Are You Toxic? 10 Ways To Tell And How To Stop

Yesterday I read an article about toxic behaviors and how to detect if you got some. It’s a fine read and I’d like to share that with you. You can read the article over at medium using this link. If it’s blocked, just use an incognito window in your browser.

Go ahead and read it. Then come back to this email so we can talk about one point of her list and how I think mindfulness can help you with those issues.

As No 5 she lists “You’re never responsible for anything”. I think that is a big issue for many people. It’s often the outside world that is at “fault” when something goes wrong. And wrong can sometimes already be “it didn’t go as planned”. Or even ridiculous things.

A friend of mine, for example, has this attitude of saying “Sorry, but …” and with the but the fault is pushed to the other person. Like this one time we were shopping and she accidentally stepped on my foot and when I said something, she replied with “Sorry… but you are always standing in the way. Can’t you stay at the side?” and voila, now it’s my mistake that she didn’t watch out and stepped on me.

Man, stepping on someone’s toes happens. And with a normal sorry it’s usually done. But if your reflex is a “Sorry, but…” you should think about the underlying problem you got there.

It’s toxic behavior.

And if you already do that with tiny things like stepping on someone’s toes, how are you going to deal with bigger problems in life? Will it always be the fault of the world?

Which brings me to another problem that is caused by this toxic behavior. You give control over your life to everybody else except yourself. When everything is always the world’s fault, then you don’t ever have control over anything. And without control of your own actions and life, you feel powerless. You are powerless.

Sounds harsh? Yeah but it’s true. At some point we have to face the dirty ugly truth and deal with it. Then we can transform and become the butterfly.

Not in one day or week. It takes time and practice. It takes a while on the mindfulness path to regain your power of yourself back. Step by step. Level by level.

Eventually, it will get better, your toxic behavior will dwindle and your power comes back. But it’s worth the effort!

Start today, it’s the second-best time for starting. The best one was last year.