Paying Attention to Your Body Can Actually Change Your Immune Response

“Mind over matter” is a widely held attitude towards getting through difficult experiences.

Push through it. Dismiss the discomfort. Suppress the pain, and you will supposedly emerge tougher than you were before.

Yet ignoring discomfort may not always be the best response to the physical messages your body is sending.

A new paper suggests that directing attention towards an inflammatory sensation helps the body regulate its immune response, whereas intentionally turning attention elsewhere appears to produce the reverse effect.

The findings, a team writes under the leadership of Bar-Ilan University neuroscientist Liron Rozenkrantz in Israel, “establish a causal link between attention and immune regulation in vivo, suggesting that processes often considered autonomously regulated, such as inflammatory responses, are influenced by the voluntary allocation of attentional resources.”

The study was published in Nature Human Behaviour.

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Inflammation and the body's warning signals

Inflammation commonly serves as the body's first defence against injury or infection. The immune system springs into action around the affected area, generating heat and swelling and drawing in immune cells to address the danger.

Meanwhile, signals from the nervous system alert the brain that something is wrong. These messages may be experienced as an itch or a burning feeling.

Earlier studies in people have found that shifting attention away from such sensations can make them feel less unpleasant subjectively.

However, no one had investigated whether this attentional shift also altered the immune response itself.

To examine this, researchers used the conventional histamine skin-prick test employed to identify allergies.

Histamine triggers a modest allergy-like response: a raised, swollen area known as a wheal, encircled by redness called a flare. As the response develops over roughly 20 minutes, both can be measured.

In the first experiment, 37 healthy volunteers underwent the prick test on two different occasions.

A diagram of the histamine skin-prick test. (Mizrachi et al., Nat. Hum. Behav. 2026)

During one session, participants were asked to concentrate closely on sensations arising from the inflamed area of skin. In the other, engaging videos were used to guide their attention away from it.

A second experiment, with 20 participants, followed the same procedure but altered what participants focused on. This important variable enabled the team to assess whether attention itself, rather than the particular object of attention, was responsible for the result.

Attention to inflammation and immune response

This is where the results became particularly interesting.

The strength of the discomfort reported by participants matched the findings of previous work. When they concentrated on the inflammation, participants described more intense inflammation-related sensations than they did while distracted.

But the crucial measure - the immune response itself - seemed to be regulated more effectively when participants attended to the sensation.

In the first experiment, the mean wheal size under the focus condition was only 3.5 mm, versus 5.0 mm in the distraction condition. The surrounding flare was smaller too: 10.6 mm compared with 14.0 mm.

Around 90 percent of participants had greater inflammation while distracted, with wheal and flare responses averaging about 1.5 times larger in the distraction condition.

The wheal also appeared to settle more rapidly in the focus condition. At 20 minutes, nearly 90 percent of participants focusing on the sensation had a wheal that was stable or reducing in size, compared with 46 percent of those distracted.

In the second experiment, participants viewed abstract shapes. In one session, they were told to treat the shapes as prompts to focus on their irritated skin. In another, they focused on the shapes themselves, considering whether they could exist in the real world.

How attention to inflammatory sensations influenced the size and resolution of the skin's inflammatory response. (Mizrachi et al., Nat. Hum. Behav. 2026)

The outcome was much the same. Internal attention made inflammation about 1.6 times smaller, and once more, roughly 90 percent of participants experienced the larger inflammatory response while distracted.

Why paying attention may affect inflammation

The obvious next question was why this happened.

That is where the reported differences in discomfort became informative.

The researchers proposed that attending to the sensation makes the signal more important to the brain while also providing it with information about the irritation. This, in turn, may allow the body to regulate its immune response more precisely.

To investigate the idea, the team repeated the test after numbing the area with lidocaine. As expected, the effect linked to attention was reduced.

It did not vanish completely, however. Swelling was greater than it had been when people attended to the sensation with normal feeling intact, but it remained smaller than when they were distracted.

This indicated that another process might also be involved. When the researchers monitored participants' autonomic nervous systems, they found no differences in measures such as heart rate, skin conductance and skin temperature. They did, however, detect a difference in heart-rate variability.

Heart-rate variability is an indirect measure of parasympathetic, or vagal, activity, and the vagal system contributes to inflammation regulation. Importantly, the rise in heart-rate variability linked with internal attention continued even when lidocaine had dulled sensation.

The researchers therefore believe that paying attention has two effects. It tells the brain, “Hey! Listen!” It may also activate neural pathways involved in regulating inflammation.

This certainly does not mean that people can think their way out of serious illness. The experiment involved only 57 individuals and used a very small, relatively insignificant and temporary immune test.

Related: A Week-Long Meditation Retreat Produced Psychedelic-Like Brain Changes, Study Finds

The researchers do not yet know whether the effect extends to infection, chronic inflammation, autoimmune disease or anything beyond this specific experimental skin response.

Still, the findings point to something intriguing about attention. What we focus on may alter our experience of the world, but this study indicates it could also have an unseen role in how the body responds to sensory information.

That could give scientists something to work with as they seek to understand the body and treat its ailments.

“Together,” the researchers write, “these findings implicate subjective sensory experience as an active contributor of immune regulation and extend predictive and allostatic models of brain-body interaction to include attention as an active regulatory component.”

The findings are available in Nature Human Behaviour.

This article was fact-checked and edited by Michael Irving. Although we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please let us know.