How to be more empathetic

It is a skill. **Jamil Zaki (2019)** in *The War for Kindness* makes this point directly: empathy is malleable, not fixed — it expands or contracts depending on practice and circumstance. Treating it as innate ('I am just not an empathetic person') is a decision to stop practicing, not an honest self-assessment. **Goleman and Ekman** distinguish between cognitive empathy (reasoning about another's perspective), emotional empathy (feeling their state), and compassionate empathy (acting on it). Each responds to different practice, and most people are stronger in one than the others.

**Cognitive empathy** is the ability to reason about what another person is experiencing — their context, pressures, and point of view — without necessarily feeling it yourself. **Emotional empathy** is the capacity to feel a version of what they feel, to be moved. **Goleman and Ekman** identify a third type, _compassionate empathy_, which combines understanding and feeling with the motivation to act. The practical difference matters: cognitively empathetic people can be effective at understanding others but emotionally detached; emotionally empathetic people can be overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. Zaki (2019) argues the most resilient empathizers develop all three.

By treating your first interpretation as a draft, not a fact. **Brodkin and Pallathra** describe this clearly in *Missing Each Other*: we tend to fill in others' inner states with our own emotional logic, which is often wrong. The fix is to stay curious longer before concluding. Ask a clarifying question. Sit with ambiguity. Our piece on [not assuming what others think](/en/blog/stop-assuming-what-others-think) goes deeper on the habit of projecting and how to interrupt it — the short version is that a question mark is almost always more accurate than a full stop.

No. **George Thompson** in *Verbal Judo* is explicit on this: empathy means _adopting the other's perspective_ — stepping inside their frame long enough to understand it — not endorsing it. You can fully understand why someone believes something you think is wrong, and that understanding does not commit you to agreement. In fact, perspective-taking without agreement is one of the most useful tools in a difficult conversation: you can say 'I see why this landed that way for you' and still hold a different view. Conflating understanding with approval is what makes people afraid to empathize at all.

Because **emotional empathy without boundaries** burns through you. When you absorb everyone's distress as your own, you deplete the same resources you need to help. **Clarke-Fields** in *Raising Good Humans* points to self-compassion as a prerequisite: if you cannot extend kindness to yourself when you are struggling, you cannot sustain it toward others under pressure. The fix is not to feel less — it is to build a cleaner separation between _resonating with_ someone's experience and _merging with_ it. Zaki (2019) calls this 'empathic concern': you care without drowning.

Significantly. **Sherry Turkle** in *Reclaiming Conversation* documents how constant device interruption erodes the slow, attentive presence that empathy requires. You cannot read someone's emotional state through a split-second glance; it takes sustained attention. Lubrano's observation in *Don't Talk About Politics* is similar: social habits that reward speed and volume actively weaken the capacity for patient listening. Solitude and self-reflection rebuild it — not because silence is virtuous, but because it is the only condition in which you can practice noticing your own inner state, which is the prerequisite for noticing someone else's.

Start by resisting the urge to fix. When someone is in distress, the first thing most of us do is problem-solve, which signals that their emotional state is inconvenient rather than worth staying with. **Alan Alda** argues in *If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?* that empathic listening is an act of _calibration_ — you adjust your response to what the person actually needs, not what you would need in their place. Sometimes they want solutions; more often they want to feel heard first. Our guide on [how to listen when someone is upset](/en/blog/listen-when-someone-is-upset) covers the mechanics of staying present without reflexively fixing.

Mirror neurons — neurons that fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing it — are often cited as the biological basis of empathic attunement. **Alda** and **Goman** both reference this framework: your nervous system does a form of internal mirroring of others' emotional states, which is why walking into a room with a tense person makes you tense. Worth noting: the mirror-neuron account of _human_ empathy, while compelling as a framework, is contested in the research literature — the direct evidence in humans is weaker than in macaques, where the discovery was made. The useful takeaway is not the mechanism but the implication: your emotional state is contagious, which means regulating yourself is an act of empathy toward everyone around you.

Yes, and small moments are the highest-leverage practice. **Perspective-taking** before a conversation — spending sixty seconds imagining the other person's day, pressures, and state — measurably shifts how you enter an interaction. Holding the question 'what does this person need from me right now?' during a conversation interrupts the autopilot of assumption. Our piece on [perspective-taking](/en/blog/perspective-taking) has a structured version of this exercise. Active listening — reflecting back what you heard before responding — is another daily practice with an immediate effect on the other person's sense of being understood.

Separate the behavior from the state underneath it. Difficult behavior is almost always in service of an unmet need — for control, for recognition, for safety — that the person may not be able to articulate. **Brodkin and Pallathra** describe this as the cognitive work that makes empathy possible with people who frustrate us: you do not have to admire someone's choices to understand the emotional logic driving them. This does not mean tolerating mistreatment; empathy without limits is self-neglect. But it is the difference between reacting to a person's surface and responding to what is actually happening underneath it.