Complaining Physically Rewires Your Brain To Be Anxious+3 Types of Complainers

We all know someone who is perpetually negative and tends to bring everyone down with them. For these people, life is always against them and they can never seem to catch a break. 

Everybody complains once in awhile, especially in our overly negative society. And for the most part, Dr. Robin Kowalski, professor of psychology at Clemson University, insists that complaining is perfectly normal.

Archetypes Of Negativity

Not everyone with a negative state of mind experiences and expresses their worldview in the same way. Just like every other personality trait, pessimism has its variations.

These are the 3 most common types of complainers:

Venters: are people who just want to be listened to. They typically look for someone to listen to their complaints but are quick to shut down solutions, even when it’s good advice.

Sympathy Seekers: Everyone’s come across one of these before. These kinds of complainers always one-up your misery. They always, always have it worse than you and are quick to see the fault in situations and others.

Chronic Complainers: These kinds of complainers do something researchers call “ruminating”, which means to obsessively think and complain about a problem. Instead of feeling relaxed after complaining, they actually become worried and anxious from the act.

Negativity Rewires Your Brain
Negativity is a downward spiral, meaning that the more you focus on problems instead of solutions, you eventually start to see the negative side of everything in your life.

While bouts of negative thinking happen on and off, it’s important to let yourself vent, but quickly move on to solutions. And it’s really worth doing : for one, negativity physically destroys your brain.“…people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting,” explains Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

Plus, negative thinking reinforces neuropathways associated with that emotion, eventually making it an automatic reaction.

The same can be said of ANY repetitive thought or action. However, this also allows you change your brain! You can train your brain to do anything, even when it comes to your outlook.

The more you work hard to find the positivity in every situation, the more it becomes automatic! 🙂

Article By dailyhealthpost.com