Does this make you yawn?

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

Why is that when someone yawns in front of you, you start yawning too? Or when someone who is having a laugh and smiling brings a smile on to your face? Emotions, whether they are positive or negative are contagious. Not only emotions, small everyday behaviors that you do everyday might end up being picked up by people who are close to you.

I experienced this first hand during my first year of job. I am a very rough user of the tech products I own. I have broken 100% of the phones I have had in the past few years and always had scratches on my laptops. I treat them as proper tools no matter how expensive they are. In spite of that nature of mine, the Macbook I use at work does not have a scratch on it even after a whole year with me. This really startled me, until I noticed a behavioral pattern that I picked up from my colleague. This person, let's call him Mr. S, was my mentor during my first few months. Everyday I used to see him wipe and dust his Macbook multiple times throughout the day. Since I worked close with him for the first few months, I slowly started to pick up this trait from him. Just like him, throughout my day whenever I had some free time I started wiping my Macbook. I didn't realize it at the moment but slowly as months went on it hit me, how emotional contagion worked its magic.

Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of having one person's emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many different ways both implicitly or explicitly. You can read more about the science of it here.

But the thing I want to talk about today is how this phenomenon shows the importance of our choices even if they don't matter to others. We make a lot of choices throughout our day. We have certain patterns of behavior that we repeat. No matter how irrelevant they are to others, we inadvertently influence others due to emotional contagion. You, me, we might not know which part of our behavioral traits are being picked up by others, but they are being picked up.

That is why no matter what choices we make we should be conscious of how it might impact others. This is true for behavioural traits as much as it is for emotions. The kind of emotions we display on social media directly influence people who follow us. We may not realize it but a lot of people pick up these signals.

Source: https://media.giphy.com/media/JscLXT99iC79YEpjnm/source.gif

This is one of the reasons why I try to fill my social media with positivity. It's not because my life is always positive. I do share the tough times I go through. but I try to show the bright spots so that influences and brightens someone else’s day up.

One example I myself experienced was through my running posts. I post so much about running that it even annoys me sometimes. I hardly get response from my followers but over the course of the year 2-3 people have told me how my regular posts gave them the motivation to start. One of them was my close friend from school. he ended up running 10k a day for a month and hit his weight goal for the year.

These kind of examples reassure me of my choices to promote positivity. It's not easy to be happy but in many cases happiness is a choice. If you decide to behave in certain ways or cultivate certain hobbies you are bound bring out similar results. So remember the choices you make today because they might influence someone in a positive or negative way.