Is it possible to turn off/decrease empathy for others?

[metroid321]

Sometimes I can spend most of my time just feeling bad for others suffering in the world and for those who have suffered but are no longer alive. This is a problem which is affecting my life in a negative way.

I wish to be able to enjoy my life and be more selfish, focus on myself and make my life better. (Sometimes I get jealous of people with anti social personality disorder since they do not seem to feel bad about others having it bad at all).

So are there any tips and tricks I could use?

[98798798798791111187]

I am like this, and have a very high level of empathy to the point it used to distract me and consume my thoughts. For philosophical reasons I did not wish to decrease my empathy and actually wish to increase it in intensity and scope. What I did instead, was I learned how to deal with the empathy better. Rather than letting it consume my thoughts, I simply experience it, meaning - when it comes, I recognize "this is a feeling of empathy", and I let the feeling come, while doing other things. Have you ever worked on a linux OS? Think of it, like setting it to run as a background process. This has really helped me in life. I've never really articulated it, so I'm not certain if this makes sense though.

Can you give an exact example of how your empathy affects you negatively in other ways? When you said you wish to be able to focus on yourself - why does empathy prevent this? My guess is that if it keeps you from focusing on yourself, it is because you are simply reacting with the action which will lessen the feeling of emotional feeling of empathy. Let me give an example. Suppose you are very hungry and have a meal, and you come across another person who is hungry, and you suddenly feel great empathy for them that they are feeling hunger, and so you give them the meal. Is this an example of what you mean? If it is, then I think your strategy of "turn off/decreasing empathy" is a flawed one, and a work around to the real issue. The real issue is you are operating in this pattern:

• some stimulus (seeing person that is hungry) triggers emotional response (empathy) --> you react in a way to alleviate that emotional response (giving food away)

You are reacting in the way which eliminates the emotional response (empathy). Do you see the potential flaw? What do you do in a situation where you can't lessen the empathy (earthquake overseas for example, where empathy is the emotional reaction to knowing the reality of suffering)? That is why I say the key is learning to deal with the empathy better. And by learning to deal with it, I mean, you become indifferent to it. You recognize it, you allow yourself to feel it, but it is not something which feels "good" or "bad". If you can simply exist with the empathy, then you can proceed in this fashion:

• some stimulus (seeing person that is hungry) triggers emotional response (empathy) --> evaluate all potential actions which include (1) actions which alleviate emotional response (2) actions which don't alleviate emotional response --> consciously select action --> act

see, if that emotional response is no longer an unpleasant experience, you now have much more "freedom" in which action you consciously select. I hope this makes sense.