You may have more control over your immune response than you think.
A study found that paying attention to a small skin irritation cut the resulting inflammation by about one-third.
Together, these results suggest that immune responses may not be entirely autonomous and can be shaped by attention.
“Our subjective experience of the body may be more biologically consequential than we usually assume,” Liron Rozenkrantz, the study’s senior author, told The Epoch Times.
Attention Directs the Immune System
Researchers applied histamine and pricked participants’ arms to induce a brief inflammation on their skin.
Focusing on the itching and burning without looking at their arms for 20 minutes led to about 1.5 times less swelling and redness than when participants were distracted. The finding challenges a common assumption: that the immune system runs on autopilot.
Intentionally paying attention may help the brain take note of the inflammation and allocate resources to target it, researchers said.
Paying attention made participants feel itching and burning more intensely, and researchers suggest that the stronger sensations may give the brain better information to work with, allowing it to calibrate the immune response more precisely.
In a follow-up experiment, researchers repeated the skin prick test on 17 returning participants, using lidocaine to dull the sensations. Although paying attention still reduced inflammation, its effect was weaker than when sensation was fully intact.
“Our findings suggest a fascinating attention-perception-regulation loop: signals from the body shape what we feel, attention changes how we perceive those signals, and that perception may in turn help regulate what is happening in the body,” said Rozenkrantz.
Paying attention may also help to reduce inflammation by engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, which supports rest and recovery. When participants paid attention, they had higher heart rate variability, which may suggest greater vagal activity that helps reduce inflammation.
“Our interpretation is that attention engages top-down [parasympathetic] regulation while its ‘enhancement’ of the sensory signal from the inflamed tissue helps the brain more efficiently regulate the immune response,” Rozenkrantz said.
Focusing and Not Overthinking
During the experiment, participants looked at a screen rather than at their arms. They were asked to focus on sensations such as itching or burning in the forearm and were not asked to picture the inflammation, think about healing, or try to change the response.
“We manipulated attention to bodily sensations, not positive thinking or an intention to heal,” Rozenkrantz said.
Stress responses, such as worry and tension, had little overall effect on the immune response. However, accepting the sensation was linked to a modestly stronger regulatory effect on the surrounding redness specifically.
