Is it empathy or anxiety?

What drives our desire to help others? Not all forms of empathy are experienced as supportive or helpful. Unpacking the difference between empathic concern and empathic distress.

In today’s culture, we are hearing a lot more about empathy and compassion. These terms are starting to show up more frequently at work, in education and parenting literature, and as required skillsets in relationships. The importance of these skillsets is undeniable. That is, so long as we know how to use them and apply them.

When someone sees themselves as a caring individual, it might make them more prone to assume they know how to be empathetic and compassionate by default. In the case of empathy and compassion, it is important to separate the identity from the behaviour. Identifying as “an empath” or as “a compassionate person” does not automatically make us better listeners, better colleagues, or even better partners. Our identity is separate from our behaviour.

Being someone who is highly sensitive or deeply feeling does not always guarantee that we’ll be more empathetic or compassionate. In fact, it might even make us more prone to absorbing the stress of helping instead of practicing the more helpful forms of empathy— empathic listening, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern.

Having a caring personality and a desire to help does not alone ensure we will be effective helpers. Being a caring person with a kind heart isn’t always enough to offer genuine support. Sometimes the gap between our identity as a caring person and our ability to help creates anxiety.

Empathy vs. Anxiety

Empathy is about “feeling with”. When I’m feeling empathic, I’m able to notice, understand, and share in a feeling with you. Empathy allows us to meet someone in their experience and, conversely, allows others to feel seen, heard, understood, and validated.

Anxiety is an emotional reaction to stress which can occur at different intensities. Anxiety is meant to help us overcome challenges in our environment by helping us avoid uncomfortable things. Sometimes anxiety can help us become more empathic such that it allows us to relate or connect to someone going through the same thing. Sometimes anxiety can keep us stuck in a cycle of stress that prevents us from connecting to others and prevents genuine helping. In this case, our helping reaction or desire to help is a function of worry, distress, and anxiety rather than driven by true empathic concern and connection.

Empathic Concern vs. Anxious Concern

Empathic concern is rooted in compassion, whereas anxious concern is based in fear.

Empathic concern lets someone know we are there with them. Empathic concern connects us to others to facilitate a process of supportive helping. Empathic concern is what allows us to show up in different ways for different people in different situations. For example, empathic concern might facilitate a process of problem solving, it might cue us into a process of supportive listening, or it may allow us to offer someone a mix of both.

This is what empathic concern sounds like:

• “Oh gosh, that must be so tough.”

• “Wow, that happened to you? That sounds hard.”

• “So, you’re saying that he raised his voice and that made you feel uncomfortable? Yeah, that would make me feel uneasy too.”

• “That sounds hard to do all by yourself. Do you want some help with that?”

• “She said that to you? Whew. Okay. Are you open to hearing some feedback on that?”

• “Do you want me to just listen or do you want my help figuring out what to do next?”

• “That’s hard. What do you need right now?”

Anxious concern is when we center our own feelings of worry, fear, and dread instead of being with someone in their difficult experience. We are expressing anxious concern when we project our own feelings of anxiety onto the person’s situation. We are also expressing anxious concern when we use our own anxiety as a filter to guess, often incorrectly, how the other person is feeling. It is an opportunity for empathy that is replaced by our own stress and anxiety.

Anxious concern often looks, feels, and sounds supportive, but is a function of the helper’s anxiety instead of being about the other person’s experience. Responses are usually more reactionary and are typically an attempt to relieve the helper’s anxiety.

Here is what anxious concern sounds like:

• “Oh no! You have to do something about that!”

• “Really? Let’s do something right away.”

• “She said that? You have to message her back right away.”

• “I can’t believe he would do that. Here, let me call him for you.”

• “Here’s what you should do: You need to...”

• “I’m not okay with you feeling that way!”

• “That makes me so uncomfortable!” *the helper feels a bigger feeling than the one being shared*

Anxious concern does not allow someone else to feel heard or understood. It generally makes them feel overlooked or unsupported. When someone continuously expressed anxious concern, that might also make us less likely to go to that person or confide in them when we need someone to help us through a difficult moment.

Supporting others is hard

In these situations, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking we have to say the right thing. Our own stress about saying the wrong thing might also be keeping us stuck in a pattern of being unable to show up with empathy. Be mindful of this.

Supporting others is hard work and sometimes people bring something our way that triggers us. Know that this is normal; empathy is not about having no reaction or having no emotional response. True empathy is about feeling with not feeling for. Anxious concern keeps us stuck in a cycle of emotional caretaking, where our anxiety drives us to take care of other people’s uncomfortable feelings. Empathic concern is not about taking on other people’s emotions— it is about meeting them in their experience. When we are expressing anxious concern, we tend to take on other people’s emotions as our own rather than viewing ourselves as emotionally separate.

Is it possible to care too much?

Empathy without boundaries is just anxious concern. Anxious concern is a combination of two unhelpful forms of empathy: affective empathy and empathic distress.

Affective empathy is when we experience emotional contagion and take on the emotions of others. We can experience emotional contagion by watching a relatable scene on television, talking to a friend about something hard, or even after being around people who are struggling. Emotional contagion refers to the phenomenon that occurs when we observe or interact with those who are frequently dysregulated; we take on the emotional states of others we frequently interact with.

Empathic distress is when we become upset by the state someone else is in. In our efforts to care and provide support, we should ensure we’re in a good place to provide supportive listening so we don’t become too dysregulated to offer genuine support. If you become overwhelmed when listening to someone’s experience, let them know that you need to take a break or be more discerning about what you’re able to talk on prior to checking in. Sometimes it means setting a new boundary or deciding if we are in a good place to listen.

Weekly Practice

Each week, paid subscribers will receive three practical strategies to help them address the topic of the week in their personal or professional lives. This week, I’m sharing strategies to build empathic concern and practice one of the helpful forms of empathy, which is called cognitive empathy.

The three most helpful forms of empathy are as follows: