Some People Draw You and Others Drain You

Think of someone who had you hanging on every word. You were trying to guess what they’d say before they said it. Maybe a teacher. A first date. Someone at a party who wouldn’t let go of your attention even though you couldn’t say exactly why.

Now think of someone else. Someone who drained you before they’d finished a sentence. Maybe they were negative, or arrogant, or possibly something else you could never fully explain why it grated on you the way it did.

You’ve felt both of these. Everyone has. And neither one is chemistry, or luck, or a personality mismatch you shrug off and move past. Something specific is happening in both cases, and it’s the same mechanism running in two directions.

This Is Why Some People Drain You

Your energy isn’t static. It rises to meet certain people, situations, and environments, and it dips around others.

Rising happens around whatever stretches you. Something that asks you to learn, to grow past where you currently sit. To handle more than you’re used to handling. That’s the pull toward someone who intrigues you. You’re not imagining it, and you’re not just being naive. You’re rising to meet something asking more of you than your current capacity. That feels like attraction or curiosity, because growth usually does.

The lower state happens around the opposite. Someone, somewhere, or something genuinely out of sync with how you’re built. It isn’t that they’re a bad person by some objective measure. It’s that being around them pulls you into a state that isn’t yours to hold. Your system knows it before you’ve consciously worked out why.

So Why Does Everyone Have a Different Baseline?

Here’s where it stops being vague. You always ground back to a baseline, a natural resting register that belongs to you specifically. What reads as a lower state for you might be somebody else’s ordinary Tuesday. What feels like rising for you might barely register for a person built differently.

This is why the same room can feel electric to one person and exhausting to another. Both reactions are accurate at the same time. Neither person is wrong. That’s why two people can walk out of the same room with completely different accounts of what happened.

The Body Only Reports What’s Already True

Your body isn’t where any of this starts. It’s downstream of it. It processes whatever state you’re actually in, and reports back. That’s why the physical stuff shows up late, not immediately. Tight shoulders. A short fuse. Nights your mind won’t slow down. All of it after you’ve already stayed somewhere too long.

Stay in that state long enough, somewhere or with someone that pulls against your baseline. Your body starts sending you out signals, and not gently either. Those symptoms aren’t separate problems to solve one at a time. They’re the same signal showing up in different places because you haven’t moved yet. Ignore it long enough and it gets louder. The body’s only job here is to make sure you move, and it will escalate until you do.

Rising Isn’t the Risky Part

This is where most people get it backwards. They treat the rising states, the ones that stretch and challenge you, as the dangerous ones. They’re not. Reaching past your current capacity is what you’re actually designed to do. It’s growing beyond where you currently understand or operate, not malfunctioning.

That lower state is where the actual malfunction lives, specifically the version where you get stuck there. Staying too long somewhere out of sync with your baseline is what triggers the body’s response. It’s only ever a problem once you’ve stopped moving through it.

Not Every Dip Means Leave

One honest limitation worth naming here. This isn’t permission to walk out of every job, family gathering, or hard conversation. Not just because it feels challenging. Life asks you to function in a lower register sometimes, and that’s not a design flaw either.

The difference is between passing through and getting stuck. A hard week with a difficult relative is a rough patch you move through. A years-long pattern of shrinking yourself around the same person is a lower state you’ve stopped moving out of. Your body’s been flagging it the whole time. Learning to tell those two apart is most of the actual work.

So the next time someone has your full attention without an obvious reason, pay attention. The same goes for someone who has you counting the minutes until you can leave. One of them is asking you to rise. The other is telling you where you don’t belong right now, or how long you’ve stayed there.

Reading that difference instead of white-knuckling through both is a lot of what Intuitive Mentoring is built for. If this is landing, I’d love to hear from you.