Dear Parents

We all like a good grizzle. It helps to vent our feelings about how everyone else is wrong. We don’t always get what we want and blowing off some steam can help us get over it.

Good things happen when you stop complaining all the time.

After a bad day, it’s good to have a good moan about it. However, when your venting becomes constant complaining, you’ll attract people who are usually pessimistic, negative and constant complainers themselves. We are all highly influenced by the people around us. A pessimistic attitude attracts other pessimists. The more you complain, the more people around you will complain and you’ll become part of a group that spends more time complaining than getting things done.

Once you stop complaining and start seeing your glass as being half full rather than half empty, positive people want to partner up with you. At school and in the workplace, it’s much happier when we are working with people with a positive outlook rather than a grinch.

Being a chronic complainer means you are always focused on your problems. When you’re spending all of your energy on problems, you have no energy left for solving those problems. Complaining prevents us finding solutions. When we complain, our brains release a stress hormone that slows down our problem-solving skills.

Happiness means retraining our brain to scan for the good things in life—to help us see more possibilities, to feel more energy and to do better.

By practising positive thinking, you’re literally training your brain — like athletes train their bodies — to react in a specific way, creating a happiness loop. We know happier people are healthier, more successful and even more productive in their daily tasks.

Once you stop complaining about people, you can really start to hear them out and get to know their story. You’ll focus less on the things that rub you the wrong way. What is it about this person that turns you off? Pausing and thinking about these things along the way also helps you to become a better person. After all, you can’t learn more about people if you are always complaining about the ones you don’t like.