When hustle spreads like static
You walk into a regular meeting feeling fairly neutral. Or maybe you enter already feeling a little annoyed. Within minutes, your body tightens.
Your body is the first to register: one person sighs heavily, another crosses their arms, maybe there’s a slight eyeroll or smirk. There’s hustle energy churning. It’s got the vibe of more, faster, do it yesterday. If you just worked harder, rested faster, got more ticked off your list.
No one says outright that something’s wrong, but tension is thick. As the agenda moves forward, folks may respond snippily or stay quiet. By the end, you feel drained, maybe even irritable, despite having had no direct conflict.
When you’re surrounded by others, you naturally pick up their body language, tone, and energy, both conscious and unconscious. Just like entering a shared space in a funk, this energy is contagious. And so much of this is inherent hustle culture that is running even more rampant these days, where fear and scarcity have been weaponized.
Jill Bolte Taylor (neuroscientist, My Stroke of Insight) reminds us to: “be responsible for the energy you bring to a space.” She learned this firsthand while recovering from a stroke, sensing everyone else’s energy before she could even communicate again.
This is negative contagion in action: stress and frustration spreading through the group like static electricity, often unnoticed and unaddressed. In today’s already-strained workplaces, this emotional echo gets amplified. Everyone and everything bounces off each other, reducing your capacity to stay grounded, eroding relationships, and triggering reactive rather than intentional choices.
Last week, we practiced observing group dynamics without getting pulled into the drama. This week, let’s turn the lens inward: how do you show up in these dynamics? Individual practices never happen in isolation. They are always embedded in group and relational contexts. How you regulate yourself shapes how you show up for others, and the foundation of every relationship—whether at work, home, or in your community—is the one you have with yourself.
Your micro-practice for the week: Pause and Notice After the Meeting
Before: What was my state walking in?
After: What do I notice in my body now?
Reflection: Did I absorb the energy, what did I give off, or did I hold neutral?
No need to fix anything. The point is to observe the shift. When you notice it, you create space to choose your presence rather than absorb someone else’s reactivity.
Try this in one meeting this week. Keep building your self-awareness muscles. Jot a quick note on what you observed. That small pause is where clarity, calm, and grounded connection begin as your first act of resilience in group spaces.