Had enough? You are not alone

Empathy burnout is real. It can silently take a toll on you and hurt you in ways you do not fathom.

In January 2020, Manish Thapa, senior manager (product and marketing) at a multinational conglomerate started a fundraiser for an ailing family member who worked as a teacher in China. The fundraiser received a heartwarming response, and the family was able to pool together a substantial amount for her treatment. A lot has changed since then, with India and the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, with lives lost and livelihoods destroyed.

“When I reflect on my personal experience and the difference between the response to my fundraiser in early 2020 and now, I am saddened to see that our response to this crisis has tapered. Stories of Covid deaths, orphaned people and unemployment have now become everyday events; no single person has been left untouched. While we have all been impacted by it and which means on one level we should all feel empathy, the overwhelming nature of this collective grief has made us numb,” he explains.

Earlier, during the peak of the second wave, Manish had wondered in an online post, “Will we become indifferent to excitement, motivation, passion, concerns, fears and to life in general?”

Indeed, the pandemic has raised many such questions, turning us all into the “betwixt and between” people; as British anthropologist Victor Turner put it, we are in a liminal space, a state of suspended animation that has now become the “new normal”.

In March 2020, when a nationwide lockdown was first imposed, hundreds of migrant workers made their way back to their villages and towns from the cities. They walked long distances, sometimes bare feet. In a horrific incident, 16 migrant labourers who were trying to return to their home state were run over by a goods train. With the virus making its way into the cities and towns, livelihoods were upended. The second wave of the pandemic wreaked greater havoc. At the same time, citizens took it upon themselves to create networks and organise relief. Volunteers and healthcare workers strove tirelessly to ensure oxygen supplies when the hospitals were inundated with the ailing and there was a shortage of oxygen. There was an outpouring of empathy and citizens tried in their own ways to help each other.

Meanwhile, what about the other challenges of our times?

Even as the pandemic continues to affect lives with the cumulative cases in India in excess of 3.3 crore and the death toll crossing 4.4 lakh, it’s not as if there has been a temporary halt on other crises. Both mass media and social media have brought us face to face with the horrors of extreme weather events, inequalities and injustices round the clock. Happenings around the recent withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban take over is just one instance. The scenes that followed when Kabul fell to the Taliban were brought to us on our smart devices by way of heartrending videos. However, when there is a glut of bad news, people may tend to throw in the towel and disengage with news altogether. What’s more, people may even disengage with the issues troubling our communities and society altogether. As Professor Matthew Flinders at the University of Sheffield, UK, is quoted in the WIRED (wired.com), “Why not, if we’re going to hell in a handcart? Let’s just enjoy tomorrow.”

When numbers numb

Manish, who terms what’s happening to us in the wake of prolonged grief as “universal apathy”, says that “we are exhausted with grief, with uncertainty, with constantly living in fear and both physically and metaphorically not even breathing fully (with masks on). We are now aching for normality to return and yes this has impacted our ability to devote any mind space to any other crisis."

Empathy fatigue is described by psychologists as an individual’s inability to care. Some of the symptoms may be a feeling of numbness, disconnectedness and a lack of energy to care for things happening around them. Experts note that this fatigue is a defense mechanism to cope with a crisis or a disaster.

Then, there is also the scale and duration of disaster. It’s been 18 months since we have been living with the pandemic, and the scale of people impacted is also unlike any other crisis. According to a report published in the journal ‘Nature’ in June 2020, scientists used functional MRI to show that the brain’s core empathy network “was more engaged for events happening to a single person than those happening to many people, no matter whether the events were emotionally neutral or negative.”

The report talks about how the photo of a three-year-old Kurdish boy from Syria who drowned while trying to reach Greece from Turkey in 2015 led to an increase in google searches for terms like “refugees” and “Syria”. Researchers, according to the ‘Nature’ report, noted that daily donations to the Swedish Red Cross rose 55-fold for a fund to help Syrian refugees. However, when 700 refugees drowned in 2016, and or when other incidents occurred where there was a higher number of casualties, there was less coverage and fewer empathetic responses, the report notes.

A spectrum of responses

Organisational psychologist Shalini Duggal explains, “Some of us may be naturally more empathetic than others. As a result, how empathetic people feel in any situation also differs from person to person.”

“Since empathy is of two types — cognitive empathy — the ability to understand another's perspective and emotional empathy — to actually feel what another is feeling, the depth of empathy may also differ in people or across situations,” she adds.

However, Shalini notes that when tragedy strikes close to home, one may be overwhelmed by their own feelings of sadness, anxiety, frustration, anger, and one's ability for empathy may get compromised. Also relentless news of crisis and people suffering may desensitise people to some extent. “But I would still say that there will be individual variation to that."

Is a switch-off possible?

Bengaluru-based physiotherapist Dr Ruchika Bhargava joined the corona warrior volunteer programme run by the Karnataka government and Indian Red Cross Society (Karnataka) in March 2020. As part of the group, she helped in ensuring lockdown was strictly followed and with the help of local police, she distributed food and groceries to slums and camps of labourers. Back then, she also spent hours at a local police station for a month to make sure migrants reached home safely on ‘shramik’ trains. She has also been actively involved in other Covid-related assistance as part of a neighbourhood volunteer group.

Did she at any point just switch off from news and take a break from social media because of the constant bad news, the shortage of oxygen during the second wave, for instance, or news of deaths on social media? “Yes, many times,” she notes, adding, “I wanted to stop and avoid taking part in all these support activities, but my husband and daughter were supportive and proud of what I did.”

In October last year, Ruchika lost her brother. “Life came to a standstill. I had taken a break from all activities as my family needed me the most. However, helping others gives a sense of purpose and satisfaction and is healing. I was back in Bengaluru in a month and resumed volunteer work as cases had started to rise again and we were about to hit the peak of the second wave.”

“A lot of people called me later to thank me for getting them on their trains home or for getting help in the form of beds, medicines, oxygen cylinders etc. That kept me going. I realised there are many people in need of help and if the smallest of contributions can make a difference to someone's life, I would continue to do so."

'Tell me how you feel'

In a Time magazine article, Professor Sherry Turkle, author of ‘The Empathy Diaries’ writes poignantly about the pandemic and what it has done to us and what we might take away. She writes, “We can go beyond hopes and prayers and well wishes for those cast aside to seeing ourselves in their place and feeling at one with them. Empathy is a first step. It doesn’t begin with 'I know how you feel', but with the humility to say that you don’t know how another feels. So, it begins with an offer to listen: 'Tell me how you feel'."

How to beat empathy fatigue

* One of the first steps to take is to be aware of one’s own feelings. Self-compassion is the first step to empathy and so, it becomes important to feel an emotion and stay with it.

* The other step is to find a sense of balance, nurturing other interests apart from regular work, setting boundaries and controlling time spent on social media.

* Staying connected with loved ones is another step that will help overcome empathy fatigue, suggest psychologists.

Evolution of empathy

“The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people kill each other, we call them 'animals'. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being 'humane'," writes primatologist Frans de Waal. The primatologist, who is also the author of ‘The age of Empathy’, says that while we may think of empathy as unique to human beings, it is something that apes and other animals also have.

The paradox of our times

The influenza of 1918-1920 ravaged the world and took the lives of nearly 50 million people. India alone lost over 16.5 million people and yet there are few personal records of suffering. The pandemic of the early 20th century largely remained forgotten for a major part of the decades to follow. One reason was that World War 1 gained precedence over it, while another reason cited by social commentators is that people did not realise the sheer scale of the pandemic back then.

Contrast this to 2020, when we live in an era of 24x7 news cycles and pandemic-related news is available on tap, on social media platforms. Every day, during the second wave of the pandemic, Twitter saw a tsunami of people seeking help with hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. Every day on social media platforms, we saw news of death. While social media and technology has helped save lives and strengthened connections, we were all doom scrolling day in and day out.

According to a survey of 6,000 Indian consumers conducted by an information management solutions firm based in Canada earlier this year, nearly 44 per cent of the respondents said information overload during the pandemic had increased their stress levels. Also, 52 per cent of those surveyed said their sources of information, including email, social media platforms, and news feeds had also grown during the pandemic.

This information overload also served to numb people; pushing many to disconnect or withdraw into cocoons of safety. This in turn led to a depletion of empathy as well. Therein lies the great paradox of our times: social media and technology that help us connect and empathise also leads to disconnection and apathy. What has brought us together in our collective grief and need has also pushed us to grow apart.