What We Can Learn From Apathy
Indifference could be a solution to emotional exhaustion.
My sister sent a message to our group chat the other day complaining about the long line at the testing centre for Covid. Surprised, I immediately rang her to get some answers, since I had no idea she needed a test — what symptoms did she have? How bad were they?
We live in different countries and we have seen each other just twice in the last year because of the travel restrictions caused by the pandemic. Before she had a chance to answer the phone, I already felt scared and helpless at the prospect that my sister was ill and I couldn’t be there for her.
My sister answered the call and sounded like she had a cold. She was coughing — the main symptom of the virus. I didn’t show it, but I went into panic mode. After I hung up the phone I started crying. My husband took our son into another room to allow me to gather myself.
My fear took control of me. I had awful vivid visions of my sister and felt worried for her daughter. My heart rate increased, my breathing was short, and I started sweating.
It took me a few minutes, but I did come out of it. I sipped some water, counted to 10, reminded myself of the importance of my health and brought myself back to the room by looking around and listing what I saw.
Logic made its way back into my brain. My sister is young, fit, and healthy. Statistics are on her side. Either way, whether she had the virus or not, she would be fine — I told myself.
The moral of the story is, I am a highly sensitive person, and I can easily become consumed with emotions of fear and worry for others. Even though I came out of my anxiety attack, I was on edge all day. When my sister got her results that evening and confirmed she did not have the virus, I was relieved but still felt anxious.
Fear lingers.
Empathy Is Only Good in Moderation
Empathy is one of the best self-improvement habits we can nurture in order to bring about a sense of fulfilment. I have a whole article about it which you can find here.
To summarise, empathy is arguably intrinsically good for you. There are many benefits to it, but mostly, it increases your ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their emotions, thus helping you to be more considerate, loving, and generous — all those happy virtues.
“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” — Meryl Streep
Research shows that compassionate people are generally happier. Empathy lowers stress and could be the answer to avoiding burnout at work:
“When we fully engage in empathy, we draw on skills for emotion regulation. In doing so, we are also controlling emotions that can be stressful. Thus, the side benefit from being fully engaged empathically is that we can be exercising good control over our emotions, taking care of our own stress.” — Psychology Today
By exercising empathy we are more likely to feel happy, and thus, it is encouraged to find ways to deliberately practice it if one is not naturally able to do so.
But everything has its side effects.
If you are highly sensitive, it means you might become consumed by others’ emotions and over-empathise, which can lead to an increase in emotional distress, including burnout(!)
Psychology Today says,
“Unbridled empathy can lead to concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol, making it difficult to release the emotions. Taking on other people’s feelings so that you live their experience can make you susceptible to feelings of depression or hopelessness.”
So, if you tend to over-care and over-empathise with people’s problems and circumstances, it is advised to make a deliberate effort not to expose yourself to unnecessary stress, and take extra care of yourself when you do inevitably become exposed to it.
Sometimes, that could involve somewhat detaching from people who aren’t feeling happy. It could mean being more selective about the news you watch to avoid triggers of stress.
It could mean cultivating the skill of apathy.
How Everyone Is Apathetic
Apathy is a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern, according to the Google dictionary. It is listed as one of the antonyms of empathy.
Apathy can be a sign of a bigger problem, such as a mental illness, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s. It is not to be confused with depression, for the “symptoms” of feeling unmotivated or careless are similar.
Apathy is not an emotion, but a lack of them.
It is a condition that is diagnosable by a medical expert. Emotions play a huge part in society and in relationships, so apathy is seen as a disorder that needs addressing.
The term was used more loosely in an episode of a TV show episode of You, Me, Her (a series which I am apathetic about if you’re wondering 😜).
It mentions how apathy is the opposite of love because it is the absence of it.
It suggests that apathy is something that can be triggered in certain areas of your life but not in others. And if this is at all possible, then, apathy might be desirable for the highly sensitive who need to detach emotionally from toxic situations or people.
Josh Kaufman put it beautifully when he coined the term “strategic apathy”. He admits that everyone filters out what to care about and what not to care about. Thus, everyone is apathetic to some extent towards something. For example, I don’t care about cricket. I don’t follow the sport, I couldn’t give you the name of a famous player, and I can’t tell you which teams are good. I am apathetic towards cricket.
“In order to function in a world overflowing with information and options, we’re forced to filter. The name of that filter? Apathy. We all use it every day in the service of sanity.”
Apathy could be a skill that we can practice in order to emotionally regulate. But it is also something that we all practice, sometimes unknowingly. For example, you can give money to charity, but you aren’t going to exhaust all your financial resources in helping others. You’re not going to care about every single cause. The choice of less care in those areas can be interpreted as apathy, but it doesn’t make you apathetic.
Practising Apathy Without Becoming Apathetic
A few nights ago, a friend of mine expressed how sad she was about the recent news. She asked everyone in our group chat how we were all doing, and this was met with your expected sympathetic replies of “I’m so sorry, I know it’s awful,” etc.
I first asked myself “which news?”, till I remembered that a woman was murdered and the body was found a mile away from my house. What with it being International Women’s Day recently, this was a huge piece of news, one that everybody was talking about.
The news piece can be found here, if you’re interested.
However, I didn’t hear about the murder from a news source. Another friend told me about it.
I was not touched by the murder nearby. I agree that it is an objectively sad event, but I haven’t thought about it too deeply and it has not triggered any feelings of empathy or sadness within me.
I have no room for the details of the news. It is not that I don’t care, but I have to be selective about what to care about as well as looking after my own emotional wellbeing. Because I know I can care too much, I would prefer not to care about the news at all and deliberately steer away from them.
If I shared with my group of friends that I didn’t care about the woman who was murdered, I probably would’ve been secretly judged. Either for being selfish, or, if I explained the reason why I didn’t care, too emotional.
There is an unspoken rule within society that we have to demonstrate care for other people’s cares, and if we don’t, then we are accused of being selfish or weakminded.
The determining factor I use about whether or not to trigger feelings of empathy towards different things is this: can you do something with that extra care?
If all it is doing is consuming you with overwhelming anxiety and fear, I’d suggest the bliss of indifference.
So that’s why I remain apathetic to most news — because I have to care for myself first.
Actively deterring yourself from things you don’t need to care about and creating a sense of apathy towards those things can allow you to focus more on the things you do care about. It is like decluttering your brain.
Takeaway
There is a difference between being an apathetic person and practicing apathy as a skill to self-preserve. Everyone practices apathy to a certain extent — you cannot possibly care about everything in the world, and you have an existing filter already.
By channeling that filter and aiming it at things you previously cared about but that were unnecessary to, you create a healthy barrier of emotional detachment that protects you from experiencing negative feelings. This may mean talking to a friend a bit less without cutting them off. This may mean not getting involved in negative conversations with co-workers. It may mean remaining ignorant to the news for a while, or being more selective about what you do consume.
If you have a tendency to over-care, you have an ability to self-care.
Cultivate a healthy amount of apathy in order to create distance between yourself and your triggers, and maximise your potential to heighten your happy emotions.
Sylvia Emokpae is passionate about self-love and motherhood. See more work like this.