Common humanity: remember you are not alone
Say to yourself: "Suffering is a part of life — I am not alone in this."
Key takeaways
- What it is: Say to yourself: "Suffering is a part of life — I am not alone in this."
- Why it works: Isolation amplifies pain; the brain registers social exclusion in the same regions that process physical pain. Reminding yourself that struggle is a shared human experience interrupts the isolation response, reducing the secondary suffering layered on top of the primary pain.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Turning it into minimization — "other people have it much worse" — which invalidates the current experience rather than contextualizing it.
Why it works
Isolation amplifies pain; the brain registers social exclusion in the same regions that process physical pain. Reminding yourself that struggle is a shared human experience interrupts the isolation response, reducing the secondary suffering layered on top of the primary pain.
How to do it
- 1After acknowledging the difficulty, say: "Suffering is a part of life" or "I am not alone in feeling this."
- 2Visualize others — somewhere right now — who are facing something similar.
- 3Let this be factual, not a competition ("others have it worse") — both can be true simultaneously.
What the evidence says
ObservationalSocial pain overlaps with physical pain circuits (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). Common humanity is a defined component of Neff’s self-compassion scale, and its correlation with reduced isolation and depression has observational support.
Honest caveat: These support the mechanism indirectly; common humanity as a distinct intervention ingredient has not been experimentally isolated from the other MSC components.
- — Eisenberger & Lieberman (2004), social exclusion and physical pain overlap, Science
- — Neff (2003), self-compassion scale development, Self and Identity
Common mistake
Turning it into minimization — "other people have it much worse" — which invalidates the current experience rather than contextualizing it.
IX Coach reflects the normalcy of your experience back to you, drawing on the reality that the patterns you are navigating are widely shared — without minimizing what is yours.
Practice this with IX Coach →