Why Do I Absorb Other People’s Emotions?

You cry because you see someone else well up with tears. You feel heavy sadness at someone else’s grief. And you can easily get energized and lit up by an encounter with a friend who’s flying sky-high.  

Maybe you’ve been called “too sensitive.” 

Is it just you, or does everyone feel this way?

Absorbing other people’s emotions, feeling the weight of a room, or getting uneasy in a crowd; when you feel like a human emotion antenna, it can make ordinary social situations feel harder than they need to be. (Literally.)

Absorbing other’s emotions is a normal human experience. It’s something that all of us are capable of doing to some degree, yet some of us just feel the emotional weather more intensely. 

How much you take in varies from person to person.

If you’re someone who is highly perceptive to the emotions and moods of those around you, you’ve probably been accused at one time or another of being too sensitive. Or you may have felt confused or even shamed about taking on what isn’t yours. 

But what if absorbing other people’s emotions is exactly what your brain evolved to do?

Emotional contagion is a part of the human experience. 

Your brain is wired for emotional contagion, an evolutionary survival mechanism that helps humans stay connected and avoid danger. 

This ability to emotionally converge with another human has evolutionary benefits. 

Emotional contagion provides a shortcut to the social learning curve. Instead of learning the long, slow way how to fit in and adapt into a social environment, emotional contagion provides a cheat code by letting you instantly feel the emotions of those around you. 

The evolutionary benefits of emotional contagion don’t stop there: 

In a group, the rapid spread of fear could allow most group members to escape from potential danger. 

And for parents, being affected by the emotions of an infant/child could help you better respond to their needs, making it a critical component for evolutionary success. 

While emotional contagion is a deeply human experience, we’re not alone in sensing, responding to, and mimicking the emotions of those around us. Animals do this too, and emotional contagion has been identified in highly social animals, like rodents, ravens, elephants, and non-human primates. 

What’s happening when you catch someone else’s emotions?

Emotional contagion, empathy, and helping behaviors all happen based on something known as the Perception-Action Model, which says that seeing a state in someone else activates that state in you. 

When you notice what someone else is feeling, your brain automatically switches on its own copy of that same state. That activation sets off the matching physical response in you, your heart rate, your facial muscles, and your body, so you start to physically and emotionally feel a version of what they're feeling. 

This process is automatic and happens without you deciding to, which is why other people's emotions can reach you before you've had a chance to think about them.

Your face may even start parroting their feelings back to them before you even realize you’re doing it. Facial mimicry happens when the muscles in your face start to activate and copy others, like when the corners of your mouth lift up into a smile when you see someone else smiling at you. You don’t even realize it’s happening, and then, before you know it, the smile on your face triggers  your own feelings of happiness. 

This trait isn’t evenly distributed; highly expressive people can have a stronger impact on the emotions of those around them.

Finally, network spread can be affecting your ability to absorb other people’s emotions. Researchers have found that emotions (positive and negative) can travel from person to person, to a range of three degrees. 

That means the friends of your friends could be impacting your emotional state.

Unfortunately, negative emotions like depression are more contagious in social networks; negative emotions tend to spread more than others.

Why do you seem to absorb more than others?

Everyone has the mechanism for emotional contagion, but the degree to which your dial is set is individual.

Individuals higher in empathy and agreeableness can be more susceptible to the emotional states of others. If you are moderately or highly emotionally permeable, you may find yourself absorbing more.

Emotional Permeability describes how open your system is to emotional information — how much you notice, absorb, carry, and respond to what is happening emotionally around you.

Emotional Permeability is a spectrum, and where you sit on that spectrum determines if more emotions get in or fewer. More permeable people find themselves highly open to emotional information, while others are more grounded and able to notice emotional information without instantly absorbing it. 

Other aspects of your personality dimensions can also influence how heavy it feels to carry the weight of other people’s emotions or reflect their inner state.

If You’re Highly Harmonizing: Leaning towards Harmony means you may be highly aware of emotional ease and safety within a group, and when tension enters a room you get right to work trying to soothe and manage it for everyone else. If Permeability is the sensitivity to other’s emotions, Harmony starts putting that to work and giving it a job. 

If You’re Highly Expressive: Leaning more Expressive means you may process information out loud and externally. So when you feel someone else’s state, your Expression dimension could mean that you stay in the emotional current instead of stepping back from it as you externally process what you’re feeling. 

You can take the SHEER Personality assessment to find out where you sit on the spectrum across five personality dimensions, including Emotional Permeability, Harmony, Expression, Structure, and Receptivity. 

Learn more about the SHEER Personality dimensions. 

Where does empathy come into play?

If you’re regularly picking up on other people’s emotions, you may have been described as empathetic in the past. 

If all humans can experience emotional contagion, how does empathy fit in?

Mimicry, emotional contagion, and empathy are three separate but progressive concepts:

1. Mimicry happens when individuals copy similar behaviors, such as facial movements, and can be independent of emotional experience. 
2. Emotional contagion is when individuals unconsciously synchronize with other people’s emotional state, resulting in a change in their own emotions without understanding or intention.
3. Empathy adds the complexity of cognition: it’s when you understand why someone is feeling the way they do, or when you feel motivated to offer “helping” behavior. 

Empathy is the social awareness component of emotional intelligence (EQ) that provides the raw materials for relational intelligence (RQ). 

It’s when your internal radar shifts into external action. 

EQ tells you what someone is feeling, while RQ tells you what to do about it. 

How to manage your own emotions when you feel everyone else’s

If you’re highly emotionally permeable, empathetic, or possess a combination of personality traits that make you more susceptible to other people’s emotions, it can cost you a lot.

You might avoid crowds or big events so you don’t feel overwhelmed. 

You might crawl into bed after spending time with a friend who is going through a hard time.

You might exhaust yourself or endlessly spin your wheels trying to fix a problem that’s not yours to fix.

You don’t need to turn your emotional permeability down (or even shut it off). At its most basic concept, emotional contagion makes you human. And your level of emotional susceptibility is what makes you uniquely, well, you. 

But you can set some guardrails up to protect and help you recover when you do absorb the emotional states of others. You can reduce the cost. 

Noticing is not responding

You don’t have to be the fixer. When you notice you’ve picked up someone else’s emotional state, you can leave it at that. Notice it. Don’t carry it back home with you, don’t start making a plan or strategy to help your friend out, and don’t go home and wrestle with those emotions all night. Find separation between someone else’s emotional state and your own.

Build in recovery time

If you’re a lightening rod for other people’s feelings, give yourself some grace and start scheduling in recovery time around your day. Provide time between errands, interactions, and events. Schedule buffers in between back-to-back conversations or meetings. Take a walk after leaving a heavy emotional environment.

Move it through

When you’re struggling to regulate emotions, whether they’re your own or someone else's, calming your body through breathing, mindfulness, movement, or relaxation may help move them through. 

Get support

If carrying the weight of other’s emotions is impacting your mental health, get support from a trusted professional.

See yourself clearly

If you want to learn more about your personality dimensions, how they impact the way you show up in the world, and how they impact your relational patterns, take the SHEER Personality assessment. 

Take the assessment, unlock your unique personality shape, and access the SHEER Insight Guide to get personalized recommendations on how you can create guardrails and support systems based on your individual results. Get personalized insights now.