These reflections depict an excess of empathy as potentially hazardous to one’s mental health.
Practice loving-kindness meditation
When the news is anxiety-provoking, try the loving-kindness meditation in which you generate goodwill toward yourself and others, including strangers who may be suffering.
Only when we can build the shield of positive feelings with compassion can we strategize how to approach and contribute in overwhelming circumstances. It helps you develop your ‘compassion muscles,’ which put between you and the negative feelings so you can be motivated to help and not overwhelmed by disturbing emotions.
That is why it is necessary to point out that loving-kindness meditation does not eliminate negative emotions. Instead, it raises activity in the areas of the brain that correspond to feelings such as love, hope, belonging, and reward.
Practice self-compassion
Do you wonder why you can’t help and punish yourself for your inabilities? Or seem guilty of living while other people die? Perhaps one should be more friendly to oneself. Just as no two people experience pain the same way, no one’s pain is singular, although individual. That is why one Prosperity gospel states that we all go through some affliction or suffering. It’s a universal thing. While observing your suffering, please do not get too attached or absorbed by it. These acts of self-compassion will help alleviate the distress experienced when experiencing empathic burnout and consequently increase the level of well-being.
Take action
Letting the self be affected by others’ emotions stresses the self and activates negative feelings, leading to unsociable tendencies. However, love has positive connotations, such as compassion for the other. They cause us to act. In particular, compassion assists in the instigation of sociability. One way to counter empathic distress is to get involved: contribute, participate, and coordinate.
Stop doomscrolling
As would be expected, people seek knowledge during calamities. It assists to be forearmed. However, repeated browsing and reading news feeds that are sad or anxiety-inducing, for instance, on social media sites or the phone, is not beneficial in any way.
The analysis of social media activities during the pandemic pointed out what we have already discussed: that it is important to moderate the news intake and avoid boosting stress and negative feelings. Complete avoidance of news is impossible, but limiting the amount of news we take in is useful.
