One of the worst habits that I have is hitting the snooze button on my phone when the alarm goes off in the morning. My worst habit may actually be sleeping with the phone next to me in the first place, but the mere act of hitting that red button while quiet, crescendoing piano music wakes me up at 7:00 a.m. is close behind. I’m not attempting to moralize “snoozing,” but the habitual delay, the deferral of beginning the day, says something I’m generally uncomfortable with: I want life to wait until I’m ready for it. I want it on my terms.
Maybe that sounds a bit hyperbolic. An alternative explanation could be, I just want more sleep. But is the extra nine minutes going to materially improve my wellbeing throughout the day? I’d strongly argue no. Those nine minutes won’t help me get my kids off to school and take care of our dogs in the morning. They won’t help me connect during conversation with my wife. And they certainly won’t help me support my clients as they navigate the complexities of their lives.
If anything, what the snooze button offers me is not rest, but probably more stress. If you’ve ever been in a season of life where it seems every minute counts, and the bus isn’t waiting for your kids to board it, you know what I mean. But in a strange way, the day’s deferment offers me an opportunity for my first complaint: there’s just too much to do and too little time.
The uncomfortable truth is that this reflex, this compulsion to complain, doesn’t stay in the bedroom at 7:09 a.m. It shows up everywhere, all the time. And so the snooze button isn’t the issue. The attitude is. That small act of deferral reveals something that I don’t love admitting: some part of me wants to negotiate with reality before I’m willing to participate in it.
I see the same reflex show up in a thousand other ways throughout the day. In traffic. In waiting. In discomfort. In being tired. In getting an email I didn’t want. In a plan changing. In the dog barking at the wrong time. In my kids needing something when I’m already at capacity. In my body not cooperating with whatever story I’m telling myself about how it “should” feel today.
Life sometimes has a way of enforcing a will that is inconsistent with my own.
And the real issue, psychologically and spiritually, is not that life does that. It’s that many of us quietly or forcefully resist it. We are constantly bumping into reality and then reacting as if it violated some contract that only we are aware of. And that resistance tends to leak out of us in one very common way:
Complaining.
The Habit of Complaining
I want to be careful with how I define “complaining” here. I’m not talking about grief, lament for something precious that’s been lost. That’s authentic, and it’s often part of healing. I’m also not talking about naming and defining a problem, which is the first step toward solving one. What I mean is the low-grade, chronic narration of what’s wrong, what’s unfair, what people “should” do differently, how the day is already ruined before it’s begun, the kind of grievance airing that isn’t aimed at anything productive. It’s aimed at one thing: the short-lived comfort of absolving yourself of the responsibility for your own mood.
And the central reason it’s such a hazard isn’t because it’s almost always useless, but because it’s quietly addicting.
Consciously or otherwise, we are always training our brain what to pay attention to. If you practice gratitude, your attention begins to notice what is good. If you practice savoring, your attention starts noticing what is beautiful. If you practice anxiety, your attention starts scanning for threat.
And if you practice complaining, your attention becomes trained to scan for what’s wrong, and how you lack the agency to change it.
The issue isn’t that problems exist. The issue is that chronic complaining makes the problem the centerpiece of your consciousness. It narrows your world, keeps you externally oriented, reactive, and worst of all, keeps you in a posture of victimhood, even when there are potentially real options and solutions available.
Victimhood
If we’ve worked together before, you’ve probably heard my whole shpiel about two fundamental mindsets: there is a problem-oriented, victim mindset, and then there is a solution-oriented, survivor mindset. Now while that’s a very general way of describing the distinction, I think the simplicity of the dichotomy makes it easier to identify when we find ourselves succumbing to the allure of victimhood.
That’s probably a strange way of saying it, “allure of victimhood.” After all, who wants to be a victim? But it is in the abdicating of responsibility I referenced before that many of us find a strange sense of temporary comfort. “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m justified in doing nothing.”
And that justification feels like relief, briefly. Then the complaint needs refreshing. You tell the story again, to someone else, or to yourself in the car or in the shower. Each retelling reinforces the same conclusion: “I’m stuck, and it’s not my fault.” The problem isn’t that the feeling is dishonest. Sometimes you are stuck, and sometimes it isn’t your fault. The problem is that rehearsing powerlessness trains you to stop looking for a way to make things better.
The most common pushback I face when talking through the distinction between these two mindsets is that people conflate a solution-oriented focus with something like optimism. You don’t have to be a “glass half full kind of person” to adopt a survivor mindset. It doesn’t require you to pretend the situation is fine. It requires one shift: moving from “What is happening to me?” to “What am I going to do about it?” That’s it. That’s the pivot. And complaining, left unchecked, is what keeps us from ever making it.
The Social Trap
“Can you believe this?” “Isn’t it ridiculous?” “This is insane” (the most common one I hear these days).
Conversations with these tag lines at the center of them often make us feel pretty good. And there’s a somewhat awful reason for that. Complaining is something like social glue. It bonds people and makes us feel closer to them, even people we have never met before (I’m writing this five minutes after grumbling to a stranger sitting next to me on the tarmac, 30 minutes after our plane was supposed to depart). But the effect is even more pronounced among people we regularly associate with.
Amanda Rose, a psychologist, called this phenomenon co-rumination back in 2002: the excessive rehashing of problems between friends, speculating, dwelling, blaming, subtly encouraging each other to stay in it. All seemingly benign commiserating that her research found predicts closer friendships. However, co-rumination was also found to predict higher rates of depression and anxiety. So the bond gets tighter while the mood gets worse. Misery doesn’t just love company, it seems company tends to manufacture more misery.
And again, sometimes it really is ridiculous. Sometimes it really is insane. But if shared negativity becomes your primary bonding ritual, you may begin noticing that the dissatisfaction with your respective dilemmas becomes the foundation of your relationship, the relationship begins to form around contempt.
And contempt is not neutral. It doesn’t just target “the thing.” Contempt tends to generalize. It begins to shape the person doing the contempting: the tone of their inner narrative, the posture they bring to the next interaction, the story they’re already telling themselves about the next disappointment or the next person who will let them down.
Which is why chronic complaining quietly turns into chronic irritability. And then irritability starts feeling like a personality.
Own Your Life
Owning your life doesn’t mean pretending life is easy, and it doesn’t require you to never utter a word of discontent, for that matter. But what owning your life means is accepting that the conditions of your life may, and absolutely will, always be imperfect. The imperfect conditions do not offer us always-available, built-in excuses to avoid the responsibility for what we can actually control. Owning your life means you can say, “this is hard,” without adding, “and I’m helpless.”
Because when you can’t change the circumstance, the power you own, the responsibility you have, is to change your posture.
You can complain. Or you can choose the next right thing.
I’m not suggesting that you never vent. I’m saying be careful what you practice, because repetition is training.
A Small Practice for This Week
Here’s something simple, and annoyingly effective.
The next time you catch yourself complaining, ask:
Is this helping me move toward agency?
Or is it just helping me feel justified?
If it’s agency, great. Name the problem, then name the next step.
If it’s justification, consider stopping. Not because you’re ignoring reality, but because you’re refusing to rehearse helplessness.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Where in my life am I resisting reality instead of meeting it?
And what would change if, instead of complaining about it, I owned the part that’s mine?
Be well.