Ahhh! That’s better (Wendy Ashton/Getty)

Painful needle heading your way? A sharp intake of breath might be all that is needed to make that injection a little more bearable.

When you are stressed, your blood pressure rises to fuel your brain or limbs should you need to fight or flee. But your body has a natural response for calming back down. Pressure sensors on blood vessels in your lungs can tell your brain to bring the pressure back down, and the signals from these sensors also make the brain dampen the nervous system, leaving you less sensitive to pain. This dampening mechanism might be why people with higher blood pressures appear to have higher pain thresholds.

Gustavo Reyes del Paso at the University of Jaén in Spain wondered whether holding your breath – a stress-free way of raising blood pressure and triggering the pressure sensors – might also raise a person’s pain threshold. To find out, he squashed the fingernails of 38 people for 5 seconds while they held their breath. Then he repeated the test while the volunteers breathed slowly. Both techniques were distracting, but the volunteers reported less pain when breath-holding than when slow breathing.

Reyes del Paso thinks holding your breath might be a natural response to the expectation of pain. “Several of our volunteers told us they already do this when they are in pain,” he says. But he doesn’t think the trick will work for a stubbed toe or unexpected injury. You have to start before the pain kicks in, he says, for example, in anticipation of an injection.


“It may be possible to coach people in acute pain – such as during childbirth – to control their pain by breath-holding,” says Richard Chapman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. But he adds that holding your breath can also tense your muscles, which might make some painful conditions worse.

Although Reyes del Paso discovered a pain-numbing effect, it wasn’t very large – on average, the pain experienced fell by half a point from 5.5 to 5, judged on a 10-point pain scale. “The effect might be significant but I’d want it to be bigger for clinical use,” says Anne Murphy at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Journal reference: Pain Medicine, DOI: 10.1111/pme.12764, doi.org/4gk

Read more: “7 easy ways to reduce the pain you’re feeling“