My first training in stress reduction through empathy came from my dear Grandma Laura. With Grandma Laura the force of empathy was strong. However, she came from a time and place, prior to the Internet, that did not require much formal education. 

My Grandma Laura may actually have believed that getting caught in the rain caused upper respiratory infections such as the common cold. She was happy to make the chicken soup to sooth my sneezes and colds, and she endorsed chicken soup as the treatment of choice for the common cold. 

Grandma was relying on common sense—and a wisdom that is all-too-rare in our own time. She noted that people who were physically stressed out by exposure to cold and wet weather succumbed to the common cold. She also observed that rest and warm, nourishing liquids—chicken soup—provided relief to the sneezing, sniffling, suffering survivor until the cold had run its natural course. 

I acknowledge the book Chicken Soup for the Soul. I stopped counting how many had been published in the series when the number hit eighteen. ^[i] Keep up the great work! The point here is that chicken soup, delivered in the proper context, reduces stress; and so it reduces the symptoms of inflammation (runny nose and so on) that occur when the immune system fights back against infection. 

Thus, empathy is compared to chicken soup. It has also been compared to sinking back into a hot bath, and taking the “healing waters” as part of a spa treatment. We shall work with all these metaphors. We shall also continue the work begun in Chapter Four with evidence-based, peer-reviewed, scientific publications that the benefits of empathy for the recipient are closely related to stress reduction. First, some background. 

My Grandma may not actually have had the distinction “immune system.” This distinction provides what we call the “confounding variable” in “Getting caught in the rain causes the common cold.” Of course, the rain does not cause the common cold. The rhino virus causes the common cold. What getting caught in the rain does is reduce the body’s immune system’s defense against viruses such as the rhino virus that already live in the body. 

The sneezing, sniffling, and suffering are the inflammation that occur when the body’s immune system is mobilized and fights back against the virus by producing the bodily defenses called “antibodies,” sending them to the site of the infection (i.e., the nose) to disrupt the viral attack. Antibodies are doing battle against the attacking viruses, the antigens. The result, at thirty thousand feet, is that the person experiences all the annoying symptoms of a head cold. 

In my case, Grandma was spot on in correlating getting wet and physically exhausted by the storm with coming down with a cold. We forgive her lack of scientific rigor. After all, she was a world class cook, even if an unsung one until now, not a immunologist. 

A word of caution. The distinction between “body and mind” is already embedded into our modern science, our thinking, our way of relating to other people, and our way of relating to ourselves. 

We are not going to undo centuries of distinguishing mind and body in this book. Still, we may usefully recall one philosopher’s (Ludwig Wittgenstein’s) anecdote: “The human body is the best picture of the soul.”^[ii] Keep that in mind. 

A small set of practices such as receiving empathy, meditation (mindfulness), Yoga, and Tai Chi Chuan, promote recovery and well-being in reducing inflammation. The solution then is a hot bath? A spa treatment? Don’t laugh. There are many less useful interventions available. The limitation of a spa treatment is that it provides symptom relief, not a long-term solution. After the benefits of the spa treatment wear off in a couple of weeks, the person is right back where she or he started. The difference between empathy and a hot bath—granted that both are relaxing—is that empathy provides for structural change to the person’s personality, expanding resilience, emotional stability, and relatedness. Advantage empathy: empathy is superior to a spa treatment for the soul. How is this so? 

Today it is fashionable to say that whatever benefits a person, whether Prozac or mindfulness, rewires the brain. In plain English, practicing empathy, receiving empathy, being empathic, also rewires the brain, that is, it builds new habits. 

Empathy builds new habits in relationships—in engaging in listening to the other person, in interacting across personal boundaries, in reducing conflict, in an expanding toleration of upsets in relatedness, and in building a community of engaged neighbors. 

Expanding one’s empathy enhances one’s ability to deal with personal dynamics in friendships, intimate relationships, and in groups such as the workplace, school, and community. 

Expanding empathy enhances a person’s stability, strength of character, and emotional equilibrium in the face of destabilizing upsets. It enables one to be with people and events that are difficult. Expanding one’s empathy enables one effectively to get results where previously one would have experienced failure and frustration—and the resulting stress. 

With acknowledgement to Donald Hebb, “neurons that fire together wire together.” “Rewiring” is the new buzzword for “building habits.”

If the ideas in biology that we explore in this and the following posts are a tad technical, I am unapologetic. 

Psychopharmacologists and practitioners of behavioral interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been less than charitable in engaging with the status of the evidence on behalf of empathy and empathy-related interventions. “Dismissive” is the word that comes to mind; and yet the evidence-based, peer-reviewed distinctions that are engaged in this engagement with empathy cannot be dismissed. Those with economic and territorial incentives to provide a complex and expensive solution do not necessarily welcome a less complex or less expensive one such as empathy. 

The results are now in. Substantial evidence is available of what most people with common sense have appreciated all along, that empathy and being treated empathically are good for people’s health and well-being. Stress reduction works. Empathy works. The work we do in this chapter enables us to expand our understanding of why. 

Stress reduction practices such as meditation, Yoga, and Tai Chi do not necessarily work in the same way as empathy. (Full disclosure: I practiced Tai Chi weekly for four years, but have limited experience with the others.) 

I hypothesize that all these practices create a distance between one’s experience and one’s cognitive and emotional processes. This distance opens up a place for empathy to expand and authentic relatedness to occur. 

When this “distance” between one’s experience and one’s cognitive and emotional responses becomes habitual—today we would say “encoded in the neurons”—then the change is structural and, thus, long lasting and enduring. How does this work? 

The answer to the question awaits the next episode, the next post, in this series due out next week. Stand by for update!

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Notes

^[i] Jack Canfield, Sally Burbank, Terri Elders, and Amy Newmark. (2003). Chicken Soup for the Soul. New York: Soul Publishing (Simon and Shuster).

^[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein. (1951). Philosophical Investigations, tr. E. Anscombe. London: Basil Blackwell, 1968.Blackwell, 1968.

IMAGE CREDIT: Creative Commons Attribution: Logeshwaran Rajendran

(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project