A Slight Change of PlansFor a long time, scientists believed our capacity for empathy remains more or less fixed throughout our lives. But research by Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor at Stanford, shows that empathy is actually a skill we can cultivate. Jamil explains that there are different types of empathy — three, to be exact! — and we can learn to be more discerning about when we apply them. Maya and Jamil also discuss the dangers of caring too much, and how we can show compassion for others while avoiding burnout.
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Pushkin. It's often counterintuitive for people that empathy could be more than one thing, like walking in someone else's shoes, feeling their pain, caring about them and being kind. And people say, how could one word like empathy refer to many things? But empathy is the way that other people's experiences get into our experiences, and so there should be many ways that that happens. That's Jamie Zaki, a professor of psychology and an expert on empathy. Jamil is the author of the book The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World, and he sees empathy as a kind of psychological superglue that connects people. Neil says empathy is a skill we can cultivate and that we should be more intentional about where we focus it. Empathy is like a spotlight. The thing that I think is really important to remember is that we are the ones pointing that spotlight, and that we have agency. We have autonomy to align our emotional experiences with the people we want to be. On today's episode, a deep dive into the science of empathy, the different types, how we can build it, and what you can do if you feel things too much. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plan, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. I would love to start by hearing about how it is that you got interested in the topic of empathy. Yeah. Well, I've been interested in this topic since well before I knew what the word empathy meant. My parents come from very different places. My dad is from Pakistan and my mom is from Peru, and they both immigrated to the United States when they were about twenty five years old and ended up, of all places, in Pullman, Washington, at Washington State University, where they met and fell in love. I think that they fell in love mostly because they both felt out of place in the US as immigrants, as foreigners, you know. And I think that they found solace and commiseration in each other. But I think as they grew acclimated to this country, they realized how little they have in common, which is very little, like very little, And by the time I was six years old, it was clear that it wasn't going to work for them. They started divorcing when I was eight, but didn't finish until I was twelve, and it was not what you would call an amicable split. I'm their only child, and for a bunch of my childhood, my primary experience was being in this state of conflict with these two people whose minds and hearts were as different as the countries that they came from, and it was a lot of turmoil. It was a lot of pain, and so I felt like my job as a kid, almost as a survival strategy for our family, was to learn to tune myself to their different frequencies. I think these days of my parents divorces like an empathy gym that forced me to work at care and understanding. Yeah. Interesting. I love the definition of empathy that you give in your book. It's really beautiful to me and very stirring. You talk about empathy as being our emotional and psychological entanglements with one another. You also define three different types of empathy, and I'm wondering if we can actually just walk through each one in detail to give people a sense of what each of these different types of empathy means. So I love it if we could first talk about what you call emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is the evolutionary and developmentally oldest type of empathy, so it's the type of empathy we share with many other species in fact, and it's this idea of resonance or feeling what other people feel. So it's that experience of I don't know if you've ever watched a tightrope walker and you kind of feel yourself, Yeah, like your palms start to sweat and you feel like I'm hyperactive ver neurals hard for me to watch movies even exactly. So that experience of resonance, whether it's motor resonance, sort of as you see someone move in a certain way, you kind of feel something in that part of your body. It can be resonance for pain, it can be resonance for different emotions like sadness, anger, and joy as well. But that sense of overlap between self and other emotionally is what we think of as emotional empathy. And how is that different from cognitive empathy. Yeah, so cognitive empathy I would think of as the detective work that we do to try to understand what's in someone's mind. Now, there's a big difference between emotional and cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy often trades on the things that we have in common. If I see you in pain. I can sort of imagine what that feels like, and it's the similarities between us that allow me to access that type of emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy is useful when we don't come from the same place, when I'm trying to take the perspective of someone whose worldview or perspective is different from my own. And then finally, the third type of empathy is something that you call empathic concern or compassion. Do you mind just describing what empathic concern is. It's a desire to improve somebody else's well being, to decrease their suffering, or to increase their joy. It's a mission that we put ourselves on, right, It's a motivation, And that part of empathy is actually probably the least well understood by scientists and the most well understood by spiritual practice. Tis. It's been studied and developed for thousands of years in numerous spiritual traditions. But neuroscientists, for instance, have studied compassion far less than they've studied cognitive empathy, and much less than what we think of as emotional empathy. So to summarize, empathy has three core components. Emotional empathy, which is that kind of resonance, that feeling of what other people feel. Cognitive empathy the efforts we make to try to understand what is in someone's mind and in their heart. And empathic concern or compassion, the desire or motivation we have to improve their well being. One of the most fascinating things you talk about in your book that really stuck with me is that these three types of empathy are only moderately correlated with each other. So, for example, you can be the kind of person who intensely feels another person's sadness, but you might not be very good at understanding why they feel that way or how to actually help them. Yeah. I think a lot of times when I describe the three pieces of empathy, people are like, all right, Zachi, you just describe the same thing in three different ways. You know, if I share what someone feels, won't I understand it? And if I understand it once, I also care about it, And I say, well, you know that's fair. But it turns out that these pieces of empathy, although they do connect in many ways, are weirdly independent at a number of levels. So, for one, they're not that correlated in the population. If you are somebody who really takes on other people's feelings. That doesn't tell me very much about how good you'll be at understanding them. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes we make in cognitive empathy is assuming that people are just like us, assuming that we can use ourselves as a beacon for understanding someone else. So, for instance, if I meet somebody else whose parents are divorced and they tell me their story, I might think to myself, Oh, their parents divorce must have been really difficult for them, because my parents' divorce is really difficult for me. But maybe they had a breeze of it, right. And our overuse of assume similarity is one of the things that gets this in the most trouble with respect to cognitive empathy. Yeah, it's so interesting in this moment, I'm reflecting Jamil on the fact that we tend to put a premium on this first type of empathy, emotional empathy one, because it does breathe this instant feeling of solidarity. So I sit down for dinner with you, I tell you about my problem, and it just feels so unifying to see that you are carrying a bit of my distress, right, that you are feeling my pain, and similarly, if you're the one feeling it, it feels really good to feel someone else's pain because you know you're connecting with them emotionally. But I'm reflecting in this moment that maybe we should be more open minded about the different ways in which people can provide empathy to us. Right, someone might not actually be great at emotional empathy, but their intentions might very well be in the right place. They absolutely have that will to help you. So in that moment, I might write them off and say, oh, they didn't even seem to care that I'm having the worst day ever and all these terrible things happen to me, and so they're an unempathetic person. But upon reflection, if I think through this lens, this framework that you're providing for us, and might think, look, maybe emotional empathy in this person is not super high, but they really excel in the cognitive empathy space. They are like my super friend when it comes to understanding what I'm feeling, why I'm feeling it, ways that they can actually help me. And so I just wonder if you could lead all of us to kind of revisit our expectations of others and from ourselves, and to recognize that even if someone doesn't excel in one of these three domains, they might actually be excellent in the other ones. I love that perspective. I think you're right that emotional empathy is so easy to access, it's so palpable. But I feel like there's all this talk these days about what are known as love language, is the different ways that people communicate their affection and care for one another. Maybe we should be more open to empathic languages, to understanding both ourselves and each other in terms of a profile, right, Yeah, And if you're not a person who's very warm and fuzzy, you don't always feel what other people feel, that doesn't mean you're unempathic, and you don't have to think of yourself that way. And this is a great idea from you, Maya. It might be useful for us to each introspect a little bit about who we are and then maybe even communicate that. Say, you know, my favorite way of empathizing with people is to try to listen and understand, and I hope that's okay. You know, just bringing that into conversation could enrich our ability to connect with each other. So much. Yeah. Okay, so now we have a better understanding of what empathy is, Jimial and I'm wondering why should we care about empathy? And I ask this in part because sometimes our minds can be so overwhelmed by the empathic needs of just living on this planet, because there is so much suffering and distress, it's easy to just want to put a lid on it sometimes and be like, you know what, I'm over this, Like I cannot solve all the world's ills, you know, of course. Yeah, I think that the reason that we should care about empathy is because it is at the root of who we are and how we flourish. And that's true at basically every level you can think of. I mean, I think it's probably one of the secrets of our species success. You know, human beings not really that impressive. An animal, what do you think about it? Right, We're just medium sized mammals, you know, not really that fast. We can't fly or swim very well, right, I mean, as solo creatures, we have no chance. What we are is a coalitional and hypersocial species, and so that means that it's important to understand, well, what is it that's in us. What did nature imbue us with that allows us to work together so well? And I would say that one of the pillars of our ability to cooperate and to coordinate is our tendency to connect with one another and to care for one another. Empathy basically benefits almost everybody involved, including the people who feel it. You know, it's easy to think of empathy is something you do for other people, But people who report being empathic versus less empathic tend to have deeper and more meaningful connections to family and friends. And then, finally, I think empathy is really critical to building community, to seeing people who are different from us free from the lens of stereotyping, prejudice, and bias. To our ability for collective action, from making small sacrifices for the greater good. Really all the things that allow us to work together. Yeah, you know, on this question of bias, researchers like Paul Bloom and others have pointed out that our empathy has design flaws, right, and so if we rely too much on our empathy to guide our decisions, it can carry some risks. So, for example, we feel less empathy for people who are from different cultures than we are, or who don't share our skin color, or we feel more empathy for people who are attractive or are right in front of us, right, are approximate. Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy is well worth a read. It's really provocative and interesting, and as you say, he points out, hey, wait a minute, empathy doesn't always move us towards justice. It doesn't always move us towards kindness equity, right, Yeah, it moves us to care for people who were evolutionarily programmed to care for. I think that empathy, like every other part of our mind and our psychology, is built for an ancient world, one in which probably we are just around our family members and community members, and it's hard to scale up experiences like empathy for the needs of the modern world, to help people who we will never meet, who are thousands of miles away. Yeah, And I think it's so important for us to recognize where these biases lie. Like you said, an empathy, but all spaces of behavioral science. I feel like in my entire career, whether I been a practitioner of this phase or an academic, I'm always looking at ways in which these more ancient intuitions can lead us astray. We want to be very intentional about where we are directing our empathy spotlight. Right, You call empathy as spotlight, and we as humans have the ability to maybe direct that spotlight. Empathy is like a spotlight, and we are the ones pointing that spotlight, and that we have agency. We have autonomy to align our emotional experiences with the people we want to be, and when we're able to do that, empathy can supercharge our values and morals by adding emotional weight to them. So, for instance, if you feel like you are more inclined to empathize with people who look like you than people who don't look like you, it's a great opportunity to interact with people who don't look like you and learn more about them, or read their stories, or just become familiar because it turns that that those experiences can reshape our empathy, broaden it, widen it in ways that are more appropriate for the morality that many of us have these days. Yeah, it is very helpful for us to understand the ways in which it can be biased, because a lot of these empathetic responses are operating at a purely subconscious level. Right, we're not consciously deliberating over who gets our empathy, and so does require some higher level cognition kicking in. Yeah, you can think of ourselves as being on autopilot some vast majority of the time, and sometimes we have to switch into manual and drive the car ourselves. And I think that's definitely true of empathy as well. Well said, so empathy can confer a lot of benefits on an individual level, on a societal level, as you've just described, but you note that sadly, empathy has been steadily decreasing over time, and you've identified that there are some building blocks of empathy that are crucial for empathies revival, if you will, that are less available to us in present day than they used to be, and this might be responsible for some of the decline. Do you mind sharing what those building blocks are? Yeah. I talk a lot about the world that empathy evolved in, right, So if you think about the social world that we had one hundred thousand years ago, it's just a lot different than where we are now. You know, people existed in small bands of hunter gatherers, maybe a few families a piece, and what that meant is that if you interacted with somebody else, probably a bunch of things were true. You were really familiar to one another, maybe you were related. People were visible to one another. We could hear pain and pleasure in each other's voices, see it in each other's faces, and we were accountable to one another. It was clear who had acted kindly and cruelly, and we could take that history into account when we decide how we wanted to treat them. And I think of those pieces of social life, visibility, familiarity, and accountability as kind of empathies, immortal soup packed with ingredients that make it easy and natural to connect with one another. But those ingredients have fallen out of the lives that we live now more than ever. You know, even before the pandemic, people were living in giant cities more than ever in human history, and a loan, so we were sort of seeing more people than ever, but familiar with fewer of them. It's almost like people turned into obstacles instead of people. We interact now more in anonymous ways, in transactional ways, and those types of human connections are really not great soil for empathy to grow in. Yeah, well, we're going to give listeners. Some hope now, Jamil, because the very hopeful message coming out of your book is that we are not doomed given modern barriers. Empathy is something that we can in fact increase with some effort. Yeah, you know, I think that for a long time, scientists, philosophers and the rest of us have thought of empathy as a trait. You either have it or you don't. It's just fixed. And I ask people a lot, you know, to think of the most empathic and least empathic person they've ever known. And if I ask people, how did that individual get that way? They said, well, what do you mean? They didn't get that way. They were born that way, and they were that way of their whole life. And I think it's normal to see ourselves as fixed because we don't see ourselves changing, because we change slowly, and when something happens slowly, it's hard to see. It's also it's been true by the way of other parts of our mind. We used to think of intelligence as something that was fixed. We used to think of our personalities as totally fixed. But it turns out that people do change and we do move. In fact, the only thing that you can't do is stop changing evidence suggests that although some people are born more empathic than others, our experiences matter enormously, and some experiences can cause our empathy to grow and some can cause it to shrink and weaken. Ahead, Jamil gives us strategies to try and become more empathetic. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. So I'd love to talk about how it is that we can be more empathetic. Right, so you've built a strong case that, Okay, good news, folks. Empathy is more of a muscle than you think it is. It can grow with hard work and perseverance and effort and understanding. Now let's get into some of the tactics. So you know, I'm listening to this podcast, I'm feeling motivated to be my best empathetic self. I didn't want to say most empathetic, by the way, because we'll get to why that might be problematic language in a little bit. But I want to be my best empathetic self. So the version of Maya that helps people in the most impactful ways possible. And one antagonist you say that gets in the way of feeling empathy is our tendency to engage in what's called tribal thinking. So there are those people who are members of our group, and then there are those people who are not members of our group. And you say that having in us and them mentality can sap us of our innate curiosity and our empathy for those who are not in our group. And so, given this, what are some strategies we can use to resist tribal thinking? Yeah, I think it's a great question. Tribal thinking gets in the way of empathy. It even does more than that. In some cases, if we think of ourselves as having an in group sort of us, and an outgroup them, we might empathize less with people who we think are different from us. But the real problem comes when those groups come into conflict or competition with each other, because then the outgroup, the people who are you know them, aren't just different from us, they're a direct threat to our community. And when you get into that situation, whatever happens that's good for them is bad for us, and whatever is bad for them is good for us. So you get not only a lack of empathy, you get what my friend Mina Chakara calls shod in Freuda and She's studied this a lot. This is kind of savoring other people's pain. I feel these days that a lot of Twitter has become sort of a shod In Freud a buffet at this point, you know, But you get this reversal of empathy, and I think that there are ways that we can overcome this. The first is to understand who's really out there. We often have gross misconceptions of what the other side is like. We think that they are way more extreme, way more threatening, way more violent than they really are. So learning and trying to revive some curiosity about who's actually on the other side is quite helpful in reducing that sense of threat. Relationships, in a way, are a key that can unlock our openness not just to the people we connect with, but to people like them. And that's part of why it's so important for any buddy who wants to build their empathy to try to foster these individual connections, because they go far beyond just the two people who might be talking with one another. Yeah, and there's really interesting research corroborating what you've just said. Do you mind sharing some of the research in this area. Yeah. Absolutely. There's a study from almost twenty five years ago. That shows how empathizing with an individual can unlock our care and understanding for an entire group. So in this study, people were asked to read the story of somebody named Julie who was suffering from AIDS, and I should say the study conduct in the nineteen nineties, when there is still more stigma than there is now around AIDS. Some of these people, in reading about Julie were asked to empathize with her, to really try to understand what she's going through and what this might be like for her. Other people, while reading her story were told just be objective and detached. Now the people were asked to empathize, empathized with Julie. No shock, they're really But what's more interesting is what happened when the researchers then ask these people, well, what about folks who have AIDS in general? How should we think about them? How should society treat them? What support should we have in place for them? And it turned out that people who empathize with Julie didn't just care for Julie, they cared more about people with AIDS in general. So again, in this way, relationships aren't just connections between one person and another they're keys that unlock our ability to connect with all sorts of people and entire groups of people. Yeah. I find that to be such an inspiring takeaway because it feels like something that exists within our control to build empathy with an individual person that we know or we're reading about, and then to think that that can have all sorts of positive spillover effects for how we think about communities all over the world. Yeah. It just makes my heart happy that there's hope in this space. And I think think many of us have had this experience where we've connected with someone who's different from us and just learned so much so quickly, and we think of what we learn as I have this new perspective, I have this new knowledge, but I want people to realize that they're also learning emotionally. They're also learning what other people's worlds are like and what they care about, and that makes it easier for us to care about that too. Yeah. No, I love that. Another way that you say we can create more empathy in the world is to better establish empathy as a norm. And we know from lots of social psychology research that, of course we as people are highly influenced by how other people behave. We tend to follow social norms. And there's this very fun, charming study that was run on seventh graders in which empathy was established as the norm. So this is a particularly impressionable population. And so yeah, would you mind just talking a bit more about this study? Yeah, of course. I mean, seventh graders turned out to be the most conformist people on the planet by age, right, So if you map conformity against age at peaks in early adolescence, and I get it. I mean, shoot, when I was in seventh grade, I would have done anything to fit in with anyone at any time. Not that it worked, but that's a conversation from my therapist. But so I think, especially in adolescence, it's easy to think of conformity as pretty dangerous, as something that's going to lead people, lead kids to do things that maybe they shouldn't, to be mean, or to engage in risky behaviors. But just like with adults, adolescent conformity can be a force for ill or a force for good. And so we decided, in work with my graduate in Erica Wise to see if we could use conformity to build empathy among seventh grade classrooms. So we worked in four schools and a third of the students we worked with we put in what we called an empathic social norms condition, which basically means we tried to convince them empathy is cool. We really We showed them videos, and I should say all the videos were based on real data, so we were not deceiving these kids in any way. But the videos basically talked about how empathy is this real, powerful social skill that helps you make friends, and that seventh graders really value empathy, that they tend to gravitate towards other kids who are empathic. Again, this is all true. We then asked them to, based on what they had seen, write about why they valued empathy, and then we collated all their responses why so that when they came back to the classroom, we could give these kids a brochure of all of their friends and classmates saying why they value empathy. In essence, we're alerting them to a social norm that was all around them, but that they might not have realized. Was there the popularity of empathy among their peers. So we came back to these classrooms a month later and we asked students to nominate people in their class who were nice, who seemed compassionate, and did favors for other kids. And we found that kids in our empathic social norms condition who were more motivated to empathize a month later, we're more likely to be nominated by their peers as somebody who was acting kindly, which is to us not just an indication that this effect lasted a long time, but also that it showed up not just in kids' hearts and minds, but in the way that they acted towards one another. Yeah, in their behaviors and their expressions. Yeah, I love that outcome metric. Your final recommendation in your book, Jamil, around building empathy has to do with changing our own mindsets about empathy being something that is in fact malluable, that is something that we can change, And you say that it is a self fulfilling prophecy, right, Like, the more we believe that we can change our empathy, the more successful will be at empathizing with others. Do you mind sharing some of the work that you've done in this space. Yes, this is work with one of my scientific idols, Carol Dweck. Carol is uber famous for her work on mindsets. This idea that you're expressing. When people think that they can't change, they don't really try to, because why was the energy. When people know that they can change, they tend to work harder, which in turn makes it more likely that they really do change, and that turns out to be true for empathy as well. In a series of experiments, Carol and I, along with our colleague Karina Schumann, presented people with one of two essays. Some people read an essay that said empathy is a fixed rate. You can't really change it. Whoever you are now, you're going to be for the rest of your life. Other people read an essay that told them empathy is a skill that you can grow. It's up to you how empathic you become, at least to some level. And after people read one of these essays, we put them through an empathic obstacle course full of situations in which it doesn't always come naturally to connect with people, the very situations that sometimes put walls up against our empathy, like difference. For instance, we might ask people to listen to emotional stories that are told by someone who is a different race, or we would ask them to imagine a conversation with somebody they disagreed with politically and ask how much energy would you put into trying to understand this person in their perspective. These are the very cases where empathy doesn't always happen the way that we wish it would, where our biases get in the way, And that's why we were so curious about those very cases. He said, well, what if people know that they can grow their empathy? And it turns out that people who we had just taught that empathy was a skill worked harder at it, including in trying to overcome those biases. They spent more time listening to stories told by someone who is a different race, They put more energy into trying to understand someone who was different from them ideologically. They basically put in the work in cases where empathy takes work. And I think that's what mattered most to us about that study, is that it's not just that people work harder at empathy when it's really fun and easy, they work harder at it when it's hard. Think it's important to note in this conversation, and I imagine there are many listeners of a slight change of plans in particular that fall into this camp, which is having too much empathy. You note that it can debilitate us psychologically, it can prevent us from doing our jobs. And conventional guidance for people in high empathy professions in particular, so people like first responders, healthcare workers, etc. Is for them to engage in more self care. But you offer up another way of thinking about this problem altogether. And look, I think there are multiple solutions to obviously a single problem. I mean, for one, we shouldn't have our first responders working sixteen hour shifts. That's in humane, and so we have to have protections for people. But there is a shift in mindset we can have around the kind of empathy we feel. And you talk about the fact that we don't want to rid ourselves that the empathy altogether, because certain types of empathy can actually be protective against burnouts. So walk me through some of this work because it might be a little counterintuitive for people. Yeah, I want to start by just thanking you for acknowledging the structural piece here. You know, it's so important that as a psychologist I focus on people's minds and their emotions, but the structure is and culture around us matters so much and so you're exactly right. I mean, the first step towards decreasing burnout is building a just system for the people who work within it. Yeah, it's like, if you're getting three hours of sleep at night, only so much a mindset shift can do. Let's be reasonable here, please, right, please, there are limits on the power of the mind when it's severely sleep deprived and underfed. You know, in my book, I talk about my older daughter who had a very difficult birth and then was in in NIKKIU for a long time, and the people who cared for her and really cared for my wife and I as well. We're empathic superheroes. I mean, we needed them so much, and they were there for us at such a deep level. And as I got out of the fog of worrying about my daughter, I started to kind of worry about them because I thought, how do you do this every day? Go home to your own families, and then come back and do it again. So I ended up shadowing the nurses and physicians and texts on that unit, and I've found that many of them were empathizing so much that they were really losing themselves. You know, I think many of us these days, even if we're not healthcare workers have this sense that we're drinking from a fire hose of human misery. They were doing it at their jobs. We might be doing it when we doom scroll at one in the morning. But there's just so much pain out there, and it's very easy to feel overwhelmed and shut down. One choice that we often feel we have to make is then to say, Okay, do I keep on empathizing and wear myself into a nub or do I stop? Do I shut off my empathy as a kind of self preservation mechanism. It turns out, though, that we don't need to see it in such black and white terms, that you don't have to choose between burning out and empathizing or protecting yourself by becoming callous. And this gets back to the same three pieces of that we were talking about earlier. Yes, and you were talking about how emotional empathy is so palpable. It feels like that's what empathy is to many people. I think that a lot of people who care deeply for others think that the only way that they can express that care is by feeling what other people feel. But it turns out that that type of empathy is the easiest one to burn out. It's the path through which we get overwhelmed, and it's the path through which we end up feeling like we don't have anything left to give, whereas cognitive empathy and especially empathic concern turn out in medical professionals and healthcare workers to be protective against burnout. So it's amazing, right, I mean, empathy is not just one thing. It's complicated, and different pieces of empathy could either put you at risk or protect you from that very same risk. And you know, to dig into some of the risks of emotional empathy because it does me that when you are in cognitive empathy mode, when you're in empathic concern mode, it's a very other minded orientation where you're almost exclusively focused on relieving the other person's pain through problem solving. If you're in the emotional empathic space, all of a sudden, you're now carrying a mental burden that you can be very eager to relieve yourself of, or you might look for a quick fix just because you're feeling distressed. Like I can just imagine it having distortionary impact. That's extremely insightful and well put because when you feel personal distressed, your goal changes. It's not any longer that I just need to be there for this person, It's I want to stop feeling bad right now. Yeah. But if you feel compassion, your goal is to help the other person, and that goal cannot be satisfied by merely doing whatever it takes to feel better yourself. Yeah. So interesting. If we do suffer from turn out, if we do feel the burden of sharing in other people's emotions, what can we do to re orient ourselves towards more of a cognitive empathy empathic concern way of thinking. Like I'm just thinking, I mean, it makes so much sense, but I'm trying to give people a means towards that end in case they're really eager to dive in. There are a lot of great contemplative practices that help with tuning our empathy away from personal distress and towards compassion. A lot of these drawn from sort of the Buddhist tradition, but there are these practices in mindful self compassion as well. You can find videos and scripts for this on YouTube all over the place that again help orient us not towards how we are reacting to somebody, but towards their reality and what we can do for them. And it's a slight change of mindset, but it's enormously important to basically the extent that we can realize that we are are not the ones going through this situation. You know, one of the nurses at the Nikku that I shadowed from my book had this practice of when she was with the family who was going through a tragedy or a really difficult time, she would be there for them, and then she would go to the kind of break room and just sit and repeat to herself, this is not my tragedy, And that's not at all to be callous. She cared enormously about those people, but in fact, she was more capable of caring for them effectively when she got herself out of the equation, when she focused on the good she could do for them instead of the bad that she was feeling. Hey, thanks so much for listening. On next week's episode, we'll hear from writer Kelly Corrigan. Kelly shares how parenting her two kids went to exactly according to plan and still left her reeling it is different. It is over, like that part is over and it's fine, Like I'm going to have a great forty years, but there's no denying that, Like the big page has been turned and I'm something else now. To them, I'm something different. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Drew Bastola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industry, So big thanks to everyone there, and of course, of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. I love that reflection, Maya. I think it's so critical when we reflect on our own empathic biases to not just say I tend to be more attractive. I'm sorry. That's one more time at Jamiel at the Truth. Okay,
