How stress spreads through teams

Have you ever driven a boat fast across the water, focused on getting somewhere, not thinking at all about what you’re leaving behind you? Then you look back and see a huge wake rolling out behind the boat, big enough to rock every smaller craft nearby.

We don’t feel our own wake. But our wake is what everyone else feels. And most of the time, we don’t even realise we’re creating it.

Stress seems to spread the same way. We may be leaving a stress wake behind us, the emotional impact we leave for the people around us.

So here’s a question worth sitting with: if someone followed you through your day, what would they feel?

What I find fascinating is that this stress wake is actually measurable. Researchers looking at heart rate, cortisol, even brain activity have found that when people spend time together, their nervous systems start to sync up. Literally. It’s not just “I can tell you’re stressed.” It’s closer to “my body starts responding as if your stress is happening to me.”

From a survival perspective, this makes sense. If someone in your prehistoric cave spotted a sabre-toothed cat, it wasn’t the moment to stay relaxed and chill. That wouldn’t have gone well for our ancestors! So, our nervous systems developed a remarkable ability to link up, to catch each other’s alarm fast, before anyone could put it into words.

You’ve probably felt it. Have you ever noticed people in a meeting start speaking a little faster, interrupting a little more, thinking a little less clearly? Nobody announced they were stressed. But somehow everyone joined in.

Which puts a different lens on that figure from earlier in this series, that around 80% of Australian and New Zealand employees report symptoms of burnout. We hear it and think that’s a lot of individuals struggling.

But stress isn’t only sitting inside people. It may be accumulating across teams, amplifying across departments, quietly becoming the baseline state of an organisation. Some of the stress in your workplace may not be coming from the work at all. It may be spreading between people.

If everyone is driving their boats fast, the wakes get very big. And it becomes unsafe to be out there.

Next week: if your stress spreads to your team, so does your calm. Why your state sets the tone, and what that means if you lead.

Human Foundations is a weekly look at the science behind high performance and wellbeing at work, from keynote speaker, psychiatrist, comedian and author Dr Jo Prendergast. Subscribe to get each edition as it lands.