How to Avoid Empathy Burnout
nautil.us
nautil.us
For whatever reason, the brain appears to have a limit to the amount of built-up negative emotions it can deal with. Beyond a certain point the result is burnout, depression and psychosomatic illnesses.
(source: I suffered from severe burnout, recovered, and have been researching and writing about it for the past 16 years).
Let me guess: engineer?
There's absolutely a personality type that prefers to solve all problems with logic and clear thinking, which is a very good thing when you're dealing with engineering problems.
When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic.
Not all people and all problems are amenable to "logical" solutions.
Controlling negative emotions is a very good thing. But there are many ways to achieve that. Turning to rational problem solving is just one mental tool, but it's not fit for all occasions.
Nonsense! As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help. There's nothing illogical or non-intellectual about realizing that, it's just a matter of learning from experience. In fact, people who regularly turn to problem solving and annoy their significant others are probably too driven by their own emotions of frustration and empathy.
A better example of how logical, intellectual approaches to people problems don't always work might be with character judgments. Many people can derive intuitions about people without consciously recognizing where those intuitions are coming from, and deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy is often impossible to break down to logical terms until it's too late.
One scenario that stood out was how somebody would be emotional and that the partner immediately turns to problem solving to try and "fix it" when in fact the number 1 need is emotional support and to know they're there. The problem solver makes things worse by shunning the emotional needs and working to minimise them - perhaps as an internal reaction to difficult emotions.
The goal of the therapy is to admit to each other that you depend on each other and that's alright. Moving forward, expressing this need for closeness and dependence. This runs counter to traditional couples therapy, which has indeed focused on problem solving and a supposed need for independence.
I've been applying some of the ideas to my own relationship that has, especially over the last 6 months, been quite turbulent. The results are looking good.
The book is called 'Hold Me Tight'. Very interesting.
In the context of the parent comment, providing emotional support for your wife is an emotional response, even if you decided to take that response for logical reasons. A logical response in this context would be ignoring the feelings your wife has and focussing on what can be done to solve the problem.
Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less stressful for your wife if she could take about things before she was emotional about them.
This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.
To what extent?
So in technical terms:
> I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent,
Signal processing? Capacity management?
> that the best way to improve her mental state
State change management/processing?
But psychological thinking has it's very strange non-mathemalical logic... and vocabulary ;)
Of course, the natural way of achieving the correct response is by "simulating" the other person's emotional state to try to predict the best outcome (which includes their future emotional state) -- this is what I understand people generally mean when talking about empathy, and this is what the article refers as 'Emotional contagion'. However, as the article argues, it shouldn't be the only way. You should in principle be able to build a sufficient model of people's emotions and reactions without having to use your own "emotional engine" and being impacted yourself (which may in turn affect your own capability to make good decisions).
If you run in to that (I have many times, still do occasionally), it means that you're not solving the right problem, or you're trying to solve it in the wrong way. The way to solve the problem in that case is by listening and offering emotional support, but it's still not productive to react with negative emotions.
The rational reaction to such situations would be to recognize that this approach yields bad results and to try something different instead, e.g. the emotional manipulation you seem to be implicitly recommending.
One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are. Unfortunately the desire to empathize and treat others like oneself makes this a difficult lesson to learn.
> One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do
> is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The
> more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov
> chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my
> life outcomes are.
The people making those decisions may simply value vastly different things than you do. A lot of people would say us engineer types are completely irrational for wanting to spend large portions of our lives staring at computer screens.
I think all humans are emotion optimizers, trying to maximize the good ones while avoiding the bad ones. But:
1. Some do it by hacking the world to make it feel better.
2. Some do it by hacking their perception of the world to make it feel better.
3. Some do it by trusting others to make them feel better.
Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.
Or buddhists.
> Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.
There is definitely genius in realizing the distinction between number 1 and number 2 is finer than it might initially look.
By "hacking perception" I meant things like hiding thoughts from your consciousness so that other can't learn about them, masking unwanted emotions with others, forcing yourself to feel particular emotions in order to achieve some external goals - pretty un-Buddhist things to do, if my understanding of Buddhism is worth anything.
The distinction between 1 and 2 as I meant them is influencing emotions directly vs. influencing external factors which those emotions have evolved to benchmark, if that makes sense. I'm a (recovering) nerd, not a Buddhist :)
Thinking that others are like us is narcissism. Feeling other people's pain as our own is empathy.
You -> Others ( bad )
Others -> You ( good, in limited quantities )
I can't help but link to "It's not about the Nail": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
regulating rather than controlling
to move this even more away from the current technical main-stream (mis)understanding ;) ... this is as well a more realistic, natural and humane way to think about it, i think.
On an different note, it looks like there is still a huge mental wall built up between "the rational" and "the emotional" which actually is just a mental one or cultural and and bears less and less factual indications the more we learn about our mental inner workings.
I think we need to tackle that wall from both sides: techies need to accept and deal with "the emotional", which would change the way they work and their products
and
on the other side "the rational" needs to lose its tag of being simply cold, inhumane and not appropriate in certain domains. The most "social" areas of our society need a certain level of "the rational".
Looking forward to the generation capable to spark a "social silicon valley" ;) ...
For dealing with people, you're right, an intellectual response alone is not the solution. I was more just pointing out that it is the negative emotions that appear be the cause of the burnout.
Interesting. Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? That would be big news.
By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true.
The research suggests that burnout is a lot less likely if you enjoy your job and have sufficient support (see the Demands-Resources model of burnout).
From research into the brain (see Boksem 2008, and Noakes 2012) there appear to be areas in the brain dedicated to calculating the costs vs benefits of performing activities. Some of the inputs to this system are emotion-based, but others are physiological (e.g. sleep, tissue damage, etc). You can override your brain's fatigue/tiredness signals, but if you do that long-term then burnout will still likely occur.
An interesting factoid is that fatigue itself is actually an itself (see Noakes' reviews). So what will likely happen if you continue working hard 16 hour days is that your brain will say "enough is enough" at some point, and you will start to feel negative emotions towards your work even though you previously enjoyed it (and even though consciously you still want to do it).
>By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true.
Well, it will certainly help if you are suffering from short-term burnout, or to avoid burnout in the first place. Sleep is definitely one of the factors that the brain uses in determining fatigue/burnout.
Dashrath Manjhi ran away from his home at a young age and worked at Dhanbad's coal mines. He returned to his village and married Phalguni Devi. While crossing Gehlour hills to bring him lunch, she slipped and seriously injured herself, which eventually led to her death. Manjhi was deeply disturbed and that very night decided to carve a path through the Gehlour hills so that his village could have easier access to medical attention. He carved a path 360-feet-long (110 m), 25-feet-deep (7.6 m) in places and 30-feet-wide (9.1 m) to form a road through the rocks in Gehlour hill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
Not a statistical argument (which your words suggest you expected), but I think it agrees with the spirit of the article - you can find motivation for truly crazy stunts if you focus on obtaining future good emotions instead of avoiding present bad emotions. Working to avoid losing the rat race is a burnout-prone kind of motivation, for example.
The problem is when these people sometimes think that their employees should be able to handle the same workload, which then inevitably leads to burnout.
The natural response of the human brain is to get angry at the person reporting the bug. Obviously this isn't very useful or logical. A better solution is to think about the problems reported, and decide whether it is a valid complaint or not. Many people automatically feel anger in situations like this, but you can train yourself out of it. It's essentially a kind of mindfulness: you just look at the situation intellectually and watch your emotions, rather than letting your emotions take control.
I would say the only logical time for feeling anger is when someone does something like raping or murdering a member of your family. Even then, anger is only useful in helping you formulate a plan of retaliation.
The best method for me was to reduce, as much as possible, my use of the words, "I hate XYZ."
For most of us, it's latter that causes the problem.
That is certainly a problem, but it isn't what I was referring to. I meant that hate and anger can lead to burnout (primarily fatigue and depression), if they are experienced excessively.
Acting out the anger may in fact lead to reduced chance of burnout, as it prevents the emotions from building up inside.
The side effects of a culture that stigmatizes anger or of acting on anger destructively, are that you experience it more.
Logic isn't a solution in itself since it always require a premise to begin with.
You can logically win a discussion and still loose the argument.
The trouble comes when a person gets embedded into a circumstance that truly, legitimately warrants the negative emotion, but which is not (or cannot be) removed or changed.
Crucially, it is a situation for which it is unequivocally correct to bear the costs of negative short-term emotions to create a noticeable signal that something's just not right and something needs to be fixed. But where those negative emotions would normally serve their purpose and direct you to make a change or direct someone else to make a change in response to you, instead no change occurs.
Now the supposedly short-term effects of the negative emotions become long-term effects, and that is what burnout is. It's the application of negative emotions in a circumstance that literally requires short term change, but which resists being changed over a long period. The circumstance is the burnout. Not your negative emotions, which are merely the correct and reasonable response to the circumstance.
Problems with a job are a classic example. If you are being treated badly, if basic human needs are not being met, or if you are actively being prevented from satisfying basic human drives, that absolutely warrants negative emotions, and their short-term downsides are necessary evils to bring about change to your situation (whether change that you are able to enact, or if you are not in control, then change which someone else must enact).
But at the same time, modern employment is structured for most people to be engineered precisely to disregard human negative reactions. Such reactions will be vilified and/or punished, but they will not be considered in the fullness of humanity and accepted as signals that something is wrong and in need of adjustment. It's simply incompatible with most implementations of bureaucracy to allow for something as messy and bespoke as human needs to drive business policy, and this is why we require employment laws to enforce at least a minimal degree of human-needs-respecting policy (apart from extremely rare businesses actually run by people who consider the human condition of their workers), and also why political activism around worker rights has had such a bloody history, and shows no real reasons to believe it's going to be less bloody going forward from here.
So it's a perfect storm. Jobs generally trigger negative emotions due to the way that jobs prevent humans from satisfying basic, required needs (needs for privacy, needs for autonomy, etc.). But our prevailing framework for structuring the human-to-work interface, bureaucracy, is literally based upon the idea of only accommodating human needs to the most threadbare level of uniformity and minimality.
As a result, to last a long time in a company, you either are already or become one of the following:
(1) genetically predisposed to be capable of sublimating away the human needs that will go unmet, thus sublimating away any negative emotion reactions. Some fraction of this group may not be genetically well-suited for it, but is instead well suited to "drink the Kool-Aid" and fundamentally re-map their internal goal orientation to pulsate in unison with their employer [either way, this is extremely rare, and leads to what Michael O. Church called "macho subordination" whereby people compete to be seen as the "most loyal" by virtue of who can overtly signal that they are most willing to sublimate away human needs for the sake of the company, similar to a proud martyr kind of attitude]
(2) constantly drenching yourself in stress hormones, probably eating your feelings, failing at personal relationships, exercise goals, etc., and slowly decaying into a burnt out mess because you can barely duct tape it all together in the morning and drag yourself to face the sisyphean task of pretending to sublimate away your negative emotions every day [pretty common, maybe not the majority]
(3) taking medication / seeking major therapy which helps mask the symptom (the negative emotions) without addressing the actual cause (that the concept of work life is structured to be at odds with human goal satisfaction) [probably a much larger fraction than we admit]
(4) someone who thinks they are "getting by" but who is actually acting horribly to their coworkers as little cracks in the facade start showing over the years of dealing with the negative emotions, rendering you into someone who is probably the cause of this whole chain of problems for other people, especially when you rise to the level of manager [most middle management that I've ever heard of, encountered myself, or read about in principled research on this issue, like Moral Mazes].
I suspect that many other modalities of life -- long term resentment in marriages or relationships, family dysfunction, negligence regarding easily preventable health problems, etc., -- can be analyzed in a similar way as working life is analyzed above, and that problems of burnout affect most of us in huge ways across vast spectra of our lives.
As this becomes better understood, I think burnout will begin to be seen as a fundamentally physiological and even rational response to the way that most modern modalities of life are structured.
But I also predict that the only change is that research into pharmaceutical engineering to prevent burnout symptoms will intensify, and that lazy mental health professionals will mostly resort to tossing drugs at people to get them off their back, and basically, with regard to burnout in general, the prevailing attitude will sort of just be "deal with it -- take some drugs to alleviate the symptoms, but don't expect anyone to ever care about the cause."
This is one common theme I have seen in a wide range of dystopian literature as well, even though it's not always directly stated as such. When side-effects of structuring society in fundamentally anti-human ways become problematic and it eventually starts trickling up to rich people who begin to be inconvenienced by it, the response is to create a distraction or a device or drug to mask the symptoms just long enough for symptom-sufferers to go on servicing that rich person's desires, but none of which actually offers relief from the underlying cause, and it leads to wider and wider spread feelings of prolonged misery and burnout, despite greater and greater societal wealth in the form of technology.
However, you seem to be painting an overly negative picture. I think in many cases there are actual solutions, but it's just difficult for people to make significant changes in their life. If your spouse is a bully/asshole, the best solution in many cases is to leave them. Of course this can be a very difficult decision to make, especially if you have children, but in the end it will likely work out for the best.
Also, I think that in a lot of cases it isn't entirely obvious what is causing the fatigue or depression, so there is some doubt as to whether changes need to be made. Many people prefer to take a pill, or get diagnosed with chronic lyme with an unvalidated test, or something along those lines. This is an easily solution than getting a divorce or quitting your job.
In some cases - where the problem simply cannot be rectified - the best solution might simply be to put up with the shitty situation. If you read the stories of Japanese prison camp survivors (e.g. "Unbroken"), it's simply astounding how much physical and mental abuse people can actually tolerate if there is no other option.
My own solution was to quit working for other people on soul-destroyingly boring jobs in soul-destroying cubicles from 9-5 and work full-time on my own business instead. Luckily I already had a side-project that people were paying money for when I experienced burnout, so I had a nice easy solution. I realise most people aren't so lucky.
The larger-scale structural problems (particularly the vexing in-principle problem of modern employment) have been the major proponents for my own self-study of burnout, and so I have a major availability bias when thinking about burnout leading me to connect it to those types of issues.
Isn't assholism a "niceness burnout"? ;)
I suppose one would have to observe children to see that, as that's when those traits usually start to appear.
I'm thinking this post is a thorough, and probably pretty spot on, analysis of the situation. A great problem statement. Ironically, it is a bit dystopian and defeatist, can we not turn that around?
So with a slight rewording at the end, I turn it into an Ask Hacker News:
What could a daring entrepreneur start doing to change the world into a place where society, and work, is better aligned with basic human needs?
Making this a law is argued as inefficient by some, and that there could be a part of the job market in which employees seek to negotiate different options, and the mandate for fixed vacation time hinders competition.
My interpretation of reality is that this is false. It just leads to the burnout and anti-human need sublimation I wrote about above -- which should not be viewed as though it is a positive reflection of market clearing conditions or some nonsense, especially not when the participants are often young people with no developed perspective yet on the trade-offs needed for their health and huge information asymmetry disadvantages.
Your suggestion of viewing this as an entrepreneurial problem concerns me, because I think that way of viewing the problem is largely what has led to it being as anti-human and severe as it is.
In the bigger scheme of things I advocate a radical restructuring of the economy. Land tax and similar capital taxes (capital rent actually) and basic income. Only, the actionable items to get there would be more long term and require more collaboration
IIRC, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had a few things to say about work and motivation.
Reading a book certainly is actionable ;) and I think some business owners/managers could benefit from reading this one, at least in terms of employee retention rate. Or maybe they wouldn't, I've never been a business manager, actually :) But this story isn't terribly long to read and I found it interesting on its own right.
Here's a post touching on this topic [0], and the underlying data summary post that it was based on [1].
This is exactly the sort of thing I am referring to. We have useful structures to understand human health at work (such as heteronomous vs. autonomous goals), but since we use bureaucracy as the primary means of structuring work, it shields wealthy elites from ever having to care about these aspects of the human beings who provide them with labor.
I think to crack this issue, we have to devise ways to make capital deployers have no choice but to prioritize these types of human aspects of labor providers. I don't care how we do that: through heavily enforced laws and employee unionization, or through market incentives that make it more worthwhile to care about worker cognitive health than to paper over it, or any other options.
But without intervention, there doesn't seem to be any natural property of market economics that enables human flourishing in this way.
[0] < http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-hire-underemployme... >
I learn every single word of this the hard way.
But the hardest is to learn that it's important to recognise "psychological distance". Because building up an "emotional armor" is trickier than keeping "physical distance" from some negative source.
Furthermore, whilst I agree that our society is fairly individualistic, there is a certain wisdom in that. Our society has changed dramatically over the past 200 years and that rate of change doesn't show many signs of slowing down. I'd argue this has led to making it harder to learn from our immediate predecessors. For example, take relationships. Divorce has become the norm rather than a rarity, and while that's not necessarily a negative trend (I'd rather people became divorced if it was clear that the care needed to resolve issues was lacking), it would suggest many people grow up without a model of a healthy adult relationship to follow. If we don't know how to be in a relationship, then we should at least focus on looking after ourselves until we work out what a healthy relationship should be like.