Sometimes, and seemingly more and more, I just feel entirely wiped out after spending time around certain people. Emotional vampires — that’s what we call them.
Maybe it’s the friend whose relationship problems always end up taking over girls’ night. Or that one coworker whose stress somehow always raises your blood pressure. Or after your teenager’s latest emotional outburst, you feel like you need to lie down and take a big ol’ nap.
But lately, it feels like I’m absorbing other people’s anxiety, sadness, frustration, and stress to a degree that I’m just plain… depleted. And after hearing a few other mom friends vent about feeling the same way, it made me wonder: What does it mean when you’re exhausted by other people’s emotions?
The default response is chalking this up to being “an empath.” However, experts say that’s not necessarily what’s happening.
There’s a Difference Between Empathy and Emotional Overload
One of the biggest misconceptions, say experts, is that empathy automatically means absorbing other people’s feelings.
“People often use ‘empath’ as a catch-all, but clinically speaking, there is a meaningful difference between empathy and emotional overwhelm,” says Ellie Holmberg, licensed clinical social worker and founder of Stillwater Therapy. “Empathy is the ability to understand and emotionally resonate with someone’s experience while staying anchored in your own. Emotional overwhelm happens when that boundary blurs. You are no longer witnessing someone’s feelings; you are absorbing them.”
A helpful way to think about it? “Empathy says, ‘I can sit with you in this.’ Overwhelm says, ‘I am drowning in this with you.’”
Signs You’ve Crossed the Line From Caring to Carrying
If you’re wondering if you’ve wandered into unhealthy territory, somatic trauma therapist Chloë Bean, LMFT, says there are some common red flags:
- You leave most interactions feeling drained instead of more connected.
- You feel responsible for how everyone is feeling around you and anxious if they’re not OK.
- You can clock a shift in someone’s mood from across the room, and your system goes into alert mode.
- You’re probably amazing at tracking everyone else’s needs and kind of lost when it comes to your own.
“When empathy is healthy, you can care without it costing your sense of self. When it’s tipped over, caring and self-abandonment start to blend,” cautions Bean.
Dr. Carson Brown, an integrative psychiatrist who specializes in working with highly sensitive people, points out that it’s easy for this to slip into codependency. “It becomes unhealthy when the empathetic person is trying to control the other person’s behaviors,” Brown says, i.e., “I don’t want to feel nervous, so you need to send that email. I don’t want to feel worried, so you need to stop drinking.”
Why It Feels So Exhausting
This is clearly an emotional issue, but it’s a nervous system issue too — and, as Bean puts it, “it’s really hard on the nervous system.” Basically, you’re keeping your body in low-grade fight-or-flight mode.
“Our nervous systems have the capacity to hold one person’s emotions: our own,” says Brown. “When we are taking on the emotions of others in addition, we are overtaxing what our nervous system is meant to manage.”
And this eventually manifests itself in all sorts of ways.
“Over time, this shows up as exhaustion, trouble sleeping, irritability, tension, and even GI issues,” says Bean. “The nervous system wasn’t meant to stay on monitoring mode around the clock. So that bone-deep tired a lot of women talk about isn’t laziness; it’s the bill due for being hyper-attuned to everyone else for years.”
This kind of constant nervous system activation can even lead you to swing too far in the opposite direction.
“People sometimes get very isolated because, rather than learning how to titrate responses to other people’s emotions, they just avoid people altogether in order to feel calmer,” says Brown.
If You Guessed This Can Trace Back To Childhood, You Nailed It
Several experts pointed to a surprisingly common source of this pattern: growing up feeling responsible for the emotions of the grownups around you.
“So many women I work with learned to read the room before they could even read a book,” shares Bean. “If you grew up with a parent who was unpredictable or emotionally volatile, you figured out early that keeping others regulated was how you stayed safe and connected.”
As someone who that hits home pretty hard for, oof. The problem, of course, is that the very response that helped protect us as kids is the same one that can so often lead to burnout in adulthood.
How to Care Without Carrying Too Much
OK, that was a lot to unload on you. The good news? Experts say establishing healthy boundaries can help and, no, boundaries do not require being uncaring or detached. In fact, they often make relationships stronger.
“This is where people get stuck, because they assume boundaries mean becoming cold or shutting people out,” says Bean. “It doesn’t. A boundary isn’t a wall to keep people out — it’s a line that lets you stay in the room without losing yourself.”
According to Holmberg, this means practicing regulated empathy.
“That means staying compassionate without over-identifying,” she explains. “Healthy emotional boundaries can look like reminding yourself, ‘This feeling belongs to them, not me,’ allowing pauses before responding, and resisting the urge to fix or absorb everything. You can care deeply without taking ownership of someone else’s emotional experience.”
You can accomplish this through small, consistent shifts, reassures Holmberg:
- Do quick emotional check-ins after intense interactions.
- Limit emotional multitasking.
- Build in nervous system resets throughout the day, such as movement, stepping outside, or slowing your breathing.
- Practice tolerating the discomfort of not rescuing others.
Because, contrary to what so many of us have been taught, being a caring person does not mean becoming an emotional sponge.
“Emotional capacity is not infinite. Being a caring person does not mean being endlessly available at your own expense,” reminds Holmberg. “The healthiest form of empathy includes you in the equation.”
