How to be more empathetic

If you’d like to practice how to become more empathetic, Headspace offers a 10-day Kindness course (available only to logged-in subscribers) that incorporates skillful compassion and loving-kindness visualizations, helping to foster feelings of compassion and decrease judgments. Also available to logged-in subscribers is the 10-day Generosity course, which can help cultivate an attitude of general openness and encourage the mind to be less critical. In addition to meditation for empathy, Headspace offers courses that can help with sleep, anxiety, and even grief. Everyone’s meditation journey is different, so take a moment to browse through the library and find what works for you.

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Existing in the world can come with a bit of sensory overload. A lot is going on out there, and it’s no wonder that we become preoccupied with our mind’s chatter. So often, our thoughts and emotions take over, leaving little space for those around us to feel seen or heard. And when we do migrate toward social interaction, we tend to stick to our birds of a feather.

All these behaviors can lead to an empathy deficit — where we’re only exposed to those similar to us — and being able to show compassion for people and perspectives that are different than ours becomes difficult, if not impossible. It can all seem a bit frustrating and disheartening. But asking yourself how you can be more empathetic and venturing into understanding those around you is worth the work. Here are some of the benefits:

• Stronger relationships.

Learning to listen to those around you without passing judgment can strengthen not only your familial relationships and partnerships, but also your friendships.

• An overall happiness boost.

Empathy is one of the most deeply appreciated human qualities. Those who can give it, create stronger bonds with their social circles. These stronger bonds bring about more joy within one’s life.

• Higher emotional intelligence.

Empathy is at the heart of emotional intelligence, or our ability to be aware of our emotions and handle interpersonal relationships. Being able to empathize with those around us gives us a better grasp of navigating interpersonal relationships.

• Better leader and worker.

Being able to navigate human relationships and situations successfully can make office life much easier to take on. If you can read and understand the emotions, needs, and thoughts of your reports and co-workers, you are much more likely to communicate and collaborate effectively.

When our brain goes to work figuring out how to be more empathetic, what it’s doing is getting the emotional center and cognitive center to collaborate and make sense of the situation in front of it. The brain’s emotional center, or limbic system, includes the amygdala and the hippocampus. This area stores feelings, experiences, and impressions. It can also perceive the feelings of others. The frontal lobe, which makes sense of behavior at the highest level, is where the empathizing magic happens. It tries to problem-solve and understand why someone may be feeling the way they are.

Empathy has multiple components: the cognitive, where you understand the person’s thoughts or feelings; the emotional, where you can share these feelings; and the compassionate, where you go beyond sharing concern and actively try to reduce someone’s pain.

If you’re in the process of learning how to be more empathetic in a relationship or everyday life, the main thing to do is give your interactions a makeover: Talk to new people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Actively listen to those around you. Allow yourself to be vulnerable in relationships. Focus on the interests and needs of others. Try not to make assumptions about those around you. And, of course, meditate.

Researchers from Emory University discovered that compassion meditation could improve our ability to empathize with those around us. It is thought that meditation for empathy can do so by activating the areas of the brain associated with compassion. When researchers from Mount Sinai Medical Center scanned patients’ brains during meditation, the brain’s empathy area began lighting up significantly. Meditation may also increase empathy by expanding self-awareness. In calming the nervous system, meditation helps you become more aware of your own emotions, making you more adept at empathizing with others’ emotions. And so as we learn through meditation to see our own thought-patterns, inner dialogue, and suffering, we move closer to the suffering of others. Empathy is essentially an understanding of the shared human condition — and this is the unfolding nature of our own kindness and compassion.