Why Negative People Have So Much Power Over Your Mood
Two takeaways:
Foroux, a writer and instructor, says that putting his work out into the world has led him to a simple conclusion: some people are content (and intent) on sending out negative energy. What’s more, the internet age has enabled more ways than ever before to post these negative comments — anonymously, in many cases.
Luckily, the power of the human mind to overcome and dispense with the negativity of others has been explored since the dawn of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, famously wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
We each have complete power, Foroux argues, to build mental barriers to the negativity of others. We must remember that criticism or negativity from someone else is, fundamentally, an “outside event.”
We cannot control the presence of negative thought. But we can control our response to that negativity.
So, what do we actually do to steel ourselves against giving negative response an outsized place in our psyche? Foroux offers two tactics:
- Be intentional about ignoring and keeping out the criticism of others, knowing that it is unchangeable and exterior to you. In short: take pride in ignoring these people.
- Be intentional about finding groups of people you respect and who are qualified to give you criticism, and who care about you enough to make sure that criticism is constructive.
By being intentional about choosing who you let critique you, you make it easier on yourself to keep needless criticism from taking up too much mental bandwidth.
Doing this helps us arrive at the conclusion illustrated here by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who spent a lifetime studying human nature and warned us to willfully ignore negativity: “We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.”
By Darius Foroux for Wise Wealthy
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