Show Notes
Oh my God, I can't stop reading the news. I am so infuriated! Did you see this other article?!
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Hello! I’m Cianna Stewart, founder of the No Complaining Project. I define complaining as expressing grief, pain, or discontent without contributing to solving the problem. Many of us complain as an unconscious habit, and it’s hurting us and the people around us in more ways than we realize. My goal is to share tools and information to support you in changing your life and improving your relationships by shifting from complaining to taking action. Quitting complaining seems simple, but it goes deep, and once you stop, you’ll never want to start again. I hope you’ll join me in Going NoCo - NoCo for No Complaining. Your world will look different if you do.
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I'm recording this at the beginning of May 2020 and the world is crazy. Well, that’s one word for it. You could also say: disorienting, distressing, terrifying, anxiety-producing… The exact feeling varies depending on what you’re personally going through. What is universal is that this is different than anything we’ve ever experienced before, and it’s hard.
We're all dealing with uncertainty, a loss of control. And in general, humans don't like uncertainty. Even those of us (like me) who are anti-routine… we like novelty, but not uncertainty. So I'm finding that a lot of people are looking to the news or to their friends, all sorts of places around them in order to get information to try to feel a little bit more settled inside, to feel like they at least know what's going on. Like maybe more information will help them figure out what to do.
People are also talking through their stress and their anxiety with their friends. So many of us are going through very similar things right now and it feels great to be able to share support around that.
All of that is pretty understandable. It's normal. If it’s done right, it can be healthy, even healing. Unfortunately, many of us are more destructive than healing. If you’re not careful, all that reading and all that talking about stress actually can become really damaging to your health. Not just your mental health, but actually also your physical health. And while the world is without a doubt messed up, I don’t want you to make it any worse for yourself. So that's what I want to talk about today.
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What I’m concerned about is, for example, say you’re someone who’s feeling anxiety or stress about the current situation in the world. Maybe you read some articles online or saw someone posting something on social media which made you concerned. Maybe you then went looking for more articles on that same topic so you could learn more about it, read some opinion pieces, watched a video. Maybe after that you saw some other articles on a similar topic that warned you about the dangers of something else that’s related so you started looking into those as well. Maybe you found yourself having lost more time than you intended doing this, and it seems like this happens almost every day.
Or maybe you’re talking with a friend about your frustration or your anger. You know your friend is going through a similar thing. You swap stories back and forth. You’re both getting more worked up as you talk. “Misery loves company,” right? It feels like you’ve had this conversation a hundred times, that the situation is endless and you’re stuck.
Both of these scenarios are damaging for a similar reason: You are actively focusing your brain on the negative, training it to pay attention only to that.
Yes, I said you are actively training your brain. Neuroscientists have learned that our brains keep developing and changing throughout our lives, in response to what stimulus they receive. This is called “neuroplasticity” and it’s incredibly powerful. And you can use it to your advantage if you understand it and work with it.
Super-simplified, the brain works by passing electrical signals between receivers called neurons. The more often a particular pair of neurons fire off an electrical signal between them, the easier it is for them to fire in the future. It’s like water slowly carving a path as it flows. Eventually one route becomes worn into a groove and the water keeps flowing in that direction, wearing out more of a groove and making it even easier for more water to flow there. A similar thing is happening to pairs of neurons. The ones that get fired often become easier to trigger and so then they fire more often and they become your go-to way of thinking. They can even pull in adjacent neurons to help boost the signal. There’s a saying, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” It’s like a skill that gets trained in your brain.
You see where this is going? When you continually focus on negative things, you train your brain to look for the negative. You become an expert in seeing danger and issuing warnings. This is useful if you’re watching out for predators in a jungle or are working in security, but most of us on an average day are not in a constantly elevated level of danger. The tricky thing with the pandemic right now is that we are learning to respond to a new and unfamiliar danger and that has us on high alert. And even though most of us are not at immediate risk every hour of the day, we’re operating on an increased anxiety level as if we are.
You might think this is keeping you safe, but that’s only true up to a point. In truth, complaining and obsessing on the danger and uncertainty is one of the worst things that you can possibly do for your mental and physical health.
When you’re complaining with someone or you’re reading news that continually fires up your feelings of danger, you are raising and reinforcing your stress. You’re increasing the stress hormone, cortisol, and over time that can do great damage to your body. Chronic stress has been linked to an elevated risk of heart attacks, diabetes, even cancer. It can shut down activity in the planning center of your brain, the pre-frontal cortex. It also weakens your immune system, which is definitely not something you want right now. It’s hard to overstate the importance of managing your stress levels in order to maintain your health.
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Habitual complaining also puts you at greater risk for depression. I look at studies on rumination to understand this, because rumination is defined simply as repeating a thought or concern without completion, meaning that something is going round and round in your head and you do nothing about it to get out that loop. We’ve all found ourselves doing this at some point, but when it becomes a dominant form of thought, then you are oiling the wheels towards depression, speeding things up if you’re already at risk.
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As if that’s not enough, habitual complaining and focusing on the negative actually makes your world seem worse than it is. It can keep you from noticing or remembering the parts of your world that are good or even just ok. The end result is you think that everything is horrible when it isn’t, that it’s worse than it actually is.
In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to watch which parts of our brain get activated when we’re doing or thinking certain things. They use a tool called “functional magnetic resonance imaging” or FMRIs, and this has led to so many breakthroughs in neuroscience it’s kind of unbelievable to compare what we know now to what we knew even 25 years ago.
One of the most interesting things has been to see that when people are negatively focused, when you're actively thinking about a negative thing, it tends to narrow the activity in your brain to certain regions. Those activated regions are focused on protecting you, defending you, and all sorts of really good and useful things if you're in immediate danger. It sharpens your vision and quickens your motor reflexes - just what you’d need to, say, escape a jaguar.
If you're not in immediate danger though, and you're just chatting away in a complaining way, simply listing negative thoughts all the time, then there's no practical utility from a brain standpoint to doing that. All you're doing is narrowing your activation centers to watching out for something that you actually can do nothing about or to down to something that you're not focused on fixing or solving the consequences of.
The thing that's super extra matters in this conversation is that you're doing more than just activating one part of the brain. Other parts of your brain are actually getting turned off so you can focus on that danger. The parts of your brain that have lower activity include those related to problem solving, and creativity. In an ironic twist, all that focus also impedes your ability to have an open awareness of your surrounding environment, which can actually put you in more danger. You know when you get really focused on something and get startled when someone taps you on the shoulder? That’s what I’m talking about when say you lose your general awareness of your surroundings.
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Lastly, when I say that habitual complaining can keep you from noticing the good things in your environment, that’s not an exaggeration. Studies have shown we have “attentional bias” meaning that what we see is affected by what we choose to look for.
For a while I was part of a photography group that would send out daily assignments. Every day we were told to take a photo of something green or that was square or they’d send a word like “laughter.” No matter what the assignment, for the rest of the day, my eye would get drawn to things that were green or square or which made me laugh or whatever. I wouldn’t be going out in search of it, I would still be at home or at work, in familiar environments but seeing them in a new way. It was all about where I was choosing to place my focus.
This also happens, you know, if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle, which a lot of us are doing right now as we’re staying at home. You know, you've got one particular shape that you're looking for, or one particular color, and you just keep scanning through this field of pieces and then that piece pops out at you. That's because you’re looking for it.
There's another side of this that's also fascinating called, “inattentional blindness.” What that means is while you’re focused on something, you can actually be effectively blind to the things that you're not looking for, even when they’re really obvious. This was first demonstrated in a famous experiment called “The Invisible Gorilla,” where subjects who were focused on a counting task that required concentration entirely missed the appearance of a person in a gorilla suit appearing in the middle of the video. In a much more tragic application, drivers of cars have been shown to entirely miss seeing pedestrians, bicycles, or even motorcycles when their concentration was entirely focused only on looking for other cars.
What this means here is that if we spend all our time reading, talking, and thinking about negative things, then that’s all we’re going to notice and experience in the world. And no matter how bad things get, there are still positive things or even neutral things happening — if only you could notice them.
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So, what to do? Now, I’m not the kind of person who’s going to tell you that you shouldn’t be reading the news or talking with your friends about what’s going on. I’m never going to tell you to just ignore it, to bury your head in the sand, to think happy thoughts and pretend like everything is ok. I think that kind of Pollyanna advice is damaging. Not only that, it’s insulting when your day to day reality is stressful and you’re feeling overwhelmed. I want you to be able to look at the reality of what’s happening, to see what’s wrong. I just don’t want you to get stuck there.
So to help with that, I’m going to share with you three different techniques for easing your stress and making your world a little less horrible.
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One of the easiest things that I'm sure you’ve heard about: Start a gratitude practice. So you understand why it’s actually important and not just woo-woo, I want to explain to you why this works and then give you a couple of easy ways to do it.
What's actually happening in your brain when you start a gratitude practice is another trick of focusing. Let’s say you decide that every day you’re going to write down 3 things that you’re grateful for. In order to do this, you’ll have to start scanning through your day, through your life, looking for positive things to write down. The practice forces you to change your focus away from the negative and towards the positive, even if just for 5 minutes a day.
This is also a great practice if you have someone in your life who’s driving you crazy right now. You can keep a record of one thing a day that you genuinely appreciate about this person. Keep this up for a year and you’re likely to shift how you experience that person for the better. As a bonus: This is especially great for relationships that have been going on for a while and which have started to get stale.
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I know that sometimes it's really hard when you’re deep in it to think of things that are positive. The gratitude practice can feel like too much work. In those situations, if it gets too tough, I don't want you to beat yourself up. As an alternative, after every time you complain about something, just add, “And I am so grateful.” You don't have to say anything else. You don't have to say what you're grateful for. Just, every time you catch yourself complaining, I say, and I am so grateful. Some people like to say, “and I am so blessed,” instead. Either one of those works. The goal here — and why it’s important to say “and” at the beginning — is that it's a way to be inclusive of a wider reality. It’s an acknowledgment that the world is complex and every minute of every day yes, bad things are happening (especially now), but good things are also happening. There were dolphins swimming through bioluminescent waters last week in San Diego. There was someone singing on a balcony. A baby was born today. The sun rose. These are all things that also happened today in addition to everything else that’s bad that gets reported.
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Of course, one of the very best things is to do a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness gets a lot of buzz right now and it's because after thousands of years of people practicing this in all different forms around the globe, we have lots of evidence that it's really useful, evidence that has more recently been backed up by neuroscience.
If you haven't practiced it before, or don’t really understand what it is, don’t be put off by thinking that you have to go into the mountains or give up hours of every day or make it some elaborate thing. Mindfulness is really very simple. It’s really just training your ability to choose where you're placing your focus. That's it. Choosing to be present in this moment and choosing what you're paying attention to.
You can do mindfulness training in a number of ways. You can do a formal mindfulness practice, even if it's five or 10 minutes a day, that will be enough to help you learn to focus. There are lots of apps and courses on doing that. Here I want to give you one short exercise that you can do anytime, anywhere to get yourself into the present moment.
All you need to do is get focused and go through each of your senses. Just ask yourself, what am I seeing right now? What am I hearing right now? What am I smelling right now? What am I tasting right now? What am I touching right now? After each question, take a moment and try to really experience whatever is happening through that sense.
If there are two of you who want to practice together, here’s another cool exercise. Set a timer for five minutes, look into each other’s eyes, and take turns sharing what you’re noticing. You just say “right now I am noticing [whatever].” Make it short and don’t go into what it means or anything. Just say things like, “right now I am noticing the sun bouncing through the window off the neighbor’s house,” or “right now I am noticing that my shoulders feel cool” or “right now I’m noticing laughter bubbling up in my stomach.” Sounds crazy, but it's pretty cool to discover what you're noticing and to see how that actually can deepen your connection with another person as you both become really aware of being in the very same space together and not up in your heads.
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To summarize all that: Don’t sabotage your ability to experience some relief and maybe even pleasure from your world right now. Take action to help keep yourself from getting so caught up in the bad news that you’re not able to see anything that’s good. Add or reinforce your gratitude practice. Practice mindfulness. Work on keeping an open awareness so you can notice the many many different things happening all around you.
I wish you well and I hope this helps.
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Thank you for choosing the podcast for the No Complaining Project.
It was written, recorded, and edited by me, Cianna Stewart.
All our music is by the multi-talented Daniel Berkman. Find him on Bandcamp.
The transcript is in the show notes, and you can find more tips and links to my book at GoNoCo.com. That’s G-O-N-O-C-O.com.
Thank you for giving the gift of No Complaining to yourself and to the people around you.
Until next time, Go NoCo!
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