It’s 4 a.m., and you are once again doomscrolling through the news on your phone. You are well aware that this is the opposite of good sleep hygiene, but you can’t stop. It’s an itch that you scratch, knowing full well it is counterproductive.

Your emotional state is unsettled and extremely uncomfortable. You aren’t ready to rest, and you definitely are not ready to face tomorrow morning.

The specifics of what causes you to go down this rabbit hole vary. One week, it is ICE you are endlessly researching; another week, you are in deep with the Epstein files. The event you are focused on changes, but the dynamic is consistent.

It is one of your core values to be civically engaged. You want to be a witness, active in your world, eyes open to what others are experiencing. You want to model for your children what it looks like to participate in a democracy, to be an upstander for those who need support. Not participating would clash with how you see yourself, with your identity as a thoughtful, caring, educated person. And yet, you can’t help but wonder, is the way you are engaging leading to anything helpful for you, your children, or the people struggling in the world around us? To what end do you continue? And what would it mean to do something different? How would that even look?

The people I see in my private practice, smart, capable, hardworking adults maintaining jobs and holding families together, are increasingly becoming personally dysregulated in response to the news they consume. They describe out-of-character emotional flooding in workplaces, nervous systems stuck in hyperdrive, worrying, struggling to engage with the things they are responsible for—work, family. For many, this has become a new normal.

This isn’t a sign of fragility. It is a sign of humanity. We are not capable of sustaining heightened empathy for bottomless pain. The nervous system, specifically the emotion regulation centers, eventually overloads.

When we make ourselves endlessly available to information depicting a scale of suffering, instability, and threat that is so massive, we start to fray.

Signposts of compassion collapse are that we oscillate between flooding and numbness. The nervous system loses its access to the capacity to downregulate or self-soothe, which is why we cannot sleep. Hypervigilance from this upregulation keeps us on repeat checking headlines again and again, even when there is no logical reason to do so, even when it runs counter to our own goals. We continue in this upregulated cycle until exhaustion of the emotion regulation system. Then we experience shutdown and the emotional exhaustion component of the cycle.

This emotional exhaustion is one of the defining features of burnout, a syndrome characterized by the World Health Organization as consisting of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy. The difference between burnout and compassion collapse is that burnout specifically speaks about a reaction to work environments. Compassion collapse, on the other hand, is a result of prolonged exposure to overwhelming pain without sufficient processing or recovery.

Research on compassion collapse helps explain this dynamic. When suffering exceeds what we can metabolize, emotional responses max out and shut down. This is why nonprofits often portray one child’s story rather than an entire neighborhood. Presenting suffering at scale leads to less giving, not more. The scale of suffering can overwhelm the capacity for responsive care.

We are not proud of this. We may be uncomfortable even asking what a collapse of compassionate capacity says about us.

It clashes with how we want to see ourselves. That something as seemingly basic as reading the news could feel so overwhelming and existentially unsettling is not easy to admit. This limitation is especially dissonant if you are a therapist or someone who identifies as emotionally intelligent. A person who supports others, we might feel, should not struggle with something so basic as emotion regulation in response to suffering.

But compassion collapse need not be interpreted as moral failure. Compassion collapse signals that a threshold has been crossed.

When news consumption becomes compulsive, when it interferes with our ability to sleep, to do our work, to relate with loved ones. When we flood or cease to show up as our caring selves with the people in front of us. These are signs we may have exceeded our capacity for compassionate response.

The question is not how much news you should consume, as though there were a singular answer for everyone. The amount depends, in part, on the other stressors you are experiencing, mentally and physically, in your life. Also, we can train to increase capacity through compassion cultivation practice. Compassion is dynamic. It shifts depending on the other stressors we are carrying. Recalibration will be ongoing.

Choosing contact with news and suffering in the world that preserves your ability to act where you actually have influence, in your home, your work, your community, is healthy behavior. Compassion collapse is not a sign of character deficiency. It is an indication that engagement with charged material requires adjustment. Sustainable exposure, coupled with thoughtful boundaries, allows us to engage compassionately over time.

© Psychology Today