Caring fatigue
Κόπωση από τη φροντίδα
The ordinary, reversible state in which the attention you have for other people has run down, usually because the fourth conversation of the week started before you had come down from the third. Here it means that everyday state and nothing heavier. The first sign is usually not sadness but flatness, or irritation at the person in front of you.
How to spot it
Count instead of checking how you feel. How many of these have you had this week, and how many hours passed between the last one and the one before it? A number is easier to see than a state.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Davidson, R. J., Jackson, D. C., & Kalin, N. H. (2000). Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regulation — doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.6.890
What it found
- Two broad emotional systems, approach and withdrawal, rest mainly on the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
- The time an emotional response takes to arise and to subside is a measurable dimension of an individual's affective style.
- The circuits of emotion show plasticity: experience alters structures such as the hippocampus, with consequences for psychopathology and stress-related symptoms.
How it found it
Review of the neuroscientific literature on the neural basis of emotion, with proposals formulated for the role of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
What it means for empathy
Regulating your own emotion and being able to stay present with someone else's emotion share common circuitry: empathy requires that your own emotion not overwhelm you.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
The Fourth One Today
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Davidson, R. J., Jackson, D. C., & Kalin, N. H. (2000). Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regulation — doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.6.890