Celebrating love this weekend? Let’s start with empathy

February is American Heart Month. It’s also when we celebrate love, in all its forms, through the observance of Valentine’s Day.

In fact there is another form of caring, called empathy, that is scientifically proven to support not only our hearts, but our overall health. In the past, empathy was once thought of as something you either had or did not. Plato posed the ancient question, “Can virtue be taught?” In fact, science has since shown that it can be.

Empathy allows you to understand the perspective of others and also to appreciate their experiences. Practicing empathy by focusing on how someone else is feeling or what they’re going through can actually benefit us as well.

It works because it’s a form of connection, and science tells us that feeling connected to others helps to reduce stress, lower stress-response hormones, and relate to people better, which in turn can lower stress further. A 2018 article in Psychology Today shares that empathy can help keep us from feeling overwhelmed and “burning out.”

In addition, empathy helps our community address how healthy we all are. When a community better understands what people are experiencing, we begin to shift the conversation away from stigmatizing or blaming others when we encounter challenges. Research on equity shows that differences in people’s health are often due to systematic barriers and exclusion from opportunities, not just individual choices.

The Cleveland Clinic captured the importance of empathy perfectly in their short video entitled, Empathy - The Human Connection to Patient Care, which went viral. In the health care setting, provider empathy can lead to more accurate diagnoses, more caring treatment, higher patient satisfaction, less likelihood of mistakes, as well as improvements to patients’ emotional health and their symptoms.

While practicing empathy can help us regulate our emotions and reduce our stress, it’s important to know that it is possible to take on too many of another person’s feelings or to empathize too closely with their situation. Empathy fatigue is when we identify too closely with the feelings of others, or with what they’re going through. This can cause us to have an increase of stress and burn-out, instead of helping us manage it. So how can we find a good balance?

Most people think of empathy as the ability to “walk in another person’s shoes.” In truth that goal can cause stress and even depression. The goal isn’t for all of us to suffer together. Rather, the best way to increase healthy levels of empathy is to practice sensing what another person is feeling with a level of emotional distance that makes doing so more comfortable. Offering solutions can be a valuable experience for both people, but identifying solutions isn’t the primary goal of empathy. Allowing someone to be heard and understood is the primary goal.

Practice healthy empathy by asking yourself to think about how a person must be feeling rather than asking yourself to imagine how you would feel if you were that person. Healthy empathy builds trust, reduces stress, anxiety, pain and fear.

The best part is that we can practice empathy every day, and with everyone in our lives. This “Heart Month” I hope you’ll practice healthy empathy with those around you. Read more about empathy at the Greater Good magazine from the University of California Berkeley: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition