Physicians, like many people in the caring professions, regularly face people who are in the midst of pain and crisis. One of the challenges they face is how to deal effectively with this exposure. Conventional wisdom suggests that, if it affects us too much, we lose objectivity and we risk burnout. But become too calloused and we cannot be effective caregivers.

A recent study found that physicians who effectively regulated their emotional responses to patients’ pain were able to “dampen counterproductive feelings of alarm and fear [which] frees up processing capacity to be of assistance for the other.” In other words, these physicians were able to provide better care.

However, the researchers also warned that the constant need to suppress their natural emotional response was stressful for physicians. They also caution that such suppression might also strain their relationships with their patients. “Physicians face the challenge of devoting the right balance of cognitive and emotional resources to their patients’ pain experience..They must try to resonate and understand the patient without becoming emotionally over-involved in a way that can preclude effective medical management.”

Turns out there really is a razor’s edge here or what I sometimes call a Goldilock’s paradox. Care givers do need to ward off responding with emotions that are too strong, but they must also maintain vital human connections as well. This is clearly difficult to do and it is one more reason that at the Well-being at Work project we admire care professionals so much.

We hope you are thriving at work.

~matt

Study details: Decety J, Yang CY, & Cheng Y (2010). Physicians down-regulate their pain empathy response: an event-related brain potential study. NeuroImage, 50 (4), 1676-82