Do You Have the Discipline to Make a Change?

I will just come out and say it: it takes grounded action to make a difference in the world. 

Today we live in a milieu of polycrisis. It comes in waves for most of us — at times we're bombarded with environmental, economic, personal, familial, and societal disasters all at once. Writing this as a white woman living in the U.S., I recognize that the waves are often more gentle on me than they are on people of color in other areas of the world. My heart breaks for the separations of families, the war-torn countries, the genocides that are somehow still going on today. I wish better for humanity at large. If I look like I have cried, it's because I have been. I have been aching for a way to make a positive change. So I went looking — for the science, and for the stories — to deepen my own understanding and hopefully shine some light into these dark times.

Why Looking Away Can Feel Like the Healthy Choice

For many people, avoiding the global lens feels like the most beneficial thing they can do for their mental and emotional health. And current scientific studies actually support that instinct, because we are neurologically attuned for empathy, and empathy has its limitations.

There are two models of how this works: a top-down, deliberate cognitive perspective-taking system, and a bottom-up, automatic mirror neuron system. The deliberate system can regulate the automatic one, keeping empathic contagion from tipping into personal distress. This is where boundaries preserve the will to go on. This is why many choose to look the other way when they feel personally distressed by it all. 

This is why the  importance of compassion here can't be overlooked. It is the antidote to what researcher Paul Slovic, who studied empathy, calls "psychic numbing." His work is widely cited and backed by brain imaging studies, which show that activation in key empathy-related brain regions actually drops as victim counts rise. That's hard data to argue with, and it builds a thesis that humans simply aren't wired for polycrisis.

But there is a path to deeper feeling without the emotional fatigue, the numbing, the complacency. First, let's understand the neurology of empathy. Then let's look at how we can foster compassion and resilience instead.

The Neurology of Empathy

Several factors change how strongly people empathize — and they explain a lot about why global-scale suffering can feel abstract, and why increased exposure can lead to numbing rather than action:

Proximity and relationship matter. Empathic brain response is stronger when we're closer to, or feel emotionally connected to, the person suffering — though it still occurs with total strangers.

Intensity and immediacy matter. Sudden, acute, high-intensity pain produces a bigger neural response than chronic or low-intensity pain, which helps explain "crisis fatigue" toward slow-moving catastrophes like climate change.

Attention and framing matter. When people were distracted, or told the pain served a therapeutic purpose, empathic brain activation dropped substantially. This is exactly why narrative framing and sustained attention (versus scrolling past headlines) shape whether people actually feel moved to act.

Personal experience and expertise can blunt it. Practitioners regularly exposed to others' pain showed measurably lower empathic response than controls. It's worth sitting with what that means for our own desensitization to crisis news.

Empathy and Compassion Are Not the Same Word

The two words don't just differ in meaning — they differ in etymology, and in neurology.

Empathy comes from the Ancient Greek empatheia, built from en meaning "in" and pathos  meaning "passion" or "suffering". Compassion comes from the Latin com meaning "with" or "together", and pati meaning "to suffer". One is taking the suffering happening and feeling it in you. The other is knowing suffering happening with you — alongside, not as a replacement for your own ground.

That linguistic difference shows up directly in the brain. Empathy recruits pain-related regions that cause you to feel someone's distress as your own. Compassion activates a different network entirely, tied to positive affect, warmth, and reward: the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the ventral striatum. It comes with the intention to help, not the shared distress itself. It does not lead to psychic numbing or emotional fatigue, compassion actually generates energy. 

In 2014, Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, and Singer found something remarkable: short-term compassion training (as little as a few days) increased positive affect and activated reward-related brain regions, effectively inoculating participants against empathic distress. In Ricard's account, what we usually call burnout is really "empathy fatigue," not "compassion fatigue." Compassion, far from causing distress, reinforces inner strength and the resolve to keep helping. 

Put simply: empathy is resonance with someone's pain, feeling their distress as your own. Compassion is a warm, other-oriented motivational state, concern for someone's wellbeing paired with the intention to help. Neurologically, it sits closer to love than to shared pain.

That is the distinct difference, feeling the world's pain as your own distress is unsustainable. Orienting toward the world's wellbeing with warmth and the intention to act is sustainable, even energizing, and regenerative. Compassion is relational and active. Empathy alone is reactive.

Compassion requires practice, empathy is a natural reaction. It gives us resilience to practice compassion and it changes baseline processing. Compassion and mindfulness training has been shown to alter amygdala response to emotional stimuli even in an ordinary, non-meditative state, meaning the shift outlasts the meditation cushion. Singer's ReSource Project, tracking months of compassion training at the Max Planck Institute, found durable changes in brain structure, function, and stress physiology tied to sustained compassionate engagement rather than withdrawal. And Ricard's own fMRI recordings (as a lifelong Buddhist practitioner) showed measurably distinct neural signatures when he deliberately shifted from empathy to compassion meditation, a finding that helped launch this entire research program.

Get a Daily Dose

It is as simple, and as difficult, as loving-kindness. That's exactly what Klimecki and Singer's lab found compassion meditation to be.

What we need are grounded practitioners from every background, religion, socio-economic status, and lifestyle, holding just twenty minutes a day for intentional loving-kindness. This has to be an embodied, disciplined practice — not a passive belief. Done that way, it regulates the nervous system while staying oriented toward others' suffering, rather than withdrawing from it. These aren't coping mechanisms that numb a person to the crisis. They're training systems that change how the crisis is metabolized.

It doesn’t have to be 20-minutes. It is shown that lasting neurological change happens best with consistency. The data comes back again and again highlighting that 11- to 20-minute intervals help with mood stabilization. However, practicing daily for 5 or 10 minutes beats skipping longer sessions altogether. The something is better than nothing proverb applies here.  Deepening focus takes time for the initial rush of daily thoughts to slow down and settle. Research links 20-minute sessions to organized prefrontal cortex activity and better executive decision-making under pressure leading to brain organization. Then there is the tradition, many classic programs and teachers recommend 20 minutes as a solid baseline to train the wandering mind.

Breath and nervous system regulation are the mechanism. Compassion training studies measure real changes in amygdala reactivity and stress physiology — cortisol, in the ReSource Project data. Pranayama and Qi Gong breath practices are doing the same regulatory work through a different door: down-regulating the threat and distress response so a person can stay present to hard information instead of shutting down or fleeing into numbness.

And discipline is the crux. Klimecki's finding was that this shift isn't automatic — it takes training. That's why we need yoga workshops, structured 200-hour teacher trainings, and retreats in this world. Consistent practice, not just good intentions, is what actually builds the neural and somatic capacity to face a polycrisis without collapsing into numbness or despair.

Two Practices to Get You Grounded

Metta Meditation. Metta is the Pali word for loving-kindness, rooted in the Sanskrit maitri, meaning friend. The practice is simple: begin by grounding into the moment through the breath, then move through four phrases — May I/they be well. May I/they be free. May I/they be happy. May I/they be free from suffering. (I like to add: and know the source of all of these things.) Repeat this for four groups, in order: your most beloved friend, an acquaintance, a perceived enemy, and finally, yourself.

Qi and Grounded Action. Chinese medicine's framework of rooting is just as simple. It starts with the breath — a deep breath drawn all the way down through the lower dan tian, the lower abdomen. Then you direct your energy, your intention, your Qi, down through the feet — specifically Yongquan, "Gushing Spring," Kidney 1 — down into the Earth. This is a somatic version of exactly what neuroscience calls "sustained, resourced engagement": the opposite of the disembodied, purely cognitive overwhelm that produces compassion collapse.

This relational orientation is resilient. In a reactive state, humans are bound to empathy alone, and therefore to psychic numbing. To hold an ecological orientation to life rather than an egoic one, we have to apply disciplined practice to ground the heart.

Facing the Beast

Many facets of capitalist society have tried to train compassion out of us and replace it with the cold return of capital — investment, stuff, status. The urge is to keep going, accumulating, producing. Make content. Share. Like. Subscribe. But how often do we actually sit and just be with the breath?

Could radical change really happen without all the status and the stuff? Can you make an impact by consolidating your Qi rather than dispersing it? The answer, as you may suspect, is yes. You can make a difference that counts by following the old idiom: think global, act local. It's not easy to face the beast all the time. But to face any challenge or change, we need to be grounded first. So let's go on a journey through the lens of ancient healing arts to discover how you, too, can find your ground when it matters.

Making a difference means making a change. It means staying resilient, and practicing loving-kindness — as a discipline, not a mood.

If there is anyone to look to when we face the beast of colonialism, it's Mahatma Gandhi (October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948). He was not a saint. He was a commoner with the will and discipline of love. He is remembered as a freedom fighter who stood for nonviolence, and he stood for India's independence from Britain — decolonizing before it was a trend.

His words, published in 1913, still hold:

"We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him."

Self-accountability is the whole practice. This man had a major impact through nonviolent action, as a man without status, stuff, or capital. Humanity learned this tool over a century ago. So what's stopping us from applying it — and being the change ourselves?

Coming in my next article: the will behind the way.