A three-step process for managing emotional labour at work

For anyone working in the care sector (health, education, disability, aged care, community services), staying emotionally present for other people is central to the work itself. It also comes with a cost that workplace conversations about wellbeing rarely name directly: empathic strain.

Caring for others can open something in us: grief, tenderness, and responsiveness to another person's pain. That opening is often healthy. But when it repeats, without enough recovery or support, it can tip into something more depleting.

‍Empathy and compassion aren't the same thing

‍When we engage in care, we generally draw on one of two capacities: empathy or compassion. They're often confused, but they feel and function quite differently in the body.

‍Affective empathy is an emotional response that features a significant measure of absorption. When we experience it, we become highly attuned to another person's experience, and the distinction between self and other can temporarily soften.

Compassion, by contrast, is an emotional response that features steadiness. When we feel compassion, we hold another person's experience with warmth and concern, without collapsing the self-other distinction. For many people whose natural orientation leans toward affective empathy, this steadiness is something that has to be learned.

‍Neither is wrong. Empathy is how babies and children learn to self-regulate and build relationships. It's social glue. But for those of us who lean toward the absorptive end, learning to move between empathic resonance and compassionate steadiness is a real skill. It's also one that can meaningfully reduce our vulnerability to vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout.

‍Why this shows up so much in care work

‍The care sector asks people to stay emotionally present in the face of distress, trauma, and ongoing human need, often over long periods, and within systems already under strain. Traumatologist Charles Figley called this "the cost of caring."

‍Empathic strain doesn't happen because someone cares too much, or isn't capable of compassion. It happens when the capacities care work relies on (attention, emotional presence, regulation, relational responsiveness) are drawn on without enough structural support, recovery time, or integration.

A three-step practice for managing emotional labour

‍Alongside the systems work required to ease empathic strain, there are also evidence-based somatic skills we can draw on to protect our energy in the moment. Here's a simple three-step way to stay present without absorbing what isn't yours to carry.

‍Step 1: Ground

‍Before you engage, land in your body. Feel the floor, the chair, your breath. This helps maintain a clearer sense of self-other distinction: the felt boundary between what's yours and what belongs to the person in front of you.

‍A few slow, rhythmic breaths can also help shift your nervous system out of threat activation and stress, and towards calm.

‍Step 2: Anchor in warmth

‍Loving-kindness and compassion practices help strengthen your capacity for warmth, care, and emotional steadiness, without requiring emotional absorption.

Keeping your feet on the ground and your breath steady, try bringing a phrase of care, purpose, or safety to mind. This builds steadiness and warmth, without taking on someone else's stress or distress as your own.

Step 3: Turn feeling into action

Adopting a supportive, boundaried stance, rather than experiencing yourself as responsible for carrying another person's distress, reduces helplessness and supports resilience over time.

Ask: "What's one useful action that I can take?" This can move you from carrying someone's pain to engaging in compassionate action.

A note on individual practice ‍

Any emphasis on individual practice, particularly within contemporary wellbeing discourse, risks reinforcing the idea that distress is primarily an individual responsibility to manage. It's really important to distinguish self-care as responsibilisation (the idea that self-care is the whole strategy, and it's on you to cope with structurally stressful conditions) from self-care as sustainability, where caring for yourself is part of a bigger strategy that also includes structural and cultural change.

We all deserve to be well - and this requires both self-awareness and broader relational and systems work.

Curious to learn more?

Read: For a closer look at this, including a personal reflection on working with affective empathy, the neurobiology behind empathy and compassion, why care work is structured in ways that make empathic strain so common, and what leaders can do to build genuinely sustainable teams, read our article: The Nuances of Care-Related Stress and Fatigue on Substack.

Study: Join our next intake of The Resilient Practitioner to deepen your skills and understanding of relational work.

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