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Life is full of beautiful moments, like spending time with loved ones or enjoying a nourishing meal. But as the Internet and social platforms increase connectivity worldwide, it’s difficult to ignore the events that strike the heartstrings.
Social media feeds are often filled with posts and ads that encourage you to empathize with others’ suffering. This might be learning about people less fortunate than you or a faraway natural disaster.
These triggers don’t have to be so far-removed, either. You might empathize with a friend who’s lost their job or a coworker struggling with a family loss.
While empathizing with others is natural and helps you connect more deeply, if you’re a highly sensitive person, these emotions might become overwhelming and toxic to your mental health. Learning how to protect yourself from toxic empathy will help you retain your emotional energy.
What’s empathy?
Empathy is the ability to understand someone's experience and emotions. Very empathetic people (sometimes called “empaths”) are good at recognizing and relating to the thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences of others.
If you suffer when you see someone hurting, it’s not just your imagination. Research in neuroscience shows that your pain circuits activate when you see someone in pain, to the point that taking a painkiller impairs your ability to empathize with others’ physical pain.
And what scientists call affective empathy, or the ability to feel the emotions of others, is deeply embodied. When two friends tune into each other’s emotions, their heartbeats synchronize. And smelling the sweat of anxious people can make you feel anxious and even interfere with your work performance.
When does empathy become toxic?
Continually experiencing the pain, stress, and fear of others as though it’s your own can overload your nervous system and start to cause damage: this is “toxic empathy.”
Toxic empathy, also called hyper-empathy syndrome, is a type of empathy disorder where one struggles to regulate their emotions and empathizes with others so much it impacts their well-being. This contrasts empathy deficit disorder (EDD), where one lacks the ability to empathize with others.
Empathy is a building block of emotional intelligence. It allows you to form deep emotional connections, write fiction, or be a good parent. But being overly empathetic can leave you depressed, anxious, and unable to focus on your own needs and goals.
4 signs you’re falling prey to toxic empathy
Feeling emotionally and mentally fatigued and wondering if you're falling prey to toxic empathy? Look out for the following signs:
1. You justify bad behavior
Empathy helps you perceive the feelings and external circumstances that lead people to behave the way they do. So if a manager is a bit hot-tempered, you might recognize they’re struggling with an overwhelming workload, making it easier to deal with them.
But making excuses for other people’s behavior can enable it, leading to unhealthy relationship dynamics in the long run.
2. You find it difficult to say “No”
Empathy makes you sensitive to the needs and desires of others. If you feel these needs intensely when people ask you to do something, you might find it difficult to say “No.”
Saying “Yes” feels good in the moment when you see the happiness or relief on a person’s face. But saying “Yes” too much can overwhelm you when all your past promises catch up with you.
3. You’re physically affected
Having too much empathy can take a physical toll. If you’re taking on others’ stress, you’re also taking on the damaging physical effects of that stress.
Empathy can also increase inflammation in the body and trigger a fight-or-flight response, which increases the level of the stress hormone cortisol and damages the cardiovascular system.
4. You struggle to complete everyday tasks
The emotional overwhelm caused by empathizing too much can affect your energy levels and make it hard to focus on daily personal and professional tasks.
This can make it difficult to keep up with what you need to do and may eventually lead to burnout. If you’re experiencing toxic empathy, you may also have trouble maintaining your normal self-care routine since you see others’ well-being as more valuable than yours.
Protecting yourself against toxic empathy: 8 tips
If you’ve noticed any of the above signs, it’s time to implement some empath protection strategies to catch toxic empathy before it does more damage.
Even if you haven’t noticed any signs of toxic empathy, it’s good to be proactive so you have some go-to strategies if it shows up.
1. Cultivate healthy relationships
Empathy is one of the foundations of a healthy relationship — but only if it’s reciprocal. If you realize you’re empathizing with someone who doesn’t show care and concern for your situation, step back and look at the relationship to see what’s going on.
Spending more time with this person will likely feed any tendencies toward toxic empathy.
In healthy relationships, people set and maintain healthy boundaries and respect the other person’s limits. Setting boundaries includes learning to say “No” (without feeling guilty) when people ask for too much.
If you feel you can’t do this in some of your relationships, you might need to set even stricter boundaries with these people to protect your energy.
It’s also okay to be selective about who you spend time with. Avoiding emotional vampires (people who drain your energy) and other toxic people can help keep your empathy stores high.
2. Name the feeling
Sometimes empathy leads to confusing experiences. Your gut is twisting or your pulse is racing, but you can’t figure out why.
When this happens, strive for clarity. What’s the emotion (or combination of emotions)? Where can you feel them in your body? What caused them?
Labeling your feelings using precise language helps you develop self-awareness and emotional regulation skills. With strong emotional regulation skills, you can control the strength of the vicarious emotion and dial down the intensity if needed.
Some empathy turns toxic because you can’t clearly distinguish your feelings from the other person’s. When this self/other boundary is blurry, you experience emotional contagion rather than true empathy, so you’re no longer in control of your own emotions and risk having them hijacked by the emotions of others.
Naming your feelings and developing self-awareness will help you distinguish your feelings from others’.
3. Use visualization techniques
Visualizations are a great empath shielding technique. Try imagining a shield around you that deflects or absorbs other peoples’ emotions. You could visualize it as metal armor or a colored bubble filled with light — whatever makes you feel most protected and in control.
Another option is to imagine a glass wall between you and the other person, seeing their emotions as negative energy that hits the wall and bounces off without touching you. This technique is especially effective against venting or gossip.
Visualizations also help you let go of emotional baggage you’ve been carrying around for other people. Imagine dropping a leaf in a stream and watching the unwanted emotions get carried away with the current, or blowing at a dandelion head and seeing them float off on the breeze.
4. Be strategic
Create a strategy about how you spend your time that prioritizes your mental health. If you know an event will drain you, plan to take a day off to relax afterward.
And take empathy breaks throughout these events if you can, using visualization techniques or re-focusing your thoughts on your needs and concerns.
Plan who you’ll spend your time with as well. If you’re socializing often without a plan for how you’ll deal with over-empathizing, you’ll drain your emotional resources fast. Decide ahead of time who you’re going to focus on and stick to the plan as stubbornly as possible.
Also consider how your behavior might be contributing to feelings of overwhelm. One study found that “doom-scrolling” (looking at negative news on social media) for just 2–4 minutes made people less happy and optimistic.
Those who looked at positive social media posts or didn’t look at social media at all didn’t experience these effects. Try to reduce any habits you think might be contributing to feeling overwhelmed with empathy, like doom-scrolling.
5. Practice mindfulness
Developing a mindfulness practice can help you process the emotional buildup caused by toxic empathy and stay alert to prevent it from happening in the future.
For example, grounding yourself by touching physical objects around you, feeling your feet on the floor, and looking around at concrete items in the room helps connect you to your body, creating psychological distance between you and other people.
Another form of mindfulness is paying attention to your breath. You don’t have to breathe in any special way — just observe the breaths going in and out. Keep your breathing as it is or gradually take deeper breaths.
Deep, conscious breathing calms the nervous system, helps you develop mental discipline, and improves emotional regulation.
6. Take time off
Anything that gets you away from other people will give your empathy muscles a break. Alone time activities are different for everyone — you might want to garden, do crafts, or go for a solo run.
If you have pets, spending time with them is especially good for empaths. They don’t require as much emotional energy from you and, instead, help you recharge by offering unconditional love and affection.
If your work environment is a source of toxic empathy and your energy reserves are depleted after every workday, a job or career change might be in order.
7. Talk to someone
If you’re highly empathic, you probably spend a lot of time listening to and supporting others. This might make you feel lonely. Everyone comes to you with their problems, but you also need a friendly ear to listen to and support you.
Try confiding in a friend or family member who you know will show you the same empathy you offer others. The right therapist or coach can also guide you through emotional overwhelm and help you devise strategies to suit your personality and situation.
Another option is confiding in your journal — this is a great way to let things go and regulate your emotions.
8. Cultivate compassion
Compassion is empathy plus a desire to take action. If you see an abandoned dog shivering on the street, you might feel empathy — but once you start thinking about ways to help the dog, empathy has turned into compassion.
To be compassionate, you have to distance yourself slightly from the suffering you see (exercise “cognitive empathy”), which makes your nervous system interpret the problem as an energizing challenge rather than a threat to your survival.
Compassion includes self-compassion, too. Recognize that no one person — not even you — can carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Show yourself the same kindness and care you show others.
As valuable as it is, your empathy isn’t the only thing you have to offer the world. Sharing some of your other positive personality traits might give your empathy a much-needed break while you positively affect your surroundings in other ways.
Make your empathy sustainable
While empathy can turn toxic, it’s also responsible for some of the high points of human existence. It feels great to see someone relax when you give them a hug, or to genuinely be happy for others when they’ve achieved something they’re proud of.
The world is a better place because of your empathy. And learning how to protect yourself against toxic empathy is the best way to have a sustainable positive impact on everyone around you.
