Kat McAdaragh

For highly sensitive people who absorb everyone’s emotions

I was sitting in the coffee shop last Tuesday, minding my own business and trying to write, when the woman at the table next to me got a phone call. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could feel the tension radiating from her body like heat from a radiator. Within minutes, my chest felt tight, my stomach churning, and I had this urge to flee the building.

The rational part of my brain knew this was ridiculous. Her phone call had nothing to do with me. But my nervous system didn’t get the memo—it was responding to her distress as if it were my own emergency.

By the time she hung up and left, I was exhausted and anxious about things that weren’t even happening in my life. I sat there for another twenty minutes trying to shake off the feelings that never belonged to me in the first place.

If this sounds familiar, welcome to the club nobody asked to join.

The Emotional Sponge

There’s this thing that happens when you’re someone who absorbs other people’s emotions: you walk into a room and immediately know who’s fighting with their partner, who got bad news, who’s anxious about something they can’t name. It’s like having emotional X-ray vision, except instead of being a superpower, it’s mostly just exhausting.

You go to family gatherings and come home needing three days to recover from feelings that weren’t even yours. You sit next to a stressed coworker and suddenly find yourself worrying about their deadlines. you have coffee with a friend who’s going through a breakup and end up feeling heartbroken for the rest of the week.

The confusing part is that it doesn’t feel like you’re choosing to take these emotions on. They just show up in your body, as real and urgent as if they originated there. You can’t tell where your feelings end and everyone else’s begin, which makes you question whether you’re losing your mind or just being dramatic.

And then, someone tells you you’re “too sensitive” or asks why you “let other people affect you so much,” as if sensitivity were a choice you could simply opt out of.

How We Got Here

For many of us, this hypervigilance to other people’s emotional states started early. Maybe you grew up in a household where someone’s mood determined the entire family’s emotional weather. Maybe you learned that your job was to keep everyone happy or at least predict when someone was about to explode so you could brace for impact.

Children are natural barometers—we learn to read the adults around us for signs of danger or safety. Some of us just never turned that system off. We kept scanning and absorbing and trying to regulate everyone else’s feelings because it once kept us safe.

The problem is that what served us as children can become a prison as adults. When your nervous system is constantly monitoring everyone else’s emotional state, you never really get to rest. You’re always on, always taking in data, always trying to manage situations that aren’t actually yours to manage.

The Hidden Costs

Living as an emotional sponge is more exhausting than most people realize. You’re tired for reasons you can’t explain. You make decisions based on a mix of your own intuition and everyone else’s unprocessed feelings. You end up resentful of people who don’t even know they’re affecting you.

Your sense of self gets muddy when you’re constantly merging with other people’s experiences. You might find yourself attracted to people who need a lot of emotional support, not because you enjoy helping, but because your system recognizes the familiar dynamic of being needed to regulate someone else.

The physical symptoms are real too—headaches, stomach issues, trouble sleeping, feeling depleted even when nothing particularly challenging happened in your own life. Your body doesn’t distinguish between your stress and absorbed stress; it just knows something feels urgent and wrong.

What Doesn’t Work

I’ve tried most of the advice out there for “highly sensitive people,” and I need to tell you that a lot of it is pretty useless when you’re actually in the thick of absorbing someone else’s panic attack.

“Just put up walls” sounds reasonable until you realize that emotional numbing isn’t selective—when you shut down to other people’s feelings, you often shut down to your own too. “Stop caring so much” is like telling someone to stop having brown eyes. You can’t just turn off empathy like a faucet.

The visualization techniques where you imagine protective shields or bubbles around yourself? They might work for some people, but they’ve never done much for me when I’m sitting across from someone whose anxiety is literally making my hands shake.

The most frustrating advice is “you’re choosing to feel this way.” This completely misunderstands what’s happening. Nobody chooses to absorb other people’s emotions. It’s not a conscious decision—it’s more like an automatic nervous system response that happens faster than thought.

What Actually Helps

The first step is simply recognizing when you’re absorbing something that isn’t yours. This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly hard to do in the moment. I’ve started asking myself, “Was I feeling this way five minutes ago?” If the answer is no, and nothing in my actual circumstances has changed, there’s a good chance I’m picking up someone else’s emotional state.

Physical distance helps when it’s possible. If you’re absorbing stress from someone across the room, sometimes literally moving your body to a different location can break the energetic connection. I know this sounds woo-woo, but proximity matters more than we’d like to admit.

Breathing consciously—not the deep breathing everyone always recommends, but intentional breathing that reminds your nervous system that you’re safe and separate—can create a buffer between you and whatever emotional energy is floating around.

I’ve also learned to do emotional archaeology after social interactions. I sit with whatever I’m feeling and try to trace it back: What’s mine? What did I absorb? What belongs to that conversation, that person, that environment? It’s like sorting laundry, but for feelings.

The Return Policy

One of the most helpful concepts I’ve learned is that you can consciously give back emotions that don’t belong to you. This isn’t about being uncaring or shutting down your empathy. It’s about recognizing that taking on someone else’s anxiety doesn’t actually help them, and it definitely doesn’t help you.

I’ve started doing this thing where I mentally acknowledge what I’ve absorbed (I’m carrying Sarah’s worry about her job interview”) and then consciously release it back to where it came from. Sometimes I imagine breathing it out, sometimes I picture handing it back, sometimes I just say, “this isn’t mine to carry.”

It doesn’t always work perfectly, but it helps me remember that I have a choice about what emotional energy I hold onto.

Building a Sustainable Life

The goal isn’t to become emotionally invulnerable—that would mean losing some of the depth and insight that come with sensitivity. The goal is learning to be selectively permeable, to choose when to be open and when to protect yourself.

This means getting pickier about the people you spend time with. Not everyone deserves access to your emotional bandwidth. Some people are emotional vampires who will drain you dry if you let them. Others are reciprocal—they give as much energy as they take, and being around them feels nourishing rather than depleting.

It means creating spaces in your life for emotional recovery. Your home should be a sanctuary where you can decompress from the emotional weight of the world. Your social calendar should include downtime, not just back-to-back commitments.

It means learning to trust your own emotional reality, even when other people tell you you’re being too sensitive. Your feelings are information, and the fact that you can sense things others miss doesn’t make you wrong—it makes you aware.

When It’s More Than Sensitivity

Sometimes the tendency to absorb other people’s emotions is rooted in trauma or conditioning that goes beyond ordinary sensitivity. If you find that you can’t function normally because you’re constantly overwhelmed by other people’s feelings, if you’ve lost all sense of your own emotional boundaries, or if this pattern is seriously impacting your ability to work or maintain relationships, it might be worth exploring with a therapist who understands trauma and nervous system responses.

There are somatic approaches, EMDR, and other therapeutic modalities that can help you develop healthier boundaries without losing your capacity for empathy. Sometimes we need professional help to untangle patterns that formed in childhood.

The Both/And Truth

Here’s what I’ve learned: being someone who feels other people’s emotions deeply is both a burden and a gift, often simultaneously. It’s exhausting and overwhelming, but it also provides information that can be incredibly valuable. It complicates relationships, but it also creates the possibility for profound connection.

The key is learning to work with your sensitivity rather than against it. To honor what you’re picking up without automatically taking responsibility for fixing it. To use the information you’re receiving without letting it run your life.

You don’t have to carry everyone’s emotions. Other people’s feelings are information, not assignments. Protecting your energy isn’t selfish—it’s necessary for your survival and your ability to show up authentically in the world.

This is ongoing work, not a problem to be solved once and forgotten. Some days you’ll absorb everything and feel like you’re drowning in other people’s experiences. Other days you’ll maintain your boundaries and feel proud of how far you’ve come.

Both are okay. Both are part of learning to live as a sensitive person in a world that often feels too much, too intense, too overwhelming.

But you don’t have to carry it all. You really don’t.

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If you’re someone who absorbs other people’s emotions, start small: practice noticing when your mood shifts in response to someone else’s energy. You don’t have to do anything about it yet—just notice. Awareness is always the first step toward choice.