The Neuroscience of Compassion

Cultivating compassion is an ancient practice that may be easier than you think

A boy takes a picture of an image of Mother Teresa that hangs in a carriage of the "Mother Express" train in Mumbai. Research has found that witnessing extraordinary acts of compassion inspire others to do good in their own lives. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images)

Neuroscientists are affirming what people have known for centuries: We can train our brain for compassion. Ancient practices include cultivating compassion; in modern parlance, we say we can retrain the brain. These changes can increase our capabilities for love, happiness, and success. Once you learn how easy it is to rewire your brain for compassion, with repetition and practice, you can cultivate more of it in under 30 seconds.

Why Compassion Matters

We have deep needs for love and belonging, but we often go about seeking them in the wrong way. We turn to external sources for validation, like social media, or markers of success, like buying a car we can’t really afford. We wonder why there’s chaos and unruliness in our lives, when, in fact, it is our mental space that needs sweeping and cultivating.

For millennia, poets, mystics, philosophers, monks, and compassion cultivators have disseminated wisdom about what they have known to be true about the body and existence. Now, researchers have begun to dig into this mind-body-brain relationship, looking for ways to study and quantify what humans have learned through millennia of direct experience.

“Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. This helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter,” says Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

Compassion abates our pain and suffering, even as it shows us that we are not the only ones going through pain and suffering. Our inescapable interdependence makes compassion a natural and essential quality for human beings. Compassion, then, isn’t just a feel-good strength and virtue to cultivate; it is important to our survival.

Balancing Traditions With Science

Cultivating compassion isn’t new, but the discussion is recently gaining traction. Buddhist monks and others have long meditated to cultivate this altruistic behavior. Now, neuroscientists are starting to understand why.

You may wonder if you can ever attain this level of awakening and enlightenment. After all, in our modern world, most of us are bombarded by distractions and demands on our time, and sitting for long hours of meditation isn’t always feasible.

Fortunately, there are many ways to cultivate compassion, and some require little more than the intent to do so and the mindfulness to be aware of how we are thinking and feeling.

Awakening compassion isn’t the kind of change that can be packaged in a pill, nor dissected with molecular precision. While science attempts to give us better insights into our dynamic universe, it cannot answer who we are at our core, nor replace our spiritual nature.

“We are not like machine-made objects,” the Dalai Lama says. “It is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone.”

In other words, cultivating compassion requires something grander than the breadth of science; it requires our human capacity for transcendence.

Benefits of Compassion

As the ancients knew, having a mindfulness practice, which includes cultivating compassion, leads to increased well-being, decreased stress, and, in some cases, even reduced inflammation.

A 2009 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology looked at how compassion meditation affected the innate immune and neuroendocrine systems and “behavioral responses to psychosocial stress.” Its findings suggest that increasing compassion in our lives “may reduce stress-induced immune and behavioral responses,” wrote the authors. A 2017 review published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences looked at several similar studies and also found that meditation was linked to improvements in immune function.

The Role Science Plays in Compassion

Today, psychology and neurology researchers seek to understand the profound relationship between mind and body in the terms of modern science. The emerging field of neuroscience can help quantify how our brains change through compassion, suggests a study from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After engaging in compassion meditation, an ancient Buddhist technique, the study participants showed a measurable increase in compassion.

Previous findings have shown that how we use our minds, including having repetitive thoughts and behaviors, will change the very structure of our brains. This implies that we don’t always need to meditate for hours to cultivate compassion, though there may be unique benefits to that approach. Some neuroscientists have confirmed through testing that people can focus on, recognize, and change their thoughts and feelings.

A Neuroscientist’s Perspective

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, author and founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, the key to rewiring our brain is learning to shift out of our negative states.

“The main way to develop inner strengths is to have experiences of them,” he wrote in his 2013 positive neuroplasticity study. “Positive neural traits are built from positive mental states.”

He calls this “experience-dependent neuroplasticity.” To change negative states, we need to have more repeated feelings of changing our negative state. One way to do this is to feel positive experiences more fully and look for the good in your life. This creates positive grooves in the brain, and the next time you are in a rut, it’s easier to get out; the brain knows what to do.

Although we know it takes months, if not decades, of practice to get to the level of advanced compassion cultivators, neuroscientists have learned to observe and measure the ways human beings can change their character towards a more positive state.

Dr. Hanson’s four-step process is designed to take in the good and derive deeper learning from positive experiences. He calls it H.E.A.L., and it is meant to directly counter our propensity for dwelling on negative thoughts and experiences:

1. Have a positive experience.
2. Enrich it.
3. Absorb it.
4. Link positive and negative material.

One reason that it is hard for the brain to change is our inherent negative bias. Our brain keeps us safe from danger by being on high alert, constantly looking for threats. That can be beneficial, but the result is that we can become oriented towards the negative. And in the modern world, where entire industries like media and insurance have been built on our fear of bad things, and myriad movies and television programs give us grim visions of the future, we can be constantly triggered towards negative thinking. This can contribute to chronic stress, due to staying in fight-or-flight mode for far too long.

This negativity bias “blocks good experiences from becoming inner strengths built into neural structure,” Dr. Hanson writes. Through his H.E.A.L. process, he has found that “it is possible to teach people how to make good stronger than bad.”

Another modern technique comes from the work of Eric Langshur and Dr. Nate Klemp, and is called Notice-Shift-Rewire:

1. Notice your negative bias.
2. Shift to a moment of gratitude.
3. Rewire your brain.

Whenever we experience something unpleasant, the brain automatically goes into a negativity bias mode. If you have dwelt on the negative, that’s what that is. The brain searches for more negativity biases to confirm its own biases. To get out, some call this shift from negative to positive “a pattern interrupt.” Once you notice a negativity bias event, the next step is to shift to a feeling of gratitude. When you sit with this new feeling, that “savoring” rewires your brain.

Both the H.E.A.L. and Notice-Shift-Rewire processes take under 30 seconds to practice. Although the techniques are different, the idea behind them is the same: They both help you produce a mind shift.

These techniques are essentially secular methods of ancient practices that require cultivators to look inward and see how they respond to the world around them. When they have dark thoughts, such practices have guided them towards compassion and forgiveness, and letting go of thoughts generating negative feelings, in the search for tranquility.

The Brain and Compassion in Action

A growing body of research affirms the long-held belief that we can rewire our brains for compassion, and we now see declarations that “compassion wires the brain,” as Dr. David Hamilton, author and kindness scientist, wrote in his blog.

These processes change the resistant brain, and help the brain record new experiences. As a result, the brain forms new structures and pathways.

When you feel a calming effect, you know that these pathways are taking hold and whatever you’re doing is working. Your nervous system has moved from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (rest and recovery).

Since “we continually look for negative information, overreact to it, and then quickly store these reactions in brain structure,” Dr. Hanson writes, “repeated patterns of brain activity change neural structure and function.”

Like anything you want to get good at, you need to practice, and repetition is key. Shifting the brain from complaint to compassion isn’t idealistic; it’s an exercise in self transformation that gets easier the more you do it.

In the words of leading neuroscientist Dr. Dan Siegel, who does pioneering work in interpersonal neurobiology, “We can actively ‘inspire each other to rewire.’”

Sarah Bun is a functional medicine certified health coach, author, and holistic and lifestyle writer. 

This article was first published in Radiant Life magazine.