I was driving home yesterday when a white sedan zoomed past me, blasting its horn and leaving a trail of smoke. Suddenly, it veered in front of a van, and slammed its breaks, causing the van to screech to a stop — all before the sedan began driving again.
Then, the van got into the passing lane, floored it, got in front of the sedan, and did the same exact thing in revenge. I’d clearly missed some portion of this story, as they were both acting so irrationally.
Seconds later, I’m stuck behind both cars at a red light, groaning at my bad luck. The van’s driver, a large a built man with brown hair, got out and walked up to the sedan, shouting profanity into the car. The car’s driver was shouting back, waving his hand. Each was threatening violence upon each other.
I was concerned I was going to have to get out and break up a fight. Or worse, get caught in a road rage shooting. Fortunately, the fight stayed verbal and ended as the van driver got back in his car, his face crimson and fists clenched.
It amazes me that people allow their emotions to induce such tunnel vision. Anger turns them into different people and they forget to treat each other like human beings.
Yes, empathy can boost understanding and reduce conflict, and it could have in this case. But empathy alone is limited and has a better alternative, an upgrade that can help you live better: compassion.
Clarifying the distinction
Empathy means you’re putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling their pain. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone who is in physical or emotional pain.
Put another way, empathy is wincing when you see someone get hurt. Sympathy is feeling sad hearing how someone got hurt.
Empathy has great utility: a study found that patients coped better with bad medical news when their doctor showed empathy. Showing empathy for someone in pain is proven to reduce their pain temporarily.
But empathy comes with a cost. It can easily put you in a worse mood if you are being empathetic to someone’s negative emotions. It can also hurt decision making. University of Toronto psychologist, Dr. Paul Bloom, wrote in his book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, that empathy “can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions.”
For example, leaders and lawmakers might hold people to different standards based on how much they relate to them. This unconscious bias also skews how we perceive conflicts. In short, we’re more likely to express empathy for people who look and live like us.
To make empathy more effective, it needs complementary behaviors. In particular, it should become compassion — which has enormous benefits.
What even is compassion?
In a study led by psychologist Dr. Clara Strauss, scientists defined effective compassion as recognizing one’s suffering, understanding it, and feeling empathy for the sufferer. Additionally, you choose to tolerate these uncomfortable feelings and take action to alleviate them.
It allows you to be more analytical and objective in a situation, not robotic and uncaring. Compassion training proved highly effective for doctors. They better delivered treatments that involved pain with their patients (such as with acupuncture).
Empathy can promote connection and understanding. But compassion helps you both deal with the heaviness at the moment and stay proactive in solving a problem rather than wallowing in it.
But so what? These are just words and facts. How can you implement this to better your life? How can you level up by using compassion? Here are two strategies.
1. Learn to endure the tough stuff
I suffered a terrible back injury in my early 20s and was out of school and work for a full year. I was put into physical therapy for four days a week. The doctor told me upfront, “Your situation is going to get worse before it gets better with therapy.”
He managed that expectation, because patients often resist treatments for that very reason. They don’t want to feel pain or be broken down so that they can be built back up. Unfortunately, we often think an experience will be far more negative than it actually is. One study showed that patients overestimate the pain involved in surgery and often wish they’d had the procedure done sooner.
But even when it is as bad as you thought — there are means of enduring and practicing self-compassion.
With physical therapy, I developed strategies to deal with the pain. My dad was a Navy SEAL, and he taught me to focus on other things and not dwell on the intensity of the discomfort or frustrations in my head. It was a meditative exercise that made the therapy far more tolerable over time.
And by doing this, I made the process of healing that much easier and began to see my improvement rather than focus on the cost of achieving those gains.
With self-compassion, you’re acknowledging pain and hardship but being intentional in not allowing it to rule over your mood.
2. Stay proactive and forward-focused
With empathy, you are stuck on someone’s feelings — which can be good in many contexts. It’s certainly better than not caring. But with compassion, you are also looking forward to a solution and taking action to get there.
My decision to get into physical therapy on its own was an act of compassion. When my friend decided to get sober, and do it with a professional, she was showing self-compassion, rather than feeling sorry for herself and doing nothing. But this only happened because friends chose to confront her about needing to get clean. They were willing to be uncomfortable in that confrontation because they cared enough to see her change.
Compassion can be counseling a friend when they’ve lost their job, feeling sad for them, but also giving them useful feedback that isn’t solely pandering to their feelings.
Choosing to end a toxic relationship, which is clearly making you both less happy and worse people, is an act of compassion.
My parents took my video games away in 8th grade because my grades were tanking. I was very unhappy but, sure enough, my grades went right back up again and I started performing well. They were empathetic to my being upset, but knew that this was the correct decision as I was preparing to enter high school, and would bring bad habits with me if they didn’t act.
Sometimes, the most compassionate thing you can do is forgive someone, or yourself — and choose to let the past go.
Remember that compassion stems from the Latin word compati, which means that you are both suffering together, but taking action to suffer less. It is forward-looking and anticipatory of imminent pain, but knowing that pain can still lead to a better place.
The takeaway
It is great to be empathetic. But remember that empathy facilitates compassion.
Perhaps the two guys on the road wouldn’t have been in a shouting match if they’d taken each other’s perspectives into account and not let their egos control them.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a naturally compassionate person. You can develop it through practice.
The easiest and simplest way is to just remember the actual purpose of compassion:
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Relate to and feel their or your pain.
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Deal with that pain constructively.
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Take concrete steps to alleviate it.
There are also compassion meditation exercises one can use. Either way, let’s focus on thinking outside of ourselves and remember that any person you see could have just as easily been you looking out from their eyes.
This world needs more love, empathy, sympathy, and certainly more compassion.
As Plato once wrote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
