Choose who gets your energy: Why some people lift you up and others leave you exhausted

Have you ever spent an hour with somebody and walked away feeling lighter, happier and somehow more energised than you were before you saw them? Then there are the other conversations. You haven’t done anything particularly strenuous; you might have simply had a coffee, answered a phone call or spent half an hour listening to somebody talk, yet afterwards you feel completely exhausted.

Most of us have people in our lives who seem to energise us and others who, for whatever reason, drain us. It doesn’t necessarily mean the second group are bad people, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should start removing everybody from our lives who occasionally has a bad day. However, paying attention to how we feel around the people we spend our time with can tell us something important about our own wellbeing, because our time and emotional energy aren’t unlimited.

The people who fill your cup

Think about the people you genuinely enjoy spending time with. They’re often the ones around whom you don’t have to perform. You can tell them something good that’s happened without worrying they’ll find a way to diminish it, and you can tell them something difficult without every conversation immediately becoming about them. You laugh, you listen to each other and, importantly, there’s a balance.

You might leave their company feeling encouraged, calmer or simply glad you made the effort to see them. Those relationships matter. Good social connections can provide emotional support, a sense of belonging and somewhere safe to share both the brilliant and thoroughly rubbish parts of life. Having lots of people around you, however, isn’t necessarily the same thing as having good relationships. You can know hundreds of people and still feel lonely, while one or two genuinely supportive relationships can make an enormous difference.

What exactly is an emotional vampire?

“Emotional vampire” isn’t a medical or psychological diagnosis. It’s an informal expression used to describe somebody whose interactions consistently leave other people feeling emotionally depleted, and most of us can probably think of at least one person we’ve encountered who fits the description.

Perhaps every conversation is a crisis. There is always somebody who has wronged them, something that has gone terribly wrong or another drama requiring your immediate attention. You listen, reassure them, suggest solutions and try to help, only to find yourself having exactly the same conversation a few days later. There are other versions too: the person who constantly criticises, the friend who competes with every piece of good news, the relative who uses guilt to get what they want or the colleague whose negativity manages to suck the enthusiasm out of an entire room.

Sometimes the exhausting part isn’t even what somebody says. It’s the amount of emotional work you find yourself doing whenever you’re with them. You might constantly monitor their mood, choose your words carefully, try not to upset them, reassure them or make yourself smaller to keep everything comfortable. When you regularly come away from interactions feeling drained, anxious or relieved that they’re over, it may be worth paying attention to that pattern.

Having problems doesn’t make somebody draining

There is an important distinction to make here. Someone needing support does not make them an emotional vampire. People experience grief, divorce, illness, financial problems, relationship difficulties, worries about their children and periods when life is simply horrible. Friendship isn’t supposed to mean only being available when somebody is cheerful, positive and easy company.

There will be times when somebody you love needs far more from you than they are capable of giving back, and there will almost certainly be times when you’re that person too. Healthy relationships aren’t perfectly balanced every day, and nor should they be. The balance becomes apparent over months and years rather than individual conversations.

A better question is whether there is generally room in the relationship for both of you. Can you have a problem too? Do they listen when you speak? Can they celebrate something good happening in your life without turning it into a competition? Do they ever ask how you are and actually listen to the answer? There is a big difference between supporting someone through a difficult period and being in a relationship where one person’s needs permanently dominate.

Pay attention to how people make you feel

One of the simplest ways to understand the relationships in your life is to start noticing how you feel after spending time with people. You don’t need to analyse every conversation or start conducting friendship performance reviews, but your emotional response can sometimes tell you something you’ve been overlooking.

Think about the people who make you laugh, encourage you and allow you to completely relax. Who can you sit with without worrying about what you’re saying? Who are you genuinely pleased to see? Who celebrates your successes without making you feel guilty for having them? These are often the people whose company restores rather than depletes us.

Then think about the opposite. Whose name appearing on your phone immediately makes your heart sink? Who leaves you questioning yourself after you’ve spoken to them? Who manages to turn every conversation towards something negative? Who expects you to repeatedly solve problems they have no intention of changing? One difficult conversation tells you very little about a relationship, but when the same feeling happens repeatedly, it may be telling you something worth hearing.

Boundaries don’t have to mean cutting somebody off

We hear a lot about boundaries, particularly on social media, where the solution to almost every difficult relationship can sometimes appear to be cutting somebody out of your life entirely. Real relationships are usually much more complicated than that. The person draining you could be somebody you work with, a relative you love, a lifelong friend or somebody going through circumstances that make you reluctant to step away.

Setting a boundary doesn’t have to involve a confrontation or dramatic announcement. It can simply mean deciding that you don’t have to answer every phone call immediately, saying that you haven’t got the headspace for a particular conversation tonight, or spending an hour with somebody rather than an entire afternoon. It might mean refusing to become involved in every disagreement you’re invited into or recognising that another adult’s problems don’t automatically become yours to solve.

You can care deeply about somebody without being permanently available to them. You can also love someone while acknowledging that you need to limit how much emotional energy a particular relationship consumes. Both things can be true at the same time.

When you’re always the person everybody needs

This can be particularly important for people who naturally fall into caring roles. If you’re the dependable one in your family, the manager everybody calls when something goes wrong, the friend who always listens, a healthcare professional who spends their working day looking after other people or somebody caring for a loved one at home, it can become incredibly easy to spend your entire life responding to other people’s needs.

Being needed can feel good, but constantly being needed can also be exhausting. If your working day involves giving your attention and emotional energy to other people, and your personal relationships require exactly the same thing when you get home, there may eventually be very little left for you. Protecting some of your emotional capacity isn’t selfish; it is part of recognising that you have needs as well.

Make time for the people who make life feel lighter

Being more conscious about who gets your time isn’t only about limiting difficult relationships. It is just as important to invest in the good ones, particularly because those are often the relationships we accidentally neglect when life becomes busy.

Call the friend who always makes you laugh. Have lunch with the person you can talk to for three hours without noticing the time. Make plans with people who are genuinely pleased when something goes well for you and who don’t require you to edit yourself depending on their mood. These are the relationships that can easily be taken for granted precisely because they don’t demand our constant attention.

Adult life becomes busy remarkably quickly. Work, children, caring responsibilities, relationships, appointments, housework and the endless list of things we’re all supposed to remember can mean friendships are given whatever scraps of time remain. We can spend hours dealing with the people who demand our attention while forgetting to make time for the people whose company we actually enjoy.

Choose carefully who gets most of you

We talk a lot about protecting our physical health. We exercise, try to sleep enough, drink more water and occasionally convince ourselves that this will finally be the week we eat significantly more vegetables. Yet our wellbeing is also affected by the environments and relationships we repeatedly put ourselves in.

You cannot control everybody you encounter, and you certainly don’t need to divide the world into people who are “positive” and people who are “toxic”. Human beings are far more complicated than that. Good people can have difficult periods, friendships can go through challenging phases and sometimes the person doing the emotional draining might even be us.

What we can do is become more conscious of the patterns. We can notice which relationships are consistently one-sided, recognise when we’re giving more than we can sustain and create boundaries where we need them. At the same time, we can make a deliberate effort to give more of our limited time to the people who make us feel supported, comfortable, understood and happy.

Our time is one of the few things we cannot earn back once we’ve spent it. Choosing who gets a significant part of it isn’t cruel or selfish; it is part of looking after ourselves.

Some people will leave you feeling heavier and some will make life feel a little lighter. We can’t always choose who enters our lives, but where we do have a choice, it is worth choosing carefully.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.

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