- What are the scientifically trackable personality traits
in empaths?
Today's video is gonna be kind of controversial
because in a way I'm gonna be demystifying
a bit of what's going on in the brain of the empath.
Now, a lot of what I talk about on this channel
has to do with Myers-Briggs personality typology
but here's the thing,
Myers-Briggs isn't so scientific.
The only scientific personality measurement
is the Big Five.
What the Big Five is
are five personality traits
and you are rated on a scale,
whether you're high or low in each of these traits.
Everyone has all five
but it's just a matter of seeing
on the scale where are you,
high or low.
Those traits really quick
you can remember them with the acronym OCEAN.
It's openness,
conscientiousness,
extroversion, which we've all heard of,
agreeableness, which is pretty self-explanatory,
and neuroticism.
Ooh.
Let's do it, let's demystify a little bit
of what's going on with an empath.
So, three of those five that I mentioned
seem to me to jump out specifically
as traits that an empath is going to be very high in.
So, first of all,
an empath is going to be high in agreeableness, very high.
It sounds pretty self-explanatory, doesn't it?
It means you are willing to go along
with what other people want.
You're going to be kind,
compassionate, tolerant, cooperative.
You're not gonna stand your ground and say,
no, let's not do that.
You'll be like, sure, you wanna do X Y Z, let's do it.
Sure, you have these feelings?
Let's go along with it.
It's like in my last video about empaths
called The Truth About Empaths.
I talk about how as an empath
you're gonna struggle a little bit with drawing boundaries.
That comes with being high in agreeableness,
this personality trait.
People who are high in agreeableness,
specially the compassion aspect of agreeableness,
are gonna be very interested in other people's problems
and wanting to help them out.
You're gonna be very interested
in making other people feel better,
but the flip side of it is
you're gonna have a tough time
standing up for yourself and your own feelings.
Yeah, sure, it's good that you're able to be compassionate
and help others,
but there's the problem
of not being able to assert yourself.
And that's something that I think
you can work on a little bit,
work on drawing your boundaries,
work on saying no from time to time.
Next, empaths are high in openness.
Sometimes this is called openness to experience.
People who are high in openness are very creative.
Openness is basically like creativity and imagination.
High openness people are gonna be very intrigued
by complex situations and complex problems.
They're gonna want to tease it out and solve it.
It's also gonna make you very inventive
and looking for new ideas.
Like I said, it's creative.
When you're high in openness,
this is also going to lead you
to get really into your imagination,
which can play into getting really into stories
that aren't your own,
getting into other people's stories.
And you see, that's what empaths do.
It's they're feeling the emotions of others
and in many ways it's like we are diving into their story,
another person's life.
Now, being high in openness to experience
sounds like it's all good, all upside, right?
Well, there's one bad thing.
And that's when you're so creative
and you're so focused on teasing out complex things
that it can cause you to overwork that
and constantly question yourself.
Do you see the pattern here
that empaths are so good at focusing outward
that the issues come when it comes to focusing inward?
So when you're high in openness,
you might question yourself a lot
and you might feel lost.
Specially when you're getting lost in someone else's story,
you might lose your own bearings
about what you're doing in your life.
When you're so caught up in someone else's feelings,
you might question, what do I actually feel?
And the third personality trait
that empaths are very high in is,
believe it or not,
neuroticism.
And neuroticism is,
it sounds negative, doesn't it?
But what it really is
is the sensitivity to negative emotion.
So, for a neurotic person, a highly neurotic person,
you're going to be constantly seeing
where things could wrong,
you might also just assume that everything is going wrong,
and you're going to look for worst-case scenarios,
maybe turn everything into a catastrophe in your mind.
On the extreme side of high neuroticism.
Now, why is this something that an empath has?
Well, being an empath means
you can pick on other people's emotions,
but I think a lot of the times what we mean is
we feel out when someone's not feeling good.
We can really feel out the negative emotions.
We walk in a room and we just feel something's off.
We're sensitive to the negative emotion.
And the drawback, obviously, it's a high neuroticism,
is it can lead to depression and anxiety.
Specially if it's not yours to begin with,
it's not your negative feelings to begin with
but you just can't help pick it up.
And it's almost like you feel a responsibility
to pick up these emotions around you.
The good thing about being highly neurotic
is that it's a way of avoiding danger.
So if you are neurotic,
you might actually plan well enough
to be able to hit off
certain things that could be dangerous.
But when it comes to just being an empath,
you have to be able to pick up
on the rough stuff in life.
You have to be able to see where the suffering is,
where the things that need to be made better are.
Those three things you will find in every empath.
Now, is that it to an empath?
No.
I feel like there's more to it.
But if there is anything that can be tracked
in the real world
to show that there is actually something to being an empath
and it's not just something someone made up,
it's that,
those personality traits in the Big Five system.
I hope you'll check out my video about the Big Five,
where I took the personality test.
And also if you check out my other video about empaths,
The Truth About Empaths,
I think you'll get a lot out of it
if you haven't seen it already.
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Why not?
Thanks for watching, until next time.
Stay cool and attractive.