We all know that friendships are an essential part of life – whatever life you have. We all know we should associate ourselves with positive people and avoid negative people. In your community, work, school, or even your own family, you choose how to closely associate with people in each group or create a proper distance with some. But what if we still associate studying with, working with, or living with negative people who have unwholesome ways of thinking, speaking, and doing?

Be honest with yourself about how you feel towards a person. Do you generally feel worse when you hang out with the person? Do you feel drained of energy whenever you spend time with him or her? An unhealthy friendship might be bad for your mental health and wellbeing. So, it’s time to finally be true to yourself. Life is about making clever choices. Making friends is a big one.

Negative people will keep dominating us with their words and our annoyance seem to be the source of their pleasure. Listening to what they say can easily annoy our feelings. However, it’s nearly impossible to expect them to change. So, instead of trying to change their words that might sometimes seem impossible, a feasible approach is changing the way we deal with them. If we don’t take their words, they won’t matter to us.

Sometimes just getting close to or having to talk to negative people frightens, irritates, or annoys us already. It’s important to calm our minds down and return to our senses. Don’t respond with anger even if they make you feel angry. Respond politely and out of compassion. If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.

Negative people don’t like to keep things straight to the point. They criticize people. They talk about the favor of what they did to us in the past or the favor that they make empty promises for the future. It’s our job to keep the talk or the work straight to the point. So, we don’t have to spend our time listening to something that is not only inappropriate and useless, but also we don’t have to absorb negative energy from their words and their actions. In addition, make sure that what you say is accurate, useful, appropriate, mindful, endearing, and compassionate.

Living with fools, their ideas, words, and actions become a part of our memory. If we are not mindful, this negative memory might fool us and makes us accept that the wrong is correct. The most challenging part about living with fools is that we MUST not become fools ourselves. The only way to do that is to spend more time with positive friends and less time with negative ones. Lord Buddha mentioned that you should only spend your time with negative people when you want to help them change and are ready to do so.