COMPASSION

Despite popular belief that happiness depends solely on you, the way to achieve it may not lie just within yourself, but in your relationships and interactions with others. “When we have feelings of caring or love for other people, we feel better,” “We all think we want to be loved, but what actually feels good to us is feeling loving – and part of what makes us feel more love for other people is doing kind, compassionate things for them.” The good news is, if you don’t normally identify as someone who is overly empathetic. You find commonalities with other people.

Compassionate people know what it’s like to be down on their luck, and they keep those experiences in mind to develop a more empathetic nature, whether through volunteering or just simply networking. “Compassionate people are very outward-focused because they think and feel about other people,” “They have that ability to feel others’ feelings, so they’re very socially connected.” And turns out, there’s science behind why we feel compassion toward people who have been in our same boat. Humans’ sense of compassion actually increases when there’s a common connection with the other person. The compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves — even a relatively trivial one — the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly,”