"We have broadened the circle of those we love,” said astronomer Carl Sagan in 1980, when the world was different but those universal truths had long before revealed themselves. “If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth … The choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.”

Universal love. It’s a comforting thought. Until we remember how much love can hurt. When I began thinking about this article it was in the wake of the bushfires that ashened the innocence of the Australian summer – idyllic in our collective memory till then. For those of us watching from a distance as the landscape burned, the disaster still felt tangible, heavy – with us weighed by empathy.

I was sure our screens, on fire and clogged with smoke, had something to do with this grief by osmosis. In Australia’s Eastern states, at least, most had an internet acquaintance directly affected by the tragedy. We experienced it with them. Through our devices, we saw it through their eyes.

We feel so much further than we can touch. We have broadened the circle, I thought at the time –

What are we going to do with all this love?

It was scarcely four months later that everything has changed again. Coronavirus. We compared that virus era to the world wars of last century. ‘War’ is relevant, but ‘world’ is perhaps the operative word. To most of us the situation is alien, but the helplessness is familiar. And the overwhelm of our devices. We are not truly adapted to handle the blue screens affixed to our bodies – so how can our programming possibly cope with this influx of things and people to care about, altering the balance of our internal ecosystems?

When we talk about empathy, on a scale of human attributes, it’s a quality considered among the most virtuous. To “lack empathy” is to be insensitive, self-involved, out of touch – a psychopath. But its colloquial definition belies its complexity.

Often interchanged with the slightly less involved compassion (sympathetic consciousness of an other’s distress) or the close-but-not-quite altruism (unselfish devotion to the welfare of others), empathy is defined as the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation. It isn’t a solely human trait; empathy’s evolutionary advantages, like caring for young and cooperating in a society, extend to our other animal counterparts.

We began as tribal beings, born into close social confines; groups defined by geography and ‘same’ness. From families to villages – to the occurrence of high-density cities, literature, air travel, globalised journalism – the progress of civilisation has provided us with ever more opportunity to bear witness to the experience of others, until the ‘other’ begins to feel more like ‘us’. In present days, our intimate connections are reminiscent of those city lights pulsing like heartbeats in satellite footage of earth.

The advent of the internet has provided, perhaps, the most expansive source of connectivity in human history. Has our ability to empathise broadened in turn? Yes and no.

An important thing to know about empathy is that it’s fickle. Likely due to its evolutionary roots, it is swayed towards an ‘in group’: people we find attractive or those with whom we see something in common. We can find our communities online; empathy and compassion channelled via the internet have been instrumental in campaigns for human rights, the raising of funds and institutional change. But the flipside of this – the drawing of lines – will be familiar to anyone who’s ever scrolled the Instagram comments of a celebrity or political entity, or blocked an outspoken relative on Facebook.

A great many charitable marketing campaigns rest on the well-established notion that we are pre-programmed to assign our empathy to one person at a time: why we’re met with the eyes of a single child rather than the expanse of a country or region in need. And yet, certain studies have suggested this could be a kind of defence mechanism, switched on to slow our distress by osmosis down to a trickle. Perhaps, because absorbing the true flood of human suffering would be too much for many of us to bear.

According to stress and trauma expert Dr Scott Lyons, we all have a bandwidth for anxiety and suffering, including that of others. And – unsurprisingly – that’s particularly relevant to the situation we’ve recently found ourselves in as a global population.

“Who isn’t calling their friends right now, telling them about the woes and the challenges?” Lyons asks rhetorically down the line from his rental in northern New South Wales, where he’s been locked down since borders closed and flights to his home in NYC became inadvisable. As a clinical psychologist treating clients by correspondence, he’s gained unique insight into the responses of individuals across borders. For those taking in the pain of people they love, “the difficulty here is two pronged,” he says.

“One is, we all know how to listen to a friend, but do we know how to listen to multiple friends, over and over again as the circumstances aren’t really changing they might just be worsening?

Essentially our social networks, which are usually there just to sort of hold us, have in some ways become our therapist, which in some ways it’s good – we’re connecting with other people – but there’s sort of a limit to how much most people can intake.

You think about, a psychologist goes to school for seven years, and suddenly everyone is being inundated with this same amount of listening, from all of their friends, and the general public may not have the sort of safety mechanisms to preserve themselves during that inundation of content.”

“… We all hit a wall of our bandwidth. And this is specifically a bandwidth of social engagement, a bandwidth of connection.”

“The other piece of that,” Lyons explains, “Is that every single person in the world right now, pretty much, is going through the same experience, so the bandwidth of a single individual to take on that role is already small. There’s literally a flood of overwhelm and that will look like depression, that will look like someone starts to self-isolate more, they might just be less cognitively functional, they’ll lose a sense of empathy. I mean these things are real and perpetuate the isolation that’s happened.”

‘Compassion fatigue’ is a term associated with a decline in one’s capacity to assign both empathy and compassion to the suffering of others – with symptoms including ‘existential despair’, anxiety, dissociation, sleeplessness, nightmares, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness, and a persistent negative attitude. While the denomination was coined in association with people in caring professions – nurses, doctors, psychologists – it affects a general public that Dr Lyons believes is increasingly less resilient to its associated stressors.

In times of crisis and hyperconnectivity, there is more than one biological reaction at play.

The first is purer, on a sensory level – but no less significant. When we absorb information through our screens – images, words, motion – our bodies react accordingly. “Let’s say in a healthy nervous system there’s an intake of information, it’s called a sensory intake,” explains Lyons. “The balance of a sensory intake is a motoric response in the nerves. You have sensory and motor nerves. So when you have the intake of information, let’s say from watching social media … there’s no mechanism or means to motor it back out, to do anything, what we tend to experience is an overload … We’ll call this sensory flood, an arousal or activation response – what we could call a stress response – it’s a preparation to act and respond. And when we’re inundated over and over and over again by images and ideas and stories, without the motoric balance, we crash, essentially. We get depleted, we feel overwhelmed. And we start to even find our nervous system freezes. We have a freeze in our body because we can’t take in; we numb as a way to compensate.”

Compassion or empathy fatigue can come into play when that activating content has a narrative, evoking the want to help or causing us to take on the grief of people we know on the internet. “You have a response and because this is not interactive … we might write, and that might feel like enough. But also, we might maintain a sense of helplessness,” says Lyons.

And the more we identify with a crisis – or the people involved – the more likely it is to affect us mentally and emotionally.

Dr Robert Kraft, a professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University and the author of several books navigating the notion of compassion fatigue, believes that in this sense, events like the coronavirus pandemic signify a rare juncture in human history. While our privileges and challenges vary with geography and personal circumstance, we still share something in common. “With the pandemic, we are all members of the same group: humans who can potentially get critically ill from the coronavirus,” says Kraft. “The pandemic is unique in that we are all members of the in-group. Compassion for victims of the coronavirus comes more easily because of this.”

In such times of mutual crisis across our increasingly connected planet, are we all at risk of contracting compassion fatigue? According to Kraft, no.

“To begin, humanity presents a wide distribution of individual differences in the ability to empathise.

"Those who don’t empathise much won’t get fatigued by compassion,” he explains.

“It is the compassionate who are afflicted, not the insensitive. Compassion is a positive word and being compassionate is a virtue, but as with all virtues, too much becomes a fault.”

It’s a cruel trick for the socially engaged that those devices providing the connection we crave can be similarly instrumental in rendering us despondent. ‘Arousal material’ on our screens acts as a vacuum for attention, drawing it away from individual needs, like rest, movement and recuperation. But even when our conscious mind is otherwise occupied, the body keeps the score.

How to know when to step away? “There are really easy signs for that,” explains Dr Lyons.

“How are your eyes? Do they feel strained? That is where you’re visually taking in information.

“If you just worked out at the gym and your body’s totally fatigued and someone asked you to pick up a heavy box – you would probably go, let me recuperate first. And somehow that’s not translating in life right now where we’re going, Oh, my eyes are actually fatigued. They have bags. There’s a lack of acuity in my eyesight, or just a fatigue in my neck … that’s a very clear way of registering what’s happening in your physical body.”

“And just generally know,” he adds. “We’re not really meant for this much screen time.”

Needless to say, these afflictions of the internet age existed long before the events of this year. And Lyons reasons that before we can take steps to improve our wellbeing we must first get back in touch with what that feels like for us.

“If someone asked, how do I take care of myself, I would first ask the question, what does taking care of yourself mean to you? And how do you know? What does it feel like when you’ve been taking care of yourself? Because we need these points of reference in order to work towards.”

I reflect on the last few times I really felt good, and a common thread is the absence of obligation, however short-lived, to outside entities; connection with others was a joy, never a chore. I’m struck by how much stress we collect in our day-to-day lives, like a tornado or tumbleweed. How little time we have left to converse with ourselves.

When our wellbeing improves, says Lyons, “part of what we know is that people are able to engage more again. They are less burdened. They are able to listen. They feel things. People are talking again.”

In times of acute stress, wellbeing is relative; it may not feel like a vacation. But despite the pull to our newsfeeds in a crisis, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it is both “permissible and healthy” to find pleasure in other activities, Dr Kraft notes. “For able-bodied people, walking is a simple activity that can help immensely and uplift the psyche.”

Also, putting words on paper: “Writing is an act. Indeed, writing about compassion fatigue is one way to address the suffering of others, while alleviating compassion fatigue and taking care of one’s self,” Kraft says.

“We gain control of our words – and therefore our meanings. Ultimately, we are able to stand apart from our own writing and study it as an artefact of self-revelation.”

I’m reminded of the actions that brought me out of despondency during the summer bushfires. When I was able to cycle absorption into output – physical movement; meaningful work; donations, however small – a measure of heaviness subsided. “In the general public, compassion fatigue does not arise only from encountering widespread suffering,” explains Kraft. “It is the combination of widespread suffering and a sense of helplessness that creates the fatigue. We can’t eliminate the suffering, but we can address the feeling of helplessness. We can do something.”

A cognizance of our true bandwidth for giving – in a mental and emotional sense, especially – will always be relevant. As is the reminder that taking on another’s pain is hardly the perfect cure. Often, it’s enough to be present beside them. Our journeys to wellbeing may be individual but certainly, we weren’t meant to walk alone.

It’s like Sagan said, “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”