Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.
—MOHSIN HAMID
• Empathy arises from brain regions that regulate the quality of our relationships to others.
• Practicing empathy skills improves the ability to regulate your mind and behavior.
• Empathy is interactive; it influences the brains of those with whom you interact.
• When empathy is actively practiced, calmness, contentment, and satisfaction can flourish.
• Developing empathic children may be the greatest legacy we can transmit to the next generation.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may seem a strange place to begin a discussion about the role of empathy in successful aging. But in fact, researchers at MIT studied the capacity to put ourselves into someone else’s felt experience, which is thought by many to be among the highest of human achievements. Everything from avoidance of war to the establishment of lifelong loving relationships depends, in some measure, on the ability to appreciate the other’s perspective, to feel their feelings, and to be able to “walk a mile in their shoes.” And to this end, a product designed at MIT seeks to open a window into empathy, aging, and the creation of a more aging-sensitive world.
Joseph Coughlin, a professor at MIT, recognized that our culture is physically designed in ways oblivious to the comfort and accessibility needs of older adults. Beginning in 1999, his lab developed AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System).1 It is a suit containing weights, specialized clothing and shoes, elastic straps, colored goggles, and other headgear carefully designed to force the wearer to mimic the experience of moving about in the world as an older adult. Research volunteers wear the suit while walking, climbing stairs, shopping, or otherwise engaging in the routine activities of daily living. They quickly discover how little of our cultural landscape is designed with the elderly in mind. Fatigue rapidly sets in. Frustration levels rise. Removing a gallon-sized jug of juice from a grocery store’s upper shelf suddenly becomes an effortful labor. The experience quickly creates feelings of empathy in the volunteers for what it is like for older adults to simply move about their world on a day-to-day basis.
The results of AGNES suit studies have been used by some of the largest and most recognizable US companies to redesign their products to better attend to the needs of our graying society. AGNES influenced the product design process of huge corporations by having researchers literally walk a mile in the shoes of older adults.
The power and influence of empathic experience should not be underestimated. Jack Handey, an American humorist, agrees: “Before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Then when you do criticize them, you will be a mile away and have their shoes!” Funny, but his line also captures the idea that where empathy operates, criticism fades. Empathy draws us closer to one another, while criticism spawns defensiveness and interpersonal distance.
As we hope to make clear in this chapter, developing and maintaining high levels of empathy become especially important as we age. Studies show that empathy declines with aging unless it is deliberately and regularly cultivated.2 Therefore, a major method of staving off feelings of disconnection or social isolation following loss is to actively exercise empathy skills throughout one’s life. In fact, updated studies of older adults show that declines in empathy have less to do with an aging brain than with how that person exercised their empathy-building skills earlier in life.3
Honeybees don’t need empathy. They pollinate the flowers and fruits of the world just fine without it. Swans don’t require empathy either. Their grace and beauty shine brightly without the benefit of empathic skills. Most creatures live in a world of simple action and reaction. People, on the other hand—and most mammals—occupy a different and more complex world. Empathy is vital to successfully negotiating their way through the complex maze of social group relationships.
The insula is a structure that sits deep within the brain, where it is richly linked to other brain areas that process sensations (hypothalamus) within the body and basic emotions (amygdala) that are aroused from situations outside the body. Occupying the pickle-in-the-middle position, the insula links together raw feelings with the particular state of the body that is connected to those feelings. The relevance of this nerve pathway with regard to empathy became clearer through studies done early in the last century by William James and Carl Lange.4 Their experiments showed that when there is a threat, the body is first alerted that danger looms, and only then does the threat reach conscious awareness. So we experience emotions in response to sensations aroused in our bodies, not the other way around! In other words, we know about our feelings through our bodies (embodied awareness).
About twenty years ago, scientists studying the motor region (the area responsible for goal-directed actions) of monkey brains made a startling discovery. The brains of the monkeys fired when they observed researchers engaged in activities like reaching for a tool or piece of food. More important, the researchers found that even though the monkeys were merely watching, the very same areas were activated in their brains as those activated in the researchers’ own brains by reaching for the food. Having monkeys reach for food wasn’t the important discovery here. It was the discovery that monkeys learned about how to obtain food by a method they wouldn’t normally use because their brain activity mimicked the brains of the researchers actually doing the eating. This was a real, live version of “monkey see, monkey do.” One brain’s activation pattern was imprinted into the brain activation pattern of the observer monkey, making it much easier for the observer monkey to learn the new behavior quickly. The monkeys showed they could learn complex social actions by mimicking what the researchers did.5,6 The name given to those nerve cells that fire while mimicking the purposeful behavior of others is mirror neurons.
Many years and countless experiments later, a blueprint emerged for constructing the human capacity for empathy: When we observe someone doing something that is important to us, our mirror neurons fire off in our own brain. The firing pattern in our brain allows us to mimic and mentally reproduce what we see the other person do, as well as the emotions associated with what they are doing. Mirror neurons, with the support of other key brain structures, help us to generate an internal map in our brain of the pattern of electrical signals that are firing in the brain of the other person. In that way, we are able to read, with remarkable accuracy, the feeling state that the other person is experiencing!
The mirror neurons create a highly sophisticated speed-reading system. In milliseconds we can read whether a person’s smile is sincere; the mimicking capabilities of the mirror neuron systems allow us to read the feeling state of the smiling person, which quickly helps us intuitively sense whether to deepen our connection to that person or to pull back. This is empathy: the ability to feel the feeling that the other person is feeling as the person is experiencing it. Empathy creates an emotional echo that reverberates within us. The first echoes of this reverberation are formed by the patterns of connection to our caregivers very early in life.
At birth we are entirely dependent for our survival on those who care for us. We require a multilayered connection to others in order to live and grow. Attachment research has identified the profound impact that the quality of the early caregiving connection has on us over the course of our lives.7 This interpersonal parent-child connection constitutes a multilane, emotional superhighway. The traffic on this highway flows in both directions: caregiver to infant and back again. The quality of the interaction with caregivers etches complex patterns into the infant’s developing brain that regulate arousal, reward, safety, excitement, and danger. These form the foundations for empathy.
At first, the attentive caregiver reads our emotional and physical needs and responds to them. After years of being read by others, we gradually learn to read those needs within ourselves. Later, having learned to read ourselves, we become capable of reading others. This cycle of being read, reading ourselves, and later reading others binds us to one another in endless loops of empathy-based social connections. From infancy through the early years of childhood, increasingly complex interaction patterns are absorbed, shaping the young person’s ability to regulate his/her own behavior in an expanding range of interpersonal encounters. That is why these early patterns of interacting can so powerfully shape the kind and quality of your relationships throughout life.
Alan Schore8,9,10 is one of the major figures to clarify the nature of the reciprocal relationship between brains as people interact with one another.11,12,13 Much of his research looks at the special role played by the right brain hemisphere in human relationships. The right hemisphere is better able than the left to perceive what is new as a relationship unfolds moment by moment. The right hemisphere is more strongly connected to the body, enabling you to sense the physical and sensory impact of interactions with others. The right hemisphere perceives the nonverbal aspects of our interactions, like the subtle facial expressions which make up 50 to 90 percent of what gets communicated during an encounter. Nonverbal signals provide the emotional context for interpreting the words being spoken. The right hemisphere of the brain is fundamentally the relationship hemisphere, whereas the left hemisphere is the storekeeper of the memories of those experiences.
When people gather to celebrate life’s events—anniversaries of births, marriages, deaths, sobriety dates, holidays, retirements, or perhaps first dates—they invariably reminisce about the past. They catch up with each other by filling in the blanks of what has occurred since the last time they were in contact with each other. Thinking back to recall earlier shared experiences brings people together and fosters nostalgia and closeness. Emotional intimacy takes that closeness a step or two farther. Emotional intimacy is a bonding agent that keeps relationships alive, vibrant, and loving. Of course people vary in their ability to develop intimacy,14 but regardless of where you are on that continuum, you can grow in your human capacity for greater intimacy.
Maintaining and even deepening intimacy in the second half of life is important for several reasons. Aging is filled with pervasive stresses that intensify over time. People who are more intimately wired to others tend to withstand the impact of stress with greater hardiness and may even thrive. An intimate connection to a partner or a network of friends generates a protective buffer that dampens the impact of losses and setbacks that accumulate over time.
The capacity for intimacy is inextricably linked to the capacity for empathy.15 Both are rooted in our neurobiology. Both are capable of expanding and rewiring the brain to create a lasting source of closeness and comfort. Marsha Lucas has nicely captured seven characteristics exhibited by people in healthy relationships.16 Notice how many of the characteristics paraphrased here involve the set of skills we have promoted for preserving a youthful brain.
• Learn how to regulate or manage your body’s reactions to stressors.
• Develop the ability to modulate your response to fear.
• Cultivate skills that build emotional resiliency.
• Grow your capacity to respond to challenges in a flexible manner.
• Develop insight that leads to knowing yourself more honestly.
• Learn to tune in to your own feelings and those of others (empathy).
• Shift your outlook from “me” to “we.”
Practicing these seven skills can make genuine intimacy more accessible. It is the quality of the encounter between two people that comes to define the nature of the relationship. The goal of intimacy is to recognize and honor what is unique and whole about the other.
Empathy’s role in staying on the path to joy varies as it sometimes supports the growth of joy and sometimes challenges it, especially as we age. Nature seems to have anticipated that. For example, adults entering their sixties showed greater ability to empathize with people facing unfortunate circumstances. They also showed greater ability to see the good in difficult circumstances when compared to people in their twenties or forties, according to research conducted by R. Levenson and others. 17,18
The research also suggests that there is a major shift in the second half of life toward establishing close interpersonal relationships. For example, Gisela Labouvie-Vief has found evidence that older adults enter a formal stage of cognitive development that supports long-term commitment and that includes a stronger ability to integrate emotion and logical thinking when making complex decisions. While this capacity makes its initial appearance in early adulthood, her research suggests it continues to mature and strengthen, meaning that in the second half of life, the commitments into which adults can enter are potentially richer and more complex.19 Nevertheless, the strong capacity for empathy seen in older adults is a powerful foundation upon which compassion for self and others can grow, and current research hails the role of such compassion skills in sustaining and building resilient health skills well into older age.20
Depth of connection becomes more important than the number of people with whom to connect. Ironically, the emphasis on relationship closeness exposes older adults to more encounters with sadness. Today’s older adults live much longer than in the past. But in our society, those extra years are often spent at greater geographic distance from children and extended family. Exposure to physical illness and the decline and death of loved ones are additional sources of sadness. And a society too often fixated on youth and beauty becomes yet another source of sadness by conveying a message that loss of youth means loss of value or worth.
In light of these experiences, maintaining empathy as we age is important both for the individual and for society. For example, individuals high in empathy skills have healthier hearts. They also tend to be more open-hearted, showing higher levels of compassion and expressed concern toward others. Since empathy involves tuning into one’s self and then using that inner knowledge to become attuned to others, empathy also becomes important for building more connected social communities in which people in the second half of their lives play vital roles. When sympathy abounds, positive social benefits begin to blossom. Studies have shown relationships between higher empathy skills and altruism,21 with a range of successful business-savvy practices having clear economic benefits for others,22 and with more modest, simple actions that make random encounters between strangers more pleasant.23
Storytelling is an important practice for exercising empathy. Author Paul John Eakin captured this idea when he wrote that “our life stories are not merely about us but in an inescapable and profound way are us,” (emphasis added).24 Cell biologist and author Bruce Lipton says that our beliefs about relationships, as reflected in our stories, are so powerful that they shape our biology, right down to the level of how genes in our cells are turned on or off.
While stories arise from past experience, they can also modify future experience by refining our recollection of the past, emphasizing greater optimism and a more positive outlook going forward. Since our stories are changeable, the implication is that our biology is changeable too, as shown by research into the neuroplastic potential of the brain.
Increasing empathy in daily life involves several practices that show up over and over in the research literature. They draw upon skills you have already been exposed to, especially the triad of flexibility, curiosity, and optimism described in part 3. Below are practical methods you can use to increase your empathy. Your brain and your social network will thank you.
Active listening is a multilevel form of communicating. By listening to the other, you allow yourself to be changed by the other. When you listen with your heart (right brain) and not just with your intellect (left brain), you will find yourself drawn into what the other person is saying and also into what they are experiencing (you will feel empathy). As a result, you will be affected more deeply by their story. That is why active listening rests upon your ability to tolerate vulnerability. Actively listening with vulnerability means to be actively affected by the other’s experience in ways that lead to a shift in your understanding of the person’s experience. This often leads to greater acceptance of the other’s perspective (not necessarily agreeing, but accepting) and an increase in feelings of compassion for that perspective. Guidelines for active listening include
• not interrupting.
• asking questions that invite others to keep expressing what they need or want to express.
• taking care not to give advice or tell them what you think they should do or minimize their feelings. Any of these can turn heartfelt empathy into judgmental sympathy or pity.
• reflecting back what you understand them to be saying so they have an opportunity both to feel heard and to restate anything that has been misunderstood.
• through your body language, communicating that you are listening (for example, maintaining eye contact, facing them, leaning in toward them, nodding your head).
Curiosity is the mental attitude that says, “There is something here for me to discover.” It is the antithesis of prejudgment, bias, or prejudice. When curious, you are drawn toward others to discover through nonjudgmental questions what is interesting, attractive, intriguing, and novel about them. Perhaps most important, a curious mind develops your empathy skills because it assumes the other has something important to offer. To discover what that something is, you will have to persist in your efforts to make that enriching connection. At the end of the day, the empathic connection gets organized around the similarities you share rather than the differences that might divide and separate you.
Empathy felt toward someone creates bonds that can generate synergy, meaning more can be accomplished together than separately. At times, those efforts become powerful agents for social change. Children of Peace, for example, is a nonpartisan organization that brings together Palestinian, Israeli, Turkish, and other Middle Eastern children ages fourteen to seventeen to forge lasting friendships through arts, education, health, and sports programming. Participants transform their dim and prejudiced views of one another into a vision of peaceful coexistence that transcends current regional realities. Another example is the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, which aligns the efforts at three universities to promote greater understanding across people of different faith traditions and unites their efforts toward a greater common social good.
Clearly, empathy is a good quality, but is it possible to have too much empathy? Indeed, there are risks from unregulated empathy, and the metaphor of a camera’s lens helps us understand them. Photographers regulate the intensity of light falling on the camera sensor by varying how widely the lens aperture is open. If the lens is open too wide, it may allow in excessive light and the image can be blown out.
So too with empathy. Chronically keeping the empathy dial on maximum can allow in too much of other people’s experiences. Your stress coping system can be overwhelmed by too much vulnerability, or what psychologists call poor interpersonal boundaries. Over time, this can result in a variety of stress-related conditions.
While the benefits of empathy are clear, unregulated empathy can produce the emotional equivalent of a repetitive stress injury. It is often in the second half of life when these mental injuries show up in the form of burnout, including diminished mental performance, physical illnesses, and emotional numbing. People in caregiving positions, like health care workers, teachers, and law enforcement personnel, have the highest rates of burnout. The term for this type of burnout is vicarious traumatization. As the name implies, bearing witness to people’s suffering can have very negative health consequences. Being overexposed to other people’s pain and struggles can exact a negative toll.
Burnout may have a neurobiological basis involving negative neuroplastic change.25,26 Under the stress of constant input, such as an overempathic connection to others, the hippocampus (the brain area involved in encoding new experience) seems to go dormant. Fewer nerve cells germinate. The sprouting of new brain cells (neurogenesis) declines, leaving one less resilient in the face of future stresses.
The good news is that the risk of overexposure to empathy is quite manageable with active and consistent self-care. This includes play and laughter, along with the core practices of exercise, sleep, and sound nutrition outlined earlier in this book. Also, engaging in the regular practice of healthy empathy tells your brain to secrete more serotonin.27 When bathed in calm contentment as a result of higher brain serotonin levels, you can deepen your connection to others, and you have a greater desire to do so. The strengthening of your social networks offsets any risk from being more emotionally open and vulnerable in your expression of empathy.28 Active self-care and rich social networks are our way of adjusting our emotional aperture to avoid feeling blown out or burned out.
Empathy is an acquired ability that depends upon the social interactions and environment in which we are raised. Empathy is an emergent aspect of being human. In other words, our genetic capacity for empathy is maximized or stifled depending upon how the empathy circuits within the brain are exercised. Those circuits cannot be exercised in isolation. In fact, isolation is quite unhealthy for the development of empathy. Empathy must, as we said earlier, emerge from and get tuned by our early encounters with caregivers. The tuning process later gets refined in the context of our primary adult relationships.
As we have shown, the cultivation of empathy ultimately depends upon the quality of the relationship we have with ourselves. It is difficult to express to others what we don’t feel toward ourselves. Even simply being kind to someone else becomes harder when we harbor anger toward ourselves or sling harsh messages at our own hearts over perceived flaws and failures. The paradox is that acting with compassion and empathy toward others becomes much more natural when we express compassion and empathy toward our own inescapable shortcomings and imperfections. You don’t have to be perfect to be great!
Judaism contains a principle called tikkun olam, or the repair of the world. The idea is that in the course of our lives, we are all obligated to leave the world better off than it was when we inherited it. There is a spiritual aspect to this principle that involves doing our individual part in restoring the world to a state of divinely inspired perfection. However, nowhere is there the assumption that any one of us alone will succeed in bringing the world to a state of perfection, nor is there an expectation that we will ever achieve that perfect state ourselves. We are and always will remain flawed. Why, then, is the principle of tikkun olam so appealing?
Using our lives to make a positive difference in the world—to do our part to repair it—involves both aspiration and legacy. The principle generates an aspiration to create a future that relies on our being our best selves. The principle involves legacy in that it encourages us to consider what the result of our life’s efforts will leave to the generations that follow us. Both topics are especially poignant as we enter the second half of our lives. To practice empathy in our intimate and general relationships is among the most important aspirations we can reach for. It helps assure that our legacy will be that the world we leave behind will be a kinder, gentler, and more loving place.
The most critical arena in which empathy needs to be practiced is in the care and raising of children. The health of future generations depends upon it. As older adults, our essential role in the raising of children is often overlooked, whether or not they are our own. The prevailing message is that once our own children are grown and having children of their own, our time in the sun has passed and our value in raising children has been drained away. The baton has been handed off to the next generation to raise the children while we, the older generation, no longer have a place or a purpose in child rearing of any sort. Neuroscience, however, tells us that nothing could be further from the truth.
Adults in the second half of life are critically important role models for children. Developmental theorists have identified the later stages of life as the time when creativity, moral thinking, problem solving, the softening of biases and prejudices, and various forms of self-acceptance all mature. Whether as parents of young adult children, grandparents, bosses, work colleagues, tutors, or athletic coaches, older adults play vital roles in shaping the worldviews of children as they prepare them not just to survive but actually to thrive in the world they will inherit.
Reverse mentoring is a recently coined term. It shifts the idea that skill acquisition is a one-way street that travels from elders to the young and inexperienced. Instead, reverse mentoring conveys the idea that skills acquisition in the workplace flows in both directions. Younger and older learn from one another and have different skill sets to offer each other. The reciprocal nature of that relationship increases the odds that empathy for each one’s perspective will produce more diverse and successful solutions to the problems that are undertaken—in the workplace and in life.
Older adults also have the opportunity to model something not usually associated with them: playfulness. Playful adults are “active, adventurous, cheerful, energetic, friendly, funny, happy, humorous, impulsive, outgoing, sociable, spontaneous, and unpredictable,” according to Yarnal and Quian.29 To associate those attributes with older adults dispels the negative message that growing old equals growing dull. The attractiveness of these attributes invites the young to learn how to be a playful grown-up. Wanting to “know what it’s like to be like” an older adult is a core ingredient in building empathy. Playfulness strengthens cross-generational connections. At the same time, maintaining playfulness throughout life counters the social disconnectedness and isolation that can ambush vital physical and emotional health in older adulthood.30 Playfulness in older adults is one important quality that helps to shape children to become better able to let off steam. There is also a variety of health benefits enjoyed by people who are playful. An upcoming generation of children who are healthier, more resilient, and more creative in the face of life’s stressors is a potent legacy!31
Older adults have a wonderful opportunity to model one of the most important but overlooked aspects of empathy. Prosocial behavior (or other-directed behavior) is focused on ways of meeting or supporting the needs and wants of another person. In other words, prosocial behavior is empathy in action. The social benefits of empathic behavior have been known since the rise of civilization. More than two thousand years ago, Hillel, a first-century BCE scholar, was challenged by a cynic and skeptic to teach him the whole of Judaism’s written laws while standing on one foot. Hillel responded to the challenge by stating, “Do not treat others in a way that you wouldn’t want to be treated.” Jesus later made a similar statement: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Either way, the message is clear. We are not independent islands of individual people. We are interconnected beings, and the nature of our interactions shapes us and each other.
Empathy is our social glue. Empathy opens our hearts to others, connecting us to them and signaling that we are receptive and available to them. From the intimacy of connections to our long-term partners, to the deeply felt connections we form to the larger communities of which we are a part, empathy continues to play an important role in maintaining our physical and emotional health in the second half of life. What follows is a practice to help you build and strengthen your empathy circuits.
Painting an Open Heart: A Meditation for Empathic Connection
You can read the following exercise, pausing as often as you choose. You can also find a recorded version of this exercise through our website (see Resources).
Sit in a comfortable position in a favorite chair. Allow your breathing to naturally slow down and deepen. Bring your awareness to the calming effect that tuning in to your breath has on your body and your mind. Stay with this cycle for several minutes. Breathing in and out. Slowly quieting the body as you calm the mind.
When ready, allow your eyes to close. Just keep breathing, gently quieting the body as you continue to calm your mind. By settling your mind and body, you have already begun to open your heart, making your brain more ready to rewire as you expand your empathy skills. Empathy allows you to feel inside of you what other people are feeling inside of them. Through empathy you can temporarily take on and take in another’s experience so you can truly appreciate that person’s perspective without judging it. Empathy creates a vital emotional link connecting another’s feelings to your open heart.
Bring to mind the faces of the people you care deeply about. Select one person for whom you would like to develop more empathy. With whom would you like to develop a deeper and more satisfying relationship? With whom would you like to replace the baggage of negative feelings with a more positive and loving connection? Linger on the images and memories of time shared with that person. As you focus on that person’s face and the times spent together, notice the emotions that rise up in your body. How do you become aware of them? What do you feel in your body? Notice the depth, the texture, and the tones of the feelings you connect with that person and your relationship.
Now imagine that you are an artist with a unique skill. You know how to mix and apply a special paint. Your paint creates empathy when you brush it on your heart. With your brush you open your heart to this other person. Your empathy brush allows you to feel that person’s feelings as your own.
Apply the brush to your heart. Feel the other’s love, sadness, hurt, or anger. With your open heart, you can meet that pain with forgiveness toward the other, with understanding of, patience with, and compassion for this person. In short, practice basic acceptance.
Each of us seeks to have our needs met, and we need one another to make that happen. We are not self-sufficient islands able to completely take care of ourselves all by ourselves. We need one another. Sometimes those needs are expressed in difficult ways. There may be times you’ve been hurt or offended by someone you care about. Even in recalling that, you may notice how those difficult feelings come back even now and how they affect your body. Notice those changes in your body. Don’t judge them, but notice them.
Apply another layer of empathy paint to your heart. Feel your heart open even more. Let their feelings in, as difficult as that may be initially. Take their feelings in as they feel them while you remain receptive and open-hearted to them. As you do, the magic of empathy can expand. Your reaction to any negative feelings they’ve carried can soften. At the same time, by your remaining open without judgment to their feelings, the negativity they’ve been carrying can begin to soften too. Stay with the exercise, slowly reducing and transforming your tendency to react to any negative feelings by closing your heart. Replace your reactivity—the primary foe of empathy—with the ability to remain open-hearted to the other person even in the presence of negative emotions they may express. During the exercise, keep replacing any negative feelings that arise with another layer of paint from the empathy brush. Just hold that empathic space open. Keep breathing slow and steady. Anytime you find yourself wavering in your ability to maintain a heart open to the other person’s feelings, apply another layer of the empathy paint and return your attention to your breathing.
With practice, your ability to hold empathy for the other can grow. It doesn’t stop there, however. Regular practice of feeling empathy toward one person can help you become more empathic to many people. The more empathic you become, the more confidently you can engage with the many people you encounter in your life. Regardless of their feelings, you can understand them and accept them as they are. You can use your empathy skills to build a stronger bridge between you and them that leads to a more cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship. Practicing empathy building can truly paint the years of the second half of life with a more golden hue.