Have you ever found yourself lying awake at night worrying about whether everyone else is okay? Wondering if someone is upset, whether they're making the right decisions, or what you might need to do to help them?

I used to do this all the time. Quite literally, I would lie in bed going through each of my siblings in my head, one by one, thinking about whether they were okay and what I needed to do to make sure they stayed that way. As the eldest child, I'd somehow taken on this responsibility of looking after everyone, and for years I didn't really question it.

At the time, I genuinely believed I was being loving and caring. And of course I loved them, but looking back now, I can see how much unnecessary emotional responsibility I was carrying around with me. It was exhausting, and I didn't even realise I was doing it.

Why Feeling Responsible for Everyone Else's Feelings Can Be So Exhausting

I think it's helpful to look at the difference between practical responsibility and emotional responsibility, because they're two very different things.

For example, I have a young daughter. I have a practical responsibility to feed her, get her to school and take care of her. That's just part of being a parent, and I'm certainly not suggesting we stop doing those things!

But recently, when I was unwell with a sickness bug, some of our usual routines went out of the window. My daughter had microwave meals for a couple of days (which, by the way, she absolutely loves!), and we just did what we needed to do to get through.

Now, the practical responsibility was taken care of. She was fed, happy and looked after. But I could quite easily have added another layer of thinking about whether giving her microwave meals made me a bad parent.

And that's the emotional weight I'm talking about.

So much of what we carry isn't actually about what needs doing. It's all the thinking we add around it. Whether we've done enough, whether someone is happy with us, whether we're letting people down or whether something might go wrong.

I've explored this further in my article about the hidden exhaustion of overthinking, because sometimes it's the stuff happening in our heads that's tiring us out more than what we're physically doing.

When Worry Starts to Look Like Love

One of the things I've come to see over the years is how easily we confuse worrying about somebody with loving them.

For a long time, I almost felt that if I wasn't worrying about my siblings, I wasn't doing my job properly. If they were unhappy or making decisions I didn't agree with, I felt I needed to step in and sort it out.

But what was I actually trying to achieve?

When I look back now, I can see that I was trying to create a sense of security for myself. I thought that if everybody around me was okay, then I could finally feel okay too.

The problem with that, of course, is that other people are living their own lives, having their own thoughts, feelings and experiences. No matter how much we love them, we cannot control any of that.

And actually, we don't need to.

This was something we explored recently in one of my membership's All About sessions, where I asked everyone to consider a question:

Whose feelings have I been quietly in charge of this week?

I love that word quietly, because so often we're doing it without even noticing. It becomes such a normal part of how we operate that we barely recognise the weight until we're feeling overwhelmed.

What If the People You Love Have Their Own Wisdom Too?

Something else I find really interesting is how readily we recognise our own ability to figure things out, yet when it comes to the people we love, we sometimes forget that they have that same ability.

We all have access to our own wisdom, including our children, partners, friends and family.

That doesn't mean they're always going to make decisions we agree with. Of course they won't. And it doesn't mean we stop offering help or being there when we're needed.

But sometimes, when we're constantly trying to solve things for other people, we're not giving them the opportunity to discover what they're capable of themselves.

I've spoken before about staying in your own lane and trusting your wisdom, and I think this understanding is just as valuable when it comes to trusting the wisdom of those around us.

Letting Go of Emotional Responsibility Doesn't Have to Be Another Thing to Do

When we talk about letting go, it's tempting to start wondering how we actually do it. How do I stop worrying? How do I stop feeling responsible? How do I make myself think differently?

But I don't want to give you another job to do here.

In my experience, letting go happens much more naturally when we begin to see what we're doing and understand where that heavy feeling is coming from.

We spend so much time rehearsing things that haven't happened yet, imagining how people might feel, what decisions they'll make and what might go wrong. Yet when something actually happens, we can respond to what's in front of us, with the wisdom and understanding we have in that moment.

We can still turn up for people, love them, support them and be incredibly helpful without taking responsibility for making their entire experience of life okay.

So I'll leave you with the same question I shared with my members, and there's no need to analyse it or work out the perfect answer.

What would I do here if I didn't have to make everyone okay?

Just get curious about that, because perhaps there's a lot more room for you to enjoy your own life when you're not so busy trying to manage everybody else's.

A Little More to Explore

If you'd like to understand more about why we get so caught up in our thinking, and how we can begin to experience life differently, I've created a free three-part mini course called Understand Anxiety, Overthinking & Fear Differently.

It's an introduction to The Unrestricted Model®, where I share a different way of understanding thought, fear and our own innate wellbeing, without giving you more things to fix or manage.

You can join me for the free mini course here.

Lots of love,

Sarie x