How to stay calm around a difficult coworker

To stay calm around a difficult coworker, name the specific feeling instead of swallowing it, slow your exhale for about a minute, and add a short round of bilateral stimulation before you respond. You can do this at your desk. You’re not aiming to feel nothing, just to keep access to your clearest thinking.

Maybe it’s the sarcastic aside in a meeting, credit for your work landing on someone else’s slide, or the same passive-aggressive tone in every email they send you. Whatever the specific move is, your body reacts before you’ve decided how to respond: jaw tight, face hot, heart thudding a little too hard for what actually just happened.

Why does one coworker get under your skin so fast?

You’re not imagining that it’s disruptive, and you’re not thin-skinned for still thinking about it an hour later. Rudeness measurably interferes with thinking, even for people who only witness it.

A 2007 study in the Academy of Management Journal found that people exposed to a rude interaction performed worse afterward on routine and creative tasks alike. They were also less willing to help a colleague. The effect held whether the rudeness came from someone with real authority over them or a peer with none.

There’s also a reason their mood seems to leak into the whole room. Moods spread between people at work the way a cold does, especially strong, clearly expressed ones like irritation or contempt. A 2002 study in Administrative Science Quarterly tracked this kind of emotional contagion directly: one person’s mood measurably shifted the mood, cooperation, and conflict level of an entire group, without anyone naming what was happening.

You’re not overreacting. You’re picking up on something real. The two effects stack: their mood spreads through the room, and the rudeness itself slows your own thinking down, right when you need it most.

If one particular kind of dig, being talked over, dismissed, or blamed, hits far harder than the moment seems to justify, that intensity is often a clue rather than a flaw. Reactions like this usually have roots in earlier experiences, long before this coworker existed. Our guide to attachment wounds and EMDR goes into where that extra charge tends to come from.

How do you stay calm around them, right in the moment?

All three steps below take under two minutes, and you can run them at your desk, in a hallway, or in the seconds after you hang up the phone.

Name the specific feeling

Silently name what you’re actually feeling, in one or two words: irritated, dismissed, small, disrespected. Not the whole story of what they did, just the feeling itself. Putting a specific word on an emotion measurably lowers activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection center, according to a 2007 study in Psychological Science.

Slow your exhale

Breathe in through your nose, add a second short sip of air at the top, then let a long, slow exhale run out through your mouth, for about a minute. A 2023 randomized study in Cell Reports Medicine found this double-inhale, long-exhale pattern, called cyclic sighing, lowered physiological arousal and improved mood more than an equal stretch of mindfulness meditation. You don’t need five minutes for this to register.

Add a brief, discreet round of bilateral stimulation

Then add bilateral stimulation (BLS), the rhythmic left-right movement or tapping at the center of EMDR therapy. At your desk, that can be as small as pressing your feet flat and alternating gentle pressure, left, right, left, right, for 30 seconds. Let the moment sit loosely in mind while you do it. Away from your desk, cross your arms and tap your own shoulders left-right instead, the classic butterfly hug.

A 2013 meta-analysis of 26 studies in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that eye-movement bilateral stimulation, the most-studied version, meaningfully reduced the vividness and emotional charge of distressing material held in mind. Tapping and foot-pressing lean on the same dual-attention idea, though they’re less directly studied on their own.

If you’d rather be guided through the pacing than count your own taps, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs this same left-right rhythm as a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, in the web app.

Does it get easier with the same coworker over time?

Doing this once won’t make the friction disappear, and it isn’t meant to. But the same reset works on the same trigger more than once.

Each time you settle your reaction to a specific comment or exchange, you’re doing a small, present-day version of what EMDR itself is built around. It works through one distressing target at a time, so it stops running your nervous system on repeat. That’s real, if modest, progress, even while the coworker stays exactly the same.

When is this more than a difficult-coworker problem?

This reset is built for the ordinary friction of working near someone abrasive. It isn’t for situations that have crossed into harassment or a hostile work environment. If a coworker’s behavior includes threats, discrimination, or repeated targeting, that calls for HR or another workplace professional, not a breathing technique.

If you actually need to say something to this person, our guides to steadying yourself before a difficult conversation and to preparing a boundary without the guilt spike can help you get there. If what stings most is the criticism itself rather than the person delivering it, see our piece on taking criticism without taking it personally.

And if nearly every difficult person in your life gets under your skin this same way, that pattern is less about any one coworker and more worth exploring with a therapist. For more ways to stay steady with the people around you, our relationships toolkit has further tools.

You can’t control whether this person changes. You can control whether their bad Tuesday becomes your bad Tuesday too, and that’s worth the two minutes it takes.