Mindful breathing for pain control: Like Yin and Yang

Date:
October 12, 2021
Source:
University of Michigan
Summary:
It's long been known that meditative mindful breathing helps with
various health conditions, including pain.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
It's long been known that meditative mindful breathing helps with various health conditions, including pain.


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To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan compared two types
of meditative breathing -- traditional mindful breathing and virtual
reality, 3D- guided mindful breathing -- to reduce pain. They found that
each lessened pain by modulating the somatosensory cortex, a region of the brain responsible for processing pain, but each used different mechanisms,
said Alexandre DaSilva, associate professor at the School of Dentistry.

With the traditional breathing group, the functional connection with
the brain's frontal regions increased, because this region was focused
on the body's internal sensory details, called interoception, DaSilva
said. This competed with the external pain signals and inhibited the
ability of the somatosensory cortex to process pain. This follows the
common assumption that mindful breathing exerts its painkilling effect
by interoception, which means the conscious refocusing of the mind's
attention to the physical sensation of an internal organ function.

In the virtual reality group, subjects wore special glasses and watched
a pair of virtual reality 3D lungs, while breathing mindfully. The
technology was developed in-house and the lungs synchronized with the
subjects' breathing cycles in real time. This provided an immersive visual
and audio external stimulus. Pain decreased when the sensory regions
of the brain (visual, auditory) engaged with the immersive virtual
reality sound and image stimulations. This is called exteroception,
and it weakened the pain processing function of the somatosensory cortex.

"(I was surprised) that both meditative breathing methods decreased
pain sensitivity, but oppositely in the brain, like yin and yang,"
DaSilva said.

"One by engaging the brain in an immersive exterior 3D experience of our
own breathing, or exteroception -- yang, and the other by focusing on our interior world, interoception -- yin." Though both approaches decreased
pain sensitivity, traditional mindful breathing can be challenging because
it requires long-time attention and focus on an abstract experience,
he said. Virtual reality breathing might be more accessible, especially
for beginners, because it lends an immersive "visual and auditory guide"
to the meditation experience.

And, the virtual reality mindful breathing gives medical professionals
another possible option for pain relief, to decrease the tendency to
rely solely on pain medications, including opiates, DaSilva said.

Pain is processed by many regions in the brain that provide different information for the global pain experience. DaSilva's lab learned in
previous studies that some of those regions can be externally targeted
by neuromodulation, a process whereby electrical impulses are used to
directly modulate brain activity.

However, here was to dissect and understand the two brain mechanisms for
pain modulation using breathing. To that end, DaSilva's team compared
the two methods of breathing, by placing a single, unilateral thermode
on the left mandibular nerve branch of the trigeminal cranial nerve for
each participant - - think of a tiny, computer-controlled hotplate on
your face.

To study the brain mechanisms used during the two types of breathing, researchers analyzed their associated functional connectivity -- i.e.,
what regions of the brain were co-activated and when -- during each type
of breathing and pain stimulation. They investigated the acute (same
session) and long effects (after one week) of breathing techniques,
and in the week between the two neuroimaging sessions, both groups did traditional mindful breathing at home.

DaSilva's research group, which focuses heavily on migraine and pain, is working on options to deliver this virtual reality breathing experience
via a mobile application and extending its clinical benefit to multiple
chronic pain disorders beyond the lab space.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Michigan. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Xiao-Su Hu, Katherine Beard, Mary C Bender, Thiago D Nascimento,
Sean
Petty, Eddie Pantzlaff, David Schwitzer, Niko Kaciroti, Eric
Maslowski, Lawrence M Ashman, Stephen E Feinberg, Alexandre
F. DaSilva. Brain Mechanisms of Virtual Reality Breathing versus
Traditional Mindful Breathing in Pain Modulation: An Observational
Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study (Preprint). Journal
of Medical Internet Research, 2021; DOI: 10.2196/27298 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211012154810.htm

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