Complainers Be Complaining!

Vent Wisely…and Outside of School

Get it off your chest away from school campus. Otherwise, it amounts to gossip and complaining, which is the tea for a toxic work environment and physical stress to your personal health and emotional well-being.

How long should you vent before you start talking about a solution or finding one positive aspect of a situation? One day? Five days? Thirty days? Does regular complaining without talk of a solution create a positive environment in the school? In a classroom? In your mind? In your body?

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The Science I Explored

Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future—so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it. You can’t blame your brain. Who’d want to build a temporary bridge every time you need to cross a river? It makes a lot more sense to construct a permanent bridge. So your neurons grow closer together, and the connections between them become more permanent. Scientists like to describe this process as “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you. And here’s the kicker: complaining damages other areas of your brain as well. Research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus—an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought. Damage to the hippocampus is scary, especially when you consider that it’s one of the primary brain areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s. When you complain, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol shifts you into fight-or-flight mode, directing oxygen, blood, and energy away from everything but the systems that are essential to immediate survival. One effect of cortisol, for example, is to raise your blood pressure and blood sugar so that you’ll be prepared to either escape or defend yourself. All the extra cortisol released by frequent complaining impairs your immune system and makes you more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. It even makes the brain more vulnerable to strokes.[1]

A Situation

An educator is having a rough start to the school year. Supplies seem to be limited. Technology is going haywire. Administrators are uncooperative, even uncaring, due to their own pressures. Parents are demanding and children are in high need of attention. A mental health day has not been enjoyed yet. This educator is on the edge, and hearing fellow teachers complain is adding to the negative feelings floating in the air of the building. Even the students are noticing the sour faces on some teachers. The educator hears the students mention it in their complaints.

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Venting Wisely

Venting or complaining is directly connected to your overall health. Talk to someone you trust outside of the situation. This person will not relay your complaints to others or criticize your feelings or even solve your problem. This person will listen with an unbiased ear. This person will hear you out and allow you to come to your own solutions with little input or advise if needed. Count yourself lucky or blessed if this is an actual person in your life.

But, if like many of us, no “person” fits this role, write it out. Get a pen and paper and let every frustration flow out of your system. Then shred that paper. Do this until you naturally start writing about a solution.

Write solutions that you have may have personal control over. If you find yourself wanting to complain over and over again—you just cannot see the good—reevaluate your role as an educator. Years of complaining and disliking your career will only be harmful to your entire well-being.

Funny how you can complain and complain and not realize the impact it has on your health and not the problem you are complaining about. Now can you please wipe your face with a warm cloth and smile at yourself in the mirror right after you have vented and come up with your various solutions?

Say it with me: “I’ll vent, but not at my own expense.”

Quotes

When you complain, you make yourself the victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.

—Eckhart Tolle

You do not make progress standing on the sidelines whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

—Shirley Chisholm

[1] Travis Bradberry, PhD, “How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity,” TalentSmartEQ, Accessed December 20, 2020, http://www.talentsmart.com/media/uploads/articles/pdfs/How%20Complaining%20Rewires%20Your%20Brain%20for%20Negativity.pdf.