How to Break the Cycle of

Dr. Jennie Gunlogson, DC, CACCP

Cornerstone Chiropractic Health Partners

Montevideo, MN

Objectives

· In this session we will discuss how complaining physically changes and rewires the brain for negativity.

· We will also discuss the ways in which negativity can impact our physical health.

· We will discuss the antidote to this, which is found with gratitude.

· We will discuss the psychological and physical benefits of gratitude and how we can reasonably incorporate this practice into our classrooms and lives for ourselves and our kids.

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Complaining

Research shows… The average person complains once a minute during a typical conversation.

Complaining is tempting because it feels good at the time, but like many other things that are enjoyable -- like smoking or eating a family size bag of M&Ms -- complaining isn’t good for you.

How Complaining Changes the Brain

"Synapses that fire together wire together."

This is one of the first lessons neuroscience students learn. Throughout your brain there is a collection of synapses separated by empty space called the synaptic cleft. Whenever you have a thought, one synapse shoots a chemical across the cleft to another synapse, thus building a bridge over which an electric signal can cross, carrying along its charge the relevant information you're thinking about. Every time this electrical charge is triggered, the synapses grow closer together in order to decrease the distance the electrical charge has to cross.... The brain is rewiring its own circuitry, physically changing itself, to make it easier and more likely that the proper synapses will share the chemical link and thus spark together--in essence, making it easier for the thought to trigger.

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How Complaining Changes the Brain

In simple terms:

• Having a thought makes it easier for you to have that thought again. That's not good news for the perpetually gloomy (though, it seems gratitude, can work the opposite way. More on that later!).
• Not only do repeated negative thoughts make it easier to think yet more negative thoughts, they also make it more likely that negative thoughts will occur to you just randomly walking down the street. (Another way to put this is that being consistently negative starts to push your personality towards the negative).

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How Complaining Changes the Brain

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.

You Are Who You Hang Out With

Not only does hanging out with your own negative thoughts rewire your brain for negativity, hanging out with negative people does much the same. When we see someone experiencing an emotion (be it anger, sadness, happiness, etc), our brain 'tries out' that same emotion to imagine what the other person is going through (“neuronal mirroring”). And it does this by attempting to fire the same synapses in your own brain so that you can attempt to relate to the emotion you're observing (basically empathy).

You Are Who You Hang Out With

• Unfortunately, negativity seems to be MORE easily catchy than positive emotions & expressions.
• The takeaway lesson is, if you want to strengthen your capacity for positivity and weaken your reflex for gloom, surround yourself with happy people who help you rewire your brain towards gratitude or seeing the positive.

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How Complaining Affects Physical Health

• Weakening immune system
• Raising your blood pressure
• Increasing your risk of heart disease, obesity & diabetes
• Interferes with learning & memory
• Lowered bone density

How Complaining Affects Physical Health

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This is primarily through the action of the stress hormone cortisol. When you’re negative, you release it, and chronically elevated levels of cortisol can result in a whole plethora of health ailments.

Complaining is contagious

• With ourselves- if you don’t start, you don’t have to stop.
• With others- it is easy to default into the emotional patterns of those around us (tips coming later!)

What is Your Complaining Type?

• Superior Steve

Steve stands in line at the checkout and mumbles under his breath to others that the cashier is incompetent and slow. Steve may think he’s in control, but he is really a victim giving the play-by-play on a situation that won’t change unless he reports the problem to the store manager.

• Donna Downer

Donna uses complaining as a conversation starter the way most people use hello. Complaining helps people unite over a common enemy and can often lead to bonding, but when Donna types take this too far, they become social pariahs. She sees herself as creating something positive over this shared disdain, but others just want to run for cover.

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What is Your Complaining Type?

• Bobby Blamer

Bobby doesn’t view himself as a complainer, nor does he ever see any fault in his own actions. He spends his time blaming every mishap, mistake or accident on anyone he can find. In that legend in his own mind, Bobby does no wrong.

• Venting Veronica

Meet up with her, and you have signed up for Monday morning quarterbacking on everything from a reality-show faux pas to her significant other’s slovenly housekeeping. She is that negative friend who can’t wait to unload all of life’s problems on you. Sessions with her do little besides fostering an environment of feeding on the flaws of others.

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Is Venting OK?

By getting our emotions out, we reason, we'll feel better.

But science suggests there are a few serious flaws in that reasoning. However, not only does expressing negativity tend not to make us feel better, it's also catching, making listeners feel worse.

Something you may consider a simple declarative statement, may not resonate as such with your, or your listener’s, physiology.

A certain degree of complaining is inevitable, but when it becomes habitual, it can negatively affect your mood and those around you.

Dealing With Complainers

1. Dress Happy- something that cheers you up.
2. Come prepared- have an upbeat topic, start the conversation yourself. This gives you more control of the tone of the conversation.
3. Try radical empathy- try to understand where they are coming from. There are often feelings of low self-esteem or inferiority behind all the negative chatter. Having empathy can help to dilute the effect of their words on you & boost your mood.
4. Start with an unstressed body- get enough sleep, eat well, practice gratitude & mindfulness, take a walk or get physical activity regularly. All of this will make you mentally stronger to not catching the “negativity bug”.
5. Train them with your attention- ignore behaviors you don’t want & reward those you do. Don’t reward perpetually gloomy behaviors with your attention.

Solutions!

• Recognize your complaining style or the situations that tend to trigger it.
• Pause before you speak.
• Try to keep negative thoughts to yourself.
• Add a simple “but… <positive>” to the end of your complaining statements.
• Then try to reduce complaining urges:
• Calm music, fun music, humor, say thank you more often, have a bedtime notebook to write down 3-5 things for which you are grateful, do an optimistic/kindness/joyful 30 day challenge with co-workers or family, etc, etc.
• Take inventory of the influence of the people around you: family, friends, co-workers, social media, etc. Do you need to reduce your exposure to anyone?

www.actionforhappiness.org

Solution-oriented Complaining

This is ONLY when you have something that is truly worth complaining about. Think of it as complaining with a purpose. Solution-oriented complaining should do the following:

1. Have a clear purpose. Before complaining, know what outcome you’re looking for. If you can’t identify a purpose, there’s a good chance you just want to complain for its own sake, and that’s the kind of complaining you should nip in the bud.
2. Start with something positive. It may seem counterintuitive to start a complaint with a compliment, but starting with a positive helps keep the other person from getting defensive. For example, before launching into a complaint about poor customer service, you could say something like, “I’ve been a customer for a very long time and have always been thrilled with your service...”
3. Be specific. When you’re complaining it’s not a good time to dredge up every minor annoyance from the past 20 years. Just address the current situation and be as specific as possible. Instead of saying, “Your employee was rude to me,” describe specifically what the employee did that seemed rude.
4. End on a positive. If you end your complaint with, “I’m never shopping here again,” the person who’s listening has no motivation to act on your complaint. In that case, you’re just venting, or complaining with no purpose other than to complain. Instead, restate your purpose, as well as your hope that the desired result can be achieved, for example, “I’d like to work this out so that we can keep our business relationship intact.”

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The Most Powerful Antidote to Complaining...

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GRATITUDE!

Psychological Benefits of Gratitude

• Increased Happiness, Increased Resiliency (esp. when overcoming trauma)
• Decreased Depression, Decreased Anxiety (thru sleep), Decreased Stress, Decreased PTSD, Decreased Negative emotions (envy, resentment, frustration, regret
• Increased Self-esteem, Decreased Social comparisons

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Change Your Brain With Gratitude

NIH researchers examined blood flow in various brain regions while subjects summoned up feelings of gratitude (Zahn et al, 2009). They found that subjects who showed more gratitude overall had higher levels of activity in the hypothalamus. This is important because the hypothalamus controls a huge array of essential bodily functions, including eating, drinking and sleeping. It also has a huge influence on your metabolism and stress levels. From this evidence on brain activity it starts to become clear how improvements in gratitude could have such wide-ranging effects from increased exercise, and improved sleep to decreased depression and fewer aches and pains.

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Change Your Brain With Gratitude

Furthermore, feelings of gratitude directly activated brain regions associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine feels good to get, which is why it’s generally considered the “reward” neurotransmitter. But dopamine is also almost as important in initiating action. That means increases in dopamine make you more likely to do the thing you just did. It’s the brain saying, “Oh, do that again.” Your brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias; that is it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. And the dopamine reinforces that as well. So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for. That’s how the cycle gets created.

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Physical Benefits of Gratitude

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• Decreased Aches & Pains, Decreased Blood pressure
• Increased Energy
• Improved sleep in those who write in a gratitude journal.
• Grateful people are more likely to report feeling healthier and to live longer. They are more likely to take care of their health, such as exercising, attending check-ups/wellness appts.

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Better Relationships with Gratitude

• Thanking new acquaintances makes them more likely to seek an ongoing relationship (friend, spouse, employer).
• Grateful people tend to be more sensitive & empathetic towards others.
• Grateful people are less likely to seek revenge or retaliate (even when others behave less kindly).
• Survival of marriage is more likely in those who practice gratitude with each other. Unless a couple is able to maintain a high ratio of positive to negative encounters (5:1 or greater), it is more likely the marriage will struggle. The formula is that for every negative expression (a complaint, frown, put-down, expression of anger) there needs to be about five positive ones (smiles, compliments, laughter, expressions of appreciation and gratitude).

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How to Develop an Attitude of Gratitude

1. Bedtime journal or notebook ( 3 items, 5 items, paragraph). Even a weekly gratitude journal was found to be beneficial- Subjects assigned to journal weekly on gratitude showed greater improvements in optimism. 3 Good Things
2. Try an app for your phone or device.
3. When you are getting ready for the day, think about something you appreciate or like about yourself.
4. Practice gratitude with meals.
5. Focus on what you have, not what you lack.
6. Celebrate minor accomplishments.
7. Tell someone (spouse, partner, friend, child, coworker) something you appreciate about them every day.
8. Work toward speaking your thoughts & feelings of gratitude.
9. Give yourself a little time if needed after a trauma if needed, & then start to find any little thing you can to be grateful for.

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Practicing Gratitude

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It’s not always easy to remember to be grateful, particularly since the human brain is so adaptable. We easily get used to whatever comforts are around us. When was the last time you turned the key in your car’s ignition and praised the miracles of the internal combustion engine? In disasters, like a Hurricane for example, we can come to see that we shouldn’t take things like running water and electricity for granted. But how long does that feeling last for? Within a few days you’re back to cursing when the the red light takes too long.

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Gratitude takes practice like any other skill. Thanksgiving Day is often a time that we start, but if you want to reap all the benefits, keep practicing after that. Even just thinking of one thing every day that you’re grateful for.

Practicing Gratitude

21 day Gratitude Challenge

21 day Gratitude Challenge Calendar

30 days of Gratitude calendar

Gratitude at home & in the Classroom

Now I want to hear your ideas & feedback! GO!

Questions?

Thank you for attending my session & I hope you find the presentation informative! Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions!�

drjennie@cornerstonechiropractichealth.com

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