Self-Regulation: Managing Emotions
My husband and I watch a lot of sports. We are both drawn to the performance part of sports, but spend even more time being curious about the psychological elements of the game. Have you ever watched a baseball game, a player hits a home run, and all of the sudden there are several more home runs in the game? My husband often says, “Hitting is contagious,” but what is really happening?
If we look to psychology, it isn’t so much that hitting is contagious, but that emotional contagion is taking place. Emotional contagion is a psychological concept proposing humans are hard-wired to mirror emotional experiences of the people we are surrounded by through mimicking and interpreting their emotional expressions and behaviors. An easier way to explain this is that we “catch feelings.”
Obviously there are positive and negative aspects to emotional contagion. If you are part of a sports team and one player goes off, potentially inspiring the rest of the team to raise their level of performance, this is a positive result of emotional contagion. If you are super excited about some news and go home to share it with your partner, but come to find they are in a bad mood and it kills the vibe of your excitement, this is a negative outcome of emotional contagion. For the most part, people are going to embrace catching positive emotions such as joy, optimism, enthusiasm, and love. The dilemma of emotional contagion occurs more when surrounded by someone experiencing anger, sadness, negativity, fear, and hate.
There are ways to mitigate the impact of our loved one’s emotional experiences. This seems especially important as we continue to operate in our social bubbles and in the face of social media influences. Yes, you can most certainly experience emotional contagion from social media posts.
The most important tool in managing your own emotional state is understanding you are in charge of the way you feel. You are your own coach and can learn to regulate your emotions independent of your environment. Regulating your emotions is not easy and it takes practice, but it can be done. Agency over your emotional state is a meta-cognitive practice, meaning you are thinking about the way you are thinking and feeling. Rather than being in a reactive emotional state, you can rise up, almost like a bird’s eye view, to assess your emotional experience and how you want to engage emotionally.
When you allow yourself to see things through a meta-cognitive lens, it creates a mindfulness and an emotional distance, allowing you more cogency in your emotional experience. Let’s go back to the example of coming home with exciting news. When you realize your partner is in a negative emotional state, you have a choice. You can continue to engage with their current mood or you can gently remove yourself from that experience and take care of your own needs. Taking care of yourself may involve sharing the news with someone else or waiting to share until your partner has shifted their mood. Disengaging with someone’s negative emotional state may also involve not taking their mood personally and understanding their mood may have nothing to do with you.
Avoiding negative emotional contagion is challenging, but incredibly worthwhile. The more you realize that you can manage your emotional experience, the smoother life will go.