
How to Avoid Empathy Burnout - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/how-to-avoid-empathy-burnout
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cpncrunch
Talking about burnout in general, the main factor that appears to cause all
types of burnout is negative emotions. From my perspective, the best antidote
is to always use logical, intellectual responses to problems, rather than an
emotional response. This is also generally more useful than an emotional
response. You can train yourself to nip negative emotional responses in the
bud, and instead convert them into working out a solution to a problem.

For whatever reason, the brain appears to have a limit to the amount of built-
up negative emotions it can deal with. Beyond a certain point the result is
burnout, depression and psychosomatic illnesses.

(source: I suffered from severe burnout, recovered, and have been researching
and writing about it for the past 16 years).

~~~
zzalpha
_From my perspective, the best antidote is to always use logical, intellectual
responses to problems, rather than an emotional response._

Let me guess: engineer?

There's absolutely a personality type that prefers to solve all problems with
logic and clear thinking, which is a very good thing when you're dealing with
engineering problems.

When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively
counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond
negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize
this dynamic.

Not all people and all problems are amenable to "logical" solutions.

Controlling negative emotions is a very good thing. But there are many ways to
achieve that. Turning to rational problem solving is just one mental tool, but
it's not fit for all occasions.

~~~
philwelch
> When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be
> actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and
> respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably
> recognize this dynamic.

Nonsense! As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife
is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state
is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can
help. There's nothing illogical or non-intellectual about realizing that, it's
just a matter of learning from experience. In fact, people who regularly turn
to problem solving and annoy their significant others are probably too driven
by their own emotions of frustration and empathy.

A better example of how logical, intellectual approaches to people problems
don't always work might be with character judgments. Many people can derive
intuitions about people without consciously recognizing where those intuitions
are coming from, and deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy is often
impossible to break down to logical terms until it's too late.

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onion2k
_As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is
emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is
to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there 's any way I can
help._

Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't
have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the
actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe
people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That
doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less
stressful for your wife if she could take about things _before_ she was
emotional about them.

This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems
until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.

~~~
philwelch
I mean, sometimes people just come home emotional. I don't really want to
dissect my marriage on here or anything--my point is that there is nothing
illogical or non-logical about dealing with other people's feelings.

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linhchi
Recently I can afford to implement this rule "I choose who can come and how
much close to me, male and female alike, physical distance and psychological
distance alike".

I learn every single word of this the hard way.

But the hardest is to learn that it's important to recognise "psychological
distance". Because building up an "emotional armor" is trickier than keeping
"physical distance" from some negative source.

~~~
azraomega
I can relate. 2 things: \- get leaner \- get more solitude time

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nnq
The saddest thing not said is that we live in a society where we need to have
_professionals paid to care_ because most of are too unavailable to just care
because... uhm... you know... _we are all f human beings!_

~~~
ZenoArrow
Did you read the article? If you did you would understand there's an art to
getting caring right, to 'just care' can be damaging if its not done right.

Furthermore, whilst I agree that our society is fairly individualistic, there
is a certain wisdom in that. Our society has changed dramatically over the
past 200 years and that rate of change doesn't show many signs of slowing
down. I'd argue this has led to making it harder to learn from our immediate
predecessors. For example, take relationships. Divorce has become the norm
rather than a rarity, and while that's not necessarily a negative trend (I'd
rather people became divorced if it was clear that the care needed to resolve
issues was lacking), it would suggest many people grow up without a model of a
healthy adult relationship to follow. If we don't know how to be in a
relationship, then we should at least focus on looking after ourselves until
we work out what a healthy relationship should be like.

