Nobody Cares Too Much [6 of 7]

Caring isn't burning you out. Empathy might.

“Maybe I just care too much.” Her shoulders slumped as she spoke, which I found encouraging. Not because I wanted her to be sad, but because the body language and questioning tone betrayed a lack of conviction in what she was saying.

She was a nurse on the brink of burnout and came to see me for help.

I’d seen this lack of conviction behind these same words many times in the past. Nurses, doctors, psychologists, teachers, parents, and even random people at public talks have unconvincingly told me that caring too much is burning them out. Many don’t find it a convincing explanation, but it’s usually the only one they have. Left long enough, this idea becomes normalised, reified, and eventually a belief. If it goes unchallenged long enough, it can become a core belief, at which point the doubt in the voice disappears and things become more difficult.

Healthcare is stressful. So is teaching, parenting, and (let’s face it) just being alive in the 21st century. There’s little, if anything, I can do about most of that, but adding the burden of “caring too much” confuses and unnecessarily stresses people already close to their limit.

Worse still, it’s not true.

There are definitely things we can care too much about. The temperature of a coffee, the brand names on our clothing, the number of likes on a post, to name a few.

But not the welfare of people.

I think this is why people often sound unconvinced when they say they care too much. The alternative — that they should care less about people — doesn’t feel right either. There’s (almost) no culture where not caring about others is admired or encouraged, and it feels natural to care. It’s obvious from an early age that we’re wired to care about each other, so caring for people isn’t the reason so many people are stressed. Caring is actually an important part of avoiding burnout.

The problem is empathy.

Imagine being in your kitchen with a friend or family member, and you see them accidentally jam their right thumb in a drawer. Instinctively, you may wince and reach for your own right thumb. This is empathy, specifically affective empathy, which is the natural sharing in the experiences of others without needing to be told about them.

This empathy might spur you into action. Maybe you reach for an ice pack, lead them to the couch, get a painkiller, a drink of water (or something stronger), and show your concern. You might even do all this quite automatically, with no need to think it through. You can see this in a parent responding to a baby’s cry before they’ve consciously decided to act.

A distressed person is helped, social bonds are strengthened, it seems like a very elegant solution.

I want to draw your attention to a thread that runs through these empathic responses, which is the automatic responding. Encountering someone in distress, we move in to alleviate it without even being fully aware we’re doing it, which I find a source of hope in our increasingly fragmented world. Evidence that we’re wired to lean in, not turn away.

It’s an impressive system. We encounter distress, resonate emotionally with it, and move automatically to alleviate it. It’s a great system, until you consider — whose distress?

To what degree are these automatic responses about one’s own empathically triggered distress, and to what degree is it a genuine focus on alleviating the distress of the other person? An honest look can make this an uncomfortable question.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Our empathic response system is very well-evolved for a hunter-gatherer society or a small community. It almost automates a network of cooperation among people who rely on each other to survive and even flourish.

It’s less well-suited for much of our 21st-century experience.

Take a nurse going from bed to bed on a ward, a doctor or psychologist seeing one patient after another in their office. Their days are spent attending to people in distress, which will often automatically put them in distress as well. A teacher in front of a classroom, or parents raising children, will be regularly set off emotionally by others. And that’s on top of whatever stress they’re already under in their personal lives.

It’s worth mentioning that empathic resonance works in the other direction as well. When we encounter people enjoying themselves and laughing, we’ll also resonate with that; I often laughed along with Tibetans before I could speak the language, and I love the arrivals hall in airports. The constant stream of loved ones being reunited is an easy way to generate smiles and emotions that we should spend more time cultivating in ourselves.

We’ve gone from a society of people who knew very little about communities more than a few days’ walk away to being regularly notified about earthquakes, floods and wars on the other side of the world. This has happened quite quickly in evolutionary terms and is compounded by the fact that so much of the information we receive is filtered by algorithms to spark strong emotional reactions. It can mean we’re constantly resonating with the anger, fear, and sadness of people we wouldn’t have previously known anything about, let alone met in person.

So far, this might sound like a case against empathy, but I assure you it’s not. Left unchecked, empathic distress can become a pathway to burnout. But there’s a way to make that response protective.

Transform it into compassion.

Our culture often conflates empathy and compassion, which may be one reason we continue to misunderstand burnout among healthcare professionals. People leave the profession believing they “care too much.”

Consider two nurses performing exactly the same tasks on the same ward. From the outside, their behaviour is identical: same attentiveness, same skill, same bedside manner. But internally, one is running on autopilot, exhausted by the day's emotional residue. The other notices those empathic reactions as they arise, returns attention to the patient’s distress, and seeks to reduce it.

We might not tell the difference from the outside, but the inner orientation changes everything.

Buddhist psychology agrees: compassion is fundamentally a mental state. It often expresses itself through actions, but it isn’t reducible to them. The degree to which we can call any act compassionate is the degree to which the person is focused on alleviating the suffering of another — and that focus on the other isn’t what defines empathy.

Empathy is resonance with another person’s experience.
Compassion is the wish that they not suffer.
Those are not the same thing.

Which means what people often call “compassion fatigue” may be something else entirely: empathic distress. Increasingly, research suggests compassion isn’t the cause of this kind of burnout. It may actually be the solution.

Blaming compassion for burnout is like blaming the cast on your arm for the broken bone.

Can we swap empathy for compassion — is this what contemplative traditions like Buddhism do?

No. We actually need empathy to develop compassion. We need to understand what it’s like for other people in distress so that we can develop the aspiration to help free them from it.

You can have high levels of empathy without compassion, but you can’t have high levels of compassion without empathy.

This is why I was encouraged by the nurse's doubting tone. I wasn’t talking to someone who “cared too much”, but someone who’d mistaken empathy for compassion.

And that’s something that can be trained.

The distinction between empathic distress and compassion isn’t merely philosophical. It’s practical, and contemplative traditions have spent centuries developing methods for cultivating it. Modern psychology is increasingly arriving at many of the same conclusions.

That’s what Ground State: Mindfulness That Holds Its Ground is built around. Eight weeks of structured practice grounded in contemplative tradition and contemporary science, helping caring people make compassion sustainable rather than exhausting.

Not by caring less, but by learning to care differently.

If this post has named something you’ve felt but couldn’t quite articulate, the next step is practice.