Is Your Empathy Burning You Out?

What we can do when our care for others hurts us

Hi friends,

It’s a hard time to be a human. It feels like everywhere we look, there’s another piece of negative news. I’ve felt pretty overwhelmed lately and I imagine many of you are feeling similarly. 

By nature, I have a strong, visceral response to other people’s suffering, especially when children are involved. I’ve often thought that I have “hyperactive” mirror neurons! It’s tough for me to even watch sad or violent movies. And so, in times like these, it’s felt like I only have two options if I want to protect my mental health: 

1) Avoid the news entirely

2) Build up emotional walls to steel myself against what I’m hearing

Both options depress me and would be inconsistent with my values. I want to be an informed, educated person, and I also don’t want to block out the empathy I feel for others. In a world filled with suffering, it feels like I would only be piling on more negativity if I also stopped caring so much about people.

If this type of thinking resonates with you, you might be wondering what options exist. This is where the expertise of my friend, the Stanford psychology professor, Jamil Zaki, is helpful. Jamil has spent his career researching the science of empathy, which he (beautifully) defines as “our emotional and psychological entanglements with one another.” Before I share his wisdom about what to do when we’re drowning in empathy, I want to first share a quick 101 on empathy.

There are three types of empathy: 

🥺 Emotional empathy: the visceral experience of feeling what someone else is feeling

🧠 Cognitive empathy: the ability to diagnose what exactly is at the root of someone’s emotional state. Jamil calls this kind of empathy the “detective work” required to step outside of our frame of reference and try to adopt the other person’s perspective.

🫂 Empathic concern: the desire to help someone else, whether it’s to relieve their distress or boost their joy. 

Interestingly, these three types of empathy are only moderately correlated with each other. You can be the kind of person who experiences intense emotional empathy, but you may not be very good at understanding why they feel that way, or how to help.

Our society tends to put a premium on emotional empathy. When we see a child begin to cry when their friend gets hurt, we instinctively label them as empathetic. At times, I’ve bristled when a friend of mine doesn’t seem to be overtly feeling what I’m feeling. If they don’t show visible signs that they’re carrying some of my distress, it’s been easy to believe that they simply don’t care. Emotional empathy breeds solidarity, right?

But my conversation with Jamil helped me understand that we should see empathic languages similarly to how we see love languages: they all matter equally! A friend who doesn’t tear up when you share sad news might be the same friend who perfectly understands what’s happening in your mind or who shows up at your doorstep with meals. 

So lesson #1: be more open-minded about the kind of empathy you and other people in your life bring to the table. They are each valuable in their own way. 

Okay, now onto lesson #2: research shows that having a lot of emotional empathy is the easiest path to burnout. So, should you just stop feeling things? The good news is no! There is another solution: you can learn to shift your spotlight away from emotional empathy and towards cognitive empathy or empathic concern— both of which, it turns out, are actually protective against burnout. 

That brings me to lesson #3: these three types of empathy are not immutable traits, but skills you can cultivate with practice. If you’re looking for help with tuning your empathy and redirecting it when needed, there are many contemplative practices that can help. (You can learn more by listening to my full conversation with Jamil here.)

For example, Jamil remembers one anecdote from when his baby daughter was in the NICU. After caring for any given family, this one nurse would find a private moment to repeat the following chant to herself: “this is not my trauma.” She did this because fostering a bit of emotional distance and putting herself more into a cognitive, action-oriented frame of mind made it more possible for her to care for these families in need.

THIS WEEK’S READER WISDOM

In my last post, I asked you all to share a story of a time you successfully or unsuccessfully “let them”—in other words, let go of micromanaging other people’s feelings and behaviors. Nicole weighed in with this reflection:

"I’m dating a guy who’s very health conscious so I asked him a few days ago what caused this and he said “there’s one reason but it’s kind of private.” We’re only one month into dating but I can’t stop thinking about this reply. My mind’s thinking “Oh he doesn’t trust me, this isn’t gonna work out, he doesn’t like me enough.” Maybe because I’ve been very open and vulnerable with him so I expected him to be the same. I really don’t want to sabotage this, and I’m still trying (really hard) to just accept it and let them."

Can anyone relate? Any words of wisdom or encouragement for Nicole? Leave a comment below. 

OK, here are your two prompts for the week:

1. What kind of empathy language do you most relate to?

2. Is there a story you can remember when you and someone you cared about had a different way of expressing empathy?

Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to this free newsletter and share with your community!

Warmly,

Maya