Simply imagining something to be less painful may ease your experience of it, a new research from the Netherlands suggests.
The theory relies on the placebo effect which says that our experience is shaped by our expectations – so if you imagine that something won’t hurt, it just might not.
Through visualization exercises, the researchers found that experiment participants could, to some extent, control how painful their experiences were.
The study author hopes that her work in healthy people could be applied to patients to help ease their suffering through chronic pain and other conditions.
Visualizing something to be less painful can make it hurt less, according to new research
Doctoral candidate Kaya Peerdeman studies placebo and nocebo effects.
The two phenomena are flip sides of the same coin. In the placebo effect, a person’s expectations are manipulated so that, because they are receiving some kind of treatment, they believe they will feel better.
The same phenomenon but with the opposite experience happens in the nocebo effect: when told that a fake treatment will make them feel worse – through side effects or by intensifying pain – people tend to experience exactly that.
In her doctoral thesis research, Peerdeman created a similar phenomenon without an actual treatment (often given in the form of a sugar pill), Leiden University where she studies, reported.
She found that simply by having her study participants to visualize something reducing the pain of an experience, they would actually feel that it was less painful.
Peerdeman used a bucket of ice cold water to create a painful experience.
One group of her participants simply put one of their hands in the water and rated their pain.
Before immersing their hands in the painfully icy water, Peerdeman told the other group to visualize that they were wearing a protective, warm, waterproof glove that would shield them from the freezing temperatures, Leiden University reported.
‘We discovered that the candidates expected less pain having done this exercise with their imagination and that they actually felt less pain when they put their hand in the cold water,’ she told the site.
The placebo effect can be problematic for experiments, especially for drug clinical trials where improvements are seen in both the group that receives a real treatment and the one that gets a placebo.
But Peerdeman’s study is part of a growing body of research that aims to make the pesky effect useful.
As many psychologists do in their experiments, she used principles of classical conditioning to manipulate her subjects experiences – but for their own good.
In classical conditioning, a stimulus – which can be anything from a verbal cue, to a sugar pill or visual signal – acts as a prompt for whatever will come next, building up an expectation in the mind of the subject.
So, for the visualization group in Peerdeman’s experiment, what she told them to imagine experiencing became linked to what they were about to experience, which in turn became less pain.
Peerdeman said that she hopes to use the success of her thesis experiment to translate the pain-mitigating effects into clinical practice.
In the US, the ongoing opioid epidemic has clinicians, counsellors and researchers alike searching for safer, non-addictive ways to ease the suffering of chronic pain and disease patients.
In recent years, even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have introduced techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as recommended methods for treating pain not through medication that dulls it, but through the psychological experience of it.
Other research has suggested that meditation and mindfulness can have similarly alleviating effects on the experience – if not the cause – of pain.
In the same vein, Peerdeman said that her research shows that ‘the imagination has an effect on the patient’s expectation, and as a result of what they imagine, can reduce the amount of pain they experience.’