Health and Disability

If you suffer from chronic pain, and perhaps the angry emotions that hurting all the time can lead to, there’s a drug-free treatment that takes only 15 minutes a day and can bring real relief.

It’s called compassion meditation. It’s not like “regular” meditation. Rather than letting your mind wander, you actively direct your thoughts—toward kindness and altruism. Don’t believe this could relieve your pain? Rigorous scientific studies have found that it can—and it even may help you live longer.

• Chronic pain—and anger. Among people with chronic pain, a nine-week compassion meditation program at Stanford University led to significantly reduced pain severity and greater pain acceptance by the end of the program, according to a study published in Journal of Compassionate Health Care. One way it helped was that it reduced levels of anger, based on self-evaluations of the patients. Anger has been shown to be an important predictor of chronic pain symptoms, and cultivating compassion has been shown to positively influence how we process emotions, reducing the tendency toward negativity, including anger.
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In a study at the Veterans Administration’s Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, published in Journal of Traumatic Stress, researchers found that when veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) practiced loving-kindness meditation (a form of compassion meditation) for 12 weeks, they experienced a reduction in PTSD symptoms and depression. The benefits were still evident three months later.
• Migraines. A study from University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, published in Pain Management Nursing, found that migraine sufferers who learned loving-kindness meditation in a single session experienced a 33% decrease in pain and a 43% reduction in emotional tension.
• Longevity. While there’s certainly no conclusive evidence that learning to be compassionate to yourself and to others will help you live longer, there are intriguing clues that it might. The connection: Telomeres, which are “caps” on the tips of each strand of DNA on your chromosomes. A study from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, found that people experienced in practicing loving-kindness meditation have longer telomeres, which are associated with greater longevity.