How Mindfulness Cultivates Compassion Towards Others

It isn’t a leap for one to gather that regular mindfulness practices can lead to increased compassion for oneself. But can it also affect our compassion towards others? While mindfulness meditation is best known for its positive effects on our own mind and body, more and more research has found that it also encourages compassion towards – you guessed it – others. Recent studies have shown that as a society our concern for the welfare of others has been steadily dropping since the 1990s.

Our levels of self-reported compassion and empathy is lower now than at any point in the past 30 years! Worse yet, our rate of compassion is decreasing more precipitously with each year. As shocking as that may be to some, to others – it may seem right on point. Compassion, unfortunately, does not happen organically within us. In fact, it takes willpower – and a certain frame of mind - to make the decision to place one’s selfish urges behind the needs of another. Further, “concern for others tends to nosedive as suffering grows because, thanks to our natural empathic response, distress is a bit contagious,” writes David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.Is all hope for compassion lost? Not even close.

In fact, studies show that regular mindfulness meditation can increase our ability to recenter and reframe our approach to others – and inherently. Professor DeSteno conducted multiple studies on compassion which showed that subjects who participated in an 8-week mindfulness program showed a higher propensity for empathy and compassion than those who did not yet take a course for which they were waitlisted. The study showed how those who participated in the program were xx times more likely to give up their seat to someone in pain, despite going up against a staged “bystander effect” (where actors pretended to not notice or care for the person in pain), than those who did not take the course. In fact, 8 weeks of guided mindfulness practices triples the likelihood of benevolent behavior, even under conditions that may discourage acts of compassion. Additionally, regular practitioners of mindfulness have been found to not have as much “compassion fatigue” as those who do not practice.

So, what’s the moral of the story? A little mindfulness can cultivate a lot of compassion.