How Your Mood Can Positively Impact Others

Moods are contagious. The good mood you’re in today can infect others, setting them up for a better day. Unfortunately, the same is true when you’re in a bad mood. The other person may not be affected by your mood if they have particularly strong boundaries or a positive mindset, but those who are more sensitive or vulnerable may catch your low mood and spread it to others like a virus.

One happy person can affect hundreds, maybe thousands of people, depending on how connected they are. I’m not just making this up, it’s science. And it’s an important thing to consider if you work with humans who have porous boundaries and/or are emotionally volatile.

So, how do you maintain and demonstrate positivity without being disingenuous or performative? Here are a few simple ways to bring more joy into your life and make a more positive impact on others:

Practice Gratitude Regularly

Integrating gratitude into your daily routine is one surefire way of improving your mood overall. It’s nearly impossible to feel grumpy when you’re consciously focusing on what you’re grateful for. Gratitude is fairly simple to weave into the fabric of the day and morning is often the best time to begin because it can set the tone for your day. 

Some helpful practices include leaving a gratitude list by your bedside to remind your morning self what you’re thankful for, making breakfast a time to consider how fortunate you are, allowing every frustrating moment in your day to trigger thoughts of gratitude, and by keeping a daily gratitude journal that documents the deepening of your gratitude over time. 

Think about the rhythm of your day and when you’re particularly susceptible to feeling depleted or low. How can you take care of yourself during those moments and insert a gratitude practice to give you a lift?

Strengthen Self-Awareness 

Self-awareness isn’t a goal you ever really reach. It’s a muscle that needs constant exercise to remain strong. Being self-aware means having deep knowledge of who you are, including what you value and how your values affect your thinking, what your blind spots and triggers are, and how your behaviors and character affect others. As we grow and change, all of these things change along with us, requiring an ongoing process of self-exploration. The deeper we go, the more insight we have into our behaviors and interactions with others and the more consciously we can navigate our relationships. 

Meditation can help increase self-awareness, allowing you direct access to the thoughts that flow through your head. Journaling can be helpful for the same reasons, and asking for feedback from those who love you can offer a fresh lens. This article offers additional information and guidance for cultivating self-awareness. 

How do you exercise your self-awareness muscles? How might you expand your awareness of yourself and your impact on others?

Practice Empathy 

Empathy allows us to see the world through others' eyes. Though empathy can’t be forced (you can’t feel empathy for someone you can’t relate to), you can tend the soil for it to grow. For example, you may not naturally understand or resonate with someone, but you can take the time to identify elements of their experience that have meaning or resonance for you. These elements can become points of connection where you can nurture understanding, compassion, and empathy. 

One of the biggest blocks to empathy is when someone holds values that conflict with our own. It’s easy to see people as “other” when they don’t think like us. People can hold different values and still have a lot in common however. Those commonalities may just be hidden at the moment. It may take some time, but the more connections you can make between yourself and the other, the more you see yourself in the other and the more you are likely to feel empathy. (You can find additional ways to develop empathy here.)

What keeps you from feeling empathy for others? Do some of your values set you up to be triggered when others believe differently? How might you seek common values even in the presence of differing values?

Interpret Your Feelings as Positive

According to Lisa Barrett Feldman, we construct our emotions by making connections between what’s happening in our environment and the sensations we’re feeling in our body. For example, we may feel the sensation of butterflies as we’re entering a meeting. We could interpret that to mean that we’re nervous and go into a tailspin that leaves us sweaty and stuttering, or we could see it as a sign that we’re excited and walk into the meeting feeling confident and sharp. If this doesn’t resonate with you, watch her short film. It’s pretty groundbreaking stuff. 

Instead of deciding that lethargy in the morning is an indication that you’re depressed or in trouble at work, consider what else it could mean. It could mean you didn’t sleep well and need a quick walk. It could mean you need to drink some water. It could just be a passing feeling that, if you sit with it, will pass in a moment. It doesn’t have to dictate the mood of your day. 

With that said, one caveat is that sometimes your emotions are gently (or not so gently) nudging you to acknowledge a trigger or recognize misalignment in your life. Managing your mood does not mean avoiding your triggers or bypassing your internal warning systems. It does mean being cognizant of how your emotions can be hijacked by your environment and rewiring your brain so that it can create joy when you’ve determined that you are safe. 

What are you feeling right now? How might your brain be constructing your current emotion? What assumptions is it making about your environment and the sensations in your body? What would you prefer to feel? How might you adjust your assumptions to get closer to your preferred feeling?