If you’ve ever had someone tell you that you’re too emotional, you’re probably familiar with feeling the weight of “feeling too much.” For people who feel deeply, it’s not uncommon to be told by others that they are “too much.”
Has anyone ever told you the following?
- You’re too much to handle.
- You’re so intense all the time!
- You’re just sensitive.
- You’re always so emotional!
- You’re too dramatic.
- You just need to be stronger and not let things bother you so much.
Whether you’ve always been emotional or you go through ups and downs of feeling emotions more heavily, you can’t help but notice more subtleties than others do. Sometimes our brains just reflect and process information more deeply.
People who would describe themselves as emotionally intense are some of the most attentive, caring, and yes – sensitive people out there. There are also times where people who don’t usually have this issue become more aware that they are feeling more emotional than usual. There are several reasons that either are affecting you.
Below, we’ll talk about the reasons you might be feeling more emotional lately if the emotional intensity isn’t your usual way of being. We’ll also talk about what it’s like to be a person who simply feels deeply, all the time.
Being An Emotionally Intense Person
At your best, you’re keenly observant of people and feelings in your environment; you’re intuitive and perceptive. At your worst, you’re overwhelmed by your surroundings, by the energy put out by others, but the nuances of other’s ups and downs.
As someone who is highly emotional, you can become overstimulated quickly; often, when things are chaotic for long periods or too many emotions from others surround you. But the ability to feel deeply is a gift that not everyone has, so don’t let its novelty wear off and make you uncomfortable.
If you have this ability, you probably became aware of it from a young age as this is a time when we’re learning emotional regulation and aren’t very skilled at it. This lack of ability to regulate things felt so deeply can make children feel lonely and isolated. The caregiver may not be aware of the issue at hand and aren’t able to deal with the outcomes correctly.
There’s debate about the existence of highly sensitive people and what it logically or scientifically entails. However, there are several other explanations for feeling the way you do. Here are several examples.
- You may fall into the category of gifted people.
- You may legitimately be wired differently, as 15-20 percent of the population is highly sensitive.
- You may have an emotional regulation disorder such as depression, ADHD, or Bipolar Disorder.
The world is full of neurodiverse people, including neurotypical and neuroatypical. Although some feel uncomfortable with the idea of labels, the key takeaway is that diversity is getting more recognition, studied, and people are making more attempts to understand the variety.
Although the world is coming around to accepting these varied gifts and people who are other than “typical,” there is still little awareness surrounding the subject. That leaves many emotionally intense adults, feeling misunderstood and lonely or isolated.
What Do Emotionally Intense or Highly Sensitive People Feel Like Daily?
Here’s a look at some of the signs and symptoms you may be experiencing as a highly sensitive person or emotionally intense person.
Sensitivity and Empathy
You may have heard of the word “empath” and resonated with its meaning. In her book, The Empath’s Survival Guide, Dr. Judith Orloff explains that empaths are different from other people in that they absorb the emotions of other people. Empathy often includes experiencing physical symptoms related to being unable to intellectualize their feelings.
When empaths become overwhelmed, it’s not uncommon for them to experience chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety attacks, physical symptoms, and drug, sex, and food binges.
Intense Concern for Others
Beginning at an early age, you had grave concerns for the well-being of others. When you witnessed abuses or wrong-doing, even as a child, you may have felt as though it were happening directly to you.
Deep Connections
You may be able to foster deep, meaningful connections to others more efficiently than your peers. Because you can relate to others, and honestly feel their pain, people connect to you and bond with you quickly.
Increased Vulnerability
Unfortunately, as you’re naturally sensitive to the feelings of others, it can put you in a vulnerable position within relationships. Rejections and trauma, even from an early age, can have lasting effects. Relational injuries can happen to sensitive people a little more quickly than others who don’t feel so deeply or take on the emotions of others.
Acute Perceptivity
Plenty of people would label themselves as conscious, but the highly sensitive person can perceive things that most people would miss. You may notice patterns in the world around you, notice links, and see past superficiality.
Insight and Intuition
Your ability to see through things and use your highly tuned intuition allows you to stay one step ahead of others. Nothing gets past you, including people who are attempting to hide their true intentions. When people are hiding their thoughts and feelings, you can sense the incongruence.
Ability Doesn’t Equate to Ease
Many people think that because highly sensitive people have these abilities, it may make their life easier. Like they have a leg up on the rest of the crowd, but it’s not necessarily true. Perhaps, you may know more than others when someone is trying to take advantage of you, which could serve you well, but it’s probably not a super common occurrence.
Instead, your ability can seem to way you down sometimes. You may also find yourself in conflict with those people that you can see through. Your talents can be intimidating to some as well.
Boundary Pushing
It’s easy for you to test boundaries, question authority, and to challenge conformity. You may find that the injustices of the world weigh heavily on you, and you challenge the meaningless or unfairness of situations. Inequalities and corruption frustrate you, especially when you don’t feel that there is anything you can do about it.
Becoming a Leader
Many deep feelers and highly sensitive people overcome the challenges and difficulties they face with their gifts. With the right vision and practice, they can quickly become great leaders. Whether leadership comes to you among your inner circle of friends or in a managerial position at work, your ability will serve you well and help you thrive.
Advanced Literary Skills
Your world becomes rich as you explore topics more deeply. You may have intense visualizations, use metaphors, and have a vivid imagination. Other people may even refer to you as a dreamer since you’re so quickly in-tune with things more profound than the rest can see.
Intellectual Ability
Because you’re emotional and feel things that others don’t feel, it causes you to be reflective and analytical. As you seek to understand something that plagues you, you become more aware and more knowledgeable. You expand your horizons and often analyze things until you have a well-grounded understanding.
Being Overzealous
It’s easy for highly sensitive people to become overzealous. You can’t help but become enthusiastic over new topics that excite you. When you get a new idea, your mind runs faster than you can keep up with, and you might start chattering or get carried away. Nothing can stop you from carrying out new endeavors until you achieve them.
Skilled at Processing Information
You’re great at absorbing information and soaking up all the details. Consequently, you become great at processing information very quickly. You’re able to put things together and make connections much faster than others.
Other Things Fall by The Wayside
When something interests you, you may become so enamored with it that other things, people, and obligations fall by the wayside. Whether it’s a new person you’re interested in, a new book, a piece of art, or music, you’re wrapped up in feeling and exploring it so you may let other things slip.
Self-Reflection
You often deal with the feelings of others that you have taken on. To process these emotions and get them off your chest, it’s likely that you practice a ton of self-reflection. When done so often and carefully, self-reflection becomes a well-developed skill that feeds your ability to help others with their emotions.
Being Open-Minded
As a deeply emotional person who feels the feelings of others, you have an understanding that most people don’t. Rather than judging people, you find that you can understand their plight. You may find that you don’t agree with other people who can’t seem to find it in themselves to understand viewpoints past their own. This is one of the many challenges of being an emotionally sensitive person.
Highly sensitive people and people who feel emotions more intensely than others have a gift that not everyone has. It comes with its ups and downs, many challenges, but many positives as well. Some people are emotional for other reasons. Let’s explore why you might be feeling so emotional if you don’t consider yourself a highly sensitive person, and deep emotion isn’t your usual.
Why Am I So Emotional Lately?
If you don’t feel like you’re an empath, a highly sensitive person, or someone who often finds themselves to be emotional, it can be highly off-putting to become one suddenly. There are tons of reasons why you may be experiencing heightened emotions.
Feeling like you’re suddenly unable to control your emotions is quite common. Here are several reasons you might be finding your feelings to be heavier than usual.
It Just Happens
The first reason is the most obvious; you’re human. It just happens from time to time. A typical range of human emotion is highly varied depending on so many factors that, indeed, at any given time, you may be susceptible to some highs or lows.
From time to time, everyone feels a little happy with big bursts of content; we may feel bland or exhilarated. That’s because emotions are just a normal part of life for humans. There are things inside our bodies that influence our feelings along with things outside our bodies.
If someone tells you you’re too emotional during a time of you just being human, it’s probably them, not you. You shouldn’t consider your ups and downs much of a problem unless they’re hindering your day to day functioning.
Depression
If your emotions are becoming more than you can handle and interrupting your everyday life, you could be facing depression. Depression affects 264 million people across the globe.
If you’re facing depression, you could be feeling more cynical. Feeling negative feelings could be the reason why you’re more aware of your emotions lately, as negative feelings can become overwhelming.
If you’re struggling with depression, you could also be having trouble regulating your emotions altogether, feeling intense sadness and not being able to use coping mechanisms that usually work for you, can make you feel worse.
Depression can make people feel negative, sad, hopeless, and overwhelmed. If you’re feeling this way, and you think that depression is the culprit, it’s essential to see the help of professionals qualified to treat your depression.
Anxiety
Anxiety is another common ailment that many people face across the world. It’s likely that at some point in your life, you’ll experience fear. If you don’t usually suffer from ongoing anxiety disorders, the feeling can be hard to describe.
Sometimes, a little bit of self-reflection and self-awareness can help you here. If you’re feeling more emotional than usual and you think it could be anxiety, sit down and think about what’s been going on lately in your life.
Perhaps situations are going on with your friends, family, or work that are making you a little more stressed and anxious lately.
People tend to think of anxiety as intense worry, but what’s interesting about anxiety is that it can take on many forms and symptoms such as fear, stress, feeling like you are stuck in fight-or-flight mode, irritability, and even apprehension.
While it’s not uncommon for people to experience anxiety from time to time, it’s something that you should look into if you’re often feeling intense emotions that you’re not able to regulate. In this study, researchers found that people with generalized anxiety disorder had a hard time regulating emotions.
Anxiety is a treatable disorder, so getting help if you need it is the quickest way to start feeling better.
Stress
Stress and burnout happen from time to time, as well. There may be something stressing you out at work or among your family. Over time, if you aren’t dealing with the things that stress you out, it can take a severe toll on your health.
If you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, it could be the reason why you’re feeling especially emotional lately. If that sounds like it may be your problem, take some time to destress, and, likely, your emotions won’t be running so high.
Lacking Sleep
If you’re feeling especially emotional lately and you can’t put your finger on why you may want to think about how much sleep you’ve been getting lately. Sometimes, we don’t think about it missing an hour here or an hour there, but for a couple of weeks, a lack of sleep can get you entirely out of sorts.
Here are some of the symptoms you can begin to experience from a lack of sleep.
- Your immune system becomes weakened
- You’re at a higher risk for depression and anxiety
- Difficulty holding concentrating or thinking clearly
- An increased risk for accidents
A lack of sleep not only affects your mood but your interactions, and it can even disrupt your emotional regulation. This study found that those who were experiencing a lack of sleep felt like their emotions had gone haywire.
Consider Your Diet
You’ve heard the saying that you are what you eat, and it couldn’t be more accurate. Your diet can affect your overall well-being. If you’re eating very poorly or not enough of the right things, your mental health can be changed.
If you find yourself feeling more emotional than usual, you might consider keeping a food journal to help you see any correlations between what you’re eating and how you feel.
To ensure a healthy range of emotions, consider the following about what you’re eating.
- Eat a wide range of foods to ensure a good mixture of nutrients
- Try to ensure that you’re packing in all the essential vitamins and minerals as well
- Don’t skip meals
- Don’t skip meals, if you can help it
Exercise
If you’re feeling exceptionally emotional lately, you could implement exercise into your day. Most people are aware that the recommendation for exercise is 30 minutes per day, but for many of us, we don’t get 30 minutes per week, let alone 30 minutes per day.
It can be hard to find the motivation to exercise, especially if you’re not feeling like your best as it is. Research suggests that exercise can help ward off feelings of depression and anxiety and increase your overall well-being.
Life Changes
Significant life changes can be a huge culprit when it comes to your emotions going haywire, and it’s not always obvious. Remember that when your feelings feel bigger than usual, it only takes a few moments to sit and think about what’s been going on in your life lately that could cause some upset in your mind.
You could be experiencing things that are making you happy, like a recent marriage that you may not think would cause such an emotional uproar. But humans are complex creatures, and changes can be harder than we realize to accept.
Grief
Grief can be overwhelming for those going through it. It doesn’t matter what the pain is coming from; whether it’s the loss of a person as a result of death, to the ending of the relationship, grief often changes people.
If you’re experiencing grief, even if you feel like you’re dealing with it in healthy ways or getting help with it, it can still cause some severe upset with your emotions and your day to day life. Everyone handles grief in their own way, but if the pain is causing your day to day life to suffer for a prolonged period, it’s wise to seek professional help to ensure you’re able to process your feelings.
Hormones
Another part of simply being human is that people have natural hormone fluctuations that can have psychological effects. Not only that, but our hormones can cause physical symptoms as well. Here are some examples of hormone issues that could be the cause of feeling like your more emotional than usual lately.
- Birth control – If you’re feeling unusually emotional, consider whether or not the changes coincide with the start of a new birth control method. Birth control hormones can wreak havoc on women’s emotional states, so it’s worth considering.
- Premenstrual syndrome – Also known as PMS, women are susceptible to physical and emotional symptoms due to the variance in hormones related to their menstrual cycles. Many women report feeling more sensitive than usual during certain times of their period.
- Menopause – When women stop menstruating, they go through menopause, which can also have a significant effect on emotions as hormones fluctuate.
- Thyroid issues – Your thyroid could be the cause of hormone imbalances, which can affect emotions and even be the underlying cause of anxiety and depression.
- PCOS – Polycystic ovarian syndrome is a disorder that makes women have higher than usual male hormones, and it can cause distress for some women.
When To Seek Help
We’ve talked a lot about what might be the cause of feeling emotional in your life. Remember that everyone has feelings and emotions, but not everyone is overly sensitive. It’s not a bad thing to be too emotional. As we discussed earlier, some people have different gifts and abilities than others who generally live with being “overly emotional.”
While emotions are a completely normal part of life, there are times when they become too much for us to handle on our own. You may not want to seek outside help, or think that your problems are worthy of enlisting the help of a professional, but there’s no harm in doing so when you need to.
Because there are so many things that could be affecting your mood, there’s never a wrong time to head to the doctor for an evaluation. If you’re not one for proactive treatment, that’s okay too. Here’s a look at the signs and symptoms you might be experiencing that is a good indicator that you should seek some outside help with your feelings.
- Irritability
- Intense anger
- Difficulty sleeping
- Prolonged disruption to your daily life
- Difficulty managing work or family obligations
- Thoughts of harming yourself or others
- Feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness
If you don’t feel comfortable enlisting the help of a stranger or a professional, you can always consider reaching out to a trusted family member or friend. Sometimes, asking for help can be the most challenging thing you do.
There’s no reason to suffer in silence. You shouldn’t go on feeling like your emotions are getting in the way of your well-being. The sooner you gather the courage to get the help you need, the sooner you’ll be on your way to feeling like yourself again.
Be Honest With Yourself
It can be tough for people to come to terms with things like emotional health, mental health, and things of that nature. Many families don’t openly talk about their feelings, and children aren’t raised to be forthcoming about things like mental health.
The only person who’s genuinely affected by ignoring the signs is you. So, if you’re reading this because you’ve felt a certain way about things lately, take some time and permit yourself to be honest with yourself about what’s going on.
Be Kind to Yourself
You could be feeling emotional lately because you’re a highly sensitive person who’s become overburdened. You could also be going through something that’s taking an emotional toll on you. In either instance, don’t let anyone get you down by telling you that you’re too much to handle or that you’re overly sensitive.
People who aren’t going through what you’re going through should take up no space in your head, so don’t let the thoughts of others get you down. The real issue is whether or not you’re struggling with your current state of emotions.
Whether you think you need to reach out and get a little help from a trusted friend or go in to see your primary care physician, it’s completely OK to ask for the help you need.
Wrapping Up
There’s no shortage of reasons why you’re feeling so emotional. Once you’ve narrowed down the reason why you’re feeling the way you do, you might be feeling like you can handle your emotions better. On the other hand, you may have figured out that you’d like to consider getting some help with your situation.
In either case, it’s important to remember that you should be kind to yourself. There’s no shame or blame in being human. If you’re feeling comfortable where you’re at, then keep on going, and don’t be afraid to own your feelings. The only person whose opinion matters about your feelings is you.