Does it actually do anything? A podcast conversation about meditation — and what we rarely talk about

For his podcast “Chancen der Zuversicht” (episode 105) Heinz Jiranek with me about meditation — Heinz is a very experienced, long-standing psychologist and coach, and we have known each other for fifteen years. What follows is not a lecture but the distilled trace of that conversation.

As a coach, Heinz often reaches the point where he thinks: now would be the moment f

or meditation. And then he meets the same three questions. “Does it really do anything?” “Am I meditating correctly, or am I just sitting here with a thousand thoughts in my head?” And: “I do believe it helps — but I start, and then my energy fizzles out.” We worked our way along these three questions.

Would anyone pour that much money into a fad?

One indicator convinces me long before we get to any single effect. The American Mindfulness Research Association counts the scientific papers each year with “mindfulness” in the title. In 2000 there were ten; in 2024 there were 1,312 — from institutions like Oxford, Stanford, Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute. Funding and research on this scale rarely flow into a pure wave that has now lasted more than two decades. That proves no single effect, but it is worth looking more closely.

What do we mean by “useful”?

We measure almost everything by its use, preferably in numbers. Heinz, who also comes at things from philosophy, brought in Aristotle here: does happiness actually have to have a measurable use? Some effects appear only late, and on a different level from the one we were searching on.

There was that wave of companies introducing mindfulness programmes — Google, SAP, many others. And then an uncomfortable observation: someone who perceives more consciously also notices sooner what is not good for them. In the studies, work output sometimes drops. Someone draws clearer boundaries, leaves earlier, says no for once. “And does my boss want that?” Heinz asked drily. From the logic of the quarter, that is a loss. On the other side of the ledger are the long-term absences that increase when no one notices early enough that they are working at the expense of their own substance.

We spend all day training ourselves to be distracted

I started because I am easily distracted. Early signals from Stanford showed that certain forms of meditation strengthen the brain regions for directing attention. The mechanism is simple: my mind wanders, I notice it, I take it gently by the scruff of the neck and bring it back. Again and again — that trains precisely the ability to stay with one thing.

In everyday life we train the opposite. Social media conditions us into a kind of pseudo-attention: the next video appears with a lurid title, and I barely have to pay attention at all. At some point it becomes hard to read a page of text from start to finish. Practising focus, deliberately, as a counterweight — that appealed to me from the beginning.

Catching the moment when the chocolate stops tasting good

The second effect is awareness. Every change in behaviour begins with my noticing at all how automatically I decide. If I notice the impulse a moment earlier, I have the choice not to go along with it straight away.

Judson Brewer studied this with smokers: they were allowed to smoke but were to really notice how the smoke touches the tongue, how it tastes. The craving turned into awareness — and that changed the distance to the cigarette. His example with chocolate has stayed with me: the first piece tastes good, the second too, and at some point it no longer tastes good and you keep going anyway. Catching that moment is what it is about — not forbidding yourself the first piece.

Meditation takes nothing away. It makes conscious enjoyment possible, and then the perception of when it tips over. Food today is optimised for ravenous hunger, for the ratio of salt, sugar and fat that keeps us wanting more. Simply noticing the difference between the first bite and the fifth is already the whole practice.

Self-determination, not resilience

It was Heinz who found the fitting word, better than anything from the coaching vocabulary: self-determination — what Immanuel Kant called Mündigkeit. Someone who cannot get free of endless scrolling is, in Kant’s terms, in a kind of self-imposed immaturity. Meditation widens the space in which I decide consciously, rather than driving through the day on autopilot.

We have come to prefer this to the fashionable word resilience. Resilience is sometimes understood as adapting to the stressors of the workplace — we may load you up, after all we send you to resilience training. With self-determination that move does not work. And it means more than a more wakeful mind: someone who meditates regularly also gains more attention for the body’s signals, which often say very clearly what is good and what is not.

Do I have to go up a mountain for this?

Can I learn this myself, or do I have to sit on a mountain for six hours and check out? This image — the lotus position, alone on a peak, no thoughts at all — is surprisingly young, and yet very present. It probably became popular only through the Beatles and Transcendental Meditation, with the kung-fu films and their solitary master on the mountain coming later. These images lead us astray. It is not about having no thoughts — with anything that begins with “no,” you end up with more of it in your head.

My own way in ran through the exercises of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the eight-week MBSR course; much of it is freely available, for instance on YouTube. It is about cultivating a stance that is as curious and non-judging as possible. What is here right now, and what changes from one moment to the next? When I notice that my attention is wandering — and it will — I bring it back to the breath, kindly. When thoughts come up like “try harder” or “do it right,” then an accepting noticing, and back to the breath.

The breath is such a good anchor because it is always there and happens within me, not outside. It is about only observing it, not deliberately changing it. Buddhism fondly calls our mind the monkey mind: something rustles somewhere in the forest, and off we are. We notice it, return, stay curious. That is the real practice — not an achieved state of stillness, but this patient coming back.

And it works faster than you would think. Simply sitting down and noticing often has immediate effects on physiology — on average, blood pressure drops. Sometimes it rises at first, because you only now notice how tense you actually are. The decisive thing is the stance: as long as I struggle inwardly and want it not to be the way it is, the activation can rise instead. In the accepting stance — “yes, right now it is like this” — the system settles.

Why the energy fizzles out — and what helps

That leaves the third and perhaps most important question, the one about staying with it. So many people know this: you start with enthusiasm, last five days, skip the sixth — and after two weeks the whole thing has quietly disappeared. I know it well enough from myself.

Two things help. The first comes from willpower research: create a fixed place that invites you to sit down. If I have to fetch my meditation chair from the basement every time and put it away again, the chances are slim that I will still be at it on the second day. The second is a question of measure: five minutes as a recommended lower bound. Small units, so short that you can hardly find an excuse, last better than the resolve to sit for half an hour once a week. A Buddhist teacher advises sitting only as long as you have the sense that you could sit longer — a good ending is what motivates you to continue.

During the practice itself, I often only notice how distracted I am, and only afterwards that it did me good. If you really want to see changes in the brain — resilience anchored more deeply, as Richard Davidson studies it in long-practising monks — it takes a lot of time. Davidson, incidentally, names just as carefully where the effects are overstated as he shows that they exist. In Tania Singer’s ReSource Project at the Max Planck Institute it was possible to show over longer periods that cortisol levels drop lastingly with certain forms of practice — though these were structured trainings over months.

In everyday life the most honest measure is a simpler one: does it do me good? Try it for two or three weeks, in short units, without great expectation. There will still be days when the monkey mind stages utter chaos — that stays so, even after years. But you get a feel for whether it gives you something. And in that, trust what the research says quite clearly: staying with it is one of the most important factors of all.

#UndSoWeiterGerne

The full conversation with Heinz Jiranek is available on the podcast “Chancen der Zuversicht” (episode 105, in German):

→ Spotify

→ chancen-der-zuversicht.podigee.io

Show notes

Research institutions and organisations

• American Mindfulness Research Association (AMRA) — cited for the steep rise in meditation studies: from 10 papers in 2000 to 1,312 in 2024.

• Max Planck Institute (Germany) — conducts extensive research, including the ReSource study (see also Tania Singer).

• Stanford, Oxford and Wisconsin — leading research centres on mindfulness, including early studies showing that meditation strengthens the brain regions responsible for attention.

Researchers and specific studies

• Jon Kabat-Zinn — set this line of research in motion at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the late 1970s and developed the eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

• Judson Brewer — known for his experiments and talks on how mindfulness affects smoking (TED Talk) and eating (book The Hunger Habit): how awareness can change the automatic craving impulse.

• Richard Davidson — researcher at the University of Wisconsin who studies long-practising monks, among others, and shows how much time it takes to anchor resilience deeply in the brain.

• Tania Singer — researcher at the Max Planck Institute; her project demonstrated that levels of the stress hormone cortisol drop lastingly through certain forms of meditation.

Philosophers

• Aristotle — invoked around the question of whether things like “happiness” must have any measurable use at all.

• Immanuel Kant — brought in by Heinz: his notion of “self-imposed immaturity” (for instance, in the face of TikTok); meditation as a path toward genuine self-determination, toward conscious choice.

Other references mentioned

• One Moment Meditation — a cartoon and exercise online, recommended with a wink as a way in: start with just one minute of awareness a day.