Paying Attention to Your Body Can Change Your Immune Response

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

Soldier on. Dismiss the discomfort. Push past the pain, and you will emerge tougher than you were before.

Yet it may be surprising to hear that overlooking discomfort is not necessarily the best response to the physical messages your own body sends.

A new paper suggests that directing attention towards an inflammatory sensation helps the body control its immune response, whereas intentionally shifting attention away appears to do the reverse.

The findings, write a team led by 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.

Inflammation, discomfort and the immune response

Inflammation frequently serves as the body’s initial defence against injury or infection. The immune response springs into action around the affected area, generating heat and swelling while bringing in immune cells to confront the threat.

Meanwhile, the nervous system alerts the brain that something is wrong. These signals may be felt as an itch or a burning sensation.

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

However, no one had investigated whether that redirection also changed the immune response itself.

To explore this, the researchers used the routine histamine skin-prick test employed to detect allergies.

Histamine triggers a small allergy-like response: a raised, swollen patch known as a wheal, encircled by redness called a flare. As the reaction unfolds 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 closely attend to the sensations arising from the inflamed skin patch. In the other, engaging videos were used to draw their attention elsewhere.

A second experiment, with 20 participants, followed the same procedure but altered the focus. This important variable let the researchers examine whether the result came from attention itself, rather than the particular object being attended to.

Attention to inflammation changed the skin-prick response

This was where the results became particularly interesting.

The level of discomfort reported by participants aligned with those earlier studies. They described stronger inflammation-related sensations when concentrating on the inflammation than when they were distracted.

Yet the key 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 in 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 rather than 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 resolve more quickly in the focus condition. At the 20-minute mark, nearly 90 percent of those in the focus condition had a wheal that was either stable or getting smaller, compared with 46 percent in the distraction condition.

In the second experiment, participants viewed abstract shapes. In one session, they were told to treat the shapes as prompts to pay attention to their irritated skin. In the other, they concentrated 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 displayed the larger inflammatory response when distracted.

Why focusing attention may regulate inflammation

The obvious next question was why this happened.

This is where the participants’ 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 information about the irritation. That, in turn, may enable the body to manage the immune response more precisely.

To examine this idea, they repeated the test after using lidocaine to numb the area. As expected, the effect linked to attention was reduced.

It did not vanish altogether, though. Swelling was greater than when participants paid attention while sensation remained intact, but it was still less than when they were distracted.

That indicated another process could be involved. When the scientists monitored participants’ autonomic nervous systems, they observed 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 helps control inflammation. Importantly, the rise in heart-rate variability connected with internal attention remained even when lidocaine had dulled sensation.

The researchers therefore suggest that paying attention has two effects. It tells the brain, “Hey! Listen!” It may also activate neural pathways that help regulate inflammation.

This is still a long way from showing that people can think themselves out of serious illness. The experiment included just 57 people and involved a small, comparatively 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 reaction.

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

That may offer scientists a useful avenue for understanding how the body functions and how its ailments might be treated.

“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. While we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please let us know.