Is your energy being drained?

Is someone in your life behaving like an “energy vampire”?

This behavior can be especially toxic, draining, and socially contagious since stress drives so much of our social interaction, especially online.

When you perceive someone else is struggling or in trouble, your sense of empathy may be energized by your nervous system to try to understand and help them—to reduce stress, to solve the problem, to achieve a healthful outcome. However, when your stress response is the desired outcome, then your effort to help actually fuels an unhealthful neurochemical cycle of stress-driven motivation.

When you’re trying to help to reduce stress, it can feel confusing, frustrating, and draining when you don’t achieve the healthful outcome you expect, and your efforts only fuel more stress!

Since unhealthful behaviors and emotions can be experienced in-person or online, it’s important to know what you can do to proactively and preventively protect YOUR OWN health and well-being while trying to support the health and well-being of others (to avoid perpetuating this toxic cycle of stress!).

How to protect your health & well-being (and theirs)

While using characterizations and metaphors like “energy vampire” can help illustrate and understand certain unhealthy behaviors, it’s important to know that calling someone a shameful name like “energy vampire” will only INCREASE their unconscious stress response and not lead to a healthful outcome (another reason this toxic cycle can be so hard to heal!).

When your good will, love, and compassion are used for another’s pleasure and reward without any concern or consideration for your health and well-being, it perpetuates a pattern of unhealthful codependence.

What makes codependent behaviors so toxic is that they cause CHRONIC STRESS, especially when the source of stress is someone you can’t avoid, like a family member or coworker.

This is why spending too much time with someone who continuously drains your emotional energy without any healthful resolve can make you mentally, emotionally, and even physically SICK.

Constantly having your stress level elevated and your emotional energy drained has a REAL impact on your health and well-being since chronic stress effects multiple systems in the body, including your immune, cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and central nervous systems.

To protect your health (and theirs), it’s important to use the following practices:

🧠 Avoid calling them an “energy vampire” (or any other derogatory name) even when they are behaving in a way that makes you want to call them every painful name in the book (fueled by your own unconscious stress response).

🧠 Avoid or limit contact (if you can).

🧠 Set healthful boundaries to know and communicate your own limits.

🧠 Lower your expectations to avoid feeling continually guilty or disappointed for not being able to help them (that is not their goal).

🧠 Be "too tired" for them (to conserve your energy).

🧠 Don't react or respond (to avoid reinforcing their toxic behavior with the stress response they want).

🧠 Know the difference between “venting” (i.e., emotional processing with accountability) and “dumping" (i.e., chronic and habitual complaining with no accountability).

🧠 Regulate your stress response to NOT overreact (that will only escalate the situation).

🧠 Consult other healthy people for assurance and support to maintain your own mental health and clarity.

🧠 Say “no” nicely (to protect your own health and well-being).