How To Avoid Being A Toxic Person: 13 Simple Tips

I was driving to town the other day, when, at some point on the highway, I found myself near a huge truck. I don’t know if you know the type: ugly, noisy and… toxic! The exhaustion pipe was left oriented, and since the truck was rolling on my right, even if my windows were closed, I was inhaling huge amounts of gas. Toxic gas.

After a few hundreds meters I went ahead of it and looked to the rear mirror: the driver didn’t seem to have any problem with all that toxic gas he was literally exhaling on the highway. He looked calm and somehow on top of the situation. I could see he had no idea he was a really toxic person to other people.

The day went on as usual but on my way home, around the same place I met the truck, something hit me: we can all be toxic persons to other people, only we don’t realize it. We’re going on and on, relaxed and somehow on top of the situation without even noticing how infectious we can be at times, just like the driver of the morning truck. We can all spread gas on other people cars, so to speak, and the worst thing is we don’t even realize how toxic we are.

Once home, I started to think about what makes us toxic persons. Even more, I tried to identify some simple ways to avoid becoming such a person. What follows is only a short list of what I found. Generally speaking, I was searching for things which can lower your toxic “gas emissions”, making it easier to become an “ecological” citizen. The list is not even near to be complete, so feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

1. Say Thank You

Sometimes you simply forgot to say “thank you’, sometimes you’re in a hurry, or sometimes you just don’t want to say it out loud. But fact is, every time you’re not saying ”thank you“ you leave room for a toxic thought or approach. The simple act of saying ”thank you“ closes an interaction in a completely healthy way, no room left for any potential harmful follow up.

2. Say Only What You Mean

It’s not only about plain lying, although it encompasses this too. It’s about keeping what you’re saying in sync with your mind, goals and attitude. The moment you’re starting saying things you don’t really mean, your communication process becomes heavily ineffective, hence you’re going to emit huge amounts of toxic gas, just like that ugly, noisy truck.

3. Clearly State What You Want

A lot of toxicity exhales from misunderstanding. Small confusions, false impressions or misinterpretations are like glitches in a car engine. Every time you get such a glitch, it’s like having water in your gasoline: the conversation engine will start to cough and before you know it, you’ll get an increased level of toxicity. Just say what you want.

4. Say Something Nice To An Unknown Person

Like it or not, we do live in an emotionally polluted world. Doesn’t matter if this emotional pollution comes, most of the time, from people who don’t even realize they’re toxic, like the driver of that truck. What really counts in this dusty environment is to try lowering this pollution index as much as we can. And saying something nice to a completely unknown person will have exactly this effect: it will act like an air freshener, making the smog disappear at least for a few moments.

5. Don’t Gossip

Talking behind other people’s back is like putting your exhaustion pipe to somebody else door, while pretending you’re looking in a different direction. Even if you’re not talking directly to those people, you’re directing your toxic emissions to their houses. Sooner or later they’ll realize something is wrong and they’ll also identify the source.

6. No Regrets

Even if you don’t realize, when you regret stuff for yourself you’re affecting the reality of others too. Even if your regrets have nothing to do, directly, with their reality. The mere act of keeping strings attached to the past will make you be that driver who’s going ten miles per hour on a speed lane. This apparently small inconvenient of not letting others go faster will soon become toxic for them.

7. Pay Attention To People Around You

For starters, just look around and realize there are other people around you, that would be enough. A lot of toxicity arise from ignorance. If the driver of that huge truck would have look at me he could have seen that I was a little bit upset because of all this gas. But he just assumed that everything was ok, without checking. Most of the time we do the same.

8. Help Somebody Around

If ”saying something nice to an unknown person“ will act like an air freshener, helping somebody around will be equivalent to a full repair of a damaged exhaustion pipe. Helping other people will lower not only their existent toxicity but it will also drastically reduce the odds of an uncontrolled increase. If you help somebody out, you will in fact create a fresher environment for yourself.

9. Give Your Time To What’s Important

If you’re drifting away from task to task, without focusing on what’s really important all you’re going to do is to create an awfully crowded traffic. It’s like driving in circles on the same roads again and again, without doing anything from what you intended to. The only problem with that is that you’re becoming a problem too. If you can’t focus, move away from the road and let others reach their goals.

10. Let Go Of The Unneeded

Clutter is bad. Period. Loading yourself with tons of unneeded gadgets or beliefs will make you move slower and slower. Be elastic, be slim. Adjust instantly to new environments. If you can’t do that, you’ll be like a 4×4 car carrying away a huge truck. Not only your mileage will sky rocket, but your overall performance will go down. You will become toxic by immobility.

11. Avoid Procrastination

How many times you went in circles in a public parking waiting for a free spot? Well, if you procrastinate, you’re one of the guys keeping a parking spot for ever. And that’s pretty frustrating. Procrastination is not only an individual choice, it will affect your interaction with other people too. If you’re not doing your job, you’re infecting others with your behavior.

12 Don’t Talk Bad About Yourself

It’s contagious. Other people can borrow this attitude pretty easily and that would create some sort of an epidemic. Not to mention the fact that talking bad about yourself it’s like scratching your own car, because you think it “deserves” that. Yeah, if we’re talking about a car it’s kinda funny, right? How can one scratch his own car? But at the same time we keep talking bad about ourselves. Try to visualize yourself walking around with a lot of scars for your own punches…

13. Don’t Enter A Fight

Fighting – as in verbal fighting – it’s such a waste of time. Have you ever noticed those drivers fighting when someone blunders in traffic? They spend minutes and minutes blocking the road just to tell how smarter and skilled they are, and how stupid the other guy is. Meanwhile, the road is blocked, everybody is delayed and the toxic gas from the immobilized cars is slowly replacing the oxygen.

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What are you experience with people toxicity? The list above is merely a click from a random encounter between me and a huge truck on the highway, and it is by no mean complete. Feel free to add your thoughts. It’s not toxic

How To Keep Your Mind Virus Free

Viruses are wonderful living creatures. I know you wouldn’t expected this as a starting sentence, but this the bare truth: in terms of biological life, viruses are one of the most fascinating and powerful living beings.

Unfortunately, we, humans, seem to have a rather hard time with them. Why? Because we’re on a constant battle to take over the world. Sometimes we win, sometimes the viruses win. But if you take a closer look you’re going to discover some wonderful things about viruses, that even we, humans, can’t say we have at this moment. For instance, the ability to identify and inhabit an appropriate host or to modify some inner key characteristics in order to adapt to new conditions.

Yes, viruses are a very interesting topic but today I’m not going to talk about viruses as living creatures. Not even about computer viruses. Today I’m going to talk about mind viruses, or, more precisely, how to keep your mind clean from them.

This is the third follow-up to this article: How To Run The Best Version Of Yourself, in which I’m using a computer-human metaphor for personal development. You can find the first two articles here:

How To Defrag Your Mind In 5 Easy Steps
How To Maintain And Upgrade Your Life Device Drivers

What Is A Mind Virus?

The simplest way to describe a mind virus is an addiction. A repeated action, with a consistent harming potential, most of the time performed without our will. Smoking, over drinking, or fighting are good examples of a mind virus. Mind viruses are learned behaviors which are self-propagating and slowly consuming the host. But addictions are only the most visible, and not the most dangerous mind virus.

The most dangerous viruses are those who are spreading without our knowledge and, even more, without easy to spot symptoms. I mean, smoking and over drinking are so easy to spot, they have a very clear pathology. You can’t miss them. But how can you identify a mind virus which constantly prevents you from being happy? Or a mind virus which creates limiting beliefs about money? Or a virus which constantly makes you feel powerless and defeated?

How To Identify A Mind Virus

First of all, a mind virus is something you “caught” from somebody else. Viruses are spreading from host to host. You aren’t born with them. So, the first step in identifying a repetitive behavior as a mind virus would be to identify its origin. Did we have this behavior since we were born? Or we learned it in school, or at work? Most of the time we get mind viruses from social interaction.

Second, a mind virus is able to adjust to various changes of the host. I think in technical terms this is called polymorphism, but we’re just call it adaptability. If you tried various approaches towards a specific toxic behavior, to no success, that could be a pretty good sign we’re dealing with a mind virus and not with an isolated deviation.

And third, a very common characteristic of a mind virus would be its ability to replicate itself. It will actually try to propagate itself onto other people around us. And, to some extent, we will help it big time, without knowing, of course. There will be a certain vibe of “I’m right and you’re wrong” every time we’ll be in that mind virus sequence. For instance, if our mind virus is creating limiting beliefs about money, we will reinforce these beliefs constantly while talking with others : “don’t you know money is so difficult to make?”.

Mind Virus Prevention

The easiest way to cure an illness is to prevent it. That’s equally true for mind viruses so here are some simple prevention measures which could significantly minimize the chances to be contaminated:

• chose safe surroundings. Don’t join groups which seems “infected” or which are good mediums for mind virus spreading (groups which are indiscriminately propagate all sort of ideas, theories or approaches, without backing them up with solid experience and/or arguments).
• verify your information sources are often as you can. Many mind viruses are spreading because of your ignorance or laziness. You take for granted anything you read, hear or see and the next second you realize you just caught a nasty mind virus without even knowing it.
• do your own experiments. In terms of mind viruses, experiments are like vaccines: they allow you to practice a little bit of something, just to get a glimpse of it and, if you don’t like it, you can move on. But because you took the time to try it first, now you’re immune.

Mind Virus Diagnose

Ok, but what happens if we actually caught a virus? How can we tell? How do we know we have a mind virus and not something else?

First of all, try to analyze if there’s something toxic in that specific behavior. If we’re talking about simple things like addictions (smoking, drinking or over-fighting) that’s easy. You already feel at the physical level you’re doing something wrong. But what happens when we’re dealing with a much subtle mind virus, like one who will prevent you have more money by creating limiting beliefs about wealth?

In this case, you should assess your life for longer periods of times. Let’s say you’re a person who never had too much money. You may blame this on your current environment, to the world financial crisis or to bad luck. But if you’re really analyzing what’s holding you back, and see that this lack of money somehow followed you despite the environment, world progress or good luck, you’ll most likely find that at the core of this situation is a mind virus. A toxic, acquired behavior which adjusts if you try to change and feeds itself with your own misery and sadness.

Another way to diagnose a mind virus would be to test its “host” penetration. The biggest challenge in identifying a mind virus is that we can always mistake it as a form of original thinking. No, it’s not a virus, this is how we really are. But testing this “host” penetration will help us see if what we’re thinking it’s just a borrowed pack of nonsenses which are making our life a living hell, or an internal conviction.

Just look around and try to identify the same behavior in other people. Let’s say your mind virus is about relationships. Which you consider something difficult to obtain, maintain and get satisfaction from. Try to see if there are other people having the same approach. Try to see if there are people which are treating relationships the same way you are. If there’s a mind virus involved, you will identify those people, but you will immediately spot the gap between their real potential as human beings and their toxic behavior. Sometimes it’s easy to spot the illness in somebody else before accepting that you’re having it too.

Curing A Mind Virus Disease

Ok, we failed to prevent a contamination, we correctly diagnosed that we do have a mind virus infection, now what? We have to cure it.

A mind virus illness manifests itself in the form of a constant, toxic activity. To cure the illness all we have to do is to put an end to the associated activity. Without it, the mind virus won’t get enough “food” and will eventually die.

Suppose we have a mind virus which prevents us traveling because, well, in order to travel you have to have time. Now, the associated activity of this mind virus is… yes, a job! What do we have to do in order to kill this virus? Kill the job, exactly! Once you won’t have a job anymore (attention: I didn’t say: once you don’t have money, I said once you don’t have a job, because you can make money outside of a job pretty well) the virus won’t be able to manifest, and you can safely start to travel around the world.

Now, not always the associated activity of a virus would be so easy to spot, but most of the time we will get enough hints to look in the right direction. There will be some trial and error, but if we’re really after that mind virus, we will find its associated activity.

How we stop that activity is beyond the scope of the article. Replacing an activity with another one is most of the time a question of habits and their management. If you want to know more about how to create a habit, you may want to start with this article: How To Create A Habit In 15 Days.

Mind Virus Rebounds

As in any other illness, there will be rebounds. Every now and then, our emotional body will be weakened and, since we had this sensitive terrain before, it will be easier to get the same virus again. We grew some sort of sensitivity over a specific virus.

I don’t think there’s a problem with that, as long as we’re aware. If we know we are sensitive to a certain virus, getting it again at certain time intervals won’t be a huge surprise. The good news is that we already beat it before, so every time we get a rebound we’re going to get rid of it easier and easier.

As long as we’re working on it, of course.

A Personal Example

One of the most resilient mind viruses I had was about “not being good enough”. This mind virus infection made me prove all the time that I have to deserve everything I get. Everything worth having was for me something that I had to fight for. Every time I wanted to express my individuality I had to prove something to somebody. Either by making more money than the average, either by acting riskier. Bottom line: because I was thinking I wasn’t good enough as I was, I always pushed things up trying to prove myself worthy of attention.

Diagnose:

At first, I thought this was part of my personality. This is how I am, a bold and courageous individual. I do stuff because I can and because I’m better than others. Alas, that wasn’t true.

At some point, after a few years in which I took more and more risks just to prove myself worthy of… I don’t even remember of what, I realized there’s a pattern. Every time I was feeling insecure and alone, I was pushing it more. Every time I was in need of relaxation and acceptance I was striving more. Yes, there was a pattern.

But this pattern alone couldn’t tell me if it was a mind virus or just… well, a pattern. So, I started to identify the “host” penetration. I started to look around for people exhibiting the same behavior like me. People who were courageous, yet eager to prove themselves worthy of attention at all cost. It wasn’t long until I find them, in the same circles like me (most of them were entrepreneurs too). Seeing them from the outside made me realize instantly that this was a mind virus: it was so easy to spot the difference between what they wanted (acceptance and validation) and what they did (taking more risks).

Cure

Once I realized my company (and my whole approach as an entrepreneur) was the result of some mind virus, making me push things just to prove myself worthy of attention, I just decided to let go. I didn’t need any title (entrepreneur, business man, etc) to make me feel better. I was ok the way I was. So, I decided to sell the company I created, after 10 years of managing it.

In a few months after I sold the company, things started to improve. I realized I survived without pushing it and taking risks in exchange of attention. I realized I can be a decent person without proving my worth every day. I realized I am good enough just the way I am.

Rebounds

Every now and then this mind virus rebounds. It’s less than 2 years since I finished my role as an entrepreneur and I suspect there are still some uncut strings attaching me from the past. Right now, the rebounds are taking a different form: if I’m not able to finish some tasks, I feel sad.

But I’m working on it.