This psychology-based insight explains why high empathy can blur emotional boundaries.
Why High-Empathy People Often Carry Other People's Anxiety
Without strong emotional boundaries, empathy can quietly turn into emotional overload.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
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.
(Take my science-inspired Boundary Setting Style Test to know if you can regulate your empathy.)
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 into the nervous system, resulting in emotional alignment without deliberate intention or awareness.
In other words, before we think about what someone is feeling, our body has often already started to mirror it. This mechanism tends to be especially pronounced for people who are highly empathic. They do not simply register that someone is anxious; their own physiology begins to shift in parallel.
This means that, often without their knowledge, their heart rate changes, muscles subtly tense up and their breathing becomes shallower in response to another's. Long before conscious interpretation kicks in, their nervous system is already running the other person's emotional program.
The issue then becomes lack of differentiation. When self–other boundaries are weak, a highly empathic person's system struggles with the basic perceptual task of checking in with the self with questions like, "Is this emotional signal originating within me, or am I detecting it in the environment?"
This is also why many empathic people report feeling emotionally drained after social interactions even when nothing overtly stressful occurred: their nervous system has been continuously co-regulating what did not originate within them, but was nonetheless processed as if it did. This converts emotional contagion into physiological workload for high-empathy individuals.
2. Empathy That Takes Too Much Responsibility
Empathy often comes bundled with the tendency to feel personally accountable for other people's emotional states. Some examples of the internal thoughts sound like:
- "If someone is upset around me, I should help them feel better."
- "If they're anxious, I must be missing something."
- "If they leave feeling stressed, I failed somehow."
High-empathy people are especially vulnerable to this pattern because they are good at emotional regulation. They can soothe, validate and stabilize interpersonal environments, and over time, this capacity turns into an unspoken expectation. What they can do begins to feel like what they should do.
Research on emotional labor helps explain why this becomes psychologically costly. A large-scale 2025 study from Scientific Reports shows that emotional labor is a strong predictor of emotional exhaustion, and crucially, that this relationship is mediated by empathic concern.
People who feel more emotionally aligned to others experience greater burnout when they repeatedly engage in emotional regulation for them. This creates a self-reinforcing loop wherein:
- They detect anxiety in others quickly
- They feel it viscerally
- They assume responsibility for reducing it
- They monitor constantly to see if it worked
Empathy, in such scenarios, turns into over-functioning. And the high-empathy individual becomes an informal nervous system manager for the group, tracking moods, smoothing tensions, anticipating distress and adjusting themselves accordingly.
The concern here is that when someone feels responsible for emotional outcomes they do not actually control, their nervous system stays in a state of low-grade vigilance. They are always scanning the environment for emotional disturbances, because they register as their own problem to solve.
Empathy, in this context, while being a relational strength, becomes a form of psychological labor that the nervous system quietly absorbs.
3. Empathy That Confuses Intuition With Internal Data
Intuition and empathy almost always go hand-in-hand. People with this skill tend to pick up on micro-signals, subtle mood shifts and emotional undercurrents that others normally miss. Some individuals are especially sensitive to others' emotional expressions and social cues. But this sensitivity comes with the hidden cognitive risk of source confusion.
A 2025 study published in Acta Psychologica on affective self-other distinction shows that humans vary in how well they can separate their own emotional states from those of others. When this distinction is less effective, people are prone to systematic emotional biases.
The most notable of these biases is emotional altercentric bias: the tendency to internalize other people's emotions as if they were self-generated. In experimental settings, individuals regularly experience others' facial expressions and emotional signals as their own affective state, even when the source is clearly external.
This results in misattribution of affect wherein one ends up assigning the wrong origin to an emotional experience. Instead of recognizing the emotion as socially induced, the person begins to self-analyze. Their mind is plagued by thoughts like:
- "Why am I anxious?"
- "What's wrong with me today?"
- "Am I avoiding something?"
But, in reality, nothing may be wrong at all. They are simply running someone else's emotional weather system.
Over time, this confusion can erode emotional clarity. People may eventually become deeply attuned to emotional environments, yet increasingly uncertain about which emotions belong to them and which are being sampled from the social field around them. They feel more, yes, but they also feel less certain about emotional ownership.
This core psychological paradox increases emotional permeability. Some of the manifestations of paradoxical traits are:
- You become better at detecting signals, but worse at filtering them
- You feel more, but differentiate less
- You connect deeply, but carry more than your share
How To Regulate Your Empathy
The solution to this problem is not to "be less empathic," because empathy is not the problem. The real issue here is unfiltered resonance with other's emotions. You just need to work on building empathic differentiation, or the ability to stay emotionally attuned without losing internal boundaries. This involves three core skills:
- Source awareness. Regularly ask yourself questions like, "Is this emotion originating in me, or am I detecting it in the environment?"
- Responsibility realism. Noticing when care quietly turns into emotional over-functioning.
- Intentional nervous system recovery. Spending time in states where you are not tracking anyone else: no emotional labor, no co-regulation and no interpersonal monitoring.
When empathy is paired with differentiation, it becomes wisdom. Take the science-inspired Hidden Superpower Test to see if you need to hone it.
If your empathy does not feel like a superpower yet, it may turn into anxiety that was never yours to begin with. Take the science-backed Emotional Quotient Inventory to know how aware you are.