Common Signs Of Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue is basically a chronic, low level cloud over the care and concern you have for your older adult.
When you overuse your compassion without taking time to regularly recharge, the ability to feel and care for others becomes worn down.
Common symptoms of compassion fatigue include:
- Physical or emotional exhaustion
- Reduced feelings of sympathy or empathy
- Dreading taking care of someone and feeling guilty about it
- Feeling irritable, angry, or anxious
Cfap Founder Patricia Smith
| Patricia Smith is the Founder of the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project and Healthy Caregiving, LLC. As a certified Compassion Fatigue Specialist and Educator with nearly two decades of hands-on experience, she writes, speaks, and facilitates trainings in service of those who care for others in all of the helping professions. Patricia’s extensive work in the field of compassion fatigue began in 2002. As the training & development manager for the Humane Society Silicon Valley, she created a critical shelter-wide compassion fatigue training for employees that proved successful in increasing the staff’s well-being and work satisfaction. With the implementation of this project, Patricia recognized the dire need for resources about compassion fatigue and self-care amongst caregivers across the helping professions. She founded the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project that same year. |
How To Overcome And Treat Empathy Fatigue And Compassion Fatigue
The causes of empathy and compassion fatigue are nuanced, and theres no one right way to recover. However, the first step you should take is to put yourself in a place where you can hear what you need in order to function at your best.
Those that are tasked with caring for others often feel like they dont have time for themselves. However, it is an undeniable truth that you cannot serve others to the best of your ability if you feel worn down or disconnected.
Therefore, the best place to start particularly if your work depends on your ability to empathize with others is to take care of yourself.
As Professor Stebnicki observes, the ability to overcome empathy fatigue involves an ongoing commitment to self-care, wellness, and conscious awareness of ones empathy fatigue triggers.
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Engage In Outside Hobbies
Maintaining a solid work-life balance can help protect you from compassion fatigue. When all your time is spent working or thinking about work, it can be easy to burn out. Studies have shown work-life balance is becoming more important to workers, and making time for leisure activities and personal hobbies outside of work can help lower stress levels and improve overall life satisfaction.
Burnout Vs Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue and burnout are not the same thing, although they do share some overlapping traits. The American Institute of Stress explains the difference: Compassion Fatigue has a more rapid onset while burnout emerges over time. If recognized early, Compassion Fatigue is less severe with a faster recovery.
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Seek Help For Empathy Fatigue And Compassion Fatigue
Its not just healthcare workers and caregivers who require empathy to perform well in their jobs. In todays world, its more important than ever for leaders to be empathetic toward their teams. Empathy and compassion are important qualities to have in any workplace environment.
If youd like to turn your empathy and compassion fatigue into compassion satisfaction, dont hesitate to seek help.
How To Manage Compassion Fatigue
Caring for someone else is challenging
It is not selfish to love yourself, take care of yourself, and make your happiness a priority. Its necessary. ~ Mandy Hale
Andy met Sue and fell in love with her immediately. She told him she lived with a severe mental health challenge and that she was in treatment to heal. Andy didnt care because he loved her so much. Now, after five years of marriage and aiding Sue to heal, Andy feels burned out and fatigued. After seeking help for himself, his therapist quickly diagnosed Andy with compassion fatigue.
The subject for this article, as you have surmised, is compassion fatigue. We shall examine how it affects the people who love those living with severe mental and physical health conditions. There are some signs that one may be feeling this type of emotional turmoil, and in this piece, we will discuss them.
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How To Manage Compassion Fatigue And Burnout
Burnout happens to the best of us, its when you feel tired and no longer have the motivation to continue with things you were once so passionate about or enjoyed. A particular form of this is called Compassion Fatigue.This specific type of burnout can occur when you have expressed extreme amounts of empathy towards others and even taken on another persons pain, ultimately causing your own trauma response. It is quite a common phenomenon amongst healthcare, social and mental health workers, particularly Accidental Counsellors however it can impact almost anyone who exerts this amount of care towards others.
The first step in preventing Compassion Fatigue is knowing the symptoms, these can include:
- Sleeping trouble or insomnia
- Feeling isolated and hopeless
- Dreading going to work
Once you are aware of these symptoms, have identified this problem and recognised that it is not a weakness you can work towards a resolution.
Go back to basics
When we feel overwhelmed or fatigued we often forget about the essential things that fuel us such as diet, exercise and sleep schedule. Some tips to help you remember these key aspects of living are:
- Carry a water bottle around with you
- Eating balanced meals
- Keeping meals and snacks at consistent times
- Spend at least half and hour outside in the sun preferably doing exercise or some form of movement
Watch for destruction
Learn to love yourself
Radical Acceptance
Compartmentalise
Stress Is Part Of Life
It is important to recognize that stress is a part of life, and it is easy to experience burnout and compassion fatigue when we do not move off of our automatic pilot way of steering through life instead of taking the steering wheel, recalibrating, and moving carefully and calculated in a values-driven direction. In fact, all humans will and do experience discomfort, including stress, self-doubt, fatigue, and fear. It is our attempts to eliminate discomfort that are doomed to fail at some point. We find that the more you try to get rid of discomfort the more you got it . We eventually realize that our solutions to eliminate discomfort now become the problem. This can exacerbate our burnout and compassion fatigue. Instead of focusing on self-care, we incorrectly focus on trying to keep digging and digging within the hole we have found ourselves. Yet, analyzing how we got in the hole or blaming the hole or the shovel does not help at all. We need to stop struggling with the stress and take active steps to do something different, something aligned with who and what we care about. This includes steps to care for yourself.
If you did not care you, you would not experience discomfort and there would be no potential struggle. However, there does not have to be a struggle. There can and is a better way of managing the situation, our thoughts, and emotions.
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Take Breaks From Caregiving
When caregiving is your full-time job it can be hard to take breaks in between patients. However, you should still take them to decompress when they happen. Use the time to watch funny videos, try a guided meditation for burnout, or chat with a friend.
If the person youre caring for is a family member, take turns to provide care with other family members. A sibling, spouse, or close relative can swap turns to take care of the loved one.
Compassion fatigue often arises when you need to put on a happy face when someone is not in a happy place. If a loved one is battling cancer or Alzheimers it can be hard to watch them deteriorate. Its normal to feel conflicted, too. If you have adult children who can provide support so you can take a break every now and then, let them take the reins.
Taking the time to eat, shower, and sleep is crucial to ensure that you recharge your batteries so you can continue to be the loving and kind person you naturally are.
Assessment Of Compassion Fatigue
The identification of compassion fatigue requires assessment of various helper characteristics germane to counter-transference reactions. Five characteristics that may contribute to compassion fatigue include:
- affective states in the helper
- cognitive expectations and individual capacities to process information
- ego-defensive processes
- stress effects on the helperâs self-capacities, ideological beliefs, and systems of meaning
- coping abilities and techniques of stress management
Available instruments that measure the presence of compassion fatigue are limited in scope and appropriateness for use with nurses . Their domains fail to capture unique aspects of the nurses’ role and target only select populations . To date, the following three tools have been used most frequently to measure compassion fatigue:
- The Professional Quality of Life Scale
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Compassion Satisfaction And Fatigue Test
The Compassion Satisfaction and Fatigue Test explores the positive and negative effects of compassion felt for others in caring situations. The scoring, between 0 and 5 , provides an insight into the individualâs risk of burnout and compassion fatigue by asking about you,being a helper, and the environment in which you work. Here are some examples :
About you:
- I find my life satisfying.
- I have beliefs that sustain me.
- I feel estranged from others.
- I find that I learn new things from those I care for.
About being a helper and your environment:
- I like my work as a helper.
- I feel like I have the tools and resources that I need to do my work as a helper.
- I have felt weak, tired, and run down as a result of my work as helper.
- I have felt depressed as a result of my work as a helper.
- I have thoughts that I am a âsuccessâ as a helper.
Where To Find Help
The following provide support for physicians with compassion fatigue. Call or visit their Web sites for specific information about the type of help they offer
Center for Professional Well-Being, Durham, N.C. Web site: www.cpwb.org telephone: 919-489-9167
Professional Renewal Center, Lawrence, Kan. Web site: www.prckansas.org telephone: 877-978-4772
Institute for the Study of Health and Illness’ Detoxifying Death workshop series, Bolinas, Calif. Web site: telephone: 415-868-2642
Ahnna Lake, MD. Stowe, Vt. Telephone: 802-253-9369
MDIntelliNet, LLC, Boston. Web site: www.mdintellinet.com telephone: 617-713-3688
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Engage In Mindful Caregiving
Did you know compassion is a skill you can work on? There is a meditation called Loving-Kindness meditation by Tara Brach, and a study on it was done which resulted in increased altruism in participants. They developed compassionate thoughts and reflections which impacted compassionate action and deeds. Such mental activities led to changes in the brain. According to Feel Guide, People who received the compassion training showed increased activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others, regulating emotions, and positive feelings in response to a reward or goal.
You might think, Im burned out on compassion. Why would I want to do a compassion meditation? The point is to make yourself available to people with intention for compassion and to remove codependency and let go of control. Letting go is what does the work for you.
The Loving-Kindness Meditation by Tara Brach starts with:
May I be happy.
A Perfect Storm For Compassion Fatigue
Unlike other disasters that tend to bring people together to rebuild, pandemics make you fear your neighbor.
Pandemics cause compassion fatigue because the price is so high with getting sick and the fear it generates, explains Charles Figley, founder and leading researcher at the Traumatology Institute at Tulane.
The cost of caring is sometimes high, says Figley.
Every day we hear about the millions of Americans who have been infected by the new coronavirus and the hundreds of thousands who have died, often alone and away from family.
We hear the pain of their grieving loved ones, as well as the hardships faced by people losing their jobs, fearing eviction, and being unable to feed their families.
We get burned emotionally when we absorb trauma on a regular basis without a working plan to manage the consequence of the trauma memories and its wake of impact, says Figley.
This is why, throughout history, plagues have often led to loss of compassion. In the early 15th century and 16th century, plague victims were shipped to an island to die and buried in mass graves. In other cities, victims were sealed in their homes and no food or care was allowed.
In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe wrote about an epidemic that struck London in 1665.
Everyone is struggling, and so its important to look out for each other, says Eric Zillmer, a professor of neuropsychology. Compassion creates a sense of belonging and a feeling of peace and mindfulness.
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What Is Compassion Fatigue
The American Institute of Stress defines compassion fatigue as the emotional residue or strain of exposure to working with those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events. Its typically seen in those who regularly interact with victims of trauma or disaster at work, such as healthcare workers, emergency responders, social workers, therapists, and journalists, and can even affect their loved ones. It can occur from working a single, difficult case or after working in the field for years.
Burnout And Compassion Fatigue
Burnout is a special type of stress that caregivers and professionals may experience, including a sense of reduced accomplishment and physical and/or emotional exhaustion. Compassion fatigue encompasses a much greater level of stress and exhaustion, occurring as a result of helping others who experience emotional or physical pain, oftentimes referred to as the cost of caring however, someone presenting with compassion fatigue shows a significant decrease in the ability to empathize with others.
Compassion fatigue is a type of secondary traumatic stress, which occurs as a result of helping or wanting to help others who are in need. Though they share similar features, burnout generally develops more slowly over a period of time, while compassion fatigue may have an unexpected onset and can occur without warning signs. Professionals and caregivers who experience compassion fatigue may react to situations differently from the way in which others typically respond, due to an erosion of compassion skills. A majority of individuals in any kind of helping profession experience at least some degree of burnout or compassion fatigue in their lives.
Minimizing and managing ones stress are important for self-care and living life more fully. This leads to greater self-compassion, including self-kindness, mindfulness, and our shared humanity.
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Develop Your Own Self
The lifestyle changes you choose to make will depend on your unique circumstances, but three things can speed your recovery.
Spend plenty of quiet time alone. Learning mindfulness meditation is an excellent way to ground yourself in the moment and keep your thoughts from pulling you in different directions. The ability to reconnect with a spiritual source will also help you achieve inner balance and can produce an almost miraculous turnaround, even when your world seems its blackest.
Recharge your batteries daily. Something as simple as committing to eat better and stopping all other activities while eating can have an exponential benefit on both your psyche and your physical body. A regular exercise regimen can reduce stress, help you achieve outer balance and re-energize you for time with family and friends.
Hold one focused, connected and meaningful conversation each day. This will jump start even the most depleted batteries. Time with family and close friends feeds the soul like nothing else and sadly seems to be the first thing to go when time is scarce.
Avoid Escaping In Unhealthy Ways
When experiencing extreme stress, it is normal to just want to find a way to feel better. But often in these times, people turn to unhealthy ways to soothe themselves. Drinking, doing drugs, shopping, overeating, endlessly scrolling social media, binge-watching television all seem to help at the moment. But ultimately these patterns only serve as a way for you to escape at the moment and can become destructive. Finding coping skills that legitimately help reduce your stress and not just escape or avoid your stress momentarily are far healthier.
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How To Deal With Compassion Fatigue: 3 Mindset Shifts To Help You Feel Better
- A reduced ability to feel pleasure
- Trouble sleeping
- An urge to isolate yourself from others
- Self-doubt and reduced self-esteem
- Signs of anxiety such as breathing difficulties, muscle tension and digestive problems
What Is A Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue is a term that describes the physical, emotional, and psychological impact of helping others â often through experiences of stress or trauma. Compassion fatigue is often mistaken for burnout, which is a cumulative sense of fatigue or dissatisfaction.
While burnout is one part of this form of fatigue, the term compassion fatigue encompasses a more specific experience, which may be brought about by a stressful workplace or environment, lack of resources, or excessive hours.
This form of fatigue is sometimes called a secondary stress reaction, secondhand shock, secondary traumatic stress, or vicarious trauma â largely because of compassion fatigueâs link to careers and positions that may regularly place you in stressful situations.
Compassion fatigue impacts a wide range of caregivers and professions. It is most common among professionals who work in a healing or helping capacity. If you are a legal professional, medical professional, therapist, first responder, nurse, or service provider of any kind, you may be more at risk for compassion fatigue.
For example, therapists may be affected by compassion fatigue through the experiences and stories of their patients. Some examples of common compassion fatigue triggers are:
While the symptoms can be frightening and sometimes debilitating, there are steps you can take to heal. Recognizing the signs, taking proactive preventive measures, and seeking treatment can help.
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