Marta Zaraska is a Canadian-Polish science journalist and the author of Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100, her most recent book.
Becoming more empathetic doesn’t feature often among New Year’s resolutions. The most important goal for Canadians is usually losing weight and eating healthier, followed by ditching bad habits and making sounder financial decisions. In none of the surveys I’ve found did empathy make the cut. At best, it might have been hidden somewhere among “mis,cellaneous” and “other.” Yet if we truly care for our health and well-being, empathy should be our top priority.
You may get an inkling that empathy is in crisis these days from the moment you turn on the TV or log into social media. But there are hard data on this, too. A meta-analysis of studies conducted on more than 13,000 North American students showed that between 1979 and 2009 empathic concern has nosedived by 48 per cent.
In one of his speeches, former U.S. president Barack Obama noted that “we live in a culture that discourages empathy.” He blamed the empathy crisis on the selfish impulses promoted by our culture: to be entertained, famous, thin and rich. Mr. Obama was partly right to point his finger at the pursuit of riches – studies confirm that those who are financially very well off tend to score low on empathy. Smartphones are likely another part of the story – research suggests that a mere presence of a mobile phone makes us experience others as less empathetic.
In his book The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin argues that the most important question facing humanity is: “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” And although the empathy crisis certainly casts a dark shadow both on our society and on the state of the planet, it has another consequence that is usually overlooked – it damages our health. In pandemic times, we can’t take this lightly.
The importance of empathy for our health became apparent to me over the past few years as I dug through hundreds of research papers to write my most recent book. For one, high empathy usually means better friendships and better marriages – which, in turn, can prolong our life far more than even the famed Mediterranean diet.
Consider the numbers: Eating six servings of fruits and vegetables a day can cut the danger of dying early by 26 per cent, and the Mediterranean diet by 21 per cent. Meanwhile, building a strong support network of family and friends lowers mortality risk by 45 per cent. Marriage, and in particular a happy one, can stave off cancer, diabetes, heart disease and the flu. And if there is one thing that predicts relationship satisfaction, that’s empathy.
The second reason for why empathy may be vital for health is because it leads to kindness, volunteering and charitable giving. In both epidemiological studies and lab experiments, empathy makes people more helpful and generous. Volunteers, in turn, have lower risk of high blood glucose, lower risk of high inflammation levels and spend 38 per cent fewer nights in hospitals than do people who shy from involvement in charities. And, in a pandemic-relevant twist, volunteering may lower C-reactive protein levels, which have been implicated in preliminary research in severe outcomes of COVID-19.
Experiencing empathy may also affect health directly through biological processes – it triggers the release of oxytocin, often called the “love” hormone. Besides making us feel socially connected, oxytocin has anti-inflammatory properties, reduces pain and helps bone growth, potentially preventing osteoporosis.
Last but not least, empathy is linked to health because it has potent anti-loneliness effects. No matter your age, the more empathic you are, the less likely you are to feel all alone in the world. Now consider that lonely people have shorter telomeres, higher blood pressure and an increased expression of gene modules that promote cancer progression. And if that wasn’t enough, they also have weakened antiviral response and react worse to vaccinations.
When I discuss this research with readers, however, I’m often faced with the following logic: I was born with low empathy, I can’t do anything about it. Although empathy is indeed heritable, it is so only in about 28 per cent of us. The rest is up to our environment and our choices.
Studies show that you can actually train empathy by learning to decode facial expressions, improving listening skills and mastering how to take the perspective of another person. Even reading books and watching emotionally charged movies can help us practise empathy – if you’ve ever cried in a cinema or while reading a novel, you probably know what I mean.
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