Changing Your Environment Could Change Your Life

Changing Your Environment Could Change Your Life

By Aurora McCausland

You’ve probably been told before that you are a product of your environment. You begin to act like the people you spend the most time with. Spending a lot of time in a negative environment can affect other areas of your life. It’s not that these negative things are inescapable, but that the effects of it begin to permeate other areas of your life without you even realizing it. For example, have you ever had an inside joke with coworkers, and then mentioned it later at home when you were with your partner? It was a funny joke, but they weren’t there at work to understand the context. This is just an example of how areas of your life can affect each other indirectly.

Evaluate the negativity in your life

If you’re experiencing a lot of negativity and negative emotion in your daily life, try to pinpoint why you’re experiencing those feelings, when they start, or what is causing them. It can be hard to navigate and find the exact cause at first. For others, they may immediately know the source of negativity in their lives. Maybe it’s a friend group that is causing stress. Maybe it’s work. Or maybe there is something in your home life that is causing you emotional pain. Once you have a broad idea of what is causing the negativity, it’s easier to pinpoint a more exact reason. Maybe there is a toxic person in your friend group causing pain. Or a coworker who is harassing you. Or there’s a mess in your home that you are avoiding.

It can be a long process to pinpoint the negative influences in your life. There could be more than one, and it might not even be an incredibly specific reason. But doing your best to recognize the thing causing you pain will help you eliminate it.

Make small changes where they are necessary

If it’s your work that is stressing you out, you obviously can’t just quit your job tomorrow in hopes of improving your life. If there’s a specific person at work who is making life unbearable, see if you can talk to HR about what is going on, or request to move to a different department to avoid interacting with them. The same can go for basically any issue that you are facing. If the entire issue cannot be removed easily from your life, see what you can do to lessen the issue before finding a way to replace the negative thing. Maybe you begin a job search somewhere else and try to spend less time with the annoying coworker in the interim. If your home life is uncomfortable, find a way to clean up the mess or confront the problem. Dealing with this pain is definitely uncomfortable and there’s obviously a reason why you have been avoiding it. But even slightly changing and modifying these things will vastly improve your life for the better.

Find positive outlets

It’s likely that you won’t notice any big changes overnight. And that’s okay! Changing a toxic or uncomfortable environment takes time. A great way to speed the process along, is to find new, positive things in your life. Especially if you aren’t able to change much when it comes to cutting the negative things out of your life. Find new things to bring you joy, and enhance the other areas of your life. Find an art class you enjoy. Meet new people in your area to spend your free time with. Hire someone to come clean your house so you don’t have to. Changing your environment isn’t just about removing the toxic parts. It’s also so important to add positive things to your life, in order to truly build yourself a life that you love.

Samantha

Samantha hails from Virginia and is a proud wife to a retired Deputy Sheriff and mother to two amazing little boys named Jack & William. A veteran product reviewer; Samantha has been reviewing products for 8 years and offers high quality product reviews with original photography.