When you are with someone you love, it can feel like nothing else matters. Many believe that love conquers all.
I began to wonder if love could conquer physical pain. I decided to look at the research to find out if love is a painkiller.
Love can be a painkiller. Aspects of love can reduce a person’s experience of physical pain, it activating the reward system in the brain. People in love have higher circulation of nerve growth factor, which gives better pain control. Level of pain relief depends on personality and relating style.
In this post, I’ll share with you some of what I discovered about how love affects physical pain.
Does love reduce physical pain?
Researchers in 2009 set up an experiment to find out whether our experience of physical pain can be reduced by contact with a romantic partner.
The experiment involved inducing pain using heat, and then asking the female participants to rate their level of discomfort under several different conditions.
These involved holding either their long-term partner’s hand, a male stranger’s hand, a squeeze ball, a picture of their partner, a picture of a male stranger, a picture of an object, or just looking at a cross on a screen.
They found that participants reported significantly less pain while holding their partner’s hand or a picture of their partner.
The researchers explained,
“Seeing photographs of loved ones may prime associated mental representations of being loved and supported, which may be sufficient to attenuate pain experience.”
(Master et al., 2009)
A team of researchers in 2010 ran a similar experiment using heat to cause pain, and viewing pictures of romantic partners. The participants in the study were chosen for being in the early stages of a romantic relationship.
This study also used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to view what was happening in their brain at the same time.
People reported significantly less pain while looking at a photo of their partner than when looking at a stranger. But a similar reduction in pain was reported during the control condition of the experiment, which used a distraction task.
But the brain scans showed that when people were looking at the photos of their partners, there was a lot of activity happening in their brain’s ‘reward system’ – a part of the brain where the neurotransmitter dopamine is produced.
Different parts of the brain were activated when people were just being distracted.
This review points out that problems with the reward circuitry in the brain was shown to make it more likely that acute pain would become chronic.
We’re still not sure how this works. But it suggests that some sense of connection to someone we love can actually reduce our experience of physical pain.
That’s pretty powerful in itself.
And of course, research never really ends – the more we know, the more we want to learn.
Why does love help with physical pain?
Researchers in 2014 wanted to know if the reduction in pain could be associated with being preoccupied, as we tend to be preoccupied with the other person in new romantic relationships.
They ran a similar type of experiment as the others, but they also asked the people in their study to rate how much time they thought of their partner throughout the day.
In all cases, there was a reduction in pain during the experiments, but the people who reported the most pain reduction were those who had rated themselves as being most preoccupied with their partner.
“The results suggest that preoccupation with a romantic partner during early-stage romantic love is a predictor of pain relief when viewing pictures of the beloved.”
(Nilakantan et al., 2014)
Maybe the reason why there’s a pain-relieving effect from the reward center of the brain when thinking about someone we love, is we are immersed in them at the beginning stages of a new relationship, thinking about them a lot.
These scientists explain that higher levels of nerve growth factor (NGF) are circulating in people who are in love.
“NGF affects sensory neurons and provides better pain control, which makes it a love painkiller.”
(Cikmaz et al., 2017)
How your relationship style affects level of pain relief
Pain researchers were also interested to discover if the way that we relate to others in a relationship has any effect on our experience of pain.
In particular, this study in 2006 was interested in attachment style.
Attachment style is the type of emotional bond that you form with others. Our attachment style is based on the relationships we have with our primary caregiver in infancy.
Those early relationships are thought to result in a way of relating to others that can play out through life.
The people who took part in this study were asked questions beforehand to find out their attachment style. Then cold was used to induce pain.
Those who had secure attachment style had more control over the pain, and weren’t as worried about the pain as those who had anxious attachment style, who were more likely to worry excessively when the pain intensity was high. I talk about how worry affects pain in this post.
Anxious attachment style was related to a person believing they had less control over the pain, and a lower pain threshold.
The researchers explain that those with anxious attachment styles can be more vulnerable to,
“Chronic pain following acute episodes of pain, while secure attachment may provide more resilience.”
(Meredith, Strong & Feeney, 2006)
So, how effective love is at reducing pain seems to depend on your relationship attachment style. It can and also your personality and how you regulate emotions, according to this review.
The more we learn about how people experience pain differently, the more we will know about how to treat it.
Even though we don’t yet know all the answers about how love reduces physical pain, we know that it can.
References
Cikmaz, S., Ozturk, G., Ozturk, L., & Yilmaz, A. (2017). Neuroanatomy of romantic love and nerve growth factor as a love painkiller. Scripta Scientifica Medica, [S.l.], v. 49, p. 40.
Meredith, P. J., Strong, J., & Feeney, J. A. (2006).
The relationship of adult attachment to emotion, catastrophizing, control, threshold and tolerance, in experimentally-induced pain. Pain, Volume 120, Issues 1–2, Pages 44-52.
Master, S. L., Eisenberger, N. I., Taylor, S. E., Naliboff, B. D., Shirinyan, D., & Lieberman, M. D. (2009). A Picture’s Worth: Partner Photographs Reduce Experimentally Induced Pain. Psychological Science, 20(11):1316-1318.
Nilakantan, A., Younger, J., Aron, A., & Mackey, S. (2014). Preoccupation in an early-romantic relationship predicts experimental pain relief. Pain Med, Jun;15(6):947-53.
Tamam, S., & Ahmad, A. H. (2017). Love as a Modulator of Pain. The Malaysian journal of medical sciences : MJMS, 24(3), 5–14.
Younger, J., Aron, A., Parke, S., Chatterjee, N., & and Mackey, S. (2010). Viewing pictures of a romantic partner reduces experimental pain: Involvement of neural reward systems. PLoS one, 5 (10).