How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller

It’s well-known (at least to regular 10almonds-readers) that seeing nature, ideally green leaves and blue sky, improves our mood by stimulating production of serotonin.

See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet

But it does a lot more.

Reducing the actual signals of pain

Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered that viewing nature scenes (even if just on video) alleviates physical pain—not just in self-reported subjective assessments, but also by a reduction of the neural activity that signals pain:

❝Pain is like a puzzle, made up of different pieces that are processed differently in the brain. Some pieces of the puzzle relate to our emotional response to pain, such as how unpleasant we find it. Other pieces correspond to the physical signals underlying the painful experience, such as its location in the body and its intensity.

Unlike placebos, which usually change our emotional response to pain, viewing nature changed how the brain processed early, raw sensory signals of pain.

Thus, the effect appears to be less influenced by participants’ expectations, and more by changes in the underlying pain signals❞

This was tested against, varyingly, viewing an urban environment or viewing an indoor environment, neither of which gave the same benefits.

The setup of the experiment is relevant, so…

Matching soundscape accompanied each visual stimulus. The three pain runs had a total duration of 9 min each, during which one environment was accompanied by 16 painful and 16 non-painful shocks. Neuroimaging was used for all parts, and participants were exposed to all environments:

• First, a cue indicating the intensity of the next shock (red = painful, yellow = not painful) was presented for 2000 milliseconds (ms).
• Second, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms was shown.
• Third, a cue indicating the intensity of the shock was presented for 1000 ms, accompanied by an electrical shock with a duration of 500 ms.
• Fourth, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms followed.
• Fifth, after each third trial, participants rated the shock’s intensity and unpleasantness at 6000 ms each.
• Sixth, each trial ended with an intertrial interval (ITI) presented for 2000 ms.

They found that as well as the self-assessment reports being as expected (nature scenes reduced subjective experience of pain),

❝In summary, the multivoxel and region of interest analyses converged in showing that pain responses when exposed to nature as compared to urban or indoor stimuli were associated with a decrease in neural processes related to lower-level nociception-related features (NPS, thalamus), as well as in regions of descending modulatory circuitry associated with attentional alterations of pain that also encode sensory-discriminative aspects (S2, pINS).❞

In other words—to the extent that pain can be quantified objectively by neural imaging—the pain was also objectively reduced, much like with a chemical painkiller.

You can read the paper in full, here:

Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing

How to benefit from this

Well, first there is the obvious, “view nature“.

However, note the timescales involved in the testing periods: 2000 milliseconds is two seconds, and that was the intertrial interval used—the equivalent of a washout phase in an interventional trial (but a drug/supplement/diet washout is usually a number of weeks).

The fact that the test periods were a matter of seconds, and the intertrial period was also literally two seconds, this means:

It works quickly, and the effect disappears quickly, too.

In other words: if you want pain relief from nature, the good news is you can get it immediately while viewing nature, and the bad news is that you have to keep viewing nature to continue enjoying the painkilling effect.

So that’s a limitation, but it’s still clearly a very worthy option for a little respite from chronic pain now and again, for example.

Want to learn more?

We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:

• Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
• How To Stop Pain Spreading
• How To Dial Down Your Pain
• Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
• Get The Right Help For Your Pain
• The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
• Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)

Take care!