Is Your Anxiety Really Yours?

We embody emotions even via fictional entertainment

Source: PR image factory/Canva

A split-second glimpse of an anxious person’s face can have an impact on our mood for hours without us knowing—just a photograph, not even a real person. Even if we can’t see their face but can see the position of their body, we still take on their emotion for quite some time. Our impressions of emotion are processed rapidly—and are embodied; we share the emotion we see.

When we are near real people, we also respond to chemical signals of fear and anxiety that exude from sweat glands. One study found that dental students were subconsciously affected by their patient’s fear even to the point of making mistakes. We seem to have no awareness of being influenced by others’ emotions. The neurological pathways are so primitive that they lay beyond our ability to articulate what is going on using language. The only way scientists can establish that we are noticing anxiety is that our body shows the same emotional response. Although people can report feeling fine, when exposed to images of anxiety, the fear centres in their brain are activating, their heart rate is increasing, and their sweat is changing. We are not merely noticing others’ anxiety; we become anxious ourselves: Their anxiety becomes ours.

In the Animal World

Emotional contagion happens throughout the animal world; anxiety spreads through a range of species rapidly. And between species, too. Dogs catch their owner’s anxiety as do horses. Biologists think there are good reasons for emotional contagion—that survival has relied on an ability to rapidly share a readiness for action. When there is potential danger, there is no time to work out what it is or where it is. We need to be ready to escape, fight, or hide even if we haven’t seen the source of danger ourselves.

Now put that inbuilt super-sensitive danger-detector into our modern lives in which we are bombarded with imagery of trauma, violence, anxiety, fear, and terror on TV, newspapers, books, films, video games, advertisements—even chosen as "thrilling" entertainment—and it is easy to see why we have an epidemic of anxiety. Our unconscious alarm detector is on high alert even though there may be no danger in our personal lives.

Real and Fictional Imagery

Our natural tendency to take on the emotions of others means that we need to be mindful of what imagery and ideas infiltrate our highly sensitive alarm system. If you are suffering from anxiety, you would benefit from avoiding violent, threatening, or unpleasant information in books, TV, social media, conversations, radio, and video games. You cannot assume that you are not impacted because “it is only fiction.” Your unconscious alarm detector does not discern between fictional and real events. Nor can you assume that you are not alarmed because the events you are sensing are not happening to you. Emotional contagion means that you are to some degree sharing the experience. The distinction between self and other is not as strong as we imagine. Do you really want to experience mini traumas every day just for entertainment?

The primitive brain structures that respond to potential danger evolved to act first, think later. It is sensible to presume danger is true until proven otherwise. Today, we are exposed to an unnatural amount of fictional imagery. In our relatively recent past, if you saw a mad axeman running toward you, you were in real danger and you had better get out of the way. When we now watch a film, read a book, or listen to the radio describing a dangerous person running our way, our body responds with heightened arousal ready for action even though we "know" it is only fiction. This is, after all, the reason we find such fiction "exciting."

However, it is important to realise that the body has taken on that danger as if real. The accumulated impact of unconsciously sharing anxiety and fear with others (via any of our senses) produces a state of chronic anxiety.

If you suffer from chronic anxiety, it may not necessarily be about you or your situation but about the anxiety you have been exposed to from someone else near or far, real or fictional.