Reduce the Impact of Emotional Contagion

There has been a rising emotional buzz in the workplace lately, for good reason. While it’s understandable that your colleagues might be angry, frustrated, sad, or anxious, how do you deal with it so your teammates’ stresses don’t become your own? How do you reduce the impact of emotional contagion?

If you haven’t read my previous post, here’s a quick refresher: Emotional contagion is the unconscious spread of emotions from one person to another. It’s not the same as empathy, where you understand someone’s feelings without experiencing them. Emotional contagion is the process of being infected by someone’s emotional state without knowing.

If that emotional virus you’re catching is positive, you might be happy to breathe it in, but what can you do if you’re exposed to a colleague’s negative feelings? There are a variety of techniques you can use to inoculate yourself from emotional contagion.

Let’s consider the strategies in order, from preventative medicine to in-the-moment protection to post-infection treatments.

Innoculate Yourself from Emotional Contagion

As an ongoing investment in emotional immunity, try the following:

Invest in your Resilience

When you are well-rested, energized, and in control of your emotional state, you’re less likely to be susceptible to the negative emotions of others. I notice this in myself. When I’m in a good phase, sleeping eight hours, on my exercise routine, I’m more aware of my emotional state and the impact others are having on me. I’m also better able to modulate my response.

Practice Mindfulness or Meditation

Emotional contagion seems to work through an intermediate mechanism of mirrored body language. When someone is sad, their brows furrow, their mouth sags, and their shoulders slump. You unconsciously mirror those expressions and postures, and your brain interprets that as your sadness.

If you are good at sensing what’s happening in your body, you can interrupt the progression from body language to emotions. Noticing your slumping shoulders (or angry, pinched face, etc.) can give you the opportunity to attribute your response to something other than your mood. But it takes practice to get in touch with your body; adding some form of mindfulness or meditation can help.

Protect Yourself from Negative Emotions

When you’re in the moment interacting with someone who is expressing negative emotions (either overtly or more subtly), these strategies will limit your exposure to their emotional state.

Acknowledge What You’re Seeing

Because emotional contagion happens without your realizing it, the faster you can label the negative emotion you’re seeing, the less likely it will spread to you. Rather than trying to attribute their behavior to a given emotion, they just zero in on what is directly observable. Are their pupils dilating, feet tapping, or eyes darting? Is their volume rising, fists clenching, or face reddening?

As you acknowledge the gestures, posture, and body language of their emotions, you can choose not to mirror them. (In the next post, I’ll discuss how you can reverse the direction and get them to follow your body language.)

Get Curious, Go Intellectual

Curiosity is a powerful antidote to almost any negative emotion, and this is a great time to deploy it. If you find the person’s behavior fascinating and start searching for its roots, you’ll be more cognitively engaged but less emotionally involved. Try asking yourself questions like, “What am I seeing here?” “Where might this be coming from?” “How are they interpreting this situation?”

Pay Attention to What’s Different

I’ll talk in another post about the factors that make you more or less susceptible to contracting someone else’s emotions. Let’s simplify it by saying that the more you relate to the person or identify with them, the stronger the emotional contagion. That gives rise to another strategy you can use in the moment: focus on what’s different between you.

When someone is feeling poorly, consider what allows you to feel good. It can be as simple as “She has young kids. I’ve had way more sleep than she has.” It can be, “I’ve got a stronger relationship with the boss, so I feel more confident.” To be clear, these are coping strategies you can use that will protect you from taking on the other person’s negative feelings. You are getting on top of your emotions so you can help the other person start to feel better. It’s not about saying, “Woah, sucks to be you!”

Recover from Emotional Contagion

Sometimes, you’ll notice that you feel bad without realizing it is happening. That’s when you need to be deliberate about managing your mood. Try

Interrupt the Emotion

You might use terms like emotions and feelings synonymously, but there’s a difference between the raw data your brain gets subconsciously as it scans your body (emotions) and the story you consciously create as you process emotions in the context of all of your past experiences (feelings). Our language is clumsy and crude and does you a disservice because it might lead you to believe that certain feelings are inevitable when they aren’t.

Once you separate the idea of an emotion and a feeling, even if you have taken on another person’s emotional state, you do not have to create the same narrative. When you interrupt the transfer from negative emotions to negative feelings and attributions, you can choose to behave in a way that helps you restore a positive mood.

Sync with Someone Else

If you’ve just been exposed to someone in a negative mood, seek out someone (or something) who will help you neutralize the effect. You could connect with a colleague or friend who buoys your spirits or go for a walk and listen to music that pumps you up.

Limit Your Exposure

Another choice you can make is to limit your exposure to a person who is continually passing on their negative mood. Even if you can recognize and reverse the effects of the emotional contagion, that process can be exhausting. Find a way to limit your interactions with the person, especially when your resilience might be low and your ability to ward off their negative emotional contagion compromised.

Conclusion

Preventing, mitigating, and recovering from emotional contagion takes effort and will likely require new skills. You can make a few better investments in your health, happiness, and productivity. Building your emotional intelligence to cope with emotional contagion will serve you well in all domains of your life.

Additional Resources

Managing Your Emotions at Work

Dealing with negative emotions

Dr. Tod Grande What are Emotions, Feeling, Affect, and Mood?

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