Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 298: How (and Why) to Hack Your Empathy | Jamil Zaki

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Kindness and empathy are loaded propositions right now. When you hear those words, you might think: Eh, those are soft skills that won’t help me get ahead. Or: If I’m too nice, I will get trampled. Or: I need my anger to be effective. Or: I am plenty nice -- it’s other people who need to up their game. My guest today will push back on all of these reservations, and tell us how -- and why -- to, as he says, “hack your empathy.” Jamil Zaki is a psychologist and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He wrote a book called, The War for Kindness. In this conversation, we talk about how our modern culture is suffering from an “empathy deficit”; why he believes selfishness is a sickness; how to avoid empathy burnout; and the academic criticism that empathy is actually an outmoded and unreliable human capacity. Where to find Jamil Zaki online: Website: https://www.warforkindness.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/zakijam Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warforkindness/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/warforkindness/ Full shownotes and list of other resources mentioned: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jamil-zaki-298 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, kindness and empathy are, to say the least, loaded propositions right now. When you hear those words, some of you might think, and those are soft skills that won't help me get ahead.

Or if I'm too nice, I'll get trampled. Or I need my anger to be effective. Or I'm plenty nice. It's other people who need to up their game. My guest today is gonna push back on all of those reservations and tell us how and why to, as he says, hack your empathy. Jamil Zaki is a psychologist and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

He wrote a book called The War for Kindness. And in this conversation, we talk about how our modern culture is suffering from what he calls an empathy deficit, why he believes selfishness is a sickness. How to avoid empathy, burn out. And we talk about the academic criticism that he has faced from the man he calls his academic nemesis. That criticism is that empathy is actually an outmoded and unreliable human capacity.

So here we go now with Jamil Zaki. All right, Jamil, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on. That's great to meet you too. I know it's going to be hard to focus since I have a cat in the back of it. Easily in the top five best types of distractions on Zoom. We're looking at each other on a video program and I have a cat over my shoulder who now may be leaving or not. Actually, no, he just looks like he's going to make himself more knowing. Good opportunity to practice kindness. So that brings me to actually the question I wanted to ask you, which is war for kindness. What do you mean by that? How did you come up with that title and what what are you going for?

You know the book wasn't always called the War for Kindness. It used to be called choosing empathy, which is now the title of one of the chapters, but then something happened. I don't know sometime in late 2016 early 2017. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it felt like the country became angrier and more divided. And I think that there were these forces that were pushing us further apart instead of bringing us together. And it really put, for me, a quite a fine point on something, which is that kindness is something that we can practice individually.

But it's not just a practice that we engage with in a vacuum. There are other forces around us inside ourselves and social forces, and some of those push us away from kindness towards ourselves and away from kindness towards others. And so in order to be kind, we often need to fight back kindness and empathy can be radical acts, and they can take fighting. And so that's why I sort of arrived at the title that I ended up with. So it sounds like you're pushing back against the notion that somehow kindness is weak or soft or fuzzy.

Oh, absolutely. I think it's fierce and painful and takes bravery in many cases. Say more about that. Like what are the cases that come to mind? I think that one of the hardest things is to be kind to ourselves. And you talk about this a lot on the show, but you know, oftentimes we have to overcome a certain view of who we are. We want to think of ourselves as exceptional. And therefore, we want to see our failures differently than we see the failures of other people. We want to think that, well, if someone I love has a problem, well, it's not their fault. That could have happened to anybody. But

if I have a problem, if I mess up one thing out of the hundred things that I'm trying to do, that's not right because I'm different. I'm supposed to be different. And so just believing that our struggles are normal, believing that they're okay, being kind to ourselves is incredibly difficult, or at least it has been for me in the past. And then, I mean, kind of towards others is so fraught these days in ways that it wasn't even, five or 10 years ago, it's just been, feels like we're in this vice

of tightening social tensions, in which, for instance, being kind or listening actively to someone who we disagree with ideologically, now feels complicated in a way it didn't before. It feels like am I betraying my own position? Am I a bad member of my tribe? Will I be judged for empathizing along these lines?

And so I think those are two examples of times when kindness and empathy take a surprising amount of fight in order to enact. A couple of things, Kim and mine, while you were talking there. I heard you talk about, sort of our inner self-directed laceration in the face of, you know, any failure.

And while that may seem like we are sort of looking down on ourselves, if that's even possible, there's ego in it because there's an assumption of personal exceptionalism. I think that's exactly right. I think a lot of the times there is a lot of ego embedded in what seems like self-deprecation because you have to ask why am I being harder on myself than I am on other people and we're hard on ourselves based on what we expect versus what comes out in reality. And so if what we're doing in reality is not that different from what other people are doing, the reason that we're being hard on ourselves must have to do with our expectations and must have to do with the fact that we expect more of ourselves than we do of others, which I think

involves a lot of ego. That leads me beautifully to the second thing I want to ask you, which is, as a scientist, is there evidence that if we can start to be kinder to ourselves, that it in inexorably leads to kindness to other people? There's not as much work on this as I wish there were. We're doing some work on it right now, but there is evidence in general that when people are stressed or in a state of threat that they draw into themselves, you think about stress responses in our bodies, right? Your blood vessels constrict and more blood goes to the center, to your core and out of

your limbs. Why? Because in case you suffer an injury, that way, in case you have an arm lopped off, you're less likely to die. When you're in a state of stress, you just draw into your center. And I think that happens psychologically as well.

In essence, you focus on whatever you think you need to survive, to the exclusion of anything else. And so psychologists have found, for instance, that when people are under acute stress, they get worse at picking out emotions in other people. They get worse at paying attention to what's going on in the social world around them as well. And so I think to the extent that kindness to ourselves

can just turn the temperature down on the noise that we're experiencing, the threat that we're experiencing in general, it can open us up, it can sort of open the aperture that we have to see other people more clearly as well. I think in your book you referenced the fact that even about of depression can reduce one's capacity for empathy.

That's right, yeah. So in longitudinal studies, so these are studies where you measure people over many years, if you measure someone's level of depression, where it changes in their depression, and then follow them for a couple of years, their empathy will decline afterwards. Again, I think this also points to a really tough irony about stress and anxiety and depression, states of being that are ascendant now during the COVID-19 pandemic is that oftentimes when we're struggling in these ways, we make these unforced errors. We make the decision that I'm so depleted, I'm hurting so much, I need to take care only

of myself. It's unthinkable that I would have the bandwidth to reach out to someone else. The resources to be there were show up for someone who needs me. But in fact, one of the great sources of joy in our life and mental health and well-being is our ability to show up for other people. When we help others, we help ourselves in all these different ways.

So when we make the decision that our distress means we can't help others, we're actually depriving not just them, we're actually depriving not just them, we're depriving ourselves of what could help us. That reminds me of something that former guest on the show, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said he wrote a book about loneliness and he was saying that when people are lonely, one of the counter and intuitive bits of counter programming you can do is engage in an act of service. That's exactly right. Yeah, and his book is beautiful. And I think the point is so well stated.

And I would broaden it even a little bit. An act of service to someone is a great way to jumpstart one's own sense of autonomy, one's own sense of purpose and meaning. But there are other ways that are even more low impact to get that same benefit, which is just to engage in an act of connection. I think sometimes we put a lot of pressure on ourselves for what service means. I think right now, so many of us are surrounded by people who are struggling and we think to ourselves, I want to be there for that person, but in order to really be there, I need to be heroic.

I need to turn off all of my own suffering and show up for them in a clean way. I need to say the exact right thing. I need to fix their problem. But sometimes all people really want or need from us is for us to be there with them. Sometimes sharing our own vulnerability, our own struggles is a way to connect with them. Sometimes asking for help is a meaningful way to engage. And in all of these cases, I love your term counter

programming because we need that counter programming. There's a real irony that when people are under stress and even when they're not, they completely get wrong what will help them. So my friends Nick Eppley and Juliana Schroder have done a lot of work on this where they ask people, for instance, how do you think you'd feel if you talk to a stranger on the bus today? Back when we took buses and saw strangers and all that, but how do you think you'd feel?

How do you think the conversation would go? And people say, well, I think it would be horribly awkward. And you couldn't pay me to do that. And then they'll take a separate group of people and say, we're going to ask you to talk to a stranger on the bus today. And it turns out that people's responses to this real interaction are basically

the opposite of what they'd expect. They think it will be awkward. They think it will feel like they're being judged. They think that the conversation will be boring. They think that they'll want it to end very quickly. And in fact, it's often the best part of their day. I saw this. I saw that study when it came out and I took note of it and really tried to focus on it in elevators. Now, things have changed since the study came out and we're now trying not to be packed into elevators, but in particular, when I lived in an apartment building in New York City

and people were beginning on and off the elevator, my habit was always for years to look at my phone. And then I started to experiment with just saying hello to my neighbors, and I could see, I don't know if I was just because I was primed for it, but I could see in my own mind that there was a brightening effect. I think that's a great example of it. And it's funny though, right? Because what would you have thought before you did that? I don't know. If it's me, maybe I would have thought, well, I don't think this person wants me to interrupt their day. What's more intrusive than some random neighbor just starting to chat you up on an elevator?

It feels almost like a violation of some personal mental space. But we are fundamentally connected creatures. That's one of the things that makes our species different from other animals on the planet, right? We are the groupiest animal on Earth, and I think that it's strange that we've developed a set of inner expectations that so run counter to that deep part of our nature. Why do you think we've developed these expectations?

Hmm. I think that we've changed the structure of our lives a lot. I mean, even if you think about human history from a sort of evolutionary perspective, you know, it did do the whole thing where if there's 24 hours in the day, then what the pyramids were built at 11.50 pm or something like that, right? I mean, we're right. It would, things have been changing so rapidly. And some of the ways that things have changed

are concerning potentially. So, more people live in cities than ever, but more people live alone than ever. And many of the rituals that used to bring us into regular contact with each other have gone away, right? I mean, so things like bowling leagues and church going, even grocery shopping.

Like, I know there's so many people now who don't even go to the groceries or everything just gets delivered to us. We're a little bit more hermetically sealed off from others in the way that we live. And yet, we're around more people than we ever have been before. So we're, in essence, interacting more, but we ever have been before. So we're in essence interacting more,

but in a less human way. We're standing in each other's way on the sidewalk, but not interacting with each other at a deep level. Now, this is not scientific evidence. This is just observations, but I think that, to me, if you ask the question, where do these new instincts come from? Where do these instincts for aloneness come from? When togetherness is both our origin and a solution

to many of our problems, I'd say it's because some of the practices that we've developed have pulled us apart. I think there's a quote in your book, the modern world has made kindness harder. I think there's a quote in your book, the modern world has made kindness harder. I do think that's true. And I think that that's true for a number of reasons. Again, I don't claim to have scientific evidence for this because it's true that urban living, solitary living, the internet have all coincided with a decrease in empathy,

at least in the United States, a pretty substantial decrease in empathy. You can't say that one thing caused the other, right? History is not an experiment that you can run multiple times and just tinker with different things. But to me, the coincidence of these different forces and then an effect that I think a lot of us are

pretty unhappy with is worth paying attention to. I think that we talk a lot about the mental health crisis that's been brought on by COVID-19 rates of depression are three and a half times or so, what they were in early 2019, for instance, anxiety, skyrocketed. But I think we had some social pre-existing conditions. Loneliness had been creeping up.

Depression had been creeping up. Anxiety had been creeping up before this. I think that the pandemic has put in stark relief what happens when you separate people. But we were already separating ourselves and already paying the cost of that separation beforehand. before hand. Every time I hear somebody describe the ways in which modern life seems to have contributed to what you call an empathy deficit, I think about the closing scenes of that movie Wally, that Pixar movie Wally were all the human race is living on spaceships hovering over destroyed polluted earth and everybody's in overfed, you know, knowing on a turkey bone and a giant, many

gallon serving size of soda strapped into individual motorized strollers and watching TV that's hanging in front of them. And it seems like not far from what we're living right now. Gosh, I mean, it's bleak, but it resonates, doesn't it? The overfed part is interesting because I think that we are overfed in a way when it comes to information more than anything. I think one super troubling thing for me is somebody who really believes in and studies human connection is the way that media has fractured to the point that we now each really, truly live in our own version of reality. And we're not aware that we do either. Right? So I mean, you go on Facebook and I go on Facebook and we think, you know, if you

look at how these platforms were described 10 or 15 years ago, we're entering the digital public square. We're entering a place that is a global online space for community where anybody can connect with anybody, anywhere, anytime on their own terms, this should be a factory for human compassion. This should be the greatest empathic opportunity our species has ever had. And why do so many people, including me, feel that it's gone in the exact opposite direction? I think one reason is that we don't actually exist in a public square. We think that when we log on to these sites, we're engaging in a public square, but actually they're being curated to exactly what we like or at least what keeps us online, which might be what scares us or what angers us, but whatever keeps us there,

you know, it turns into what we see. And that means that you and I think that we're experiencing something common, but in fact we're experiencing something totally made for us, a world of information and feeling that's packaged based on our addictions. It's not really, I think, a healthy way to build a connected culture. And I think it's, I guess the Wally imagery brings me there more than any place else. So would you say we shouldn't, we should boycott the internet? I think that horse is out of the barn, so to speak. As are many of these horses.

I mean, I'm not a let-ite. I don't think that the modern world should be abandoned nor do I think it can be. I think more than anything, we can be intentional and mindful and aware of how different social, economic, technological forces are affecting us. You know, one big part of my work is the assertion, which I feel strongly about in which there's lots of evidence for it, that who we are is up to us in more ways than we realize. I mean, I know Dan, you've discovered that a lot through contemplative practice. I think a lot of people are not aware of how much they can grow themselves.

And in fact, I would even put it more strenuously. It's not just that we can change. We can't not change. You know, the ship is sailing. All we can do is steer it. And I think that one thing that I try to encourage is many people as will listen to do, is to do an internal audit of themselves.

Think about their values, think about who they want to be. If the answer for you is not empathy and kindness, that's fine. But I think that you should do it. And I think that once we do, we can ask ourselves as we experience different things, as we encounter someone we disagree with politically,

as we go online and obsessively check how many likes we have. URI's authors, maybe my sign that things are going off the rails is I'm on the Amazon author page looking at my sales rank. We can examine our behaviors. We can put them in the context of what we derive meaning from and then we can make different choices and we can cultivate different habits. I know again, you and many of your guests are experts on this, but I think that a lot of people don't realize how much power they have, and so I think that empowerment could be a good foil for the modern world that we live in.

You dive deeply in the book, into techniques that we we to use your phrase here, hack empathy. But before we dive into that, I want to just step back for a second and talk about empathy. How do you define it and what's its relationship to kindness? Thank you so much, Dan. This is really important for us to talk about. I think any conversation about empathy needs to start with some definitional work because people can get confused about this. And also, I want to acknowledge that different traditions think about these terms in different ways. And I think that much respect to many different perspectives on this. I'll give you a research psychologist definition of empathy,

which is the way that people in my world think about it and the way that we talk about it when we study it. So we think of empathy as an umbrella term that encompasses multiple ways that we respond to other people's emotional lives. So I'll unpack it through an example. Let's say that you're having lunch with a friend back when we did that type of thing and he gets a phone call and you don't know who's on the other line or what they're saying, but you know it's not good because your friend breaks down in tears. Right. So as you see him crying, a few things might happen inside you and you might notice all of them. One, you might feel bad yourself.

You might start to frown. You might vicariously take on his feelings. That's what we would call emotional empathy. It can sometimes also be called emotion contagion or empathic distress, but it's basically feeling as somebody else feels. A second thing that you might do is try to figure out what he's feeling and why. Who is this person on the phone? What are they saying? What has he told me about something that matters to him? Was he waiting for a call? That type of cognitive detective work is what we call theory of mind.

It's the attempt to inhabit or form a model of what the world looks like to someone else, what it feels like to somebody else. And then third, at least if you're a decent pal, you probably wish for your friend to feel better. And you might even think about what you could do to help your friend. So that's what we would call in research psychology

empathic concern. And I want to deeply acknowledge that that piece of empathy is the most consonant with what people in contemplative in other traditions would think of as compassion. It's the motivation to enter into another person's world not idly, but actively with the goal of decreasing their suffering and improving their well-being.

So those are the three pieces that I think about when I think of empathy. Because empathy has of late, and I think this is linguistic or definitional, semantic, academic perhaps, but empathy has gotten a bit of a bad rap. So in the contemplative world, we often talk about the difference between empathy and compassion.

So empathy is often defined in the contemplative circles as just a raw sharing of somebody else's emotion, which can quickly lead to burnout. Compassion has the enobling add on the resilience creating add on of a desire to help, which is a key difference. And what I'm hearing from you is actually, it's a, that's just empathic concern, all of which falls under the umbrella of empathy. That's the way that I and other people in research psychology would think about it. But again, with great humility and the understanding

that this might just be a semantic difference. I think you had a recent conversation with Reverend Angel Akeoto Williams, where I loved the way that she used these different terms. I think that the intuition is shared, that there is a taking on of other people's feelings, and then there is a desire to help them, and that those two things can be distinguished from each other.

In fact, psychologists do this all the time. One of the researchers who've done the most work in this space is Dan Batson. He's like the grand daddy event that the research and social psychology, and he talks about this sort of affect sharing and empathic concern in really interesting ways. It's done all these studies where he has you, for instance, watch someone in pain or read a story of someone who's just suffered a horrible family tragedy. And then you have an opportunity to help them or not. Sometimes he tries to get you to feel empathic concern or compassion. He says,

really, you know, I want you to think about this person, how they're seeing the world, what you could do for them. And other times, he really ramps up empathic distress. Imagine that you were in this situation. Imagine that you lost your brother, that you broke your leg. So sort of ramping up the vicarious sharing component. And what he finds is that when you're feeling lots of distress, you'll help if you have to. But your actual goal is not to help someone else. It's to stop feeling bad. You're basically like, this sucks. I don't wanna feel this.

What can I do to get out of this? And so if the only means of escape from your own suffering is to help this other person, you'll do it. But if Dan bats and gives you this other way out, if he says, you can also just leave, you'll never meet this person. You'll do that instead. But if instead he fosters empathic concern in you, you'll help no matter what.

Your ultimate goal is not to relieve your own suffering. Your ultimate goal is to relieve the suffering of that other person. And I'm a little bit in the weeds here. I hope that makes sense in terms of, yeah, I think that the way that psychologists in research think about this is actually not that dissimilar from the way that people in contemplative practices do. I think that's right. It's just a question of language.

Let me just pick up on another attack on empathy that I've seen of late and I apologize in advance because I may be misremembering, if that's a word, of the author who I'm about to reference and I may be mistating his argument, but I suspect you'll know the author and the argument and you'll correct me. Paul Bloom, an academic wrote a book, I believe it's called Against Empathy. And the argument was our empathic capacity is so polluted through evolution that we're designed to sympathize with people who look like us, et cetera, et cetera, that empathy sort of misfires in ways that have civilizational, deleterious impacts. I believe that's his argument,

but please, if you're familiar with it, can you expand on it and rebut? I think you nailed it. Yeah. So first of all, Paul is a great guy. And one of the best things that ever happened to me as a scientist is having a nemesis. It's so helpful in thinking about your own perspective to disagree.

He's a brilliant and generous debate partner. I want to give all credit to Paul. I think that his argument is incredibly provocative and quite useful. I think you summarized it well. If I may, it's like you said, that evolution has equipped us with empathy, which is maybe a kind of alarm system that causes us to help other people, but it's so inherently problematic. It focuses on people who look like us, we think like us, people who are attractive, people who are right in front of us, and that's just not scalable. We can't take that ancient emotion and expect to build a modern morality or to support a modern society. And so he would say, we should, to the extent that we can, just get rid of it, just try to go Vulcan, you know, or if you're a next generation person,

try to go turn into data, you know, the Android from that show, you know, that we should exercise or amputate emotions from our moral lives. And I think that that's a really interesting perspective that I strenuously disagree with. Now, I think for one, the attempt to remove emotion from our lives is not necessarily a wise one. Emotions are here for a reason. They're not always misguided. They're not always chaotic. They're signals. They're signals about what we care about in the world. Second, I don't think that emotions can be extracted from from our lives in any simple way. And third, I think that the replacement that Paul offers, which is that we should just reason out what is moral and what is right, is also not that compelling.

I think we've seen in history, over and over again, people convince themselves that they're being rational and then arriving at the exact same biases that they had before. I guess a broader response that I have to some of Paul's writing though is, and I can use a metaphor here, which is his own. He says, empathy is a spotlight. It points our goodwill and our help and our kindness towards certain people, but we point it too narrowly. And what I would say is the piece that Paul is missing is that we're the ones in control of that spotlight, that we can point it wherever we want,

and that we work with our emotions, that we're wiser emotionally as a species that we often give ourselves credit for. We can aim our emotions in ways that accord with our values. So for instance, if there's a tragedy half a world away, yeah, I might not be seeing pictures of people who are suffering, and therefore I might not immediately feel empathy for them. But I can sure as heck read a news story or seek out first person accounts of what's happening. I can point my empathy in ways that I want to and that can turbocharge my willingness, my desire to help. So I think sometimes our emotional lives serve a really important purpose and I think that we can make choices about how we want that to happen.

But I guess without having really spent much time marinating in Paul's argument, I actually didn't know that you guys were sparring partners. I just had heard of the book independently and heard him interviewed before. I guess the part of his argument that seems trickiest for me is the Vulcan part. I don't see how it's in any way plausible that we would uproot our emotions and go straight to reason only. So we should just work with what we've got. It seems to me, but again, I'm talking to somebody who's inclined to agree. You are.

Yeah, I would say we have to work with what we've got. And I think a lot of the work that you talk about and a lot of the people that you talk with, I think that's kind of the starting point, isn't it? Is that we need to accept what we are and then ask ourselves who we can be, starting with that acceptance. And I personally feel as though both based on empirical data and on my own intuition, starting with the premise that we should try to eliminate a enormous part of human nature in all of our decision-making is unrealistic. But I think it's not, that doesn't make me feel hopeless or helpless. Because again, I feel that we can control our emotions much more than we realize.

And I think that when we, for instance, think, oh, my empathy is biasing me. I'm only empathizing with people who agree with me. Once you have that realization, you don't have to let go of empathy. You can make choices that broaden your empathy. For instance, you can get to know people from different ideological perspectives. You can start to try to decouple your empathy from the little niche that you're in. You can make choices that allow you to have greater

contact with more of humanity and therefore a deeper sense of connection to more of humanity. That to me is a deeply desirable goal and one that's both more realistic and more human than I suppose morphing into another federation species. As you look around at the world though, do you see a lot of that happening? I do. Yeah, I see a lot of that happening. I see a lot of it not happening. And I see a lot of the opposite happening. I think that we're often inundated with stories of the opposite happening, of cruelty and indifference. Because those stories both are eye catching

and also fulfill, I think, fears that people sometimes in a way want confirmed. I talk with a lot of people who are very skeptical of the idea that people could ever be good. People think of a lot of cynicism. In fact, cynicism has been on the rise in the last 50 years, pretty strongly. People have a growing view of humanity as fundamentally selfish and self-oriented. And so people will hit me with these examples. Did you see that this person acted in this horrible way? How could you possibly think that people are anything else? I think that that is a really self-fulfilling view of the world. I think that once you start to believe that you look for confirmation. I think that in media, oftentimes, we see confirmation of that because of the way that negative

events are more reported than positive ones. For instance, the COVID pandemic has brought a tsunami of kindness all around the world. I mean, there's been incredible acts of selflessness from neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger, even during this period when we can't be together. And, you know, social distancing, whether it hasn't been adhered to perfectly, of course, not. I still think it's the largest global act active cooperation our species has ever engaged in. I think about billions of people making small sacrifices for the collective good.

So yeah, I do see reason for hope. I do see people acting in ways that signal solidarity and signal connection. I guess I was more specifically thinking about tribalism and trying to take the perspective of people with whom you disagree. I definitely see kindness and I agree with all the examples you're citing. I don't necessarily see people going out of their way

to empathize with people who vote differently. That's true. And I think that part of that surrounds the beliefs that we have about empathy. A lot of my lab's research focuses on what we think about what we feel and how that changes what we feel. So for instance, if you think that empathy is a fixed trait that you can never change, people don't work as hard to empathize with folks who are different from themselves. If you tell people, empathy is a skill. You can grow it.

People take on more ownership of it, and they work harder at it, including with people they disagree with. Recently one of my students started this project that I love. It's on what people believe about empathy in politics. So again, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think sometimes people feel like if I really listen to someone who I disagree with, isn't that the same as betraying the people I agree with? Like, we've gotten to this state of just hyper-tribalism where you can really believe that. And so what my

student, Luis Asanto's found is is that indeed many people do believe that empathy is actively counterproductive to their willingness or ability to be a good member of their own political party. Does that make sense? Yes. If you listen to the other side, you're giving up the game. You've already lost the argument as though life has to be only an argument. Just to amplify your point.

There was a Democratic Senator the other day here in the United States who hugged your Republican and has been hearing no end of verbal abuse as a consequence from her own side. Yeah, it's really, I mean, polarization can reach such a point that empathy becomes the enemy to some people. And that is a really sad and a really interesting state of affairs in my opinion and so Luisa has found that when people hold that belief that empathy will be counterproductive they stop using it and they don't want to compromise they don't want to talk to people who are different from themselves. But we found that we can also convince people that empathy can be useful because it turns out it can. There's this whole line of work in political science called deep canvassing. So deep canvassing

is basically same as regular canvassing. You go door to door to people's houses and try to talk with them about particular issues. The difference is in how you talk to them. So, you know, a canvasser might come to your door and say, did you know that 40% of X believe Y and that 35% of Z sort of hits you with a blitzkrieg of statistics and kind of puts you in a position where you feel judged. If you don't agree with the canvassar, you're just holding an obviously immoral position. That type of canvassing is not very effective. In fact, it basically doesn't move people at all. Deep canvassing starts instead with shared storytelling, asking people when they answer their door to say something about their story,

times that they felt like they didn't fit in, times that they felt scared, times that they felt threatened. And then the canvassers sharing their own story. Oftentimes these canvassers represent a group that is relevant to the issue, right? So for instance, if it's canvassing for trans rights, the canvassers might be trans themselves. Anyways, you start with sharing stories

and you use that empathic connection as like an Archimedes point to have a conversation about an issue, but you start by helping people feel safe and connected and not attacked. Now, empathy in this political climate could feel like bringing cotton candy to a gunfight, like what could be more useless, and in fact the opposite is true. Deep canvassing is far

more effective, including in persuading people of these really hot button issues than regular canvassing. It turns out that when we in my lab tell people that empathy can be useful, they use it more. And in using it more, they actually become more persuasive advocates for their own position. So I think that you're right, Dan, that in general, we're not empathizing across political lines. And there are lots of reasons for that. But I think again, you know, just like the way that we don't help others when helping them would help us, this is another unforced error, I would call it, an unforced psychological error, where we just have a misprediction about how things will go if we try to connect versus if we stay disconnected. And because of that, we miss really critical opportunities, but we don't have to. I'm guessing this is the optimistic thing that I can say.

I know we're talking a lot about our foibles and failures as a social species, but I think that all of this is reversible. All of this is under our power. As promised, I do want to talk more about the optimistic side of this, but let me just ask one last language question, which may seem incredibly obvious, but I want to make sure that I'm not somehow

missing something here. What is the connection between empathy and kindness? Thank you. Yeah. So empathy is an experience and kindness is an action. Kindness, which is also known in wonky circles as prosociality, is any action that we take that benefits another person that improves their well-being in some measurable way. If you want to get extra separating our peas and carrots,

kindness can come in the form of cooperation, which is where I help you and myself at the same time, or in the form of altruism, where I help you and maybe sacrifice something myself at the same time. Now, empathy, the experience of sharing, trying to understand and caring for other people's emotions, is a robust predictor of kindness, right?

When I experience empathy for you, I'm more likely to act kindly towards you, whether you're my friend, family member, stranger, colleague, patient if I'm a physician, right? So empathy is connected to kindness, but it's not a one-to-one connection. Oftentimes, we feel empathy, and we don't act kindly. I think a lot of stress and strain these days and burnout comes from being inundated with stories of suffering that we can't do

anything about where we end up feeling helpless. And also, we often act kindly without experiencing any empathy. And interestingly, those acts of kindness are not very useful to us. Right? So, there's research from MyLab and lots of others that looks at different acts of kindness and how they affect our happiness and stress. And you might have heard, and this is true, and this is a long program of research from Liz Dunn, and others that when you spend money on others, for instance, or do a favor for someone else, you end up happier. That's true.

In fact, it also can improve your health and even longevity in older adults to do for others. But it turns out that not all kindness is created equal. So for instance, if you act kindly out of sheer obligation, a sense that you have to, or that someone will be angry at you if you don't. Those benefits go away, whereas if you act kindly through a sense of deep purpose and connection to another person, those benefits are amplified. Much more of my conversation with Jamil Zaki coming up after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time,

pure on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here

by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App.

So in the book, you talk about, I believe, 10 ways to hack our capacity for empathy. What can we do to boost this quality that you say is not really good for the world, but it's good for us as individuals? Yeah, I think one that encompasses many strategies, one meta strategy, is to broaden our shopping for other people's experience, to be more voracious and wider in our curiosity about other people's experience. And that can come in a number of different ways. But one is through engagement with stories. So this can be fiction, theater, film, just narratives are sort of like a performance enhancing drug for empathy, right? Because they allow us to enter into

the minds and lives of people who are so different from us, and actually to expand even our sense of possibility about what could be a mind. You know, I remember reading a novel, I think it was by Tom Robbins, where, was a whole set of characters that are utensils, like a fork and a spoon and napkin. And they would have these rich interlives. And I was like, wow, you know, this is 20 years ago. And I remember thinking, my gosh, you know, just broadening a sense of what a life could be, what an experience could be, it's such a powerful thing. And likewise, I mean, when we read fiction that has protagonists who are different from

us in terms of their sexual orientation or their ethnicity or their nationality or their ideology, it turns out that we actually build empathy for real people in those groups as well. We're doing deep canvassing on ourselves. Exactly. Exactly. That's a really good way of putting it. And you know, the thing that I love about it is that it's so low impact. You know, I think a lot of empathy building starts at the deep end. Go and find your uncle who's saying stuff you disagree with online. Call him and talk to him and have that

tough conversation. And first of all, that is a great thing to do. But it's scary. It feels like a lot of work, especially if you're already under strain. I love an empathy building practice that starts with just laying on your couch with a novel. So that's one thing that I was encouraged people to do is work out their imagination. Because you can cultivate a really broad perspective without going anywhere just by using the power of your mind. A second thing that I think people can do is to schedule connection to others.

So it's actually make it a practice and you know, this will be, there are many ways to do that. One way of course, which you've talked about a lot is through, you know, I think you call it on the cushion or sort of practices, right? So doing things like meta or practicing compassion meditation are all extremely powerful ways to turn empathy into a practice. There are other ways too that are off the cushion. So, for instance, you know, if you want to engage with others, if you want to check in with friends and make sure that they're feeling supported, if you want to write a note of gratitude to someone, if you want to make connections, don't just want to do it, do it, and do it regularly.

So, it could be five minutes a day, or it could be one hour a week. I care less about the rhythm, I care more about the regularity. And I think that there is abundant evidence that regular practices of connection of any sort are an incredibly powerful way to build our empathy. And then a third is to believe in ourselves. Right? So again, I talked a little bit about this earlier, but I've worked with Carol Dweck, who's famous for her research on mindsets, right, on growth versus fixed mindsets. In case listeners don't know about this, you know, mindsets are beliefs that we hold

about ourselves, that change how we deal with challenges, right? So if you think, for instance, that intelligence is a skill, you like embrace really difficult mathematical problems. You really want to push yourself because you can grow. I used to do this when I was an avid chess player. The clear thing was you always want to lose at least 75% of the games that you play. You want to be playing against people who are a little bit better than you, because you want to be at that limit of your capacity. But if you believe that intelligence

is a fixed trait, that same situation is totally aversive and painful and horrible, because you keep on exposing your limits. You keep on being exposed as less than. So whether you think about something as a skill or a trait is critical. And I think that's true for empathy as well. In fact, that's what Carol and I have been working on for years. We found that when you tell someone that empathy is a trait that they can't grow their empathy, they get really scared of situations where they'd be tested. They get relatively scared of interacting with people with different ideologies. They get relatively scared of spending time with people who are in great pain, like people

who are suffering from cancer. They don't want to put themselves in those tough, empathic situations because presumably they worry that their limits will be revealed. And people are really scared to see their ceiling. But if you convince people that empathy is a skill that they can work on, they embrace the same challenges. They look out for chances to grow. And they see the opportunity in those situations. And so,

you know, my graduate student, Erica Wise has done a project now where we give people a growth mindset around empathy. And we show that even months later, they have a richer social life, for instance, they make more friends when after starting college. So that's another way to have hope and belief in ourselves. I'll offer one more and then I'll stop. You can do that. These are great. Don't add yourself on my bat. Another thing that my lab has worked on that I believe as a purveyor of empathy is that

we should understand how much influence we have over other people and how much influence they have over us. I think the term conformist and the idea of conformity gets such a bad rap. In other words, especially in the West and especially in the US, people do not want to be heard animals. And yet we are. I mean, even our attempts at individuality often

are comically conformist in nature. We all get the same piercings. But I think that there's a powerful line of work in psychology that is around embracing our connection to each other and realizing that the best way often to encourage something is not to tell people to strike out on their own and do it, but rather to highlight what's already being done. I guess this gets back to our people being empathic and kind. I think if you look at the news, the answer is no. I think that oftentimes the loudest voices in our culture are not the kindest.

You know, you think about extreme pundit on cable news or your favorite loud mean person on Twitter. And these people might not represent us, but they take up so much air at time that it's easy to think that they do and that in order to fall in line, we need to be like they are. I think of the people around you and the social information you take in as like the air you breathe or the food you eat, it changes you. I think that because of that, I try to encourage other people to notice kindness and empathy around them, to really stop and acknowledge it, to realize when it's happening,

because when we realize that something is popular around us, we're more likely to engage with it. We did a study with middle schoolers, where we had middle schoolers, these are seventh graders who are, no knock on them, the most conformist people on earth by age, right? I mean, no one wants to be more like other seventh graders than seventh right? I mean no one wants to be more like

other seventh graders than seventh graders right? No one wants to be more like other people than seventh graders and so we worked with like eight hundred seventh graders and some of them we put them in what we called an empathic norms condition so we asked them to write about why they value empathy and then we co-related all their responses why so that when they went back to school, we could show them a brochure of their friends and classmates saying why they valued empathy. Now mind you, we're not lying to these students. There's no deception at all in this study.

We're just alerting them to a social norm that they might not have known about. The popularity of empathy among their peers. And it turns out that that, in turn, influenced their desire to be empathic. And a month later, that desire predicted other people in their class saying that they were acting kindly. Does that make sense? So if I realize how popular empathy is, I want to be more empathic. And a month later, my classmate say that I've been kinder. So I think that,

you know, again, there are two sides to this. One is to curate the information that we see and to pay attention to kindness around us. The other is to make it loud for other people. You know, I think if we want empathy and kindness to be contagious, I suppose a good kind of contagion for a change, we need to make it visible for people. And I think this is especially important for folks in leadership anywhere, whether you're the leader of a family or a town or a team or a company, you know, to highlight and elevate and amplify kindness with the understanding that that's not just a way to make people feel good. It's a way to license them, to give them

permission to express that side of themselves too. As you evangelize on behalf of empathy and kindness and study it, etc., etc. But don't you have to convince people that there's something in it for them that there's a kind of enlightened self-interest here? I think that you can do that. I think it's a very easy case to make. Again, you know, when we do for others, we also do for ourselves. And there's ample evidence from many parts of psychology and public health. And, you know, you name it that demonstrate the utility of empathy, right? I think just what we've gone over this conversation, you end up happier, you end up healthier. We can live longer if you're

an older adult. You can be more politically persuasive. You can form greater friendships. You know, I mean, people at work are more involved in creative and productive if they believe that they're part of an empathic team. Physicians, you know, have patients who are happier and more likely to listen to their recommendations if they act empathically. The enlightened self-interest case can be made robustly and easily, and I make it all the time. I don't think it's the only case, though. I mean, I think that there is a case that we want to be part of something greater than ourselves and that there is inherent value to empathy, kindness, and connection for their

own sake, not just because we want to be helped by them, but because we want to be part of a species that embodies those characteristics. I still think that's in line self-interest. Oh, I just think it just depends how you define self. I love that. Yeah, I think the anthropologist Marshall Salons has this whole, has a book, I think it's called the Western Illusion of Cell for something like that where he basically

says, you know, we've built our entire philosophy on these physical borders between us. And that completely ignores what is known in many other parts of the world, which is that those borders are much more amorphous when you look inside our hearts or inside our minds. I don't know if this is a non-sequitor, but there is a great quote from an author, George Sonders, I believe, in your book, who described selfishness as sickness. Yeah, that is from Sonders, my favorite living writer. And he talks about, yeah, he does talk about selfishness as a sickness. He also talks about it as an, he calls it an inborn confusion. He says, there are these certain Darwinian confusions that we have. And maybe they've helped us survive, but they're not helping us thrive.

And they include the idea that we are separate from other people. They also include the idea that we cannot die. Basically, what Ernest Becker would call a denial of death, right, as sort of a desire to ignore or repel a sense of impermanence. And then he has a third one, and I can't remember it. Sorry, George Sauders. But those beliefs, again, might help us in terms of our very basic self-preservation, right? Maybe thinking that you're different from other people is really important to not, you know, immediately sacrificing yourself for others right away in every situation. Maybe it's important to have some illusions in order to get through life in certain ways. But again, I think that has more to do with surviving,

and less with thriving. And I think Saunders would agree, right? I mean, I think that he, in his fiction and in his life, has been on a quest to overcome those confusions, and to really, you know, to get past the idea of a strong distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world and to get past the fear of our own impermanence. I think that those two are obviously related, right? I mean, I think that we're scared to end because we think that when we're gone, everything that we are is gone. And I think that if we acknowledge that our interconnection is really, I mean, here I'm departing from

science obviously, but I feel strongly that, you know, in my own practice, for instance, that really trying to dissolve the difference between you and I is, for me, has been a strong step towards letting go of some of my deepest fears, which is obviously an ongoing process. Yes, I'm just thinking about that because it is very hard. And if you. I found that I have committed to that job, but you know, the any time I take my foot off the pedal, I fall back right into selfishness. It's not hard to tip me right back into selfishness.

Oh, it's so hard to not get tipped back into it. And, you know, I think, again, moments of strain can be this wall that separates us from the rest of the world and that scares us. And I think that that sense of separation immediately, to me at least, leads to fear. You know, I'm on my own, I'm different than everybody else. I need to look out for myself, but that's never a job that will be successful. If I'm fighting to be a unique identity forever, that's a failed mission already. I know you talk a lot about self-compassion, and I did want to share that that's been the hardest thing for me.

I had this ironic experience where I was writing this book, I was going up for 10 years and I had a one month old and a one and a half year old. So this is a couple of years ago, three years ago now. And it's probably like the most stressful point of my life. And I remember, just as you said, you put it fairly evangelizing for kindness and empathy. Like that was my literal job was to tell people

about the positive benefits of kindness, including to oneself. And internally, I was just at war. I mean, I don't, a war for kindness, even with myself, right? I mean, I just was full of self-punishment and ego as we were talking about earlier. You know, I was trying to thread all these needles at the same time to accomplish something that I thought would be great and in that was so much pride and also immediately so much fear and

really and also immediately so much fear and really a negation of what I was preaching. It was a really chaotic time for me. And I'm thankful that I had a self-compassion teacher here in San Francisco named Michael Klein, who I worked with, and it really changed my life. And it's funny that it took writing a book about these themes to understand it, right?

I mean, I've been focused on empathy and kindness as a scientist, of course, as a person as well. But it was the writing of the book that made me contend with some of my own failures in this. And Michael really helped me in one of the things that he, one of the images that he uses that I find really powerful, I don't know if you've encountered it. Maybe it's, maybe it's common is, he it's common. Michael would ask me to think about a failure of mine or a struggle that I was having. I need to say, now I want you to imagine a soccer stadium full of people who are suffering in the exact same way as you are right now. And that was an image for common humanity, an image for taking the suffering and struggles that we're going through, and turning them from walls that separate us into bridges that

can connect us through shared vulnerability, through commiseration, through shared helping, and hopefully shared healing as well. And I've gone back to that image. I mean, I can't even, to say the number of total times would be impossible. I would say five times a day, maybe at least. It's just, to me, incredibly powerful. I'm more so now than ever. I mean, COVID, of course, has affected many people in many different ways.

It's in some cases exacerbated discrepancies, economic and racial discrepancies, for instance. But I think it also has created the largest shared experience of my lifetime and probably of most living people's lifetime. And yet we're apart and we're struggling. And I think that when we don't pick up the phone, when we don't send that message, when we don't reach out, we're missing out on an opportunity for common humanity, and we don't reach out, we're missing out on an opportunity for common humanity, and we don't have to. Except for we shouldn't be doing it out of obligation, because then it won't be, because I do wrestle with that.

Sometimes I'll make a list of people, yeah, I got to call these people. And there is, I'm thinking like, oh, well, am I going to really, how much benefit will be created for the other person or for me if I'm doing it because it's on a list that I need to check off? So there you go, right? I mean, I was saying to turn it into a practice, something that's on a list that you have to check off. I think that a sense of obligation can mean a lot of different things, right? So I can say, I'm committing to do this today. A commitment, I guess, is different than an obligation. A commitment can be a practice. The same action can feel so different depending on your frame for it.

I can commit to doing something every day and before doing it, connect to my purpose for doing it. Why does this bring me meaning? Why is this important? Just that little psychological move can immediately put me into the place of autonomy and value that brings all of the depth to that action, not just in terms of its benefits for me detect authenticity in acts of kindness. I'm sure that they can detect the meaning and openness of the person on the other side of that interaction. So anyways, I think that there are values affirmation is one way of doing this.

It's just simply before doing anything, before engaging in an action, asking yourself, why? What is the purpose here? How does this connect with who I want to be? I think you can do that every day. I think that there is such a thing as a scheduled practice that also is tied to meaning. I think just doing something over and over again doesn't mean that it has to turn into that negative form of obligation. Yeah, that little psychological movie describes which is us from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation,

which changes everything. Exactly. So I would be remiss before we close, if I didn't, for a couple of reasons, get into one of the pitfalls of empathy, which is burnout. I referenced it briefly earlier, but you've written an article for the Lancet about the burnout in a medical context. I sensitive to that as the child of doctors and the husband

of another doctor, but I think it's not just limited to medical context. It's anybody who's forced to care for other people. If you're dwelling only in a certain kind of empathy, it can have all sorts of pernicious impacts. So anyway, I'll shut up and let you talk about it. Yeah, this is a huge topic of interest for me, and it started really personally. So I write about in that article, and in my book, about the birth of our older daughter,

Alma, about five years ago. And, about the birth of our older daughter, Alma, about five years ago. And I think as a parent, you probably understand like that her birth is like easily tied for the best day of our life with our other daughter's birth. But for us, it was also the worst day of our life, unequivocally, she had my wife went through an extremely difficult labor and, you know,

Alma was delivered by an emergency C section, you know, in the middle of the night. And, you know, Alma was delivered by an emergency C-section, you know, in the middle of the night. And, you know, it was one of those things. It's my first moment as a parent and you imagine a lot of about becoming a parent. And for me, I guess, from television as in movies, it's just like the cry, you know, the first cry. I was like, well, will it sound like what frequency will she be at? All these things that you imagine. And I just remember the silence, you know, just no sound coming from her, no sound coming from the medical team, just this dead silence and, you know, it's just obvious that something was wrong. I remember looking at her

and she looked like she was struggling to live. And yeah, I think, you know, I remember that that first moment, two visceral realizations in my body, one that I wanted to protect this person more than I ever wanted anything in my life. And then the second that I had already failed at that mission, right? And I think that none of us can protect our kids forever, but I certainly wasn't ready to fail in the first seconds of my first child's life. Anyway, so she turns out I had had a stroke during her birth. And she's thriving now.

I mean, she's about to turn five next week. She's like, great dancer, super-ranged, bunkshess, terrific artist. She's doing terrifically well now, which we are grateful for every day. But, you know, she spent her first weeks of life in this NICU at UCSF, just really struggling. And so were we? And the staff at that NICU were some of the most, I mean, I

think of them as empathic heroes, you know, having studied this forever, I had never encountered empathy from strangers in that way. I mean, maybe you know this from your parents or your partner, but sometimes a physician is like, the person who's most there with you, even more than your own family or friends because they have answers, they can tell you something. And the way that they tell it to you, whether they're there with you, sitting with you and experiencing that moment with you or not,

is such a world of difference as a patient, whereas in this case for us family member of a patient, you know, the way that we were treated at UCSF by our neonatologist Liz Rogers and all these other people changed our lives. I feel safe saying that it changed our lives because moments like that sit with you forever. And the way that that moment sits for us is one of great hardship, but also great support and community. And they were part of that community for us.

But as I'll start getting better, I started, it's weird. I started, you know, how are these people doing it? How are they okay? You know, because all around her were other babies who were struggling to live. And I know on that unit, they lose about once a week a baby dies. I say, how do you drink from that fire hose of human anguish and then go home and then come back and do it again? I shadowed the physicians there for a week.

As you might expect, saw a lot of burnout, a lot of fatigue. And so I also investigated ways that people are working with that. How do we, and as you put it, it's not just physicians, it's not just nurses, social workers. Now, many of us are surrounded by suffering more than we have been in the past. So how do you work with that without drowning in other people suffering? And there's a couple of messages that I saw from the research here. And the first is exactly what you said. Sort of that tight distinction between feeling

as somebody does and feeling for somebody, between what I would call empathic distress and empathic concern, or if you prefer, you can call empathy and compassion. The names matter less. But I think that if our version of connection is that I feel everything you do, that's not necessarily going to be sustainable for us.

And it's not necessarily the most helpful thing for other people. I mean, if I go to my therapist, I don't want him crying and be like, oh my god, your life really does suck, right? I don't need him to feel exactly what I'm feeling. I want him to care for me, but to see my situation from a different perspective. I think one of the beautiful things about empathic concern or compassion is that it's a hopeful state.

It's not just a resonance with what someone's feeling now. It's a vision for how they could feel, and it's a desire to get them from where they are, to where they could be. It inherently contains the hope for some type of positive contribution that you can make, as opposed to just wallowing in the suffering that you see around you. So empathic distress can lead to burnout or sort of, as you described in the article, sort of defensive apathy, but so how do we jar ourselves out of empathic distress and into empathic concern?

Yeah, I mean, so here, I think, contemplative practice is the best solution. I mean, so as you might know, there are now these sort of pilot programs all over the world, where there are different types of contemplative practices that medical students or residents take part in. And the evidence is pretty, it's emerging still, so it's not the most rock solid decades of evidence type of situation in the world. But it's highly consistent that there are ways to decrease stress through these practices for people in the medical world. In particular, compassion meditation, there's at least a couple of studies that have found

that it allows people to fix what I might think of as a double bind, right? Because if you're in a caring profession or if you're just a caring person, you might think, I've got this choice. I can either empathize with this other person who's suffering, but then I'm going to burn out or I can detach. I can just dehumanize them. I can let go. Totally. I can shut myself off. Now, that's a crappy choice because we don't want either of those. We don't want to drown in other people's pain, but we don't abandon them either. And if you're in a caring profession, it's your job to not abandon them. And so there's some evidence that compassion meditation helps people to split the difference. So for instance, in one

study of medical students who engaged in this practice had lower depression scores, but also had higher scores when it comes to connections with their patients. So it's a way to maybe solve that Rubik's cube or to navigate that maze of difficult empathy. I'd be remiss to not also acknowledge that the systems that we work in matter. I think that to have one medical student practice, compassion meditation, will be of dubious usefulness. If they're in a system that just forces them

to see one patient every seven minutes, and they're constantly overworked, and they're having a system that just forces them to see one patient every seven minutes and you know they're constantly overworked and they're you know they're having 36 hours shifts and they're not given support socially or structurally right I mean there's not a easy fix we need to think about the systems that we work in and that's true if we're physicians and it's true in general right if we're trying to support other people we need to make sure that we have support around us as well. But I do think that those internal practices matter.

Another tool that I found that I think is really important is how we can screw what it means to help somebody else. And I think that in the medical world, oftentimes physicians are sort of at least in the West, are champions in the battle against death. You know, they're supposed to protect us from illness and from death, but that too is a fundamentally losing battle. So if I as a helping professional think that the only way that I can truly help is by curing

you, that might not be a very useful stance for me to have. And one of the things that I was so moved by at that NICU when I spent a lot of time with the staff there was the way that they talked about good deaths versus bad deaths. And we're talking about tragedies all the way down here, to lose a baby. It can seriously think of a sad or a thing on Earth, really. But they talked a lot about how honored they were to be there with families in that moment of stark humanity and to be able to offer goodwill, to offer comfort, to do the best that they could. They called it a privilege and they talked about how beautiful that could be. And I

think that that was something that I had never thought about in that way. I think even the rest of us when we try to have a sick friend or a sick relative, or just someone who's hurting in our lives, it's so easy to think that our job is not done unless they're not hurting anymore. But I think that's a failure of imagination. And I think it's often not the best way to connect with other people either because to say I'm going to fix you is to disempower somebody else. You know, to say I'm going to show up for you however I can. I'm going to ask you what you need and I'm going to do my best to fulfill that. Strikes me as more human and more open.

Yeah, in a world where you know, pain is inevitable given the non-negotiability of impermanence. of impermanence, there can be sort of a, I don't know if redeeming is the right word or just sort of a beautiful aspect of just the willingness to show up and have good will and want to help. Yeah, I think so. And that also, that open stance towards helping can do from multiple people at once. I mean, it can connect us to our meaning in a way that is non-contingent. It allows us to cultivate non-attachment to outcomes. It allows us to say kindness doesn't mean this other thing happens in the

world. Kindness is a state or empathy or compassion. These are states of being inside me. And my job is just to cultivate that experience and express it and put it out into the world. And what the world brings back to me is not something that I can control, right? I can't determine whether someone listens to me. I can't determine whether they're healed by what I have to say. All I can do is be the person that I want to be to the extent that I can. Counter programming to anxiety about a world that's out of our control. I'll end it on a lighter note, Jameela. Just just pan down here and show you that Toby the cat has just been lulled into a post-launched extumper during this entire conversation. He started off a little rambunctious, but he's behaved well.

I'll choose to interpret that as our mutually soothing presence. Well, he can't hear you. He can only hear me. So mostly he's heard silence and nonsense. It's been a pleasure to meet you and to chat with you. Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Dan. Big thanks to Jamil. One last thing before we go, we, as I hope you know, care deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the 10% happier apps say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers and the deep wisdom they impart to help them deepen their own practice. For anyone new to this app, we've got a special discount just for you.

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