How To Protect Yourself As An Empath or Highly Sensitive People!

I wanted to dive into this topic because I have a lot of coaching clients that come to me and ask, “How do I protect myself if I’m an empath but I’m a guy, Apollonia?” The first thing I really want to address before we go any further here is that I don’t want you to look at this as a negative thing! Being an empath can actually give you an advantage and hopefully, after you read this article, you’ll walk away with understanding yourself a little more and how to manage this gift!

I am actually an empath myself, so I can speak from experience in regards to this and how I protected my energy and became a little bit stronger in controlling my emotions, which I mention and go over in a lot of my videos and articles. But being an empath does not mean anything negative. It means that you have a tendency to feel more. You have a tendency to be more relatable sometimes. You have a tendency to have emotions and be really in tune with those and that’s actually an amazing quality. The first thing that we have to do is not look at it as a bad thing, but we do have to understand it and start to control it and give our energy and vulnerability to the right people.

6 Empath Protection Tools:

Tip #1 You have to work on getting rid of the negative people, the negative things, the negative associations that you might have in your life.

So as an empath, you have to protect your energy when you’re first starting. It can get better as you understand more, now I don’t have to protect my energy I coach all the time and nothing really affects me unless I let it. But how in order to get to that point, I had to clear out the negative people, the negative news that I watched, possibly the negative family members in my life, the negative friends in my life. I had to put those to a halt. I had to cut those things out because I had to really have a conversation with myself and say, “Is this an engine or an anchor?” So if they were an engine and they brought me up and they kind of delivered, I would keep them in my life, but if there were an anchor and they held me down, then that was the point where I wouldn’t keep them in my life.

Tip #2 What you put in you affects you!

Empaths can be more sensitive to what you’re surrounded by and also what you’re putting into your body! For example, when I drank wine, the next day I would feel down the whole day so I stopped drinking wine and instead of drinking wine when I go home after work when I was working a nine to five back then and I would just go to the gym instead. So we have to change our direction and refocus.

Focusing on how your body is affected by food can help you tremendously. Too much caffeine can create your central nervous system to work in overtime making it even more difficult to be around people or to settle your nerves. Create a food journal and take notes of how things affect you and see how you can improve!

Tip #3 Make sure your surroundings are positive.

A lot of times, empaths do really well with sunlight. So make sure that your place has solitude and has natural sunlight that comes in. Also, another thing that you can do is music. Music has saved my life so many times as an empath. The way that you can be more positive, dominant, more in control, more confident and not listen to negativity is by the music that you listen to as well.

So put on music, do the things that make you happy, but also be aware of your surroundings and what you’re listening to when you’re first trying to control this emotional impact that you might have. How often are you watching and surrounded by negativity? How often do you watch the news? How often do you watch horror movies? How often do you watch sad stories? How often do you watch action movies with people killing each other? How often do you play video games like this? Understand that your conscious and your subconscious registers this stuff to make you feel a certain way. For example, if I am trying to just calm down from a day and my mind continues to race on work, work, work, and finally, I hit the bed, my way of calming down sometimes it’s to watch positive, easy-going movies, read a book or just meditate.

Sometimes I’ll just want to watch a movie because I’m just tired I don’t want to have to do anything or think. Depending on that movie I watch, I’ll have some insecurities arise in my dream. What we watch affects us. So I’ve noticed comedies and movies similar to that like will bring up my mood and that’s a great thing for me to watch before I go to bed. Understand that as an empath you take on a lot of emotions because we feel and we connect with our hearts a lot. It’s not looked at as a bad thing, but you have to understand how to control it and how to accept it.

Tip #4 Meditate and journal!

If you’ve never attempted meditations before, meditation is a game changer guys. For me, journaling also really impacted my life because I was already meditating, but when I added in journaling and really took a look at what my mind was doing, what my thoughts were saying, I learned at that moment that I could change the way my thoughts ran through my head. And I never had to be ruled by emotions again.

So I felt like I got a lot more clarity because I’m a visual learner and I have to see things on paper to really understand sometimes or I have to break it down myself to really understand. So meditation’s helped me get there and be more conscious and aware. But combining meditations and journaling has helped me be way more in tune with myself and my emotions.

Tip #5 Watch who you’re attracting in your life.

Now, I want you to understand this because it is so important out of everything that I’m saying here is empaths are typically natural givers because we want people to be happy. We love from our heart, we love from integrity, we love from pureness. We’re just seeing the good in everybody, but this can also be a negative quality about ourselves.

But what happens is when we start to give and give and give, we attract takers, people that just want to take and take and take. And what we have to understand is giving comes from time, patience and getting to know someone if they are worthy of our energy and worthy of us giving to them. So I used to always want to give and over give. But I had to find a balance of where when I give I feel very validated within myself. If you’re giving to people and you feel drained, this is your red flag. Take a step back and make sure you’re able to say no to people and respect your energy and your time.

Tip #6 Zip yourself up!

I want to share with you a story that I used to do that worked so well and I did it all of the time when I did speeches. So back when I was starting my coaching practice, I had a lot of speeches in Miami, in New York, and people would find me because of television and radio, whatever. I was speaking a lot because that’s what I could do at that time since I had a full-time job. But I was also taking on a lot of energy. I was seeing that people’s energy was affecting me and people would come up and they would tackle me and ask questions and they came from a low point and they were at a very solid low energy, they had addictions, etc. I would come home and I would be frustrated. I would be tired, I would cry. And I gave everybody my energy.

As an empath, remember we want to give, so we attract takers. So I decided to try some new tricks out the next times before I had a speech, I did a little meditation or a little affirmation or a little prayer, whatever you want to call it, right? Whatever works for you. And what I did was I zipped myself up. I literally had an invisible bag around me and I would say my emotions are going to be cultivated for myself. My emotions are going to be healed within and nobody is going to take my energy. I’m here to give and I’m here to give solitude, but no one’s going to take. And I would zip myself up and zip myself up from behind too. And it sounds like the cheesiest thing ever, but it really worked.

And let me tell you why this works. I’ve done a lot of studying about the human mind and when we can trick our mind into understanding that we’re in control, we start to become in control. And that’s exactly what I did there.

Strategies For An Empath:

The best thing to do when you wake up in the morning is to assess your day. If you know that you are going to be around a lot of people, that can be draining. Visualization techniques will help you to protect your energy so you aren’t giving yours away left and right and also so that you aren’t picking up other peoples. One great visualization is surrounding yourself in a soft, warm, white light. Close your eyes and imagine it shielding you and protecting you. You can do this before you get around large crowds and even while you’re in the middle of it.

Another strategy is when you start to feel like you’re feeling off, or your gut starts clenching and you feel anxious, ask yourself some questions. “Is this coming from me? Is this energy coming from someone else? Am I picking up someone else’s energy right now.” And then allow yourself to breathe through it, identify it, and self-soothe. Sometimes just knowing that the emotions or intensity you’re feeling isn’t even your own is enough to take a step back and allow those emotions to pass through you more quickly and not get attached to them.

Tips For Sensitive People:

Empaths come in many different levels. You could just consider yourself to be very sensitive or you might not feel other people’s emotions as intensely as an empath, but you are still affected by intense surroundings, too many people are draining, or your body is hyper-reactive to things. This would still be considered sensitive. It’s going to still help tremendously to follow the same guidelines as an empath.

Get at least 20 minutes a day of vitamin D from the sun. Watch what you’re putting into your body. Caffeine and other stimulants can cause sensitivities to be heightened. Make sure you’re scheduling time to yourself and getting recentered. That is going to be crucial. You’ll still need human interaction, but getting back to being centered and grounded and doing some self-assessments are going to help you keep your energy and not feel as worn out or frazzled.

Self-Care Tips For Empaths:

Self-assessments! Make sure that you’re checking in with yourself and seeing how you’re feeling. If your energy is low, find out what might be draining it and listen to your body. Make sure you’re getting enough rest.

Quiet time alone. Getting back to your center and feeling grounded again is crucial for an empath! Spend some time in nature. Once a week is good. Meditate by the ocean or go for a hike by yourself. These are the things that are going to replenish you and the time alone with yourself is also important for feeling centered when you’re around a lot of people.

No isolating. It’s easy for an empath to get stuck inside and afraid of venturing out. But the human connection is crucial, guys! It is literally why we are on this planet! So do the things above and make sure you’re protecting your energy and go out into the world. There is a reason why empaths exist. In society, we are typically the counselors, advisors, healers of the world and it’s an important job. It’s just also important to make sure you’re putting your needs and mental health first.

I hope these tips helped you and you can start to work on some of these today!
If you liked this article, please comment below. And as always, if you are someone that is trying to really get good at mastering women and you are an empath man, and you’re just like, “How do I connect with women on a deeper level without showing too much emotion?” I want you to download my 20 question manual to get to know a woman’s true self because in there I give you questions that you can start to identify and ask and have great conversations with women.

And remember,

You are always loved.

Apollonia Ponti