What happens when caring becomes too costly? For anyone working in service of others — volunteers, nonprofit professionals, corporate social impact practitioners — burnout and compassion fatigue are an occupational reality. When we get to this place of overwhelm, it often feels easier to tune out and turn off than lean in and activate.
Why does this happen? And what can we do about it? The good news: there’s a strong biological and neurological reason for burnout and compassion fatigue — and, more importantly, a remedy.
We’re all familiar with the word “empathy” but what actually happens in our brains when we feel empathy for another? It turns out there are several types of empathy, and differentiating between them is critical.
Affective Empathy (“I feel what you feel”)
When we witness someone else in pain, the regions in our brain that process our own pain can be activated. This “pain matrix” creates a simulation of another’s suffering within our own nervous system. These reactions are fast and pre-conscious.
Research by Tania Singer showed that affective empathy can increase burnout and antisocial behavior in healthcare workers frequently exposed to trauma – and can also lead to distress and overwhelm. In other words, feeling too much, too often, without a way through, wears us down.
Cognitive Empathy (“I understand how you feel”)
When we witness someone else in pain and we choose to listen, understand, and believe their experience — even when it differs from our own* — completely different regions of our brain are activated. This conscious perspective-taking is slower, more effortful, and deliberate.
Unlike affective empathy, cognitive empathy isn’t nearly as taxing, has been shown to decrease burnout, and is the foundation for something that feels genuinely rewarding to our brain: compassion.
Compassion (“I witness your suffering and I take action”)
Compassion activates entirely different neural circuitry, engaging the brain’s reward and caregiving systems. These regions are rich in dopamine and endogenous opioids — which is why compassion feels rewarding rather than depleting. It is neurologically sustainable in ways that affective empathy is not.
Singer’s research demonstrated that subjects trained in compassion — through loving-kindness meditation — showed measurable brain activity shifts away from the pain matrix and toward the reward network, with decreased negative affect and increased resilience.
Compassion does not fatigue. What fatigues is empathic distress: getting stuck in the pain loop without ever transitioning to the care circuit.
The Shift We Need to Make
The move we collectively need to make is away from affective empathy’s pain loop and toward action rooted in compassion — which happens to be the ideal foundation for volunteerism to thrive. This is precisely why program design and employee training are so critical in employee volunteering programs.
When we implement the Transformative approach to employee volunteering, we incorporate perspective-taking exercises, critical reflection, and intentional design — the elements that help surface our shared humanity and activate compassion at scale.
The good news? This shift isn’t just possible — it’s trainable. When organizations invest in program design that moves employees from passive witnessing to intentional compassionate action, they’re not just building better volunteer programs. They’re building more resilient, more engaged human beings. In a world that desperately needs people to show up — and keep showing up — that’s not a small thing. That’s the whole point.
*The language to describe cognitive empathy came from this Brene Brown podcast episode
