"Spend a few minutes online and you'll find no shortage of warnings about the dangers of being "too empathic." Headlines like "Are You an Empath? 5 Ways to Avoid Emotional Burnout " and "Why Empaths Experience Burnout Like No Other" paint a picture of empathy as a psychological liability-something that leaves caring people overwhelmed, depleted, and at special risk of exhaustion. Some articles offer nuance buried in the fine print, but many do not."
"In my own meta-analysis on this topic, published this week in Psychology, Health & Medicine, we examined more than 72 studies representing over 20,000 people, and found that individuals high in empathic concern (feeling compassion for others) and perspective taking (understanding others' views) reported fewer burnout symptoms. This was true across ages, genders, occupations, and countries."
"Our research discovered that unlike empathic concern or perspective taking, emotional resonance (automatically absorbing other people's emotions) can increase vulnerability to burnout. So there is a small kernel of truth to the idea that empathic people may be at risk of burning out, but it's constrained to just this one kind of empathy: emotional resonance."
Most types of empathy protect against burnout across ages, genders, occupations, and countries. Empathic concern (feeling compassion for others) and perspective taking (understanding others' views) consistently buffer against burnout symptoms. A meta-analysis of more than 72 studies and over 20,000 people found these protective effects. Emotional resonance, defined as automatically absorbing other people's emotions, increases vulnerability to burnout. The common belief that empathy generally causes burnout conflates different empathy processes and overgeneralizes media warnings. Only the tendency to mirror others' distress reliably raises burnout risk, while other empathic processes are protective.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]