In this post we’re going to cover the 3 signs that your heart chakra is overactive, and how to fix it.

If you are looking for one section of this article in particular, you can use the links below to go straight to the relevant section:

• The 3 signs of an overactive heart chakra
• What causes an overactive heart chakra
• How to fix an overactive heart chakra

Before we get into the main part of the article, let’s just take a look at what the heart chakra is and where it is:

The heart plexus is the fourth chakra in the chakra system, and it’s found, funnily enough near your heart, in the centre of your chest.

The heart chakra is the centre of giving and receiving love, emotions & emotional attachments, self-esteem, empathy and forgiveness.

When the heart chakra is balanced, we take care of ourselves and we also behave with care and respect towards others. We are able to both express and receive love freely. We have solid self-esteem and we are able to empathise with others.

Now let’s take a look at the 3 major signs your heart chakra is overactive.

1. You overgive

The heart chakra is the centre of both giving and receiving love, affection and support. People with an overactive heart chakra can give love and support freely, but they go overboard with this, and have no boundaries around it. They often cannot receive back.

People with an overactive heart chakra consider other peoples’ needs to be much more important than their own. This leads to scenarios like:

Giving financially until their coffers are depleted. This results in situations like not being able to retire at age 75 because you gave all your money away to your kids or grandkids or to some cause that is important to you.

Giving of their energy until they are exhausted and have nothing left to give

Giving of their time, to the point where they don’t have time to pee.

Basically, people with heart chakra overactivity specialise in self-sacrifice. Deep down, they feel like it’s their job to save the world and other people from themselves. If they don’t do it, who will? That’s how they think.

They also tend to have a bleeding heart for every cause out there and if they do some kind of activism, they tend to spread themselves really thin. They really care about this cause, and that cause and also this one, and they try to dedicate themselves to all of it.

Now let’s have a look at the second indicator of an overactive heart chakra:

2. You’re floored by other peoples’ pain

Someone who has an overactive heart chakra tends to identify as an empath, and an overwhelmed one, at that. Overwhelmed empaths are people who feel and absorb other peoples’ negative emotions and cannot shake them off afterwards. Other peoples’ bad experiences and moods really affect them.

If you’d like to find out if you’re an empath (and if so, what kind) check out this article: What Kind of Empath Are You?

You can also find out if you’re a balanced or overwhelmed empath by reading this article.

If you identified as both an empath, and an overwhelmed one, from those articles, it means your heart chakra is overactive.

Next, onto another common sign of a heart chakra imbalance:

3. You love people who mistreat you

If you’re the kind of person who only sees the good in people (and ignores the shadow side), this is an indicator that your heart chakra is overactive.

People with a lot of energy running through their heart chakra tend to see the beauty in every soul, however this can mean they focus more on a person’s good points, even while that person is behaving badly. This is an unwillingness to see the truth of who someone really is, both the good and the bad.

So, if you have tolerated a lot of unacceptable behaviour over the course of your life, this is a sign that your heart chakra is out of balance. I’m talking things like violence, verbal abuse, mean words, intimidation, emotional abuse, gaslighting, and coercive or controlling relationships.

For this one to apply, there needs to be a pattern of accepting the unacceptable in relationships, and repeatedly staying when you should have left.

If you identified with more than one of the signs I mentioned above, your heart chakra is overactive.

Next, I am going to go into the most common reasons for an overactive heart chakra.

A common reason for ending up with an overactive heart chakra is that you grew up in an environment where you received the message that as a child, you were responsible for certain things (that in reality you couldn’t possibly be responsible for, because you were so young.)

So, if you were raised with alcoholic parents who acted like your role was to look after them, this does a real number on your heart chakra.

Anther example of this would be: if you were given the message that you had to excel academically to make your narcissistic parent feel OK about themselves, and that whether they were happy or not, was all down to you, that sort of thing is going to affect the development of your heart chakra. In situations like that, you end up with this belief that your role is to save others and make everything OK, at your own expense.

Basically, children who grow up in co-dependent environments tend to take these patterns into adulthood, and energetically, codependent patterns show up predominantly in the heart chakra, as overactivity.

Another reason for an overactive heart chakra is shaky self-worth and self-esteem. If you took a knock to your self-esteem early on in life (say, if you were bullied at school and given the message that you weren’t good enough), one of the ways you may feel OK about yourself later on is in being needed by others. The more you are needed, and the more you can give, the better you might feel about yourself.

So, low self-esteem sounds like under-activity in the heart chakra, but it can also cause over-activity.

Now let’s go into how we can balance an overactive heart chakra:

The #1 thing for people with an overactive heart chakra to work on, is putting themselves first and focusing on self-care. You can’t put someone else’s oxygen mask on if you don’t put your own on first.

The book ‘Codependent No More’ may be helpful for you if your heart chakra is overactive. ‘The Art of Extreme Self Care’ is another good book that may be helpful for people with an overactive heart chakra.

Another way to bring balance to the heart chakra is to release blockages in your solar plexus chakra. All chakras affect one another, and I’ve noticed there’s a particular knock on effect when the solar plexus chakra is underactive, it often results in a heart chakra imbalance.

Having a healthy and strong solar plexus means you are able to set healthy boundaries with others. In the absence of this, it is hard for the heart chakra to be in balance. Because the heart chakra represents giving and receiving love and support in ways that are nourishing for us and others. So if our boundaries are off because the solar plexus is out of balance, it affects that healthy balance of give and take at the heart chakra.

That’s what I mean when I say there is a real knock on effect for the heart chakra, when the solar plexus is out of balance.

If you resonated with the signs of heart chakra overactivity in this article, I recommend you read this article because it may well apply to you and be at the root of your heart chakra issue: Signs Your Solar Plexus Is Underactive & How to Fix It.

If you also identified as an overwhelmed empath, I recommend that you read my book for empaths – The Empath’s Toolkit: A Guide to Recovery for the Overwhelmed Empath.