Why is compassion so powerful?

Like many forms of spirituality and meditation, compassion practice has

been shown by research to enhance your health, psychological well-being, relationships, and sense of
purpose. In The Science of Compassion: Getting Started, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal lays out
what to expect in the audio-only The Science of Compassion series. She presents a practical workshop to
help you understand what makes compassion work, and how you can cultivate it in your life. Kelly
examines the many benefits of compassion, not just to those who receive it, but also to those who give
it, and to all who witness the act of compassion in action. Over the course of this series, she provides
tools and guidance for overcoming emotional fatigue, empathic distress, self-judgment, and other
obstacles that can keep you closed down and afraid to reach out.

Skills covered

• Emotional IntelligenceCompassion

• Getting started with the science of compassion

- [Announcer] This is an audio course, no need to watch, just listen. Welcome to the latest addition to
LinkedIn Learning, podcasts. We've curated some of the best business podcasts and made them even
easier to listen to. Each episode is split into sections, use the links in the contents area to skip to
whichever section you like. We're always looking for new ways to help you learn, and we appreciate your
feedback. Thanks for listening. (gentle guitar music) - [Presenter] Sounds True presents, The Science of
Compassion, a modern approach for cultivating empathy, love and connection with Health Psychologist
and Stanford University Lecturer, Kelly McGonigal. And now session one, our program introduction and
overview. (gentle guitar music) - [Kelly] Welcome to the science of compassion, whenever I begin a new
journey, I find it so helpful to connect to the heart and I wonder if, as you settle in to listen to the science
and the stories of compassion, if you might join me in taking a few breaths and connecting to your heart.
Wherever you are, dropping your awareness to the area around your physical heart and bringing your
attention to how it feels to breathe. Perhaps imagining that you could inhale into your heart space, and
exhale out of the heart. Taking a deep breath into the heart and breathing out of the heart. And taking
one more breath, and settling into an awareness of this heart space. Whenever I teach a class or a
workshop about compassion, I usually ask people to remember a time that they experienced
compassion, whether it was a time that they were the recipient of someone else's compassion or a time
when they felt compassion for someone else. And then I ask them to share those stories. And I thought
that as we begin this journey together, I might share with you an experience that I had recently, that was
for me, a profound experience of compassion. This happened about a month ago and I was on United
flight from Newark, New Jersey to Denver. I was on my way to give a talk on the neuroscience of change
to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and one thing you should know about me, is I
really don't like flying. I have a kind of phobia of flying and usually when I'm on a plane, from takeoff to
touchdown, I am tense, I am anxious, I am uncomfortable, I'm in a kind of state of existential dread, just
waiting for it to be over. And no matter how many times I fly, how many flights I take, that never really
seems to change, that experience of anxiety and dread on an airplane. So on this flight last month, it was
actually a plane that had two-by-two configurations, so two seats in each aisle and the person I was
sitting next to when we settled in, we said, hello, we did that kind of stranger nod and smile where you
acknowledge each other's existence and then kind of agree to ignore each other for the next four hours
of the flight. He was a tall man, maybe early to mid 40s. Seemed like a nice guy, but I was basically ready
to go into my airplane bubble and not really have any contact with him for the rest of the flight. So about
an hour into the flight, he received a call on his cell phone, which is actually something I'd never seen
before, and at first I was actually kind of irritated by it. I was thinking, "Ugh, this guy, he's going to be
talking on the phone." You know, how annoying, the plane was like the one last safe space from having
to listen to one-sided cell phone conversations. And then after a couple of minutes, he ended the call,
put the phone down on his tray table and burst into sobs. He actually collapsed, folded his arms on the
tray table, and he was just, his chest was heaving, his shoulders were moving up and down, he was
covering his face and I was stunned, right? This was a total shock. And there were two airline attendants
close to us and they were shocked too, they actually froze and I made eye contact with them, like, none
of us knew what to do. The airline attendants, they raced to the restroom and then they came out and
started shoving tissues and paper towels from the bathroom into this man's lap and into his face. And as
I sat there, sort of wondering what had happened, after an agonizing minute, he lifted his head and told
us he had just gotten the news that his son was brain dead. He was on that flight because his son had
been in an accident and he was on his way to see him in the hospital. And now he had just found out
that he was not on his way to the hospital to see his son, but as he put it, to tell the medical staff to pull
the tubes and donate his son's organs. (sighs) None of us knew what to say. The airline attendants, they
gave him a glass of water and an airsickness bag, to do something, and then they just disappeared. And I
asked this stranger, if he wanted a hand to hold, if he wanted a hug, if he wanted to talk, and I just kept
saying, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." "Is there anything I could do?" I asked him. And he said, "No," and he
said he didn't want to talk. He looked me right in the eyes and said, "There's nothing you can say." And
as we were looking at each other, tears were sliding down my cheeks and we were silent and just looking
at each other for another minute. And then all of a sudden he stopped crying, he put his headphones
back on and he resumed watching the in-flight movie that he'd been watching before he got that call,
which as far as I could tell, just involved things being blown up. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I
wanted to do something. This man had gone from being a complete stranger that I was planning to
ignore for four hours, to someone I now felt a strong sense of connection to, and I didn't want to go back
into my bubble of pretending that we weren't connected. So I started practicing a compassion
meditation called Tonglen, and this is a practice where you imagine breathing another person's suffering
into your heart, imagining that person suffering as a dark smoke or a thick cloud, and so I imagined his
suffering, his pain, as a thick cloud that I could breathe into my heart, and I remember thinking, "Hey, my
heart can hold this." And I sensed every breath I took, it felt like my heart was expanding, it felt like my
chest was swelling. And I imagined breathing that dark cloud in and I imagined breathing out clear air
and compassion. And as I imagined breathing compassion out of my heart, the words, "I love you, sir, I
love you, sir," kept running through my mind, which is kind of funny because those aren't the traditional
phrases you say, when you do compassion meditation or Tonglen. Normally, you would say things like,
"May you be free from suffering. May you know, peace." But all I kept thinking was, "I love you, sir, I love
you." And I don't even know what that sir was about. Maybe it was like a sense of wanting to
acknowledge that he was a stranger, that this wasn't my grief, and not wanting to intrude on his private
experience. But also I feel like it was wanting to show him some kind of respect. Like it was perfectly
dignified if he wanted to sob on a plane hurdling through the sky, because he was on his way to see his
son who was now brain dead. We had almost three hours left on the flight and I practiced Tonglen most
of that time, and every now and then, the man sitting next to me would start crying again, just for a
minute and then stop and go back to watching a movie. And in that three hours, in addition to practicing
Tonglen, I thought about the fact that his son would be donating organs that somehow in his own
suffering, this man had made a choice of offering compassion to others. That the man sitting next to me
had gotten the worst phone call of his life, it was possible that I'd actually witnessed the worst moment
of his life and that because of that call, there would be many people who would be getting what might
be the best call of their lives. A call they'd been desperately waiting for and praying for. That soon there
would be tears of joy and gratitude and relief because people would be receiving this man's son's
organs. And that these two opposites could be true at the same time, this horrendous loss and pain and
this miraculous hope. And although it's probably the least important thing that was happening in that
moment, I couldn't help but notice the absolute absence of my own anxiety. It was the most calm and
centered I'd ever felt on a flight, even when the pilot got on the loudspeaker, giving us warnings of a
snow storm in Denver and how turbulent the landing was going to be. Something had shifted. My
compassion for him had dissolved my fear, and I'd never experienced anything like that on a flight
before. I'm not sure that I did anything to actually relieve this man's suffering, but the experience stood
out to me as a really powerful, personal experience of compassion and I wanted to share it with you
because I think it actually is an example that really highlights a lot of the different dimensions of
compassion.

Compassion as an unfolding process

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- [Narrator] And the definition of compassion that I use in my work in studying compassion scientifically
and teaching people about compassion is that compassion is an unfolding process in our minds and in
our bodies that is in response to pain or suffering. That compassion begins when we become aware of
suffering, it could be another person suffering, it could be our own suffering. And as compassion unfolds
we have a sense of sharing in or being affected in some way by that suffering. We may feel a sense of
distress about the fact that someone is suffering. And after that distress we feel a sense of connection
and care a love or kindness toward the one who is suffering whether it's someone else or whether it's
ourselves, a desire to relieve that suffering a wish that the one who is suffering could know peace or
courage or hope and there is a willingness to respond so that we might relieve that suffering. There's a
willingness to stay, there's a willingness to lean into the suffering rather than a desire to just escape to
get away or to defend against that suffering. And this capacity to notice suffering, to be moved by
suffering and to respond it seems to be related to our caregiving instinct that very basic instinct we have
where say a child or a loved one is in pain or distressed and how quickly and instantly we feel that pain
and we become moved to help but compassion somehow transcends that, that basic instinct of caring
for our own children, our own loved ones. It's an ability to respond to suffering that really goes beyond
the self. And it's so strongly rooted in a mindset of caring, of kindness and of love and of an ability to
understand that other people's experiences are in some way similar to our own that when another
person is in pain, that pain is as real and as strong as our own pain when we are suffering. And I think the
thing that has surprised me the most in learning about compassion through my own experience and in
understanding the science of compassion is that it's not just caregiving instinct and it's not just a form of
love or connection, compassion seems to be a form of courage. It's a source of very real physical energy
and physical motivation and strength. And there's something about the experience of compassion that
gives us the courage to stay with rather than flee suffering. That compassion is an embodied state that
prepares us to act. I'm a Scientist who studies compassion and this program as you know it's called the
Science of Compassion and I'm very aware that for most people, these two words science and
compassion do not seem to go together, they don't belong. I think a lot of people view science as being
it's cold, it's intellectual, it's all head it's no heart and compassion is completely the opposite. It's warm
and fuzzy, it's emotional, it's spiritual and to understand compassion, you need to understand that with
your heart not with your brain not through intellectual discussion or clinical scientific investigation. And
in fact when I teach the Science of Compassion I'm quite used to people coming into the classroom and
saying, "I really hope you don't suck all of the soul out of compassion with your science." And yet, in my
experience as both a scientist and a lifelong seeker, I've never been good at keeping the head and the
heart separate. The questions that I want to investigate as a scientist, they come from my heart, of
wanting to understand my own experience and of wanting to be able to help others. And I've often
found that the insights I discover in science nourish my heart. And in the last decade there really has
been a growing recognition, both the scientific community and the contemplative communities, people
who have dedicated their lives to practicing and training in compassion. A growing recognition that
science and the wisdom of contemplative traditions can actually support each other and enhance each
other. There's no reason to keep them separate. In fact, in a talk at the annual meeting for the Society for
Neuroscience in 2005 the Dalai Lama told congregation of scientists a dialogue between neuroscience
and society could have profound benefits and that it may help deepen our basic understanding of what it
means to be human. And in 2008, the Dalai Lama donated funds to Stanford University to help create
the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, also known as CCARE, which was
founded by Stanford Neurosurgeon, James Doty and has been actually my home for studying and
teaching compassion. The center is a small group of scientists, physicians and psychologists like myself
who study empathy and compassion and altruism and are also committed to not just understanding
these things scientifically but also helping people and organizations and communities become more
compassionate. Now I've been fortunate to be a part of CCARE since its beginning. And my primary role
has been in helping to create and then study a program called the Stanford Compassion Cultivation
Training which is a nine week course that helps people investigate compassion from both a scientific
point of view and as a personal practice. And for the last few years, I've really dedicated much of my time
in understanding how it is we can better help people, strengthen their own compassion and also training
people around the world to teach this compassion cultivation program. And as part of my work, I've
come to three understandings about compassion and the process of training in compassion that are
really going to inform our time together. The first understanding is that compassion compassion is a
natural instinct. It's a basic human capacity that all humans have. It's not like some people are born with
the single compassion gene and they will be the ones who are helpful and caring and kind and sort of
the rest of us are stuck with a limited compassion that maybe only extends to a few. It seems like the
capacity to notice suffering and respond to suffering of others even beyond our small circle is a basic
human capacity. And yet it also competes with other basic human instincts and capacities and that
means that while compassion is always a possibility it also is sometimes really hard to access that we can
have a lot of responses to suffering that are not compassion. Compassion is competing with a very basic
human desire to avoid suffering and to escape suffering. And so sometimes instead of feeling
compassion and acting with compassion, we see suffering and we turn around and run. We go into
denial. Sometimes we feel suffering so deeply, we actually experience a desire to escalate suffering
rather than relieve suffering. We have a human instinct toward revenge, punishment that are fueled by
anger. And sometimes we can even when we're aware of suffering, go into a state of self-focus or self
comparison where we start to weigh who suffering is more intense and whose suffering is more
deserving of help or compassion. We can go into a kind of competitive suffering or even the sense that
our own suffering really isn't that big of a deal. And in many ways this natural capacity for compassion
can collapse under the weight of these other instincts and emotions. And it's really important to
understand them if we want to strengthen our capacity to choose compassion as our response to our
own suffering or to the suffering of others. And the last understanding that I've come to is that
compassion is a skill, really a set of skills and a set of intentions that we can strengthen. You can't just say
to yourself, "okay, now I'm compassionate, I'm feeling compassion, I'm going to do compassion now." But
there are mindsets and there are states of the body that we can consciously cultivate that support our
ability to choose compassion. There are attitudes that we can develop, reflections that we can take that
make it more likely that when we are confronted with suffering, our first response will be compassion
and not anger and rage or revenge and punishment or despair. And so my intention for this program is to
actually help you do that. We're going to explore the many dimensions of compassion, including how it
affects us, how it affects other people around us. And we're also going to explore what gets in the way of
compassion to actually bring a kind of mindful, compassionate acceptance to all those things we
experience around suffering that aren't quite compassion. And we're going to look at how to access
compassion in the face of suffering whether it's our own suffering or other's suffering. And that really is
the idea of strengthening compassion as a value that we can commit to and a response that we can train
in. And along the way, we'll also consider the benefits of strengthening compassion in a way that I hope
will inspire you to commit to compassion as both a core value and a way of life.

Why strengthen compassion?

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- [Narrator] In choosing this program, you've made a conscious choice to commit some of your time to
strengthening compassion. I thought it might be helpful to reflect a little bit on why. Why strengthen
compassion? Why commit our time and our energy and attention to this task? And I think sort of first
and foremost, it's for the sake of compassion itself and how much the world right now needs
compassion. A few years ago, I was reading an article in the New York times and a quote in that article
really stood out to me. The journalist wrote about the only thing tanking faster than consumer
confidence and the Greek economy would be the global compassion index if such a measure existed.
And I think many of us feel this way, that somehow compassion is being challenged more now than ever.
At least here in the U S where I live, I feel like we have a culture that celebrates cynicism and violence
that glamorizes the entertainment value of other people's problems, without really connecting to those
problems in a compassionate way. We're also now aware more than ever of global suffering that can feel
overwhelming as we think about the problems that face our planet, as we think about the traumas and
the horrors that people experience around the world and close to home. And that awareness of
suffering, can lead us to a place of despair in which we desperately need the courage and the energy and
the hope, that compassion can provide. People also now are reporting rising rates of loneliness and
growing sense of being socially disconnected. Social anxiety is one of the most common problems that
people report. And there's a growing mistrust of others that often is fed by these other challenges in our
culture. And I feel that if we don't consciously choose compassion that our capacity to care and to
respond to the suffering in the world, can be overwhelmed by these forces. But in addition to this basic
desire to be able to better respond to the suffering in the world, we know that strengthening
compassion has a lot of very personal and private benefits that we can celebrate. For example, as we'll
see, compassion seems to be linked to happiness somehow, the more time we spend contemplating the
suffering of others, the more likely we are to actually experience a deep kind of happiness, a sense of
gratitude and a sense of resilience to the stress and the problems in our own lives. Compassion also
seems to be linked to better physical health and wellbeing often in surprising ways that people who
report high levels of compassion live longer, for example. We also know that when we experience
compassion and choose compassion as an orientation to the world, that it deeply strengthens
relationships but it promotes social connection and can become a very powerful antidote to feelings of
loneliness or social anxiety or separation. Compassion also seems to be a key source of meaning and
hope, and when we are connected to compassion, it can actually save us from the downward spiral of
depression and despair. And it's not even in a abstract way that moments of choosing compassion can be
like, powerful medicine to relieve our own suffering. And in fact, one of the studies that stays with me, is
a study that ask people to do one random act of kindness. And in that study, people who completed just
one act of kindness, they reported an increased sense of meaning in life that when they reflected on
their own lives, they had a greater sense of purpose and of hope. And so the intention of this program, is
to help you strengthen compassion. Through science, through stories through self-reflections that I'll
invite you to take and also through meditation and mindset exercises that really help you access the
attitudes and the emotions that support compassion. And I know that I mentioned earlier that often
people feel like science and compassion are actually two things that don't belong together. And I just
wanted to emphasize again that science is not here to replace direct experience or wisdom, it's simply
another source of insights about yourself and about other people and my goal is to share scientific
theories and findings that really help you understand your own experiences around suffering. That the
science isn't to give you just an intellectual understanding of what compassion is, but to truly deepen
your direct experience of compassion and self-compassion. And I hope that the science will give you
more confidence in the value and the power of compassion and strengthen your ability to choose
compassion even in difficult circumstances. And in my experience, one thing that the science seems to
do, better than any other tool that I've worked with, is it can help us have compassion for ourselves
around the barriers to compassion. Things like anger or fear or burnout or shame. The stories that I
share with you, some of them will come from my own life, but also some of the stories will come from
my students and some will come from my fellow compassion researchers and teachers. And I'm so
grateful to them for giving me permission to share these stories. I chose them because each one of those
stories actually awakened a sense of compassion in me. And I hope that some of these stories will do the
same for you. We're going to experience some short practices in every session, that are meant to be a
way to just quickly touch into your own compassionate intentions, compassionate feelings and even
ways of embodying compassion. And each exercise will help you connect to the themes of that session.
But also at the end of the program, you'll find an entire extended session that offers a collection of
longer, guided, compassion meditations. And these compassion meditations are ways to really deeply
train in the experience of compassion and in strengthening all of the attitudes and all of the skills that
we'll be talking about in the previous sessions.

Your personal intention matters

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- [Instructor] We've been talking a bit about the importance of intention. And when it comes to
strengthening compassion, your personal intention really matters. Because compassion has a very
particular flavor of intention, compassion has compassionate intention. What does that mean? It's an
intention that is not solely self-serving. It's not an intention that is all about me and what I can get out of
being compassionate. But it also isn't, self-sacrificing. There's a quality of intention that comes from the
wisdom of recognizing how fundamentally interdependent we are on others. It's an intention that comes
from understanding how connected we all already are. And compassion is also always a response to
suffering that is rooted in caring. And so when we come to the work and the practice of strengthening
compassion, if our intentions don't fit those descriptions, we can get into real trouble. And I wanted to
share with you a few examples that can also sort of highlight some of the obstacles that can come up
when we start to think about compassion and cultivate compassion. So one set of studies has actually
looked into what happens when you try to be compassionate and caring, because you want other people
to accept you. You want other people to like you or approve of you. And one way that researchers
measure this, they ask people how much they agree with statements like these. I try to help people as
much as I can so that they appreciate me. I always put the needs of others on top of mine, because
that's what it takes to be loved. I try to be caring and helpful to avoid arguments and conflicts. You might
think if those motives ever play a role in your own kindness or compassion. It's actually quite human to
have those motivations when those are your strongest motivations. Studies show that the more
compassionate you try to be, the more likely you are to experience depression, anxiety, and even shame.
The desire to be compassionate so that others will accept you and love you, the desire to be
compassionate so that you'll be safe from other people's anger or from conflict. They also interfere with
your ability to experience what psychologists call compassion satisfaction. And I know you've
experienced that, it's that warm glow that you get when you know that you've really helped someone
when you feel really connected to someone. When we try to be compassionate, because we're trying to
fulfill our own needs, we actually miss out on that warm glow. And instead, seem to only continue to
experience our own inadequacy. Now that's one example. Another example that really stood out to me
when I saw this finding has to do with the relationship between helping others and physical health and
longevity. I mentioned earlier that people who experience a lot of compassion, they tend to be healthier,
they tend to live longer. But studies show that again, intention matters. And one study at the University
of Michigan, they tracked older adults for four years and they looked at how often those adults
volunteered, but they also asked them why they volunteered. Did they volunteer because they really
wanted to help others and they enjoyed helping others? Did they volunteer because they felt a sense of
connection to a community and they wanted to give back? Or were they volunteering because they
wanted other people to view them as nice and as generous? Were they trying to cultivate an image of
being someone who helps out? And what the researchers found is that among the people who were
volunteering for more sort of truly compassionate reasons, they were significantly more likely to be alive
at the end of the four years. And the people who volunteered the most had the greatest protection. In
contrast, people who were volunteering for what the researchers called self-oriented reasons, they
wanted to look like they were good people, they wanted to get sort of social status as being a helper,
they didn't show any benefit at all. They didn't get the health benefit. They didn't get the longevity
benefit. And finally, only one of my favorite studies that illuminates the importance of intention was
actually sort of an accidental finding for the researchers. They were looking for ways to improve people's
empathy. But how could you get people to be more skillful at understanding what other people are
thinking and feeling? So they decided to try paying people for their empathic accuracy. So imagine you're
going to be paid for how accurate you are at understanding what someone else is thinking and feeling.
And what the study found is that when you pay people to be more empathic, you actually make them
less accurate and understanding what other people are thinking and feeling. And the reason is, it's not
enough to just want to be empathic. When you're trying to be empathic for personal gain, you're actually
undermining the brain's capacity to connect with others. You're in a state of brain and mind that actually
inhibits empathy. And compassion and the ability to understand what others are going through, it's
rooted in a mindset that transcends that kind of self focus. In order to really access your natural capacity
for empathy and for compassion, you need to find a way to step a little bit outside of yourself. So as we
close this first session, I encourage you to take a few moments to consider your own intentions for this
program and for strengthening compassion. In my experience, teaching both science of compassion
classes and the Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training, I find that often people come to this work for
one of two reasons. Many people are involved in professional activities that require compassion and
they want to be more skillful in their compassion. They might find it difficult to sustain the levels of
compassion. They want to be able to offer those they are helping and those they're serving. But I've also
found that a very high percentage of people who show up to the work of strengthening compassion are
people who are reeling from some kind of personal crisis that they themselves are suffering. And
somehow they sense that compassion could be an answer to their own suffering. That they are both in
need of compassion and self-compassion, and that compassion could be a kind of life raft for the
situation that they're in. You might relate to one of these callings, the desire to be more skillful in how
you offer compassion to the world, or a sense that you yourself are in need of compassion in this
moment. Or you might have a totally different reason for wanting to strengthen compassion. To help you
explore these intentions, I'm going to lead a guided reflection. And before I do, I wanted to say just a
little bit about how these guided reflections or mindset exercises will work. Because as I said, each
session will end with one, some sessions might have a few in them. And they're meant to be first and
foremost, just listen to that you might decide, you just want to listen to me, ask the questions or suggest
the images. And you can connect to the feeling of the reflection. The feeling of what comes up when you
hear the question or you consider an image. See what comes up as you listen. See what thoughts,
emotions, or ideas come up. And for some of these reflections and practices, that really is enough. But
you might also find that as you listen to the reflections, there's a question that really captures your
attention that you want to come back to, or maybe it's an idea, or maybe it's an image. And you can use
these questions or ideas or images as writing prompts. And I actually encourage you, when you hear a
reflection, that really resonates with you to think about writing it down or pausing the program and
taking a few minutes to write about it. Or maybe you'll use it as a reflection while you go for a walk or
even use it as a prompt for a conversation with someone you care about. And you can come back to
these reflections and these brief practices in any way that serves you.

Guided reflection: Why is compassion important to you?

- [Instructor] In this first reflection, I'll be asking you a series of questions. Also, feel free to pause the
program after any question, to give yourself the space to really reflect on that question. And you can
come back whenever you're ready. Why is compassion important to you? Is there a suffering you feel
called to heal or transform? What or who do you deeply care about? How have you been the recipient of
compassion? Is there a kindness that you've received, that you feel called to pay forward? When or how
is your compassion challenged? When do you find it difficult to access compassion? In what way would
you like to strengthen or deepen your compassion?