How To Tell If You Are Empathic (Are You An Empath?)

To be empathic is to feel to feelings of others. It is quite an extraordinary thing - a marvel of human capability.

There are a couple of near-instant ways of testing whether or not you are empathic that I am aware of. They shouldn’t take more than a minute for the average person to perform, and I will try to describe them here as simply as is possible.

The first way of telling is as follows: Take to the fingertips of one hand, and place them gently on the inside wrist of the opposite arm to feel or palpate for a pulse. It can take a few seconds to find that sweet spot on your wrist where you can feel the rhythm of your pulse as it beats along.

If it is hard for you to find a pulse on your wrist, try to find it on the side of your throat/neck. Once you’ve located your pulse and can feel it, congratulations - you’re empathic!

If that first test didn’t work, the second is even more foolproof. In this test, all you need to do is fully exhale and then hold your breath. Don’t hold it until you become uncomfortable - only until you feel the urge to inhale. This is not a contest. You don’t need to stretch this out - just exhale, hold, and wait until the urge to inhale arrives. When that happens - congratulations! You’re empathic!

Okay, as you may have figured out by now, this is all a bit of a clever way for me to say something simple: Everyone is empathic. To be empathic is to be a living, breathing human with a pulse. There are varying degrees to which we are connected to, or disconnected from, our empathic sensitivity, but to have empathic impressions seems to be as natural as it is for us to feel emotions.

An Empathic Spectrum

There are probably a variety of conditions that severely limit or disconnect one from their empathic sensitivity, but excluding those exceptions, being empathic is something we all experience in various ways. Some are more connected to their empathic faculties than others, but for most of us, those faculties are an intrinsic part of who we are. We may disassociate from them for many reasons, but they don’t disappear. And even when we are relatively disconnected from them, under certain conditions, they will come screaming to the forefront of our awareness.

The question then changes from: How do I know if I’m empathic to How do I become more connected to my empathic perceptions?

I have found that for myself, the clearest path here is through developing a certain kind of emotional awareness. Or, stated more simply: Paying attention to what I feel, and seeking to understand what the heck is going on with all of it.

In Practice

Example: A woman walks into the room and I notice myself immediately become tense, stiff, quiet and uncomfortable. My emotions or energy had a strong response to her arrival. Is this because she has some discomfort in her that I am empathically picking up on? Or, is it because of my personal emotional dynamics being triggered by her presence - in which case my response is not an empathic reaction at all? Is it even possible for me to fully separate these two things (my empathic sensations, and my emotional baggage)?

This is the great frontier of emotional/empathic awareness. In some cases, the strong emotional response I described above will be almost completely an empathic reaction to someone else’s energy. And in others, it will be purely my insecurity and projection. Sometimes it will be a blend of the two (this is very common). Learning how to tease this all apart, to become empowered, clear, and humble in our empathic perceptions/emotional awareness, is an extraordinary art form.

It’s one of the most beautiful things we can explore as we move through these lives, this world, and our relationships - humbly, openly exploring what the feelings we feel are showing us.

So, while there are as many ways of this expressing itself as there are people, for the most part, we’re all empathic. It’s one of the wonders of being human.