HealthyGamerGG - Why Empathy Matters More Than Ever

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

In today's video, we learn why empathy matters more than ever and explore how embracing it can positively impact your life. Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So let's say that your partner forgets your birthday. Oh my God, this person doesn't care about me. I do so much for them. They always forget my birthday. This is the last time. If you take a step back and you look at things from their perspective, oh, my partner is working so hard. They're so stressed about this.

As you put yourself in their shoes, the amount of hurt you receive actually goes down. Today, we're going to talk about how and why you can be more selfless in an increasingly selfishness. world. So if you look around, everyone is self-absorbed. We see a ton of stuff on social media that's all about me, me, me. We have a lot of people who are incredibly burnt out with their jobs, with their social situation. Dating is an absolute mess. There's a loneliness epidemic. And so it seems like no one has time for anyone else, which is really weird, right? Because we have so much technology.

We've done so many things to make life easy. And yet everyone is becoming more selfish. And this is not just your perception. There's research to back this up. What we're seeing is that there's something called the narcissistic personality inventory, which measures how narcissistic people are. And what we're seeing is that scores are rising over time. And it turns out that along with people being more narcissistic, we're also seeing a mental health crisis. Rates of suicidal behavior, completed suicides, rates of suicidal thinking, depression, anxiety, loneliness, stress, burnout, and imposter syndrome, all of these things are increasing too. And so it may sound kind of weird, but like clearly there's some kind of connection there. And it turns out that the capacity to

care for others, which is very lacking in narcissists, actually leads to very positive impacts on our mental health. Working as a psychiatrist, I work with a lot of people who are successful, unsuccessful, CEOs, people who are degenerate gamers living in people's basements. And the one thing that I always see is people come in wanting help for themselves. They're always thinking about this is my problem and I need help and this is going on and I don't know how to do this. It's kind of all about me, which makes sense because you're going to go see a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist's job is to help you, right? They're not there to help you help other people. But one of the things that I've learned through psychiatric practice and sort of evidence-based techniques is that when I help my patients develop more empathy,

when I help them be more kind and compassionate to the people around them, they are the ones that benefit. And there's a ton of research that actually supports that. That the more empathic you are, the more compassionate you are, the more your physical health improves, the more your mental health improves, and even objective things in the world like your relationships and your job performance also go up. Now, even if I say all of that stuff, there's a huge problem because we sort of also know that empathy leads to all kinds of problems. So if you're someone who's like a highly sensitive person, you may have heard of HSPs, who are very, very empathic. And the more empathic you are, the more you get contaminated by other people's stuff. Right. So this is something where like there's actually this term called emotional contagion, which is a consequence of high empathy. And this means you make other people's problems yours and it adversely affects you. We also see this in situations like social media where there's even evidence of vicarious trauma through social. media. So if you watch a lot of bad stuff on the internet, your own mental will actually get messed up. And we also know that if you're empathic, other people are likely to take advantage

of you, right? The basic issue right now is that everyone out there is saying, advocate for yourself. Like, they're all these, like, you know, like success bros who are like, life is zero some day. If you, if you win, someone else has to lose, you got to get your own. No one going to take care of you, man. Like, you've got to do it all yourself. Right. They have this sort of attitude that like being kind to other people is not going to lead to success in life. And if you're on the receiving end of that and you are compassionate towards someone else, chances are you'll just get taken advantage of. So here they are being self-absorbed. And here you are being compassionate and kind and trying to be nice to them. So they benefit from your

compassion, but you don't seem to benefit from theirs because they're not reciprocating. And this is also something that I see so much of. I'm always the friend that texts first. I take care of my friend, but my friend doesn't take care of me. I'm really, really emotionally supportive towards my boyfriend, but my boyfriend is not supportive towards me, or I'm really supportive towards my girlfriend, but she's not supportive towards me. So we're seeing a lot of lopsided support and care, which naturally leads people to conclude, I can't care about other people. I can't afford to care about other people, because if I focus on other people, my life continues to stall. And so today, we're going to advocate for you actually being more empathic and compassionate,

and I recognize the problem. We're going to walk you through that. And the main reason is not to benefit other people. The reason for you to be empathic and compassionate is for your own benefit. And it turns out that there are a ton of benefits to being compassionate. Hey, all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk,

and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So let's kind of take a step back and think about this from an evolutionary perspective. Why is this? So human beings are community-based organisms, right? We're not actually loners. It takes a village to raise a child. We're sort of like tribal, right? And so if you kind of think about it from an evolutionary perspective, evolution wants to give us a positive reward for helping members of our tribe. We see this in things like, you know, any movie that you watch has some noble hero or heroine who makes a sacrifice for the greater good, right? And we all like applaud this kind of thing.

We thank people for the military service that they do. If someone's an organ donor, like, that's really great. Like you sacrifice for the benefit and we're going to say, good job, bro. You get to board first on the flight. Well, actually, they don't do that for organ donors. which is absolutely insane, but whatever. Right? So you get more overhead space. Like, that's the advantage.

But if you kind of think about it from a very practical perspective, right? So we want evolution or evolution wants to reward us, rewards this organism for helping other organisms. So for example, even when we're looking at non-clinical populations, okay, there are many studies demonstrating associations between empathy-related traits and behaviors and good mental and physical health. For example, highly empathic or compassionate people report better, mental health, lower stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and depression, and participate in fewer health risk behaviors like drinking and smoking. So there's a ton of research that actually shows that being empathic towards other people

improves your own health. What if I told you there's one thing that you can do that will lower your depression, your anxiety, your sense of hopelessness, help you form connections, and cut back on unhealthy coping mechanisms like going to your goon cave every single day. What if I told there was one thing that would do that? And you'd be like, yeah, sign me up. Like what supplement is it? Is it a course? What is it meditation? It's not meditation. It's not journaling. It's not therapy. It's actually being nice to other human beings. And the mechanism of this is fascinating. So if you give someone, this is a really cool study, if you boost someone's serotonin transmission, they become more

empathic. And the reverse is also true that when we become, become more empathic, our serotonergic circuitry actually gets buffed, which is why we see that people who are empathic have lower levels of depression and anxiety. And what is the treatment that we use for depression and anxiety? It's giving people selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. We basically boost their serotonin transmission. We also know that being empathic and kind towards other people lowers cortisol. So cortisol is a stress hormone that does things like causes us to drink, smoke, play video games to manage that negative emotion, interferes with sleep, interferes with falling asleep, interferes with the quality of sleep, messes with our appetite,

increases our heart rate, literally increases the rate at which our cells age. Stress causes us to age more rapidly. And so it turns out that empathy from a neurobiological perspective enhances serotonin transmission, enhances things like oxytocin production, and reduces things like cortisol. So it seems like in a lot of ways it's the silver bullet. The problem, of course, is that if we try to be empathic, oftentimes we get burned. So we're going to dive a little bit into that. So what we see when we look at the research is that scores on empathic concern and perspective

taking on the interpersonal reactivity index have been declining over the past 30 years in the United States, and that's even before the explosion of social media. And scores on narcissistic personality inventory with low embaltive. empathy have been increasing across the same time period, right? So this is crazy. People are becoming less empathic over time, more narcissistic over time, and it is resulting in a mental health epidemic across the globe. Even though we have scientific evidence of how helpful empathy can be for you, forget about other people, there's still this huge problem of how do I be empathic properly? Because there are a group of people who, unless you learn how to utilize your empathy and compensate

for your high level of empathy, it will tear you apart. Not only will you get emotional contagion from the negativity of others, but people will do things like take advantage of you. And I'm also preparing a lecture on why you should be less empathic in the dangers of empathy. That's for a different day, though. So in order to really understand how to be empathic in a positive way and sort of really understand, like, how can this really help me? What we're actually going to look at is romantic relationships.

Now, a lot of people may say, well, duh, Dr. K, like, oh, oh, like, if I'm empathic, doesn't it improve my romantic relationships? Like, that's obvious. But let's understand the mechanism because it's not just about romantic relationships. So within romantic relationships, some research has found that people scoring high in perspective-taking or cognitive empathy report being more satisfied with their relationships. Now, I want you all to notice this. This is very important to understand. This is not saying that someone who has high empathy has better relationships.

This is when you have higher empathy, your self. satisfaction with the relationship actually improves. Another interesting study found that married people with higher dispositional empathy are less likely to ruminate over perceived transgressions and more likely to forgive their partners for their transgressions with downstream consequences on higher marital quality. What this paper is really looking at or what these studies are looking at is not that empathy benefits your partner. It does, but that's not what we're talking about. We're focused on you, right? Because we're selfish, you remember? So we're talking about the benefit for you.

So let's just understand this, okay? Because I think once I explain it, hopefully it'll make sense. So let's say that your partner forgets your birthday. And when they forget your birthday, what tends to happen is unless we're careful, we'll start ruminating on, oh my God, this person doesn't care about me. I do so much for them. They don't do a whole lot for me. And then we kind of get stuck in our own head.

We're just thinking about things from our perspective. And as we think about things from our perspective, we get more. more and more frustrated with our partner. They don't care. This is lopsided. They always forget my birthday. This is the last time. I swear this is never going to happen again. I don't know why I'm in this relationship. We think all of these negative thoughts. And I don't know if you all have had friends or partners or kids or parents or whoever who's very ruminative. What you'll notice is that they get stuck in their own head. And there may be times in your life where you've gotten stuck in your own head. And you're constantly thinking negative thoughts to yourself and you can't

seem to snap out of it. Now, let's understand which capacity of human beings allows them to snap out of it. And this turns out is empathy. So this is where empathy gets divided into two kinds. So there's something called cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand what someone thinks and believes. Can I understand what's going on in their head? And there's also something called affective empathy, which is the ability to feel what someone else feels. So when someone else is hurting, I'm hurting too. It turns out that emotional contagion is basically affective empathy running unchecked, but a lot of good can come out of cognitive empathy. So in the case of your partner who's forgotten your birthday present or friend or whoever, if you take a step back and you look at things from

their perspective, oh, my partner is working so hard, they're so stressed about this, they have a parent who has cancer, the more that you understand their perspective. And they demonstrate their love, not by giving me a gift on my birthday, but they've been planning this amazing vacation for the two of us that's going to start in one month. And that's where their mind has been. Now, let's tunnel down and understand this. So as you put yourself in their shoes, the amount of hurt you receive actually goes down. Because this isn't a case of them being callous or really incredibly mean or trying to hurt your feelings, their mind is on other things. And as you are able to understand them, it's less offensive to you and your capacity to forgive actually increases. Now, if we look at

someone who's a narcissist, they are incapable of doing that, right? Oh my God, I can't believe you forgot my gift. You're the word. I must be completely meaningless to you. I must be the most worthless human being on the planet. I don't understand how you could hurt me. I don't understand why you could, how you could do this to me. And if you deal with narcissists, you know exactly what I'm talking about, that they take everything as a personal injury. They don't take any time to think about what your perspective is. And the real crazy thing is, yeah, that's frustrating for you to deal with.

But now I want you to imagine things from the narcissist's perspective. Any random occurrence of you being busy or you forgetting or whatever suddenly turns into a full-on attack for a narcissist. narcissists are not happy people. They oftentimes are depressed. They're anxious. They're stressed out. They don't have good relationships.

And so this comes at a cost to them. The key thing to keep in mind, though, is that when you are empathic towards other people, it reduces the injuries that you experience, right? So your life becomes less painful. It becomes less emotionally charged. You can focus on other things instead of being wrecked by this relationship. And it allows you to forgive people more. And when you do those two things,

it enhances the quality of the relationship over time. So in one relationship, there's taking things personally and no forgiveness. And in the other relationship, there is recognizing that your partner has challenges of their own, putting what they did to you in context and being able to forgive them. And which relationship do you think will lead to more of your satisfaction over time? And that's the crazy thing, is that empathy actually benefits you. It turns out that empathy also helps us in our professional life in an objective way. So studies find associations between empathy in instructors and higher student motivation and effort,

using both correlational and longitudinal designs. Empathy and instructors is also positively correlated with actual achievement outcomes. So if your job is to be a teacher, and I know we have a ton of teachers in our audience, y'all are getting absolutely wrecked by school systems right now. But what we tend to find is that when instructors are empathic, their students actually get better grades. And y'all may have experienced this yourself in life, right? Because sometimes we're lucky enough to have a teacher who cares about us. And if you have a single teacher that cares about you and inspires you, it can do so much good for you.

So interestingly, college students' perceptions of the professor's concern and consideration, i.e. empathy, is the single largest predictor of overall teacher evaluations. Perceived teacher empathy explains 54% of the variance, while perceived teacher competence only explains 6.9% of the variance. When students are evaluating teacher's job performance, 54% of their evaluation is dependent not on how competent the teacher is, insane, not how smart they are, not how well they know the material, how organized their class is, it's none of that crap.

54% of the variance is determined by how much the teacher cares about me. Only 6.9% of it depends on things like actual teacher competence. And I've seen this in the professional world as well. When I look at people who are strong leaders, so I did a lot of work in banking, and we have managing directors that are managing these like mergers and acquisitions of billions of dollars. And in banking, there is a very high turnover. The churn in banking is really high because you get burnt out from banking over here and then you go to this other place. You get burnt out over there.

You get burnt out over there. And so the attitude of these leaders and these investment banks is I've got fresh meat, right? This is how we talk about people. We talk about them like meat and I need to chew them up as quickly as I can before they get burnt out and leave. And this is the attitude that some leaders have. And once in a blue moon, you have a very good. leader who cares about the people under them. And when they care about the people under them, those people not only stay, but they perform so much better. And I want you all to think about

the times in your life where you perform the best. How do the people around you treat you? Oftentimes when we have supportive parents and coaches who encourage us and friends who encourage us and siblings or even spouses that encourage us, it brings out the best in us. And when you are empathic towards other people, it actually brings out their best performance and people look at you and think, oh my God, this person is amazing and it leads to positive professional evaluations. So this is why you should be more empathic. You should be more compassionate. But there is this huge problem of how do I do that? Because unless I'm careful and I'm empathic, I'm going to get taken advantage of. I'm going to suffer from emotional contagion. And that's where we are going to

to teach you the core skill of being safely empathic. Okay? So this involves a couple of different things. So the first thing to understand is that empathy without affective regulation or emotional regulation is a recipe for disaster. So when we are empathic, we will get some of their negative energy into us. So this is called emotional contagion. And we need some way to manage that negative emotion.

So if you are empathic without emotional regulation skills, Empathy is going to be a net negative for you. You won't see these effects because when you are caring about your students and they fail, you get depressed. So instead of being what they need you to be, you're getting a contagion of their depression. This is what we also see on support communities on the internet, which are actually like cesspools of negativity if you all know what I'm talking about. These are oftentimes gender-related communities and things like that.

It's an absolute mess. Okay. The first thing we need is methods of affective regulation. or emotional regulation. We have a ton of videos on things like Alexothymia and community events and stuff and that where we teach all emotional regulation skills. But this is really important, right? So as we get better at emotional regulation skills, we can also not engage in unhealthy

coping mechanisms like drinking, smoking, that tells you how old this paper is. That study, I think, was from 2013, right? So before, like, gaming and porn and social media were, like, huge things when they were, like, in their infancy, right? So that's what this study is talking about. but right now we see all these negative behaviors like internet use. Okay. So the most important skill is the ability to switch wherever your mind is.

So this is the core. This is kind of like the robot in the ocean of empathy. Okay. This is how you stay afloat. So let's take an example of when this does not work. So if I'm someone who's narcissistic, I ruminate, I get stuck in my own head. If I'm someone who has imposter syndrome, I also ruminate. I get stuck in my own head.

Right? So I look at other people and I'm not able to really understand their perspective. So let's take the case of imposter syndrome. I think I'm an imposter. I think I'm terrible. And someone walks up to me and says, wow, you did a great job on that presentation. And what does my mind do? Is my mind able to step outside of my own head and step into their head? Absolutely not. Right. So what I tell myself is, oh, this person is just being nice. I'm not actually receiving their compliment. I'm not trying to understand their perspective. I immediately reject someone else's perspective. And I say they're just saying that to be nice. It's a formality. Of course, what are they going to do? Walk up to me and say, oh, my God, your presentation was terrible. That's what we do.

We're not able to step outside of our own head. And this is literally the treatment for people with narcissistic personality disorder. There's a treatment called mentalization-based therapy. And what that literally means is to mentalize, means to think about someone else's perspective, to be able to put yourself in their shoes. Okay? So this is very important to do. Let's take the flip side of it. So if you're someone who's a highly sensitive person or you're prone to emotional contagion, what oftentimes happens is you have the same problem but flipped around where now I get caught up in someone else's stuff and I can't

switch outside of them back into me. So this is a huge part if you are a mental health professional. So my job as a psychiatrist as I go into an office and I do psychotherapy with someone who who's been traumatized, and I'm there with them, I'm feeling their feelings, and then at the end of the hour, I need to be able to unplug. I need to be able to leave my work at work and be able to go home. So I'm empathic with them, and then I pull myself out of their mind and back into my mind. So as a psychiatrist, even though we're talking about really bad things, I can pull myself back into my mind and I can say, okay, at the end of this therapy session, even though we discussed a lot of heavy stuff, it's good.

Right? This is a good thing. This person is in therapy. Even though there's a lot of negative feeling in the room right now, this is the process of healing. So in that moment, I'm unplugging from that person and back into myself. And so the key skill that we need in order to be successfully empathic is the ability to switch. Right. So if I'm stuck in my own head and ruminating, I need to consider their perspective. And if I'm caught up in their perspective, it's a whirlwind. And we also see this in people like helicopter parents and parents who live viability. vicariously through their children, right? There's like a blending that goes on that's super toxic between parent and child. That parent needs to back the fuck up. You know what I'm saying? Like, does that kind of make sense? So that's the key skill. So now the question becomes, how do we become more empathic without getting swept away with emotional contagion? So we're going to go into a couple of fundamental empathy-based skills, which most psychiatrists and therapists have to learn, which you can absolutely learn too to harness the benefits of empathy. So the first thing to understand is that empathy without affective or emotional regulation is a problem. So when we're empathic,

we are in essence either thinking or understanding what someone else's believes or feeling what they feel. Now, this can be beneficial in many ways, but if we're not careful, we will get swept up with their feelings. So as psychiatrists and therapists, we have to learn how to limit how to be empathic and compassionate without being overwhelmed. So there are a couple of different ways to do that. The first thing, to understand is when you are being empathic towards someone, recognize that your responsibility is to help them not to

fix their problems. Now this is a subtle but very important difference. So I see this a lot when I was teaching, right? So I was faculty at Harvard Medical School and so the people that I was teaching were very, very driven. These are some of the most caring, hard working people. They've volunteered for thousands

and thousands of hours. They've worked in refugee camps in remote parts of the world. They've also done things like, you know, teach mindfulness and prisons, like all kinds, these are just deeply caring people. And when they actually graduated from med school and became interns, residents, psychiatrists, and training, they started to get overwhelmed or some of them get very quickly overwhelmed by how much they care about their patients.

Because if you're a therapist or a psychiatrist or a school teacher, what you find is that you can't fix someone else's life. but since you are there to help them, we can, if we're not careful, we'll get really muddy with this and we will try to fix their life. Instead, recognize that being empathic is not about fixing someone's life. It is about helping them fix their own life. If we accept responsibility for fixing their life, we have this person that we're trying to fix that we can't control. We can't make sure they wake up on time. We can't make sure that they work on their resume.

We can't be in the room with them when they're interviewing with a job. or with them when they go on a date. And so we are attaching ourselves to success in their life, which will tear us apart. Because as they keep making mistakes, we will invest more and more energy and become more and more burnt out. So one of the things that we have to learn as psychiatrists and something that I really focus on teaching is that your responsibility is to help, not to fix. So you're going to, in a sense, limit the amount of time and energy that you're going to do with 100% compassion. while you're there, and then set limits around it, right? So as a therapist, I see people once a week, usually for about an hour, and I'm 100% present with them. But when they leave the office,

it's their responsibility to take the next step. Oftentimes, what we find in people who are empathic is that they don't do this, right? They're checking up on their friend, trying to make sure that everything is going okay. They're texting them every day. And then what paradoxically happens is that your friend stops being responsible for their life because you are taking on all of the responsibility. As you take on all the responsibility, you start siphoning their burnout into yourself. So we need a way to limit or regulate our emotions when we're empathic with someone. The best way is, as we said, just limiting what you sign up for. And this mental shift will be incredibly helpful. But then we can also do a lot of standard emotional regulation techniques,

journaling, going for walks, self-care, right? We're not getting so caught up in their stuff that we start neglecting ourselves, it's time to set limits with them, take care of ourselves, meditate, eat healthy, go for a walk, pet your cat, whatever it is that you do play some video games. Go for it. The second thing that we need to learn how to do is mentalize. So if we look at treatments for narcissistic personality disorder, what we are literally trying to teach is something called mentalizing, which is the capacity to step outside of your own mind and step into someone else's. So when a narcissist feels hurt by someone, this is where, oh, this person forgot my birthday, and I take it so personally, right? I don't think about everything that's going on in

their life. I don't think about all the difficulties in their life. I'm just thinking about me. We tend to ruminate in our heads. So how do we stop ruminating in our heads? How do we actively take on an outside perspective? So this is where if you're careful, what you'll find is that when you're ruminating, signals from the outside will disagree with you. So we're going to use the example of giving a presentation. So let's say I have a big presentation to give. And I'm very nervous about it. I'm like, oh my God, this presentation could go terribly. It's so important. I'm going to be talking in front of hundreds of people. This is so important for my job or my career or my class or whatever. So you're filled with anxiety and you're worried about the

presentation not going well. And then what happens is the presentation happens and then you're terrified the whole time, you're anxious the whole time, you prepared for it so much the presentation ends. Someone walks up to you and was like, hey, Dr. Kay, I thought you did a great job. I really loved your presentation. And what do you do in your mind? You reject what they say, right? You say like, oh, your mind says, I didn't do a good job because I was feeling anxious. My perspective is that I was anxious, I should have prepared more, other people are better, and I did a terrible job. You are getting data from the outside that is contrary to your belief. Now, if we don't know how to mentalize, what we will do is reject that data, right?

We'll say, oh, this person is just saying it to be nice. That's what they say to everyone, right? This is what we do. We dismiss what someone says. So the core skill of mentalization is to assume for a moment that the other person is right. And then try to figure out what do they have to experience in order for this to be right? Where are they coming from? How could they possibly believe that this presentation was good?

And the interesting thing is if we sort of focus on assuming that the other person is right for a little while, we're not saying take what they say is 100% correct. What we're saying is sort of consider for a moment that they could be right and try to, in your mind, work through some logic to arrive at their conclusion. Well, I did have some pretty cool graphics over there. I had that joke that people laughed at at the very beginning. People asked a lot of questions. And usually crappy presentations, people are sort of mentally checked out. And this is what we teach people with narcissistic personality disorder. When someone says, hey, you're kind of an asshole.

Where are they coming from? What could they possibly have experience that make them think this way? Right. And when we literally step outside of our heads and spend some time trying to hypothesize what is in someone else's head, that's incredibly effective. So this is a skill that you can level up, you know, immensely over time. But even that basic element will reduce the rumination and sort of really help you become a little bit more empathic because empathy helps us step outside of ourselves and into

other people. So there's one last thing to consider, which is that a lot of y'all may be listening to this and thinking, well, sometimes like I feel super obligated to help people. I try to help them. I really like do my best, but I don't seem to be getting these mental health benefits. I'm still hopeless. I feel depressed. I feel anxious. I feel stressed out all the time. So this is the really fascinating thing about empathy. In order to get the health benefits of empathy, what is in your heart actually matters. If you do something out of a sense of stress and obligation, it does not lead to health benefits. You have to do things in order to actually help people and to be focused on helping the other person. So for example, if you force someone into community service or

volunteering, they do not get the benefits of this sort of compassionate perspective. Importantly, a recent study found that in order to receive a health benefit of volunteering, people had to be motivated by care for others. Those who are motivated by potential ways they could personally benefit from volunteering, learning something new, or feeling good, did not experience a later health benefit. So I work with a lot of medical students who are like, okay, like in order to get into medical school, I have to volunteer for 5,000 hours. And they will go volunteer for the sake of patting their resume. This does not result in health benefits. So a lot of times what we feel is we get pushed into a situation where we have to help someone.

But in our hearts, unless we want to help them, unless we actually care about them, our oxytocin, our serotonin, or cortisol will not be affected in the right way. So I know it sounds kind of weird, but what you really have to do is think about the other person, think about helping them and set healthy boundaries, right? There's only so much you can do. And then kind of take a step back, help them in that way, and then take a step back. That's the healthy way to be empathic. So I know it sounds kind of crazy.

But in this world, everyone is becoming more narcissistic, and there is data to support that. Everyone is like, in order to get ahead in life, you've got to step on other people. The really beautiful thing is that if we become selfless, which is something that I try to cultivate, right? So there's kinds of meditation, like met the meditation, developing compassion. I see a huge gain in the people that I work with. It benefits you to care about other people. I haven't talked about the benefits for other people at all over the course of this video, right? And that's because we're not talking about them.

We're talking about you. And this is the other beautiful thing. One last advantage that I'm going to leave y'all with. In a world where everyone is looking out for themselves, imagine what it's like if you meet someone who actually cares about other people. Your value as a human being, the way that people perceive you, the way that people will treat you, if you are someone who is kind, in a world of people who are burnt out will be so much higher. And what I see when I work with people who are in relationships is like, what do they say? They say that this person was nice.

This person was kind. What I value about them so much is their kindness. And then a lot of people get really upset because they're like, I'm a nice guy, right? I'm a nice guy. I don't understand why people don't suck my d'I. I don't know if that needs to be edited out, right? But that's what people say. But if you look at these people who are nice guys, what is in their heart?

they're acting transactionally, which is why they don't get perceived, first of all. They may be nice, but they're not empathic. They're not compassionate. They're acting nice in order to get something. So if you are genuinely good, right? If you really focus on compassion, then it will be such a breath of fresher. It will be such a competitive advantage. And now we get to the biggest problem in this video, which is that I recently showed y'all evidence that if you are being kind for the sake of gaining something,

like improving your mental health, then the kindness doesn't work, right? That it doesn't actually improve your mental health. And that's something that I haven't figured out. So maybe in educating y'all about the value of empathy, what I've actually done is doom y'all to an existence where now that is no longer an option. I don't know. Maybe we'll figure it out. I think it's still okay. So give it a shot and let us know, okay? My condolences.

I did it out of love. I didn't think this through. Oh.