Empaths feel what others feel and this can sometimes be overwhelming. So empaths need a few survival tips to help them negotiate the world and stay balanced.
These seven survival tips for empaths may help you maintain emotional balance and help others without ignoring your own needs, desires and dreams.
1. Put yourself at the heart of your life.
It is not selfish to put your own needs first. If others are relying on you, it is essential that you keep yourself healthy and emotionally stable so that you can help them. Besides, you were put on this earth foremost to be yourself and bring your unique gifts to the world. You are not meant to be only a helper of others – you are meant to shine your own light.
Take care of yourself by focusing on your own needs. Ensure you take the time to look after your body, mind, emotions and spirit in whatever way is best for you. Follow your intuition and listen to your body. Don’t do things just because everyone else is doing them. The latest fad diet or meditation technique might not be right for you.
By a process of listening to yourself and experimenting, you will find the self-care routines that are right for you. These should include a mix of eating what suits you, finding the right exercise to keep you healthy and energized, finding restorative activities that refuel you and taking the time to follow your own dreams and goals.
2. Make time for downtime
Because us empaths find it hard to refuse to help others, and because we can be exhausted by their emotional needs, we need a lot of downtime. You need to refuel your energy levels by doing whatever is restorative for you.
Again, you need to listen to yourself and find the right activities for you. You might like quiet time to meditate journal or read. Alternatively, you might find spending time taking long walks in nature restores you. Or it might be mountain biking, fencing, cooking, knitting or restoring vintage cars.
3. The magic of meditation
Meditation also helps empaths to take stock of their emotions, find balance, and heal. Starting a meditation practice can be hard. We don’t necessarily want to be alone with our thoughts. But the practice can allow us to become aware of what’s going on in our minds and bodies. It can help us sort our own stuff from the emotions of others.
Commit to a regular practice. Starting off with just a few minutes a day if it is new to you. I encourage you to check out my Rock Your Ascension monthly membership where I share meditations, tapping scripts and loads of other spiritual support tools.
4. Protect your energy
As an empath, you easily pick up on negative energies from others. If you know you have to spend time with people you find draining you might like to consider protecting yourself in some way beforehand.
You can try a meditation where you imagine yourself bathed in golden light, or alternatively imagine a halo of light around yourself, like an eggshell or a protective bubble. There are many such meditations available on the internet.
5. Find an ally or mentor
Trained counselors and psychologists always have regular sessions with other counselors to help them deal with the difficulties they have faced in counseling sessions. As an empath, you will likely be spending a lot of your time dealing with the emotions of others.
People are probably drawn to your understanding of nature and compassionate energy. But you need a place to discuss these emotions and work through them yourself. Find a friend who shares your empathetic nature with whom you can discuss, in confidence, any emotions you have picked up from others that you are struggling to deal with alone.
6. Prioritize how you spend your precious energy.
We only have a certain amount of energy at our disposal and it is important to prioritize how we use our limited supply. For an empath, it can be tempting to give away all our energy in helping others. We find it difficult to refuse when we see a person in need.
However, we need to be careful about how we use our energies. Our precious supplies should be saved for those who will appreciate our help and who genuinely want to improve their lives.
We can be a support to others but we can’t solve everyone’s problems or make others happy all the time. We may spend a lot of time trying to help people who have no intention of making changes but prefer to wallow in self-pity and drain the energies of others. Spending too much time with these people isn’t helpful to them or us. Sometimes the best way to help people is to let them figure things out for themselves.
7. Follow your own dreams
As an empath, it can be all too easy to get so caught up in others’ dramas that you fail to give enough attention to your own life-purpose. Make the time to sit down and work out what your own desires, goals, and ambitions are and then work out how you are going to achieve them.
To do this, you might need to learn to say no to other’s needs a little more often. Marking out time on your calendar to meet your own needs and follow your own goals can help you to ensure you find a balance between being there for others and being there for yourself.
Using the survival tips
Being an empath is a gift and a responsibility, but ultimately our main responsibility is to ourselves. By following these survival tips, we can lead by example and inspire and uplift others by living our own dreams and following our own life-purpose. This is often more helpful than trying to support everyone else.
We can use our empathy to help others who truly need support at a difficult time in their lives. However, we need to give others space to allow them to learn and grow.
We must understand that we can’t always solve others’ problems or take away their pain, so we need to protect ourselves from becoming too deeply enmeshed in the emotions of others. Following the survival tips can help us to understand the best way to truly help others.
In being our most bright and beautiful selves we offer inspiration and healing to others. By doing this we can ease any guilt we feel when we can’t be there for everyone else all of the time.
We can use these survival tips to support and guide ourselves and find a balance between helping others and being true to ourselves. In this way, we can heal and inspire others while still living the authentic life we are meant to lead.
Please share with us your own survival tips that help you stay balanced as an empath!
I have created a safe space for empaths to learn, grow and support each other. I invite you to join my Evolutionary Empath Hacks community here.
