Loving-Kindness Meditation, Pain and Social Well-Being: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Young et al., 2026)
Loving-kindness meditation asks people to send wishes of goodwill first to themselves and then to people who are progressively harder to care about. Because pain and loneliness are both partly social experiences, researchers have wondered whether this practice could ease one by strengthening the other. A randomized trial in PLOS ONE, from Olivia Young, Abigail Marsh and colleagues, set out to test that idea, and its answer was a measured no.
The study enrolled 75 U.S. adults aged 18 to 55 who had no chronic pain and no meditation experience; 69 were included in the final analysis. Participants were randomly assigned in equal numbers to four weeks of online training, made up of 24 audio sessions of about 15 minutes each. One group practiced loving-kindness meditation. The other practiced progressive muscle relaxation, a calming exercise with no social focus, which served as an active comparison. Pain was induced over video conference using the wall sit test, in which a person holds a seated position against a wall with no chair, and the researchers measured how long participants could endure it and how painful it felt. Questionnaires tracked loneliness and perceived social support. The trial was registered in advance on ClinicalTrials.gov.
Contrary to the team’s hypotheses, neither practice reduced reported pain or clearly increased pain tolerance relative to the other. Tolerance rose in everyone by roughly eight seconds, with no difference between groups. Perceived social support actually increased more with muscle relaxation than with loving-kindness meditation, and loneliness showed a similar trend, though it fell short of the usual threshold. Participants in the relaxation group also rated the wall sit as more painful afterward. In an exploratory analysis across the whole sample, people whose social support rose most tended to show the biggest gains in pain tolerance.
The authors point to several limits. Data were gathered in the early COVID-19 pandemic, when social contact was restricted, which may have shaped how connected people felt. With no do-nothing group, it is impossible to know whether either practice changed anything beyond what the passage of time would have done, and two similarly effective programs would also produce no difference. The remote pain test was new, the sample skewed young, female and urban, and four weeks of practice may be too brief for novices.
The takeaway is a modest one: in this setting, loving-kindness did not outperform a simple relaxation exercise. Future studies will need longer training, larger and more varied samples, and a clearer picture of which people, if any, gain social or pain-related benefits from the practice.
Reference and link: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357888
