From Burden to Blessing: The Benefit of Reframing Empathy

Source: RomanSamborskyi_Shutterstock

Picture the scene: You’re winding down for a long-awaited vacation, almost at inbox zero, with a few hours to go, and then you’re free. All is going to plan. Suddenly, you hear the familiar ping of a new email notification. The trepidation starts. You’ve been waiting for this vacation for months—the last thing you need is more work to pile up on your desk. With unease, you open your inbox, anticipating drama about to fill your screen. But, as you scroll through the subject lines, you see some unexpected words—“Interview for Oprah Winfrey Site.”

As a department chair, I’m always mindful of the importance of taking a break. After all, looking after ourselves is crucial to help us care for others. Still, when the scenario above happened to me just before an upcoming break, I couldn’t help but take the opportunity—it’s Oprah, after all!

The interview in question was for a piece written about people highly sensitive to the emotions and feelings of others—so susceptible that, in some cases, they might physically feel sensations on their own bodies when viewing other people in pain.¹ You might think this sounds like a miraculous gift— to be attuned to the sensations of others, like fictional characters in television or movies. Still, feeling with other people can be draining.

That empathy can be draining isn’t just valid for people who appear acutely sensitive to the feelings of those around them. We can all, at times, risk finding empathy effortful and energy-zapping. Put simply, when we empathise with someone, we are not only feeling our own emotions but also sharing the emotions of the person we are empathising with. This can, over time, take its toll.

Preference to Avoid Empathy

One study showed that, if people are given a choice to share empathy or an alternative course of action, they show “a robust preference to avoid empathy.”²

The study involved 11 different experiments and used an empathy selection task. In this task, people encounter a stranger in an emotional situation and can choose between engaging empathically or with detachment. Across each study, people typically opted to avoid empathy, particularly when they perceived it to be effortful.

People’s willingness to engage in empathy also decreased over time, hinting that perceived costs of engaging in empathy carry forward and increase the longer the people engaged in the process. In the study authors’ words, for every “additional trial in the empathy selection task, the odds of choosing the empathy were 2% lower.”²

To put that into a more applied example, have you ever found yourself emotionally drained by empathic reactions at work and simply wanting to shut yourself away from others at the end of the day? I know I can relate to this feeling. The draining nature of empathy may contribute to this.

Over the years, I’ve also worked with some care practitioners who have reported how a tragic event earlier in the day has carried forward and impacted a later interaction. Part of the reason for this is that our past interactions can affect future interactions. For this reason, organisations that try to train empathy often highlight the importance of checking in with ourselves to understand if we are carrying over previous encounters before entering a new interaction.

Putting all this together, we’re left with a bit of a dilemma: Empathy benefits social interaction and relationships (in both personal and professional contexts). But it also carries felt costs and, for some, can be overwhelming. What is the best way to approach empathy? What can we do to help regulate our empathic reactions to ensure that we can care but are less likely to feel fatigued by our empathy for others?

Source: Nadine Shaabana/Unsplash

Effects of Framing

How we frame empathy can matter.

In 2020, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University found that simply changing how a situation was framed impacted empathic and prosocial responses to another person in distress.

In the study, participants encountered different photos of people experiencing neutral or negative emotions. For some trials, they simply observed the emotions. For others, they were instructed to think hopefully (or hopelessly) about the situation. For instance, a hopeful framing included thinking, “something could be done to make the situation better.” In contrast, a hopeless thought process included thinking, “it is a hopeless situation for this person.”

The researchers wanted to know whether changing how people framed the situation would impact their emotional responses to empathising with the other person. And, so, it did. Framing led to less personal feelings of discomfort when empathising. Putting on a hopeful lens, in particular, led to people feeling positive themselves.

Empathy Essential Reads

How to Help Someone Have an Empathy Makeover

The Impact of Detached Reactions to Tragedy

In short, how people anticipated the outcomes of empathy to play out mattered. Framing empathy helped people feel less upset when dealing with a difficult situation. A subtle tweak in mindset led to a change in approach.³

These results speak to a broader message seen in other research: Empathy is a skill that can be regulated and trained.⁴ This indicates that although we might sometimes feel overwhelmed by empathy, we can learn to spot triggers and engage in behaviours that regulate them.

What might these behaviours look like in practice? One possibility is taking a step back to assess our emotional state before engaging in empathetic responses. Another is to intentionally switch our framing away from our own distress toward positive opportunities available to help the person we are empathising with. For example, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the challenges our interaction partners face, we can focus on the satisfaction that comes from being able to help them, or we can trust that they can help themselves to a positive outcome.