Local excitations in molecular systems are studied taking into account the influence of soft impurities. The dynamics of activation processes (high-energy events) due to nonlinear mechanisms is studied. The following examples of classical macroscopic systems with strong nonlinear interaction are investigated: 1D Toda chains, 1D Morse rings, and 3D systems of hard spheres including impurities. It is shown that solitonlike excitations may lead to the concentration of energy at definite sites (weak springs or soft spheres). The accumulation of energy is mainly due to soliton-fusion effects. In thermal equilibrium an optimum temperature exists, where the thermally averaged potential energy is preferably partitioned to the soft springs embedded into a hard-spring solvent. Further, we show that the effect of thermal energy localization and the temperature dependence also persists for solutions of soft spheres in hard-sphere solvents.