Tylenol fixes your headache, but it may also reduce the pain of existential angst, according to a study from the University of British Columbia.

The research, led by PhD student Daniel Randles, is published in the journal Psychological Science. It found people who took the pill seemed less upset after discussing death.

“Nobody has shown this before, and we are surprised that the effect emerged so robustly, that a drug meant primarily to alleviate headaches also prevents people from being bothered all that much by thinking about death. It was certainly surprising,” Randles said in an interview.

Previous research has found a link between physical pain and social anxiety. “We’re arguing that the same sense of distress or anxiety is also experienced when you think about the impermanence of your life or think about how your life doesn’t have purpose and so on,” Randles added.

The study divided participants into two groups. The first group involved 121 participants, some of whom were given Tylenol and some a placebo. Among the tasks they were asked to perform was to talk about death or to what happens to their bodies after death.

They were then asked to hypothetically determine the amount of bail to set for a prostitute. Those who had taken Tylenol were less harsh in their judgment than those who performed the same tasks in the placebo group, suggesting they had less anxiety.

Among the tasks set for a second study group of 207 participants was to watch a “surreal (and) confusing” four-minute film by director David Lynch and then to determine punishment for a participant in the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots of 2011. Again, Tylenol users choose less harsh punishments.

“The new finding is that, if participants had taken Tylenol, this effect (of people who are unsettled or uneasy making harsher judgments) disappeared entirely and they looked just like the control group that hadn’t talked about their death or watched the unpleasant (film) clip,” he added.

Previous research has shown that acetaminophen, the drug in Tylenol, impacts on the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, a part of the brain that deals with both physical pain and social anxiety or distress.

Randles noted that his study is “behavourial” and that further research to look at neurological effects is needed.