#1 Best All-Natural Painkiller: MEDITATING!

While massage can be an effective way to ease your aches and pain, there’s new evidence that meditating (yes, meditating!) is the single best all-natural painkiller. In a recent study, people who had a pain-inducing heating device placed on their legs were able to reduce the pain by 40 percent, simply by meditating. “In comparison, morphine only decreases pain by about 25 percent,” says Robert Coghill, PhD, the study’s senior researcher and associate professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Subjects used the “focused attention” technique: Close your eyes, breathe through your nose, and concentrate on the air coming in and going out. According to Coghill, “the more you practice, the better it works.”
There are even more benefits to meditating:

Better Focus: People trained to meditate are better able to sustain their attention that those who aren’t, according to a study in Psychology Science,

Lowers Blood Pressure: People with hypertension who meditated reduced their blood pressure. In fact, “it was as effective as adding a second blood pressure medication,” says lead author James W. Anderson, MD, from a University of Kentucky study,

Relieves Stress: Practicing meditation for eight weeks not only relieved feelings of stress but actually caused physical changes in the amygdala, the area of the brain that controls those feelings, according to a study published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.