Does meditation change your brain? What the evidence says

It’s 1am. You’re replaying something you said in a meeting. Then something you said in 2019. Then you’re rehearsing an argument that will never happen, with someone who isn’t thinking about you at all.

Meanwhile, your feed promises that ten minutes of meditation a day will “rewire your brain”.

Both are about the same thing: what happens when you turn your attention inward. One version helps. The other keeps you up at night. And the science behind them is more interesting, and more modest, than the wellness posts suggest.

Is self-reflection good for you? It depends which kind

In 1999, psychologists Paul Trapnell and Jennifer Campbell drew a line that’s still useful. They separated two habits that look identical from the outside, because both involve thinking about yourself.

• Rumination is self-focus driven by threat: going over losses, mistakes and unfairness. In their data it went with neuroticism, the tendency towards anxiety and low mood.
• Reflection is self-focus driven by curiosity: wanting to understand yourself the way you’d want to understand a good film. It went with openness to experience.

The difference matters because rumination isn’t harmless. In a 2008 review, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, who spent decades studying it, and her colleagues set out the evidence that repeatedly dwelling on your distress predicts the onset and persistence of depression, and tends to make problem-solving worse rather than better. The goal isn’t to think about yourself more. It’s to think about yourself differently.

Where does a wandering mind go?

Most rumination starts with the mind drifting. In a 2010 study, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to ping 2,250 adults at random moments and ask what they were doing, what they were thinking about and how they felt. People’s minds were wandering in 46.9% of the moments sampled, and they were generally less happy when their minds wandered than when they were focused on what they were doing. The paper’s title puts it bluntly: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

Neuroscientists link this kind of drifting, self-focused thinking to a set of brain regions called the default mode network, which tends to be active when you aren’t concentrating on a task. In 2011, Judson Brewer and colleagues at Yale scanned a small group of experienced meditators and a similar group of people new to meditation. While meditating, the experienced group showed less activity in the network’s main hubs, the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices.

It’s a neat result with a big caveat. It compared two small groups at one point in time, so it can’t show that meditating caused the difference. People who stick with meditation for years may have been different to begin with.

Does meditation actually change your brain?

This is where the headlines run ahead of the evidence.

The study behind many of those headlines came out in 2011. Britta Hölzel, Sara Lazar and colleagues scanned 16 people before and after an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, and compared them with 17 people on a waiting list. The course group showed increases in grey matter concentration in the left hippocampus, an area involved in learning, memory and regulating emotion, plus a few other regions. The waiting-list group didn’t.

Then the field grew up. A 2014 meta-analysis led by Kieran Fox pooled 21 brain-imaging studies covering around 300 meditators. It found consistent differences in about eight regions, including areas tied to body awareness and self-monitoring, with effects in the medium range. But the authors flagged small samples, likely publication bias, and the fact that most studies simply compared meditators with non-meditators.

The most rigorous test so far is less exciting. In 2022, Tammi Kral, Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ran two randomised trials with 218 healthy adults, assigning them to MBSR, a closely matched health programme, or a waiting list. After eight weeks, MRI scans showed no evidence that MBSR had changed brain structure compared with the other groups.

So here’s where things stand. Meditation changes what your brain is doing while you meditate, as any practised skill does. Long-term meditators may differ in some brain regions, though we can’t yet say why. But the idea that an eight-week course visibly reshapes your brain hasn’t held up in the largest trial to test it.

What meditation reliably does

Put the brain scans aside and look at how people actually feel, and the picture is steadier.

In 2014, Madhav Goyal and colleagues at Johns Hopkins reviewed 47 randomised trials involving 3,515 people for JAMA Internal Medicine. Mindfulness programmes showed moderate evidence of improving anxiety, depression and pain, with small effects (effect sizes of roughly 0.3 to 0.4 at eight weeks). Evidence for things like sleep, attention and positive mood was low or insufficient. And there was no evidence that meditation beat active treatments such as exercise, medication or other therapies.

The rumination link shows up most clearly in depression. A 2016 analysis led by Willem Kuyken pooled data from 1,258 people with recurrent depression across nine trials. Those offered Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which trains you to notice spiralling thoughts and step back from them, had about a 31% lower risk of relapse over the following 60 weeks than those who weren’t.

Small, real and worth having. Not a miracle, and not a substitute for treatment if you’re struggling.

How to start a reflection practice

1. Ten minutes of attention. Sit, set a timer and notice your breathing. When your mind wanders (it will, constantly), notice where it went and come back. The coming back is the exercise, not a failure.
2. Reflect on paper, concretely. Once a week, write three short answers: What happened? What did I feel? What, if anything, will I do differently? Specific questions keep you in reflection mode. “Why am I like this?” tends to tip into rumination.
3. Run the rumination check. If you’ve been turning something over for ten minutes, ask: am I understanding this better, or just going round again? If it’s the second, stop and do something absorbing: a walk, a task, a chat.
4. Swap threat questions for curious ones. “What did I get wrong?” becomes “What was I trying to do there?”. Same event, different engine.
5. Want structure? Take a proper course. MBSR and MBCT are eight-week programmes with the strongest evidence behind them. If you’re dealing with depression, ask a GP or therapist about MBCT rather than going it alone.

Reflection doesn’t have to be solitary

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Trapnell, P. D., & Campbell, J. D. (1999). Private self-consciousness and the five-factor model of personality: Distinguishing rumination from reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(2), 284-304. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.2.284
2. Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400-424. doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x
3. Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
4. Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y.-Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254-20259. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108
5. Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36-43. doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006
6. Fox, K. C. R., Nijeboer, S., Dixon, M. L., Floman, J. L., Ellamil, M., Rumak, S. P., Sedlmeier, P., & Christoff, K. (2014). Is meditation associated with altered brain structure? A systematic review and meta-analysis of morphometric neuroimaging in meditation practitioners. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 43, 48-73. doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2014.03.016
7. Kral, T. R. A., Davis, K., Korponay, C., Hirshberg, M. J., Hoel, R., Tello, L. Y., Goldman, R. I., Rosenkranz, M. A., Lutz, A., & Davidson, R. J. (2022). Absence of structural brain changes from mindfulness-based stress reduction: Two combined randomized controlled trials. Science Advances, 8(20), eabk3316. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abk3316
8. Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M. S., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B., & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357-368. doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018
9. Kuyken, W., Warren, F. C., Taylor, R. S., Whalley, B., Crane, C., Bondolfi, G., et al. (2016). Efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in prevention of depressive relapse: An individual patient data meta-analysis from randomized trials. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(6), 565-574. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.0076