While being an empath is an amazing thing and a gift for more reasons than most care to explain, it also has some downsides. Because empaths absorb so much in their day-to-day lives they tend to face something we in the world of empaths refer to as ’empath fatigue.’
Empath fatigue is not like normal fatigue. It is more intense and much harder to escape. This is a sense of emotional exhaustion that when you fall into it, you have to really fight to find yourself again. Throughout the years’ lots of different empathic figures have been speaking out about empath fatigue but not everyone is as aware of it as they should be.
Because we as empaths take on the stress and pain that others are feeling as if it were our own, we too fall victim to the things they’re facing on an energetic and physical level. We are much more vulnerable to something that the average person refers to as adrenal fatigue and being aware of that is crucial for properly caring for our own health as a whole.
Now, in regards to empath fatigue Jennifer Soldner wrote as follows on her website:
Empaths naturally carry a heavy load throughout the day. Often times highly sensitive people, the empath feels an intense level of fluctuating emotions in response to things occurring around them. Add to that their ability to absorb emotions outside of them and you have a recipe for daily fatigue.
What makes this exhaustion worse is the inability to escape it. For the average person, spending some time on the couch, relaxing to their favorite music, or a good night’s sleep is enough to leave them feeling refreshed. But for the empath, there is little escape.
Seclusion is of no use when you feel global emotions, or even the emotions of loved ones, regardless of their location. Absorbing energy from objects, walls, the earth, or animals add into this overload of emotion. Then there are those who pick up energetic memories and the emotions of spirits. These empaths can feel as though they have no options for solitude.
The bottom line is that everything around us is energy and empaths, being heavily affected by this energy, have little or no escape.
At the end of the day, as an empath crawls into bed, they hope for an emotional escape in their slumber, only to enter an overactive dream state. Lucid dreams, vibrant colors and vivid events of past, present, and future. Uncontrollable whirlwinds of emotions overtaking their mental and physical state without conscious reprieve. Spiritual intruders, entering the dream state and even luring them to different places and out-of-body experiences.
Empaths often find themselves waking up even more exhausted, tensed, and stressed than before they fell asleep.
If you’re an empath and that sounds like you, then you need to work to take better care of yourself overall. You need to stop letting the things going on around you take such control over your life and this means taking a serious step back. While overcoming this kind of thing will take a lot of work, you are capable and once you master it things will seriously begin looking up in a big way.
This crash of energy levels you’re experiencing is happening because you’re not cycling through the things you’re taking in properly. You’re allowing them to build up within you and allowing them to wreak havoc on your world as a whole. At the end of every single day, we need to be looking through our emotions and letting go of the ones that do not belong to us.
The more you allow these things to bombard you the more overwhelmed you will become and that in itself will feed into the fire that is this whole concept. You must make the time that you need to work through the things going on inside your mind and body. Meditation for the empath is crucial.
The more stress we put ourselves under by not processing properly the harder our adrenal glands will end up being forced to work because of how stressed we become. We need to be taking care of ourselves properly and while as an empath that requires a little more effort, it is so worth it. For more information on this topic please check out the video below if you’re struggling in this area.
Sources:
https://www.jennifersoldner.com/2017/01/overcoming-empath-fatigue.html
https://drjudithorloff.com/why-empaths-are-at-risk-for-adrenal-fatigue/