You are an emotional athlete

Are you recovering like one?

I always thought of emotional exhaustion as being the same as compassion fatigue - exhaustion from caring for, or being empathetic towards, the suffering of others.

But emotional labour is actually defined as “regulating or managing emotional expressions with others as part of one’s professional work role.” (Hochschild - The Managed Heart) or “the act of displaying the appropriate emotion” (Ashforth & Humphrey's (1993, 1995))

The annoyance you hide, the smile you maintain and the cheerfulness you create to prepare your patient for an uncomfortable procedure - that is additional labour you are performing on a daily basis. 

Realising this was HUGE for me - I realised why I was always so emotionally exhausted and why I craved so much solitude (other than the fact that I am highly introverted!). This was something that shifted significantly in my personal life, and subsequently in my work as well.

So what might be the factors might increase the amount of resources this emotional labour uses up and make us prone to emotional exhaustion?

One idea is surface vs deep acting. 

Surface acting is when you don’t genuinely feel the emotion, but you express it anyway because it is what is deemed acceptable. This causes cognitive/emotive dissonance because what you are feeling or experiencing internally is at odds with what you are displaying outwardly in terms of your facial expression, gestures or tone of voice. 

Deep acting, however, refers to the generation of emotions and expressions that are in line with our beliefs or values in such a way that you genuinely do experience the emotion, or you psyche yourself up for the role or emotion you are trying to display. You convince or remind yourself that what you are doing reflects a deeper value, for example when you produce a feeling of enthusiasm because you know that it will help your patient reach a goal that means a lot to them, and helping them do that is something that you deeply value. This type of “acting” uses less resources, results in less dissonance and therefore doesn’t cause as much emotional exhaustion and negative effects on your health. 

There are also times when less effort is required to produce the desired emotion/expression, such as when it spontaneously and naturally occurs or when it is done on a regular basis it soon becomes second-nature, as if you are on autopilot. 

Another factor that can influence the amount of emotional labour we are performing is our internal or external norms and expectations. If I am someone who thinks it is unacceptable to ever show a patient that I am not absolutely enthralled by their story about what their dog did last Saturday, I will continually be expending energy to look enthusiastic and interested. Someone else, however, might have absolutely no problem letting the patient know that that isn’t particularly interesting or relevant and change the topic to something they both enjoy or find useful. Other norms could be related to your gender, race or standards at your workplace.

If you think about yourself as an emotional athlete and recognise and honour this additional labour you are performing at work, the more you will take steps to ensure that you are decreasing the load where possible and recovering appropriately. This could look like having a space in your private or work life where you are not expected to manage your emotions or expressions. You could use a journal to reflect on where there was dissonance between how you felt and what you thought was appropriate to display. You can examine some of the rules that you take as obviously true about what is and isn’t appropriate and start to poke holes to see if it holds up.

Training awareness of your emotions and thoughts and learning skills of emotional regulation can help you “perform” more deep than surface acting. Your general rest, recovery and resilience plan can also help you maintain the necessary resources to cope with this stressor.

We would never expect a physical athlete to come home and continue performing the sport that they just trained hours for. We know that this kind of athleticism requires rest and recovery.

Why not treat ourselves the same way?