When you hang around other people, their energies infect you. It doesn't matter if the energy is positive or negative. When you're around someone else you open yourself to that person's influence.

Their words. Their actions. Yes, even what they're thinking.

Now, this doesn't mean that everything someone says will be accepted by your mind. It just means it's knocking at the door of your subconscious mind. And you can, with some mental effort, reject those influences as you see, hear and feel them coming.

Here's the challenge, though: You cannot reject 100% of the influences coming your way. There are too many to block all at once and your energy is finite.

Your only choice is to disassociate.

I've never been a smoker. In my high school years I had some good friends who smoked marijuana regularly. I would hang with them even when they were smoking. And one day I eventually tried it. It's not even that I was curious. I was just around it so much that I ran out of mental energy to reject the curiosity of my immediate environment.

I just had to not be around when the smoking commenced. Haven't smoked anything since.


Don't waste your mental stamina rejecting bad energy when you can remove yourself from it completely and save that energy for more important matters.