Yes, abusive jerks can harm your health. Here's how.

As Travis Bradberry writes over at Quartz, “studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain.” Constant states of anguish and anxiety can irreversibly damage neuronal dendrites and destroy neurons, thus weakening the way your brain communicates with itself. To say that stress can be a major detriment to your personal health and success is a massive understatement.

Bradberry then points out that recent research out of Germany has proven that dealing with negative, abusive, and toxic people will elicit huge amounts of stress in the brain. These are folks whose mere presence can send you into a flurry. They know how to push your buttons, intimidate you for no reason, and create obstacles between you and your goals. When Bradberry’s company investigated skills and qualities attributable to the world’s most successful people, it’s unsurprising that their results revealed the value of being able to deal with jerks.

TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90 percent of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control. One of their greatest gifts is the ability to neutralize toxic people.

According to Bradberry, the key to dealing with these negative influences is to adopt “an approach that enables you, across the board, to control what you can and eliminate what you can’t.” His article (linked again below) offers useful suggestions for overcoming toxic people. It’s definitely worth a read, as is any other strategy guide for warding off the negative forces that stress you out.

Learning to overcome the jerks in your life will allow you the ability to achieve personal success (and maintain your health) while minimizing the amount of stress your poor brain has to deal with.