Empathy Fatigue
A gradual dulling of empathic response from sustained, close-range exposure to other people's distress — feeling less, not more, after repeated emotional engagement.
Empathy fatigue shows up in roles that require repeated affective empathy on demand — nursing, social work, customer support, parenting a chronically distressed child. The nervous system that once flinched at someone else's pain adapts to constant exposure, and the flinch gets smaller. That is protective in the short term and corrosive in the long term.
It differs from ordinary tiredness because the symptom is specifically emotional: the person can still think clearly and work competently, but the automatic caring response, the part that used to happen without effort, goes quiet. Rest and workload reduction help; so does deliberately leaning on cognitive empathy (understanding a situation) rather than emotional empathy (absorbing it), since the cognitive route is far less exhausting to sustain.