Most people have taken on the emotional tone of a room and those around them at some stage. For instance, you might have walked into an environment that felt tense, causing your own thoughts to race. Or you may have grown up in a home where worrying seemed to be the default setting – and somewhere along the way it became yours, too.
Emotional contagion anxiety is a well-documented phenomenon. Plus, the science behind it says something important about how deeply we’re wired as humans to absorb the emotional states of those around us.[1]
But does this make anxiety contagious? Well, not in the way a virus is, but relationships can shape our nervous systems, threat responses, and baseline sense of safety in the world. This article will explore this phenomenon, including:
“Emotional contagion” refers to the process by which someone’s emotional state can transfer to someone else via automatic, largely unconscious mechanisms.[1] This process is the reason why laughter can spread across the room before anyone recognizes why something was funny. It’s also why sitting with someone in distress can make you feel depleted.
The neurological basis for emotional contagion is based in something called “mirror neurons.” These are cells in the brain that activate when someone does something and when they observe someone else do the same thing.[2]
This cause-and-effect evolved for good reasons: emotional attunement and relating to others’ experiences is one of the core foundations of empathy, cooperation, and social bonding.[3] Being able to read and resonate with someone else’s emotional state allows for unspoken communication about potential threats and safety. However, the problem comes in when this system doesn’t distinguish very well between anxiety that’s relevant to you and anxiety that belongs to someone else.
Not everyone takes in secondhand stress and anxiety the same way. Research has suggested that people who are highly empathic may have anxious attachment styles, perhaps leading them to be more prone to emotional contagion. Similarly, those who have a personal history of anxiety can be more vulnerable to experiencing emotional contagion.[4]
For these people, being in proximity to someone in a chronic state of anxiety can be genuinely dysregulating in ways that can last long after their interaction with the other person concludes.
Additionally, early relational experiences can play a large role as well. Growing up with a parent or caregiver with anxiety can teach your nervous system to treat hypervigilance as a baseline, calibrating your own threat-detection system to match your environment.
AMFM is here to help you or your loved one take the next steps towards an improved mental well-being.
Secondhand stress symptoms can be easy to miss because they feel like they’re coming from you and not an outside source. The anxiety simply appears and feels like it’s yours, so recognizing that what you’re carrying might have originated from someone or something else can be a useful step.
The physical signs of this anxiety tend to look a lot like anxiety that stems from your own experiences. For example, feeling tight in the shoulders and jaw, having disrupted sleep, struggling with feelings of restlessness, and fatigue that sleeping or resting doesn’t seem to fix. All of these symptoms can be the body’s response to your nervous system running in a state of low-grade alertness. But it’s actually the proximity to someone else who is chronically anxious that is keeping your guard constantly engaged.
Emotionally speaking, secondhand stress can often show up as something akin to background dread, a feeling that something is wrong that seems difficult to identify. Absorbing a partner, friend, or family member’s anxiety can often feel like you’re responsible for fixing it. And, hyperfixating on their mood can, over time, produce its own anxiety symptoms that feel remarkably similar to those of an anxiety disorder.
As a test, try to pay attention to how you feel when the other person isn’t around. If time away from them brings you noticeable relief, then that’s worth paying attention to. While it doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship is bad or harmful, it could suggest that something in the overall dynamic is costing you more than you initially recognized.
Anxiety has a way of moving through families, genetically and otherwise. In fact, studies have shown that anxiety disorders have around a 30 to 40% genetic component.[5] However, the environment of your childhood home, its relationship patterns, and the coping strategies that were modeled also play a large role in what gets passed down.
Children, by and large, are constant observers of the world around them. A parent who treats the world as inherently threatening and catastrophizes uncertainty can shape a child’s threat detection and overall development, with long-lasting effects. As a result, children can absorb anxiety through thousands of micro-interactions that start to build a bigger picture about how safe or unsafe the world really is.
Family anxiety patterns tend to revolve around particular themes, such as health, financial security, social judgment, or catastrophes. These themes can quickly develop into worldviews, making generational anxiety difficult to address until the very concept itself gets brought to your attention.
Often framed as “intuition” or “common sense”, transmitted anxiety can wreak havoc on your nervous system and well-being, coloring how you view the world around you.
Anxiety and codependency are frequently seen together, with the relationship typically operating in both directions. Codependency, or an excessive emotional reliance on someone else, can easily create the kind of conditions that anxiety thrives on. At the same time, anxiety can push people toward codependent patterns as a way of managing their ongoing fears.
In a codependent dynamic, one person typically revolves their emotional life around managing or “fixing” the other person. For the person taking in someone else’s anxiety, they can find themselves being hyper-aware of the other’s mood and outlook. So they might compulsively seek reassurance or attempt to give it, which can be damaging to their boundaries.
Checking in on an anxious partner reduces the immediate discomfort of watching them try to cope. Doing so may provide short-term relief – but reorganizing your plans around someone else’s anxiety also avoids the conflict that might follow if you hadn’t. These responses can feel like care (and sometimes they are), but they also prevent the anxious person from developing their own distress tolerance for anxiety.
Trauma bonding and anxiety can cause anxiety and closeness to become overly intertwined, with the same relationship that causes your distress also becoming a go-to source for comfort. Breaking this pattern can require couples therapy for anxiety, individual treatment, or a combination of the two.
A Mission For Michael (AMFM) provides treatment for adults experiencing various conditions. Anxiety support is a phone call away – call 866-478-4383 to learn about our current treatment options. See our residences in Southern California’s Orange County & San Diego County. Take a look at our homes on the east side of the Metro area in Washington County. View our facilities in Fairfax County, VA within the DC metro area.
Find Anxiety Treatment Programs
Carlsbad – Goldenbush
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & covered seating in backyard.
Carlsbad – Hoover
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms for our clients with ocean views and large rooms.
Dana Point – Blue Lantern
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & pool.
Dana Point – Crystal Lantern
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Includes large rooms, updated interior, & private treatment rooms.
Fallbrook – North Ridge
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features a tennis court, pool, and game area.
Fallbrook – Peony
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Secluded area with library, large backyard, and pool.
Laguna Hills – Waterwheel
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & large backyard.
Laguna Niguel – Campeon
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & covered seating in backyard.
Lake Forest – Grayston
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & covered seating in backyard.
Lake Forest – Sunnybrook
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Newly remodeled interior with large rooms and backyard with garden.
San Juan Capistrano – Banderas
Male identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Updated interior, & covered seating in backyard.
San Juan Capistrano – Valencia
Female identifying house with double occupancy rooms. Features large rooms, updated interior, & covered seating in backyard.
Stillwater – Arcola
Male mental health residential house with double and single occupancy rooms. Secluded area with large backyard many dedicated spaces for therapy.
Stillwater – Dellwood
Female mental health residential house with double and single occupancy rooms. Beautifully appointed, relaxing atmosphere for healing.
Annandale – Rebel Rose
Female identifying house with single and double occupancy rooms. Secluded area with movie theater, on a large property.
Fairfax Station – Derbyshire
Male only house with double occupancy rooms. Secluded area with large rooms, gorgeous interior, and music/game room.
Great Falls – Kellie Jean
Gender Inclusive house with double and single occupancy rooms. Secluded area with movie theater, game room, and large property.
Vienna – Browns Mill
Gender Inclusive property, Restoring hope and well-being, AMFM Mental Health Treatment provides compassionate care in a peaceful setting.
Vienna – Corsica
Gender Inclusive house with double and single occupancy rooms. Secluded area with large backyard, movie theater, and dedicated spaces for therapy.
Vienna – Lawyers
Male identifying house with double and single occupancy rooms. Secluded area with large backyard many dedicated spaces for therapy.
Anxiety that’s enmeshed with your close relationships can benefit from treatment – for both the anxiety and the relationships themselves. Individual therapy is usually the starting point, and with good reason. Approaches like CBT can help you identify your thought patterns and any cognitive distortions present, while psychodynamic therapy can deeply examine attachment issues and family experiences.
Couples therapy for anxiety is also worth considering when your experiences of anxiety are affecting your relationships. It may also be effective when the dynamic between two people is working to maintain anxiety for one or both parties. A skilled clinician can help both partners to better recognize their respective roles in these patterns, building new communication strategies that don’t reinforce cycles of anxiety and developing tools for navigating the difficult moments.
Additionally, group therapy for anxiety offers a way to experience re-regulating your nervous system in the presence of other people who share your difficulties. Practicing boundaries and expressing vulnerability in the group setting builds capacity that transfers to many other settings in your daily life. This offers the opportunity to connect and try out new styles of thinking and being.
For those whose anxiety in relationships has become severe, adult anxiety treatment programs at the residential level can provide structured support that outpatient alone might not be enough to deliver. Mental health support for families is also available at that level, recognizing that recovery is often intertwined with the people closest to us.
Anxiety can sometimes feel insurmountable and impossible to overcome, but you can find healing with the right support. A Mission For Michael offers anxiety recovery services and adult anxiety treatment programs across both residential and outpatient levels of care, including evidence-based and holistic treatment methods.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you find your best path forward.
Complete the form to receive a prompt call back from a member of our experienced and compassionate admissions staff. All communication is 100% confidential.
"*" indicates required fields
If you suspect that emotional contagion is affecting your relationship, it’s normal to have some questions about this phenomenon. To help, we’ve provided the following answers to FAQs we commonly receive.
It absolutely can. Scrolling through content from others that constantly expresses fear, outrage, anger, anxiety, and catastrophic thinking patterns can cause similar emotional contagion reactions, just like in-person experiences can.
Social media exposes people to distress with no natural or inherent break, which can produce a cumulative stress response that feels puzzling and difficult to trace back to its source. This can leave you feeling anxious without exactly knowing why.
Yes, because the source of anxiety doesn’t always present itself clearly. Sometimes it shows up as irritability, controlling behaviors, excessive planning, or an indescribable yet palpable tension. This can cause you to take on the nervousness or tension they give off and cause your nervous system to go into overdrive.
No, your future isn’t written for you just because of how you grew up or your current circumstances. It is important to remember that the patterns you took in are very real and likely deeply ingrained, but they’re not permanent. Your brain maintains its ability to form new patterns throughout the lifespan, and therapy can help you to find new ways of coping and relating to the world around you.
At AMFM, we strive to provide the most up-to-date and accurate medical information based on current best practices, evolving information, and our team’s approach to care. Our aim is that our readers can make informed decisions about their healthcare.
Our reviewers are credentialed medical providers specializing and practicing behavioral healthcare. We follow strict guidelines when fact-checking information and only use credible sources when citing statistics and medical information. Look for the medically reviewed badge on our articles for the most up-to-date and accurate information.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate or out of date, please let us know at info@amfmhealthcare.com
