Most healthcare professionals join the workforce to make a positive impact in the lives of those who need help most, and they do so by providing timely, empathetic, and skilled care. However, in the course of providing compassionate care to patients, healthcare workers can sometimes become overwhelmed with the needs of patients and their family members. This can lead to healthcare workers experiencing compassion fatigue, affecting their overall health, job satisfaction, and job performance.
In this article, we take a deep dive into compassion fatigue — what it is, how to recognize its signs and symptoms, and how to prevent and recover from it.
What is compassion fatigue?
Compassion fatigue is a kind of secondary traumatic stress reaction that happens to healthcare professionals such as therapists, doctors, and nurses when they become preoccupied with absorbing the emotional stresses of patients they care for. Compassion fatigue is an occupational hazard for people with roles that provide healing, care, and support to others.
There are two main components of compassion fatigue: burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Burnout can cause a person to have feelings of exhaustion and being overwhelmed, which could lead to depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, secondary traumatic stress occurs when healthcare professionals feel the traumatic or painful experiences of the patients they’re caring for as if the experiences are happening to them or their loved ones. Because of their indirect exposure to trauma when helping their patients, they’re experiencing physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
What are the symptoms of compassion fatigue?
It’s important to understand that compassion fatigue manifests differently in different individuals. Some people can have all the symptoms, while others can have a few. Generally, people with compassion fatigue will feel like they can’t feel sympathy and empathy and act compassionately toward their patients, loved ones, or friends.
According to a scientific journal published in the National Library of Medicine in 2020, the following are some common compassion fatigue symptoms:
· Mood swings
· Tearfulness
· Anxiety
· Irrational fears
· Melancholy, sadness, despair, and suicidal ideation
· Inability to think clearly and use good judgment
· Difficulty in decision-making and concentration
· Memory lapses and forgetfulness
Compassion fatigue recovery tips
We’ve rounded up some helpful tips to help you prevent or heal from compassion fatigue:
1. Move your body
To provide the best possible care for your patients, you need to ensure that you’re as physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy as possible, and that means intentionally moving your body via exercise.
Exercising has many wonderful benefits, including reducing the risk of many cardiovascular illnesses and even different kinds of cancer, as well as helping reduce symptoms of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and even schizophrenia.
Moving your body regularly can help keep compassion fatigue — and the poor mental health days it comes with — at bay. A 2018 study that involved 1.2 million adult participants found that, on average, a person has 3.4 poor mental health days in a month. However, among participants who exercised, the number of poor mental health days dropped by more than 40 percent, highlighting the connection between exercise and depression or anxiety.
Find an exercise or physical activity that you find enjoyable. It can be swimming, running, hiking, biking, or even dancing or skating.
2. Leave work at work
This is possibly one of the most challenging things to make a habit of, especially for new nurses: To have a work-life balance, it’s essential to leave work at work.
A good way to adopt this is by creating a post-work ritual that works for you. For example, your post-work ritual can include activities that can help you decompress and relax, such as going for a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood or on your treadmill, taking a hot shower, drinking tea or fruit-infused water, and reading a book or listening to your favorite podcast. These activities can give your body the signal that it’s time to let go of the stresses and challenges that happened at work that day, accept that you did all you could do with the resources and bandwidth you had, and help give yourself the time and space you need to rest.
3. Take vacations
Aside from destressing daily, it’s also important to plan and go on vacations. Traveling to new places and taking vacations can help improve your mental health when you’re stressed at work, helping you calm down, have fun, rest and sleep better, express your creativity, and improve your cognitive functions.
It doesn’t have to be a grand vacation for it to be effective — a weekend trip to the beach or camping in a nearby park or campsite can leave you rested and relaxed. The important thing is to always have something to look forward to in your calendar.
4. Build a strong support system at work
Let’s face it: healthcare work can be physically demanding and mentally and emotionally draining. Having someone to debrief and commiserate with at work can do wonders for your mental health. So, it’s important to have someone or a group of people who can help support you at work, especially when you’re having a challenging day or when you’re processing new and difficult emotions. Having a support system can allow you to share your feelings and experiences, gain new perspectives, and learn new ways to cope with work-related issues healthily.
