What gets spent when you feel someone else's pain
When someone near you tells you about something terrible, you don't just hear the words. Your brain fills in their state: areas that respond to unpleasant sensations in your own body also switch on for someone else's experience. It's not the part that distinguishes exactly where it hurts, but the part that makes pain unbearable.
That's why an hour of someone else's story can cost about as much as an hour of your own. You weren't solving problems, often weren't even responding - yet by evening, you feel empty. Your body spent that hour as if you were the one hurting.
about this often, people chose to empathize when they could simply describe
In experiments, people were given 2 sets of cards: describe the person in a photo from the outside, or empathize with them. There were no rewards or evaluations for either choice - yet they chose empathizing in about a third of cases. They explained opting out by saying it was hard and "I won't be able to do it." From the outside, this can look like coldness, but it is really an assessment of effort.
Empathy and compassion cost different things
When people were trained to distinguish someone else's feelings more precisely, their unpleasant states and responses in those same "pain" areas increased. When they were trained in compassion - not to merge, but to wish the person well and stay close - the picture changed: more warm states and activity in networks linked to attachment. These were small studies with short courses, mostly from 1 research group: the pattern repeats, but the effect size is still being clarified.
The difference isn't in how much you care. It's whether you are standing beside them or inside their experience.
- Action: ask what they need
- Compassion: your pain matters to me
- Empathy: I imagine how you feel
- Contagion: I feel as bad as you
Burnout in people who help was long called compassion fatigue. It seems that what wears you down isn't compassion, but the bottom level - contagion with no way into action. While you're inside someone else's state, you have nothing to help with: there are 2 of you in the same trouble and not a single free pair of hands.
The way out isn't to feel less. It's to keep a boundary between "I feel for you" and "I feel just as bad." You hold it with your body and words: as long as you notice your own breathing and name the other person's feeling out loud, you stay beside them rather than becoming a second victim.
- Name their feeling: "you're scared"
- Notice your body: feet, breath, back
- Ask what they need now - listening or help
- Chase their state to "really understand"
- Silently endure the whole story with a straight face
- Replay their story for another hour afterward
Finish reading in the Miqo app
1 more minute, then a quiz at the end. Find it under “Relationships → Empathy”
Point your phone camera here to open the App Store or Google Play.
Sources
- Klimecki, Singer, and colleagues on the different effects of compassion and empathy training (Cerebral Cortex, 2013
- Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2014)
- Cameron and colleagues, "Empathy Is Hard Work" (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2019)