Research has found a strong connection between high empathy and anxiety. Through setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care, individuals can learn to care for others without spiking anxiety.
Empathy helps you understand the feelings of others and see things from their perspective. This important social response can promote compassion and care for other people’s well-being.
Everyone has a natural capacity for empathy, but it’s generally considered more of a skill than a fixed trait. It develops through a combination of your experiences and relationships, beginning with childhood caregivers. It’s important to note that genes also play a small role in the development of empathy.
As a result, people end up with varying levels of empathy as adults.
Some people, known as empaths, have such high empathy that they seem to take on the feelings of others.
If you’re an empath, you might find yourself absorbing the emotions of those around you. When they experience joy, you get caught up in their happiness. When they experience sadness, you carry that emotional burden, too.
It may come as little surprise, then, that there’s a potential link between high empathy and anxiety. Here’s what to know about that link, along with some guidance on protecting your emotional health.
If you live with general anxiety, you may spend a fair amount of time worrying about the future or cycling through negative, unwanted thoughts.
You might worry about a choice you made that affected a friend. Or, you might mull over broader fears.
“How would I feel if that were me?” you might wonder. This thought can spur your desire to help and make it easier to imagine yourself in a similar situation. But when you have high empathy, existing anxiety can feed off the emotions of people around you, making you feel even worse.
You might become so fixated on their pain that you have a hard time distancing yourself from it. It might feel difficult — if not impossible — to “turn off” this heightened empathy and detach from your anxious concern.
One 2018 study exploring the link between anxiety and empathy looked at teenagers admitted to a private psychiatric hospital over a period of 6 years.
Participants completed three self-report assessments of empathy, anxiety, and depression. The results of the assessments suggested a positive correlation between affective empathy (i.e., feeling what someone else is feeling) and anxiety: When one increased, so did the other.
This may happen because sharing emotions often prompts distress. If you feel you’re unable to help your loved ones, you might feel guilty when you think about their struggles or share their pain.
Your guilt can fuel worries about them being disappointed in you or rejecting you. This perception could eventually lead you to withdraw or strain the relationship in other ways. As you begin worrying about the relationship’s health, the dominoes continue to fall.
The same 2018 study found a negative correlation between social anxiety and cognitive empathy, meaning participants with lower cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others are feeling) were more likely to experience higher levels of social anxiety.
The study also revealed that people with high affective empathy (the ability to feel others’ emotions) and low cognitive empathy experienced more severe social anxiety. In other words, while they felt others’ emotions deeply, they struggled to understand why those emotions were happening.
A
When you have high affective empathy but low cognitive empathy, it can be hard to make sense of the emotions you’re experiencing or seeing in others. This can feel especially overwhelming in social situations, particularly when negative emotions are involved.
Lower cognitive empathy makes it harder to navigate social dynamics or connect with peers. If social interactions are challenging, it’s natural to feel nervous or anxious about them. You may find it easier to stick with a small group of people you understand, and the thought of interacting with others can increase your anxiety.
Now that you know about the connection, you can take steps to address its effect. Here’s what that can look like.
Practice mindful acceptance
Empaths often find their emotional sensitivity difficult to switch off. Maybe you’ve noticed that the emotional energy given off by those around you prompts stress or a low mood.
You don’t necessarily have to “turn down” your capacity to care — you can boost resilience and cultivate concern for others at the same time.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed by other’s emotions, you can try the following exercises:
- Take a few deep breaths to ground yourself.
- Acknowledge the distress you feel.
- Remind yourself that taking on their pain won’t help them.
- Take a few more deep breaths, imagining the distress leaving your body as you exhale.
Remember, empathy isn’t the same as compassion. Getting stuck in distress can affect your ability to offer support. Mindfully releasing emotions helps you move from the “feeling” stage to the “acting” stage, where you can show compassion by validating their distress, asking how you can help, or offering a positive distraction.
Finding it tough to accept and let go of difficult emotions? Consider giving meditation a try.
Honor your boundaries
Strong personal boundaries are key for empaths.
Feeling overwhelmed by emotions can lead you to avoid situations that put pressure on your empathetic resources. You might struggle to manage difficult feelings and withdraw from loved ones to better protect yourself.
Setting limits around situations that tax you emotionally can lower your risk of reaching a breaking point.
If you’re already feeling low, maybe you reschedule plans with a friend who drains you emotionally. When you feel anxious, you might skip scrollingthrough news articles and social media in favor of reading a favorite book or watching a comforting movie.
Good self-care also matters. You’re more likely to feel anxious and low when running on empty. Keep your batteries charged by paying attention to what you need in terms of quality rest and solitude. Then, set aside time to fulfill those needs.
Watch for looping thoughts
Rumination, or cycling through the same distressing thoughts again and again, can happen with anxiety.
Circling through fears and worries might seem like a good way to resolve them, but ruminating on negative experiences and emotions can actually make it harder to find solutions. In the end, you’re more likely to feel trapped by the cycle of distress.
Not all empaths experience anxiety, and there’s some
This is likely because if you don’t ruminate on the emotions you share with others, your distress may be fleeting rather than a source of persistent worry.
You can sometimes ease the emotional overwhelm that often accompanies empathy on your own. When it begins to make you feel anxious or distressed, though, it may be time to talk with a professional.
A therapist can help you identify links between empathy and distress and work to address any patterns causing difficulty. In therapy, you can also learn about setting healthy boundaries and building a toolbox of coping skills, including meditation and self-care practices.
Therapists can also offer support with developing empathy by helping you practice active listening, mindfulness, and other helpful approaches.
Experts haven’t reached any definite conclusions about how empathy leads to anxiety, or vice versa, but research suggests a link of some kind between them.
This doesn’t mean empathy is bad or that you should block out feelings to enjoy good emotional health. It does, however, make it important to expand your emotional regulation skills and learn helpful ways to manage difficult feelings.