Psychologist Exposes The Empathy Trap

Some people leave every conversation feeling wrung out, and psychologist Lisa Damour says there’s a real reason why.

Quick Take

Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour explains why highly empathic people often feel emotionally drained.
She says healthy emotion regulation requires two skills: expressing feelings and taming them.
Many people lean hard into one skill while ignoring the other, which causes burnout.
Newer research shows not all empathy drains people. Some forms actually protect against exhaustion.

The Two Skills Behind Emotional Exhaustion

Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist, says highly empathic people feel drained because they soak up other people’s emotions and respond to them with full intensity. In her video, she breaks emotion regulation down into two separate skills: expressing feelings and taming them. Most people, she notes, get good at one and neglect the other entirely.

That imbalance matters. Someone who only expresses feelings without ever taming them can get swept up in every wave of emotion around them, theirs and everyone else’s. Someone who only tames feelings without ever expressing them bottles things up until it costs them. Damour argues both skills need practice, not just one.

Why Absorbing Emotion Feels So Costly

Other researchers describe the same pattern in plain terms. Highly sensitive people often register other people’s emotions through their nervous system almost automatically, leaving them exhausted after ordinary conversations and carrying stress that was never theirs to begin with. Psychology Today describes this as a real trade-off for empaths, who often are intuitive and caring but pay for it with burnout and exhaustion when they constantly pick up on what others feel.

Caregivers, counselors, and teachers face this most often, because their jobs demand constant emotional contact with people in pain. Writers on empathic distress argue that people in these roles can internalize others’ emotions so deeply that it starts to wear down their own well-being over time. Centerstone, a mental health nonprofit, puts it simply: empathy is noble, but it can also be extremely draining when people absorb too much emotional weight from everyone around them.

Not All Empathy Works the Same Way

Here’s where the story gets more interesting than a simple warning label. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis found that empathy is not one single trait, it’s several different mechanisms, and they don’t all behave the same way. Cognitive empathy and compassion were linked to lower burnout, while emotional contagion, catching someone else’s mood like a cold, was linked to higher burnout.

That distinction lines up with a broader academic argument published just this month. One Psychology Today piece, drawing on over a decade of research across physicians, nurses, and teachers, states plainly that most types of empathy actually protect against burnout rather than cause it. The exhaustion many people blame on “being too empathetic” may really trace back to one narrower piece of empathy: unfiltered emotional contagion, not caring itself.

This distinction should matter to anyone who has been told to just “care less” to protect their energy. The research suggests the opposite fix works better: build the skill of taming emotional reactions while keeping the compassion intact. Caring about people isn’t the problem. Failing to regulate the flood that caring can bring with it is.

What This Means for Everyday People

For parents, spouses, coworkers, and caregivers, the takeaway is practical. Feeling drained after supporting someone doesn’t mean you’re too soft or too caring. It likely means one emotional muscle got a workout while the other sat idle. Learning to name and express feelings, then learning to settle them back down, builds resilience instead of resentment toward the empathy itself.

This is why highly empathic people feel drained all the time | Lisa Damour https://t.co/p5sIioWWNR via @YouTube

— Sebastian Meritless Tickbox Fasttrack-Blythe (@Jason_MI5) August 20, 2026

Common sense backs this up better than any slogan about empaths absorbing “energy” from strangers. People wear out when they never get a break from other people’s problems and never learn how to set their own emotions down at the end of the day. The fix isn’t shutting off compassion. It’s learning both halves of the skill Damour describes, so caring for others doesn’t come at the cost of caring for yourself.