Are you in a career where the ability to show empathy is important? New research suggests that how you arrive at empathy is as important as being empathetic. And that old adage about developing empathy by walking a mile in their shoes may actually increase your burnout potential.
Certain jobs and careers benefit from the ability to develop empathy and show it in your work with others. If you’re a manager, mediator, teacher, customer service rep, tech support specialist, coach, or counselor, for example, empathy and perspective-taking are essential job and conflict resolution skills.
But in careers and jobs where experiencing others’ pain and suffering occurs on a regular basis, developing empathy can increase stress, be physiologically harmful, contribute to burnout, and ultimately affect your work and health.
The key, according to recent research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is to take a specific path to empathy that doesn’t make that empathy a burden on you.
Two routes to empathy
Researchers examined two methods or routes for achieving feelings of empathy. Both achieve the same result — developing empathy — but the impact on the empathizer is demonstrably different.
One route is to put yourself in someone else’s situation, as in the classic adage, “Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” The researchers called this route “imagine-self perspective-taking” or ISPT.
The other — and apparently healthier — route is to observe and infer how someone feels, which the researchers called “imagine-other perspective-taking or IOPT. This route is about reflecting on their experience or feelings without immersing yourself in them.
In the study, participants using the walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes method showed signs of the physiological fight-or-flight threat response, which releases the stress hormone cortisol. While this natural stress response is very useful for surviving imminent danger, chronic exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones is associated with health problems, including depression, digestive problems, interrupted sleep, and heart disease.
Said lead researcher Dr. Michael Poulin,
When we are feeling threatened or anxious, some peripheral blood vessels constrict making it harder for the heart to pump blood through the body. We can detect this in the lab and what we found is that people who engaged in ISPT had greater levels of this threat response compared to people who engaged in IOPT.
Putting the research to work for you
The takeaway from this research is not to try to suppress empathy, but to think about the other person’s experience and feelings without trying to actually feel them. As Poulin says,
You can think about another person’s feelings without taking those feelings upon yourself (IOPT). But I begin to feel sad once I go down the mental pathway of putting myself into the place of someone who is feeling sad (ISPT).
So, instead of asking yourself, “How would I feel if that had happened to me?” you might instead reflect on what the person is feeling. Instead of asking yourself, “If I lived their life right now, how would I be feeling?” you might instead ask yourself, “What does living that life right now make them feel like?”
Co-researcher Dr. Anneke Buffone suggests that parents avoid this type of admonishment to their children: “How would you feel if Sally had hit you with her truck?” The research suggests that a better response would be, “How do you think Sally felt when you hit her with your truck?”