We all know that second-hand smoke is dangerous. So is second-hand stress.
Emotions naturally pass between humans through special cells called mirror neurons.
When friends, family, or colleagues are stressed, it rubs off on you whether you want it to or not.
Second-hand stress is even worse when the person at the center is an authority figure or leader. While your unconscious brain is mirroring their negativity, your conscious brain is trying to figure out why they’re in such a bad mood. In the absence of facts, human imaginations produce some wild stories to explain what we see and hear.
There must be bad news coming that we don’t know yet!
I did something wrong! That email I sent was too long!
They didn’t like the slides we put together!
These imagined causes are usually much worse than reality. Unfortunately, neither the human brain nor body are good at separating imagined threats from real ones. We feel the stress either way.
To rein in my anxious mind and avoid passing my own stress on to others, I keep a tongue-in-cheek quote from Mark Twain tacked up on my wall. It reads: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
What are your go-to tools for managing first- and second-hand stress these days?
