Compassion Fatigue
How many of you feel exhausted most days?
Despite the fact that you might have more time affluence since COVID’s restrictions began months ago, it’s likely that you still feel tired. This fatigue can result from a busy schedule, emotional challenges, financial burdens and high responsibilities that impact your quality of life. Sometimes stress is caused by physical activity and time commitments, but it is often the result of carrying fast-paced or heavy emotional loads and fighting off constant racing thoughts. Regardless of the trigger, your thoughts, emotions and lifestyle habits can result in developing significant fatigue. This is why you are exhausted after an emotional event such as a funeral, a stressful day at work, conflict or family drama. Repeated reviewing of stress in your mind and fearing the “what ifs?” of the future impacts your energy and negatively impacts your health.
When you enter worry mode, this mental exhaustion takes a toll on your health. The cost is high levels of cortisol and adrenal fatigue that often come from high empathy — emotions connected to caring for others and wanting necessary change in the world.
Sometimes you become energy-drained by the constant fears produced from hearing repeated stories of people suffering from hardships and negative circumstances. In the last months, you have been bombarded with reports about COVID statistics, uncertainty and financial devastation from mass violence, distorted news reporting and repetitive venting patterns from loved ones about politics. Your mind is overloaded by constant emotion — and this impacts your energy tank.
It does not matter what triggers your repetitive stress. What matters is how you navigate through it and the mindset you keep when repeatedly faced with energy-draining experiences.
The research on compassion fatigue from the American Institute of Stress (American Institute of Stress, 2019) reports that hearing repeated stories involving the intense suffering of others can impact optimism, reduce meaningfulness and lead to exhaustion on emotional, mental and physical levels. High-empathy people tend to carry these stories around with them, and this weight impacts emotional presence, sleep and productivity.
Compassion fatigue is a form of burnout that creates dissonance between your body, mind and behavioral functioning, throwing you into dysregulation for periods of time. When stress is long-term, it can lower functioning baselines and increase levels of depression and anxiety, creating negative emotional habits and causing havoc in your quality of life.
When you are in mental depletion, you move from stages of enthusiasm to stagnation to frustration and then to apathy. In the midst of these stages of burnout, sleep becomes impaired, cognitive ability (memory and organization) drops, moods become inconsistent and thinking errors replace hope-filled paradigms. Isolation increases as frustration causes people to withdraw, disengage and even become cynical.
In these periods of compassion fatigue, you can experience an imbalance of adrenaline, fluctuating from moments of too much adrenaline to moments of an empty emotional tank. This swing from one side — marked by heightened irritability, frustration, anxiety or worry — to the other side of fatigue — disengagement, lack of motivation and apathy — can quickly become a pattern that needs correcting.
One of the tools I recommend in life-coaching is learning to recognize when you are out of energy balance and taking an opposite action to reset back to optimal functioning. When you are lacking energy, leaning into energy-creating activities restores balance.
For example, if you find yourself lethargic and disengaged, your energy system is below optimal level. The opposite-action technique directs you to engage in an energy-building activity, such as taking a brisk walk, listening to energizing music or doing a brief workout routine. While doing this energy-building activity, pairing a mindset of recharge with that activity directs your brain to reset that energy to a high level of functioning. Reciting a mantra to match the activity can also help initiate a reset moment. You might say to yourself, “This walk will bring my energy level back to productive focus.” However, if on that walk you are focused on how tired you feel, the reset will not occur. Internal dialogue must match the behavior and your desired outcome in order to effectively move you in the right direction.
On the flip side, when you have too much adrenaline, regaining peacefulness creates regulation, returning you to a healthy balance. If you find yourself overwhelmed with frustration or anxiety, stepping back and slowing your body and mind through meditation, prayer or breathing exercises are all effective strategies. By intentionally setting your mind on peaceful thoughts and leaning into a quiet activity that resets energy back to baseline, balance is all but guaranteed. This congruence with body, mind and choice takes practice, and your habit systems fight you until new habits become new trained pathways.
This body-mind-choice formula for regulating energy helps to build the mental and physical muscles necessary to navigate through tough times. When these three parts of self are in harmony, you can experience peace regardless of circumstance. This is why when you are distracting yourself with busyness, you actually reinforce anxiety.
Distractions used to avoid racing thoughts can temporarily push emotions away, but they don’t get the anxiety off of your back. On the other hand, intentionally directing anxiety in a purposeful way builds pathways for strengthening regulation. If you use nothing but distractions to avoid anxiety, it will show up later in your quiet moments, typically when you are trying to fall asleep or when you get up in the morning.
Emotional intelligence allows you to notice when you are in fatigue. It also provides you with the opportunity to re-establish balance through skills that can help lead you back to your optimal energy and core principles for living. It can be a struggle, but no one gets to go through life without struggle. You can only focus on things within your control. Your intention to balance your energy, set your mindset, and lean into the choice that creates internal harmony, provides freedom to exercise the muscles of navigation. You need those navigation muscles in order to stay aligned with your best version of self. Our best self is the one consistently aligned with your values regardless of what is going on around you.