Well-Being
Loren Bonner
You are exhausted and, frankly, you—like so many other health care providers right now—have no more energy to care. Could this be “empathy fatigue?”
According to Susan Albers, PsyD, who shares her insight in a recent Cleveland Clinic article, someone’s ability to relate and care for others—in other words, one’s empathy—is a limited resource. She said that if individuals drain their empa-thy account, they can end up feeling negative emotions that experts call “empathy fatigue.”
Empathy fatigue is on the rise for pharmacists—as well as all clinicians—during this time. Health care workers are experiencing extreme burnout from working on the frontlines of a pandemic that feels like it will never end.
Albers said empathy fatigue can manifest emotionally or physically, as the body and mind start to break down when a person is under stress day after day. Empathy fatigue is often considered a secondary traumatic stress disorder.
You can control yourself, but not other people
No health care provider could have been trained to prepare for this pandemic.
“How do you deal with certain patients and drug shortages or certain patients who are angry?” asked Jaclyn D. Cole, PharmD, BCPS, from the University of South Florida Taneja College of Pharmacy. Cole was one of the lead researchers on a September 2021 study published in JAPhA that looked at the relationship between a pharmacist’s emotional intelligence, occupational stress, job performance, and psychological affective well-being.
Emotional intelligence can influence a pharmacist’s ability to empathize, control emotions, and actively listen; it in-cludes self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management.
The study found that higher emotional intelligence correlated with lower levels of occupational stress, higher job per-formance, and enhanced psychological well-being.
“Emotional intelligence does in fact impact your everyday life, your stress response, your job performance,” said Cole.
Cole said they had planned to conduct the research—and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which made it an even better time to examine emotional intelligence, even though she admitted the picture might appear more extreme.
“Emotional intelligence gets tested with all these additional stressors,” Cole said.
Roughly 950 pharmacists from the state of Florida responded to the survey. Emotional intelligence was measured using established measurement scales for self-emotion appraisal, others’ emotion appraisal, and regulation of emotion. The surveys were collected between October 2020 and December 2020.
“[Emotional intelligence] can sometimes be difficult to capture because the respondent has to be self-aware and fully honest,” Cole said.
Secondary outcomes from the research included noting increased stress for both females and those pharmacists prac-ticing in the community setting. Hospital-based pharmacists reported higher job performance and psychological affective well-being. Additionally, the research team found that stress decreased with both age and years of experience.
Cole said that everyone is born with emotional intelligence. “But to truly develop, most people agree you can enhance it,” Cole said. “But the individual has to be willing to self-reflect and grow.”
Empathy fatigue tips
Albers said empathy fatigue can eventually slip into depression, which is why it’s important to pay attention to one’s feelings and address them. She said there’s even a model for addressing this—awareness, balance, and connection.
- Awareness: It’s important for the person to acknowledge their feelings and to show some self-compassion.
- Balance: Are there other interests outside of the person’s job and taking care of other people? Is there a balance between one’s self-care routine and constantly worrying about the state of the world? When things go awry, it can be helpful to return to the basics and focus on what we can control, Albers said.
- Connection: Feeling connected can be healing to those experiencing empathy fatigue, said Albers. Talking about your feelings with a professional or trusted friend is a good place to start.