How do toxic and negative people affect you?

Grade 9 students in the Collective Voice program at Aden Bowman Collegiate share their lives and opinions through columns. Selected columns run each Monday in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

Toxic people are everywhere. Personally, negative people do affect me. I experienced being a part of a toxic friend group in my middle school years. I would spend most of my time with that group of people, whom I called “friends.” Most times, when I was with these people, I wouldn’t be myself because I was pressured by my peer group to act upon behaviours I wasn’t used to.

In a short amount of time, I had switched up completely on the people who loved me for who I was. My guard was let down and my morals and beliefs ran free, stopping me from finding myself. During this phase in my life, I didn’t realize that these people didn’t exactly fit the “friend” title I had given them.

We encounter negativity in our lives every day, whether it be at school, in our work environment, or in our friend groups. A constant cycle of negativity affects our day and life.

A negative person, allin-all, is a downer. In my opinion, negative people show three behaviours and personality traits.

To begin with, it is toxic to be around people who criticize others and have prejudices because they don’t want someone else to be better than they are. It may also seem that these people want to bring you down to their level of negativity. Often, negative people will judge others. This may come out of jealousy and insecurity.

Second, these people can be quite narcissistic. Their beliefs consist of the world revolving around them. They might act upon this by being controlling toward their friends or being too focused on themselves rather than caring about other opinions and beliefs.

Lastly, a negative person is most likely pessimistic. They might only ever see the cynical side of things rather than looking for the good in a situation.

If you aren’t grateful for many things in your life, except for when those things turn out as you expect, you might be a negative person. I believe positive things always lie between the bad and the unexpected.

Negative people affect my mood and attitude daily. A toxic person will make me think pessimistically about myself, others and occurrences. If one person is a “Negative Nancy,” the negativity spreads like wildfire, affecting everyone’s day.

I have a job part time within a fast-food chain and I sometimes experience this there. I work with generally ecstatic people who act lively while doing their jobs, but sometimes if one person is having an off day it ends up affecting everybody who is working that day. That is when mistakes and problems arise more often than usual. The same can go for your family, school classes and your circle of friends.

I was told that, statistically, one positive person can affect 10,000 people greatly, in a positive way. The same could be said for toxic people affecting others negatively.

How can you improve your positivity? How can you be the one to affect 10,000 people just because your smile or good deed brightened another’s day? Start small, trying to look for the positive things in everyone and everything. Even if that positive thing is just a life lesson you learned, now you can carry that with you for the rest of your life.

After reading this, have you discovered more about yourself ? Are you the “glass half full” or the “glass half empty” type of person? Which of these two types of people do you want to surround yourself with?