Meditations to Support a Healthy Pregnancy & Successful Childbirth

Congrats to for receiving a from the ! This award complements her Dissertation Research Award from the  to support her work on the neurobiological mechanisms of pain relief.

Lisa writes about the funded project:

What’s less well understood is how meditation and gratitude cause pain relief. One possibility is that gratitude and or meditation cause the release of endogenous opioids in the brain, leading to pain relief in exactly the same way morphine does. Other mental processes such as beliefs and expectations can release endogenous opioids, so it’s plausible that meditation or gratitude might. This study will test this by giving people an opioid antagonist drug called Naloxone. If Naloxone makes people’s meditation or gratitude-induced pain relief go away, that will be evidence that meditation and/or gratitude cause pain relief by activating opioid receptors.