Why Do I Feel Empty: The Real Story
Feeling empty was what I related to most in my experience of being unhappy. I always felt disconnected, emotionally numb, and checked out.
I did everything I could to deny and suppress how empty I felt. It wasn't anything I wanted to know about myself. I thought I was alone and like there was something wrong with me because I felt so empty on the inside.
After working with hundreds of women over the years, I now know emptiness is one of the most common feelings we experience in our unhappiness.
While doing research for this article, I learned that the experts – the psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists – are confused about our feelings of emptiness. It’s the last human experience anyone wants to go into to express and understand.
So, today I want to pull the curtain back to help you understand our human experience of emptiness and what to do about it.
Let’s dive in.
What Is the Experience of Feeling Empty?
For a long time, I thought emptiness was a nebulous and vague feeling I couldn't pinpoint. I struggled to describe my experience beyond saying that I felt empty.
I had to learn to define my experience so that I could resolve it. I help my clients do the same – to shine the flashlight on the things we suppress and deny about ourselves.
We believe if we explore our experience of feeling empty, we’ll get stuck there when it is actually the very thing that will free us.
Our emptiness doesn't have to be so vague or nebulous that we can't clearly define it to resolve and overcome it. I want to share with you what myself and my clients have described as our experience of emptiness.
As you read, slow down and see if you can relate to this experience of yourself feeling empty:
I feel checked out and numb.
I have no connection to myself or reality.
I feel like I have disappeared from myself and my life.
I shut myself off. I don't want to feel anything.
I have nothing left to give me.
I have created nothing for myself in my life that feels meaningful and purposeful.
I put myself last. I don't want me.
Feeling empty is essentially the experience of “no me.”
We feel empty because we are not connected to ourselves.
It is why we struggle so much, feeling like we don't know who we are and that we morph into who we need to be to get approval, acceptance, and validation. It's why we feel inauthentic and like we don't know how to define ourselves.
The experience of emptiness and “no me” is why we feel like we have no identity of our own.
Now that we know the experience of feeling empty, let’s explore why it’s there in the first place.
Where Does My Emptiness Come From?
Here is the real story.
I have a straightforward perspective to explain our human experience of emptiness. It no longer needs to be overwhelming, confusing, or complicated to understand why we feel empty.
It all comes down to what I call external value.
External value is our human condition of unknowingly seeking our meaning, purpose, and sense of self-worth outside of us in the people and things in our lives.
Think of all the different relationships we use to define who we are, make us feel good, and give us meaning and purpose:
Marriage
Being a mom
A job or career
Money
Where we live
Degrees and credentials
Family
The problem with external value is that we never develop internal self-value or our own sense of meaning and purpose in who we are. We depend on the people and things in our lives to fill us up.
I often say it's like we are a bucket with holes in it. When we use our outside world to fill us up, it doesn't sustain us.
The external value we get from the people and things in our lives leaks right out, causing us to feel an emptiness and a void.
In our humanness, we reach back out to our external world to try to fill up our emptiness, but it never goes away.
We can all relate to this experience. Think about when we get the job, the marriage or relationship, or go on vacation. We feel good for a bit, but then we feel that nagging emptiness again and look for the next thing to fill us back up.
Our emptiness comes from within and our inability to connect with ourselves to be our own meaning and purpose.
Now that we know where it comes from, how common of an experience is feeling empty?
Is Feeling Empty a Common Experience?
The short answer is yes, of course.
It is human nature to try to fill ourselves up with the people and things in our external world. So as humans, we experience feeling empty.
When we are stuck in our emptiness, it is common to feel like we're the only ones that feel this way. We seek evidence that everyone else is doing great and must never feel empty. We begin to believe that there must be something wrong with us.
In working with hundreds of women over the years, I can assure you there is nothing wrong with you and that you are not alone.
Feeling empty is one of the most common symptoms of being unhappy.
The woman next to you in yoga feels empty. Your boss feels empty. The woman you see smiling in the grocery store feels empty. Your friends on Facebook and Instagram who look like they have dream lives feel empty.
I don’t want to paint a depressing view of the people around us. I am highlighting that feeling empty is our human condition.
Themes of Feeling Empty in Pop Culture
Look at the plethora of movies and songs whose underlying theme is emptiness.
Watch any sad movie or even a movie about ordinary, everyday life, and you will see the theme of feeling empty woven through the story.
Even romantic comedies have an underlying theme of emptiness. People search for love and a relationship because they think it will fill them up and dissolve their feelings of emptiness. It’s why we relate so much as women to romantic comedies.
Elizabeth Gilbert's book and movie, Eat Pray Love is all about her journey to Italy and India, desperate to fill the emptiness she felt within herself.
You can also look at social media to see that the people who paint the brightest picture of their lives on Instagram or Facebook feel the emptiest. They put their lives on display to cover up the disconnection and emptiness they feel within themselves. When we’re honest, we all know that, but we fall for the game and convince ourselves we’re alone in how we feel.
Hopefully, it is clear now that feeling empty is a widespread, normal experience we all have.
Before I give you a simple three-step process to overcome emptiness, let’s explore what the experts say to do about it.
What the Experts Say to Do About Feeling Empty
While doing my research for this article, the information I found from the experts was inconclusive and daunting to me.
The articles I researched were from three notable mental health resources online:
1) Verywell Mind: I Feel Empty: What Does It Mean If You Feel This Way?
2) PsychCentral: Feeling Empty? What It Means and What to Do
3) BetterHelp: I Feel Empty: What You Can Do When You're Feeling Down or Feel Nothing
Each of these articles is well-meaning in trying to help people who feel empty. However, as someone who’s been through it and is on the other side, it’s clear that the experts don’t have the answers or truly understand where our feelings of emptiness come from.
The most recommended suggestion from the experts on overcoming feeling empty is trying to pinpoint where it’s coming from. All the resources said it could be a host of different things why we feel empty:
Life events or challenging circumstances
Your past and painful experiences from childhood
Your upbringing
Mental illness
Exhaustion from too many demands at work or your family
Boredom with your job
Boredom with your relationships
How confusing to look at so many different things trying to figure out what could be making us feel empty.
How are we to know what’s actually causing it or that we are even on the right track?
Pinning feeling empty to something other than ourselves is a surefire way to make our experience complicated and stay stuck.
What the experts say to do about emptiness isn’t any more helpful :
Ask for help from others and delegate your responsibilities
Journal
Incorporate regular naps into your life
Try breathing exercises or meditation
Join a class or seek online support
Set life goals that establish meaning
Set up regular friend time
Again, these suggestions are all well-meaning, but being on the other side and knowing where emptiness comes from and what to do about it, they don’t work.
They are band-aids that only provide temporary relief, at best, from feeling empty.
I tried many of them, but all they did was cover my emptiness up for a little while until it all came creeping back in.
When we don’t resolve feeling empty, it’s always there waiting for us as soon as something else comes along to shake it up.
So, if the experts don’t have the answers, what does work to overcome feelings of emptiness?
3 Simple Steps to Stop Feeling Empty
I want to give you the same simple process I teach my clients to resolve feeling empty and begin creating internal happiness. It is a universal solution that works no matter your life’s circumstances or anything that’s happened in your past.
Step 1: Normalize Your Feelings of Emptiness
We must normalize our experience. We don't feel empty because there's something wrong with us. We are not broken.
We must understand that feeling empty is a universal human experience that we all have.
The purpose of normalizing and seeing emptiness as a common human experience is to see it pragmatically and not make it so big. When we think we're the only ones feeling this way, our experience is insurmountable. It becomes so big and overwhelming that we can't overcome it.
When we normalize feeling empty, we can do something about it and approach it from a non-emotional place to resolve it.
Step 2: Realize Your Emptiness is You
Feeling empty isn’t because of our past or upbringing. It's not because of our relationships or jobs. It’s not the hardships or losses we’ve experienced.
Our emptiness isn’t caused by anything that’s happened to us.
Remember, we can't do anything about it if we think it is something outside us or in our past. We're trapped in our emptiness because now we need something outside of us to change for our experience to be different.
The truth is we have no control over anyone but ourselves.
We must realize our emptiness comes from us and our human experience of looking to our external world to fill us up and give us meaning and purpose.
When we don't have meaning and purpose in ourselves, we are the empty bucket with holes, and everything leaks right out – that's why we feel empty.
It's coming from ourselves, not anything external.
My emptiness was coming from me, which was a good thing because I could do something about it.
Step 3: Learn to Fill Your Cup
The one actionable thing we need to do to resolve feeling empty and create internal happiness is to learn to put ourselves first and fill our cups.
Filling your cup means making time for and prioritizing yourself in your life by doing the things you love. When you slow down to spend quality time with yourself doing the things you love, you begin to build internal self-value and feel good about who you are.
You connect with yourself, which fills the emptiness and the void with you.
Learn More About Filling Your Cup Here – Putting Yourself First: 3 Simple Steps
Putting yourself first to fill your cup is the solution to feeling empty.
Final Thoughts: Why Do I Feel Empty
I hope this article has given you a new perspective on feeling empty and what to do about it.
Bottom line?
No one and no ‘thing’ is missing from our lives to make us feel empty. It's not a relationship, kids, the perfect job, more money, a loving family, etc., that’s missing.
We feel empty because we are missing a connection to ourselves.
I felt empty because I was missing myself – I had no connection to myself. When I normalized my experience, accepted my emptiness was coming from me, and learned to put myself first to fill my cup, my emptiness dissipated. I began to value myself and feel good about myself on the inside.
The simple process I shared to resolve feeling empty is the path to being happy.
When we learn how to be happy, we resolve our emptiness.
Interested in Working with Me?
If you're ready to learn how to let go of feeling empty so you can be happy and vibrant in your life, schedule a free get-to-know-you call with me.
In my happiness course, Awakened Grace, I'm passionate about teaching women how to be happy and know who they are.
I would love to get to know you and see if Awakened Grace is your next best step for where you are on your path.
