The Dq Life Blog

Other people’s stress becomes yours. Not metaphorically — neurologically. Here is the science behind why, and what to do about it.

You walk into a room and something shifts. Nobody has said anything yet. But you feel it. Within moments you are tense, guarded, your thoughts beginning to scatter. The stress in that room was not yours when you walked in. It is yours now.

This is contagious stress, and it is not a metaphor. It is a neurobiological process, and understanding it changes the way we think about our own wellbeing entirely.

We are wired to catch each other’s stress

Our brains are, first and foremost, social organs. As Bessel van der Kolk observes in The Body Keeps the Score, “our brains are built to help us function as members of the tribe… most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others”. From our earliest relationships throughout our lives, our encounters with others constantly shape and direct our inner experience.

“Our brains are built to help us function as members of the tribe…Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.

Central to this is what neuroscientists call our resonance circuitry: a network of mirror neurons and shared neural systems that align our internal states with those of the people around us. When someone nearby is stressed, these circuits do not simply register that as information. They replicate it. Their stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, begin to flood our own system as though we were facing the original threat ourselves (Iacoboni, 2008; Decety & Jackson, 2004).

This process operates largely beneath conscious awareness. We do not need obvious signals to know that something is wrong. Through what Stephen Porges terms neuroception, our nervous system detects threat in the environment before conscious thought has even begun. A fractional shift in eye contact. A barely perceptible change in vocal tone. Research by Mujica-Parodi and colleagues demonstrated that people detect fear through chemosensory signals in the sweat of others, triggering a stress response with no conscious awareness of having received a signal at all. We know before we know that we know.

“Special attention goes to defining the details of a system of minor-appearing stimuli that trigger intense emotional responses in the other… [they] operate more out of awareness than in awareness. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of these stimuli in any intense emotional interdependence” Murray Bowen, 1978, p. 228

Why we evolved this way

From an evolutionary perspective, this sensitivity was never a flaw. Human survival was always a collective discipline. When one member of the group detected danger, the whole group needed to feel it fast. The almost instantaneous contagion of fear across a group meant collective escape was possible before deliberate thought had begun. One person spots the predator; the whole tribe is already moving.

The problem is that this system has not updated to reflect the world we now inhabit.

The liability of an ancient system

Today, most stressors are not life-or-death threats requiring immediate collective action. They are complex, chronic and relational. A colleague’s panic about a deadline. A partner’s unresolved anxiety. A parent’s barely concealed dread. None of these require us to flee. And yet our nervous system responds as though they might.

The result is a kind of stress that is uniquely difficult to process. When we face a direct threat, we can engage with it, act on it, discharge the tension it generates. But stress absorbed from someone else sits differently. We cannot name it because it did not originate in us. We cannot address it directly because the source lies outside our control. It accumulates as chronic, background tension: harder to locate than acute stress, and for that reason, harder to shift.

This is why high-functioning, conscientious people so often find themselves burnt out by circumstances that look, from the outside, entirely manageable. The problem is not their resilience.

It is the invisible load of stress they have been absorbing, without knowing it, from the systems around them.

Bowen Systems thinking offers a framework for understanding exactly this: how stress moves between people, and how we can begin to interrupt it. A good place to start is discovering your own stress contagion profile with the Stress Contagion Quiz.

References

Decety, J. & Jackson, P.L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3(2), 71–100.

Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mujica-Parodi, L.R., Strey, H.H., Frederick, B., Savoy, R., Cox, D., Botanov, Y., Tolkunov, D.,

Rubin, D. & Weber, J. (2009). Chemosensory cues to confer vulnerability are revealed in the first episode of psychosis. PLoS ONE, 4(10), e7865.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.