As an empath, you feel everything, and there’s no way to stop this sensitivity: it’s just who you are. All the feelings and emotions of other people and all other Universes of energy, plants, objects, places and so forth, are always arriving at you. And so, one of the ways to temporarily stop this information from permeating your Self is to distract yourself with an addiction.
Alcohol or drugs or food, for example, shift your vibration higher or lower, depending on the substance. This takes you out of empath mode, into a mode where you’re not as aware. With addictions that are exercise based, as another example, exertion releases endorphins that bring euphoria, which again takes us away from feeling all the world’s pain.
Now, exercise is a great tool for empaths, but when we start to use it too much, it becomes a distraction, just like anything else. For many empaths, meditation can also be a distraction: we go into bliss state, and we never want to come back out!
If you are an empath using habits as a distraction, or as a way to lift you from the pain of everything, consider that there is another way.
Instead of numbing, you can open.
Instead of blocking, you can surrender.
In other words, you can use your empathic nature to open to everything. It is a different approach, and it is scary at first.
But when you open to love, Oneness and yourself as soul, your experience changes.