You know the feeling. You walk into a room where two people have just clashed. Nothing is said, and yet within three seconds you know something is off. Your shoulders creep up, your breath goes shallow, you are tired before anyone has asked you anything. Sit down across from someone who is genuinely calm in themselves and you notice the opposite: without paying attention, your own breathing settles down with theirs.
We call it the mood, or a click, or simply energy. Underneath that word sits a whole physiology, and it runs all the way down to the smallest part of your body that makes energy: your mitochondria.
Mitochondria are the power plants in your cells. They turn what you eat and breathe into the fuel your heart, your muscles and above all your brain run on. Your brain is a heavy user; it is a few percent of your body and asks for a fifth of your energy. No wonder that when fuel runs low you are not only weak in the legs, you also think slower, get shorter with people and lose your patience faster.
What stayed under the radar for a long time is that those same mitochondria do not only make energy, they also sense. They pick up what is happening in your body, and stress is the biggest player. Martin Picard, the researcher who built a whole field around this at Columbia University, mapped in a systematic review with Bruce McEwen how psychological stress changes the structure and function of mitochondria. In later work his group found that your psychosocial life shows up in the mitochondria in your brain. What happens in your head and in your relationships reaches your mitochondria through your stress hormones, and changes how well they do their job.
And this is where it gets interesting for the people around you. Stress is contagious, in a way you can actually measure. In research by Veronika Engert and colleagues it turned out that simply watching someone else under pressure raises your own cortisol. You have been through nothing, you are only watching, and your body joins in. With a stranger it happened to about ten percent of viewers, with a partner to forty. Put two people together for a while and their heart rate, their breathing and their cortisol start to look alike. Physiologists call it synchrony. It runs between partners, between parent and child, and simply between colleagues at a desk.
Follow those lines and you see where this goes. The other person’s state shifts your stress system, and your stress system talks straight to your mitochondria. The person across from you helps decide how efficiently your power plants run that afternoon.
And then the question it really comes down to: do your mitochondria react directly to theirs, at that level itself? This is where the proven science stops for now. Picard describes mitochondria as “social”, beautifully supported, but that is about mitochondria talking to each other within one body: they form groups, tune their behaviour to one another and send signals to the cell nucleus. That your own mitochondria directly sense another person’s has not been shown. What does make it intriguing: since 2020 there are signs that whole, loose mitochondria circulate in your blood, outside the cells, and whether they are actually functional is still very much debated. So the chain from the other person to your cells is solid; the direct cell to cell handover between two people stays an open question for now.
Even without that last piece, the conclusion is big enough. Who you surround yourself with is not a matter of taste or company, it is a lifestyle factor. Someone who is always in alarm, who complains, or who quietly leaves you feeling you fall short, does not cost you a “bad vibe”, it costs you fuel. You come out of a talk like that wiped, without having done anything. Day after day it adds up to less energy, a shorter fuse and a foggier head, exactly the things you need to build what matters to you. The other side is just as real: next to someone who radiates calm and truly listens, your system settles into a state where you think sharper, have more to give and last longer.
At GOOD we look at everything that makes your mitochondria strong or tired: how you move, how you sleep, when you get light and cold and food, how you breathe. The people around you belong in that same list, as the factor you forget most easily because it has no label and no price. And the good part is that you can do something with it, because synchrony runs both ways.
Four ways to protect your own system
The plus and minus round. This week, run through your regular contacts and put a plus or a minus next to each in your mind: do I usually come away from this person charged up or drained. You do not have to write anyone off. You only want to know where your energy goes, because once you see it you start planning differently around who you spend time with, and how long.
A scent anchor for your boundary. Smell has a direct line to the part of your brain that handles emotion and memory, faster than a thought. You can use that. Pick one scent that will come to mean “I stand firm, this is not mine to carry home”. For many people a strong, spicy blend like the Protective Blend (On Guard) works well for this, but the scent that grounds you is the right one. Build the link slowly: take a moment when you already feel calm and steady, roll the blend onto your wrist, bring it to your nose and breathe in. Do that for a few days. After that you use the same ritual right before a talk you are dreading. Be honest about what happens then: the scent does not put up a shield that stress bounces off. What it does is put your brain back, in a fraction of a second, into the state you tied to it. That is enough, because from that state you take on less of the other person’s tension.
The reset between people. Coming out of a heavy conversation, give your system ten seconds before it locks onto the other person’s state. Breathe out longer than you breathe in a few times, three counts in, six counts out, and bring in your scent anchor. That long exhale switches on your own brake, and the scent tells your body you are back with yourself. Short, but right at the moment it counts.
An image that slides off. Your mind grabs a vivid picture more easily than an instruction, so give it one. For a hard conversation, put a thin glass sphere around you, or a skin like a dolphin’s, that the other person’s tension slides off like water. And on your way out, beam yourself up like on the Enterprise, “Beam me up, Scotty”, with the transporter set so it takes only what is yours and leaves all of the other person’s stuff on the pad. Sounds daft, works surprisingly well.
And then the reversal that gives you the most. Because synchrony is contagious, you can be the calm one who pulls a room down. Walk into a tense situation with slow breathing and a soft voice, and you notice how people fold in around it. Same physiology, only now you set the tone instead of catching it.
Sources
- Picard M, McEwen BS (2018). Psychological Stress and Mitochondria: A Systematic Review. Psychosomatic Medicine.
- Trumpff C, Picard M et al. (2024). Psychosocial experiences are associated with human brain mitochondrial biology. PNAS.
- Picard M, Sandi C (2020). The social nature of mitochondria: Implications for human health.
- Engert V, Singer T et al. (2014). Cortisol increase in empathic stress is modulated by emotional closeness and observation modality. Psychoneuroendocrinology.
- Liu S et al. (2013). Synchrony of Diurnal Cortisol Pattern in Couples.
- Al Amir Dache Z et al. (2020). Blood contains circulating cell-free respiratory competent mitochondria. FASEB Journal. With critical note: Stephens et al. (2021).