Do You Feel That You Absorb The Emotions Of Others?

Surely you have ever met a friend who was very happy and excited about a project and his enthusiasm overwhelmed you so much that it motivated you to put one that you had in mind into action. But then maybe you ran into an old classmate who told you how bad things are for him and that he has long since thrown in the towel. After this encounter, you decided that it was better not to risk it just in case. Have you realized that this can mean that you absorb the emotions of others?

When you absorb the emotions of others, you allow their emotional state to influence how you feel. If you are surrounded by pessimistic people, you will start to be too. It doesn’t matter how good everything is in your life or everything you’ve accomplished. You suffer an emotional contagion that makes you appropriate an emotion that is not yours.

Emotional contagion is not the same as empathy

If you absorb the emotions of others you may think that you are too empathetic and you are not entirely wrong. However, you should know that there are big differences between empathy and emotional contagion. Let’s see some of them:

• Empathy: you are able to put yourself in the place of the other person, to take into account their feelings and to understand their perspective on what they are experiencing. But this understanding does not make you get rid of your own emotions.
• Emotional contagion : you take someone else’s feelings as your own. This affects your life and has serious consequences. You get involved in an emotional swing in which other people’s emotions run your life.

Mirror neurons

The empathic capacity arises in mirror neurons, something that Daniel Goleman mentioned in his book Social Intelligence: the new science of human relationships . According to this author, in the brain of people there is a group of neurons that are activated the same when they perform an action as when they observe it in others.

This activation is what allows you to empathize with another person and to be able to understand what they are feeling. This is nothing negative, it is more, it helps to build much healthier relationships. However, you must be careful not to start absorbing the emotions of others.

Can I avoid emotional contagion?

If you are asking yourself this question, the answer is “yes.” However, it is not something easy to achieve. You have been carried away by your empathy to the point of not knowing how to set limits, so the border that separates your emotions from those of others has been blurred. So .. what should you keep in mind?

Try to surround yourself with positive people

This is a first step that can be very interesting, because if you absorb the emotions of others, they better be positive. The fact that you feel motivated, wanting to undertake and start new activities is something fantastic.

In addition, choosing the people you want to surround yourself with will prevent that emotional swing that you can feel when in one day you meet four positive people and four negative people. It is true that you will not always be able to flee from the latter, but if there are more people in your life than the former, you will enjoy a greater balance.

Reflect on what you feel

When you absorb the emotions of others, it is important that you reflect on what you feel. Why does this motivation flood me to start my project when someone else tells me about their success? What is the reason why I feel sad and down when a friend tells me how bad he is with his partner?

Many times  that emotional contagion that you experience speaks a lot about you. In the case of the first question, what you want to do but have not yet put into action due to your insecurities. In the second, maybe because of your fears or because it reminds you of a relationship that left you with a bitter taste.

Understanding your emotions will allow you to put that distance that will help you avoid absorbing the emotions of others. Because they are not yours, although perhaps at the time they were. You are not living the same experiences as others. Therefore, although you can understand them and empathize with these people, you should not make feelings that do not correspond to you yours.

Emotional contagion wears out and produces exhaustion. Have you ever felt that you absorb the emotions of others as if you were a sponge? Have you known, to this day, how to set limits?