Compassion fatigue

Overview

Compassion fatigue refers to a state in which repeatedly empathizing with other people's pain and difficulties drains the emotional energy of the person empathizing, and their very ability to empathize declines. It's a concept that was originally studied in helping professions such as healthcare workers and counselors.

It's similar to burnout, but the cause is different. Burnout is largely caused by workload or dissatisfaction with your environment, while compassion fatigue is caused by empathy for others itself. Ironically, the more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to fall into compassion fatigue. The ability to feel other people's pain as if it were your own can wear you down.

Compassion fatigue in people who answer question boxes

Sometimes requests for advice about serious problems arrive in a question box: bullying, family problems, loneliness, self-loathing. When the person answering faces these seriously and puts their heart into each answer, compassion fatigue can build up.

Signs of compassion fatigue include finding it hard to read questions, feeling nothing about questions that used to move you, giving mechanical answers, and avoiding even opening your question box. These aren't a problem with the ability or sincerity of the person answering; they're a sign that the resource called empathy has run dry.

People answering in a question box aren't professional counselors. They haven't been trained, and there's no supervision (oversight by a professional). Even so, they're sometimes expected to play a role close to a counselor's. This structural mismatch lies behind compassion fatigue.

Protecting yourself from compassion fatigue

The basic defense against compassion fatigue is to accept your own limits. You don't need to stand by every single worry. For a serious request for advice, telling the sender "I'm not a professional, so please use an appropriate support service" is also a sincere response.

For day-to-day measures, you can alternate between heavy and light questions, limit the number of serious questions you answer per day, and use time away from the question box to recharge emotionally. Empathy isn't an unlimited resource. Protecting your ability to empathize is, in the long run, an investment that lets you keep offering value to more people through your question box.