Hey, it's Sam. Welcome back to Radio Headspace and to Thursday.

Over the last few months, I've been working on my thesis for my second masters in

emotion science and I've realized that compassion and empathy often get confused. There's also

some misunderstanding about what compassion fatigue actually is and how we can preserve

our well-being while showing compassion to those around us.

So today, let's break down these terms.

What is empathy exactly? Empathy describes our ability to understand and experience the

internal states of others. To a certain extent, emotions are contagious, and experiencing

empathy tends to make us more cooperative and act in ways that can help the people around

us. Researchers have split empathy into two distinct categories, cognitive and affective

empathy. Cognitive empathy is our ability to understand how someone is feeling. An

affective empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Empathy may help

us open to compassion, but it doesn't guarantee that we'll have it. In fact, affective

empathy can lead us to absorb others' emotions without being able to tell the difference

between our own feelings and someone else's feelings. This can result in what researchers

call empathic distress, which is a leading component of burnout, especially in caregivers

and medical staff. And that doesn't mean our compassion is being fatigued. In fact,

self-compassion is the very thing that can help us find resiliency and moments of empathic

distress. When we're able to set a boundary between our own feelings and those of others,

we prevent the unwanted absorption of other people's emotions. We also retain our ability

to regulate our own emotions. With empathy, we can absorb all kinds of feelings, like pride,

anger, joy, and fear, without realizing we've done so. With compassion, we have more

...