This is the BBC World Service. I'm Marie Keyworth with the documentary, where I'll be exploring the concept of compassion and compassion fatigue, the idea that we can feel empathy and compassion too much, and that experience

of feeling can deplete us.

Right now, which is a year and a half later, I can't face picking another parent up off the floor.

And there is a very specific sound that mothers tend to make when they find out that their children have died.

That just like rips your heart out and you can never unhear. It was sort of compassion exhaustion. I still felt like I was able to give compassion. There have been other points in my life where I was just kind of done. Thinking about others is known to be cognitively expensive. In other words, it uses quite a lot of brain power.

And when you're tired, you simply have less of that. So it isn't just that you feel

horrible but that your ability to deal with kind of complex things, thinking about how other people might feel,

that really seems to degrade very quickly.

How can stress and overwork make us unable to be kind to others and even ourselves?

There was a focus on delivering a vision and delivering results, but there wasn't a focus on the being and

the person that was delivering all of that so there was an absolute lack of compassion

for myself. We'll be looking at how the coronavirus pandemic has thrown the issue of compassion exhaustion into sharp relief.

And how can we steal ourselves against pain, suffering, sadness and stress without becoming heart-hearted.

And I think that part of the fatigue that we have is sometimes not letting ourselves feel that and to feel it and realize

that that on a deeper level everything's okay and that's not to say that there's

not terrible things happening.

We will take the action that we can take,

but it's really important to let those different feelings in and not try and keep them out

because it's the attempt to keep them out that's so exhausting. It was quite a shock I have to say. You prepare yourself as best you can but there's no way you can prepare

yourself for some of the situations you know in which you find yourself.

Okay my name is Joanna Cannon. I qualified as a doctor later in life and I'm currently working as an author.

I'm the author of a memoir about my time as a junior doctor called Breaking Amending.

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