Why you need to drop your old friends if you want to change your life

The old saying, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are” is not an outdated lesson.

There is a lot of buzz going around online about how it’s important to cut out toxic people from your life in order to grow. It sounds like a no-brainer. If one of your friends makes you feel bad about yourself or talks badly about others, it would make sense to spend less time around them. But what about your much loved friends who are not mean to you, but participate in habits you’re trying to break? They’ve done nothing “wrong” per say, so should they be dropped? The unfortunate answer is “Yes.”

It’s a heartbreaking decision to realize that a friend you’ve had dozens of beautiful memories with brings out parts of you you’re trying to leave behind. But if you stop to think about those memories, during how many of them were you drunk? How many of them include you engaging in nervous system overloading social drama? How many of them include you doing something out of alignment with who you truly want to be?

I’m going to tell you my own story.

Let’s go back to 2019. I was hanging out on the couches of people who had no real goals they wanted to work towards in life, and whose idea of a good time always included some sort of substance. Heading out to go to the gym was met with laughs or even comments about how “artsy girls don’t do that jocky sh*t”. When I wasn’t with them, I was drinking copious amounts of wine with a girlfriend who always seemed to credit my achievements to “how nice it must be to be pretty”. If not with her, on the phone with one of many friends who spent hours with me talking about how horribly someone (usually a boyfriend) treated them, only to suddenly have to go after asking how I was doing.

I would go home drained at the end of the night and unwind by looking at social media to see the lives of fitness influencers and wonder how great it would be to live a life surrounded by wellness. I had many attempts at creating a routine for myself but I always fell off. I felt defeated. I wondered what was wrong with me, why was my discipline so weak?

It wasn’t until I stopped looking down on myself and looked up at my surroundings that I actually started to make lasting change.

The Proof

It is a part of the human condition to subconsciously want to fit into the group. For tens of thousands of years, we were a tribe-based species. We relied on each other to survive. Not being accepted or liked by the group could lead to you being literally outcasted, which was known to be certain death at that time. It’s no wonder that subconsciously to this day we will model our behaviors off of our “tribe” in order to fit in best with them.

This study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that having an obese friend makes you almost 60% more likely to be obese. There is another study from the Annals of Internal Medicine showing that people were 50% more likely to be heavy drinkers if one of their friends heavily drank, and 70% more likely if they were surrounded by heavy drinkers. Another study conducted in 2010, also from the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows that one is 36% more likely to quit smoking if their friends do so.

How did it work for me?

Since I’ve decided to unfriend, unfollow, and be too busy for the people in my life who did not promote the behaviors I’ve been trying to acquire, I’ve stopped wanting to drink daily, completely stopped wanting to smoke weed, stopped waking up late, developed a life goal I feel good about working hard towards, stopped wasting my time ruminating about how people have wronged me, and developed a rock solid routine that I’ve been able to stick to for nearly two years.

“Just because the decision hurts, doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.”

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Where do you start?

It was not easy. I still sometimes get pangs of guilt and missing my old friends. Expect this to be a difficult process, but here is my advice to make the transition as easy as possible:

• Discuss your new goals with your friends. See how they react. Are they supportive vocally? What are their actions saying?

• Give them a fair chance. If you don’t do this, the guilt will stick with you harder. Explain how their behaviors affect you and suggest spending your time together doing other things. If they are open to doing that, great! They don’t have to be a bad influence on you and you don’t have to move on from them in order to better your life (best case scenario).

• If they cannot or will not participate in more constructive activities with you, you have two choices: confront them about your decision to move on or suddenly get very busy until they get the hint. I personally am not a fan of confrontation (even less so, at the time), and I wanted to avoid making someone feel judged, so I got “busy”. I started by muting their stories, replying to messages less and less often, then over the span of a few months, I let the friendship fizzle out until I felt like unfriending them would go unnoticed. I personally have never gone the confrontational route, although while considering it, I could imagine it could get messy and just make the whole process more difficult. If you have gone that route, shoot me a line! I’d love to see how that went for you.

These days, when I’m tempted to message them and see where they’re at, I take a moment to look at my life and the place where I am mentally and physically, and compare myself to who I was while I was with them. The ick I get from how it feels to be THAT version of myself quickly reminds me of why I made such a tough decision.

If you’re serious about bettering your life, I implore you to take a look at your tribe. If you’re looking for a sign to let go of certain relationships, I hope you see this article as what you’ve been needing. Wishing you the best of luck on this endeavor.

If you need a supportive group of motivated people to help you with your initial life change, join my free 7-day Habit Formation Challenge, starting May 28th. You’ll finish the 7 days with not only a solid routine to start the summer with, but also a $500 voucher to my 6 or 12 month coaching package. Click here to join.