I’d like to add the caution that not all depressed, romantically unsuccessful, or crisis-prone people are misery pits, particularly since many such people are likely to assume they themselves are. If you have friendships that extend for longer than a year or two, you are almost certainly not a misery pit.
From the perspective of a person who might be a misery pit: one key is to avoid overburdening any single person. Cycling between three or four support people can be helpful. For validation-seeking, I’ve found social media works well, since liking a sadpost is usually less stressful for most people than comforting a sad person. It’s also helpful to prioritize learning how to create value for others. Try to have pleasant interactions with your support people (fandom, gaming, sharing jokes, talking politics, doing a hobby together, whatever) more often than you call on them for help. Consider learning a service-provision skill, such as cooking.
That’s not a proxy for suffering; it is caring about more than just suffering. You might oppose making animals’ brains smaller because it also reduces their ability to feel pleasure, and you value pleasure in addition to pain. You might oppose amputating non-essential body parts because that reduces the animal’s capacity for pleasurable experiences of the sort the species tends to experience. You might oppose breeding animals that enjoy pain because of the predictable injuries and shorter lifespan that would result: physical health and fitness is conventionally included in many definitions of animal welfare. You might also be a deontologist who is opposed to certain interventions as a violation of the animal’s rights or dignity.
Not being a negative utilitarian is not a bias.