In the first part of this empathy series, I talked about how the world is broken and empathy is the key to healing. Now lets look at ways which we can increase our powers of empathy to better understand other people.
If you haven’t been feeling very empathetic recently, don’t worry. There are plenty of things you can do to recharge or increase your empathy level. First of all, you can reduce the things that have a negative effect on empathy.
Stress is a huge empathy killer. That's why high-stress work environments are often toxic. People who are highly stressed become more self-focused, making them less likely to care about the problems of others.
So focus more on positive thoughts, take time to smell the flowers, and take a breather whenever you feel overwhelmed by responsibilities! The people around you will feel the effects, and your personal relationships will improve. I know this from experience. My wife and I get along much better and find that there is far less tension occurring in our relationship when neither of us are stressed.
If you come home from work stressed to the max and your wife or girlfriend starts complaining about something minor that happened to her that day, you may react with annoyance or impatience. But if you are relaxed, you are more likely to give her your full attention and an understanding ear. Which scenario is going to lead to a more positive result?.
Isolation is another big empathy-destroyer. Your ability to empathize improves when you use it. When you are not around people, you aren’t using your empathy enough. Social interactions over the internet don’t count.
Just look at the message boards or comment sections of many popular websites to see lack of empathy in action. People say astoundingly hurtful things over the internet that in most cases they would never say to someone if they were looking them in the eye and could actually see how it affected that person.
Next, you can start increasing the types of activities that have a positive effect on empathy. The number one is, of course, socializing. Laugh, cry, share, make memories, have deep conversations, connect!
But if you’re not an extrovert, you can only take so much socializing. That’s where reading comes in. Read lots of good fiction, get into the stories, care about the characters. Literary fiction is even better for increasing empathy than genre fiction, probably because the stories tend to be more character focused and the emotions of the characters are left more open to the reader to interpret. But genre fiction works too.
Another way to increase your empathy is by listening to classical music. This works because classical music stimulates our brains to not only feel emotions, but to try to understand what emotions the composers were trying to convey.
In the next part I will talk about how to put empathy into action and understand people you don't like.
This is a modified and expanded excerpt from an original article (written by me) that first appeared on my blog at http://www.shawndove.com/blog/.
Empathy workshop, part 1: Why the world needs more empathy
Empathy workshop, part 3: Getting better at understanding people you dislike or disagree with
Empathy workshop, part 4: Putting your empathy into action
Other articles by me:
Intolerance is fear of the unknown
The old man on the bench (a flash fiction story)
