Burnout, compassion or empathy fatigue, and vicarious trauma are all very real experiences. For those of us in the mental health field, we often hear so many emotional and tough stories that it becomes a heavy load to carry. As one of my sheros, Sharon Salzberg said, “People who regularly spend much of their energy caring for others can exhaust themselves to the point of burnout, a state typically described as a mix of stress, anger, depression, and frustration. To avoid burnout, caregivers need to practice self-care.”
It goes a little deeper, which is where it can be helpful to have some help and training in supporting the mental/behavioral health workforce in preventing burnout. “Self-care” has become a bit of a buzzword, and if all we do is encourage workers to “do self-care,” we support them taking a few hours or days off the job, but we don’t change their approach to the work that can ultimately change their burnout trajectory.
There are really three different kinds of empathy – Cognitive empathy, where we rationally understand how someone else is feeling; emotional empathy, where we take on the feeling ourselves; and compassionate empathy, in which we care for the person and are motivated to help however we can. Emotional empathy is the kind that most often leads to burnout – feeling others’ emotions (on top of our own) can weigh us down and expend our own energy and psychological resources on others, depleting our ability to use that energy on our own struggles. However, a 2017 study by Buffone et al. found that compassionate empathy was actually energizing, rather than depleting. Another researcher Tania Singer found that empathy activates neural pathways that increase negative emotions, while compassion activates totally different circuits that increase positive emotions and release oxytocin, a stimulating and relational neurotransmitter. This is why continual empathy can be draining and can lead to burnout. Compassion does not.
Practicing compassion – and I do mean “practicing” as in intentionally building up our compassion as a skill – can help us to deal with the stories and struggles of others without taking on their emotional burden. If we can develop compassion as a response in place of empathy, we can hear the stories as a call to action, rather than additional stress and suffering.
This is where “Self-care” really comes in – to practice compassion toward others, first we have to be able to feel it toward ourselves. We have to practice self-compassion – relating to our own emotional pain and suffering “with kindness and acceptance” (again, the great Sharon Salzberg). This is what self-care really is – caring for ourselves so that we have the resources to also care for others – including declining from taking on their emotional burden and instead transforming our emotional empathy into energizing compassion.
