From Doing to Being: How Meditation Changes the Brain — and What Compassion Has to Do with Stress

For his podcast "Chancen der Zuversicht" I talked with Heinz Jiranek about meditation for

the second time — after our first episode on whether meditation does anything, how to begin, and how to stay with it. This time we wanted to go deeper: into the brain, and to a place many people give a wide berth — compassion. What follows is the distilled trace of that conversation.

I sit for five minutes — and my brain changes?

Heinz opened with an image that would not let him go: you sit down for five minutes, and afterwards it can be shown that something in your head is different. The astonishing part is how self-evident this has become to us. Until well into the nineties it was not at all clear that an adult brain could still change. Today it is well established: what we do often and do with pleasure — accompanied by dopamine, by moments of success — changes the wiring of the brain, into old age.

The German brain researcher Gerhard Roth coined an image for this that I like to pass on: it is like walking through a field of grain for the first time. After the first pass you see hardly anything; the field straightens up again. Walk the same way two or three times and a dent appears. Over time it becomes a path, eventually almost a motorway — and motorways are easier to use. That is exactly why change needs repetition.

Heinz brought the piano into it — we both play a little. Play a piece for the first time and you cannot do it; at some point you can. And if you can do what you could not do before, something in the brain must have changed. Where else?

Flow and meditation: related, but not the same

In our warm-up talk, flow came up — a state related to meditation that we had spoken about once before. The concept goes back to the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who observed athletes and people in everyday life sinking into what they do. I think we all know it: we feel genuinely good when we are fully with one thing. The activities vary completely — one person finds flow while ironing, another over a complex spreadsheet. I would not manage it there myself, nor with my tax return. Afterwards you surface and wonder where the time went.

Flow is marked by high concentration and by quick feedback from the activity itself — that is what draws us in. Mindfulness meditation shares this high concentration with flow. The difference lies in the observer we talked about in the first episode: in meditation, I also notice what is happening as it happens. And Csíkszentmihályi describes something else that Heinz rightly emphasised — flow feels concentrated and fulfilling. You do not surface from it feeling bad. We know the opposite state just as well: jumping from one thing to the next — you have barely settled on something when an email comes in, then someone knocks at the door. Afterwards you feel scattered. Both states are reflected in the brain, not like a digital switch, but as more and less. And attention can be trained.

Can I find my way into tasks I dislike?

Heinz brought everyday life into it: the tasks nobody loves — the tax return, the mountain of emails, or the thing you yourself see no point in, though the hierarchy of the house certainly does. Would meditation help you get through them with some concentration?

I would look at the structure first: can it be cut differently — smaller portions, a better time of day — so that flow even has a chance? And then the contemplative traditions have something like meditation in everyday life — deliberately keeping your attention with whatever is at hand, whether washing dishes or gardening, all the way to cleaning the toilet. You do not need to find the task pleasant. What matters is noticing the inner resistance instead of quarrelling with yourself. I notice the resistance — and I do it now. I set aside fifteen minutes for the unloved emails, knowing the resistance will be there. The alternative would be to do them with resistance while letting yourself be delightfully distracted — and in the evening they are still not done.

There is also a second, more cognitive notion of mindfulness: the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer wrote about it early on — staying consciously with the activity, stepping out of the automatism, and noticing how you are doing as you go. That way even cleaning the toilet can become something meditative, once the inner fight stops.

Where meditation stops being adaptation

Here a warning matters to me, and Heinz carried it with me: there are activities I do not want to lean into. I cannot and will not fit myself into every system and make peace with things I consider senseless. In the first episode we talked about self-determination — and it belongs here too. I can do many things; the question remains whether I want to do them. Meditation is not adaptation to the surrounding system, but a more conscious way of dealing with it. That includes recognising where I am still playing along and where, out of my own conviction, something is pointless or out of place.

Which brings an ethical aspect into play. Mindfulness can be carried into areas that are questionable — it exists in the military, in stock-market speculation. You can do such things more consciously with mindfulness, and still something is missing there. That is why the contemplative traditions always place compassion alongside attention. To some ears that sounds kitschy — "now you must cultivate your compassion". But thought through to the end it is the opposite of kitsch: mindfulness justifies no cruelty. The Buddhist "for the benefit of all sentient beings" may sound grandiose; the alternative would be a self-optimisation that makes everything more conscious — including what wounds. Something is missing there.

Why it is not concentration that lowers stress, but compassion

This is where the research becomes surprising. Heinz asked me to explain one sentence a second time, because it is so easy to miss: in the large ReSource Project led by Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute, it is not the concentration component that produces the long-term stress reduction — it is the cultivation of compassion.

The project distinguished several modules. The first is presence: being in the moment, not letting yourself be carried off by thoughts of past and future. Here and now, just as I am. Heinz noted that exactly this could be cultivated in any meeting — noticing what is happening right now and which contributions I may be holding back. Meetings would not become more comfortable that way, but more effective, if half the room were not working through emails behind open laptops.

The second module has to do with warmth, care and compassion, including the acceptance of difficult feelings — something pro-social. And it is precisely this module that delivers the stress reduction, measured even in cortisol, which can be determined in the hair months later. We have two stress systems: fast adrenaline, which everyone knows, and slower cortisol, which builds up over repeated strain and is sluggish to come down again. That compassion, of all things, acts on this slow system takes the whole subject out of the esoteric corner for good. Tania Singer prefers to speak of a mental gym: if you cannot lift a weight, you do not think "I can't do this" but "I haven't trained enough yet". The same holds for dealing with stress.

Self-compassion — and why the term is so unwieldy

Heinz admitted that he had long shied away from the notion of loving compassion, in coaching too — rose-tinted glasses, plushy. I know the reluctance: in workshops I rarely bring in this form, because it unsettles some people. But there is more behind it. Many people I meet look at themselves very harshly. There are estimates of thousands of critical self-directed thoughts a day; the exact number is hard to research, but the tendency is probably right: we talk to ourselves more critically than kindly. And interestingly, we are often more benevolent towards others than towards ourselves. When I ask in coaching what someone would advise a good friend in their place, much gentler answers come back.

Exactly this benevolence can be cultivated — no fabric softener, rather the thing that carries you forward with courage and motivation. Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer turned it into a researched programme, Mindful Self-Compassion, studied widely, including at Harvard.

The classic practice comes from Buddhism and begins with yourself. There are phrases — may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. What counts is the inner experience behind them; the phrases are only the carrier. Many find it hard to begin with themselves; then it helps to picture yourself as a small child, to whom you would wish nothing bad, or to start with someone you love. From there the circle widens to neutral people and finally to those you are currently at odds with.

First steps, quite practically

If you want to try this, you do not have to invent the phrases yourself. I like working with the app Insight Timer — I have used it for years and publish my own meditations there. There are many free meditations, including by Kristin Neff, and under "loving kindness" you will find countless more, likewise on YouTube. (Nobody pays us for this.) A small technical tip, because Heinz struggled with the interface: it is worth saving meditations you find straight into a playlist or folder, otherwise you will be searching for them again later. What is pleasant: the app always shows in advance how long a practice takes.

From Doing to Being

Kristin Neff has a thought that stayed with me: self-confidence carries you as long as you are successful. What carries you through the difficult phases — through the setbacks, the absence of success — is a benevolent way of dealing with yourself, as with a good friend. And the feeling of safety that grows from it is at the same time the precondition for handling complex, uncertain situations and finding creative solutions. In a time often said to be out of joint, that is no small effect — and it does not come from talking things pretty. Whoever feels less threatened makes contact differently and looks differently at conflict.

At the end, an image from Jon Kabat-Zinn remained, one of the grandfathers of this movement. We are often on the move as human doings, the to-do list in our heads, ticking off, ticking off. Sometimes it is simply good to return to the human being — to moments of being, without any demand to perform. You could underpin even that with usefulness again. But perhaps it is enough to stand on the mountain for a moment and just enjoy the mountain. That we are here — that is the actual miracle.

The full conversation with Heinz Jiranek is available on the podcast "Chancen der Zuversicht" (#106 in German):

→ chancen-der-zuversicht.podigee.io