Complaining can be likened to hamster wheels and Apollo space capsules. A person just keeps sending complaints into orbit, round and round, always returning to the same starting point.
“Complaining never changes anything but the mood,” says Dr. Matthew Budd, a Harvard Medical School physician.
Budd offers a quick story about one of his patients, Carol, a 40-something mother with severe asthma. Carol constantly complained and ruminated about the demands placed on her by four children and a husband. She “always walked around feeling she didn’t have a life.” Expressing that dissatisfaction to others, especially her spouse, didn’t alter a thing. It was only when Budd suggested she ask for time to herself-in this case, to meditate daily for 15 minutes-that Carol benefited.
“She attended a workshop [conducted by Budd and offered by the Harvard Community Health Plan HMO] and discovered meditation helped her feel better,” says Budd. “She went home and realized she wanted to meditate at about 3 p.m. the first day. She asked her children to let her do it, suggesting Mommy was going to take some time for herself until the big hand reached the 3.”
To Carol’s surprise, the kids accepted her request and stayed quiet for 15 minutes.
“When Carol told me the story, her whole face lit up,” says Budd. “She said she felt like she was getting out of jail. She had a sense of tremendous freedom that replaced the anger and resentment. Her asthma attacks became much less frequent. She literally felt she could breathe again.”
Budd says chronic or acute complaining is an underrated health risk. The risk is complaining with no purpose but to criticize or blame.
“I think ineffective complaining has a lot to do with heart disease,” says Budd. “There is no action, just anger and hostility. Chronic complainers put themselves in a heightened mood state that disrupts the physiology of the body. There is a higher risk of heart disease associated with anger and hostility.”
Other research helps make a case that complaining can lead to depression, which poses an extensive set of health problems, especially compromising the immune system. There is even preliminary evidence that a form of complaining causes people to put off seeing a doctor when it’s warranted.
Perhaps most important of all, frequent complaining is exactly what the doctor or therapist does not order for healthy relationships.
“Complaining by definition is voicing displeasure about something or someone,” says Dr. Redford Williams, director of behavioral medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and a researcher who studies the effect of hostility and isolation on health. “If all you say is, `You screwed up’ or `I don’t like it,’ that is not effective. It’s basically whining. People will want to avoid you.”
If the complainer is hard to avoid–say, he or she lives in your home or works alongside you–then what research shows is we tend to minimize any personal contact to avoid inviting the complaints. We talk about the weather or pretend we are preoccupied with another task. If the complainer starts yakking, we don’t really listen with any level of empathy or even sympathy.
“When two people [in a positive relationship] have a problem, it’s kind of like a soccer ball they’re kicking around with each other,” says John Gottman, a University of Washington psychologist and leading researcher of marriage stability. “They say: We’ve got this problem. Let’s take a look at it; let’s kick it around. How do you see it? I see it this way,’ and they kick it around. All of a sudden I can have empathy for your position because you’re telling me what you can contribute to solve the problem.”
Right about now you might be thinking, hey, it seems like a healthy thing for people to express themselves, particularly if it is to voice displeasure. You might be thinking about squeaky wheels that get the grease or that you don’t stick up for yourself enough. Maybe you tried the be-nice-and-everything-goes-your-way approach, to unhappy ends. Yet, nobody wants to be known as a complainer.
Budd is not about to argue with any of these thoughts. Instead, he wants to adjust how you view complaining versus making clear declarations and requests. He urges the distinction can make a major difference in your future health.
“It starts by declaring to a person that what happened here is not what I asked or what was promised or to the standards we agreed,” says Budd. “Then you make a clear request for action and make sure the person understands the request. The declaration and request are an antidote to the health and relationship dangers of complaining.”
Budd has conducted a Ways to Wellness workshop series for years (it has been renamed to Personal Health Improvement Program). Last year he wrote a book, “You Are What You Say: A Harvard Doctor’s Six-Step Proven Program for Transforming Stress Through the Power of Language” (Crown, $24), that underscores complaining as a major deterrent to good health.
“I told you earlier that I’m not giving advice in this book, but here I’ll break that rule, one time,” he writes in a section about complaining. “You will suffer less the more that you convert your complaints into requests.”
Eileen Doran is a 48-year-old South Boston woman and sales representative for a book publishing company. She attended one of Budd’s workshops last summer, when she weighed 210 pounds and “barely had the energy to get out of bed in the morning.”
“I was stuck in such a negative place,” she recalls. “I was complaining all of the time at work. It was taking over my identity and I was not aware of it. I alienated people and basically would eat over it to soothe the anger.”
After the workshop, Doran realized she would have to break the usual pattern with her manager. Rather than complain that sales quotas were unrealistic based on lack of support from the marketing department, she asked her boss if they could team up to figure out ways to improve promotional materials that go to buyers. For instance, they revised the one-page book summary sheets to better highlight what interested her clients, who represent the major national bookstore chains.
“I lifted off the old feeling that nobody was seeing or hearing me,” says Doran.
What’s more, she has lost 60 pounds in seven months by not eating to calm the frustration, especially late at night or between regular meals.
She is happy at 5-9 and 150 pounds.
“When I stopped complaining and started making requests, it allowed me to put the food down,” says Doran. “It opened up new doors for me. I walked away from being a victim.”
People who complain a lot see themselves as victims, says Budd.
“They are prone to an increased sense of hopelessness, which is tied to depression,” he explains. Research also shows the less control we feel about our lives or any one situation, the more stress adversely affects our bodies.
Another obstacle for depressed individuals is negative thoughts about themselves. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a researcher at University of California-Riverside, has studied rumination or passive repetitive thinking about negative emotions and events. She says depressed people tend to ruminate significantly more than others, and women are more likely to ruminate than men. University of Michigan researchers have found most men tend to rely on alcohol to cope with negative emotions, while women tend to ruminate.
“When we ruminate, we go in circles,” says Lyubomirsky. “I see complaining as an out-loud form of rumination. It is coming from someone who is self-absorbed and self-focused. The complainer is going from Point A to Point A to Point A. Chronic rumination leads to depression.”
Lyubomirsky recently completed a study about ruminators that she and a colleague are hoping to publish soon. It studied breast cancer survivors who discovered a new lump. The women evaluated as ruminators waited significantly longer on average to see a doctor about the lump than individuals in the study that didn’t focus on negative emotions.
“These are breast cancer survivors who nonetheless delayed seeing a doctor,” says Lyubomirsky.
Complaining about one’s life is practically as ancient as human language. Connecting the complaining with poor health is what’s new.
“We have data that suggests roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population say they have no good things going on in their life,” says Corey Keyes, a sociologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “You can think of them as lives of quiet despair. They’re not sick according to the medical model, but, in fact, they aren’t doing well in life.”
KNOW WHEN TO SAY YES OR NO OR MAKE A COUNTEROFFER
Turning your complaints into clear requests–rather than simply blaming someone or something else for your troubles–is an effective way to improve your health, says Dr. Matthew Budd of Harvard Medical School. He is quick to add that there are personal health matters in the balance relating to how you receive such requests.
“Some people just can’t say no,” says Budd, who founded the behavioral medicine department of the Harvard Community Health Plan HMO. “Always saying yes to people has health consequences such as anxiety, overwork, fatigue and resentment.”
Better to understand there are four possible responses when someone asks for your help:
Agree to do it.
Think about it, then commit or decline later.
Decline.
Make a counteroffer.
“If you say yes all of the time, you feel trapped,” Budd says. “But I recommend that people learn how to navigate requests rather than simply saying no.”
Budd offers an example: Your aging mother wants you to call every morning. If you say yes, it’s likely you are not going to live up to the agreement. If you say you will think about it, your mother might interpret it as putting her off or not caring. If you simply decline, you are potentially sending a message you don’t want communicated.
“Pick a day and time of the week that you can call her, say between 9 a.m. and noon every Sunday,” says Budd, “then ask your mother if that works for her. If not, agree on another time slot or day. Then make sure she is clear on the agreement.”
