10 Ways to Get Toxic People Out of Your Head

Have you ever stopped to think about what someone has done or said that has left you wondering why?

When someone hurts us — hurts our children, parents, or loved ones; talks about us behind our back; or just acts really crazy — they can end up occupying our thoughts for hours, days, or even months.

We can’t stop thinking about their behavior, and we constantly remember how they looked and what they said. This happens a lot, for example, with couples who end their relationship abruptly.

Toxic thoughts

This results in a cycle of toxic thoughts. And most of us know that this way of thinking is damaging, both emotionally and physically. In fact, studies demonstrate that a mind full of toxic thoughts is an unhappy and unhealthy mind.

When we recall memories of fighting, resentment, or loss, we tend to suffer from stress, which can have physical and psychological repercussions. Research even suggests that thinking toxic thoughts plays a fundamental role in illnesses like depression, cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases.

How can we get rid of toxic thoughts and negativity?

We work very hard to get rid of the toxic things in our lives, whether it’s buying organic products, restricting our diets, throwing away household chemicals, eating green, cleaning green, using organic cosmetics, etc. But we put very little effort into thinking green.

What is the greenest solution for toxic thought?

How can we stop thinking about negative people? How can we forget their attitudes or behaviors that let us down? Why do these unpleasant memories keep coming back to us?

These ten small but powerful ideas will help you to banish negative people from your mind, eliminating the toxic cycle that keeps happening. Try out any of these ways of thinking or acting, and you’ll be able to free yourself from that person once and for all:

1. Talk about them less and let time pass. Not bringing them up so much, along with letting time pass and act like an eraser, will get them out of your head.

2. Wait and see what happens next. We often feel the need to respond and react to difficult people or situations right away. Instead, just give yourself permission to wait and see what happens next.

3. Free yourself from blame. Thinking about past events and blaming yourself is rarely productive. Disagreements and misunderstandings just happen sometimes through a series of events, like a domino effect. In general, nobody is responsible for all of the blame.

4. Try not to let the other person think about you so much. Although really, you can’t completely control what other people think about; it’s impossible.

5. Take care of your own issues first. It doesn’t matter what happened, the biggest problem you’re faced with is your own anger. Anger creates a burst of emotions that keeps us from responding in a satisfying and productive manner.

In that sense, anger is really your biggest problem. Take care of yourself – meditate, exercise, take a long walk, whatever is necessary – before you confront the other person.

6. When you’re angry, your mind crumbles. You can’t think clearly, creatively, or thoughtfully, about the best way to manage the situation when you’re angry. If you want to think clearly, you can’t be angry about anything. Be calm.

7. Don’t believe what you think. When worry, sorrow, fear, anxiety, or anger take over, our emotional and physical state makes us think our irrational thoughts are very real, even though they might not be. In this case, we could make a poor judgement, so we must be careful.

8. You can’t control time. When we think about past events that have hurt us, sometimes we look for what we could have done differently to avoid a disagreement or unfortunate result.

What happened yesterday is as much in the past as something that happened more than a thousand years ago. We can’t change what happened during the Mayan period, and we can’t change what happened last week.

9. It’s not necessary to be faithful to our suffering; we can forgive. We tend to be very loyal to our suffering. To free ourselves from it, forgiveness is best. Forgiveness is not only something we do for the other person, we do it for ourselves, too.

10. Occupy a different mental space. Meditation, accompanied by powerful images, can help us to stop thinking in a toxic way. For example, imagine the deep blue ocean, calming your mind, leaving no room for toxic thought.

Has it left your mind yet?