What the Most Understanding People in Your Life Actually Do
Credit: Daily Vitality
You probably know someone who just gets it. You start telling them about a rough week, and within a minute your shoulders drop. They're not fixing anything or handing you advice. They're simply with you — nodding, asking the right small question, letting you feel understood. Afterward, you walk away lighter, and a little surprised at how much a short conversation helped.
It's tempting to assume those people were born that way, as if empathy were a personality lottery that some of us won and others didn't. The more encouraging truth is that empathy is far more like a muscle than a gift. It's built from specific, repeatable habits — the way someone listens, the questions they ask, the judgments they hold back, the moment they choose to step in. Researchers who study empathy generally describe it as having a few moving parts: understanding what another person is thinking, feeling something in response, and being moved to help. Highly empathetic people tend to be strong across all three.
That's good news, because it means the traits below aren't a checklist for grading yourself. They're a set of everyday behaviors you can recognize, borrow, and strengthen at your own pace. Some may already feel natural to you. Others might be worth a second look. Either way, none of them require a special personality — just attention and a little practice.
Here are eleven traits that show up again and again in the people we experience as deeply empathetic, along with what each one looks like in real life.
Highly empathetic people are quietly, sincerely curious about what's going on inside other people. It's not nosiness or small talk on autopilot. It's a real interest in how someone experiences their own life — what worried them today, what they're proud of, why a situation hit them harder than expected.
That curiosity tends to show up in the questions they ask and, more importantly, in the fact that they actually want the answer. Instead of "How are you?" as a reflex, it's "How did that meeting go — you were nervous about it?" This kind of interest is one reason empathy is considered a learned behavior rather than a fixed trait, according to workplace research from BetterUp on the habits of empathetic people. When you lead with curiosity, you gather the details that make understanding possible. You can't step into someone's world if you never ask what it's like in there.
The lovely part is that curiosity is completely learnable. It often starts with one more question than you'd normally ask, and a genuine pause to hear how someone answers it.
Most of us listen with one foot already in our response. We're half-hearing the other person while rehearsing what we'll say next. Highly empathetic people do something different: they listen to understand, giving the speaker their full attention rather than waiting for a turn to talk.
This is the heart of what psychologists call active listening — a research-backed practice that the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley describes as giving someone your complete focus, setting distractions aside, tuning into both words and body language, and reflecting back what you hear. When people feel truly listened to, something shifts. They relax, they open up, and they often feel less defensive, which makes it easier for them to work through whatever they're carrying.
What makes this trait so approachable is that it's mostly about subtraction. It's putting the phone face-down, letting a silence sit for a beat, and resisting the urge to jump in with a story of your own. You don't need the perfect words. You mostly need to be fully there.
Perspective-taking is the mental skill of imagining a situation from another person's point of view — seeing it through their eyes, with their history and their pressures, rather than your own. It's the difference between "I wouldn't be upset about that" and "I can understand why this is upsetting for you."
This is what researchers describe as cognitive empathy, and it's distinct from feeling someone's emotions. You can fully understand why a friend is anxious about a decision without feeling anxious yourself. That mental flexibility is also the foundation for a lot of the other traits on this list, since reading between the lines and holding back judgment both start with a willingness to consider a viewpoint that isn't yours.
Perspective-taking asks you to set your own frame aside for a moment, which can feel unnatural at first. It gets easier with a simple internal habit: before reacting, pausing to wonder what might be true for the other person that you can't see from where you're standing.
People rarely say exactly what they feel. They say "I'm fine" in a flat voice, or go quiet in a way that speaks volumes. Highly empathetic people are attuned to those signals — the tone, the pause, the shift in posture — and use them to sense what someone might be feeling underneath the words.
This attunement lines up with one of the four attributes of empathy identified in nursing scholar Teresa Wiseman's widely cited work: recognizing the emotion another person is feeling. That recognition draws on more than the transcript of a conversation. It reads the music underneath it — a tightness in someone's voice, the way they glance away, the smile that doesn't quite reach their eyes.
None of this is mind-reading, and empathetic people know better than to assume. Reading between the lines usually leads to a gentle check rather than a conclusion: "You got quiet — is something on your mind?" The cue gets noticed, and then it gets confirmed, not guessed at.
When someone shares something difficult, the reflex to evaluate it can be strong. We label a reaction as an overreaction, or silently decide someone brought a problem on themselves. Highly empathetic people notice that reflex and set it aside, staying out of judgment while the other person is still talking.
Staying out of judgment is another of Wiseman's four attributes, and it's what allows people to be honest with you. Criticism, even the quiet kind, tends to make others clam up or perform a tidier version of the truth. When someone senses they won't be graded, they're free to say what's actually going on — including the messy, unflattering, still-unresolved parts.
Holding back judgment doesn't mean you agree with everything or abandon your own values. It's a temporary, deliberate choice to prioritize understanding over evaluation in the moment. The assessment can come later, if it's even needed. First comes the space for someone to feel safe being real.
There's a well-meaning instinct, especially when we care about someone, to leap straight to solutions. They describe a problem, and we hand back a plan. Highly empathetic people slow that instinct down. They acknowledge the feeling first, letting the person know their emotion makes sense before any fixing begins.
This reflects the fourth of Wiseman's attributes: communicating your understanding back to the other person. Empathy isn't quite complete until someone can tell that you get it, which is why naming what you're hearing — "That sounds genuinely exhausting" or "No wonder you're frustrated" — can land more powerfully than advice. People who feel understood tend to feel more supported than those who receive quick guidance or a brisk "at least it's not worse."
Validation is a small move with a big effect. It doesn't require you to solve anything or even to agree with every detail. It simply signals that the person's experience is real and worth acknowledging. Often, that's what they were actually looking for — and once they feel it, they're far more open to problem-solving anyway.
There's a meaningful difference between feeling for someone and feeling with them. Feeling for someone is sympathy — a kind of caring that can still keep you at arm's length, looking in from outside. Feeling with someone is empathy, and it means joining them in their experience rather than observing it from a safe distance.
This distinction was popularized in Brené Brown's widely shared teaching on empathy, which draws on earlier research to show that empathy fuels connection while sympathy can quietly create distance. It's the difference between "at least you still have a job" — which subtly minimizes — and "that sounds really hard, I'm right here with you." One reaches down toward someone; the other climbs into the moment beside them.
This is emotional, or affective, empathy: an authentic response to another person's feelings rather than a tidy comment about them. People who feel deeply with others sometimes absorb a lot, which is part of why empaths can find themselves drawn to those who take more than they give. The warmth is real — and, as we'll see, it works best paired with boundaries.
Empathy that stays entirely internal can quietly fade. The most empathetic people tend to let their understanding move them to do something, even something small. This is compassionate empathy — understanding and feeling combined with the motivation to help.
Empathy is closely tied to prosocial behavior and stronger relationships, as the Greater Good Science Center notes in its work on what empathy is and why it matters. In everyday life, the action rarely needs to be grand. It's the text that says "thinking of you today," the offer to handle one specific errand, the choice to speak up for someone who's being talked over. What sets these gestures apart is that they're shaped by what the person actually needs, not by what would make the helper feel useful.
That's why highly empathetic people often ask before they act — "Would it help if I…?" or simply "What do you need right now?" The action lands because it's guided by understanding first. Care becomes something the other person can genuinely feel, not just something meant well.
It might seem like the most empathetic people would give until they're empty, but the opposite is usually true. Sustainable empathy comes with boundaries. People who stay caring over the long haul learn to step into someone's experience without losing their own footing in the process.
Feeling deeply with others, day after day, can lead to emotional exhaustion — sometimes called compassion fatigue — when there's no protection around it. Boundaries are what prevent that: knowing when to take a break from an intense conversation, recognizing which struggles are yours to carry and which aren't, and giving yourself permission to recharge. Practices as simple as those in the bare-minimum self-care checklist can help keep your own reserves from running dry.
This is worth saying plainly, because empathetic people sometimes feel guilty about limits: protecting your energy is not the opposite of caring. It's what makes caring possible again tomorrow. You can't pour from an empty cup, and the people who stay warm and present for others tend to be the ones who refill their own.
Understanding other people starts, a little surprisingly, with understanding yourself. Highly empathetic people tend to have a good read on their own emotional weather — what they're feeling, why, and how it might be coloring the moment in front of them.
This self-awareness matters because it prevents a common mix-up: projecting your own feelings onto someone else and mistaking them for empathy. If you can recognize that you're the one who's anxious or irritated, you're far less likely to assume everyone around you feels the same. Managing your own emotions well — including in tense moments, which is where science-backed ways to handle anger come in handy — helps you stay present for someone else instead of getting swept up in your own reaction.
Self-regulation is the quiet companion to self-awareness. It's the ability to feel your own emotions without being run by them, so you can stay steady while someone else is not. Together, they keep your empathy clear-eyed: tuned to the other person, rather than tangled up with your own inner noise.
Perhaps the most defining trait of all is a mindset. Highly empathetic people tend to believe that empathy can be developed — and that belief, it turns out, changes how much of it they actually show.
A 2014 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who see empathy as something that can grow put more effort into being empathic in exactly the situations where it's hardest — with people who are different from them, or in moments when connecting feels like work. Those who treated empathy as fixed tended to give up sooner. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki's broader research points in the same direction, framing empathy as something people can intentionally build over time, more like a skill than a fixed capacity.
This is why the growth mindset belongs on a list of traits: it's the engine behind all the others. When you believe your empathy can expand, you keep practicing the curiosity, the listening, and the perspective-taking — and, importantly, you keep tending to yourself so the effort is sustainable, the way building emotional resilience supports every other kind of growth. Empathy grows the way most good things do: a little at a time, through habits you return to on purpose.
About the Author
Angela Nightingale is a Senior Editor at Daily Vitality with over two decades of experience in digital publishing and health and wellness content. She specializes in turning complex, often-confusing health topics into clear, calm, and practical guidance that respects the reader's intelligence. Her work focuses on helping people feel informed and confident — never overwhelmed or alarmed — as they make everyday decisions about how they eat, move, rest, and age.
Both nature and experience play a role, but empathy is widely understood as something you can strengthen. Research on mindset has found that people who believe empathy can grow put more effort into it when connecting is difficult, and psychologists increasingly describe empathy as a set of trainable skills rather than a fixed trait.
Sympathy is feeling for someone — caring about their situation, often from a bit of a distance. Empathy is feeling with someone, joining them in their experience. Empathy tends to build connection, while sympathy, especially phrases like "at least…," can unintentionally create distance.
Psychologists commonly describe cognitive empathy (understanding what someone thinks or feels), affective or emotional empathy (actually feeling something in response), and compassionate empathy (being moved to help). Highly empathetic people tend to draw on all three.
Empathy without boundaries can lead to emotional exhaustion, sometimes called compassion fatigue. That's a sign that boundaries and self-care are missing, not that empathy itself is the problem. Some highly empathetic people also find that keeping everyday self-care habits helps them stay caring without becoming depleted.
A lot of it is subtraction — setting your phone aside, letting silences breathe, and resisting the urge to jump in with your own story. Giving someone your full attention, noticing their tone and body language, and reflecting back what you hear are the core moves of active listening.
It means letting someone know their emotion makes sense before you try to solve anything. Simple reflections like "that sounds really frustrating" signal that you understand. People often feel more supported by that acknowledgment than by immediate advice.
Feeling deeply with others uses real emotional energy, and without breaks or boundaries it can add up to burnout. Recharging and knowing which struggles are yours to carry aren't signs of caring less — they're what make ongoing empathy possible.
They can overlap, but they aren't identical. Sensitivity often describes how strongly you take in emotional information, while empathy is the broader ability to understand, share, and respond to what someone else feels. You can build empathic skills regardless of how sensitive you naturally are.
Perspective-taking is a mental skill — imagining a situation from another person's point of view. Feeling their emotions is affective empathy. You can fully understand why someone is upset without feeling upset yourself, and the two abilities support each other.
Many people find that curiosity is the easiest entry point: asking one more genuine question and truly listening to the answer. From there, small habits like pausing before you judge and acknowledging a feeling before offering advice tend to build naturally.
