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Dan, a 71-year-old retired pilot, was recuperating at home after experiencing an ischemic stroke. Depressed and living alone, he described feeling comforted by the health care team that visited his home during his rehabilitation. With tear-filled eyes, Dan shared, “Susan (his nurse) sat and listened to my stories and feelings like she deeply cared. I swear she healed me as much, if not more, than the medications.”
Dan’s experience reveals the power of empathy in healing. Research by Kitzmüller et al. (2019) backs it up by showing that empathic care and listening to people’s stories led to improved recovery and a greater sense of meaning and manageability. Yet, what happens when the healing power of empathy backfires and leads to burnout?
I have worked with a wide range of health care professionals—from hospitals and ER physicians to alternative healing practitioners and therapists—on their trauma, burnout, and compassion fatigue. The reverberating effects of burnout impact one’s mental and physical health, families, colleagues, workplaces, and the greater society in need of their services. To say, “Toughen up, buttercup,” is really not the solution to broader systemic influences that seek more from people while giving less. And yet, some fascinating new research might reveal one part of why a certain type of empathy can lead to burnout.
Before I share the research, please take a moment to ask yourself what you think empathy actually comprises.
While you are reflecting on that, you could also ask yourself how empathetic you think you are and how you might compartmentalize it at work.
Now that you’ve reflected, I am sorry to report that empathy does not have a consistent definition. This has been a hot debate among researchers—and can even vary depending on the discipline—which makes it highly confusing for the rest of us who are receiving conflicting advice on how to feel and relate to others.
While I am intrigued by the contrast of Tan et al.’s (2021) one description of task-orientation as antithetical to empathy, Matingano et al.’s (2025) recent systematic review and meta-analyses of 79 studies on empathy reveal one particular form of empathy that may lead to more burnout, with two other forms being more protective against burnout.
And since we are unpeeling the researchers’ definitions of these concepts, let me share Maslach’s (1993) definition of burnout, which highlights that burnout is a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced feelings of accomplishment.
Now, back to empathy. The researchers described three key empathy types:
- Cognitive Empathy: The person can mentally recognize another person’s feeling state and take their perspective without necessarily experiencing it.
- Compassion Empathy: This person takes it one step further than cognitive empathy, as they are able to experience empathic concern.
- Contagion Empathy: Like the word implies, this individual merges and experiences another person’s emotions as though they were their own.
Before I reveal the types of empathy that are more protective from burnout and the one that leads to burnout, which ones do you think they are? Which type fits you most?
Drumroll, please…
Number three—contagion empathy—was found to be related to more distress. Moreover, because of the intensity of experiencing another person’s feelings, people in this category were less likely to help others over time, as it was so draining, while the other two types were more likely to experience the internal rewards that come from helping others.
If you are someone who experiences the deep emotions that come with contagion empathy, please do not beat yourself up. It can be a beautiful superpower, and yet, there are ways to heal so that you can reap the benefits of compassion empathy.
For now, I encourage you to put your hands on your heart and give yourself some needed love. Most likely, you have been on overdrive your whole life, endlessly giving to everyone around you. May this be your permission to erect some self-protection boundaries with reassurance that doing so won’t make you selfish or less empathetic.
What might it feel like to care for yourself as deeply as you care for others?
