What Factors Contribute To Cf/vt And Burnout
There are many reasons for which helping professionals can develop compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. These are described in Saakvitne and Pearlmans book Transforming the Pain :
The Individual:
Your current life circumstances, your history, your coping style and your personality type all affect how compassion fatigue may impact you.
Most helpers also have other life stressors to deal with. Many are in the sandwich generation meaning that they take care of both young children and aging parents in addition to managing a heavy and complex workload. Helpers are not immune to pain in their own lives and, in fact, some studies show that they are more vulnerable to life changes than people who do less stressful work.
The Situation:
Helpers often do work that other people dont want to hear about. They spend their time caring for people who are not valued or understood in our society. This may include individuals who are homeless, abused, incarcerated or chronically ill.
Furthermore, our working environments are often stressful and fraught with workplace negativity. This negativity is often a result of individual compassion fatigue, burnout and general unhappiness. The work itself is also very stressful. Dealing with clients/patients who are experiencing chronic crises, who have difficulty controlling their emotions, and/or those who may not get better can be draining.
Burnout Vs Compassion Fatigue: 7 Ways To Tell The Difference
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When I first heard of compassion fatigue, I thought it was just another pretentious term for people who mismanage their emotional investments.
I couldnt have been more wrong.
After some revealing discussions with a couple of friends who were all working in the medical field, my perspective changed significantly.
But it wasnt until I started working as a therapist that I truly felt the burden of compassion fatigue.
Long story short, I came to realize that people CAN reach physical and emotional exhaustion when their job involves caring for others, regardless of how emotionally resilient they may be.
And since you cant stop being compassionate just like that especially when its part of your job its vital to cultivate healthy practices that restore your physical and emotional balance.
What You Will Learn
The Physical Effects Of Burnout
Signs of nurse burnout can manifest in physical symptoms. Nurses experiencing burnout may complain of:
- Digestive problems
- Disrupted sleep and insomnia
The chronic fatigue typical of nurse burnout can contribute to heart disease and high blood pressure. It may also make nurses more vulnerable to illnesses such as the flu.
Early identification of burnout can stem its progression. When nurse leaders recognize the signs of burnout, they can implement strategies that lower stress levels for nurses in distress. This can provide nurses with needed support that prevents the issue from getting out of control.
The cooperative nature of the nursing profession makes managing nurse burnout critical to maintaining a high level of care. Burnout reduces a nurses performance and concentration this, in turn, can negatively affect patient outcomes and compromise the work of other nurses working as a team.
Recognizing and managing burnout also protects the well-being of the nurses themselves. Health care organizations have an obligation to take the steps needed to shield nurses from the damaging effects of burnout.
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Emotional And Physical Exhaustion
Although its specific to a wide range of conditions, physical and emotional exhaustion is probably the most obvious sign of compassion fatigue.
You feel drained and lifeless, like a walking corpse, and all you want to do is shut down.
Some might even say that the level of exhaustion you experience after caring for someone whos in a lot of pain is comparable to a day of hard physical labor.
Developing And Practicing Self
Self-care strategies can be hugely beneficial for anyone, but they are especially helpful for those experiencing compassion fatigue. While identifying and developing self-care strategies that work is important, finding time to actually put these strategies into practice on a regular basis is more important. These strategies not only enable professionals to cope with work stress, they help boost resilience, which is the ability to quickly recover from difficult or trying situations.
Eat a Balanced Diet
While some fatigued individuals may forget to eat or resort to unhealthy processed foods, maintaining a balanced diet is one of the simplest ways to practice self-care. For those on the go all week, finding a time on the weekend to shop for healthy food and prepare meals for the workweek can be extremely helpful. Individuals with compassion fatigue will also benefit from eating three solid meals each day and keeping these meals on a somewhat regular schedule.
Exercise Regularly
Exercise has been proven to reduce stress and increase endorphins, but finding time to exercise can be difficult, especially for individuals who havenât previously had an exercise routine. Starting small with just a few minutes of walking each day and then building to longer workouts can be an effective and sustainable way to build physical activity into everyday life.
Get Consistent Sleep
Establish Work-Life Balance
Address Emotional Needs
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Cultivating Effective Coping Strategies Away From The Workplace
Coping strategies outside the workplace are just as important as within the workplace. Cultivating these strategies can help individuals maintain their work-life balance and prevent workplace stressors from seeping into their personal lives and homes. In addition to the self-care tips listed above, other effective coping strategies include deep breathing, meditation, or practicing a hands-on hobby like gardening or baking.
Compassion Fatigue: Nursing And Care Delivery Impact
Like nurse burnout, compassion fatigue doesnt just harm the nurses experiencing it. It also impacts patient care delivery by reducing a nurses work performance. The poor health and hopelessness associated with compassion fatigue often affect a nurses judgment, which can lead to medical errors.
Numerous studies have established that empathy in health care plays an important role in achieving optimal health outcomes. Empathetic nurses better understand patients feelings and opinions, enabling them to conduct accurate assessments and design treatment plans that improve patient health.
The gradual erosion of empathy characteristic of compassion fatigue disrupts the patient-nurse dynamic. When nurses lack empathy, their ability to communicate with patients suffers. This can impact their ability to build trust with patients. Poor communication can also affect patient safety and the patient experience.
The consequences of lack of empathy may include patients receiving:
- Wrong treatments
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Why Burnout Shouldnt Be Ignored:
One factor in burnout treatment that can complicate and slow recovery is the flexibility of brains. In psychotherapy and psychology, we are excited about how flexible adult brains are. It means that even adult brains can heal and recover in ways that psychiatrists 50 years ago didnt believe was possible. However, this flexibility of brains is one good reason to treat burnout ASAP. The longer brains remain in a burnout state, the more likely it is that the brain patterns involved in the symptoms of burnout become increasingly ingrained and difficult to recover from.
Just like how researchers now recommend that individuals whove experienced long-term or multiple recurrences of depression should remain on antidepressant medication indefinitely, many experts in burnout believe that a brain that has remained in the burnout state longer may have a more difficult road to recovery than a brain experiencing burnout with a rapid-onset and immediate treatment.
Differences Between Compassion Fatigue And Burnout
There are four major differences between compassion fatigue and burnout.
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Watch For These Key Warning Signs Of Compassion Fatigue
You might not be familiar with the term compassion fatigue, but you probably recognize the idea behind it: its the feeling that you have no more empathy left to give.
Compassion fatigue used to be something that mostly struck health care workers, first responders, law enforcement officers and at-home caregivers. But as the pandemic continues and the 24-hour news cycle brings nonstop news of suffering from around the world, were all at risk of developing compassion fatigue.
Compassion fatigue is similar to burnout. But burnout usually stems from having too much work or too many responsibilities. Compassion fatigue comes from helping othersyou want to keep helping, but youre overwhelmed from being exposed to the trauma of others .
Like burnout, compassion fatigue is a process. It takes time to develop. It keeps building slowly, to a point where you start to not care about yourself or others in your life. You end up overusing your compassion skills and reserves, so you no longer have much to provide, said Yazhini Srivathsal, MD, a psychiatrist with Banner Behavioral Health Hospital in Scottsdale, AZ.
Mitigate How The Work Environment Directly Leads To Burnout Or Compassion Fatigue
Long hours and a poor work-life balance are common culprits. Its up to leadership to model time boundaries and offer flexibility and time off when needed to meet the demands of the lives of each team member.
Excessive workloads and unrealistic deadlines are uniquely common to the pandemic. Many employees have had no choice but to shoulder the workloads of coworkers who have left seeking new opportunities. Employees should be given adequate time and resources to do their job and compensated for their responsibilities.
A dysfunctional work environment leads to burnout and high turnover. To avoid this, leadership should make all responsibilities clearly defined. First, your organization should train leaders to coach effectively and how to ask for and give both positive and corrective feedback.
Next, leaders should learn how unconscious bias undermines their ability to lead their employees and can even adversely affect the mental health of their employees. Last, they should be open to discussing mental health at work as a tactic to create an open culture around well-being and burnout.
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Burnout May Happen In Days Weeks Or Years
Burnout looks different for every individual. Essentially, burnout occurs when we no longer have the tools to cope with the stress we experience. For some, burnout may happen quickly in response to enormous amounts of stress. Imagine: a disaster response aid worker working 18-hour days for just a few weeks in a place where they feel isolated from anyone to process the experience with. For others, the process can happen very slowly. For example: a teacher who used to love their job but loses their enthusiasm, interest, or even empathy for teaching students over the course of years.
Both types of burnout are serious. Though, for many, its far more difficult to recognize burnout when the onset is gradual.
Difference Between Empathic Strain Vicarious Trauma And Burnout
These three terms are complementary and yet different from one another two are occupational hazards only to the helping field.
Empathic Strain , formerly known as Compassion Fatigue: refers to the profound emotional and physical exhaustion that helping professionals and caretakers can develop over the course of their career as helpers. It is a gradual erosion of all the things that keep us connected to others in our caregiver role: our hope and our empathynot only for others but also for ourselves. When we suffer from Empathic Strain, we start seeing changes in both our personal and professional lives. We can become dispirited and increasingly bitter at work we may contribute to a toxic work environment we are more prone to work errors we may violate confidentiality and lose a respectful stance toward our students and collegues we become short-tempered with our loved ones and we feel constant guilt or resentment at the never-ending demands on our personal time.
Vicarious Trauma: This term was coined by Pearlman & Saakvitne to describe the profound shift in world view that occurs in helping professionals, when they work with clients who have experienced trauma. Helpers notice that their fundamental beliefs about the world are altered and possibly damaged by being repeatedly exposed to traumatic material.
Read through the examples below and notice if you recognize elements of these scenarios in yourself.
Example:
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Watch For These Symptoms Of Compassion Fatigue
The sooner you notice signs of compassion fatigue, the sooner you can care for yourself and replenish your stores of empathy. Be on the lookout for:
- Feeling physical, psychological and emotional exhaustion
- Feeling helpless, hopeless or powerless
- Feeling irritable, angry, sad or numb
- A sense of being detached or having decreased pleasure in activities
- Ruminating about the suffering of others and feeling anger towards the events or people causing the suffering
- Blaming yourself and having thoughts of not having done enough to help the people who are suffering
- A decreased sense of personal and professional accomplishment
- A change in your worldview or spirituality
- Physical symptoms, including appetite and sleep disturbances, nausea and dizziness
Burnout Compassion Fatigue And Vicarious Trauma
Posted on – Last updated: August 24, 2022
In the simplest terms: burnout occurs when the stress we experience exceeds our capacity to cope with that stress. Some individuals may be able to thrive at least in the short term under high stress. However, chronic stress without relief eventually begins to take a toll on even the most resilient individuals.
Everyone has a different capacity to tolerate stress. Thanks to two things:
- Physiological factors some bodies may have a genetic predisposition to handling stress better, or to be relatively unhindered by aging, chronic illness, or poor sleep quality.
- Psychological resiliency adults who experienced a high number of Positive Childhood Experiences, for example, have an increased capacity for handling stress as adults.
Other individuals have less resistance to stress, such as trauma survivors, people living with chronic pain, or people experiencing difficulties in other areas of life . This impacts our bodys ability to bounce back from both specific stressors and chronic stress. When the body begins to lose the ability to bounce back after stress, the road to burnout is well underway.
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Caregiver Burnout May Be Easier To Cope With Than Compassion Fatigue
Caregiver burnout is unpleasant and harmful, but compassion fatigue may be even harder to manage. Caregiver burnout can be an ebbing and flowing condition that responds well to immediate self-care and other coping skills. On the other hand, compassion fatigue may require a complete withdrawal from the caregiving situation. A loss of empathy cant just be dialed back immediately and if left to progress without help, can become toxic to the caregiver and care receiver.
The best intervention is often prevention. If you start to recognize compassion fatigue, act immediately to get control of the situation. Check out your responses with someone you trust to give you an objective view of how you are handling things.
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The Relationship Between Compassion Fatigue And Burnout Among Nurses
When we experience compassion fatigue, we dont feel like ourselves. We feel as if were failing, even though we are giving everything we have. Compassion fatigue and burnout are similar in the sense that both require recovery. Were not satisfied with the results of our efforts. Its time to reclaim our agency and begin working toward a more rewarding future. However, how do we go about recovering from burnout?
The best way to treat compassion fatigue is to identify it as a condition and identify its symptoms. By recognizing that it is a serious issue, organizations can create an environment that encourages workers to take time to care for themselves. Its also important to have a supportive work environment. Taking time to care for yourself is critical to preventing burnout. As a nurse, you are used to putting others needs before your own, and its not unusual to be called upon to help others in their time of need.
Although burnout is often characterized by a prolonged period of inaction, it is possible to overcome the situation and avoid compassion fatigue. Self-care is essential for nurses who are used to placing the needs of others before their own. Taking extra time for yourself and your own well-being is essential in order to prevent burnout. Its also vital for nursing organizations to make their employees aware that compassion fatigue is a real and serious condition.
Counselling For Burnout And Compassion Fatigue
Counselling is an important resource for everyone impacted by the current global pandemic, especially healthcare and frontline workers. Through counselling, therapists work to assist you with burnout and compassion fatigue by helping you clearly recognize the source of stress and then work through personalized management strategies.
Of course, counselling is beneficial for those struggling to manage their symptoms, it also helps those who are on the cusp of entering into burnout. At On Your Mind Counselling, our team of experienced professionals can help you identify the root of the problem even before it begins to spill over into your home and personal life. For more information, book a free consultation today!
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