You hear about it nearly everyday in the news. Someone new dies, or goes through something excruciatingly traumatizing. Perhaps someone close to you, or that you personally know, tells you a seemingly horror story about what they wen’t through. You watch a Youtube video about the stories of human trafficking survivors, and it absolutely stuns you. You feel awful, you put yourself in the shoes of the individuals enduring such awful things.
You physically feel what they’re describing, their pain in your bones, your muscles, your skin. Emotionally it hurts even more, just thinking about what they might’ve went through makes your heart drop to your toes. Maybe even psychologically, the aftermath of this pain makes you utterly burned out and emotionally exhausted. But, unfortunately, this high amount of empathy can be bad for your personal mental health. Because we’re experiencing other’s pain, the boundary between our self and others can become blurred if we don’t have good boundaries or self-regulation skills. On that note, we experience what’s called emotional contagion.
We get entangled in the intense distress and find it challenging to soothe our emotions. We want to depersonalize, become numb, and look away. We obsess over trying to save everyone, and it’s quite harmful.
Solutions to excessive empathy
Practice loving-kindness meditation. This practice involves focusing on sending love to yourself, people you know, and those who you don’t know, who are suffering. This practice increases activation in the areas of the brain associated with positive emotions like love, hope, connection, and reward.
Self-compassion, I beat myself up over not being able to help, and feeling guilty about my life while others suffer in inhumane conditions and treatment. But it’s important to be kind to yourself. Practicing self-compassion helps reduce the distress of empathetic burnout and improves overall feeling of well-being.
Stop doom-scrolling, stop continuously consuming the same content that is causing you such distress. It is important to be aware of what’s going on in the world, but too much of anything is never good.
The best solution
This solution should be used in conjunction with the others. What is it you may ask? Taking action– volunteer, advocate, donate, you don’t have to be a full on philanthropist as one small act of kindness can cause a ripple effect. But simply taking action will change lives, and ultimately bring fulfillment. The more people realize this, the better the world would slowly, but surely become.
My ambition lead me to doing more, something grander, changing the lives of more people than I can count, so I became a philanthropist. For this, I’ve been nominated for AFP lifetime achievement award. Sometimes obsession can lead you down the right path, so don’t shun it. I no longer suffer from excessive empathy as I’m content with the impact I have committed my life to making, but by all means if this is what your heart longs for, do it. If not, random acts of kindness go a long way. Use empathy whether excessive or not to your advantage.
Make the world a better place.
Thanks for reading, thank you so much for supporting me, I love you guys
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
 |
 |
 |
 |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Terry Boynton on Unsplash
