Come on, get happy!

Today I happened upon  Kathy Sierra's  cogent, well-written article about the effects of anger and negativity on your brain as well as on the brains of others. For someone who has always been incredibly sensitive, phenomenons like "emotional contagion" and "mirror neurons" have played a significant role in my life; I just haven't always been able to describe or label what I was experiencing. We all use different terms to describe how we feel when we encounter an extremely negative person - "emotional vampire," "energy vampire," "downer," etc., but the gist is the same: we feel depleted after an interaction with someone like this. Similarly, there are those who are able to cheer you up, reinvigorate, or inspire you simply with their presence. I used to be so sensitive to others emotions (particularly those in pain/distress) that I would end up utterly depleted, burned out, and exhausted after letting myself get 'sucked in' by other's negativity. It took a lot of introspection, research, and work on myself to become centered enough to be able to control this and choose when and with whom I would engage. This entire article is worth reading for the framework she places around thinking about happiness (sic):

If you were around one or more people with a potentially harmful contagious disease, you would probably take steps to protect yourself in some way. And if you were the contagious one, you'd likely take steps to protect others until you were sure the chance of infecting someone else was gone.

But while we all have a lot of respect for physical biological contagions, we do NOT have much respect for physical emotional contagions. (I said "physical", because science has known for quite some time that "emotions" are not simply a fuzzy-feeling concept, but represent physical changes in the brain.)

From a paper on Memetics and Social Contagion,

"...social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious. Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is the social contagion thesis; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through, and leap between, populations more like outbreaks of measels or chicken pox than through a process of rational choice."

Find the rest of the article  here 

So the choice is yours...what will you spread?