Yoga Superpowers: practicing increases pain tolerance up to 50%
Yoga and the Brain - editorial by M. Elide
There are fourteen yogis and fourteen non-practitioners who dunk their hands in the freezing water... It seems like the beginning of a joke, and instead it is nothing more than a scientific experiment by a group of Canadian fellow researchers who wanted to investigate the relationship between yoga practice and pain perception.
Before starting the actual experiment they measured the sensitivity of the participants to thermal variations and their pain threshold, applying a device on the forearm with which it is possible to administer heat or cold. In this way, by varying the temperature little by little, it was possible to measure how accurately and quickly the participants were able to detect thermal changes and painful sensations, all with a simple click of the mouse.
After these early stages the participants were subjected to the formal test (called tolerance or endurance test ) which consisted of immersing the hand up to the wrist in a tank of extremely cold water (5°C)! After that, it was simply necessary to remove it when the pain was no longer bearable, while the experimenters measured the time of immersion, and therefore tolerance to pain. I think they had a lot of fun...At the end of this test the experimental subjects were interviewed about the type of strategies they used to bear the pain and their responses were then analyzed and categorized. Surprisingly enough, in the publication I found no trace of swearing… They will surely have ended up in category #2: of course "expression of negative emotions"... As the icing on the cake, participants were then scanned with a nice MRI scan to compare the brains of the two groups: practitioners and non-practitioners (or control groups).
Now to the results... In reference to preliminary evaluations, it was found that the "yoga group" had a higher threshold in pain’s endurance caused by high temperatures, although the most relevant fact concerns the cold water tank experiment. Measuring immersion times, in fact, tells us that yogis held their hand in the water well over twice the time (almost 90 seconds) compared to the control group (just under 40 seconds).
So how did they hold out for so long? Easy: using more strategies based on breathing, non-judgmental acceptance of sensations and mental and body relaxation. On the contrary, strategies to distract or ignore pain seem to prevail in the control group.
And now let’s get to the heart... that is, to the brain of the matter! In the previous episode we saw how some brain regions have a higher volume among people who are dedicated to the discipline of yoga and between the various areas we encountered the insula. Well, the surprise is that we found it here again.
Thanks to its place in limbo between deep and superficial structures, in fact, it is able to integrate the information that comes directly from the body giving it a subjective sense, that is, processing it also on a cognitive level. The transition actually also works in reverse, i.e. the insula can use the information already acquired at cognitive level to modulate the emotional, cognitive and evaluative responses of pain. To put it simply, it turns pain into something known, making it, in fact, more easily digestible.
The sense of this story? If you've ever had the impression that practicing gives you superpowers, well, that's probably true.
For nerds and geeks:
The Yoga and the Brain column is related to the practice of Yoga from the point of view of neuroscience research. We will talk about the mind-body relationship, the effects of yoga and movement on the brain, the boundaries between science and spirituality and much more, from a perspective that is anything but reductionist, but rather of research and integration. After all, "Yoga" means "Union"...
M. Elide graduated at Hari-Om in 2020. She is a trained psychologist and has been involved in neuroscientific research for years. She juggles between the study of Mind and Body, finding the true strength of practice and self-knowledge in the awareness of their encounter.