How to stop complaining about life and not whining

Master of Psychology, family psychotherapist, Psychedemia expert

“Do you notice that you have often started complaining about life and you don’t like it? Have you decided to fight the habit and do not allow yourself to “whine”, but you can’t stand it and “snap”? Then let’s figure out what to do about it.”

The habit of constant whining can indeed destroy relationships with others and further plunge into a state of helplessness. However, abandoning it altogether can also be harmful. By not allowing ourselves to complain in the first place, we lose the option of self-compassion, as well as opportunities for support and recovery.

Before you try to break the habit of “whining,” you need to understand what it is you put into this process. How do you notice yourself slipping into whining? How, in turn, does your life change when you find yourself complaining too much?

Until it becomes clear what function this habit performs for you, you can not just get rid of it, changing your life for the better. Therefore, you need to start by analyzing the causes.

Table of Contents

Where do we get the habit of whining?

In our lives, we are constantly learning psychological and behavioral strategies. This happens throughout its entire course.

The habit of complaining about life can appear and take hold unnoticed. It’s just that at some point this strategy helped you: you managed to draw attention to yourself, get help, share your worries. Your brain has learned to follow this route, expecting similar reinforcement time after time.

When a strategy stops being useful and instead only causes negative emotions and limitations, it’s a sure sign that you’ve outgrown it and it’s time to try something new.

Reasons that can lead to getting stuck in complaining about life:

it’s a strategy you’ve learned from your family;
there are cognitive distortions: fixation on the negative, catastrophizing, black and white thinking;
there’s a fear of change and free activity;
you tend to shift responsibility to other people and external circumstances;
you lack planning and goal-setting skills;
you are overwhelmed and lack delegation and recovery skills;
you have high anxiety;
you are depressed.

As we can see, the reasons can be very different: both internal and external. The high level of variability in the world, social messages and national habits are equally important backgrounds that train us to keep our focus on the negative and ignore the positive.

How to stop complaining and whining on your own?

So, first, it’s important to figure out exactly how your “whining” is organized. What are the triggers that set it off? What are the thoughts that keep it going? Under what conditions does it escalate and under what influence, on the contrary, it decreases, giving you the opportunity to be more active in life?

A popular technique is the practice of externalizing the problem. It allows you to disconnect from the uncomfortable habit, see yourself separately from it, and formulate an intention for the desired changes.

Externalization Technique

Visualize the “whining” as an external object, a character, a substance – any image that arises will do.

What does it look like, what size, color, how does it move, sound?
How does it appear near you?
How does it force you to look at the world, what does it convince you of?
When did it begin to appear in your life, under what conditions does it become stronger?
How has it helped you in the past and what does it help you with now? What does it try to bring into your life, what does it try to protect you from?
How does it hinder you, what does it separate you from, where does it block your access, what opportunities does it deprive you of, how does it harm your relationships with others?
What feelings does “whining” evoke in you when it appears?
Who does it turn you into, what do you become in the eyes of others?
How does it affect the way you feel in your body, what does it make you feel, where does it push you, or does it affect you in some other way?

You can continue to ask yourself other helpful questions of this type. The goal is to see the process of “whining” as external, separate, and affecting you in a certain way.

Practicing self-observation is a crucial step for change. It’s how you create a backlash between yourself and your problem. Which means you give yourself back the ability to act differently without submitting to the same old automatic response.

Why do we think negatively?

Apart from individual moments, there is one common reason why we slip into pessimism more easily. It’s all about our brain, which is shaped by evolution. It’s trained to keep its focus on disturbing and negative events – it’s an ancient “trick” that helped our ancestors survive. But here and now it is more and more like a “bug”. Living conditions are now the safest they have ever been in human history, but our brains don’t seem to know it yet!

There is an idea that we need to learn to think positively in every situation. It’s very popular. But “positive thinking” is an abstract concept. From a practical point of view, the most important thing is the skill of arbitrary switching of attention.

Attention is a tool. Where it is directed, that is where it “grows”: that area gets emotional and cognitive resources. Focusing on problems, failures, and mistakes robs us of the ability to notice exceptions, trace the causes of those exceptions, and use them to make further changes for the better.

Instead of focusing on those aspects of life that cause complaints, it is important for us to learn to arbitrarily shift our focus to those situations that are pleasing to us. When we succeed at something; life is enjoyable, we manage to make a difference; those around us are in contact with us and we are happy with that interaction.

This approach to positive thinking can be more productive because it doesn’t force us into abstract joy and good moods. We simply recognize that it’s a skill. And it is essential to being able to make changes in our lives.

Techniques for practicing changing focus

1- Answer yourself the questions:

what do I want to experience instead of “whining”?
what do I want to do instead of complaining about life?

2. Then train your focus on the moments when you are able to do that.

For example, you answered yourself, “Instead of whining, I want to ask for help sometimes.” Now try to keep track of how and when you succeed in asking for help. Ask yourself the questions:

When am I getting better at complaining less?
what do I already do sometimes instead of complaining about life?
What people do I complain less with?
after which do I find it easier to give up “whining” as and when I was able to do it before?

This way of asking ourselves questions and noticing the positive aspects of life helps us reshape our thinking and change the way we think about ourselves.

So, positive thinking is not just about contemplating the dew on the blades of grass (although we can do that too), but the ability to pay attention to what we are good at. Then it becomes concrete and developmental, changing us for the better.

When is whining useful?

Before we fight any habit, it’s important to understand what it’s helping us with right now.

All psychological strategies are designed to ensure our well-being. They may have been better at it in the past, they may be worse at it now, but some need likely remains. If we remove a habit but don’t replace it with other ways to fulfill that need, we will develop a deficit and probably feel worse.

What needs does the habit of whining highlight?

Behind the desire to complain about life are a variety of unmet needs. The options are many. These can include:

the need for support;
a need for self-compassion for one’s own feelings and experiences;
the unexpressed state of loss;
loss of control and the need to regain it;
need for autonomy;
need for attention;
need for companionship;
lack of rest, exhaustion;
need for help;
lack of emotional contacts;
need for time.

Through habits, even if you don’t like them, you can understand what is missing in your life. By noticing these needs, we are able to fulfill them in alternative ways. For example: asking for help, giving ourselves more time, learning to plan and divide tasks into smaller steps, etc.

How do you change a habit with new skills?

As we mentioned above, the habit of complaining about life can hide not only unrealized needs, but also a lack of necessary skills. Looking at the problem from this position is much more effective than just analyzing it.

Instead of looking for causes and endlessly revisiting the past, we can acquire new skills and develop existing ones: try, experiment and most importantly, act.

What skills will help?

1. The skills of formulating the desired future and the necessary changes. We need to answer to ourselves the questions: “What exactly do I not like?” and “How can I influence it?”.

2. Small Steps Skills. Having chosen a direction for change, divide it into small and accessible steps.

3- Delegation skills. Reduce control and delegate some of your responsibilities to other people.

4. The skill of asking for help. If there is a problem, give yourself permission to ask for help and do so in an environmentally friendly and safe way.

5. Self-compassion skills. Giving yourself support, validating the reality and significance of your own experiences, feeling sorry for yourself and warming yourself to move on.

6. Rest and recovery skills. Make lifestyle changes so that there is time for rest that will really help recovery.

7. Self-regulation, anxiety and anger reduction skills. Find your own ways to regulate your emotions when they start to go off the charts. For example, going for a walk, taking deep breaths, washing your face with cold water – these are all self-regulation skills that help reduce the intensity of your emotions.

8. Communication skills. Understanding what to talk about with others, how to maintain a meaningful conversation, what can provide quality communication.

9. Self-care skills. This is perhaps one of the most important on this list. You need to learn to be in touch with your own state: to restore your needs in time (for example, not to sit chained to the monitor during the day, but to notice that you are hungry and take a break from eating), to allocate time to be alone (when necessary), to develop supportive habits.

In this way, we’ve discovered that the habit of “whining” is more complicated than it seems. But by noticing it and choosing to retrain ourselves, we can learn something new about ourselves, notice our needs, and learn how to meet them in a more ecological way. In this case, the habit of complaining will become an incentive to develop and improve our lives.