This is why you’re running out of empathy
Whether we realize it or not, our empathy is running thin. This is how we revitalize it.
by: E.B. Johnson
Empathy and compassion are closely linked behavioral ideals, but they take effort and patience to cultivate. Though our empathy is a natural part of who we are, it can can worn down and eroded away by the negative events and experiences that we go through in a day or a lifetime. It’s important to keep an eye on our compassion levels, and make sure we’re getting the space we need to recharge our empathy and the way we relate to those we care for most.
Getting the space you need to reengage your empathy starts with understanding empathy and the benefits it can add to your life. From there, it becomes easier to understand how our empathy can change or dissolve over time, and formulate the plans we need to regenerate that empathy so we can get back to connecting to the people who matter. Only when we take a deep and honest look at our compassion fatigue and how it is affecting us can we get back to who we were before the erosion set in.
The importance of empathy.
Though some might believe otherwise, empathy is a critical part of the human experience, and it’s a critical part of learning how to live with and connect with people. Empathy makes it easier for us to communicate, and helps us resolve conflict more efficiently. It’s the key to a lot of personal growth and success in our lives, but only we can cultivate and unlock it.
Improved communication
As humans, we’re social creatures, and communication forms a critical part of both functioning and happiness. Empathy allows us to improve our communication, both in the written and verbal sense, and it also allows us to better connect with people on more meaningful levels. When you are able to understand where the other person is coming from, you can relate to what they need and compare it against your own needs. Being empathetic allows you to communicate more efficiently, but it takes a little practice to master.
Better conflict management
Empathy is great, because it allows us to pick up on a lot of non-verbal cues, and enhance the way we communicate with others. This improved communication also leads to better conflict management, and a better ability to anticipate what people want and what they need. When you’re empathetic, you’re better able to identify win-win situations.
New opportunities
When we’re empathetic to the people around us, we get to co-experience the world from a completely different perspective. We feel what that other person feels, and get to “see” what they see in a way that can help us grow in a number of ways. This open type of living can also lead to new horizons and opportunities, that might otherwise have been lost from a lack of compassion or a loss of our powerful empathy tools.
Why we run out of empathy.
Empathy isn’t a bottomless well. It’s a singular emotive experience that allows us to connect with people on a very deep level, but it has its limits and it limits how much emotional burden we can deal with. There can be a number of reasons you run out of compassion, of feel burnt out by the constant caring. These are just a few of the most common reasons we find ourselves struggling to empathize.
Anger
Anger is a powerful emotion and one that can cause a lot of problems in our lives if not properly addressed. When our anger compounds, it can cause us to shut down and shut off, feeling numb and disconnected — especially in the midst of an emotional crisis when we might be most needed. That’s because anger blocks off our ability to feel warmth, and shifts our empathy from compassionate caring to contempt.
Self-preservation
When our batteries are running low, or we fail to take care of our own inner self, we can find our empathy evaporating as a means of self-preservation. Think of it like the battery on your phone. As it depletes, so too does the functionality of your device. The lower you let yourself get run down, the less features (like empathy) you have to offer to the people who need you.
Disconnection
Disconnection can occur for a number of reasons, including a fear of intimacy or deeply-buried childhood traumas. Whatever the reason, when we start to disconnect emotionally, our empathy often goes out of the door as well. We have to feel close and connected to the people that matter.
Those most at-risk for compassion fatigue.
There are a number of professions and lifestyles that leave you more at-risk for compassion fatigue than others. That’s because empathy rundown doesn’t just happen within our personal spheres. It can occur within our professional spheres as well. If you work in one of the following fields, you could be more at risk than others for compassion fatigue and empathy breakdowns.
Nurses
Many nurses struggle with heavy caseloads, and this — coupled with terminally ill or hostile patients and family — can lead to a depletion of empathy. Nurses are required to restrain themselves regularly, and maintain their calm in the midst of anger, grief and high-pressure and high-stress situations. This takes a personal toll, and can lead to erosion of empathy as well.
Journalists
Though we don’t often think of it, the journalism career is one that can be fraught with tense experiences and high-pressure situations. Journalists who cover wars or disastrous events often find themselves faced with their own mortality, as well as the nastier aspects of human nature. Over time, this leads to a breakdown in compassion and the way these individuals see themselves and the world around them.
Caregivers
Whether caring for the elderly, or someone who is physically or mentally impaired, caregivers bear a heavy emotional burden and one that can eat away at their sense of empathy and compassion. After all, empathy is like a battery. It must be recharged in order too keep going, and that requires self care and introspection.
Lawyers
Certain lawyers find themselves required to visit accident scenes and other gory sites that can numb them, or make it hard to retain a compassionate mind. Graphic evidence eats away at their sense of self, and it can eat away at their perception of empathy and goodness too.
First responders
Law enforcement, fire and rescue are (more often than not) the first responders on the most dire of scenes. When you call 911, you’re in an extreme or emotionally stressful situation. This emotional burden is transferred onto these first responders, and can slowly break up their sense of compassion and empathy over time.
How to avoid empathy burnout.
You can avoid empathy burnout by learning how to establish some boundaries and create space between yourself and the emotional burdens of your outer world. This space doesn’t have to be permanent or event that large, but it does have to be taken for you and you alone. We aren’t machines. We’re living, breathing humans with all the frailties that entails. Protect your empathy before it’s gone.
1. Draw some boundary lines
Empathy — ultimately — is our ability to relate to the feelings and experiences in such a way that allows us to be deeply sympathetic. When you hear about two children stuck in a family tug-o-war, it might make you recall your own war-torn childhood. And that’s a good thing. It can go too far, however, and start to take a toll on your overall compassion, and the way you see yourself and those around you.
Vicarious suffering is a very real thing, and something that can occur when we find ourselves too frequently bearing the emotional burden of other people’s trauma without drawing out some clear boundary lines. Though we don’t experience the suffering-inducing event first hand, our compassion allows us to tap into the sorrow it has caused when we share details of that experience with our friend or family member. Second-hand trauma can be just as destructive as first-hand trauma, and can completely disassemble our emotional balance and sense of self.
Take a step back when you find yourself reeling from the bad news delivered by your loved one or family member. Hit the pause button and remind yourself that you (while you want to strive to understand them) you don’t have to bear their pain with them. We all have a burden in this life, and it is our responsibility to bear that burden ourselves and resolve it through introspection and healing. Reframe the situation from a distant eye, and pull away when it’s becoming too much. Be honest with yourself and be honest with the other person. You have to give yourself the room to move from distress to reserved compassion if you want find stability and peace.
2. Learn how to breathe
A good place to start when you’re feeling lost and overwhelmed is breathing. Sometimes, all we need is some space and time to clear our heads and reassess. This time can happen in just a few minutes each day, becoming a regular practice that allows you to hit pause and take some time to take a quick emotional assessment.
Find yourself a quiet place each day where you will be uninterrupted for at least 10–15 minutes. Turn the lights down. Play some relaxing music. Close your eyes and just breathe. Imagine your thoughts and your stress and your worry falling away from your (one-by-one; in time with your breathing) until your mind is clear and you can feel that tension in your shoulders ease off. At the end of the session jot your thoughts down in a journal and not how you felt at the beginning versus how you felt at the end of the exercise.
Take a little time for yourself each day to engage in this practice, and give yourself at least a few minutes each day to just be quiet and breathe deep. You don’t have to start a grand meditation practice, but you do have to start taking time for yourself. It can start here, with a few easy minutes in the quiet of your own bedroom. The stress of life is stress that can make us unwind. Start releasing that stress now so that you can get back to the root of your compassionate inner self.
3. Start filtering your news
It’s hard to avoid the news these days, but it’s easy to get worn down by it. Bad news and catastrophic world events are all around us, and you can hardly scroll through Facebook, Twitter or Instagram without being inundated by negative and empathy-sucking stories that make it hard to stay focused on the things that matter. A good place to start , therefore — when it comes to recharging our compassion — is filtering our news intake so that we can create peaceful inner climates.
Limit the time you spend looking for news, and start limiting the time you spend ingesting news. You don’t have to go cold turkey, but take a break for a day or two (or three). If you can’t cut it out completely, try to limit your intake time to a few minutes, a few times a day. There’s no need to overwhelm your system with negativity and that’s exactly what the modern news is these days — negative spin.
This isn’t about seeing only what you want to see. It’s about shifting the amount of time you spent mired in all the dank and depressing events that now constitute our 24h news cycle. When you dig in, dig in deep, but start walking away when you feel yourself becoming distressed or bogged down in all the bad news that seems to be swallowing us up. Filter your news so that you can start protecting your empathy. You don’t have an endless charge, so set some simple boundaries you can rely on.
4. Be a little more selfish
We often become bogged down and overwhelmed because we feel as though we can’t say “no”. This inability to stick up for ourselves can stem from childhood trauma, but it can also extend from generally poor self-esteem or self-defeating thoughts and negativity. If you truly want to overcome your burnout, you’ve got to start by learning how to be a little bit more selfish; something that doesn’t come naturally to us all.
You will only be able to reconnect with your happiness once you’ve created enough space to express yourself in the ways that suit you best. Self-actualization is the way by which we find meaning in our life, and it’s also the way by which we build up self-esteem and happiness in our day-to-day lives. If you’ve found yourself caught up completely in the desires and demands of others, odds are you’ve lost this space and this freedom to express yourself in the ways that you need. Learn how to be a little more selfish and start saying “no” so that you can take time for you to do the things that you need to.
Saying no starts with boundaries and communicating those boundaries effectively and civilly to the people around us. If you don’t have time for those extra tasks or get-togethers — say so, and make it clear that what you’re doing is best for both parties involved. You can create space for yourself without being problematic, and you can have boundaries without losing it all. The secret is taking the time to get to know (intimately) what boundaries you need and the best ways to communicate those new boundaries to the people around you (managers, bosses and CEO’s included).
5. Be mindful of self
If you’ve struggled with emotional burnout before, then chances are you’ve heard about a number of mindfulness techniques that can help you find your center again, and get back in touch with the parts of you that matter most. While meditation is probably the most popular among these techniques, you can also use mindful journalling, reading and even listening. Mindfulness isn’t really about one technique or set way of behaving. It’s about reshaping your internal environment in order to maximize your effectiveness in the outer world.
Start small. Find a safe and quiet space where you can relax (with no interruptions) and spend a few minutes each day getting to know yourself and your emotions. Learn to recognize how you’re feeling in the moment and why, and don’t be afraid to voice those emotions out loud, or release their power on the page by journaling about their sources and how they negatively (or positively) impact your life.
Practicing mindful meditate or journalling for just 10 minutes each day is a powerful technique for unlocking the secret opportunities of your unconcious mind. By getting more mindful, we can make it easier for ourselves to live in the present moment, thus reducing the stress caused by our expectations of the future or fears rooted in the past. Only when we learn how to relax, we can also learn how to address the things that once scared us or caused us stress.
Putting it all together…
If you feel like you’re running out of empathy for others — you might not be wrong. It is possible to use up our stores of compassion, and it’s possible to wear ourselves too thin to extend the care to others that we should. Whether you find yourself pressed to the wall by a high-stress profession, or you’re trapped within the emotional burden of caring for someone who has suffered a traumatic event, we have to safeguard our empathy in order to maintain it in the longterm. Doing, that however, takes getting realistic and getting a little more selfish about our time and how we need to spend it.
Protecting our empathy and getting back to the compassionate core of our inner natures can be done, but it takes some practice and it takes commitment each and every day. Start by drawing some boundary lines that allow you to shift from distress to compassion, and learn how to breathe and give yourself the space you need to administer the self-care you need to thrive. Filter your news and start being a little more selfish about what you need in order to maintain your zen. Be just as mindful of self as you are of others, and you will find your empathy transformed into an empowering tool, rather than a burden.
