3 Tips For Love and Pain

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Couples in hot romantic love feel fantastic! They glow. And, it turns out that love has a surprising protective effect against pain. Intense romantic love brings euphoric pleasure and also confers analgesic benefit, according to two separate Stanford studies.

In the first study, all participants were in the first nine months of a self-rated passionate and romantic relationship (Nilakantin A, et al. Pain Med., 2014). The researchers investigated whether having participants recall feelings of love would confer pain relief to participants during a task in which painful heat was applied to the hand. During one segment of the pain experiment, participants were shown photos of their beloved while the heat was applied. In a different segment, a photo of an equally attractive member of the opposite sex was shown to the participant during pain testing. The researchers found that viewing a photo of one’s beloved was associated with greater analgesia—less pain! Indeed, participants had about 30 percent reduction in overall pain, and the level of analgesia was related to one’s love intensity or preoccupation with their partner.

Another study confirmed that viewing photos of a romantic partner induces analgesia. Then they used fMRI to show that the reduced pain was associated with the neural activation of reward systems (Younger et al. PloS One, 2010). Love is indeed emotionally rewarding—you probably already knew that—and it appears to dampen pain processing. This tells us that romantic love is physically rewarding, as well.

While hot romantic love may be particularly exciting and rewarding, non-romantic love also has positive impacts on pain. Researchers have shown that viewing pictures of attachment figures activates a “safety signal” related neural region that reduces pain (Eisenberger, NI et al. 2011). In other words, seeing an image of a loved parent would induce emotions related to safety and comfort, thereby reducing any sense of threat. Because the human brain registers pain as a threat or danger signal, anything one does to reduce the threat value of the pain can reduce pain itself.

Three Tips for Love and Pain:

1. Be aware of the value of nurturing, loving relationships in providing pain relief.
2. Intense romantic love is prescriptive for pain management!
3. In the absence of hot romantic love, you may be able to harness the benefit of euphoric pleasure in other ways. Be sure to engage in the pleasurable activities that you love, to your fullest capacity. Engaging the reward system in your brain will counter physical pain.