by Carlotta Koroll

You’re having a great day, everything is going as planned, and then you have a conversation with your colleague. He tells you about his stressful family reunion, and all of a sudden you feel uncomfortable and restless. His mood has simply spread over to you. Does that sound familiar? This psychological phenomenon is called emotional contagion.

We are especially susceptible to this problem when we are at our workplace. That’s because meetings, background noise and interactions with customers cause empathetic people to soak up all these impulses like a sponge. No wonder that this exhausts you. Today we will share four methods on how to better separate yourself from other people’s feelings. In order to create a pleasant and effective working atmosphere, it is important to respect your own needs and those of your colleagues.

What is emotional contagion?

Adopting other people’s emotions and feeling them as if they were our own is usually a process that takes place unconsciously. Researchers found that negative emotions are adopted more strongly than positive ones. Furthermore, experiments have shown that emotional contagion occurs more often in women than in men, and more intensively if you are close to the other person. Even though adopting other people’s feelings can be exhausting, it is not a bad thing in itself. After all, it forms the basis for empathy, and without it, our society wouldn’t be a very nice environment to be in, would it? Would you like to find out if you are highly empathetic? Take the self-test for empathy and high empathy.

If you are prone to emotional contagion, the following four methods can help you stay more composed at work.

Empaths in the workplace – some tips

1. Schedule time-outs

Over the course of eight hours of work, we encounter many impressions and different people. For particularly empathetic people, this can be quite exhausting. That’s why it’s so important to plan time-outs. This can mean taking a break by yourself after a morning spent in meetings, occasionally working from home if your work permits it, or taking a day off during the week. Noise-canceling headphones are another option for keeping to yourself.

Have the courage to talk to your supervisor about the situation! In the end, she will benefit from you having more energy for your work. SOS tip for a short time-out: Go into the restroom and let cold water run over your wrists. This will help you reconnect with your body and detach yourself from external feelings.

2. Building compassion through distance

Removing yourself from certain situations is not always the solution – not least because we would miss out on many wonderful experiences and opportunities! That’s why it’s important to maintain a certain distance in social situations. Compassion means perceiving and respecting the feelings of others, but not feeling them yourself. In one experiment, participants were shown videos of people in pain. For most of them, watching the videos activated the pain areas of the brain. In meditating monks however, the part of the brain associated with caring for others lit up. Meditation therefore helps us distance ourselves from pain and unpleasant emotions! Another method is imagining a stressful conversation with your colleagues as if you were watching a film, instead of feeling so involved in it. This will help you create more distance and avoid letting other people’s feelings get to you.

3. Getting to know your own emotions

In the long run, you can better separate yourself from the emotions of others by getting to know your own emotions. It will help you realise: I don’t typically feel this way, where does it come from? This insight will enable you to distance yourself more quickly from other people’s emotions. Observe your mood more often in everyday life: How do I feel before and after contact with certain people or environments? How do I react to certain situations? If you find this difficult, try keeping a notebook or diary. You can record impressions, feelings and observations. It doesn’t have to be a work of art or a novel. Simply looking inward on a regular basis will give you a better understanding of your own emotions. It also helps to observe the tendencies of your colleagues and other people you come into contact with at work. Do you have a colleague who is easily stressed or particularly energetic? Knowing this will help you prepare for incoming emotions in advance and react more calmly to them.

4. Charging positive feelings

Starting the day in a mindful way is another helpful tool for empathetic people. Start the day in a peaceful way and get in touch with yourself and your body. This will allow you to sense your mood, which will help you separate it from that of others. Depending on what makes you feel good in the morning – meditating, taking the time to eat a good breakfast or reading a few pages of your current book – take at least a few minutes for those things! The feeling of having already done something good for yourself in the morning makes it much easier to deal with others’ turmoils. Of course, not every morning will be perfect, but make sure that is the exception rather than the rule. In addition, listen to yourself during the day to identify emotions that don’t belong to you – you can also remind yourself with calendar entries in your mobile phone or laptop. Just as important is giving yourself time to wind down after work. This can mean doing something fun with friends or spending some time with yourself. Sometimes all it takes is a second of mindfulness, a conscious breath that creates new space. The most important thing is to find a way to consciously leave work behind when you step out of the office. To leave your colleagues’ moods and feelings and not take them home with you.

Have the courage to set boundaries Saying no can be difficult, especially at work where you are exposed to external expectations and pressure. What will my colleagues think if I don’t go out to dinner with them? Does my boss think I don’t fit into the team if I work from home? All these worries tend to keep us from communicating our true needs. In the long run, however, this will make us feel uncomfortable with our work and unable to perform at our best. In a society where it is almost normal to experience burnout once in a lifetime, we should all try to take care of ourselves a little more and not always push ourselves to the limit – there is nothing heroic about that. Similarly, we should stop expecting too much of ourselves and instead hold ourselves to a more reasonable standard Don’t forget that a tendency to be emotionally contagious doesn’t just create obstacles in your daily work. After all, your empathy also helps you respond to the needs of your colleagues, clients and superiors and strengthens your soft skills. Each of us is a little different and it’s important not to be judgmental about that – neither about yourself nor your colleagues. So don’t be afraid to communicate your boundaries more often – because doing so gives others permission to do the same!

Picture: Annie Spratt auf Unsplash