Entrainment is a great word that sounds like what it means. Ever notice how your mood shifts according to who is beside you? On a depressing day you come across a happy friend and automatically lighten up. You are entraining to that person’s experience. She leads, you follow, like a train car behind the engine.
The entrainment mechanism works through the physical body. Without conscious thought, one person’s breathing pace becomes a match for the other’s. Body tension increases or decreases to align with the other’s tension level. Even heart rate and brain waves have been shown to entrain, to match across people, because the laws of physics, literal energy waves, are operating in the background.
Two women living in the same household will end up over time with matching menstrual cycles. Such is the power of entrainment. It works all the time and without thought. Imagine harnassing that power in your relationships.
Maria is happily reflecting on her son’s soccer game. The coach made him goalie today. In comes her husband, brow furrowed, body stiff with silent anger. Instantly her mood shifts. Her body tenses. She is entraining to his mind state. Now both are angry.
Why not entrain the other way? If she could hold tight to her pleasure in the face of his upset, it would be an invitation for him to entrain to her. Imagine their day together on that railway.
Once you notice the way it works, with a train that could drive in either direction, you can choose to be a conductor. The people who cross your path in a day will offer you their moods. Entrain to the ones that enhance you. Hold to your own mind state when they don’t. Then you are invitating them to entrain your way.
A mother is conducting entrainment when she soothes a crying baby. A therapist, calm in the face of a client’s upheaval, is doing the same. You, too, can harness the physics of emotions, if you pay attention. Choose when to entrain and when to conduct.
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