is their own – their ability to tolerate painful stimuli applied to their real arm improves. “VR can be highly immersive, interactive and engaging,” she says.
“Swearing can reduce the pain you are feeling, as long as you don’t usually swear a lot”
In fact, VR simulations of natural environments and other scenes are currently used in some hospitals to reduce pain, or doses of painkilling medication, when treating burns patients or even during surgery. If you don’t have a VR arm available, you can create a similar effect simply by moving your body into unfamiliar positions. Iannetti’s team found that getting volunteers to caused by a laser heating the back of one hand. This seems to work by confusing the brain, which normally maps signals from your right hand to the right side of your world and vice versa.
There are other pain-busting strategies that you can try at home, too. Distraction is effective, as anyone who has ever watched a TV mounted above a dentist’s chair knows. Pleasant smells seem to reduce the intensity of a painful stimulus – although it’s not entirely clear why – as does looking at pictures you find beautiful. Swearing can also work, perhaps by triggering a hormonal response that reduces pain, as long as you don’t usually swear a lot.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Cultivate your Unconscious”
