How to Combine Exercise With Compassion Practice
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Dr. Richard Davidson proposes a practical way to train the body and mind together: use part of a workout to reflect on how improving your health benefits other people. He calls this contemplative aerobics. The reflection can begin while putting on shoes or preparing to exercise, making an existing habit a reminder to practice generosity and connection. Aerobic exercise itself can support brain plasticity. In a yearlong randomized trial of 120 older adults, aerobic training increased hippocampal volume by about 2 percent, while volume declined in the control group. [1]
Compassion training offers a separate line of evidence for changing how people respond to others. In a randomized study, healthy adults practiced either compassion or cognitive reappraisal for 30 minutes daily over two weeks. The compassion group subsequently spent more of its own money helping someone treated unfairly in an economic game. Changes in altruistic behavior were associated with altered activity and connectivity in brain systems involved in social understanding, emotional regulation, and reward. The study supports Dr. Davidson's view that prosocial motivation can be practiced as a skill. [2]
Connection is central to his invitation. A separate trial of 153 adults found that smartphone-based mindfulness training combining attention monitoring with acceptance reduced daily loneliness and increased social interactions compared with monitoring alone or an active control. Dr. Davidson suggests using exercise as a recurring opportunity to cultivate that outward-looking mindset. The practical aim is to connect the familiar benefits of physical training with the people who share your life, then return to that intention consistently. [3]
- ^ Erickson, Kirk I.; Voss, Michelle W.; Prakash, Ruchika Shaurya; Basak, Chandramallika; Szabo-Reed, Amanda N.; Chaddock, Laura, et al. (2011). Exercise Training Increases Size Of Hippocampus And Improves Memory Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences 108, 7.
- ^ Weng, Helen Y.; Fox, Andrew S.; Shackman, Alexander J.; Stodola, Diane E.; Caldwell, Jessica Z. K.; Olson, Matthew C., et al. (2013). Compassion Training Alters Altruism And Neural Responses To Suffering Bioethics 24, 7.
- ^ Lindsay EK; Young S; Brown KW; Smyth JM; Creswell JD (2019). Mindfulness training reduces loneliness and increases social contact in a randomized controlled trial. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 116, 9.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: If you only have so much time in the day, and you're wanting to partake in habits that are going to benefit your mind, why would I spend time doing something like meditation when I could spend that same amount of time doing exercise, where I know that, particularly vigorous exercise, is going to be beneficial for my brain? It's going to increase things like neuroplasticity, which we'll talk about, but also positive affect. So—
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Question.
Dr. Richard Davidson: Okay, great question, and thank you so much for asking it. And I particularly like the way you posed it. My answer simply would be that you don't have to choose. You can do both together. And it won't take any extra time.
And so, exercise, physical exercise, particularly vigorous aerobic exercise of the sort that you're describing, is indeed, as you are hinting, the most empirically well-validated strategy for increasing neuroplasticity. And we can talk more about neuroplasticity in a few moments. But neuroplasticity is neutral with respect to its impact on our mind and on our well-being. If you increase neuroplasticity and you're thinking a lot of unwholesome thoughts, toxic thoughts, if you're in an environment which is stressful, you will increase the likelihood of being stressed and of being challenged because the increase in neuroplasticity is increasing the extent to which those negative thoughts are being encoded. And so, simply increasing neuroplasticity in and of itself is neutral with respect to our mind.
What the real challenge is, is being able to increase neuroplasticity and simultaneously increase our wholesome or virtuous mind state, if you will. And we can actually do both together. So, let me give you a very simple kind of invitation. Next time you do physical exercise, spend a few moments as you are ramping up to do the exercise. It may be putting on your sneakers, getting yourself ready, or it can even be during the exercise itself. Reflect on how doing this physical exercise is beneficial not only for yourself, but it's beneficial for all of those that you touch directly or indirectly. That is, it's a radical act of generosity for you to be improving your health. It's not just something good for you, but it's something good for the entire social network that you interact with, which in your case is really large.
And so, invoking that kind of mind state, or we call it a mindset, which is a mindset of generosity and altruism, is filling your mind with this virtuous, wholesome motivation while you're doing something that will increase your neuroplasticity. That is the ideal combination. This is something we've called contemplative aerobics.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I do think about positive things about myself when I am preparing for exercise. In fact, that's almost solely what I'm thinking about. How this is going to benefit me, how I'm going to be in a better mood, how I'm going to focus better, how it's good for my cardiovascular health, my brain aging. The idea of how it's good for everyone else, how me improving myself is also going to affect the way I interact with people, that is a very new concept to me. And why is that so beneficial for well-being?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Because it connects you with others, which is one of the core pillars of well-being. In 2023, the then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued the first health advisory ever issued by a public health officer in the United States on loneliness and social isolation. One of the things he called out in that report is that loneliness is a greater risk factor for premature mortality than is smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness gets under the skin and affects our biology. And the reverse of that, social connection, also gets under our skin and affects our biology. We know that connecting with others is anti-inflammatory. Practices which help us connect to others actually change our biology in very meaningful ways that are really important for our mental and physical health.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Does the act of just, I guess, this contemplative aerobics and what sounds to me like also, you said altruistic behavior, compassion. I mean, thinking about how you're improving your health and how that's going to improve the health of others. Does that somehow, just thinking about that, help you become more social or connected to others? Or how does that work?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, if it's done on a regular basis, systematically as a practice with intentional focusing of the mind on those topics, the answer is unequivocally yes. We've conducted randomized controlled trials where we have actually randomly assigned people to strategies that engage in these practices compared to those who are doing another kind of strategy, and we've looked at hard-nosed measures of altruistic behavior. We've also looked at the brain using direct measures of brain function and structure using MRI. And we've shown in hard-nosed randomized controlled trials that it doesn't take much to actually change one's behavior and one's biology, but you need to do it on a regular basis.
And just like physical exercise, you know that you can't work out for a couple of weeks and then think that the improvements that you may have gleaned from that are going to last forever if you stop working out. It's a practice that you continue to do for hopefully the remainder of your life. And similarly with this, these are practices that we envision people doing for the rest of their life. And I liken it to brushing our teeth. When humans first evolved, none of us were brushing our teeth, and yet most people, I'm sure every listener of this podcast, spends at least a few minutes a day brushing their teeth. It's not part of our genome. We've learned to do that, and the data show that if we spend even a shorter time as we spend brushing our teeth nourishing our mind and our heart, this world would be a different place.
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