Some 10 years ago, a friend shared with me that she dreams of being a princess in a medieval castle, going to banquets and dancing, and doing other princess things. She shared that this dream was important for her, a sweet feeling of belonging to a fantasy. For some reason, I’ve answered: “What about the medieval plague and poor sanitation?”.
This was a lack of empathy. Today, I’d joke more elegantly I’d imagine being a medieval prince with her.
What’s your relationship with empathy?
Do you find people around you lacking it?
Looking for practical ways to develop it?
Or even overwhelmed by your empathy?
Perhaps, you’re just exploring
For whatever reason you’re here, I invite you to see empathy as an integral part of the human psyche, as we all have it. It is akin to an API interface for psychological states of others, which is fundamental to all things involving people, e.g. communities, hierarchies, politics, arts. Further, empathy can be developed, and most people would benefit from developing it, while some % of humans are over-empathetic and can learn to control it. Finally, when we’re unconscious of our underdeveloped empathy, we can inadvertently cause harm, and I’ve seen much more harm done by people unconscious of their underdeveloped empathy (most people in the world ~ regular people) than by people who are by default non-empathetic but conscious about it.
In this post, I’ll summarize my history with empathy—the reasons to develop it and paths to do so, the case of overly-empathetic people that I tend to like and work with more often than not, and then, the blind spots that surround this beautiful human ability. This is not an academic study of empathy, nor is it a universal guide, but I believe that at least some people can benefit from trying things I explored.
1. Building empathy
I found myself some 8 years ago on the warm streets of Buenos Aires. I’ve been attending a student conference, and one of the speakers explained the difference between empathy and sympathy, while I realized the former for the first time. Before, I’ve heard of EQ and stuff, but empathy embodied something I couldn't realize before. Going back to the medieval princess story, showing sympathy would be an appraisal for the story, but it’d still leave me disconnected.
My working menomic: Empathy = Awareness + Understanding + Connection
First, you’ll have to decide to develop empathy, and ideally have a strong reason to do so. For me, the reason was to better connect with more people to build and innovate social structure. I really wanted to do this and realized that it will require better empathy. Fortunately, empathy is a learnable skill: with deliberate practice and focused attention on others’ emotions, you can deepen the sense of connection and steadily grow your ability to understand and reflect how people feel.
Empathy relies on attention, but what should we pay attention to?
Attention means actively selecting something to focus on. Here, you’ll need to focus on the emotional states of people. Luckily, emotional states are physiological; they arise as responses to external stimuli and internal thoughts, and you can simply observe them with your eyes and ears!
Observe visually: people in public places, your counterparts during a conversation, characters in (well-acted) movies—focus on their facial expressions and gesticulation, and do this many many times, trying to infer how these people are.
NB: visual expression of feelings is culturally moderated, so you can’t universally rely on this to infer, esp. complex things. But it’s a very accessible training ground to start.
Listen, sometimes closing your eyes (to increase auditory attention!): intonations, voice volume, pauses, and accents.
After a while, start merging video + audio feed to gather ‘multimodal data’.
Finally, ask some people how they feel after you’ve observed them for a while, further comparing it to your assumptions.
This will allow you to gather info to train your human neural network. And yes, it’s supposed to feel artificial at first—it will start to feel natural with practice, and nobody will notice that you’re actually an AI.
The value of self-awareness
Your perfect partner to develop empathy, your most honest coach, and your always available data source is, well, you. Before actively practicing empathy with others, you'll benefit greatly from empathy for yourself. For me, this part was quite easy, but only later did I realize how hurtful and sometimes dangerous it can be to empathize with others without empathizing with yourself.
The easiest way to start noticing your own states is journaling. There are multiple guides to journaling, e.g., ‘CBT journaling’, which I think is good for a start, but even better, I’d suggest playing with an LLM e.g. DeepSeek—while it won’t replace a human therapist for you, it’ll work wonders with your mental flow. Pay attention to emotional states, in which situations they are expressed, and how they feel.
Then, therapy is great for developing empathy, like it is for many things. In my case, we’ve tried exercises like this: “Imagine you see a mother who has just lost a child during a car crash. You don’t have children, nor can you be a mother. How do you empathise?” This particular example I’ve taken from my later therapy, but you can imagine something much easier, or again, ask LLM to give you game-type situations to play with.
As I’ve mentioned, emotions are physiological (while feelings are blended with thoughts). There is a good practice to spot emotional states that my highly empathetic friend taught me, although I strongly advise doing it with supervision from a therapist. Access here.
Finally, some positive mindfulness meditation effects on empathy are supported by meta-analyses. If you’ve never tried meditation, I recommend using the Waking Up app to try, but eventually spend some time practicing with real human teachers. In my community, Unitaware, we do this quite often.
The result of this block should be your better spotting and understanding of internal emotional states and how they are. If you want to progress in this direction even further, you can turn to self-compassion (which I’m not an expert on).
Experiencing & training empathy with others
‘An Invitation to Mr Liu’ by Bai Juyi, 800s A.D.
When you’ve learned to observe and have faced inwards, it’s finally time to engage socially, by diving into various contexts and exercising empathy.
My mentor once advised me to try hustle dancing, as for me, a martial artist, it was a new context with very different goals. Some 3-4 months of regular practice with different partners indeed forced me to empathise others and thus helped to develop empathy.
For many people, festivals, especially ones involving participatory practices, are a great way to play with empathy. Festivals help people open up, and a friendly atmosphere is perfect for the practice, also enriching the experience of everyone involved.
Intentional practice with friends can help as well, although for some it may again feel artificial. But if you have highly empathetic friends, they can be wonderful guides in such practices, where you learn to empathise with them and learn from their example directly.
There are more advanced techniques that help develop empathy, such as ‘circling’, but I’ve learned that it’s best facilitated by a psychologist.
Broadly speaking, you can practice empathy anywhere; it’s just that I’ve found new contexts to be especially helpful. To feel the power of empathy, you can trying designing situations where people, yourself included: e.g. when doing public speaking, try to set a goal of which feelings you want to create among your audience, and they try to grasp whether you’ve been successful in creating them. Such feelings can be reassurance, interest, joy, and many others.
With time, you’ll see and feel how your field of perception broadens and deepens. You’ll start noticing things and even categories of experience you haven’t paid attention to before. Exercising empathy will still deplete your energy, but now you’ll unlock this new & profound way to invest your energy into something universally meaningful.
Finally, what is empathy about
Empathy comes in (at least) three flavors: affective (I feel what you feel), cognitive (I infer what you feel), and compassionate (I’m motivated to help). Successful relationships usually require a dance of all three.
I think people mostly mean affection or compassion when mentioning empathy. Unfortunately, cognitive empathy is both rare and harder to develop, while it’s still an integral part of empathy. You basically need both good cognition and emotional awareness to be cognitively empathetic, while connecting these two takes effort and practice. However, it is those who master all sides of empathy that can truly enjoy this ability and rely on it heavily.
Now allocate 5 min and try to assess your current level of empathy in its three aspects. With some, you’ll think that you know the answers, but let’s observe empathy from a different angle to check them.
2. Lacking empathy
When hearing my friend sharing about her wish to be a medieval princess mentioned at the very beginning, I didn’t just not empathise, I also didn’t realize that I didn’t empathise. The core problem with dealing with your weaknesses is that it’s hard to realize them. E.g. it’s harder for low-intelligence people to develop intelligence as you need intelligence to develop intelligence. It’s similar with empathy. That’s why I think we should learn not to expect empathy by default.
Some people have very low empathy, but can still function well
I arguably had low empathy before, and I didn’t understand it. However, for the most part, it didn’t stop me from things I wanted to do—relationships, jobs, activities. I now see clearly that by relying on moral codes, some principles, and intelligence, humans can fare quite well without hurting others, without much empathy. It’s just that they’ll lack an important layer of life, and won’t be able to do certain roles, e.g. leadership.
But there are also people with extremely low empathy who maybe can’t do much about it. These are some autists, psychopaths, and some people with certain brain injuries. Knowing that a person is autistic can help build better communication with them—autism involves atypical cognitive empathy but can show intact affective empathy; interventions (e.g., social-skills training, oxytocin trials) yield improvements. While psychopaths can unfortunately be a good example of reduced affective empathy alongside intact cognitive empathy, allowing them to solve many social tasks well, even though they can hurt people along the way.
Low empathy doesn’t mean anything about feelings
One of the biggest fallacies about empathy and EQ is that not expressing empathy means not experiencing (strong) feelings. Interestingly, people with high empathy know this isn’t true, but it’s those people with median empathy who often perceive the world this way.
If you’re mindful and empathic enough, you can spot people with low empathy and help them turn their attention to their own feelings (which they have no less than you), thus starting the journey towards empathy. They are largely the target audience of this text. Surprisingly, helping to start doesn’t take a lot of effort, and it itself is great practice for somebody who’s covered their empathy basics.
However, if a person actively resists turning inwards, it’s unfortunately also a sign of their unwillingness to change and grow. They might need a serious event in their lives to cause change. This is why I think one should not only develop empathy, but also learn to accept low empathy.
Most likely, you lack empathy (sometimes)
Even if you can be very empathetic, you either run out of energy or you unintentionally block your empathy sometimes (more on the latter case further in the text).
Not understanding this can hurt others inadvertently, especially in a situation of conflict or high stress. This can be a sign of low self-empathy and/or a lack of mindfulness of your own emotional states.
There are two inferences from this part: become aware of your own empathy, and learn to deal with low empathy among others. These two feel very different. Just please don’t skip the first. Turn the first part again just to check.
3. Empathy overload
I’m attracted to highly empathetic people, and I like to care for them, a rare case when I actually feel the need to care. It is probably because I feel that such people have power, which is also a burden. Opposites do sometimes attract, so historically, such people often like me, too. I wish they’d learn to switch off their empathy purposefully like I can.
In my ‘princess sharing case’ from the beginning, being overly empathetic would mean living her experience of a princess by myself, or feeling as if I am this other person who is also a princess. Boundaries melting.
High empathy can backfire: some studies show that roughly 1/4 of intensive care nurses develop PTSD-level ‘empathic distress’, a self-focused overwhelm when they feel patients’ agony yet have too little power to relieve it. Unless this heat is cooled into empathic concern—the warm, other-oriented urge to help—it accumulates into burnout and withdrawal.
This is how my highly empathetic friends can describe their experience: “When she was talking about her childhood, I felt the pain physically, and afterwards I felt exhausted“.
High empathy is both a gift and a responsibility. It can be weaponized or it can be tamed like a force of nature. I know this from observing people who are very empathetic and yet do not suffer extensively from their empathy. I do not yet know their techniques, but I have some suspicions.
Understanding somebody doesn’t mean accepting. You need cognition to distinguish between the two. Turn to logic, an unforeseen ally, and with time, you’ll do it better. Your raw carbon will turn into a solid diamond, and you’ll shine.
This is you (when you learned how to own your ability)
A chain of people helped me notice my lack of empathy, understand it, and develop it once I decided to do so. I feel deep gratitude for igniting this process, purposefully or not, as well as a responsibility to bring this torch of fire further into the darkness.
Thank you, dear reader, for sharing your attention and your cognitive empathy with me today. And my thanks to the dearest Valeriya, who’ve read the drafts!
