Surely you have met a friend who is very happy and excited about a project and your enthusiasm has motivated you to put into practice something you had in mind. However, you may have later met a former classmate who told you how bad everything is in your life. After this meeting, he decided it was best not to take risks. Have you noticed how we can absorb the emotions of others?
When you absorb other people’s emotions, you allow your emotional state to influence how you feel; if you’re surrounded by pessimistic people, you’ll also start thinking that way.
- No matter how good everything is in your life or what you’ve accomplished.
- You suffer an emotional contagion that leads you to absorb an emotion that is not yours.
If you absorb other people’s emotions, you may think that you are very empathetic and that you are not completely wrong, however, there are big differences between empathy and emotional contagion, let’s look at some of them:
“I can understand what’s happening to you, understand and even feel. But shouldn’t I take care of your feelings, because they will shock me?
Empathetic ability appears in mirror neurons, which Daniel Goleman mentioned in his book “Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary Science of Human Relationships. “According to this author, in people’s brains there is a group of neurons that are activated in the same way when performing an action or when we observe it in others.
This activation allows you to empathize with the other person and understand how you feel, it is not a negative thing and helps to build much healthier relationships, however you have to be careful not to start absorbing the emotions of others.
Avoiding emotional contagion is possible, but not easy, have you let yourself be carried away so much by your empathy that you don’t know how to set limits, has the boundary between your emotions and others diminished, so what should you consider?
This is a very interesting first step, because if you want to absorb the emotions of others, it is better that they are positive, the fact that you feel motivated, that you want to undertake and undertake new activities is a fantastic thing.
In addition, choosing the people you want to live with will avoid the “emotional swings” you can feel when, in a single day, you meet four positive people and four negative people.
It’s true that you won’t always be able to escape negative people, but if there are more positive people in your life, you’ll have a better balance.
Empathy helps you understand how others feel, so you can understand your situation, this ability allows you to put yourself in each other’s shoes without appropriating your emotions.
When you absorb other people’s emotions, it’s important to think about how you feel.
Why does this motivation encourage me to start my project when someone else tells me about their success?, what is the reason why I feel sad and discouraged when a friend tells me that their relationship with their partner is not right?
Often, this emotional contagion you experience says a lot about you, in the case of the first question shows what you really want to do, but who has not yet acted for your insecurities, in the second you can show your fears, or remember a relationship that left you a bitter taste.
Understanding your emotions will allow you to impose that distance that will help you avoid absorbing the emotions of others, which are not yours, even if they have been at some point.
You don’t have the same experiences as others, so even if you can understand and empathize with them, you shouldn’t appropriate feelings that don’t belong to you.
Emotional contagion tires us and causes exhaustion. Have you ever felt like you are absorbing other people’s emotions like a sponge? Do you know how to set limits?