Absorbing Other People's Emotions: Writing Out What You Carry to Let It Go

The person at the next desk is simply in a bad mood, and though you did nothing, your chest tightens. When someone is on edge, the tension spreads to you as if it were contagious, and your shoulders stiffen too. After listening to a friend's troubles, you carry a heavier feeling home than they seemed to. Haven't you repeated moments like these, all over your daily life?

Absorbing other people's emotions comes from your rich sensitivity and your high capacity for empathy. But when that capacity reaches the point of blurring the boundary between their feelings and yours, your heart fills up with emotions that aren't your own. In this article we'll gently unpack why this happens, and share how to write out what you carry, separate it, and let it go.

Why you end up absorbing others' emotions

People who absorb emotions easily tend to pick up small changes around them with great sensitivity. The faint cloud in someone's expression, the low tone of their voice, the tension hanging in the room. You naturally catch the signals most people overlook.

The trouble comes after you catch them. The more empathetic you are, the more you don't just understand the emotion in your head but re-create and experience it inside yourself. Imagine someone's anxiety, and your own chest tightens with it. Sense someone's anger, and you brace as if it were yours. This is how another person's emotion quietly swaps itself for your own mood.

This isn't weakness. It's the flip side of a kindness that can imagine another's pain. But if that kindness is working in a direction that wears you down, there's room to change how you handle it.

Write to separate "whose emotion is this?"

The first step to not being swayed by absorbed emotions is to see your own feelings and others' feelings as distinct. Yet telling them apart in your head alone, in the thick of it, is extremely hard. That's exactly why the act of writing helps.

At the end of the day, try writing out the events that unsettled you. Then, next to how you felt, pose the question: "Is this my emotion, or one I absorbed?" "I reacted to my boss's bad mood and got heavy. But that's the boss's emotion — it isn't my fault." Just writing that distinction lets you notice that part of what you carried was never yours to begin with.

Mistaking other-sourced heaviness for your own responsibility is surprisingly common. By writing to separate it, you become able to gently set down baggage you never had to carry.

Absorbed emotions: write them back out

After separating them, what matters is not keeping absorbed emotions inside you. Highly sensitive people tend to hold the emotions they took on during the day and ruminate on them into the night. Why was that person in a bad mood — was it my fault? And so you end up handling the aftermath of someone else's emotion, all alone.

So write out the feelings you absorbed that day, just as they are. "I caught that person's anxiety today and it wore me out." "I brought that tension all the way home." The moment you put it into words and set it on the page, it becomes an event outside yourself. Return their emotion to them, and come back to your own heart — writing is also the work of redrawing that boundary line.

You don't have to blame yourself for feeling too much

Many people blame themselves for absorbing emotions: "I'm overthinking it," "if only I could be more thick-skinned." But sensitivity itself is a trait of yours that needs no changing. Because you feel richly, you can attune to others and offer fine-grained care.

What you need isn't to stop feeling, but to have a way not to hold on after you feel. Write to separate, write to get it out. This small habit becomes the support that protects your heart from being swallowed by others' emotions.

When the distress continues

If your mood swings sharply from being tossed around by others' emotions and you can't sleep, can't enjoy anything, or it disrupts daily life for a sustained period, it's generally considered a sign to talk to a professional such as a doctor or mental health specialist without toughing it out. The more sensitive you are, the more you tend to carry things alone, right up to your limit. The methods here are everyday self-care and not a substitute for medical judgment. If it feels like more than you can hold, borrow a professional's help early.

Setting it down as a "curse" is allowed too

Trying to neatly re-understand an absorbed emotion as "they were having a hard time too" leaves it, once again, sitting inside you. There's no need to force fresh compassion for the other person.

Noroi Nikki is an app for those who carry things easily. We built it as a place where you can vent the heaviness you absorbed that day exactly as it is, in the form of "curses." What you write is seen by no one and stays only within you. The more worn out you are from taking in others' feelings, the more you deserve to give yourself a little time, at the end, to set down what you carry.

References

• James W. Pennebaker, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (Guilford Press, 1997). A foundational body of research on the effects of writing out held-in emotions, known as expressive writing.