Being attentive can influence what happens inside your body, study finds
We know that where we direct our attention can change how we experience pain. Now, new research suggests that attention may affect more than just how pain feels: it may also influence the body’s immune response.
Think about the last time you hurt yourself. If you focus on the pain, it can feel more intense. But when something distracts you, a conversation, a task or even a funny video, the pain may suddenly feel less noticeable.
So when something hurts, it seems natural to think that distracting ourselves is the best way to deal with it.
Attention can influence the immune response
But new research suggests that directing attention towards the affected area may actually have the stronger effect.
To find out whether attention merely changes how an injury feels, or whether it can actually change what the body does in response to it, Dr. Liron Rozenkrantz at Bar-Ilan University’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine and her team conducted three pre-registered experiments: First, participants received a histamine skin prick on their arm, producing a small, temporary inflammatory reaction.
They were then asked either to focus their attention on the sensations at the affected area or to distract themselves with videos or tasks.
Over the next 20 minutes, researchers measured the resulting swelling and redness, as well as changes in the participants’ physiological responses.
Inflammatory response substantially smaller with internal attention
According to the results published in Nature Human Behaviour, the inflammatory response was around one-and-a-half times smaller when participants focused on their bodily sensations.
Around 90% of participants showed a stronger response when they were distracted.
What makes the finding particularly surprising is that this was not just a change in how participants experienced the discomfort. The researchers measured the physical inflammatory response in the skin itself and found that it changed depending on where participants directed their attention.
“What was particularly striking was that directing attention toward the inflamed area changed not only what participants experienced, but the inflammatory response itself,” said Dr. Rozenkrantz.
“This raises the possibility that our subjective experience of what is happening in the body is not only a passive process, but may be actively contributing to how physiological responses are regulated.”
How could this work?
The researchers identified two possible mechanisms that may help explain the effect. First, attention appears to influence the way the brain processes sensory signals coming from the inflamed area.
Second, focusing on bodily sensations was linked to increased activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, including the vagus nerve, which helps regulate inflammation.
The findings suggest that both pathways may contribute to the effect.
A closer link between brain and body
The study was conducted under controlled laboratory conditions and looked at a short-term inflammatory response in the skin after a histamine prick. The findings do not show that directing attention can treat inflammation, illness or chronic health conditions.
More research is needed to understand whether similar effects occur in real-world situations and over longer periods.
Still, the findings add to growing evidence that the brain and body are in constant two-way communication.
Where we direct our attention may have consequences that go beyond our subjective experience, potentially influencing measurable biological processes inside the body.
