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Empathy is a good thing. It is one of the elements of emotional intelligence, together with self awareness, social skills and others. Empathy is basically feeling another person’s pain (or happiness). But too much empathy can cause stress, it can lead to what is called empathic distress fatigue, and is most common for people in caring roles, including nurses, social workers, and humanitarian workers.
Avoiding burnout, Art Burns says, can be achieved through compassion, rather than empathy. Compassion goes further than empathy because it asks us not just to feel or share someone else’s pain, but to do something about it. It’s a positive emotion and it’s a prosocial emotion.
When we look at the brain, Burns continues, we can see that empathy and compassion are initiated in different parts. Empathy is in the limbic area of the brain, which is the part that automates, that’s where our habits, our reactions happen. It is not something we can control (without training, at least). Compassion, on the other hand, comes from the neocortex, areas of the brain that are concerned with happiness, caring, love. So empathy drains us, while compassion refills us, energises us.
Indeed it’s often suggested that one way to cope with other people’s distress – or the planet – is to get involved, to contribute, because this gives us a sense of agency, of hope. But what happens to our minds and bodies if we are not able to channel our anger at injustices and suffering into any meaningful change? What if our efforts go unheeded?
[Sources: “Empathic Distress”, Showing Up for Life Podcast, EP 90, Art Burns Coaching Podcast and Science Direct]
“The millions of people being uprooted by climate change do not benefit from the ‘stubborn optimism’ of environmental elites. Instead, they will be better served by the stubborn realism of the experts and activists now brave enough to call for urgent degrowth in rich countries and fair adaptation everywhere.” – Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, … but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 86, so that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at 130, 140, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.”— Katsushika Hokusai, also known as Gakyō Rōjin Manji (The Old Man Mad About Art)
“The death of human empathy is one of the first and most revealing signs of a culture that is about to fall into barbarity.” — Hannah Arendt
"Humility is admitting that I don’t know the whole story. Compassion is recognising that you don’t know it either."— Anon
Xenophile (n.): A person who has a love of foreign people and culture; A person with an interest in celebrating people's differences.
Courage (n.): Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty; the ability to control your fear in a dangerous or difficult situation.
