Empathy is treated in popular culture as something you either have or you do not, a personality trait distributed unequally like perfect pitch or double-jointedness. But this framing is not supported by what we actually know about how empathy works. It is closer to a skill, which means it responds to practice, attention, and deliberate effort. Some people start from a more naturally attuned place, but that does not mean those who feel less connected to others are stuck there.

Understanding What Empathy Actually Is

The word gets used loosely to cover a range of distinct experiences. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking or feeling, to model their perspective accurately. Affective empathy is the more visceral version, actually feeling something in response to another person's emotional state. Most people have a stronger natural lean toward one than the other, and both are worth developing. Compassionate empathy, sometimes called empathic concern, is the version that tends to lead to action. It combines understanding with a genuine desire for the other person's wellbeing. This is often what people mean when they say someone is empathetic in everyday conversation. It is worth identifying which form you are trying to cultivate, because the practice looks slightly different.

Listening as a Foundation

The most consistent obstacle to empathy is the habit of listening to respond rather than listening to understand. When someone is speaking, many people are simultaneously constructing their reply, comparing the experience to something similar in their own life, or evaluating whether the other person's reaction seems proportionate. None of these are inherently bad, but they pull attention away from the actual content of what is being communicated. Developing empathy starts with learning to stay with what someone is saying without immediately processing it through your own lens. This means sitting with discomfort when someone describes a reality that is unfamiliar to you rather than quickly assimilating it into your existing framework. Asking follow-up questions that invite more specificity, what was that like for you, what was hardest about it, helps both parties. The person sharing feels genuinely heard. You receive more information that expands your actual understanding.

Perspective-Taking as a Practice

Empathy is also built outside of direct conversation, through the deliberate practice of imagining other people's circumstances. Fiction is a well-documented route. Research from the New School for Social Research found that readers of literary fiction, characterized by complex characters with rich inner lives, scored significantly higher on measures of theory of mind and cognitive empathy than those who primarily read nonfiction or genre fiction. The effect appeared to be connected to the sustained practice of inhabiting perspectives unlike one's own. This does not mean you need to read more novels, though it is not a bad idea. It means that any practice of perspective-taking, trying to genuinely understand how a situation looks from where someone else is standing, builds the same cognitive muscle.

The Tangent About Empathy Fatigue

People who work in caregiving professions, social work, healthcare, teaching, often describe something called empathy fatigue. The experience of absorbing other people's distress without adequate recovery becomes depleting to the point of numbness. This is worth noting because it suggests that empathy without boundaries is not sustainable. Developing empathy does not mean becoming a vessel for everyone else's pain. It means increasing your capacity to genuinely connect while also knowing how to return to your own equilibrium. Boundaries and empathy are not opposites.

Small Daily Practices

Ask questions you do not already know the answer to when you are with people you think you know well. Long-term relationships develop grooves and you can stop actually seeing someone when you think you understand them. Curiosity is the engine of empathy. Notice your physical response during hard conversations. Your body often registers discomfort before your mind acknowledges it, and that discomfort is frequently information about a moment of genuine contact with another person's reality. A study from the University of Michigan found that empathy levels in college students declined measurably between 1979 and 2009, with the sharpest drop occurring after 2000. The researchers connected this to shifts in social environment rather than personality. Which is another way of saying that empathy is environmentally sensitive. You can shape yours.