 What is an empath? You guys have listened to me mention being an empath a multitude of times throughout my videos the last few months. And in today's video, I'm going to share with you guys exactly what it means and give you five little ways to see if maybe you're one too. If you're new here, I'm Sarah and I help teach people to find inner happiness through fitness and spirituality. And today I'm going to clear up what an empath is on a very basic level so that you can figure out if you're one too. So obviously comes from the word empathy. Empathy is different from sympathy. I think it's important to understand the distinction of the two. Sympathy is when you understand someone else's hurt or someone else's pain, but it's kind of like from the outside. Like you understand where they're coming from but that's kind of where an empathy on the other hand is a few steps deeper. It's where you actually feel that person's feelings their hurt or their pain within yourself as if you are them in their position. So we're going to nerd out for a few seconds here. There's a group of brain cells called mirror neurons. We all have them. However, empaths have mirror neurons that are hypersensitive. And basically what mirror neurons are is they connect with other people's mirror neurons and they are a pathway to what that person is feeling and what their emotions are. Which means that empaths will further soak in other people's feelings no matter if they're positive or negative. Think of an empath like an emotional sponge absorbing all the emotions of everyone around them. Sounds fun, right? Often empaths can't even tell where someone else's emotions end and where theirs begin. And without having the awareness that you are picking up those feelings from other people there's no way to separate them. And if you're an empath and you don't know it like I didn't for so many freaking years you may be carrying around emotions that aren't even yours and you don't even know. There are so, so many signs that you could be an empath. And I'm just going to give you five of them for now but there are just so many more. I'm going to lay out some of those with you and also my experience with them. So the first is the most obvious and that is that you have a lot of empathy. It's kind of a joke among the people that are closest to me in my personal life that I cry pretty much every day. And it's not always bad tears. I mean, sometimes I can be watching a movie, you know, some romcom where the couple has their big fight and then they make their way back to each other and I can feel the happiness through them and it makes me cry. Empaths tend to be very emotional beings or maybe a friend lost a pet and even though I wasn't close to that pet, I can literally feel their pain and therefore alignment within feeling that pain in myself as well. Another example that happens to me all the freaking time is when I'm listening to music. I always thought when I was younger and I didn't know why now I do, that I've always loved to sing, I'm not good at it, but I always thought when I was younger, there's no way I could ever even try to pursue being an artist in that sense, a musical artist, because half the time I can't get through a song without just freaking sobbing. It could be a happy song, but usually it's a sad song or a song where you can just feel the emotions of that artist. Okay, the second sign that you might be an empath is subscribing to my channel. No, I'm kidding, but you should do that. If you have just out of this world fantastic intuition and gut feelings, we all have them. We all have intuition, we all have the gut feelings, but empaths tend to have almost like a certain knowing. It's kind of beyond intuition and beyond having those gut feelings, especially once you start to train yourself to really listen to them, it's kind of crazy. It's like having a knowing about something without the evidence of that information being there, but honestly, a lot of times later on that evidence will pop up and reconfirm what you were thinking or what your gut and your intuition was telling you anyway. I have actually a really, really good example for this. My mom's an attorney and years ago she had this really great friend who was also an attorney and it was while I was in college, so I was about three, three and a half hours away from home so I wasn't home all that often and this friend of my mom's became very close with my parents and both my brothers. Everyone just absolutely loved this woman. She ended up getting cancer, she's fine. So my mom was basically going to temporarily take over her business while she was going through chemo and all of that, you know, really shitty stuff. So I come home from college while this is kind of all happening and I'm super excited to meet her. I knew that even if my younger brothers liked this woman that it was a shoe and I heard so many good things about her I couldn't wait to finally meet, you know, this mystery friend. So I meet her instantly. I just had a bad gut feeling. I, for no reason, it seemed totally illogical, totally unreasonable, did not like this woman. I did not like her. I had no reason why and honestly I really guilted myself about it because I'm like, here's this poor woman who my entire family loves who she seems so nice who's going through these hard things, has this disease that could potentially kill her and here I am coming in and meeting her for the first time and saying, I don't like you. There's something off about you. And I really beat myself up about it for a while until years down the road, she ended up being so nasty, so honestly, that shit crazy. She came after my mom for absolutely no reason. She tried to take down our family. She, it was just an awful human being, terrible. And that's kind of what I'm talking about where the evidence often shows up later on to confirm whatever that intuitive feeling that you had was. The third sign would be that it's hard for you not to care. It's hard for you to not care when someone's suffering, even if it's someone that did you wrong. I have gone through that so many times and I think that that's a huge reason why so many empaths end up in these toxic and abusive relationships, often with narcissists. And that's something I went through over and over again, it was like this cycle that I couldn't get out of because even though these men and these boyfriends were treating me like shit, I cared. I wanted to fix them, I wanted to make them feel better, I wanted to make them happy. Very weird, very weird dynamic. An example of this would be, I was dating this guy in college my sophomore year. It was summertime, we were still together but we were a few hours apart, three or four hours, we lived in different states. Beginning in the summer, I was living at the beach, working down there with my friend and he and some of his buddies just show up to surprise me. You could imagine how excited I was. It was such a great surprise, I was so excited to see him and long story short, he ended up meeting these other younger girls while we were down at the beach. I don't know where I was if I was working or I don't know what I was doing but I ended up going to this party and came back in the middle of the night, we were all still up and he had hickeys all over his neck, he cheated on me and it was awful and it wasn't the first time either but that doesn't really matter in this story. So after the big fallout, after the excuses came out, whatever, I was obviously done. Everyone went to sleep, I was so upset, I couldn't sleep, you know and I went into the room that we had been sharing and I saw that he was just laying there on top of the covers and even though he had just ripped my heart out, stomped on it, punched it, just ripped it apart, I felt bad that he was laying there without a blanket and I couldn't not care and I found myself covering him up with a blanket when he had just come home an hour or two ago after cheating on me. It makes no logical sense but that's the kind of depth and care that empaths tend to have and it's not always fun, it's not. The fourth sign that you could be an empath is liking this video. No, I'm just kidding. If people, but do it. If all your life, people have come to you for advice. Even if you don't know them very well, I find that this happens to me all the time with my current job. I go to someone's house, I'm looking at their properties, I'm looking at what renovations need to be done, how can we flip it, how can we make a profit on this property and also help these people out and there's been times where I've sat there with my client sobbing, sobbing at their story and what they're opening up to me about. There's times where after I leave a house and I'm really thinking about the experience I just had and the hardship that whoever I just met with is going through and I'm driving and sobbing and feeling bad but that's because they feel comfortable opening up to me. They feel comfortable knowing that I just have that vibe or that aura about me plus empaths are typically pretty good listeners and because going back to number three that we care so much, that vibe, that aura emits and they can feel within their mirror neurons that we do care and that we are listening and Paz can also pick up the slightest change of voice, the most subtle little physical cues and instantly kind of know something just shifted within the other person's thoughts or feelings. Sometimes it almost kind of feels like mind reading except like you're obviously not sitting there like I am reading your thoughts right now like some cartoon. It's just that you know something shifted. You just don't know what. And the fifth reason I'm gonna lay out for you guys today and again there are so many other signs that you could be an empath is that you can be easily fatigued and need a lot of recharge time. This was something I didn't even know I needed until I came to the conclusion that I was an am and empath and now I literally don't even know how I went my entire life almost without having to alone time and having this recharge time. I do not understand it because now I have become such a homebody. I have come to really, really love being by myself and doing things by myself and being alone. And the reason is is because when we're as human beings interacting with so many people on a daily basis as an empath, you're absorbing and absorbing and absorbing all these people's emotions and feelings, positive, negative thoughts and it's whack sometimes. I do think it's a gift but it's also a lot. It's a lot to deal with. It's very overwhelming. It makes us feel super fatigued, super tired very often. And that's why self care for empaths, ooh, maybe that will be a video I do soon. It's just so, so freaking important. It's so necessary and it's so needed because absorbing these emotions and being an empath, it's not really something that can be turned off. It's really just something that can be managed. I mean, even though I have a lot of energy, I would say that I come off and I feel like people look at me as that I have so much more energy than the average person and I would kind of agree with that. I think that I'm a very high energy person but weirdly enough, simultaneously, I almost always feel tired. I mean, I'm talking like 85, 90% of the time. I feel tired right now filming this video. It's a very odd thing. Guys, we will get so much deeper into empaths and highly sensitive people and how to manage it and how to really enjoy the gift that it really is and we will get so deep into this in videos to come. But I just wanted to give you guys a very, very basic outline and understanding of what exactly I mean when I mention here and there that I'm an empath and why that is so impactful in my life and why it could be also on yours if you are one or if you know one. So after I was in this video, do you think you're an empath or is someone that you know one that you were like thinking of the entire time I was talking through this video? Let me know in the comments below. I love you guys so much. Please don't forget to subscribe and like this video if you found it helpful or entertaining and love you guys so much and don't forget, be limitlessly yourself.