5 Signs Someone Is Draining Your Energy (And What to Do About It)

Jay Shetty (0:01)

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Have you ever seen someone's name appear on your phone and felt your body react before you even read the message? Your shoulders tie in, your stomach drops, you pause for a few seconds, trying to decide whether you have enough energy to answer. Nothing has even happened yet, but your body is already preparing for the conversation. Maybe you know the call will last longer than you want it to. Maybe you know you're about to hear the same problem you've discussed five times before. Maybe you're worried that if you say the wrong thing, they'll become angry, disappointed or distant. We all know people like this in our lives. The more time you spend with them, the more exhausted you feel. We often dismiss those reactions because we don't think we have enough evidence to justify them. We tell ourselves, they're going through a difficult time, or I should be more sympathetic. We worry that we're being impatient, selfish, traumatic or unkind. We look for one terrible thing the person has done, and when we can't find it, we decide the exhaustion must be our fault. But what if the exhaustion is information? What if your body is recognizing a pattern your mind has become used to explaining away? And what if I told you that the stress created by those relationships is actually following you into your sleep, your thoughts, your nervous system, and potentially into the way your body ages? A 2026 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the health effects of what the researchers called hastlers. They defined hastlers as people in someone's close social network who often hassled them, caused problems, or made life more difficult. The study included more than 2,300 adults in Indiana ranging in age from 18 to 103, and nearly 30% of people reported having at least one hastler in their social network. Researchers collected saliva samples and studied patterns in DNA methylation, which can be used to estimate biological aging. The researchers found that each additional hastler in a person's network was associated with a 1.5% faster pace of biological aging and approximately nine months of additional biological age. Simply having any hastler was associated with a 2.6% faster pace of aging and roughly 15 months of accelerated biological age. The effects appeared particularly pronounced among people who reported having family hastlers. Now, I want to be realistic about what this study does and does not tell us. It found an association, but it did not prove that one difficult person directly caused someone's body to age faster. Of course, the researchers acknowledge that other explanations may contribute as well.

But the study does add to something we already know about chronic stress. Stress is not confined to our thoughts. Your body participates in every relationship you have. It responds when you feel safe, supported and understood. And it responds when you feel criticized, trapped or constantly on alert. Recently, energy vampires has become a popular term for friends who leave us feeling emotionally depleted. I wonder if even me just saying energy vampires, brought a certain person to the front of your mind. Look, the person affecting your energy may not be cruel. They may not be intentionally manipulative. They may love you and you may love them. I know personally that some of the hardest relationships to understand are the ones that contain real affection alongside recurring stress. So today, I want to help you recognize when a dynamic is rooted in just ordinary relational friction or when it has turned into something genuinely chronically stressful. We are going to explore 5 signs that someone may be costing you more energy than you realize. And for each sign, I want to give you a practical way to shift the way you respond to them moving forward. As you listen, try not to just ask, who in my life does this? Also ask yourself, have I ever created this experience for someone else? Most of us have drained another person at some point. We've dominated a conversation, expected someone to solve a problem we were unwilling to address, or become so consumed by our own pain that we forgot to ask about theirs. Self-awareness should move in both directions, because healthy relationships are built by recognizing what we receive and what we repeatedly ask others to carry. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.