Mindfulness has been practiced for thousands of years, and studied properly for about fifty. This lesson is about what that study has actually found, because these practices are not folklore, and they are also routinely oversold.

Jon Kabat-Zinn was among the first Western researchers to look seriously at contemplative practice and ask whether there was anything in it. That work began in the late nineteen seventies with a handful of studies. By twenty seventeen, the number of mindfulness studies indexed on PubMed was approaching a thousand a year.

Much of what made that possible was imaging. Functional magnetic resonance imaging let researchers watch the brain while a person was actually doing something, and then look again later to see whether anything had changed structurally. Not just which regions are busy, but whether repeated practice leaves a mark.

It does. Here are the findings I would point you to.

Brewer and the Default Mode Network

Judson Brewer and colleagues, in twenty eleven, studied the default mode network, which is the set of brain regions responsible for self-referential thinking and for rumination. They found it was less active during meditation. They also found it was less active overall in long-term meditators than in new ones, even when those people were not meditating at the time.

That second part is the interesting one. It suggests the change is not confined to the practice session.

Eight Weeks of Practice

The same year, work from Sara Lazar’s group, published by Hölzel and colleagues, found that after eight weeks of regular practice participants showed increased gray matter density in the hippocampus, which is central to learning and memory, and decreased gray matter in the amygdala, which is central to fear.

Eight weeks of ordinary practice, producing measurable structural change. That is the strongest single argument I know of for the idea that this is training rather than relaxation.

Self-Compassion and Motivation

Now the compassion research, which is the part I find most useful, because it is counterintuitive.

Breines and Chen found that when people reflected on a personal failing with a compassionate stance rather than a critical one, they were more likely to believe change was possible, more motivated to make amends, more inclined to seek out others who were also trying to change, and more likely to actually act.

More likely. Not less.

That finding matters because almost everyone assumes the opposite. The common belief is that being hard on yourself is what keeps you moving and that easing up means giving up. The research points the other way, and if you have ever wondered whether self-compassion is just permission to coast, that is your answer.

Empathy Is Not Compassion

Then there is the distinction between empathy and compassion, which sounds academic and is not.

A meta-analysis by Decety, Lamm and Singer showed that when you witness another person’s distress, much the same neural network activates as activates in the person actually experiencing it. Empathy is not metaphorical. You are, in a real sense, running some of their distress yourself.

Which explains why sustained empathy exhausts people. If feeling someone’s pain is all you have, you eventually have to stop feeling it in order to function.

Klimecki and colleagues then trained people in compassion specifically, rather than empathy, and found something different. Compassion training increased positive emotion while participants were witnessing distress, with greater activity in regions associated with positive feeling and affiliation.

Same situation, someone suffering. Different internal result. The compassion-trained response is caring about the person and wanting to help, which is sustainable, rather than absorbing their state, which is not.

That is a direct argument for why compassion is trained as a distinct skill here rather than treated as a feeling you either have or do not.

Do Not Overstate It

And here is the caution, which I think belongs in the same lesson as the evidence.

Studies continue to come out, and the findings are real. They are also frequently reported with far more confidence than they warrant, particularly once they leave the journals and reach the marketing.

Be careful not to overstate the claims, including the ones I have just made. Let the inquiry lead.

If you want a serious and even-handed survey of what the research does and does not support, read Altered Traits, by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, published in twenty seventeen. They are both sympathetic to the practices and rigorous about the evidence, and they are notably willing to say when a widely repeated claim does not hold up.