August 2, 2025, waxing moon in Scorpio
“If you’re exhausted and emotionally on edge, you’re not alone. We are inextricably connected to each other and there is massive pain in the world today.” Brene Brown
A few days ago while quietly sitting in a patch of sunlight, hands wrapped around a mug of gently steaming tea, it hit me just how drained I felt. How I was feeling raw and battered and overwhelmed by the inescapable sea of emotions happening in the people around me triggered by natural disasters, political mayhem, and acts of incomprehensibly cruel inhumanity.
My empathy, usually one of my strengths, is overloaded. If I was a stream, I’d be flooding.
Can’t we just turn it off?
“Empathy is necessary for survival of the species. It is what alerts us to the needs of others and draws us to respond.” Babette Rothschild
Empathy is a survival tool for our species so, no, we can’t simply turn it off.1
Empathy is both psychological and somatic. We experience it in our emotions and our bodies. It’s walking in someone else’s shoes, literally feeling them pinch your toes.
The empathetic feelings humans experience are sparked by input from our five external senses—so things we see, smell, hear, taste and touch—as well as 4 internal senses that monitor things like muscle movement, body position, a sense of where we are in space. There’s a whole constellation of areas of the brain, including fascinating bits called mirror neurons2, that feed into what creates our empathy response.
Smiling when someone else smiles is a good example of mirror neurons firing and triggering an empathy response. When we mimic that facial expression we feel both the feeling of happiness or contentment and the physical sensations of being happy or content: relaxing muscles, lower heart rate, slower breathing.
The process is the same when we see and hear a child crying inconsolably, or when witnessing violence.
And, for people like me who are one of the 15–20% of the population with the trait of high sensitivity3, times like this can be especially spiky. Among other things, being a highly sensitive person (HSP) means I have empathy so fine-tuned I feel everything and feel it intensely, even when the feelings aren’t my own.
For highly sensitive people, because we have both more and more active mirror neurons than non-HSP’s, we feel everything that everyone else feels, plus we get the upgraded, in-your-face graphics and shake the walls audio expansion pack. (Yay?)
We feel ALL parts of what someone else is experiencing. We mirror their posture, feel their emotions, feel what they’re feeling in their bodies. We live their experience with them, so it’s especially hard for HSP’s to stay clear about the boundary between someone else’s experience and ours.
As you can imagine, endless images and articles and podcasts (and, and) full of violence and horror are making for some really fraught days and let’s not even talk about the nights.
The thing about empathy is that it can be both conscious and unconscious.
Conscious empathy:
leads to compassion which can lead to taking action which leads to feeling empowered
allows us to choose how entangled we become in someone else’s experience
When our empathy is unconscious:
we’re drowning in someone else’s experience before we even know what’s happening
our reactions co-opt our nervous system, energy and emotions.
it can be exhausting and overwhelming — like having an emotional infection
(Just to keep things really fun, when highly sensitive people are overwhelmed we tend to freeze rather than fight or flee. That means we can end up paralyzed by overwhelm from an experience not even our own.)
No matter who we are and how we process sensory input—sight, sound, and touch are particularly potent triggers to empathy. Think about how much drama and trauma and anger and pain we see and hear these media-saturated days. We just aren’t designed to be constantly processing this much sensory input. Is it any wonder empathy overload happens?
After writing that last sentence, the “fixer” part of me wants to launch into a chorus of "Five daily resilience practices to save your life” or something equally improbable. But, frankly, you’re all self-aware enough to already be doing what you can for yourselves, so I’ll just cheer you on. Keep going!
Mostly, I wrote these words to reach across the void so you know you’re not alone in you’re overload. Also, so you know that there might be a reason you hadn’t considered, or weren’t aware of, for why it might feel SO BIG. (Even people who know that unconscious empathy exists can’t always avoid it, and many people don’t yet know they have the trait of High Sensitivity.)
So, maybe be gentle with yourself, and, by extension, everyone around you.
In this with you,
Tracie
“Why is the human brain designed for this complex, intricate task? If human existence was simply the result of “survival of the fittest,” we would be wired solely to dominate others, not to respond to their suffering. Our capacity to perceive and resonate with others’ suffering allows us to feel and understand their pain. The personal distress experienced by observing others’ pain often motivates us to respond with compassion. The survival of our species depends on mutual aid, and providing it reduces our own distress. Mutual aid exists in the earliest reports of tribal behavior and remains a powerful force in today’s world, where thousands of organizations and millions of people work to relieve global suffering.” Riess H. The Science of Empathy. J Patient Exp. 2017 Jun;4(2):74-77. doi: 10.1177/2374373517699267. Epub 2017 May 9. PMID: 28725865; PMCID: PMC5513638.
Interesting retrospective on the past 30 years of research into mirror neurons.
A neurologic trait identified and extensively researched by Elaine Aron, PhD. Lots of good information on her website, including a self-assessment.
I feel seen. Thank you for THIS!
Kryptonite and superpower coexisting. And an explanation for our love (and need) for solitude and wildflowers. And poetry and song.