Empathy – The Forgotten Ability: Learn How To Tolerate Other People
Do you sometimes or often find other people annoying? They just don’t get it no matter what you say or do. Maybe they post something on social media that gets you all worked up. You get angry or upset.
Well, my friend, you are not alone.
In the age of social media, it’s easier than ever to get frustrated, annoyed or angry over what other people are doing. Not to mention getting sad or anxious about the state of the world: War, climate change, violations of human rights, just to name a few.
Doom scrolling is all the rage these days.
I bet you know that it is not in any way beneficial for you to get angry or upset about what others are telling you. Fear and anger are natural reactions that we have, but prolonged fear or anger is very detrimental for your mental and physical health.
You also possess a superpower called empathy, which allows you to tune in to how other people feel. Why do I call it a forgotten ability? Because we are naturally empathetic, but if you think you are not, you have forgotten how to use it.
To uncover this forgotten ability, let’s try to understand:
- Why people are acting in the way they do.
- What you can do about it.
- How you can choose to act in a totally different way.
- What empathy is and how to train it.
Why Is There SO Much Anger?
Diving first into the main cause of anger and frustration, I believe the underlying cause lies in the constructs of our society.
I’m not at all surprised that there’s so much fear anger going around. The same mechanisms in our society that create anxiety and depression cause great confusion among us. We are told by everybody (usually with best intentions) what we should do to be happy and successful, but many of the things contradict the way we feel inside.
Take happiness for example: I argue that true happiness comes from deciding and expressing who you want to be. Yet you are told that there are certain things you should do in order to be happy, e.g. get a college degree, get a high paying job, start a family etc.
When these two things contradict – the one you know intuitively and the one society imprints on you – you get frustrated, sad or angry.
I’ll present another example from my previous blogpost:
Fun and games are a natural part of us. Humans are inclined towards playing games and having fun, but we have learned to ignore it. We are told not to be childish and act responsibly, which usually means act in a “serious” manner. Fun and games are not considered professional.
This, again, goes against what we know intuitively. All too often we are told not to express what is naturally found inside of us. As you can guess, all sorts of negative emotions follow, like feelings of anxiety and depression.
Disconnection From Our True Self
All of this ties in with the “junk values” that are dominating our society. We have created a world, where we have forgotten what’s really important and concentrate on things that we think will bring us happiness, but instead often cause sadness, anxiety, frustration and depression.
We have lost touch with our inner selves, our “true” selves. The true nature of a human being is that of love, joy and compassion.
We are being taught what to think instead of how to think. No one explains to us how to control or express our emotions in a healthy way, rather we are told to hide them and repress them.
Empathy should be a part of any school’s curriculum. Instead we learn that only the strong survive, it’s eat or be eaten – survival of the fittest.
I’ve seen 5-year old children who are better at resolving their differences than adults. Somewhere during our adolescence we lose our way.
I know this may sound depressing, but it’s only meant to shake us up a bit. In order to change things we must stop lying to ourselves and accept what is. In relation to what we say we want, namely happiness and world peace, the way we are doing things now is not working. But that’s a topic for another day and I will get back to this in more detail.
You Always Have A Choice
My point is that it’s the way we live that causes us to stress and worry, be angry and frustrated. This frustration we pour on others, because we have not learned how to control and express our emotions.
So what can you do when other people get on your nerves or you find yourself angry or frustrated for any other reason?
The first and most important thing to remember, is that you always have a choice. You control your feelings. You have, at best, very limited control over what others are thinking, saying or doing, but you can control what you think, say or do. So choose your response consciously.
The key is to be aware of what you think and how you feel. Awareness gives you the possibility to think another thought and feel a different feeling. There are resources here that can help.
There Must Be Options From Which To Choose
Consider this: The way a magnet has two poles, positive and negative, so does everything else in life. A thing can exist only in relation to its opposite. There can be no hot without cold, high without low, fast without slow, “good” without “bad” (whatever you wish to label good or bad).
Therefore, you can not exist without something that is not you also existing. What I mean by that, is that whatever thought you may have, someone will have the exact opposite thought. Differing opinions are required for you to be who you are. Without the things that are not you, you cannot exist at all.
Consequently, you should try to bless the differences that we have, for without them you could not be who you want to be. How can you choose if there’s nothing to choose from?
Anger Is An Expression Of Fear
Others are acting in the way they do, because of how they feel inside. They are expressing how they feel about themselves. What, and more importantly how, they say things may have nothing to do with you. An important spiritual wisdom is, that anger is fear expressed.
If someone is angry at you (or something or someone else) it means they are afraid. Usually it is fear (real or often imagined) of losing something: losing money, power, control, possessions… the list goes on.
This applies to you too. If you are angry, take a deep breath and ask yourself: What am I afraid of? Seek to confront your fears and be freed of anger. Fear is a construct of our minds beneficial for survival but largely unnecessary in the modern world.
If you don’t accept the gift, then who has the gift?
If someone is trying to make you angry, that can hardly be compared to receiving a present. The analogy might be poor in that sense, but as it is with a gift, you can always choose if you want to receive it or not.
Remember the first point: You control your feelings, you always have a choice. If you choose to not get angry or upset, then who is angry or upset? If you don’t accept the gift, who has the gift?
It is the giver that is then stuck with the gift of course. The one who is angry is still angry and only hurting themselves with it. You are unaffected, because you chose not to accept the gift.
Anger Is Detrimental To Your Health
Feeling anger prevents you from thinking straight, not to mention the multitude of negative effects it has on your mind and body. Understanding what being constantly angry does to your mind and body may help you want to express and control your anger in a healthy way.
Prolonged or repressed anger can cause:
- Depression
- High blood pressure
- Heart attack
- Stroke
- Blood clots
- Slowed metabolism
- Excessive eating
This ties to the previous point: You are angry and if you take that on others, they may choose to react in a different way than you thought. What if they don’t get upset? It is you who suffers from being angry, not the other one.
Of course this does not take into account the extreme cases, where uninhibited anger manifests as a physical violence towards another person. All the more reason to learn to express anger in a healthy way.But by far in most cases of anger, you are only hurting yourself if you are angry.
Change Your Perception
Your perception of things is everything. Your point of view determines how you think and how you think determines your beliefs. Therefore I often bring up ideas that allow you to change your perception.
Whether you choose to change your perception or not is of course up to you. There is no right or wrong way to think and I always encourage you to go deep within yourself and find your own answers.
Which brings us handily to the point. Who else would have the answers?
If you consider, that the universe started with a big bang, it means that at some point back in time everything was quite literally one. Everything that is now was condensed to a point the size of a grain of sand. This point then expanded to make everything that now exists.
We are all made of the same materials. Quite literally, you and the others are made of the same stuff.
You See Yourself In Others
That being said, it is most likely that the thing that annoys you about another, is a thing you dislike about yourself. You possess that same trait, that the other is demonstrating, and since you do not like that about yourself, you get annoyed when another is demonstrating that trait. Go within to find the reason why another person may annoy you and seek to correct the cause.
“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.”
Benjamin Franklin – Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1756
We are not separate from one another – only different. The whole universe is fundamentally made of the same “stuff” acting differently and thus appearing to be made of separate things. This illusion, that there is someone else doing things to you, causes anger and sadness.
If you can accept that you are not separate from anything (only appearing to be different), then you can stop being a victim and start being in control of everything in your life.
When you understand this, then you understand that there is nothing to fear and nothing to lose, and you will be able to let go of anger and sadness.
Things That Can Help
Here are three things you can do to let go of anger and be more empathetic.
1. Deep Breathing
Breathing is most of the time something that you do unconsciously, but you can also control your breathing. It is a metaphorical gateway between your consciously operated and unconsciously operated nervous systems.
Breathe deeply in and out at least three times to tell your nervous system to start relaxing your body. Breathing deep is a very effective method to relax, no matter how you are feeling at the moment.
2. Avoid Getting Into An Argument
More detailed: The only way to win an argument, is to avoid getting into one. This is a teaching that I learned a long time ago from a book called “How to win friends & influence people”, by Dale Carnegie. It has helped me tremendously in my professional life and life in general. I suggest you take this teaching into serious consideration.
You may have noticed, that the more you push, the more people push back. That’s because people don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear the truth as they understand it. So let others think what they think, no matter if you agree or not.
Obviously if it is a question of defending your core values, like human rights, then an argument may be necessary. But if it’s a matter of anything other than the most important things, just let it go. You’ll be much easier off and so will the other person.
Dale Carnegie quoted Ben Franklin (yes, another one from Ben) in his book and I think this sums up the point pretty well:
“If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes;
but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.”
3. Practice Empathy
Empathy is putting yourself in the place of another. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, somewhere during adolescence we lose our way. And by “lose our way” I mean that children learn empathy from a very young age and the human brain is naturally empathetic, but we may forget how to use this skill.
You have “mirror neurons” in your brain which connect you like Wi-Fi with people you observe. Your brain automatically tunes into other people’s emotions, movements and intentions. We are naturally very good at reading other people’s emotions, this just happens unconsciously.
If you are not empathetic now, it means you have forgotten.
So you don’t even have to learn empathy, you just have to remember!
Exercises For Empathy
1. Meditate. Again, meditation proves its usefulness. Try to quiet your chattering brain, and tune in to your emotional wisdom. In truth, you can’t quiet your mind, because it is always on, but you can learn to distance yourself from your thoughts. Deep breathing is also useful for meditation, so learn to focus on your breath too. Check out my tips for meditation here.
2. Practice your awareness. Stop and watch & listen to what happens around you in a social environment. You can practice during meetings where you don’t have to talk much or concentrate on a movie for 30 minutes.
3. Ask yourself: what am I feeling. You may already recognise this practice if you’ve delved into the beliefs page of this website. Tuning in to how you feel is a good way to practice empathy too. As we discovered, you see in others parts of yourself. To put it another way: Your emotions are in part a reflection of what another person is feeling. Understanding your feelings will help you empathize when you are with others.
4. Test your emotional skills with another person. Ask someone to have a discussion with you and try to read how they might feel. You can also tell them how you feel and see if they experience the same emotions. Do this occasionally and you will start to develop your “emotional muscles”.
Since we’ve already had two quotes from Ben Franklin, let’s end with a third:
“When you’re good to others, you’re best to yourself.”
Conclusion
We all have a “superpower” called empathy. It allows us to tune in other people’s emotions and intentions.
Our brains are naturally empathetic. If you feel like you are not empathetic, you have forgotten how to use the skill.
You can control your feelings and choose how you react to others.
If you find other people annoying, seek to find and fix in yourself the things that annoy you in others.
You can release anger and fear by:
- Breathing deep
- Avoiding arguments
- Practicing empathy
Empathy can be practiced in following ways:
- Meditate
- Practice your awareness
- Ask yourself: what am I feeling.
- Test your emotional skills with another person.
Disclaimer
The entire contents of this blog are based upon the opinions of the author. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The information in this blog is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care professional before trying any of the products or methods based on this content. I cannot guarantee that you will be free of stress, anxiety or depression, or that you will be happy. I simply want to share with you what I have discovered during my twenty years of seeking happiness and what has worked for me may not work for you.
