Compassion over empathy could help prevent emotional burnout

person

...For Singer, empathy is "a precursor to compassion, but too much of it can lead to antisocial behaviour". For example, healthcare workers or caregivers who are frequently faced with trauma victims can become intensely distressed themselves, feel overwhelmed and burn out. Brain scans have shown that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and the one who feels empathy. So empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

In order to avoid this, we need to transform empathy into compassion. Compassion is a feeling of pity or a warm, caring emotion that does not involve feeling, say, sadness if the other person is sad. In order to better understand compassion, Singer has studied Buddhist monks -- renowned for being experts in "pro-social" meditation and compassion. When they watched videos of other people suffering, fMRI scans of their brains showed heightened activity in areas that are important to care, nurturing and positive social affiliation. In non-meditators, the videos were more likely to trigger the brain areas associated with unpleasant feelings of sadness and pain...


http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/12/tania-singer-compassion-burnout

Citta

Interesting.

lamaramadingdong

There was a discussion on just this topic this week on NPR.

karmablues

I think in Buddhism we are supposed to develop equanimity alongside love, compassion and sympathetic joy, as a means to prevent this "emotional burnout".

how

I have studied this for a long time with meditators and not found this to be true for me, in contrast to many of my betters.

I think burnout actually results from the limits we impose on being open, rather than just being fully open.
It is our flip flopping between opening and closing that is the real isometric burn out of the heart. This results in an emotional & physic fatigue that is hard to treat.

To open yourself wide enough is to have nothing to burn out. Burn out just shows you the present limits of what you are still unable to let go of.

Folks who have found themselves repeatedly drained from their interactions with other peoples needs, have managed to significantly lesson it over time as they become willing to more fully open up to all of it..