Complaining: How do you stop?

Edwin Selij
Dec 03, 2018

Complaining, everyone does it sometimes, like about the train being late again. The weather, your mother-in-law and that irritating brother-in-law of yours who can't keep his mouth shut and always provokes a discussion at family parties. Gone is the fun! Are you someone who just can't stop complaining? Then this is the blog for you

Why do we complain?

There are all kinds of reasons why people may complain, such as:

Reduce stress by complaining

One of the best ways to reduce stress is to talk out your problems. Who also doesn't often bottle up feelings until it comes to an eruption? By complaining, you actually dose the expression of feelings which makes you less likely to come to a major outburst. Expressing your frustrations just makes you feel better. Sometimes you just need to complain about that super annoying co-worker.

Get help

For severe stress triggers, complaining can also be a way to ask for help. For example, when you have relationship problems and complain about them to a friend, this is also an implicit request for help with your relationship problem.

Especially when you no longer see a way out for yourself, complaining is the only way to find another way out.

Depression

That feeling of being stuck is often something you might experience when you’re depressed. On top of that, you tend to focus on the negative, which naturally gives you reason to complain.

Your family also complains

Sometimes complaining is also just part of your culture, or at least, something normal for the people you interact with. For example, if you grew up in a family where there was complaining every day, you may find this very normal and have adopted the behavior.

Getting Attention

Sometimes when you feel you have no talents worthy of attention, complaining may be the only way to get attention. After all, people often do end up responding to a complaint, and you can get into a conversation that way.

What factors contribute to complaining?

What you complain about depends on several factors. For example, research on complaining about (failed) purchases shows that the size of the loss, or the wasted effort, is a reason that leads people to complain[2].

Another factor is your beliefs about complaining. Is it socially acceptable? In what contexts do you think it’s okay to complain?

Past experiences with complaining may also cause you to complain more or less. For example, some people complain because it usually gives them some kind of gain. At least in the form of attention.

How high is your confidence level?

Your self-confidence also has a major impact on your tendency to complain. If you believe you can solve your problems on your own, you’ll be much less likely to complain than if you think you can’t solve them.

Your self-confidence has a tremendous impact on your behavior, the choices you make and what you do and don't do. Therefore, researching your self-confidence and how much you complain is quite a useful move.

Why it's important to stop complaining

It’s especially important to stop complaining when you do it a lot. At work, excessive complaining isn’t appreciated. Complaining at work can lead to more arguments in the workplace. Team spirit and attitudes toward work are negatively affected. Complaining at work often creates more negativity than necessary, trapping you in a vicious cycle where you have more and more reasons to complain[3].

The downside of being seen as a complainer is that you won’t be accepted into the more informal groups at work and you’re more likely to lose your job . This doesn’t mean you should never complain; it means you should complain less often or find other ways to express your concerns.

Ways to stop complaining

Now that you know what causes there are and why it's so important to stop complaining (too much), you can identify which cause in you is causing you to complain.

Finding the cause of complaining

If this isn’t entirely clear, you can start by talking to your hypnosis expert to identify the cause. Several techniques are available for this. If you really can’t figure out why you complain so much, you can uncover the reason through regression. With regression, you go back to the moment when your subconscious decided that it’s okay for you to complain a lot and that this is something that will always work for you—even though that may no longer be the case.

These are often childhood moments because that's when you form your beliefs about how the world works and how you function best in it. However, as a child you do not have all the wisdom and sometimes you can have very illogical beliefs because of this. During a regression you actually evaluate your beliefs to see if they still fit with the knowledge you have gained in the meantime. Just realizing that a belief is illogical can make you complain less.

Improve self-confidence in your own abilities

Another way to reduce complaining is by developing more confidence in your own abilities. This doesn’t mean that a hypnosis expert will have you repeat a few times that you’re incredibly smart and can do anything—though, of course, that’s an option.

Mostly, confidence that you can learn something and keep improving is encouraged. This can be done, for example, with self-hypnosis. Depending on your beliefs about what you are complaining about and how much influence you have on this yourself, a hypnosis expert can give you hypnotic suggestions that you listen to at home to improve your beliefs about yourself so that you become more confident, these can be suggestions such as:

"You learn every time you don't reach your goal yet."

"You influence your environment."

"You can learn what you can't yet do," says the company's CEO, "and you can learn what you can't yet do."

Depending on your beliefs about influence and about your own abilities, a hypnosis expert may give you other suggestions that you can listen to at home during self-hypnosis. Usually you get these on an mp3 and there is also an induction on it so you can easily get into hypnosis. The only thing you have to do is to create a quiet environment where you can listen to the self-hypnosis recording undisturbed.

Reducing Stress

So complaining helps to reduce stress, but what if you find yourself becoming increasingly resistant to complaining? Then, of course, there are other ways to reduce your stress. For example, you can look for a solution to your complaint, or just use moments of rest to reduce your stress.

Exercise and meditation, for example, are two ways to reduce stress. Exercise reduces stress because your body produces various chemicals that make you more creative, allowing you to see more possibilities for solving your problems. One such chemical is the protein BDNF, which helps reduce stress and improve your thought processes.

Meditation helps precisely by having a real moment of rest which also already reduces stress hormones. The tendency to complain then naturally decreases.

Getting attention in a healthy way

Complaining just to get attention is, of course, not a good foundation for a long-term relationship. That’s why it’s very important to find healthy ways to get attention. To do this, you can, among other things, work on your self-esteem and find ways to build a social life.

You are worth much more than attention to solve problems, aren't you? Attention for sociability and based on similarities is much more convenient and also helps you build long-term friendships.

A good way to meet people is to do something social. For example, you can sign up for a team sport or even theater sport where the sport is more about creating theater. Something that definitely makes for sociability.

Do you find it scary to meet new people? Then a hypnosis expert can help you with a guided visualization. Such a visualization helps your imagination to show you how you can successfully participate in a form of team sport and get attention in the process without complaining.

Complaining is something many people do, but doing it too much can cause social isolation, especially at work. Therefore, it is important to find a good balance in how much you complain. Finding a cause for complaining is very important to finding a solution. Hypnosis can help you find the cause and solve the problem that causes excessive complaining.

Would you like to know exactly how hypnosis can help with this? Then come to a hypnosis workshop or sign up for one of our training courses.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fixing-families/201811/how-stop-complaining?collection=1121785

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mar.20298

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2005.tb02102.x