Emotional Contagion: Why other people’s moods affect you.

A few weeks ago I went to an event I absolutely did not want to go to.

You know when you agree to something weeks earlier because Future You seems like a very upbeat, socially capable person? Then Actual You arrives on the day standing in the hallway in a coat, already tired, wondering if you could fake a migraine convincingly enough to get out of it.

That was me.

But off I went anyway because life is complicated and sometimes you genuinely can’t tell in advance whether something is going to drain you or do you good. Every now and then it’s worth pushing past your initial resistance. If nothing else, it occasionally confirms that your initial resistance was absolutely right all along.

The event itself was perfectly fine. There was coffee. There were pastries, obviously, because no organiser has yet discovered a more effective way to convince adults to sit in a room together before noon. There was nothing objectively wrong with it at all.

But I ended up sitting opposite someone with a very particular kind of energy. They weren’t openly hostile, just completely closed off, like they’d decided before arriving that the whole thing was going to be pointless and now everyone else had to quietly experience that with them. Honestly, I think most of us have probably been that person at one time or another.

Within about twenty minutes I could feel my own nervous system folding in on itself.

I became flat. Restless. Irritable. I stopped listening properly and started mentally reorganising my afternoon around the possibility of escape. By the second coffee I would genuinely rather have been at home descaling the kettle.

Which is when I realised something slightly depressing about being human.

Other people’s moods get into us incredibly easily.

Anyway, I eventually escaped.

And sitting in the car afterwards I had this really clear thought:
Hang on. This wasn’t even my mood this morning.

Which sounds obvious, but I actually think most of us move through the world assuming all our emotions are entirely self-generated.

We think:

I’m anxious.
I’m exhausted.
I’m overwhelmed.
I’m in a terrible mood.

And sometimes we are.

But sometimes we’ve also spent three hours absorbing somebody else’s tension, stress, frustration or emotional shutdown without even realising it.

There’s research on this. A psychologist called Elaine Hatfield wrote about “emotional contagion”, the idea that humans unconsciously mirror and absorb each other’s emotional states through tone, expression, body language, nervous system responses, all sorts of things we barely consciously register.

And honestly, once you know this, an alarming amount of life starts making sense.

Of course one stressed person can shift the atmosphere of an entire house.

Of course you feel drained after certain conversations.

Of course offices can start to feel faintly unhinged by 3pm because everyone’s cortisol is bouncing off each other like badly parked bumper cars.

The problem is that modern life gives us almost no break from any of it.

We absorb not only the moods of the people around us, but the moods of hundreds of strangers too. News alerts. Group chats. Instagram stories filmed through tears in supermarket car parks. Emails that begin “Just checking in…” but somehow feel emotionally threatening.

It’s a huge amount for a nervous system to process.

And I think if you grew up around tension or unpredictability, you often become even more sensitive to all this. You learn to read rooms quickly. You notice changes in tone immediately. You can detect irritation from the way somebody puts a mug down on a counter.

Which can make you wonderfully perceptive.

But also absolutely bloody exhausted.

Because after a while you stop knowing where you end and everyone else begins.

I don’t mean this in an “avoid all negative people” sort of way because I think the internet has become a bit ridiculous about that. Human beings are messy. We all bring stress, grief, bad moods and strange energy into rooms sometimes. That’s part of being alive.

But I do think there’s something genuinely helpful about occasionally pausing and asking:
Is this actually mine?

Did I wake up feeling this way?

Or did I quietly absorb it somewhere along the way?

Not everything we carry started with us.

And personally, I find that oddly comforting.

If you’re currently carrying a lot of ‘not-yours’ and you’d like some help putting those down, you can find me here.