Empaths are individuals who get overwhelmingly concerned about other people’s feelings and emotions. An empath survival guide is important because, in the process, they take up negative energy that later manifests itself as physical, emotional, and spiritual imbalances.
How does one survive living as an empath? This is an empath survival guide that you can incorporate into your everyday life.
Carry Out a Self-Assessment into Your Sensitivities
What triggers you to be oversensitive? It could be a difficult childhood phase you had or the loss of a loved one or even unresolved issues from the past. By knowing what makes you behave the way you do, you can come up with strategies to protect yourself and still be of help to others.
There are many empath quizzes that you can take and determine what type of empathic person you are.
Develop Strategies to Protect and Replenish Your Energy
Now that you know you are an empath, you have to be proactive in protecting yourself from the negativity that you tend to absorb unwillingly. These 7 survival tactics will see you through. You can use them as a basis in developing your own empath survival guide:
1. Deal With Your Anxiety
Empaths may find themselves being anxious for no apparent reason. If they are not worrying about themselves, they are worrying about another. It is as a result of a lack of faith in one’s capabilities. Being in this state is counterproductive. When faced with anxiety, communication is vital in keeping feelings under control.
Learn to communicate your feelings so that you do not pick on other people’s stress levels. You can, for example, explain to a spouse that you need some quiet time to think about the problem at hand. Make it clear that this has nothing to do with them before they conclude that they are to blame.
2. Build Your Self-Confidence
One way to live a healthy life as an empath is by engaging in activities that build your self-confidence. Have daily affirmations reminding you of your strengths. These affirmations will instill the belief system that you want to live by.
List your fears and have a plan to conquer them.
What is that one thing that scares you the most? Just do it. See yourself the way you would like to be and make plans to achieve that.
List all the things you find wrong in yourself because most of the things we criticize ourselves for never make us better people. Why not start approving yourself and see what happens?
3. Set Clear Boundaries and Live By Them
In order to develop a tough skin when you are an empath, you need to set boundaries to what you can and cannot do. This is because, naturally, you are inclined to give to others. Whenever that urge of selflessness overwhelms you to the point you have no disregard for your own wellbeing ask yourself if you really need to do this now.
Know who you are, what you want to achieve in life, and how you plan to do so. Use this to set clear boundaries on what you are willing to tolerate. Never let others get past your boundaries.
4. Deal With Over-eating or Under-eating
Know what triggers your poor eating habits. Be mindful of what you eat. Read food labels. Measure your portions. Have a specific time for eating. Eat small frequent meals instead of a few large meals.
Our bodies tend to interpret thirst as hunger. Therefore, ensure you drink plenty of water throughout the day.
Take part in sports or regular exercises to keep fit. However, don’t overdo it. Start with regular walks and cardiovascular exercises and slowly progress to HIIT workouts.
Keep yourself busy. Idleness tends to make our minds to wonder a lot. In the process, we engage in poor habits that affect our health.
Live by this rule: Do not try to fix someone who has not asked you to do so.
5. Deal With Your Clinical Depression
Empaths are hit the hardest by clinical depression because they tend to take shock and trauma personally. Additionally, instead of dealing with the depression, empaths put the feelings and emotions of other people first, therefore ignoring their own needs.
Unlike other forms of depression, clinical depression takes more than just the will power to overcome it. If you suffer from clinical depression, you need to take a step back and analyze the possible causes of your depression. This is because clinical depression accumulates for many years before it becomes noticeable. Remember, ignoring the triggers will only make your depression to escalate.
6. Deal With Unintended Guilt
Empaths tend to internalize other people’s guilt to the extent of falling into clinical depression and even committing suicide. To avoid the bad effects of guilt, you should know that you can never control how other people feel about you or about themselves. The best you can do is assist them as much as you can, doing so with honest intentions.
7. Take the 100 Days Rejection Challenge
Have you ever heard of the 100 days rejection challenge? Your purpose for the next 100 days is to engage anyone you meet without having the fear of rejection. Just like Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
By doing this challenge, you learn to desensitize yourself from the fear of rejection. Since it takes at least 3 months to develop a habit, by the end of the 100 days, you should be more confident and assertive when interacting with colleagues. The 100 days rejection challenge makes your empath survival guide easy to live by.
Conclusion
An empath is like a psychic sponge. You suck up both the good and bad energy around you in an effort to make the other person feel better. In turn, you end up getting clogged emotionally and physically. In order to live a healthy lifestyle as an empath, you need to make sure the negative energy accumulated is removed on a regular basis. You also need to develop survival tactics that proactively keep the negative energy absorption under control. This empath survival guide gives you key strategies you need to cope with.