Kind people sometimes feel very tired after listening to others' problems. A German brain scientist, Tania Singer, studied two kinds of kindness. Empathy means feeling the same pain as another person.

Compassion means wishing that the other person will feel better. In her studies, empathy training made people feel more negative. But compassion training made them feel more positive. So when a friend is sad, wish them well with a warm heart.

Nurses, teachers, and others who support people sometimes suffer from empathy fatigue. Does this mean kind people should care less? German neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues suggest another answer. They distinguish between empathy, which means sharing another person's feelings, and compassion, which means caring about their suffering and wishing them relief.

In experiments, participants watched short videos of people in distress. After empathy training, they felt more negative emotions, and brain areas related to pain became more active. After compassion training, they felt more positive emotions, and areas related to love and reward became more active.

People whose negative feelings grew after empathy training felt better after they received compassion training. So kindness itself is not the problem, the researchers say. The real cause of fatigue is empathic distress.

Nurses, carers and teachers spend their working lives around other people's suffering, and over time many report what is called empathy fatigue. Does that mean caring people should care less? The neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues answer by separating two things. Empathy, in their terms, means resonating with another person's emotions, so that their pain becomes partly your own. Compassion means noticing suffering and responding with warmth and a wish for the other person's relief.

In training studies by Klimecki and colleagues, participants watched brief videos of people in distress before and after training. Empathy training increased negative feelings and boosted activity in pain-related regions such as the insula and midcingulate cortex. Compassion training increased positive feelings and engaged networks linked to affiliation and reward. These studies were fairly small, mostly involved women and lasted only days, so they say little about nurses who face suffering for years.

Participants who received empathy training first and compassion training afterward saw their negative emotions ease. Singer therefore prefers the term empathic distress fatigue. In her view, what wears people out is absorbing others' pain, which can even make them want to pull away from the person who is suffering.