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For people who are highly empathic, emotional sensitivity can quickly turn into emotional overload.

Empathy often comes bundled with the tendency to feel personally accountable for others' emotional states.

Humans vary in how well they can separate their own emotional states from those of others.

Empathy is almost like a social superpower because it strengthens the moral muscle behind compassion. But it also has a lesser-known shadow side that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should.

For people who are highly empathic, emotional sensitivity can quickly turn into emotional overload. Instead of simply understanding what others feel, they begin to absorb it and internalize it. Instead of resonating with someone’s anxiety, they might start carrying it, sometimes more than the original person does.

Largely, empathy involves at least two interacting systems:

Cognitive empathy (perspective-taking, mentalizing, etc.)

Affective empathy (emotional resonance, feeling-with, etc.)

Individuals high on empathy tend to score high on both. They are excellent at reading emotional cues and highly responsive to them physiologically. Their nervous systems are trained to treat other people’s emotions as personally relevant data. And that’s usually where the trouble begins, too.

Here are three psychologically grounded ways high-empathy people end up carrying anxiety that isn’t actually theirs.

1. Empathy That Absorbs Emotion Without Boundaries

Emotional contagion is the automatic process through which people “catch” the emotions of others.

A comprehensive review of three decades of research shows that emotional contagion operates primarily through unconscious mimicry and synchronization of facial expressions, vocal tone, posture, and movement. This bodily mirroring then feeds back........

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