the more empathic you are we see that it will burn you out if you are in a caring profession if you are in a caring relationship if you have friends Partners spouses you try to support them more and more it will worsen your mental and lead to burnout and in severe potential cases even lead to Vicarious trauma so a lot of people nowadays are talking about how empathy is fantastic we should have more empathy we should have empathy for our friends empathy for our work colleagues empathy for our relationships empathy for the whole world and the more impa EIC we are the more emotionally available we are the better it will be there will be articles on this everywhere I look so articles in Harvard Business review and you'll even have people like this like psychiatrists on the internet who will talk about how being more empathic will benefit you and isn't even about helping other people but it turns out that having empathy is incredibly dangerous having high levels of empathy is correlated with higher levels of burnout leads to worsening mental health actually allows people to objectively take advantage of you and most bizarrely of all can negatively impact your relationships especially romantic relationships we're going to start with this concept of emotional contagion so this is really fascinating but as people have gotten more interested in empathy over time we've basically discovered that there are multiple kinds of empathy so one is something called cognitive empathy which is the ability to understand what someone else thinks or believes so it's sort of understanding what's in someone's head and there's a second kind of empathy called affective empathy and this is more in line with what people usually think of when we think of empathy it's the ability to feel what someone else feels but as researchers have looked into affective empathy especially they've started to realize that there is a huge problem with this facet is that it leads to something called emotional contagion so what happens when you are very empathic with another person when you have affective empathy is they are feeling negative in some way they're feeling sad they're feeling depressed they're feeling hopeless and due to the empathic circuits of your brain in order to form a connection with this person you absorb some of their negativity and literally in the scientific literature this is called emotional contagion and so what ends up happening when you are empathic with someone is you absorb some of their negativity and it actually negatively affects you and this emotional contagion can lead to an incredible amount of burnout because just because you're feeling what they're feeling it doesn't necessarily help them feel better much like another kind of contagion like an infection when you get infected by someone else it doesn't reduce the amount of infection that someone else feels and a lot of research on empathy shows that when once this contagion happens you basically suffer and it doesn't necessarily lead to a benefit in other people so if we look at professions that involve a lot of empathy as part of their job like people like social workers who are working with people who are struggling in their life what we tend to find is that between 50 and 75% of social workers are actually burnt out and one of the reasons that they're burnt out is because of all of the emotions that they're constantly dealing with we see a lot of this in also something called caregiver burnout these are not just professionals but when you have someone who is taking care of someone else so you have a family member or friend who is struggling a lot and caregiver burnout was originally studied in things like cancer so when you have a spouse who has cancer you take care of them a lot you're you know taking care of all the responsibilities and that sort of leads to burnout but we're seeing caregiver burnout also in mental health related issues with people like friends or romantic Partners or even parents or children this emotional contagion also has pretty specific manifestations and a great example of this is something called vicarious trauma so we have studies that show that when you is a an empath or someone who is supporting someone else continuously gets exposed to their trauma you can exhibit symptoms of experiencing that trauma yourself this is why we call it vicarious trauma it's as if you were traumatized through simply having an empathic connection with someone who is traumatized now this is an evolutionary thing that probably it helps us in some ways so we know that for example parents experience this with children who are sick or injured in some way and in those kinds of situations it's probably pretty helpful but we know that vicarious trauma can also affect people like therapists if they're not careful they can actually suffer from the trauma of their patients the really scary thing is that we are seeing this principle play out in an entirely new way because of the internet so the internet has become a place where we really advocate for having a safe space to share and speak my truth and share the traumatic things that I've done we'll see this a lot on mental in mental health communities and discussions and on social media where people are sharing their trauma and what's happened is really interesting even though we want the internet to be a place where you can share your trauma and we want to accept you and help you heal and all that good stuff on the flip side we have people getting triggered by trauma dumping and it's like bruh you're trauma dumping I can't handle this right now and I think what we've sort of figured out is in creating some of these safe spaces we've gotten people who will essentially vomit their trauma and then that negatively affects the audience the person who's listening and there's research to back this up and I'm even seeing this in a very very like new way which is almost trauma through repeated social media exposure so it's almost like vicarious trauma that is experienced through social media so if you look at social media what you'll see is that there's a lot of like really terrible stuff that we get exposed to and the better of a person you are the more likely you are to expose yourself to traumatic things right because you care about these people people these refugees these people who are starving these people who have been taken advantage of victims of different kinds of violence and oppression and we want to like spread awareness and we want to help people understand and we want to share what's going on these tragedies because we as a world should do something about this and so the Kinder you are the more empathic you are the more that you expose yourself to this I am seeing something very scary which is vicarious trauma through social media and we're seeing evidence of this the US Surgeon General recently put out a kind of a a beautiful oped where he was advocating for putting a warning on social media platforms for the dangers to mental health so as you're empathic it can actually lead to a social media induced vicarious trauma that damages you and will worsen your mental health this is all a roundabout way of saying that the more empathic you are we see that it will burn you out if you are in a caring profession if you are in a caring relationship if you have friends Partners spouses you try to support them more and more it will worsen your mental and lead to burnout and in severe potential cases even lead to Vicarious trauma so that's the first danger but it gets better so it's not just about absorbing the emotional contagion of other people it turns out that the more empathic you are the more likely you are to be taken advantage of and if you're someone who's a highly sensitive person if you're someone who's very empathic you've already figured this out that people take advantage of your kindness they create these double standards where you understand the pain that they're going through when they get dumped and so you're there for them you're supporting them but when the situation is reversed and you need support they're so callous that they don't actually bother to help you they're like I don't have time for this they set limits with you but are upset when you set limits with them and if this is kind of the experience of a lot of people what a lot of people will say is oh it's your fault right this is all in your head you need to get better at setting boundaries things are way more even this is the callous person that you're friends with will say no no no this is actually 50/50 you just don't realize it so it turns out that there are studies fascinating studies that actually demonstrate very clearly that the more empathic you are the more likely you are to be screwed in life so I'm going to share one of these with you okay super cool study so in this study it requires a couple of different things so we have two people okay and we have let's say $100 and in this experiment what we do is we give the $100 to one person and we say to person number one you have to divide this $100 into two groups and then you have to offer one of these amounts to the other person if the second person accepts the way that you split the money both of you get to keep the money the way that you split it so if I give if I give you $100 and you decide okay like let's say it's me and you okay so let's say I have the $100 okay and I'm going to split it with you so I say okay I'm going to take $50 and you take $50 do you accept if you accept you actually get the $50 and I get the $50 if you do not accept neither of us gets money that's the way that the experiment is designed okay so what we discover is that most people if you have a relatively normal amount of empathy will split things 50/50 because that's fair right I get 50 free bucks you get 50 free bucks it's all good the second that you add a little bit of sociopathy into the mix things start to change because here I am I'm a sociopath right and so I'm thinking to myself well this is like free money either way so what I can do is I can say how about 6040 I get 60 and you get 40 if this person rejects it they get nothing and if they accept it they at least get 40 free bucks and I get 60 free bucks even though it's not even you are still benefiting and I'm willing to give you an unfair trade knowing that if you turn down my un fair trade we both get screwed so I'm going to take advantage of this fact by splitting up the money in an unfair way and what we find is that people will even split things if you're a real [ __ ] you'll split things 90 10 okay Dr K here's 100 bucks I'm going to keep 90 and you take 10 if you want to turn it down go ahead and turn it down none of us gets anything you're going to lose out on $10 and if you turn down the trade I may lose out on 90 but you're going to lose out on 10 it's just free money just take the trade I'll keep 90 you take 10 right it's a win-win for both of us so the more an antisocial you are the more likely you are to split things unfairly hey all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today now here's the crazy thing the person's capacity to accept an unfair trade depends on their level of empathy so the Kinder you are the more likely you are to accept an unfair trade in this scenario so if I'm splitting things 50/50 everyone's going to basically accept unless you're a real [ __ ] and then you say no I'm not going to accept unless you give me 90 and you take 10 right you can kind of flip it around but that's not the way the experiment is organized so basically what happens is most people will sort of default to 50/50 and in order to accept an unfair trade your empathy has to be high right and so what that basically means is that the more empathic you are the more likely you are to take an uneven or unfair trade now here's the really crazy thing okay so we know that the neurotransmitter serotonin is associated with empathy the higher your serotonin is the higher you are to be the more likely you are to be empathic as you are content and happy you are more likely to be kind to other people so they took this experiment and then what they did is they gave people ssris these are anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medications that boost serotone and transmission so this is not just a a general personality thing they actually administered medication to these people and what they found is when you give someone a serotonin boosting medication they are more likely to accept unfair trades the more empathic you are the more likely you are to get screwed by other people this is wild and if you're someone who's a highly sensitive person or incredibly empathic you know exactly what I'm talking about that your empathy allows other people to take advantage of you but it gets even weirder so the other really weird thing is if we look at histories of people who grew up abused okay they are more likely to be abusive so if I was growing up if I was a child growing up in a household where I was emotionally abused when I grow up I'm more likely to abuse use other people and so we may think okay this is just a consequence of trauma but it turns out that it's not just the trauma itself it turns out that the more empathic you are the more you understand your abuser so as you put yourself in your abuser shoes and then you sort of understand their perspective there are two separate things that happen the first is that you are likely to be forgiving of their abusive Behavior okay so this is like literally what I've seen when I work as a psychiatrist and I work with people who are like in unfair or unhealthy or abusive relationships what they always do is empathize with their abuser so if someone is let's say I'm in a romantic relationship where someone is physically abusive to me what I'll do is I'll say like oh well like I understand they're under so much stress right now you know they've been drinking a lot and that's their unhealthy coping mechanism it's something that we're working on you know I understand that their life is hard I understand why they would be like short-tempered I understand why they would get angry I understand that they grew up in a household where people were physically abusive to them the more empathic I am with them the more likely I am to be forgiving for their bad behavior tolerant of their bad behavior I empathize with my abuser in the most severe cases of this we see something called Stockholm syndrome which is pretty famous but this is when someone gets kidnapped and is controlled they start to have positive feelings towards their abuser and it appears that this is all mediated by empathy now it gets even weirder than that it turns out that the more empathic you are if you associate with people who are sociopaths the more sociopathic you will become there's a study that looks at this very specifically so they took a group of people Gamers and they had them play a video game and in one video game they play a character like Superman and in another video game they play a character like the Joker so they play like literally there's a you can play as a good character or you can play as an evil character so you play the game for a while and it's whatever but then they did something really interesting after someone finished playing the game they tested their capacity for empathy and they found that whichever character you play actually shapes the way that you then interact with the world so they discovered a couple of things the first is that if you played as the Joker you were more likely to endorse violent solutions to problems so when you play Superman and someone's like is it okay to you know hit someone in the face if they're [ __ ] annoying you and people who play Superman are like no that's not okay but if you play The Joker people are more likely to say yeah it's okay to like use violence violence is more justifiable and more likely to be a course of action that is acceptable but it gets even weirder than that it's even at the very very minute level so what they did is they took the people who played Superman they took the people who played jok The Joker and they asked them to look at neutral facial expressions so it's just a facial expr that's neutral and people who played Superman would look at this facial expression and say this person is neither angry or happy they're not upset they're not thrilled they're just chilling they're vibing they're neutral but people who played as the Joker are more likely to end interpret neutral facial expressions as being hostile or negative in some way so when we sort of act out or empathize with some kind of abusive or negative figure it changes the way that we perceive the world and it changes the way that we believe things are Justified or not justified absolutely wild right and this is not just one study I'm telling you guys about this is like one study that has also been backed up by a lot of other studies and then the third thing that they measured was how kind these people are after playing this video game and what they sort of discovered is they would ask people like how much money would you donate to a good cause and people who play Superman are more likely to donate to a good cause whereas people play Joker The Joker are less likely to donate or would donate a smaller amount so it appears that being empathic towards an evil figure of some in some way actually literally changes the way that we perceive the world changes what we think is justifiable or acceptable and literally Alters our own kindness Behavior the last thing that we're going to talk about is super wild because a lot of people think that empathy is a net positive for a relationship ship including this guy but it turns out that empathy can actually be damaging for a relationship and once I explain this to you I hope it makes sense because once I understood it it clicked for me so beautifully so let's say you're early on in a relationship you're not really committed to each other yet youall have been talking a little bit you've gone on maybe two dates now let's say you're highly empathic okay and so early on in a relationship y'all are not deeply in love y'all are kind of like I don't know if I like this I don't know if I don't like this like this person is good in this ways these are a couple of green flags these are a couple of red flags and so the more empathic you are the more sensitive and accurate you are at judging your partner's unhappiness and let's think about what that would do if I've gone on two dates with you and I recognize that you are unhappy with these qualities you don't like me for these reasons maybe you find someone else attractive and there's studies that show that people who are highly empathic are early on in relationships accurately judge when their partner is attracted to someone else okay so you someone's like hey like hey do you think that hey do you think that that that girl is pretty do you think she's pretty and I'm like no no I don't think she's pretty but if you're highly empathic you know that I'm bullshitting you can read you can read what I'm sort of really experiencing you feel that empathy because your empathy circuits are strong you're a mind reader and you actually recognize that I do think that that chick is attractive so what impact do you think this has on Rel relationships studies actually show that a high level of empathy early on in relationships can actually sabotage the relationship and prevent it from progressing because you are accurately able to detect someone else's unhappiness and remember because of the principle of emot emotional contagion when you detect that unhappiness you also feel that unhappiness so what that means is that if your partner is unhappy you are able to accurately read that and you become unhappy so let's take two scenarios one where one partner is slightly unhappy and you're actually having a great time the second person's like totally chilling totally vibing we're enjoying this it's two dates in let's see where it goes if they are not empathic and there's a term called Mind blindness if they are more mind blind they are oblivious to their partner's dissatisfaction which means that their partner can kind of like work themselves through it right just because I'm attracted to someone or just because I'm unhappy with something doesn't mean I'm going to break up with someone I may need to work through it myself I may need to let go of my ex I may need go to therapy myself or work on my confidence or whatever so in one situation you have one unhappy person and one happy person and it turns out that if you have one happy person and one unhappy person in a relationship that relationship is more likely to succeed than if you have one unhappy person emotional contagion and then a second unhappy person which relationship do you think is more likely to succeed one with an unhappy and one happy person where they can maybe work through things or a relationship where both people are unhappy so it turns out that we have studies that show that having a high level of empathy actually sabotages your early relationships and I see this so much in my clinical practice when I work with people who are very caring very empathic and even are kind of like this nice guy picture there's other stuff that involves nice guys but let's say an empathic emotionally available dude so it turns out that empathic emotionally available dudes will be like oh my God God nice guys finish last they have this consistent experience of getting into relationships being incredibly caring and for some reason they end up alone and then they say like I don't understand I'm such a nice person I'm emotionally available I'm empathic I'm caring I've gone to therapy and yet I'm alone and then what does the internet do the internet victim blames right no you're a nice guy you're one of these toxic nice people who's looking for sex and you're not actually kind and this and you're this and you're this there's no victim blaming unless you're a nice man on the internet right and that's the one situation where it's okay to victim blame so we sort of have these scenarios and I've seen this not just in men but women as well who are incredibly empathic and supportive and wind up alone and it turns out that there are a couple of good reasons for that the first is that as they are empathic they experience emotional contagion and their partner's unhappiness becomes their unhappiness instead of being stable in resilient and helping your partner move from unhappiness to happiness you get contaminated by it and it sabotages the relationship but there are also other factors as well people who are empathic as we mentioned are more likely to be taken advantage of people are going to take advantage of your kindness if you are a nice guy you know what I'm talking about because people will take advantage of your kindness there is this whole complex of sometimes people are men are deceptive right where they are expecting sex but they're offering kindness and that's kind of like an act but the opposite is also true where people are genuinely kind and get genuinely taken advantage of and there's data to support that as well and so it turns out that recognizing threats early on in a relationship is a double-edged sword because the more that you see problems in the relationship the more likely you are to mentally check out whereas recognizing threats later in the relationship seems to correlate with positive you know relationship lifespan and satisfaction so and and this may sound kind of confusing right because there are people on the internet who will talk about how you should be more empathic and you may be wondering okay well some people say you should be more empathic and some people you say you should be less empathic which one is it and it turns out that empathy just like any other human function whether we look at confidence ego narcissism fear anxiety happiness love all of these things are neither good nor bad it is who is in control of them does the love control you oh love is such a wonderful thing except when you fall in love with the wrong person oh my God anxiety is such a terrible thing except when anxiety warns you of danger and actually helps you survive and protect yourself now the question kind of becomes all right Dr K you've said that we should be less empathic but like what do I do about this how do I be less empathic should I just be more of an [ __ ] and it turns out that there are a variety of different things that correlate with sort of protecting yourself from too much empathy and as we learn these skills we will will have a healthier relationship with our empathy the first thing that we need to do is be more compassionate instead of empathic when we help someone there are two different modes of operation and it turns out that compassion is like neuroscientifically somewhat discreet from empathy so remember affective empathy is the ability to feel what someone else is feeling whereas compassion is the ability to have kindness towards someone else and often those two things come hand in hand right I feel your pain therefore I am kind but you don't have to feel someone's pain to be kind to them so when you know like if you have a little kid let's say like a six-year-old kid who loses their favorite stuffed animal or their blanket gets you know ruined in the wash even though I don't really understand that pain unless it happened to me I can still be compassionate and kind towards them what we sort of discover especially if you're a psychiatrist or therapist is that you can have compassion towards your patients without being caught up in their emotions and this is where I think a key thing to understand is recognize that you don't have to feel what you feel in order to be kind you let them stay over there and you can exhibit kindness towards them without becoming one with them the problem with empathy is that it causes two of us to fuse so very practically I I think the best way to sort of implement this for people that you want to help be responsible for help helping them don't be responsible for their problems so when you make their problems your problems when you get overly invested let's find you a girlfriend let's find you a boyfriend let's find you love I'm going to work night and day to find you love that's a recipe for disaster because you can't find them love you can't control their behavior but you're trying to achieve a particular thing in their life it actually has a paradoxical effect where the more invested you become the more it damages you and the more lazy they become as you take responsibility for the outcome they stop taking responsibility for the outcome and a pattern that I've seen in my practice over and over and over again is that the more empathic that you are the more people rely on you and become like basically [ __ ] lazy right and I see this a lot even with like parents that I work with who have children who are addicted to video games as mom does more and more and more to help their child does their laundry cooks for them let me help you with your resume let me help you with this college application did you do your college application the child becomes more and more incompetent and what you will find especially if you see all these like I see a lot of posts about things like weaponized incompetence is what you will see is for anyone to have weaponized incompetence and if you're an empathic person who deals with weaponized incompetence there is someone who facilitates or enables that weaponized incompetence that human being has to be able to be that incompetent for a reason otherwise they would be more capable right someone had to do everything for them so separate compassion from empathy the second thing that we need to understand is that the more self-critical you are the more vulnerable you are to high levels of empathy so there are studies that show that you can be empathic but if you have confidence in yourself that sort of maintains a certain amount of stability in your identity so if I'm confident and I'm empathic that kind of works out okay but if I'm self-critical if I blame myself and I'm empathic that is like a terrible cocktail that will wreck your mental so let's like think through this for a second so we understand right so let's say I feel your pain and then I'm self-critical so now that I feel bad when my emotional circuits activate it also triggers my self-critical sort of like rumination and and this kind of stuff right after you go through a breakup or when you get exposed to something sad these self-critical thoughts will start flooding your mind and it turns out that if you get that empathic signal from the outside it still triggers this self-critical reaction so if your friend is going through a breakup and they're really struggling and they're really sad you can even blame yourself I should be a better friend or they're asking for your help and you feel burnt out and then you feel guilty we'll get to that one in a second because that's a whole different thing but it turns out that the more self-critical you are the more vulnerable to empathy you will be so the solution there is to focus on your own confidence it isn't even about setting limits with other people or cutting yourself off which is often times the coping mechanism that we end up using as you reduce your own self-critical thinking and develop confidence you will be able to handle empathy better now let's get to the third thing so this is one super cool so it turns out that the other thing that makes people vulnerable to high levels of empathy is internal conflict so if you're someone who's highly empathic hopefully this makes sense too that you feel for someone's pain and then you want to help them but you recognize that there's emotional contagion you recognize that you have your own stuff to deal with you don't have the bandwidth to help them right now and so then you're conflicted because if you set boundaries with them you feel guilty and if you don't set boundaries with them you're sacrificing your own stuff so highly empathic people often times are put into lose lose situations by themselves you feel like it's someone else putting you in in that situation but is actually your internal conflict that worsens the negative impacts of empathy and so what we want to do there is recognize anytime you are kind to someone else or you're trying to be empathic towards someone else right anytime you're trying to be supportive notice if there is an internal conflict and recognize that the worse that internal conflict is the more of a lose lose situation you're going to be in so how do you resolve that and this is like literally what we do in therapy right so I have you know I had a patient once who their parents wanted them to come home for the holidays lots of patients not just one the patient doesn't like to come home from the holidays because mom and dad are divorced they live in the same city and no matter whether you go home for the holidays or don't go home for the holidays mom or dad is not going to be happy it's a very ugly divorce mom is unhappy that you're only spending Christmas morning with her dad is unhappy that Mom gets Christmas morning and they get Christmas afternoon and so these two people got divorced for a reason right they're really unhappy and they're somewhat self-absorbed and there's no way that my patient can win they hate going back because no matter what they do they cannot make both of their parents happy because what both of their parents want is a full Christmas with the child that they love and even if my patient says okay this year we're going to do you what that means is that the other parent gets no child for this year of Christmas so there's no they never hear the end of it so they would try to set limits and they would feel incredibly guilty and then they would not set limits and they would feel torn apart so literally in psychotherapy what we do with this person is work through that internal conflict right stop taking responsibility for your parents' happiness I know this sounds crazy but they signed up for only half of a Christmas the moment they got divorced do you get that like this is something of their making they're the [ __ ] ones who decide decided to get divorced and somehow this is your problem to solve now you're supposed to duplicate yourself and be in two places at once you're supposed to make up for the decision that your parents divorce themselves this is what we do in Psychotherapy it is about resolving that internal conflict and when we realize that when we have that breakthrough and he's like oh whoa whoa hold on a second this is not my problem I no longer have to feel guilty I'm going to show up at at Christmas morning with my mom show up at Christmas morning with my dad and then I I'm also going to have a conversation with them and be like hey both of y'all let's hop on a conference call both y'all want me to be there for Christmas if y'all wanted me to be there for Christmas the whole time and both of you wanted me 100% the thing that y'all should have done is never gotten divorced now y'all are in two places I cannot be in two places at once y'all tell me what you want to do y'all figure it out stop putting me in the middle it is the resolution of that internal conflict the Absolution of that guilt that then protects you from that empathy and stops getting you screwed it's such a simple solution it's such a simple realization that you as a child don't control this this is their problem and yet the more empathic we are the more we adopt their point of view because their parents are mad at each other so I'm going to accept their framing of the problem so this is something that youall have to be incredibly careful about that everyone is talking about the benefits of empathy and how we should be more empathic and all I'm looking for is someone who like is very empathic and supports me and loves me and and you know if they can't handle me at my worst they don't deserve me at my best and since they're I'm entitled to them handling me at my worst I'm going to just be my worst all the time right because that's their [ __ ] problem now and there you are accepting it you're like yeah I want to be a good boyfriend I want to be a good girlfriend I should be emotionally available I should be empathic I should be supportive because if I'm not I feel guilty and then that tears me up inside and I don't want to feel guilty because that makes me a bad person so I'm going to help them and I'm I'm not going to set boundaries with them and I'm going to let them walk all over me doesn't work so be very careful about empathy recognize that it can damage everything from your relationships to your self-esteem to having having you even experience vicarious trauma and learn to set some of these limits otherwise you will go absolutely insane and then everyone around you who cares about you can go insane with you he