3 Genius Ways Smart People Deal With Toxic People

I've taught emotional intelligence for more than 20 years at Stanford and Yale, written two books on the subject, and given countless keynotes on the topic. No matter what my audience, I always hear the same question:

How do I deal with the toxic people in my life?

After all, everyone has a difficult person: the coworker who undermines you in meetings, the relative who can't resist a jab, or the friend who leaves you feeling small every time you hang up the phone.

The problem is that you find yourself thinking about them way too much. It's like they've moved into your head rent-free, and it feels awful.

Although you'd hate to admit it, you probably think more about the toxic people in your life than the ones you actually love! A snide comment from three days ago replays on a loop while you're trying to enjoy dinner with your family.

It's crazy when you think about it. Here's why and what you can do to help yourself.

Why They Take Up So Much Space

When you perceive someone as treating you badly, your nervous system reacts as if you're facing a threat. It activates the same fight-or-flight response that would fire if someone were physically hurting you: a flood of stress hormones, a racing heart, a mind that won't let go of the problem.

After all, neuroscience shows that the emotional pain of rejection, for example, activates similar regions of the brain as physical pain. To top it off, the brain tends to focus more on the negative than the positive.

And the fight-or-flight system often does not know the difference between an active threat and a memory of one. Research on rumination shows that replaying a stressful encounter keeps cortisol elevated long after the encounter itself is over. Researchers call this the perseverative cognition hypothesis—i.e. thinking about someone you consider a jerk is, physiologically, almost as stressful as the original interaction. Except now you're doing it to yourself, on repeat, for free.

Step One: Awareness

Here's the biggest problem: If you spend your mental life marinating in anger, suspicion, and resentment toward someone, you unfortunately train your own brain to spin in that cycle. In other words, you turn your bad feelings into a habit.

You may have noticed a very weird phenomenon: Over time, people who despise someone can slowly start to become like the people they don't like. They've spent so many years dwelling on them!

You don't want to become like the person who's bothering you. That's the first step: becoming aware that your anger at someone else's negativity is making you negative. So now what?

Step Two: Forgiveness (This One's for You)

The most well-researched, most effective first step to freeing yourself from negativity is the thing you might least want to do: forgiveness.

This isn't about excusing bad behavior. Forgiveness, as researchers define it, is letting go of the grip that resentment has on you.

In a classic study, Charlotte Witvliet and colleagues had participants imagine either holding a grudge or genuinely forgiving someone who'd wronged them. Imagining not forgiving someone raised their stress response: heart rate, blood pressure, and sweat gland activity. Imagining forgiveness did the opposite: it calmed all of it back down.

Stanford's Fred Luskin has spent decades studying this in real-world settings. In one randomized trial, a short forgiveness training program significantly reduced participants' perceived stress and trait anger. In another, forgiveness training lowered blood pressure in people with hypertension who ran high on anger. Letting go of a grudge isn't just a metaphor for feeling lighter; it actually shows up on a blood pressure cuff.

You don't have to be friends with this person. Forgiveness isn't about them at all. It's about refusing to let their behavior dictate your physiology and your state of mind.

Step Three: Benevolence (Again, for You)

Here's the part most people skip, because it sounds counterintuitive and even unfair. But research suggests it works even better than forgiveness alone: actively wishing the person well. Before you punch the screen, bear with me and look at the research.

Forgiveness Essential Reads

What Forgiveness Is Not and Why

Crossing the Finish Line When It Is Hard to Forgive

Studies show that compassion is actually incredibly healing for you, predicting better mental health, physical health, and even longevity. What's more, it can help you have highly successful relationships.

This is the essence of loving-kindness meditation, a practice with roots in Buddhist psychology that's now been studied extensively in labs. In my own research with colleagues at Stanford, we found that even brief practice generating goodwill toward others shifts people toward more positive emotion and greater social connectedness, benefits that compound over time. Even making you magnetic.

The effects go deeper than mood. In a well-known study by Pace, Negi, and colleagues at Emory, people who practiced more compassion meditation showed lower levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), an inflammatory marker, in response to a stressful task. Chronic inflammation is linked to everything from heart disease to depression, so wishing someone well isn't just a nice sentiment. It may be doing measurable work inside your body.

If it feels hard to forgive someone and impossible to actually wish them well, consider this: If someone is acting toxic, selfish, mean, or jealous, it's rarely about you. It's usually a sign that they're miserable, insecure, or so lost that manipulation and cruelty are the only tools they know how to reach for. That, of course, doesn't excuse their behavior. But it can help you remember they are deeply unhappy, which can help remind you of compassion.

The Goal Isn't Peace With Them. It's Peace for You.

You don't owe this person closeness. You don't owe them a relationship. What you owe yourself is not becoming toxic in return. This point is important. It's why I've written a whole book about how to have more sovereign relationships.

Forgive first, because it frees you. Then, if you can, wish them well. Compassion frees you even further, quiets your nervous system, and may even lower the inflammation running through your body.

Do this, and something really interesting happens: You get your happiness back, maybe even more than you had before.