Recently, Facebook has found itself caught in a challenging public relations predicament. They have run experiments on a small user group by placing either positive or negative comments in their newsfeed and they have concluded that this can have an effect on mood.

In hindsight, many of us are not too surprised that this is true. We choose events, music, tv shows based on how they make us feel. It’s logical to think that a medium that we spend hours on every day can subconsciously affect how we feel about different topics or ourselves. Brand Advertising has been doing this for years via different mediums like TV to ensure we think that “choosy mom’s choose Jif Peanut Butter”, etc. .

The reality is that every exchange with information or an experience affects us subconsciously and more importantly every human interaction is an exchange of emotional energy. The question for all of us is how many of us really paying attention to our net emotional load every day. Are our daily personal interactions a net emotional ROI positive or a net ROI negative?

I’ve been to workshops listening to some of the psychological and physiological affects that impact health care workers. Why is there such a rapid burnout rate with new nurses? There are number of factors, but one of them is that by interacting with sick and dying people, particularly in challenging environments, a lot of health care workers absorb increased amounts of negative emotional energy they can’t dissipate well. The same is true of many police officers as they have to integrate with certain parts of the population that are involved with crime, violence and drugs.

They say that the set point of our own emotional state is highly correlated with the 5 people we are closest with. Who are your 5? Are those relationships net emotional positive and what can you do to affect the quality of the interactions if they are not?

I think a lot about the people in my life that I choose to work and spend personal time with and what i can do to improve the quality of those relationships. I will submit, it is very hard to change the interactions with someone you have a historical negative energy relationship with. However, there is a cost for not doing something about it. As time goes by, the continuous load of dealing with these interactions comes at a cost to you and your disposition in life.

A few thoughts to consider to reduce your emotional encumbrance:

1. Make sure you know who you really are and take responsibility for the emotions you bring into any and all of your relationships. Ask for feedback.
2. Think about the closest people in your life, determine the quality of those relationships from an emotional energy standpoint.
3. Consciously spend more time and deepen the relationships with the most positive energy people in your life.
4. Consider restarting or ending each significantly negative relationship. A first step to restarting is communicating what doesn’t work for you and at the same time being willing to listen to feedback without getting defensive. Give it everything you’ve got. It’s really okay to take a short term break from a relationship(even family members) and see what happens. A lot of times, a break gets you out of a cycle that wasn’t working, and makes you appreciate what you had before you decide what to do. Sometimes relationships end forever that just weren’t working. The faster the better. The net benefit can be dramatic as it will free you to engage with the higher emotional state that you deserve.
5. Manage your social media. Own your posts. The facebook experiment tells us all something. We have never had the power of amplification of our emotional energy, like we have now. When we send something we have the power to affect 338 people plus on average. Also, turn off posts from folks in your feeds that are not using it responsibly. You know who they are, leave more room for the energy from the folks that matter.

Remember your psychological state is your most precious commodity. You deserve the emotional state that you want to experience. Life is challenging enough so take control of the things you can by making room for more net positive people in your life, real or virtually.