Oh my God, I can't stop reading the news. I am so infuriated! Did you see this other article?!

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

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. 

[BREAK]

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.

[BREAK]

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.

[BREAK] 

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 t...