[DontStealMyBacon]

I am a college junior studying biochemical engineering. My classes give me quite a lot of stress during a semester, but being around people is still many times more stressful than classes that take hundreds of hours of studying. For some reason, I have the ability to feel other people's stress and emotions extremely fluently with or without that person's intentions of sharing those emotions. Everyone expresses emotions and everyone has stress. Different people have different levels of stress, but some people just have the tendency to emit all of their stress all of the time. These are the people I can't stand being around, but they are of course people that are ordinary in other ways and I cannot just avoid from my life entirely.

The number one person that I seem to be having this problem with is my mother. She is a very nice person and has great intentions, but she is constantly both holding in and emitting a fair amount of stress. This week I am on vacation with my family out of state. We started our trip with a long 18 hour drive stuck in a tightly packed car for the entire day. When my mom had been driving for a while and decided that she needed someone else to take over driving and that she needed to find a place for dinner, things started to get a little crazy. She was stressed from being hungry and driving for a while and getting told directions from every person in the car. When she started huffing and puffing, I was instantly feeling all of her stress. She kept saying “I'm okay, I'm doing alright.” Every time she said that, I could feel all of her stress emitting into my head.

After we ate dinner, she was a lot less stressed, but I continued to feel angry for the entire rest of the night. What can I do about this ability to absorb the stress of everyone around me and how can I deal with the few people that emitt the most stress other than avoiding them entirely?

[vital]

Originally Posted by DontStealMyBacon

I am a college junior studying biochemical engineering. My classes give me quite a lot of stress during a semester, but being around people is still many times more stressful than classes that take hundreds of hours of studying. For some reason, I have the ability to feel other people's stress and emotions extremely fluently with or without that person's intentions of sharing those emotions. Everyone expresses emotions and everyone has stress. Different people have different levels of stress, but some people just have the tendency to emit all of their stress all of the time. These are the people I can't stand being around, but they are of course people that are ordinary in other ways and I cannot just avoid from my life entirely.

The number one person that I seem to be having this problem with is my mother. She is a very nice person and has great intentions, but she is constantly both holding in and emitting a fair amount of stress. This week I am on vacation with my family out of state. We started our trip with a long 18 hour drive stuck in a tightly packed car for the entire day. When my mom had been driving for a while and decided that she needed someone else to take over driving and that she needed to find a place for dinner, things started to get a little crazy. She was stressed from being hungry and driving for a while and getting told directions from every person in the car. When she started huffing and puffing, I was instantly feeling all of her stress. She kept saying “I'm okay, I'm doing alright.” Every time she said that, I could feel all of her stress emitting into my head.

After we ate dinner, she was a lot less stressed, but I continued to feel angry for the entire rest of the night. What can I do about this ability to absorb the stress of everyone around me and how can I deal with the few people that emitt the most stress other than avoiding them entirely?

Hi DontStealMyBacon,

Stress is contagious, but so is calm and inner peace. If you can be calm and peaceful yourself, you can help your whole family and everyone around you. To free yourself from unwanted thoughts and emotions, see SNAP CLUB

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...n-escaped.html

- vital

[Thunder Bow]

Spending 18 hours in a tightly packed car is enough stress for anyone. I would be worried if you did not feel stressed out! Try to avoid doing that in the future.

[GenmaJay]

Hello, Don'tStealMyBacon (digging the username by the way).

Honestly, being that empathetic is both a curse and a blessing: a blessing when you're among friends and wanting to know their pain, and a curse when you're among stressful or difficult people.

Consider learning some coping mechanisms for this level of anxiety. This article may help.

I also have a "gift" of picking up secondhand emotions, and the way that I cope is by taking a second to check in with myself. Why am I stressed? Is it me, or this other person? If it's the other person, then you can start to look at them with some measure of concern or sympathy, and not resentment. In my experience, taking responsibility for my part in my discomfort works wonders. And then I can laugh it off.

I hope this helps, and I hope you stop feeling stressed

Good luck!

[JJBX]

You're human and humans are naturally empathetic to others. You see yourself in other people and can identify with their stress. It just sounds like you are a much more sensitive soul than the average bear, so you're prone to picking up on very subtle cues that someone is not feeling their best.

I guess part of overcoming that overwhelming feeling is learning to trust that others can handle their own problems and allowing yourself to not worry about them as much. Identify that you're seeing or hearing stress in their voice or in their body movements and try to find a way to dismiss it like, they're going to handle it and everything will be fine. You're able to handle your stress, so naturally, they will find a way to handle theirs. If part of the problem is that you feel like you don't handle stress well, then maybe the solution is getting more comfortable with handling stress so that you can trust yourself to handle stress and others to handle their stress as well.

[Weownthesky]

Whenever I can sense any negative energy off of anyone it really effects me

[DontStealMyBacon]

Thunder Bow, I understand that 18 hour car rides are terrible and I was bringing it up because it was recent and not because I didn't know why I was stressed. I did make it clear before the ride was over that the drive back would have to be across two days and not one, and my family agreed to that pretty quickly.

JJBX, I have a hard time dismissing stress because as an engineer I am a problem solver. All the time I look at things that are not working as well as they could be, and I think about what could be done to make them work better. When people that I know really well are stressed, I evaluate why they are stressed and what is different about their stress right now versus other times. The problem with feeling other peoples' stress as a problem solver is that I feel obligated to do whatever I can instead of being able to let go of my friends' stress. I really just need to learn a way to let go since I don't think I ever really have.

GenmaJay, I will definitely read the article. I have a strange combination of being empathetic and also being someone who does not express very many emotions. I find that this word describes me quite well - Alexithymia (search alexithymia on wikipedia, I can't put a link in right now). It basically means that I have emotions but I do not connect to either other people's or my own emotions very easily. I do have emotions that I show, but I feel that I do not connect to conversations based on emotions as much as people would expect me to show. As a result, I am always looking around at other people's emotional responses and always taking in the emotions they are not trying to share. I have no idea why this happens, but this is my best understanding of it.

[amandaag010]

I'm really like that too. I could feel other people's stress, burdens, emotions as if I'm the one that's going through the situation. It would literally keep me up for hours at night, hard to concentrate, anxiety levels go up, etc

[cool09]

I think peer pressure is greater as an adult than it was as an adolescent. When you reach maturity people expect you to be connected to them and everyone around you. If you're not open or connected to those around you people consider you self-centered, selfish, ignorant, etc. Being connected to others means you absorb what they're feeling - when those people are distressed you're going to feel it. I guess that's what a free spirit means - free spirits strive to connect to themselves, have solid boundaries around themselves and don't take on the stress of others.

I'm sure there are self-help books out there that could give you advice on lowering the stress. Psychiatrists, therapists know how to keep boundaries and not take on the stress from their patients.