Anger is contagious, and mostly effortless
Anger is contagious. You may have noticed it intuitively: when someone gets yelled at, they might yell back, or become angry and end up passing that sentiment onto the next unsuspecting person who crosses their path. The contagion has a mechanism: a brain that perceives someone’s anger as a threat activates its own fight or flight response, and one of the things that response produces is more anger.
When we’re confronted by someone who is angry, our brain can perceive it as a threat, which activates the fight or flight mechanism. This mechanism responds to threat and fear by giving a person the “tools” they need to survive. These include physiological changes like increased heart rate, reduced digestion and faster breathing, and cognitive changes like narrowed vision, a reduced capacity for rational thinking, and emotional reactivity, which includes the expression of anger.
Expressing anger makes us appear strong and fierce when we’re internally afraid or feeling vulnerable. It covers up our fears so we’re better able to survive. All of this happens quite automatically, which makes it hard not to react in situations that feel like attacks or threats. If an angry person activates your own anger response, you might end up passing it along to someone else without even realizing it. That’s how anger spreads.
Compassion is also contagious, but takes more effort
So what about compassion? Compassion is the willingness or urge to act to relieve someone else’s pain or suffering, or otherwise support them when they’re feeling negatively. Compassion is contagious too, but there’s a significant difference between the two. Anger is quite automatic, and self-serving: it covers up fear and hides deeper feelings of vulnerability. Being compassionate requires a person to choose a certain level of discomfort to help someone else. It’s almost like lending someone a crutch so they can find their footing – we bear part of the burden for a while. That requires us to experience some vulnerability ourselves, which our brain doesn’t like and wants to protect us from. We have to teach our brain that this kind of vulnerability is actually a good thing.
Choosing compassion is rewarding
Compassion takes a more deliberate, conscious and courageous effort than anger does. We’re sharing a feeling of security with someone else, taking on some of their vulnerability. Compassionately listening to and supporting someone whose loved one just passed away means feeling empathy for their loss; we might start thinking about loved ones we have lost and experience unpleasant emotions ourselves.
How is compassion contagious? First, when we feel safe and secure, the choice to act compassionately is easier, because we aren’t in “survival mode.” In that safe state we can consciously decide to be a little vulnerable without feeling overwhelmed, uneasy or stressed. And when we act compassionately, we move someone from a negative state to a more positive, safe and secure one, which sets them up to be compassionate towards someone else in turn.
Second, compassion makes us feel good, and the research bears this out. In brain-imaging studies, training in compassion increased people’s positive emotions and activated the brain’s reward circuitry, the same regions tied to pleasure and motivation. There’s a chemical side to it too: warm, supportive contact with others is associated with the release of oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding and to a calmer, dampened stress response. So compassion moves the giver towards a safer, more positive state, not only the person receiving it. When people feel safe and secure they’re more effective and productive, they can think more clearly, and they experience more positive emotions and fewer negative ones. With less anger, fear and stress, we also tend to focus less on negative things and more on positive ones.
So I challenge you to choose to spread compassion. Choose to care about how people feel, and to do what you can to help with honest intent. Choose to accept some discomfort, burden or small sacrifice in exchange for the positive feelings compassion creates in those who practise it.
If you’d like to improve your ability to manage your own survival state, reducing stress and shifting into a more positive, “safe” state more often, that’s something coaching can help you practise – book a free intro call if you’d like to work on it.