This is why highly empathic people feel drained all the time | Lisa Damour

0:00 Feelings aren't optional. You don't get to decide if you have them or not. Everybody has them. So, the question then becomes what do we do with them? Either you can go down the road of thinking, "Okay, this is information. What's it telling me? How do I use it to make my life better?" Or you can go down the road of, "How do I get rid of these, especially the uncomfortable ones?" Getting rid of uncomfortable emotions is a workout. It requires constant effort. It's not like they just go away. You're actually putting energy into keeping them at bay. Eventually, they find a way out or you just become exhausted and become overwhelmed by them. So, the more that we can turn and face and get to know even the emotions that we're not all that happy to have, the smarter we're going to be about ourselves, the smarter we're going to be about our lives, and frankly, the more energy we're going to have for dealing with whatever is in front of us.

0:49 I'm Dr. Lisa Damour. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm an author, and I'm the co-host of Ask Lisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens podcast. Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Big Think is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now, back to the interview.

1:24 Developing a better relationship with your emotions. So, there's a long-standing debate in psychology about where emotions fit into our lives. Are they in charge? Are we in charge? How does this work? Well, the fact of the matter is, some people are ruled by their emotions. Their emotions are calling all the shots. This is not actually how we want our lives to be. The best version I've ever heard of this comes from a colleague of mine, Dr. Terry Tobias, who is a psychologist, has this great metaphor that she uses to talk about emotions. So, we all have a personal board of directors, and on it sits, you know, our priorities, our interests, our values, our you know, logistical considerations, and our emotions. That our emotions are informational, they can tell us about how things are going, they can give us guidance about what's working and what's not.

2:16 But, the way my colleague talks about it is that she says, "Emotions have a seat on the board, but they're not the chair of the board, and they very rarely get a deciding vote." So, if we think about our emotions, we can think about them as like the most ancient part of being human, right? That emotions have always been there to help guide us, right? Anxiety keeps us safe. Our ancestors who weren't anxious, they did not survive to pass their genes into the population.

2:43 So, emotions are old, and they are powerful. And they tend to initiate in the ancient part of our brains, the older, lower parts of the brain, the amygdala being the major player here. So, first, emotions arise in the older parts of our brain, and then the newer parts of our brain, the part sort of behind our forehead, starts to interpret that emotion and decide what to make of it. Then, we can act or not act, depending on what the higher-order part of our brain has decided that emotion means. One of the biggest challenges we have right now as a culture is we've landed on an understanding of mental health that's really not accurate. And what I mean by that is so often and you'll hear people suggesting that you know you're mentally healthy if you feel good. Okay, I'm all for feeling good. I'm a psychologist. I want people to feel good. This has nothing to do with what makes for mental health. So, the definition I like to use, and this comes from my field, is being mentally healthy is about two things. First, it's about having feelings that fit what's actually happening, even if they are unwanted emotions. And then second, and this is really where the rubber hits the road, it's about managing those feelings well.

3:56 Not only is it untrue that mental health is about feeling good, sometimes it's true that mental health is about feeling bad. Okay, so for example, say you get fired at work, and it's a job you really cared about. If you feel nothing, that's weird. You should be upset. You should be worried about what's happening next. You should be concerned about missing your old colleagues. Not feeling anything under those conditions, or feeling okay under those conditions, that would actually be grounds for concern.

4:25 So, people have the idea that ideally we should feel good. And while it's nice to feel good, that's not really how life works. Instead, we want to recognize that emotions cut across a very wide range, from very pleasant to very unpleasant, and I like to think about all of them as information. They are a feedback system. They tell us how our life is going. If we do something and we hate it, we should pay attention to that. If we hang out with somebody and we feel terrible when we're with them, we should pay attention to that. If we do something and it's terrific, we should be curious about that, too. They are there as data. They are there as information. Another way to think about unwanted emotions is the way we think about physical pain. Nobody likes physical pain, but we recognize that it's actually important. If you have your hand on a burner that's on, you should feel pain that gets you to pull your hand away. If you have an injury in your knee that is painful and you go running, that injury is going to tell you to stop running.

5:24 Pain tells us to notice that something's not right and to take steps to fix it. Emotional discomfort does the exact same job. It helps us notice when something isn't working, and ideally to take steps to improve things. Especially at a time when we've decided that you're supposed to feel good, calm, at ease as much as you absolutely can, which is not really possible. We've also ended up with this idea that if you're emotional, that somehow means you're fragile, right? That you are not a sturdy person. But we know that's not true. That you can be very emotional, feel things incredibly deeply, while still being completely sturdy and able to function beautifully in the world. And in fact, being very attuned to what's happening with other people, what's happening with yourself, is a superpower, right? It can help us to make great decisions, to treat other people well.

6:21 There's no benefit to thinking that I know that I am okay or that that person's okay if we are somehow indifferent to or invulnerable to what's going on around us or inside us. Feelings aren't optional. You don't get to decide if you have them or not. Everybody has them. So the question then becomes what do we do with them? Either you can go down the road of thinking, "Okay, this is information. What's it telling me? How do I use it to make my life better?"

6:50 Or you can go down the road of, "How do I get rid of these, especially the uncomfortable ones?" Getting rid of uncomfortable emotions is a workout. It requires constant effort. It's not like they just go away. You're actually putting energy into keeping them at bay. And the way I like to think about it is, well, that's a real drain on your system. Not only are you not getting the benefit of all that information that comes with knowing your feelings, you're also having to do the workout of like keeping your shoulder against the door that keeps all of those feelings away. Eventually, they find a way out or you just become exhausted and become overwhelmed by them.

7:27 So the more that we can turn and face and get to know even the emotions that we're not all that happy to have, the smarter we're going to be about ourselves, the smarter we're going to be about our lives, and frankly, the more energy we're going to have for dealing with whatever is in front of us. So, there's this phrase that comes from the mindfulness world that I just love, which is we should think of our minds being like ponds full of fish.

7:51 And the fish are feelings, and the goal is to try to be the pond. It's another way of sort of not pushing our emotions away, but kind of holding them at a little bit of a distance as opposed to feeling like they're in charge, they're running the show. If we need another metaphor, and I can always come up with another metaphor, it's great to think of emotions as being like in the passenger seat of our lives. Like we have our hands on the wheel. We are driving this car, deciding where it goes and how fast. But emotions can give us information about where we might want to go and how quickly we might want to try to get there.

8:25 It's not great when emotions actually are the ones with their hands on the wheel. We want there to be more parts of ourselves, more information from our lives weighing in when we're choosing our direction. So, having set aside the idea that we're not supposed to have uncomfortable emotions, we can move to the much more helpful idea that emotions are going to show up, even ones we don't really want, and we have to figure out what to do with them and how to handle that well. As soon as we are into the territory of handling emotions well, we're into a field that psychologists call emotion regulation. Okay, this is a really boring term for a really important and exciting idea.

9:01 And the idea is we don't banish emotions, we manage emotions. And when we're managing emotions, we actually work across two categories. Sometimes we manage emotions by expressing them. The teenagers I will care for will talk about like getting feelings out. And sometimes we manage emotions by quieting them, taming them, bringing them back down to size. Now, the thing that's really important here is that both of these categories are equally valuable. Psychologists are good with both. Sometimes it's good to express emotions, sometimes it's good to tame emotions. You don't want to do all one or all the other. You actually want to work across both of these categories. So, this is the part of my job that's kind of magic.

9:43 We don't really understand why it works this way, but we have enough science to tell us that when we come up with a label for a feeling, we feel that feeling less intensely. If I'm sad and I tell you I feel sad, I actually feel less sad. If I'm anxious and I say I'm feeling anxious, my anxiety goes down. Now, we have some theories about why this is true. Once you take an uncomfortable emotion and put it into words, it goes from being abstract, emotions are highly abstract, to something concrete. Concrete is easier to work with. Another thing about putting words around our feelings is that now we can share them. We can tell other people what's going on inside of us.

10:19 We don't have to carry it alone, and we may even get some really great support. So, there's huge value in being able to come up with words to describe what we're feeling. And we even know that the more precise, the better. There is a line of research on emotional granularity. It's better to actually say, "I'm so disappointed." if that's what you're feeling, than just to say "I'm sad." Or "I'm so frustrated." if that's what you're feeling, instead of just saying "I don't know, I'm kind of angry, I guess." So, not only is labeling emotions powerful, the more granular the labeling is, the more bang we get for that verbal buck.

10:56 There's something else to be said about talking about our feelings, if that's something you want to do. We know as psychologists that things are often much worse on the inside than on the outside. That when it's banging around in our own head, it seems worse than when it's out on the table in front of us. And I think what's often at work there is the emotion of shame. This is an emotion that is enormously powerful, but we don't talk about all that much. When we are holding emotions inside, when we feel like we can't talk about them, usually there's a sense of shame that this reflects badly on me, that there's something wrong with me, that I have this emotion.

11:29 If we can get ourselves to a place of talking about it and sharing it and putting it in the light, what we usually see is whoever we're sharing it with goes, "I get it. Of course you feel that way." And now the shame is dispelled. We're reminded, "Yeah, emotions are part of being human, even some pretty unpleasant emotions sometimes." And if we can talk about it and share it, not only do we get social support, which is really important when we're dealing with hard things, we also get something that helps us sweep away shame.

11:59 So, if we start with the category of expressing emotions, there's better and worse ways to do it. So, healthy expression can take a lot of different forms. It usually it starts with talking, right? Just saying, "I feel this." Or "This just happened to me." Or "I need to process this and tell somebody what is on my mind." Being able to talk about our feelings is enormously valuable both in terms of understanding them ourselves and making meaningful connections with other people.

12:22 But, healthy expression isn't just about talking. The art that moves us, those are all healthy expressions. Artists, creatives, are people who are channeling their emotions into something productive. Music, graphical arts, that is an expressive phenomenon and it's a way that they are getting their emotions out into the world while making something. You also see healthy emotional expression in things like sports, right? If you've had a really rough day and you go take it out on the tennis court, that's a great way to express that discomfort. There's also unhealthy forms of emotional expression. So, if you go to work and you have a bad day and you come home and you kick the dog, you're expressing that emotion in a terrible way. Same thing with yelling, being unkind to people.

13:07 There's ways that we take our feelings out that give us relief, but they leave damage in our wake. So, this idea that expressing and taming are equally important is one that people are often surprised to hear, especially from psychologists. You think we're going to want you to talk about feelings endlessly all the time until you feel better. But, it always work that way. And in fact, one of the most valuable things that we can have in our repertoire as human beings is the ability to make feelings quiet down, to calm them down, to get them to go more quiet when we want to.

13:41 This is what we call taming. All right, there's all of these fabulous strategies for taming emotions that we don't want to have. One, distraction, right? Say for example, you had to have a medical test and you're awaiting results, right? And they could be really good or really bad and you don't know and there's nothing you can do. Thinking and thinking and thinking about it, talking and talking and talking about it is actually not going to help you out.

14:03 Watching a really good movie or losing yourself in a book is actually what you need. Distraction in these moments can be your best friend and it's a great strategy for taming discomfort. Another example of taming is problem-solving, right? If the thing that is making you upset is something you can fix, you actually don't need to spend time worrying about it, talking about it. Just get going on the fixing. That will help you feel better. Taming can also take the form of comforts, right? And this is something we do so naturally as humans, right? Taking a nice long shower, eating a food you love, right? Getting a hug is is a form of emotional taming.

14:40 I really want people to know that psychologists do not put talking as the what end-all-be-all of emotion management. It is one strategy. It is in the category of expression. There are other things in that category. Taming is a whole other category and it is full of wonderful, wonderful options. What you will do is going to be unique to you, it's going to be what you like, but it is no less valuable than talking about emotions or finding other ways to express them.

15:09 So, I'm a psychologist, we're all for talking about feelings to a point. So, what we know as psychologists is that talking about feelings should bring relief. The more you talk, the better you feel. From time to time, it doesn't work that way. Instead, the more we talk the worse we feel and so then we keep talking and we keep feeling worse. Now our technical term for this is rumination, but the best way to think about it is like getting stuck in an emotional rut or frankly it's kind of gross but it's a really helpful metaphor, picking at an emotional wound, right? You won't leave it alone, it won't heal up, you're making it worse.

15:43 So if you notice that you or someone you care about is ruminating, they're going around and around and around and on something. The more they think about it, the more they talk about it, the further they're digging themselves in. The solution is actually to stop expressing, to not keep going down that road. Now the best way to make rumination stop is actually distraction, right? It's just to find something that is totally engrossing and put your mind on it.

16:09 I think about it like a forced change of one's mental channel. I have a dear friend who had a very very taxing job and she would call me at the end of the day and she'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I had such a day. There is no way I'm going to be able to get to sleep tonight unless I watch something really dumb and really absorbing on TV." She had it right. Thinking about our problems is great if it's helping us, but we can take it to a point that actually makes things worse.

16:35 So as a psychologist, empathy is really important. I know that, you know that. And as a psychologist who cares for adolescents and the adults around them, I'm always telling the parents and caregivers of teenagers, be empathic, offer empathy. But I'm going to throw a little asterisk on this. We have research showing, and I'm not surprised by this and you won't be either, that empathy is actually taxing to the person who's being empathic, that it's a work out of its own to be the empathic person. So this is why therapy's great because you're actually paying somebody for their time and their empathy. That is the arrangement. It also means that we want to be mindful of how much we ask of other people or of any given individual. If day over day over day, we are seeking empathy from the same person, they may love us a lot, they may want to do it, they may have every investment in our well-being, we need to bear in mind that's hard and hard for them. And we want to make sure that we're not asking more than is fair. Most of the time we're not. Most of the time people are happy to do it.

17:43 But I also want to offer this, if you've ever felt that way while empathizing, like I want to be here for this person, but I'm also finding it hard, well, science has your back. Being empathic is actually not a costless activity. So, here's the bottom line. You're going to feel everything. And you don't necessarily have say about what you're going to feel or when you're going to feel it. And many of those feelings are going to be uncomfortable and unwanted. If you commit yourself to avoiding them, trying not to feel them, your life is going to get really narrow and you're going to lose touch with yourself and other people. If instead, you welcome the idea that emotions are here to stay, they are here to let us know how things are going, they are here to give us information, a whole lot of good things are going to happen even while you're contending with uncomfortable emotions. You're going to learn more about yourself. You're going to become more emotionally durable with time as you get used to managing uncomfortable emotions.

18:39 You will be more empathic to other people as they are going through hard things. And frankly, you're going to make better choices. Most of the time when we're making bad choices, is that we are ignoring uncomfortable emotions that we're either having because of those bad choices or that are trying to warn us away from those bad choices. So, treating uncomfortable emotions as friends and allies is how this works and doing so is going to make your life better.

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