The Ultimate Ability a Person Can Have: The Power to Block Things Out

I recently came across a passage that hit me with real force, and I want to share it with you:

“Find the priority in your life, and let the rest fade into the background. To put it plainly—cut the clutter, keep the essentials. If you work to earn a living, don’t waste your emotions on tangled workplace politics. If you work out to feel good in body and mind, ignore the people who say, ‘You’ve been at it forever and still haven’t lost weight.’ The world is far too noisy. Just listen to your own heart.”

Reading it, something in me quivered. All the unease and anxiety weighing on me felt instantly healed. And it brought a word to mind: the power to block things out. Coined by American psychologist Russell Beckman, the concept goes like this: “The ability to block things out is the highest-level ability a person can possess. Any person or thing that drains you—even glancing at it once is your mistake.”

I couldn’t agree more. Especially once you’re past 30, you start to notice something: the people around you who live with real ease and emotional steadiness mastered this ability early on. It hands them the steering wheel of their own lives. They don’t squander time and energy on people and things that don’t deserve it, so they grow fast—and live comfortably. Today, Kelly wants to talk with you about the highest-level ability a person can have: the power to block things out.

The Power to Block Things Out: Block Out the Useless, Don’t Let the World Wreck You

Do you ever scroll through your feed and catch yourself showing these “symptoms”?

A friend back home posts her curated, picture-perfect life, and you—still at the office at midnight—feel miserable about being a corporate drone. An old classmate you haven’t spoken to in years announces a promotion and a raise, and you, still in an entry-level role, break into a cold panic. Your best friend buys a car and a house while you still can’t scrape together a down payment, and suddenly you feel like a failure.

The mood of that moment is perfectly captured by a line that went viral a while back: “I hope you’re doing better than me—just not too much better.”

We pour enormous amounts of time and energy into useless information, passively absorbing fragmented, anxiety-peddling people and stories, until we sink into what’s called a cognitive bias—the way our perception of ourselves, others, or the world gets distorted by our own state or by the situation. Maybe you care too much about outside opinions, so you overthink, assume everyone else is living better than you, and spiral into self-doubt and self-denial. Highly sensitive people suffer this bias even more severely.

That’s when learning to block things out becomes essential. As distance between people collapses, we’re forced to take in far too much information—no one can simply “not compare, not worry.” But before the information age, we never observed other people’s lives this closely or this constantly.

So block those relationships just sitting in your contact list. Block the information that has nothing to do with you. Block the question of how everyone else is doing. Who knows whether that glossy surface is hiding a house full of chaos?

Cognitive bias teaches us this: much of what you take for reality is actually distorted. That’s the process of disenchanting the outside world. And once you truly own this power to block things out, no ripple out there can easily destroy you.

The Power to Block Things Out: Silence the Judgment, Escape the Inner Turmoil

I used to be the kind of person who’d chew on someone’s glance or an offhand remark for hours. I constantly worried I wasn’t good enough in other people’s eyes. If someone didn’t text back, I’d worry I’d said the wrong thing. Every day I’d replay what I’d done and said, wondering whether I’d upset anyone.

I knew full well that caring this much about others’ opinions was exhausting—but I couldn’t stop myself from looping: Did I offend them? What will they think of me?

Caring about what others think is normal. In the words of social psychologist Charles Horton Cooley, this is the “looking-glass self”: we treat other people as mirrors and come to know ourselves through their judgments. But that is not the same thing as this is who I truly am. A negative looking-glass self makes us overvalue others’ views—especially when the verdict is unflattering—and leaves us blaming ourselves and walking on eggshells.

Individual psychologist Alfred Adler put it this way: “All interpersonal conflict arises from interfering in other people’s tasks, or having our own tasks interfered with.” And it’s precisely because everyone’s experiences differ, and everyone’s “life task” differs, that we can never assemble a self out of the full sum of outside opinions.

When we block out idle gossip and learn to distinguish “whoever bears the direct consequence owns the task,” we climb out of inner turmoil. And when we no longer need the outside world’s gaze to affirm or deny us, no longer fret over what people think of us—life unfurls.

The Power to Block Things Out: Block the Negativity, Answer Only to Yourself

I know letting go of others’ eyes isn’t easy. After all, we catch other people’s emotions alarmingly fast.

There’s an experiment I once read about. Gary Small, a professor at the University of Los Angeles, put a beaming, smiling person in a room with a glum, frowning one to see how their moods would shift. In under half an hour, the one who’d been smiling had grown melancholy too. The experiment showed it takes only about twenty minutes for a negative mood to spread—to infect everyone in the room like a virus at speed.

My friend Lily is what everyone calls a “human sounding board.” People are always coming to her to vent about life’s petty miseries, or dragging her out for drinks after a breakup or a layoff. She used to always show up. But recently she told me, “I’m just so tired.”

It started with a colleague who complained that her mother-in-law kept pushing her to have a baby, sending her “toxic chicken soup” articles every few days: How miserable life is without children. Don’t want to be an elderly first-time mom? Have the baby before this age. At first, Lily would comfort her and coach her on how to talk to her mother-in-law, or suggest having her husband raise it. But the colleague was sure her husband would side with his mother, and equally sure her mother-in-law was simply unreachable—so she never changed a thing. Over time, Lily’s patience and energy were drained dry, and every conversation with this colleague left her in a foul mood. “Even sounding boards need to rest,” she said.

So often, our negative energy doesn’t come from us at all—it comes from taking responsibility for someone else’s bad feelings.

To be clear: I’m not advocating that you suppress your own emotions. I’m saying you should practice “separating tasks”—sorting out which emotions aren’t yours to carry. I deeply agree with what Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People: never pay the bill for someone else’s emotions. Proactively block out unnecessary negativity, because we are not saviors, and we’re not obliged to be accountable for anyone.

“Any person or thing that drains you—even glancing at it once is your mistake.” Remember: your experience, your happiness—that is the reason you came into this world.

In Closing: The Power to Block Things Out

Let me leave you with one exhilarating story.

Drew Faust was the first and only woman to serve as president of Harvard in its more than 400-year history. When she took office, critics attacked her as a woman who “didn’t measure up” and “wasn’t competent.” She stayed remarkably unruffled. She traveled the world for dialogue, brought humanistic education to her students, opened them to the world at large, and corrected Harvard’s lopsided bias toward the sciences over the humanities. By the time she stepped down, she was counted among “Harvard’s greatest presidents.”

Reflecting on that period, she said: “One of life’s great challenges is learning to block out the nonsense out there.”

So in this high-anxiety age, the power to block things out matters more than ever. As The Courage to Be Disliked puts it: “Stop following what anyone else is doing, stop guessing what anyone else is thinking, stop inventing things that haven’t happened. Be simpler, duller, slower—and you’ll find you live with real ease.”

Once this ability kicks in, you’ll focus more on yourself and become more fully yourself. Maybe that’s the real secret to living like life is on your side.

Where you spend your time is where the flowers of your life bloom.