Compassion fatigue is intense stress and burnout resulting from helping others over a long period of time. It often happens in people in helping professions, like nurses, mental health therapists, and other health care workers.
Compassion fatigue isn’t just an extreme feeling of tiredness — it’s physical, cognitive, and emotional. It also harms the professional well-being of those who experience it.
It can involve personally re-experiencing a patient’s traumatic experience, called secondary trauma.
Compassion fatigue is thought to be a combination of burnout and secondary trauma — in which someone internalizes and feels stress about the traumatic experiences of others.
The emotions going on with compassion fatigue may be closer to empathy than actual compassion, researchers say. Someone who feels a great amount of empathy toward others may become distraught when they take on the distressed emotional state of others.
- Signs and symptoms of compassion fatigue: Losing your ability to nurture, detachment, going numb, anger, irritability, depression, dreading work, headaches, stomachaches, ineffective job performance, enjoying work less, loss of morale, physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, substance use.
- More examples of what can happen with compassion fatigue: Many people have thoughts or nightmares relating to the traumas of patients or clients they care for. They may avoid colleagues and feel ineffective at work. They may find themselves crying for what feels like no reason.
- Risk factors for compassion fatigue: People who get it may be more likely to have difficulty coping with negative emotions, high levels of stress but low levels of support from others. Social factors like socioeconomic status, race, and intersectional identities may influence a person’s risk. Many people who have had their own traumatic experiences may find that patients’ experiences trigger them.
- How to prevent or help with compassion fatigue: Rest and self-care can have a protective effect against compassion fatigue. Many people find self-care makes them feel guilty. Formal education about compassion fatigue, how to spot it, and how to deal with it may better equip helping professions to manage it. Formal and informal social support can help too, such as peer supervision or peer groups. Seeing a therapist may also help. Evidence-based therapist for compassion fatigue include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
- Other words for compassion fatigue: Experts consider it to be a combination of secondary trauma and burnout. People often call it vicarious stress, compassion stress, burnout, secondary or vicarious trauma.
Explore more about compassion fatigue and related ideas on Relationship Smart:
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