Removing yourself from toxic situations is not an easy thing to do. When you are stuck there, you feel frustrated and trapped, as if you are sinking into a black hole from which there is no escape. All that apparently surrounds you is negative thoughts and energies. This makes you feel drained of all motivation and spirit. At one point or the other in our lives, we all feel stuck like this, regardless of whether it is professionally or personally. When you feel this damaged, it causes you to feel depressed.
But the good news is that you can fix this. When you have the right mindset and strategies, not only can you handle this situation, but you can also make something truly transformative out of it. In this blog, we will guide you on removing yourself from toxic situations.
Removing Yourself From Toxic Situations 101
If you want a guide on removing yourself from toxic situations, this is it. Follow these seven steps and you will be on your way to heal your life.
1. Analyze Your Situation Critically
Study all sides of the issue you are facing. What are the causes? What changes you can make to improve things? After you have answers to these questions, you will be able to move towards freeing yourself from your toxic situation. Don’t delay it, because even though critical reflection is difficult, it saves your life quite literally.
2. Replace Negative Things With Positive Ones
After you are done figuring out which scenarios are giving you stress, start by replacing every aspect of the negative situation with a positive one. This will change your life. For instance, if your friends are letting you down or indulging in negative habits, make new friends who make you feel better, and leave you in uplifted spirits. If your work environment is toxic, try to find a new job, or better yet – start your own business. When you take solid steps towards a positive goal, it will give you a sense of progress. This is important if you want to stay motivated in making a holistic change to your life.
3. Find A Higher Purpose to Keep You On Track
You need to have a bigger-perspective type of mindset to do this. Look at the world from a bird’s eye view: it has so many problems, and there are people who are suffering more than you are too. This will make you grateful for what you have, and you will start seeing the blessings you have that others don’t. They would probably give anything to live your life, if that was even possible. We are living in a chaotic era, filled with global-scale tragedies. This leaves us no choice but to get out of our own minds and try to make a positive difference to the world, in whatever way we can. This can be charity work, donations, or maybe feeding a homeless man. We all have just one life, so let’s make the best of it.
4. Get A Mentor
You need to find someone in your area of specialty who is in a position to motivate you. Actively seek their guidance on stuff you face in your life. When you try to learn from them and build your network, it will give your life a sense of direction. You can learn from anyone, but the people you like is a good place to start from. In Japanese, the word Kaizen means ‘good change.’ This means that being a learner is an approach to life, and a learner always seeks to have experiences and knowledge that will better their life.
5. Take Small Breaks & Reward Your Successes
When you are making progress on achieving your goals, you should reward yourself, even if the goal was a small one. This is basically active acknowledgement of your wins, which will release dopamine in your brain, the hormone related to creativity, enthusiasm, and high spirit.
Combine this with routine breaks that you need to take when life starts overwhelming you. Turn to nature to heal you through your break, because it does a remarkable job of recharging you in a manner you cannot get from material objects.
6. Understand That Recovery is A Continuous Process
If you don’t notice immediate results, don’t get upset. Removing yourself from toxic situations and healing your depression takes a while. Just stay consistent with the small efforts you make every day and celebrate your little wins along the way until you get there. This will keep you focused on your end goal.
7. Get Professional Help
Even experts like doctors need professional help from others when they are stuck up in a toxic situation in their life. It’s not as if they don’t have the knowledge. They know what will help. But being too close to the problem engages your own biases and feelings, which prevent you from helping yourself out. To seek help from a qualified third person means that they will probably not have the same feelings and biases, and may have learning from their own and other people’s similar experiences.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, removing yourself from toxic situations takes up a lot of efforts; one act is not going to make it happen. But all these efforts and the energy we invest in it is worth it. If you want to learn more ways to removing yourself from toxic situations, read the book “Let’s Heal, Queens and Kings” by author Aala Coax.