The second of two articles about the adrenaline response.

We suspected it. The research and speculation about mirror neurons predicted it. Now a recent study shows it: stress – and the emotions of frustration, anxiety and fear that go with it – are contagious. Strangers leak their stress to you. Watching TV – with its never-ending stream of bad news – stresses you out. All of that may make you sick.

More precisely, here’s what happens: under stress, your body kicks into high gear and releases increased amounts of glucose from the liver (and other storage areas) into the blood. Your heart rate increases, and sends more of this enriched blood to your muscles. Anything that doesn’t relate to short-terms survival slows down. Your senses are sharpened, your immune system kicks into high gear.

You’re ready to kick ass.

All of that’s great for short-term survival – such as escaping an unfriendly lion – but not so great for long-term health. The flight-or-flight-or-freeze reaction is meant to get you out of emergencies.

But watching others in stress mode, or watching TV with its stressful news and stories, puts you in that mode over a longer period of time.

And that’s what can imperil your health.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that if you know the person or people involved, you get more stressed out watching other people suffer than if they are strangers. But either way you catch the contagion. You get stressed.

With no lion to escape from – and get over – that stress lingers and that’s where the concern for your health comes in. Various studies show that low, persistent levels of stress over long periods of time cause problems for systems that weren’t meant for that kind of scenario.

Now, what does all this mean for public speakers and their audiences?

A couple of things. For speakers, thinking about your long-term health means being mindful of the adrenaline cycle and paying as much attention to the release of the stress as you do to the accumulation of it as you go into presentation mode.

In other words, consciously create a way to relax after the tension of the moment. Meditation, time alone, gentle exercise – whatever works for you to bring your body back to normal.

But speakers need to think about what’s happening between them and the audience as well. If you walk on to the stage with a lot of adrenaline coursing through your system, you’re going to be leaking that fight-or-flight-or-freeze magic to the audience. You’re going to create low-level stress in the people in front of you.

That’s going to make them less able to take in what you’re saying, because adrenaline causes tunnel vision and narrowed focus, and it’s optimistic to assume that you’ll be the beneficiary of that focus. The exit signs will be more appealing, I’m afraid, than your message.

So you need not only to school yourself in relaxation techniques, and ways to transmute that tension into positive emotions like excitement and passion, but you also need to make sure you help the audience do the same.

Rather than allow a negative doom loop of tension, anxiety, and fear to distract your audience from the message you’ve worked so hard to present, you need to manage your emotions so that what you leak to the audience is passion and enthusiasm rather than the shakes.

If it seems odd to talk about managing emotions, do recall that you’ve probably spent a good deal of time preparing your content. Why shouldn’t you prepare your emotional attitude toward your material as well?

Before you get ready to speak, find a quiet space to focus your emotions on the positive ones you want to evoke. For some people, it can help to recall a time when you naturally felt those emotions – a time when you were naturally “up” and passionate about something. For others, simply focusing on the opportunity in front of you, redefining it as an honor, or great responsibility, or chance to shine, or moment to share your wonderful ideas with a receptive audience – whatever the specifics, find a way to turn your anxiety into excitement.

Everyone’s endocrinal systems will thank you. And the audience will be able to pay attention to you and your message.

Come learn how to share positive emotions at our Powerful Public Speaking seminar — one day in October in Boston – sign up here.