Since I’ve been living sans-roommate, I’ve become more cognizant of how the moods of those around me impact my own mood. Not every day as Ellen is a beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood kind of day, but by and large, I try my best to focus on the positive and roll with the punches.
I’m an ENFJ – and a self-professed care taker. When I see others in situations that are making them unhappy, I feel obligated to do whatever I can to help…even when it has detrimental effects on my own well-being. After making a conscious effort to be in the company of upbeat, funny, and generally happy people the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the true importance of the people I choose to spend my time with.
The moods of others (and their subsequent impact) can have lasting implications in our own lives.
In their book The How of Happiness, Ken Sheldon, David Schkade, and Sonja Lyubomirsky theorize that genetics determines roughly 50% of an individual’s happiness, while another 10% is attributable to our circumstances (e.g., wealth, health, marital status). The remaining 40% is “within our power to change.”
UC San Diego professor James Fowler and Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School studied the power of our real-life social networks, and found that your friend’s friend’s friend (that’s 3 degrees of separation) can influence both your emotional and physical states. The two researchers found that “each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent.” How many 7% decreases can we afford to have if less than half of our happiness is within our realm of control?
Of course, you could argue that by being exposed to your happiness, your friend’s mood is likely to improve – but there’s a difference between someone who is having a rough day and a friend who will, without fail, reject any suggestion you make that could lead to a change for the better because it’s easier to continue to wallow in self-pity. Time will show that friends like these are emotional black holes – regardless of the effort and energy you expend trying to cheer them up, they’ll turn any semblance of positivity into gloom and doom.
Now, onto raincloud number 2: the frenemy.
You’re gearing up for a meeting, or drafting an important e-mail, and happen to check your Facebook stream for updates. Much to your dismay, one of your less-than-kindred contacts has posted an update that, for one reason or another, gets under your skin. It’s embarrassing to admit that such a small thing aggravates us, but it’s true – I’m regrettably familiar with hypertension-inducing wall posts. In a nutshell, they’re irritating.
As Dan Ariely and Eduardo Andrade confirmed in their research, when we’re in an irritated, we’re more likely to make irrational decisions. This finding may not come as much of a surprise….but when we’re faced with a similar situation in the future, our propensity to make the same irrational decision is heightened – even if we’re no longer in an irritated mood. Our irrational decision becomes “part of the blueprint for… future decisions;” what our brain considers to be the “way to act.”
Ariely writes, “When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.”
Is it worth botching an important decision in not just this meeting, but the next, because you’ve voluntarily exposed yourself to someone who can so easily manipulate your mood (as they’ve proved to do time and time again)? If a single status update can throw your whole day into a tailspin, your next course of action should be obvious:
Account > Privacy Settings > Block List
Voila! Irritating acquaintances aren’t as easy to deal with in the real world, but if you routinely spend a lot of time with individuals who make you feel like pulling your hair out, you must enjoy pain on some level.
As for me…well, going into my 24th year, I’m resolving to try to do my best to represent one of those 15% bumps in the likelihood that my close friends are happy…even if that means distancing myself from others.
