collaborative post | If you’re the kind of person who is particularly in tune with the emotional states of the people you interact with, you may be an empath — a person with a heightened sense of empathy. Being an empath comes with its pros and cons; carrying incredible emotional wisdom and understanding is a great strength, but can present some challenges in the day to day. If you are an empath, it might impact the career choices you make for yourself.
Being an Empath
Empathy is a human experience that most people will, at one point or another, feel. However when someone is described as “an empath,” it means that their ability to engage in empathy is almost unconscious, and they just find themselves being affected by the emotional energy or ‘vibes’ of others even without significant interactions or emotional behaviors. Empaths have a deep sense of intuition and may have subconsciously absorbed emotional queues in body language, vocal tonality, patterns in a person’s appearance according to their emotional state, and physical signs of stress or tiredness. The difference between experiencing empathy and being an empath, is that empaths actually take on the feelings of the people around them, and it doesn’t just apply to the people close to them, but to everyone.
As you may guess, this can be a double-edged sword. Being an empath can make you a great friend and source of support to others. It can also make you caring, and understand whether or not an interpersonal relationship is a beneficial one. Yet these gifts can also come with frequent emotional drain, you may find yourself dedicating more time to other people’s emotional needs than your own.
Careers for Empaths
So with that comes the best careers for empaths. It is important to recognise that empathy, as experienced by empaths, can be a great tool. The natural intuition for emotional experience means empaths can often tell when there’s something between the lines, meaning that there is a broader spectrum of understanding of the human experience.
Because of this, empaths may choose to study degrees such as psychology, nursing, or an online Masters in Social Work. Empaths can also make great teachers, physicians, human resource managers, vets, social workers, nurses, and other such people and care-oriented roles.
An empath’s unique emotional experience also means they can be quite good at conveying emotional circumstances. This means they are uniquely suited to positions that demand some kind of craft or creative work, such as artists, musicians, writers, copywriters, gardeners, designers, dancers, web developers, and other hands-on creative vocations.
Empaths also function very well in spaces where they are alone. ‘Chill’ jobs or careers with minimal human contact are great for empaths because they allow the empath the space to regulate and respond to only their emotional input, rather than others. This means they can thrive as photographers, data analysts, librarians, transcriptionists, accountants, and more. These roles might particularly apply to empaths who find themselves constantly in touch with their own and others’ emotions in their personal lives, and need to use their professional time to take a break from it.
Managing Yourself As An Empath
To live well as an empath, it’s important to manage the sources of your emotional intake. Your ability to pick up on and internalize the feelings of others can make you incredibly insightful, but it can also mean that if you’re not careful you might take on more than your mind and body can handle. To stave off utter emotional exhaustion there are a few strategies you can use.
Shielding Visualization
Taking a moment to picture yourself shielded from the emotional energies of others is a psychological exercise to protect yourself from excess input. Take a minute or two to close your eyes and picture a shield around yourself protecting you from negative or intrusive energies. If you have aphantasia you can instead use verbal affirmations to assert control over your emotional presence and experience.
Setting Interpersonal Expectations
This doesn’t mean starting a friendship with a formal contract, but it does mean getting comfortable asserting boundaries. This especially applies if you enter into a career particularly suited to empaths, such as psychology or other healthcare roles, where you might be taking on a lot of other people’s feelings. When you do this at work, you have to know where to put a limit on it in your personal life.
Decompressing
When people go deep diving, the increased water pressure changes the way nitrogen and other gasses circulate in their bodies. Should they rise too quickly, the body doesn’t have the requisite time to readjust to the lesser pressure of the surface, creating gas bubbles in the body causing a condition called decompression sickness or ‘the bends’. Using this as a metaphor, if socializing and conversing is akin to a deep sea dive for empaths, then suddenly going from big conversations to home can be like getting the bends but with feelings. A diver with the bends needs to go into a pressurized decompression tank that puts oceanic pressure on their body and then slowly relieves it. Similarly, once you’re home, you need to take some time to let your emotional bandwidth level out. Put on some comfy clothes, have a nap, take up a hobby, eat some good food. Bring yourself out of the sea of feelings gradually, and soon your emotional decompression sickness will alleviate and you’ll level out.
Whatever your career choice, make sure that it speaks to your passion or interests, and if you’re working in close proximity with others, make sure you’re protecting yourself. Remember to look after yourself in both your personal and professional life; while it may be your natural instinct to be in touch with others’ feelings, you should always try to be cautious of taking on more than you can reasonably handle. Being an empath comes with incredible qualities, so view it as a strength within yourself, and use it in a way that feels right for you.
