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Have you ever thought that some people take more of your energy than others? That it can feel like you just had a hard workout coming out of a conversation? If you are nodding then stay tuned and find out how this is happening and what you can do to stop it. Let’s start protecting your energy!
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You might have listened to my last episode (Episode 16) where we talked about prioritizing yourself and taking back your energy and power. Today we are going to dive into something similar and at the same time completely different. It still has to do with the exchange of energy but in this case, you are not giving your energy away but you might be taking on other people’s energy. And I don´t mean the good kind of energy.
I start us off by explaining the concept with an example. Imagine you are on the phone with a good friend of yours and they are telling you about their latest trouble with their boss at work. As a good friend and listener give that friend the space to vent and to let it all out. You really engage in the conversation by providing support, maybe some advice. You want your friend to feel understood.
After half an hour of talking it all through, you get off the phone and you feel worn out. Your energy levels feel quite depleted. You might find yourself feeling a bit down. Have you ever had this after a conversation with someone? That you felt like your energy was sucked out of you? As if you just worked a 10 hour day in just 30 minutes?
I imagine that nearly all of us have had such an experience and we never stopped and wondered what the heck just happened. We might just take it for what it is. Maybe we think that this is how it works – that we feel sometimes just really tired after talking to someone specific or about a specific topic.
Two parts can happen in such an exchange and if you are more aware of each of them, you are in a much better position for it to not happen to you. You will be able to protect your energy levels better.
The first one is that you might have been influenced by the other person´s energy. Especially if your conversation partner focuses on negative events, blaming, complaining, judging, or speaking badly about other people.
“All of these kinds of conversations are charged with lower frequency energy and you might be taking on this energy without even knowing it.”
For you to experience that you are feeling more tired after the call, you probably felt more energetic and fine before the call, right? So you were in a good place 30 minutes earlier and then 30 minutes later you feel tired, worn out and depleted. The reason for that is that you could have allowed for the lower energy frequency of your friend to enter your energy field and lower your energy frequency without you being aware of it.
Like a text message can be sent in a matter of a second via your phone across the world, the same energy frequency from another person on the other end of the phone line impacts your energy frequency. Both, the text message and the words your friend is saying via the phone, are energies that are sent across the world in an instant.
The good news is that you don’t have to take on the lower energy vibe of your friend. And you can still be a good friend and listener to them. We will talk later about how we can do that.
But first, let me talk about the second part of what happens in an exchange that leaves you feeling exhausted.
The first one we just discussed was that we are taking on a lower energy vibe from another person and our energy vibe gets decreased without us even knowing it. The other reason why you feel tired after some conversation is that you spend too much of your own energy in the conversation.
You might get so sucked into the conversation that you start to be with your friend in the deep end of their drama or conflict. And your body starts to create the same feelings your friend has in that situation. It could be frustration, anger, aggression, or disappointment. And you suddenly start to feel all of this inside of you and your body does not understand that this is not your drama – so it starts to create a response to all of these feelings inside of you and it might mobilize stress chemicals.
Your body thinks you are in a stressful situation. But in reality, you are just listening to another person talking about a stressful situation. If you let yourself get too sucked into the situation, your body does not know the difference. It will start signalling stress inside of you. And what does that mean?
“That you are expending a lot of your own energy just by listening to somebody on the phone talking about something they are going through.”
You are spending your energy on your friend´s situation, their conflict with their boss, their drama of what they make that all mean. Either this is in your nature, maybe it’s a habit that you have had for a long time. Or you think by going in deep and feeling alongside your friend you are more empathetic or helpful to him or her.
Either way, no surprise that you feel exhausted after that call. You have just lived through a stressful situation – such a bummer that it was not even yours.
Now that I described these two options, do you see yourself in one or maybe both of these? Has a past situation come to your mind where you left a conversation and you felt like you needed a nap to recover? It might even be that this is something that happens a lot in your life. Your conversation partner or friend in this scenario is most likely not doing this on purpose – but it feels nice for somebody else to go all in. For a friend to fully understand our situation and feel for us – or better with us. It feels nice, it feels supported, and we feel understood at that moment.
So the solution is not to tell your friend to never talk about their problems ever again. That might not end well for your friendship. And it´s not necessary. You can learn to protect yourself, your energy levels and your energy frequency. Well, of course, if you are interested in it. You can choose to keep letting other people’s drama deplete you of your life energies.
It’s not that hard to start practising this. The important part is conscious practice. All you need is awareness of what is happening. For you to start observing when it happens or for you to already prepare yourself when you know it might happen. The awareness of it and stepping regularly into this awareness is all you need to start protecting yourself more. (Episode 45)
If I already know that I go into a conversation with a person that will have a negative vibe that I don’t want to take on, I just stay present and aware of it during the conversation. I visualize them having their energy field around them and myself having my field. And I just imagine that there is this invisible layer between our energies that protects me from the other person´s vibe.
I still will listen, I still support the other person, I still am empathetic to their situation and might give them advice. All the things that I have done in the past. But I will not let their feelings swap over into my energy field.
And if you really think about it: Isn´t it better that you keep your energy levels up and stay strong for that other person and yourself? It might even be good that you don’t add fuel to the fire by taking on the same feelings as the other person. This might even help the other person to let go of their lower vibe feelings quicker if they don’t get energetically fueled even more.
I have had the greatest successes and changes in my life by implementing this little technique. The funny thing is that people still come to me with their problems and still see me as a great listener and friend – maybe even more so than ever before.
And at the same time, I can walk away from these conversations “unharmed” and can go on with my life with my energy intact. The other thing that I have observed is that some people stopped coming to me with their problems and I am happy about it. Can you think of a person in your life, maybe at work, who just loves to complain? They blame others and always have something to share that is currently going wrong?
These people will start to go to someone else quite quickly. Because they are not getting their fix anymore- they actually thrive on living their life like this and they love to suck other people into their drama and conflicts. And when they start to feel that you are not giving your energy to them anymore, they will walk away. I have had this happening perfectly in my life. It’s amazing how much less drama I have now in my life.
So what to do when you are not prepared and you suddenly become aware of being in such a situation. This is probably more likely to happen when you start practising this. You might suddenly be in the middle of such a conversation. You become aware that you are feeling all of the other person’s feelings and that you start to feel depleted and worn out. Perfect, this is your big win – that you become aware of it is already the main win.
And that might be all you can do in that situation, just be aware of it. Of course, you can try to start protecting yourself, but that might feel awkward. Just stay with the feeling of the win that you became aware of. Next time you will become aware of it even quicker. It’s all about practising and applying this.
If this is pretty new to you and you have heard this perspective and suggestion for the first time today, you might be thinking that this will alienate you from your friends. I can tell you from experience that this brings so much harmony into your friendships.
People that you really connect with and that are not just in your life to feed off of your energy might become even closer friends. By connecting your energy better, you uplevel your life and friends and family will feel that – mostly unconsciously – but they will still feel it.
What I have discovered is that friends open up more to me. They must feel that I am quite stable in my energy and therefore am stronger. So they trust me to be able to listen to them and help and support them more than in the past. And like I said before, other friends disappear from your life. They just don’t get what they want anymore from you.
“But you know what? When a friend like that disappears by him or herself from your life – it makes space for a much better friend to come into your life!”
I hope you start applying some of this to your life. Start looking after yourself better and start to bring more energy back into your life.
If you want to learn more techniques about protecting your energy, I just read the book “The Energy Codes” by Dr Sue Morter and loved it. She provides you with powerful tools to apply and manage your energy. I particularly love her breathwork techniques to move and release energy inside of ourselves. Check it out via THIS LINK.
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