When you feel personal distress, your goal changes. It's not any longer that I just need to be there for this person. 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. There are a lot of great practices that help with tuning our empathy away from personal distress and towards compassion.
For 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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