Why Pain Is Different From Suffering

In a research study on adversity, Cortland Dahl recounts the experience of being a test subject, and the power of discerning intensity from pain.

So this actually was a study that happened right before I came to Madison to do my PhD work. And it was a study of long-term meditators. I think the threshold was 10,000 hours of meditation. And I actually -- I myself was a subject in this particular study. So most of the research we're involved with these days, I'm one of the scientists. This one I was actually a subject, which makes it kind of fun to talk about.

However, it was not fun to be a subject because this study was on pain. And basically what Richie Davidson and Antoine Lutz -- two of my dear friends and colleagues who were the main scientists in this study -- they were subjecting us to pain by putting a little thermode on our wrists and piping in scalding hot water at regular intervals and doing this over and over again for hours.

So this was an utterly unfun experiment to be part of, but it was really illuminating. And let me just show you what this found.

So there were two groups. There was the group of experienced meditators, of which I was a part, and there was a group of non-meditators -- people who had no meditation experience.

And as I said, they had these trials over and over again where we were basically getting burned. And it was so hot that it felt intense -- just below the threshold where it was going to damage our skin. So this was really, really hot. And they were looking at the pain network in the brain -- what's called the pain matrix.

So let me show you what they found. With the non-meditators, basically what would happen -- you'd be lying there. This was in an fMRI, a big brain scanner. And you'd be lying there and then you would hear a sound. Every time you heard that sound, you would know that in 10 seconds the hot water was going to arrive.

So of course, very quickly you learn to pair that sound with the painful stimulus, the hot water. So in the non-meditators, here's what happened. As soon as that sound arrived, the pain matrix activates. So their brain starts simulating the experience of pain before the pain has even happened. Then the stimulus arrives.

That's the second point on this horizontal axis. And of course, the pain matrix obviously is active when the pain is actually happening. And then the pain goes away, and you can see there's this very slow return to baseline.

So the pain matrix activates before the pain happens. It, of course, is active while the pain is happening, and then it even happens in the aftermath. There's this very gradual return where the pain matrix slowly calms down and returns to its baseline state.

What about the meditators? What was going on for us?

Well, in this case, for the meditators, the pain matrix did not activate in that lead-up. So even though you know what's going to happen -- and I remember lying there in the scanner and I remember what I was doing.

What I was doing was exactly what we just did in that guided meditation I led. I -- and I'm sure many of the other meditators -- were simply being aware of our own internal reactions as they were happening. So I knew the pain was going to come. I knew it was happening, but instead of getting caught up in this whole swirl of thoughts and emotions, I was simply noticing what was actually happening in the moment rather than what would happen in a future moment.

So I wasn't rehearsing the future. I was noticing the present, simply put.

Interestingly, during the pain -- so when the pain actually happened -- the pain matrix was not dampened in any way. In fact, it was even a little more pronounced than the non-meditators.

So it wasn't that those of us who were in the scanner and who were experienced meditators were not feeling the pain. In fact, we were feeling it a little bit more acutely than the non-meditators, interestingly.

But afterwards, there was a much more rapid return to baseline. So what are the implications of this?

This, of course, shows something very important about the mind and the brain and how it responds to pain, but there was another very important piece of this -- which was our subjective experience of this whole thing.

So in addition to looking at the brain and measuring the activity in the pain matrix, Antoine and Richie and the other scientists also asked us two questions.

They asked us to rate the intensity of the pain, and they asked us to rate the unpleasantness of the pain. The intensity question had about the same response between the non-meditators and the meditators. We all knew when it was hot, we knew when it wasn't, and we rated it roughly the same. But the two groups departed from one another when it came to the unpleasantness.

In short, the meditators rated the unpleasantness of the pain much lower than the non-meditators did.

So what they were seeing -- what the scientists found here in this particular study -- was the neural signature of the difference between suffering and pain. This is super important. Normally, we think that pain equals suffering, and this underlying assumption drives many of the things we do in our life.

We're basically trying to avoid pain and discomfort because we think that by doing so, we will be able to avoid suffering. What this showed is that there's actually a hidden variable that most of us are completely unaware of. Suffering does not equal pain. Suffering equals pain times resistance. So if you can dial resistance down to zero, you are not doing away with the pain, but you are completely eliminating the suffering.

Super, super important fact. So if you understand that fact, this is a total game changer for how we live our lives. Because instead of focusing on trying to control the weather patterns of experience -- and we all know that it just doesn't work. If we have a body, we're going to get sick. We're going to experience pain.

If we have relationships, we're going to experience loss. We're going to experience stress and challenges. If we have jobs, if we have to relate to the rest of the world, we're going to have all these things we simply can't control or anticipate. But normally that's exactly what we're doing. We're trying to control the weather.

This is presenting a totally different alternative, which is more about opening up to what's happening, changing that dial of resistance and moving that down. And then exploring all of this. And what you'll find is that not only does this change the suffering, but that even periods of adversity become opportunities for growth, exploration, self-discovery, and inner transformation.

Basically the difficult stuff in life becomes a catalyst for growth and insight.