Happiness IS contagious
by Mira and Charles on November 11th, 2009Olivia Judson’s latest NYTimes blog reminded me of a fact we’ve been wanting to talk about. They say that mood is contagious. Well, it is, more than you think. It goes way beyond mood.
It looks as though happiness itself, and misery too, are contagious. It’s not just about a transient mood. Our underlying, baseline mood, the very way we may approach life, may be contagious.
This understanding comes to us through research into people in large social networks. All kinds of things are contagious, like happiness and obesity.
Here are Judson’s words:
…these are the results coming in from long-term studies of social networks — the networks of friends and families, neighbors and colleagues that we all belong to. Such studies have found that one person’s change in behavior ripples through his or her friends, family and acquaintances. If one of your friends becomes happy, for example, you’re more likely to become happy too. If you’re great friends with someone who becomes obese, you’re much more likely to become obese as well.
And the effect doesn’t stop there. If your friend’s friend becomes happy, that increases the chance your friend will become happy — and that you will too. Conversely, if you become obese or depressed, you may inadvertently help your friends, and your friend’s friends, to become fat or gloomy.
These findings are not only real, they are important. Some important conclusions follow from them.
1. Put out the mood you want to have. If you put out anxiety, people will catch that from you, AND THEN YOU’LL CATCH IT FROM THEM. So if you want to be happy, put out happiness, and it will come back to you and feed you. The same thing if you want to lose weight. The same thing if you want almost anything.
2. Be careful of the people with whom you spend time. It’s not just that Debbie Downer will bum you out. Time spent with Debbie Downers will actually make you less, maybe much less happy.
3. Every interaction, whatever it’s about, is also an arm-wrestling match between your mood and the other person’s. Will you catch hers or will she catch yours? It all depends on who is stronger and more consistent in putting out their mood. So if you see a negative mood coming at you from another person, don’t let yourself be swept away. If you hang on to your positive mood, you have a good chance of winning. And that’s good for you, because when you convert the other person to your mood, it will enhance your mood.
Well, that’s it. Let’s all hang onto our good feelings! One way to do get back your good mood without waiting for your friends to cheer up is to use our book The Emotional Energy Factor. This award-winning book will give you a lot of ways to bounce back from whatever you’re dealing with. And that’s good, because a lot of us are dealing with a lot of tough stuff these days.
