When Your Heart Gets Tired: Understanding Compassion Fatigue

We live in a world overflowing with pain, wars, disasters, and endless news of suffering. It’s enough to make anyone’s heart feel heavy, even numb. Why is it that the more tragedy we hear about, the less we sometimes feel? Let’s dive into the psychology behind “compassion fatigue,” a very real phenomenon that affects not just caregivers but all of us scrolling through today’s relentless news cycle. Through a mix of science, stories, and timeless wisdom, we’ll explore how to keep our hearts open without burning out.

A Heart Growing Numb

Picture this: It’s 1915, and Vera Brittain, a 22-year-old Oxford student, drops everything to volunteer as a nurse during World War I. Stationed at a London military hospital, she’s thrown into the chaos of treating soldiers fresh from the battlefield. One moment sticks with her: helping bandage a soldier’s gangrenous leg, green, swollen, with exposed bone. She nearly faints from the sight and smell, feeling a mix of nausea and shame.

But the other nurses? They seem unfazed, as if they’ve had to shut off their emotions to keep going. Over months of grueling night shifts, surrounded by screams and death, Vera changes. The horrors become routine. She stops crying, stops feeling the weight of each loss.

In her 1917 diary, she writes about dragging wounded soldiers from bed to bed to make room for new arrivals, wondering if there’s even a point. Her memoirs, Testament of Youth (1933), capture this shift, a young woman whose heart grew numb to survive. Her story became a symbol of a generation worn down by war, and it still hits home today.

What Is Compassion Fatigue?

You don’t have to be a wartime nurse to relate. Think back to how deeply we used to feel every news report of a tragedy, a soldier lost, a victim of violence. It would stop us in our tracks, sometimes for days.

But now, with a constant stream of bad news, something shifts. The heart starts to tune out. This is what psychologist Charles Figley called “compassion fatigue” in the 1980s, the emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion from being exposed to too much suffering.Figley, a trauma expert, described it as the “cost of caring.”

Caregivers like nurses, social workers, or soldiers often face this, but so do regular people like us, bombarded by endless stories of pain. It’s not that we stop caring; it’s that our empathy gets overwhelmed, like a muscle too tired to lift anymore.

In his books, like Compassion Fatigue (1995), Figley explains how this can feel like anxiety, helplessness, or even PTSD-like symptoms—not from living through trauma ourselves, but from witnessing it over and over.

Why Do Numbers Numb Us?

Ever notice how one person’s story can break your heart, but a headline about thousands of victims feels distant? Psychologist Paul Slovic calls this “psychic numbing.” He sums it up bluntly: “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Our brains just aren’t wired to process huge numbers emotionally.

In one study, people’s compassion started fading when the number of victims went from one to two. Crazy, right?

Take the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. The image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed ashore, sparked global outrage and donations. His story felt personal, human. But the hundreds of thousands of others lost in the same conflict? They blurred into numbers, hard for our hearts to grasp.

Slovic says it’s because our emotions don’t scale linearly, like how we can’t tell the difference between 30 and 31 candles, our hearts struggle to feel the jump from 87 to 88 victims. The bigger the tragedy, the less we connect.

What’s Happening in Our Brains?

This numbness isn’t a sign you’re heartless, it’s your brain trying to protect you. When we’re hit with too much suffering, the amygdala (your brain’s “fight or flight” center) goes into overdrive, flooding you with stress signals like a racing pulse or anxiety. Stay in that state too long, and your brain starts to shut down emotionally to cope. It’s like flipping a switch to avoid burnout.

Here’s the cool part: neuroscientists say empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy is feeling someone’s pain as if it’s yours, intense, but it can overwhelm you to the point of shutting down. Compassion, though, is about wanting to help, and it lights up different parts of the brain tied to love and reward. Studies on compassion meditation show it can lower stress and boost feelings of hope. So, turning empathy into action—like volunteering or donating—can actually recharge your heart.

A Jewish Perspective: Compassion with Balance

Jewish tradition gets this balance perfectly. It teaches that every life is sacred, “saving one life is like saving an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). Every person is a universe, deserving of care.

But the Sages also knew we can’t carry the world’s pain alone. They set limits, like not giving more than a fifth of your wealth to charity, so you don’t end up needing help yourself. Or the Talmud’s rule in a desert with one water flask: save yourself first, because two dead people help no one.These aren’t cold rules, they’re about sustainable compassion.

Even the story of Saul and Samuel (1 Samuel 15) shows that mercy isn’t always the answer; sometimes, following through on tough choices is what’s needed. The lesson? Care deeply, but don’t let it destroy you.

How to Keep Your Heart Open

So, how do we stay compassionate in a world that feels like it’s drowning in pain? The Sages offer a gem from Rabbi Tarfon: “You don’t have to finish the job, but you can’t quit either” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). You can’t fix every injustice, but you can do something—help one person, listen to one story, make one small difference. Those “drops in the ocean” matter.

For the person you help, it’s everything.

Here are some practical ways to manage compassion fatigue:

The Takeaway

Compassion fatigue is real, especially in our always-on, news-saturated world. It’s not about being uncaring, it’s about being human, with a heart that can only handle so much. By understanding how our brains work and drawing on wisdom like Jewish teachings, we can find a way to keep caring without burning out. Focus on one life, one act of kindness, and you’re already making a difference.

As Albert Einstein put it, our job is to keep widening our circle of compassion, even if we never get it perfect. Step by step, we can keep our hearts open and human, no matter how heavy the world feels.