When I was 19, my parents invited me to visit them in Florida during one of my college breaks. Checking in for my flight, I immediately discovered that I’d gone to the wrong airport—I went to New York’s LaGuardia, instead of JFK. In a fit of panic, I ran to a pay phone (some of you may remember those) to call my parents. Hearing my father’s voice on the other end of the line, I burst into tears, eking out the words to explain my situation, while feeling so ashamed that I’d made such a monumental mistake and would not be able to make my scheduled flight. Without a moment’s hesitation, my father replied, “Congratulations! You messed up!”
With his response, using kindness—and a touch of humor—my father showed me compassion, immediately easing my distress and sense of shame. I rebooked my flight, and I’ve never forgotten the power of his words reminding me that I, too, am human, and like everyone else, I’m allowed to mess up.
Within compassion, we find three ingredients: awareness, kindness, and a desire to help. “Compassion is the capacity to recognize and feel another’s suffering, with the motivation to act to alleviate that suffering; it’s a noun that acts like a verb,” says Catherine Schweikert, PhD, a compassion advocate and author of The Compassion Remedy.
Empathy is sometimes all we are able or willing to offer. What turns empathy into compassion is the desire to do something.
Often confused with its conceptual cousin, empathy—the ability to share and understand another person’s feelings and emotional experience—compassion goes a step further. Empathy is sometimes all we are able or willing to offer. What turns empathy into compassion is the desire to do something, whether it’s offering a kind word, helping to solve a problem, volunteering in your community, or countless other ways we can show compassion. “We use empathy and compassion synonymously, and they are not, but I see them as sequential,” says Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and New York Times bestselling author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness. “We might have a genuine moment of empathy for someone, but we’re frightened, or we are exhausted to begin with and feel we can’t cope, so we don’t try to do anything to ease the situation.”
Compassion involves the doing, taking the sharing and connection of empathy, and augmenting it with an intention to relieve another person’s suffering. “With empathy, we’re feeling the emotion of another, to some extent, but all while reflecting and noticing that it’s the other’s emotion; compassion adds an intention and a motivation to help relieve that suffering,” says Dr. Jennifer Mascaro, associate professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at Emory University, and a researcher who studies the effects of compassion meditation and compassion training.
The Trouble with Self-Compassion
The role of compassion has adapted over time, stemming from its evolutionary beginnings primarily as a means of care for others—such as between parents and children—to cultivate and deepen social bonds. Family and community members fostered trust through compassionate acts that ultimately added to their stability and safety as a group.
As the evolutionary roots of compassion developed, so did our brain’s ability to sense calls for distress and suffering. “Anything that increases perceived threats, emotional or physical, creates a contraction of our attention where we tend to narrow our focus to our immediate environment—what we can hear, what we can see,” says Jonathan Fisher, MD, a cardiologist and author of Just One Heart. “Compassion involves a broadening. It allows us to stay open and attune to the needs of others, even when we may be facing our own threats.”
“Showing up in a positive, supportive way, rather than a shaming, belittling way, is a mindset that impacts everything—body and mind.”
Dr. Kristin Neff
So while compassion evolved naturally as a means of safety and cohesion through caring for others, and is built into our physiology, showing up for ourselves in a kind, supportive way—a.k.a. self-compassion—is not as natural. “When we make a mistake or feel challenged, we feel threatened, so we go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Because the threat is internal, however, we turn this response inward,” says Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, self-compassion researcher, and author most recently of Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout. “Fight is criticism and beating ourselves up; flight is fleeing into shame and feelings of isolation; and freeze is when we ruminate and get stuck, immobilized by the pain of what we’ve done or are experiencing.”
While it may feel less natural—and while some people consider self-compassion to be self-indulgent—the act of acknowledging our own pain and giving ourselves support is also a path to feeling connected with others. “We all experience challenges, and with self-compassion, we are framing our experience and responses in light of the human experience. The moment you expand your frame of interest, recognizing that this is what it’s like to be human, you automatically connect with others and are less self-focused,” says Neff, adding, “To be kind to ourselves, we need to hack into the system that evolved to care for others and do a U-turn so we respond with warmth rather than harshness.”
What’s the hack? Research shows that the body doesn’t seem to recognize the source from where the compassion comes, Neff explains. For instance, when a person (particularly someone you know) gives you a hug, there’s a calming response in the body; a recent study shows that putting your own hand on your heart can elicit the same physiological response. “Touch is the body receiving a signal of care and we can do it ourselves,” says Neff. “It works with language also, so saying to yourself, ‘I’m here for you’ or ‘I won’t abandon you’ helps you feel secure and safe.” And it doesn’t take long: Another study indicates that 20 seconds of self-compassionate touch can increase self-compassion and reduce stress.
Self-compassion can replenish our resources so we feel more able to take that step from empathy to compassion. A good place to start is by asking yourself the following: How do you respond when things are hard and you’re feeling physical or mental pain? “Showing up in a positive, supportive way, rather than a shaming, belittling way, is a mindset that impacts everything—body and mind,” says Neff.
Healing Connections
A further look at the science of compassion reveals how it can directly impact our own lives in ways that extend to families and friends and even impact our wider communities. Practicing compassion can lead to increases in overall well-being, including greater life satisfaction and happiness, more social connection, and decreases in anxiety, stress, and rates of burnout. Compassion also improves physical health, from lower blood pressure and better immune system function to reduced inflammation and increased longevity.
“If you want to live longer and want your heart to be healthier, serve others, do good for others, be more compassionate,” Jonathan Fisher tells his patients, referring to the extensive research that has come out of the Blue Zones, communities around the world where people live longer and have significantly higher rates of well-being. “People who have strong grounding in a deep concern for others live longer, and have healthier, happier lives.”
When it comes to communities and systems, research shows that compassion can have a profound influence. More specifically, it can help people in extreme states of suffering, according to Jennifer Mascaro, whose research focuses on compassion and mindfulness meditation in healthcare. To date, many of the studies on compassion for well-being have taken place in healthcare settings, with patients emphasizing compassion’s importance to their quality of care and workers reporting a need for resources to navigate their high-stress working conditions. In a recent study on the impact of compassionate language used by hospital chaplains with patients, Mascaro and her team concluded that compassion can be used as a skillful means to reduce suffering and enhance well-being in people at their most vulnerable.
“Compassion can bring a natural feeling of safe harbor.”
Dr. Jennifer Mascaro
In one example from the study, a chaplain trained in Cognitively-Based Compassion Training helped a patient who was fearful of needles and felt abandoned. The chaplain led the patient in a guided meditation that involved walking through all the steps of making the intravenous needle that went into her arm. Through seeing that many people had contributed to the process of helping her feel better, the patient was able to recognize the care and connection within a difficult experience, which helped her feel less alone. “When people feel more appreciation of interdependence, they start to see the flowers, rather than the weeds,” says Mascaro. “It isn’t that we ignore harm, but rather that we often tend to be so good at seeing harm that we miss the network of people who help and benefit us. Compassion can bring a natural feeling of safe harbor.”
Self-compassion can also help effect cultural change, as studies show that being kind to yourself increases your capacity to show up for the people around you in difficult circumstances. In a study of healthcare workers, those who practiced taking a break to care for themselves during a busy day experienced greater well-being as well as decreased levels of stress and burnout, giving them more energy and attention to care for patients.
Another way to effect change is to model self-compassionate behavior out loud for others to see and pick up on. Neff explained that if you drop your grandma’s vase, for example, and respond by beating yourself up about it, you are modeling that behavior, as opposed to admitting that you’re really disappointed, but accidents happen. “We impact each other not only verbally, but nonverbally,” says Neff. “What you cultivate internally and display or embody affects others, who may pick up on subtle cues and become influenced by them.”
Filling Our Cup with Compassion
In our modern-day culture, driven by competition, overwhelmed by busyness and saturated with technology, compassion can be challenging to access or even seen as a weakness, affecting both individuals and groups. “Anytime we feel it’s a zero-sum game with time or resources, or a situation in which we are pitted against others, that really impedes compassion,” says Mascaro. She says that most healthcare workers feel an intense time pressure, so one important skill “is to learn to experience and convey compassion in small ways throughout their interactions, so they see that compassion doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time.” Additional factors hindering compassion include high-stress environments, which generate emotional fatigue and burnout, and mental overload, where there’s so much information and responsibility that the result is a lack of awareness of others’ needs. While circumstances like these make it harder to prioritize compassion, a mindful approach can help.
Mindfulness and compassion are often connected in practice, particularly as they relate to the qualities of heightened awareness, emotional regulation, a judgmental attitude, and a sense of connection. A hospital chaplain in Mascaro’s study wrote in a report that when he saw a patient who was involuntarily hospitalized experiencing severe distress, sobbing on the floor, the chaplain was able to notice his own hesitation and feelings of anxiety. Then he looked at the patient’s tears as a way to ground himself and cultivate inner calm. This allowed him to transition into a skillful and warm-hearted way of engaging, asking the patient to think of times when he felt in control. In a stressful moment, this mindfulness practice became a tool for the chaplain to demonstrate compassion.
Conversely, compassion is often used during mindfulness meditation, but we don’t necessarily think of it that way. “One of the crucial teachings in mindfulness is when we realize we’ve gotten distracted, we give ourselves a break, we come back, and we begin again,” says Salzberg. “What we’re really practicing, whether we call it that or not, is a kind of self-compassion, which I think in some ways could be seen as one of the secret ingredients within mindfulness.”
Compassion is often used during mindfulness meditation, but we don’t necessarily think of it that way.
Mindfulness experts offer a variety of research-based strategies for bringing compassion into our lives, both as individuals and in groups. Beginning with tips for self-compassion, Neff shares her recipe for how to make what she calls a self-compassion cookie: “You start with mindfulness, making space for what’s happening without resistance; you bring in a sense of common humanity, remembering that this is the human experience and you’re doing the best you can, and then you add in kindness, saying to yourself what you imagine you’d say to a friend in the exact same situation.” Don’t forget that the power of physical touch has great value for self-compassion, so placing a hand on your heart, on your shoulder, or holding your hands can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, making you feel safe and cared for.
A strategy Salzberg recommends is practicing compassion meditation. “Call different beings to mind, get an image of them, and offer a compassionate wish,” she says. Acknowledge how each one faces challenges or difficult times. “Let it be a variety of things—to someone you know who’s struggling, someone who’s doing well but maybe doesn’t enjoy it at that moment, someone who’s having a health crisis, and see what happens as you do that.” Explore what arises in the body, the heart, and the mind as you send these wishes to people.
“When we find ourselves in an unwelcome situation, stuck in a waiting room or a traffic jam, for example, we should look around us not to see the obstacles or causes of our frustration, but our common humanity,” says Schweikert. She suggests using the “Just Like Me” exercise from Buddhist nun and author Pema Chödrön: Begin by thinking of someone you know, reflecting on this person’s experiences and reminding yourself, “Just like me, she has had moments of joy and moments of grief.” Next, bring into awareness the fact that this person has needs and desires: “Just like me, she wants to be loved and respected.” Then, recall that while you are different people, you share common experiences: “Just like me, she has moments of anxiety and fear.” And finally, allowing feelings of compassion to arise, perhaps wishing this person kindness, peace, and safety.
I’ll never forget that awful day when I went to the wrong airport, or the shame I felt telling my father about my blunder. But what I learned in that one phone call has lasted for decades. My father’s compassionate response was a gift—he gave me the permission to be human, to remember that we all struggle, and at some point, we all mess up. I haven’t gone to the wrong airport since that day, but when I do make a mistake, I am much more accepting of and kinder to myself than I was back then.
