Dr. Goldstein on Neuroscience and Mindfulness

Giving does something to us. The obvious caveat: if someone is already pouring themselves out as a caregiver and that constant output is part of why they feel worn down or low, then generosity probably isn't the door they should walk through first. For most other people, though, it is. When we skip it, we lose something real. Giving builds a feeling of connection, and it also produces what researchers call a left prefrontal shift.

Think of the monk I mentioned earlier, the one who traveled to the University of Wisconsin. He was running a classic loving-kindness practice, a form of mindfulness distinct from the others, and it produced that same left prefrontal shift. The practice itself is simple to describe. You picture yourself, then picture other people, and you send kind wishes and intentions outward. The emphasis sits mostly on others, extending to everyone in the world and even past that.

That it shifts the brain makes a certain sense to me. We're visualizing, and in doing so we're manufacturing connection. Visualization alone can move the needle. Picture something and you set off neural shifts, actual changes in the architecture of the brain. Those changes can go in good directions or bad ones, but here the direction is good. Given that, I understand why the neuroscience lands where it does. Repeat the practice on purpose, over and over across time, and you're training a kind of compassion muscle. It functions as a natural antidepressant.

Play works along similar lines. The point is getting outside of yourself. Even playing alone, you're engaged, and that matters, because depression, especially the chronic kind, feels like disengagement. Play depends on flexibility. Chronic stress and depression tend toward rigidity, a closed and stiff quality, while play keeps you loose and open.

This is why Brian Sutton-Smith, who spent his career studying play, put it the way he did: the opposite of play isn't work, it's depression. When I bring play up with people and ask them about their own childhoods, what it felt like then, or their adolescence if play was absent earlier, and I guide them back into those memories, I can watch their bodies change. They open up. Smiles surface on their own.

From there we carry it into the present and ask how play might show up in their lives now. We'll do exercises together so they can feel in the body what play actually is, which counts for a lot. Where there used to be tightness, an openness appears. There's more aliveness in it. It's almost as if the blood moves a little more freely.