--- title: Why Meditating Makes You Feel Better description: After just four days of mindfulness meditation training, people reported feeling 21% less pain canonical: https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-03-21T18:22:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T16:00:37.426Z article:section: Health og:title: This Is Why Meditation Makes You Feel Better og:description: After just four days of mindfulness meditation training, people reported feeling 21% less pain og:url: https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta7e1db21cbec97fe/6987789df887dcfd52e89607/health-weight-exercise-yoga-mat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: TIME.com stock photos Weight Loss Health Exercise Yoga Mat og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: This Is Why Meditation Makes You Feel Better twitter:description: After just four days of mindfulness meditation training, people reported feeling 21% less pain twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta7e1db21cbec97fe/6987789df887dcfd52e89607/health-weight-exercise-yoga-mat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # This Is Why Meditation Makes You Feel Better > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement.  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Mar 21, 2016 6:22 PM UTC  Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Mar 21, 2016 6:22 PM UTC Usually, “do nothing” is poor advice to follow if you want to feel better. Yet a strong body of literature now shows that meditation—the mindful art of doing nothing but sitting still—effectively relieves pain. Now, a new [study](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/11/3391.short) published in the _Journal of Neuroscience_ shows that meditation accomplishes this differently from other pain-relievers, like opiates. “This ancient technique that’s been around for thousands of years is reducing pain through novel mechanisms, ways we’ve never seen before,” says study co-author Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. In the study, Zeidan and his colleagues took 78 healthy, pain-free people and randomly assigned them to an intervention. One group was trained in mindfulness meditation—a seated practice in which one focuses on the breath and lets thoughts and feelings pass without judgment—for 20 minutes a day over four days. The control group spent the same amount of time listening to a book read aloud. The scientists then brought everyone to the lab for a painful stimulus: a hot probe placed on the back of the leg. They expected that people who meditated during the pain would report feeling less of it, as has been shown before. But they were more curious to see what happened to the meditators if they were injected with naloxone, a drug that blocks the body’s opiate receptors. “If meditation works through opiates, and we’re blocking opiates through in the body, then the pain-relieving effects of meditation will go away,” Zeidan explains. Much to the scientists’ surprise, that’s not what happened. **MORE:** [Acupuncture Works for Neck Pain](http://time.com/4097083/acupuncture-neck-pain/) The meditators who were injected with a placebo shot of saline reported feeling 21% less pain (compared to their ratings on the same pain test before the intervention began). Similarly, the meditators who received naloxone reported feeling 24% less pain—suggesting that meditation eases pain in a way that has nothing to do with opiates. How, exactly, is not yet known. But Zeidan’s past research has shown that [meditation activates higher-order brain regions](http://time.com/4108442/mindfulness-meditation-pain-management/) associated with emotion regulation, focus and cognitive control, while tamping down activity in the thalamus, which transmits painful information from the body. That helps prevent painful information from being spread throughout the brain, he explains. **MORE**: [The Science of Floating](http://time.com/floating/) Meditation may prove especially useful for people who take painkillers, among the most commonly prescribed drugs in America. “If meditation did work through opiates, and someone is addicted to opiates for pain, you would have to meditate like the Dalai Lama for decades to produce enough opiates in your body to match that tolerance,” Zeidan says. “This is a very attractive technique for the millions of chronic pain sufferers who are seeking a non-opiate pain therapy.” Zeidan is now testing the intervention on people with chronic pain. “This is just yet another study finding that you don’t have to be a monk to reap the benefits of meditation,” he says. “With only 80 minutes of practice, we’re seeing dramatic reductions in pain.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/"},"headline":"This Is Why Meditation Makes You Feel Better","datePublished":"2016-03-21T18:22:47.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T16:00:37.426Z","description":"After just four days of meditation training, people reported feeling 21% less pain","url":"https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/","keywords":["Pain","Meditation","opioids","mindfulness meditation"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta7e1db21cbec97fe/6987789df887dcfd52e89607/health-weight-exercise-yoga-mat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mandy Oaklander","jobTitle":"Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta7e1db21cbec97fe/6987789df887dcfd52e89607/health-weight-exercise-yoga-mat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TIME.com stock photos Weight Loss Health Exercise Yoga Mat","caption":"TIME.com stock photos Weight Loss Health Exercise Yoga Mat","creditText":"Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/pain/","name":"Pain"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4263383/mindfulness-meditation-pain/","name":"This Is Why Meditation Makes You Feel Better"}}]}] ```