“Be empathetic” people always say. But feeling too much of other people’s emotions can be really harmful to your own. On the other hand, people’s infectious energy can be a real booster to yours and can result in great things! Truly, energy makes an impact on your life.
We’re all guilty of being affected by others’ energy for one simple reason… we are all human!
What is Energy?
Energy is the process of transfer, often depicted as waves or vibrations. Everyone emits an invisible intangible energy, but at different levels depending on their emotional state. Energies of love, respect, and joy are seen to be high vibrations. Whereas energies of stress, sadness, and anger are low vibrations.
These energies can very easily transfer from one individual to another.
See also: 6 Ways to Get More Energy as You Age
It’s the Who…
It’s the who that often determines the level of impact that the energy has. Likely, there are multiple examples you can think of where someone’s energy (either negative or positive) has impacted how you feel about a topic, or yourself, and has in some way influenced your actions and decisions later on.
A classic example of this is our parents.
Our parent’s thoughts and feelings towards sports, politics, values, and religion often become our thoughts and feelings on those topics. This is not necessarily because you are around them a lot (although during childhood this is a huge factor), but because you place a lot of respect and value on their judgments and views. Therefore, their positive energy towards yoga or running can encourage you to also hold these passions and views, in the same way, that their negative beliefs on eating meat may impact you in such a way that you decide to become a vegetarian.
And How Stong the Link Is
More evidence to support this is the fact that people make the strongest relationships (humans are very social creatures) with those that have complementing values and energies; an enthusiastic gardener with a positive energy for that hobby is unlikely to be in a relationship with an individual who hates gardening; therefore someone’s energy can impact your life in such a way, as to not form a closer friendship or relationship with them.
Consequently, the more value you put in someone’s judgment and views determines how much their energy impacts you.
How Can We Drop the ‘Negative’ Impact and Catch Hold of the ‘Positive’?
- Guard your time: reduce the time spent with negative people, whether it be physically with them in a room or on social media.
- Choose your attitude: don’t catch onto their gloomy outlook if you don’t see it that way.
- Refocus your thoughts: know what you believe and value and check-in with those thoughts, so someone’s negative energy has less impact.
- Express yourself 100%: be your authentic self and feel good about who you are.
- Understand you are not responsible for someone else’s actions: you have no control over how they react to you, so don’t carry that burden.
See also: What are the Effects and Symptoms of Overthinking?
