Not Thinking, Not Problem-Solving: Scientists Say This Skill Can Help Promote Good Health

Different people experience empathy to different degrees. Sociopaths, for example, don't experience a strong sense of empathy, and they're often obliged to pretend that they feel compassion for their peers in order to fit in. On the other end of the spectrum, "empaths" are people who experience an overwhelming amount of empathy. Although not a formal diagnosis, empaths are able to empathize with others so strongly that they end up absorbing other people's emotions too intensely, leading to potential emotional problems. However, most people fall towards the middle of the spectrum, where a healthy amount of empathy serves the fundamental need for social connection. Emerging research suggests that this fundamental skill can improve your overall health.

Empathy has been found to increase happiness, trigger hormones that protect the heart, and increase longevity. All these benefits are derived from the same evolutionary driver: Empathy lowers our survival stress. Human beings' survival strategy depends on social networks and cooperation, so the more social support we have, the greater our chances of surviving an individual injury, lack of food, lack of knowledge, or need for attention. Thus, psychologists believe that empathy emerged as an adaptation early on in our evolution, when our ancestors formed cooperative tribal groups to survive as the apex predators of the land. The same pattern of empathy is found in the highly social pods of orca whales, which are, uncoincidentally, the apex predators of the oceans.

Empathy is therefore a survival strategy, which is why practicing it fills our brains with "feel-good" chemical rewards, such as dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and the "love-chemical" oxytocin. We're rewarded with the same hormones when we talk on the phone (a baby boomer habit that's similarly linked to better mental health), since our brains encourage socialization. Put simply, empathy lowers survival stress by ensuring that we're connected to our social supporters, and the health benefits are extensive.

Empathy may lower stress in the long run, but it also gives our brains and emotions a workout. These two forms of empathy are distinguished as "cognitive empathy" and "emotional empathy." Cognitive empathy requires a nuanced understanding of what others are feeling based on social cues like tone of voice, speech patterns, body language, and facial expressions. By putting these social cues into the context of the person's (supposed) troubles, the brain pieces together a model of that person's experience to determine how it should respond compassionately.

Studies have shown that cognitive empathy lights up the prefrontal cortex, exercising emotional regulation and mental flexibility. As such, there's been an assumed positive correlation between cognitive empathy and intelligence — people with higher IQs might generally be more skilled at accurately calculating others' emotions.

However, a 2025 research study from Paris found that the connection between emotional empathy and intelligence isn't as direct as previously believed. Also called affective empathy, emotional empathy skips the cognitive modeling stage and jumps right into internalizing other's emotional states. Someone with high emotional empathy may feel inclined to cry when they see another person crying, even before learning the cause of the emotional distress.

The personal benefits of both types of empathy are in line with their names: Cognitive empathy exercises the part of the brain that intellectually models the perspectives of others, while emotional empathy bypasses the intellect entirely to mirror the emotions of others. Practicing both helps soothe our evolutionary drive to socially connect with others. This reduction of survival stress is healthy, especially in today's age of social isolation where Gen-Z "loneliness epidemics" are sending people to an early grave. If there's ever been a time to practice empathy, it's now.