Can You Care Too Much?

Some people’s weakness is that they care too much; it is also their strength. ~Brigitte Nicole

This week’s piece was supposed to be about grammar rules. I’ll get to that one soon enough, but something happened a few days ago that diverted my attention. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I will say that my reaction to a sad story–about people I didn’t even know–was excessive. If I had been at home, it wouldn’t have mattered. But there were people around me who might have wondered about my mental state. So, no grammar today. I’m going down a different rabbit hole.

Terms First - Sympathy vs Empathy

Of course, you can get the definitions from Webster’s, but Thriveworks goes into rather more detail than is allowed in any dictionary. Sympathy is a recognition of a sad situation that causes pain and/or discomfort. An example would be when you observe someone involved in an accident on the highway. There, but for the grace of God, go you, and you understand the associated anxiety. Even if you’ve never had a serious auto accident, you can see that it doesn’t make for a good day.

Empathy goes further than sympathy. You can’t comprehend someone’s feelings if you’ve never endured the experience you’re observing. If you’ve never lost a parent, it’s impossible to understand the immense grief that blankets the deceased’s children. But if you have, you know the pain, and it grips your heart all over again with merciless strength.

My descriptions address very basic scenarios. The Thriveworks’ article provides multiple examples that can deepen your understanding.

What Triggers the Care Response

We’ll start with the physiological realities. According to the Cleveland Clinic, everything we perceive is routed by our thalamus, which functions as a gateway. Its job is to send information to the appropriate cortical area. One output of this process is to help with emotional control by passing information between the limbic center and the prefrontal cortex. Do I understand all this in the way a medical professional would? No. However, I perceive enough to realize that my brain controls pretty much everything, and how mine is wired will, in large part, determine how I respond to hearing sad news. Probably yours is the same. Just guessing here.

But, wait. There’s more. A Pub Med Central article suggests that humans are hardwired for certain levels of empathy. Cultural and familial environments may alter our wiring, but we start a certain way. The article illustrates this suggestion using a specific subset of educated individuals – medical professionals. The writer has observed that medical training may reduce the amount of empathy shown to patients over time. Are you wondering if you should consider that a negative? I was wondering just that, until I read more.

Can You Be Too Empathetic?

The short answer is yes. Oddly enough, this is a thing, and it’s called hyper-empathy. I believe I have a dose of it, based on the descriptions I’ve found in The Very Well Mind article. These relate to empathizing with friends and family, and provide a common example: Your friend shares his grief about the loss of a child. You not only attempt to comfort him, but also (emotionally) take on those same feelings of grief as if it had happened to you. According to author, Barbara Field, that is a step too far. Those deep-seated feelings do not make your friend feel better, and they do deplete your energy and may even lead to depression. Additionally, when you are emotionally overwrought, you are more likely to make poor decisions. A certain degree of empathy communicates that you understand someone’s pain, but when you’re holding it and suffering as a result, it’s too much.

It doesn’t take much for me to tear up some days. I feel distraught if I see a dead animal in the road, and not just cats or dogs. Skunks. Opossums. Racoons. Squirrels. You name it. Even I recognize that’s off-center and unhelpful. Nothing I feel will undo the animals’ suffering and death, and those feelings certainly aren’t beneficial to my state of mind.

So, What Do I Do About It?

I’ll start with what I did, then shift to what I should have done. What I did: At a Sunday night gathering, I took half a dozen people down to my doleful level with a seriously sad story. I apologized (probably good to do that), and then I shamed myself for the next 48 hours. Not helpful. I have found what I consider to be good advice, though. It’s from an article by Melissa Noel Renzi, How to Stop Absorbing Other People’s Emotions. Here are a few of the tips, simplified:

Be honest enough with yourself to recognize the symptoms of an excessively heavy emotional response. Recalibrate and distance yourself–to some degree–from someone else’s problems.
Consider whether your feelings are on someone else’s behalf, or if they are actually yours. Maybe the person you’re worried about is handling her tragedy better than you are.
When that’s the case, remind yourself to be supportive. Consider what you can do to help, rather than letting your emotions take over.
Use visualization to release emotions. I do this sort of thing when I can’t fall asleep because something is worrying me. I imagine a tiny whisk broom in my head, just sweeping it all away. Most of the time, it works.

Understand that I have read nothing indicating that empathy is a bad thing. It isn’t, unless the emotional response overwhelms my ability to be useful. In that case, empathy diminishes me physiologically, and it does NOTHING to help the person I intend to comfort. If I extend that logic to my medical professionals, I better understand why they seem removed from my ailments. They need to be, to a certain degree, to make the best decisions. If it works that way for them, it stands to reason that a little less emotion and a little more objectivity on my part will make my decisions better, no matter how dire the situation.