The Whiner's Guide to Not Complaining

It was sunset and I was being ferried by my future uncle-in-law around Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota while a warm breeze wafted into the rental car window. My longtime boyfriend, who had just proposed, was sitting in front of me, turning around every few minutes to beam in my general direction. We were on our way to get pies. Not just any pies. Betty’s world-famous pies. Life is pretty good right now, I thought. I don’t have anything to complain about. Which led to a twinge of panic: I have nothing to complain about.

This shining moment of whine-free living made me realize how much kvetching I do on a daily basis. If I am honest with myself, I would estimate that about 70 percent of the things that come out of my mouth are gripes. Good-natured, often, but still nonessential and sometimes obnoxious to others. Usual topics of complaint include, but are not limited to: the amount of work I have, the weather, F-train delays, F-train crowds, F-train stank, existential malaise.

It’s all pretty pathetic, when you consider how lucky I am in the grand scheme, and that I’m fundamentally a reasonably happy person. But the extent of my complaining didn’t really sink in until I returned, after my Minnesotan epiphany, to all the minor irritations of my workaday life. I was in the middle of a reverie about how much work I had when my fiance began to give me suggestions about how to delegate more tasks.

“Why don’t you talk to your bosses about it?”

“Because they have just as much work as I do!”

“Remember how you were so excited when you got this job?
“Yeah. So?
“Well, it’s a great job.”

“But I’m so stressed out!”

“Dude, you’re not a lion tamer. There’s nothing to be that stressed out about.”

And so on. I wanted to punch him after a while. Why couldn’t he just listen to me whine rather than offer suggestions about how to proactively improve my mental status? Yes, this is a very stereotypical male-female behavioral pattern—and there’s a name for it: expressive complaint. In the book Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors, Clemson psychology professor Robin M. Kowalski notes that “people frequently complain not because they expect changes to be made, but, rather, because complaining simply makes them feel better.” The other kind of complaining is known as instrumental complaint—kvetching meant to bring about action.

In the case of my workload whine, expressive complaining only made me feel worse. I would blow off the initial steam, but then feel hopeless because a lot of the suggestions for improvement I’d receive seemed impossible to bring about. And what’s more, my almost-daily whining was pissing off my fiance. That’s when I started considering going cold turkey on needless complaining.

I did a little initial research—had anyone tried to give up whining? Will Bowen, a pastor from Kansas City, Mo., has a movement called A Complaint Free World. His project involves a purple bracelet that you wear for 21 days. Whenever you find yourself “complaining, gossiping, or criticizing,” you move the bracelet to the other arm and begin again. Bowen, on his website, defines “to complain” pretty narrowly: It is “to express pain, grief or discontent.” He also says that when people are complaining, “they are talking and thinking about what they do not want in their life and, thereby, attracting more pain, grief and discontent.”