I was halfway through my morning coffee when my phone buzzed with a text. Just three words: 'Can we talk?' My stomach immediately clenched. My shoulders tensed. In seconds, I'd gone from peaceful morning ritual to fight-or-flight mode, and I didn't even know what the other person wanted to discuss yet.
Maybe you know this same feeling I had, too? The way your chest tightens when you walk into a room where someone's having a bad day. How you can feel perfectly fine until you spend ten minutes with that one colleague who's perpetually overwhelmed. The strange exhaustion that follows you home after being around certain people, even during supposedly pleasant interactions.
We like to think our emotions belong to us, that our feelings are our own private experience. But science tells us something far more complex: we're constantly absorbing and reflecting the emotional states of those around us, often without realising it's happening.
When Feelings Jump Bodies
Psychologists call it emotional contagion, and it's as real as catching a cold. Mirror neurons in our brains automatically mimic the facial expressions, postures, and vocal tones of people around us. Within milliseconds, we begin to embody their emotional state. Dr Elaine Hatfield's groundbreaking research at the University of Hawaii showed that we synchronise with others so quickly and unconsciously that we can 'catch' their mood before we even process what they're feeling.
This isn't a flaw in our wiring, it's actually an evolutionary feature. For our ancestors, the ability to quickly read and match the emotional state of their group could mean the difference between survival and danger. If everyone suddenly became tense and alert, you needed to match that energy fast, whether or not you could see the approaching predator.
But here's where it gets tricky for us modern humans: our nervous systems haven't caught up to our complex social lives. That ancient alarm system can't tell the difference between a genuine threat and your colleague's deadline anxiety. Your body responds to both with the same stress cascade, the same flood of cortisol, the same depletion of energy. Before you know it, you've caught the feels.
The Empathy Trap
If you're someone who naturally attunes to others' emotions, and research suggests women and highly sensitive people are particularly susceptible, you might find yourself regularly overwhelmed by feelings that aren't even yours. As a HSP myself, I know this all too well. You walk into a meeting feeling centred and leave feeling frazzled, wondering what just happened. You spend an evening with a friend and somehow absorb their relationship drama so completely that you're lying awake at 2am worrying about their problems.
Dr Judith Orloff, author of 'The Empath's Survival Guide', describes this as emotional sponging: soaking up others' feelings until you're waterlogged with their experience. What makes it especially confusing is that these absorbed emotions feel completely real in your body. Your racing heart doesn't distinguish between your anxiety and someone else's.
This isn't about lacking boundaries or being 'too sensitive', though our culture loves to pathologise emotional attunement. It's about understanding how your nervous system works and learning to create conscious separation between your emotional experience and others.
Beyond Catching Feels: When Emotions Have Deeper Roots
But emotional contagion isn't just about what we absorb in the moment. Sometimes the feelings that seem to come from nowhere have much deeper roots. Research in epigenetics shows us that our grandparents' traumas can literally alter our gene expression. Their fears about scarcity, their hypervigilance around safety, their patterns of emotional suppression can show up in our bodies as anxiety, chronic tension, or that inexplicable feeling that something bad is always about to happen.
We inherit emotional patterns through the stories we're told, the silences we navigate, the energy that fills the spaces between words in our families. That guilt about rest even when you're exhausted? It might echo generations of women who equated their worth with their productivity. The low-level anxiety about being 'too much'? Perhaps somewhere in your family line, a woman learned that her big emotions were dangerous.
These inherited patterns aren't character flaws. They're survival strategies that outlived their usefulness, emotional hand-me-downs that no longer fit who you're becoming.
The Invisible Energy Exchange
You can think of it this way: every interaction involves an invisible energy exchange. Some people are natural radiators, broadcasting their emotional state like a radio tower. Others are natural absorbers, picking up signals from multiple frequencies at once. Most of us do both, depending on the situation and our own emotional state.
The challenge is that we're rarely taught to recognise this exchange, much less manage it consciously. We go through our days absorbing stress from the anxious parent at school pickup, frustration from the overwhelmed cashier, excitement from the colleague who just got engaged, melancholy from the sad song playing in the coffee shop, all while trying to make sense of our own legitimate feelings.
No wonder we feel emotionally scattered by evening. We're carrying pieces of everyone else's day.
Building Your Emotional Immune System
The good news here is that once you understand emotional contagion, you can develop what I like to think of as an emotional immune system: the ability to be compassionately present with others without losing yourself in their experience.
Start with awareness. Before entering any social situation, take a moment to check in with your emotional baseline. How do you feel right now? What's your energy level? This isn't about judgement, it's just data collection. Then, throughout the interaction, notice if and when that baseline shifts.
Practice emotional archaeology. When a feeling arises that seems disproportionate to the situation, get curious about its origins. Ask yourself: Whose voice do I hear when this feeling shows up? What family stories am I carrying in my body right now? If this anxiety could speak, whose words would it use? Sometimes our responses belong to a much younger version of ourselves, or even to someone who came before us.
Practice the pause. When you notice an emotional shift, ask yourself: 'Is this feeling mine?' Sometimes the answer is yes. You're genuinely upset about something that happened. But often, you'll recognise that you've absorbed someone else's emotional state, or you're carrying an inherited pattern. This recognition alone can help you begin to separate your experience from theirs.
Create conscious boundaries. This doesn't mean building walls or becoming emotionally unavailable. It means learning to be present with someone's pain without taking it on as your own. You can witness their stress without wearing it. You can offer support without absorbing their anxiety into your nervous system.
One technique I love comes from energy psychology: imagine a protective bubble around you that allows love and compassion to flow freely but filters out emotions that don't belong to you. It sounds simple, maybe even silly, but visualisation techniques like this have been shown to activate the prefrontal cortex, helping you maintain emotional regulation even in charged situations.
Return to your centre. After spending time in emotionally intense environments, create a ritual for returning to your own emotional baseline. This might be as simple as washing your hands while imagining you're washing away absorbed energy, taking three deep breaths, or spending a few minutes alone in nature.
Remember: caring about others doesn't require carrying their emotions. Compassion doesn't demand emotional fusion. You can be deeply empathetic while maintaining your own emotional sovereignty. And perhaps most powerfully, you can choose what emotional patterns you carry forward and what you lovingly release.
Your feelings are allowed to be your own.
What would it feel like to move through your day knowing you can offer your full presence without losing yourself in others' emotional weather? What relationships might shift if you approached them from a place of conscious choice rather than automatic absorption? And what inherited patterns are you ready to examine with compassion, knowing that healing yourself might actually be healing the lineage?
What helps you maintain your own emotional centre while still being present for others? Leave me a comment below.