Have you ever felt numb, overwhelmed, or excessively agitated by the torrent of suffering shown on the news, internet, and social media? I know I have—and I recently learned that this feeling has a name: “compassion fatigue.”
For decades, researchers have studied compassion fatigue among health care workers, therapists, social workers, and other people who are frequently exposed to others’ trauma at work. Practitioners can develop emotional exhaustion or even PTSD-like symptoms by immersing themselves in the problems of others, studies have shown.
While compassion fatigue hasn’t been widely studied among the general population, experts I interviewed agreed that it can affect anyone, even those who are witnessing or hearing about trauma from afar. To protect yourself, they suggested taking purposeful breaks from the news, focusing on personal wellness, and finding ways to give back to your community.
