Empathy is not a fixed personality trait you either have or lack. Your brain physically changes in response to empathy-related training, with measurable increases in activity in regions tied to understanding and sharing other people’s feelings.1PubMed Central. Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training That means empathy can be built deliberately, much like a skill. The seven exercises below are grounded in research rather than self-help intuition, and each one targets a slightly different facet of what it means to understand another person.
Two Kinds of Empathy Worth Knowing About
Before diving into the exercises, it helps to know that researchers split empathy into two broad categories. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking or feeling, to mentally step into their shoes. Affective empathy is the ability to actually feel an emotional echo of what the other person is going through, to share their sadness, excitement, or pain at a gut level. These two forms rely on different brain networks and can be disrupted independently of each other.2PubMed Central. The balance between feeling and knowing: affective and cognitive empathy are reflected in the brain’s intrinsic functional dynamics Some of the exercises below lean more toward training cognitive empathy, others toward affective empathy, and a few work on both. Knowing the difference helps you pick the ones most relevant to your own blind spots.
Exercise 1: Active Listening
Most people listen while silently preparing what they want to say next. Active listening flips that habit. The practice is straightforward: when someone is talking, your job is to fully attend to what they are saying, reflect it back, and ask clarifying questions rather than jumping in with your own experiences or advice. Research on counseling settings has found that active listening and empathy reinforce each other, creating conditions that allow emotional intimacy and relational repair to happen.3International Journal of Social Science and Human Research. The Role of Active Listening and Empathy in Christian Marriage Counselling
To practice this outside a therapy room, try the following during an everyday conversation: let the other person finish their thought completely before you speak, paraphrase what they said in your own words (“It sounds like you felt overlooked in that meeting”), and ask one open-ended follow-up question. Resist the urge to relate it back to yourself. Over time, this pattern trains your attention to focus on other people’s internal states, which is the cognitive side of empathy in action. The exercise is deceptively simple, and that simplicity is what makes it repeatable enough to become a genuine habit.
Exercise 2: Read Literary Fiction
Reading a well-crafted novel is one of the most accessible empathy exercises available, but the research comes with an important caveat: it only works if you get genuinely absorbed in the story. Two experiments showed that people who read fiction and became emotionally transported into the narrative scored higher on empathy measures a week later. Readers who were not transported actually showed lower empathy afterward, and reading nonfiction had no effect either way.4PubMed Central. How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation In other words, scanning a chapter while half-watching television is unlikely to do anything for you. The mechanism seems tied to the imaginative work of inhabiting a character’s mind, interpreting their motivations, and predicting their decisions.
A classroom study found that students who engaged with young adult fiction dealing with controversial or emotionally complex topics showed increasing ability to interpret characters’ emotions and decisions, consistent with strengthened perspective-taking skills.5East European Journal of Psycholinguistics. Reading beyond language: Young adult fiction, perspective-taking, and theory of mind in the EFL classroom The practical takeaway is to choose fiction that features characters whose lives differ meaningfully from your own, and to read in conditions where you can actually sink into it. A novel about a person navigating a world you have never experienced, read with sustained attention over days or weeks, is a remarkably low-cost empathy workout.
Exercise 3: Loving-Kindness Meditation
Loving-kindness meditation, sometimes called metta, involves directing wishes of well-being toward yourself, then expanding those wishes outward to people you know, to acquaintances, and eventually to strangers or people you find difficult. A theoretical model based on neuroscience research proposes that this kind of practice can enhance brain systems involved in simulating another person’s emotional state, taking their perspective, and regulating your own emotional response in the process.6PubMed Central. The neural mediators of kindness-based meditation: a theoretical model
A typical session lasts ten to twenty minutes. You sit quietly, bring someone to mind, and silently repeat phrases like “May you be safe,” “May you be happy,” “May you be free from suffering.” As the weeks pass, you extend those phrases to people who annoy you, then to people you have never met. The exercise builds the affective side of empathy specifically, the feeling-with-others component that can atrophy when daily life is busy or stressful. The fact that it starts with self-directed kindness is deliberate: research on therapists has found that self-regulation practices, including meditation, help prevent the emotional burnout that can occur when empathy becomes overwhelming.7Mindfulness. Psychotherapists’ Mindful Awareness and Self-Regulation in the Prevention of Empathic Distress
Exercise 4: Mindful Body Awareness
This exercise may seem less intuitive than the others, but there is a growing body of evidence that awareness of your own bodily signals, such as your heartbeat, breathing, and muscle tension, is closely linked to how well you empathize with others. One study found that tuning into your own heartbeat before observing someone else’s situation significantly boosted neural activity in brain regions associated with empathy.8PubMed Central. Interoceptive awareness enhances neural activity during empathy Separate research concluded that the more accurately people perceive their own bodily states, the more compassion they feel for others and the more intense they rate another person’s pain.9PubMed. Perceiving one’s body shapes empathy
The connection makes sense if you think about it: empathy often begins with a bodily sensation, a tightening in your chest when you see someone in distress, a mirrored wince when someone describes an injury. If you are disconnected from those signals, you miss the initial spark. To practice this, try a simple body scan: sit for five minutes, close your eyes, and systematically notice sensations from your feet up through your head. The goal is not relaxation (though that may happen) but sensitivity to your own internal landscape, which then serves as the raw material for understanding someone else’s. Research on perspective-taking tasks has found that people with higher empathic ability are more influenced by body-based cues during social cognition tasks, reinforcing the idea that the body is an underappreciated gateway to empathy.10PubMed Central. Interoception and Empathy Impact Perspective Taking
Exercise 5: Seek Out Outgroup Contact
One of empathy’s frustrating tendencies is that it flows most easily toward people who look, think, and live like you do. Deliberately spending time with people from groups you do not belong to is one of the most powerful correctives. Research on intergroup contact has found strong associations between empathic feelings experienced during specific interactions with outgroup members and broader empathic attitudes toward that outgroup as a whole.11Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. Affective generalization from intergroup contact: Associations between contact-related and outgroup-related empathy, anxiety, and trust In plain language, the empathy you build in a specific conversation with a person from a different background tends to spill over into how you feel about that group more broadly.
The research also suggests that the quality and closeness of these interactions matters. Superficial contact, like standing next to someone in an elevator, does not produce the same generalization effect. What helps is forming more intimate connections: sharing meals, collaborating on projects, having real conversations. The positive emotional reactions that arise during these encounters generalize outward. This does not require any special technique beyond the willingness to put yourself in unfamiliar social settings and to show up with genuine curiosity about another person’s experience.
Exercise 6: Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking
If you have access to a VR headset, perspective-taking simulations represent one of the most direct empathy exercises researchers have tested. In one study, participants who experienced a VR scenario from the perspective of another person reported significantly more effort to take that specific person’s perspective afterward compared to a control group.12PubMed Central. Virtual reality perspective-taking increases cognitive empathy for specific others Other research has shown that VR experiences can shift not just empathy but broader attitudes and stereotypes toward outgroup members, with empathy itself acting as the mechanism driving those attitude changes.13PubMed Central. All it takes is empathy: how virtual reality perspective-taking influences intergroup attitudes and stereotypes
One particularly interesting finding is that VR empathy can transfer across contexts. Participants who experienced an ocean acidification simulation, for instance, showed increased concern not just for the environment but for an unrelated social target, people experiencing homelessness. And people who experienced what it was like to become homeless signed a petition supporting homeless individuals at significantly higher rates than participants in a control condition.14Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Effect of Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking on Related and Unrelated Contexts That said, the transfer did not work in all directions, so there are limits to how far the effect reaches. VR is not yet ubiquitous, but if you have access to perspective-taking simulations through a library, museum, or workplace training program, they are worth seeking out.
Exercise 7: Narrative Writing
Writing a story from the perspective of someone you might normally judge is a surprisingly effective empathy intervention. In two experiments, participants who wrote narratives from the point of view of a person engaging in a stigmatized health behavior showed increased empathy, more perspective-taking, more positive attitudes toward that person, and a shift toward external explanations for the behavior, meaning they were more likely to consider circumstances rather than character flaws.15PubMed Central. Encouraging perspective taking: Using narrative writing to induce empathy for others engaging in negative health behaviors
You can try this on your own. Think of someone whose behavior you find frustrating or hard to understand, maybe a coworker, a public figure, or even a stranger you read about in the news. Then write a short first-person narrative imagining their inner life: what pressures they face, what fears keep them up at night, what they are hoping for. The exercise works not because you arrive at the “right” explanation for their behavior but because the act of imaginative construction forces your brain through the perspective-taking motions it might otherwise skip. Research using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a widely used empathy questionnaire, has confirmed that narrative engagement with fiction can trigger increases in both affective and cognitive empathy.16INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR. WOULD EMPATHY GROWS THROUGH SHORT STORY? AN INTERPERSONAL REACTIVITY INDEX ANALYSIS
Why Attribution Habits Quietly Undermine Empathy
Even if you practice all seven exercises, a common cognitive pattern can quietly undo the work. When you see someone being socially excluded or struggling with a problem, your brain quickly generates an explanation for why. If that explanation is internal, “they brought it on themselves,” “they are just that kind of person,” your empathy drops and so does your desire to connect with them. When the explanation is external, “they were dealt a bad hand,” “the system failed them,” empathy rises, and you actually want to be closer to them. Experimental research has demonstrated this pattern directly: manipulating whether people attributed someone’s exclusion to internal versus external causes shifted empathy levels and affiliation desires accordingly.17PubMed Central. Ostracized but why? Effects of attributions and empathy on connecting with the socially excluded
This is worth paying attention to because it means empathy exercises can be undermined by a snap judgment that happens before you even try to empathize. Noticing when you are making an internal attribution about someone, “they are lazy,” “they do not care,” and pausing to consider external explanations is not naivety. It is clearing a cognitive roadblock so the empathy you have been building can actually reach the person in front of you.
Does Empathy Training Actually Work Outside the Lab?
A fair question. These exercises come from controlled research settings, and you might wonder whether the effects hold up in real-world professional environments. An umbrella review of 42 reviews covering empathy training in healthcare found that about 71% of reviews concluded training led to positive outcomes, including increased patient satisfaction, better communication between providers and patients, and measurable increases in provider empathy levels. Roughly a quarter of reviews had mixed or inconclusive findings, and only about 2% found negative outcomes.18PubMed Central. Empathy training in healthcare: an umbrella review A separate systematic review of qualitative studies found that empathy-focused training benefits personal growth, professional development, and patient care from the perspective of the practitioners and students themselves.19PubMed. Experiences of empathy training in healthcare: A systematic review of qualitative studies
Healthcare is one of the most studied contexts, but the underlying mechanisms, perspective-taking, emotional regulation, narrative engagement, are not specific to medicine. The evidence is strongest when training programs combine multiple approaches rather than relying on a single technique, which is another reason to experiment with several of the exercises listed here rather than picking just one.
How Empathy Shifts as You Age
If you are in your forties or fifties and feel like you understand people less well than you used to, you are not imagining it. Research consistently shows that cognitive empathy, the ability to read and understand other people’s mental states, tends to decline with age. Affective empathy, the ability to feel what others feel or to feel compassion for them, tends to hold steady or even increase.20PubMed Central. Impact of Aging on Empathy: Review of Psychological and Neural Mechanisms A brain-imaging study confirmed this pattern, finding age-related declines in cognitive empathy for negative situations specifically, while positive affective empathy remained similar across age groups.21PubMed Central. Age-related differences in negative cognitive empathy but similarities in positive affective empathy
An experience-sampling study that tracked people’s daily empathic feelings in real life added nuance to this picture. Feelings of empathy tended to increase from age 18 through the mid-forties, then showed a tendency to decrease after 55.22Scientific Reports. Investigating adult age differences in real-life empathy, prosociality, and well-being using experience sampling This matters for exercise selection: if you are an older adult, you might focus more on the exercises that specifically target cognitive empathy, like narrative writing, fiction reading, and active listening, since your affective empathy may already be intact or stronger than average. Younger adults who feel emotions intensely but struggle to articulate what others are thinking might lean toward the same cognitive exercises for different reasons.
Culture and the Empathy Baseline
Your cultural background shapes how much empathy you tend to express and in what ways. A large study of over 104,000 adults across 63 countries found that countries scoring higher in empathy also tended to score higher in collectivism, agreeableness, self-esteem, and prosocial behavior.23Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Differences in Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking Across 63 Countries This does not mean people in individualist cultures are incapable of empathy, but it does mean the social norms around expressing and acting on empathic feelings vary widely. If you grew up in a culture that emphasized emotional restraint or self-reliance, some of these exercises, especially loving-kindness meditation and narrative writing, may feel awkward at first. That discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It may just mean you are working against a stronger cultural headwind, which arguably makes deliberate practice more valuable.
The cross-cultural data also suggests that empathy is not purely an individual trait but is shaped by the social environment. Surrounding yourself with people who value emotional attunement, joining communities that practice vulnerability, or simply naming empathy as something you care about can shift the norms in your immediate world, making it easier to sustain the habits these exercises are designed to build.
When Empathy Becomes Overwhelming
It is worth acknowledging that more empathy is not always better, at least not without the ability to regulate what you feel. Therapists, nurses, and others in high-empathy professions know this firsthand. Research on psychotherapists has identified specific self-regulation strategies that prevent empathic distress: mindful body awareness within sessions, a decentered perspective (observing your emotional reactions without being consumed by them), and socializing and meditation outside of work.7Mindfulness. Psychotherapists’ Mindful Awareness and Self-Regulation in the Prevention of Empathic Distress The brain training study mentioned at the top of this article found that empathy training alone actually increased negative affect in response to watching people suffer, which underscores the point: feeling more without the ability to manage what you feel can be counterproductive.1PubMed Central. Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training
This is why several of the exercises above are regulation-adjacent. Body scans and loving-kindness meditation do not just increase empathy; they also build the emotional infrastructure to handle it. If you already feel overwhelmed by other people’s emotions, the answer is probably not to add more empathy-boosting exercises. Start with the ones that strengthen your ability to be present without absorbing everything: mindful body awareness, loving-kindness meditation, and decentered perspective-taking. Build the container before pouring more into it.