Stop Complaining- Complaining is not just annoying to other people, it is harmful to you. huh? Complaining is the strategy we use in order to get other people to solve our problems for us, and what's more, usually it's the strategy we use to make other people feel bad for us. What complaining does for us is to attract people who want to feel bad for you, repel people who won't tolerate that sort of behavior, locks you into a dependency paradigm, and it rewards you for giving up. If you complain effectively, people will come to you and give you attention- it worked when you were a baby, right?
The problem is that when complaint becomes a habit, when your first strategy in the face of adversity is to give up and complain in the hopes that other people will come to either solve your problem for you or console you, it means that your habit is to impose on anybody who will let you. Complainers like to describe people who aren't interested in being imposed upon as 'selfish' or 'insensitive', and often are the same people who equate selfishness with bad moral character- after all, if they can't manipulate these people by complaining, they must be bad, right?
When you complain, you rob yourself of initiative, you shut your imagination down, and you stop looking for solutions to your problem on your own. Instead of becoming larger than your problems, you become smaller, and in order not to feel miserable about it, you complain in order to get some self-validation. As soon as you bring self-validation into it, you get your ego involved, which only complicates things- at that point you have to choose between being right and being happy, and your ego is very motivated to be right. Instead of finding a way to overcome your problem, you'll settle for feeling righteous about how unfair your life is.
how to know you're getting good at not complaining-
* You look for constructive things to do about a problem first
* big problems start to look a lot smaller, or even un-noticable
* drama? what drama? The interesting parts of your life are the positive things, rather than the negative ones.
* You don't take adversity personally
* People stop coming to you with their complaints, and start coming to you with good news instead.
Stop Worrying- Worry occurs in your imagination, not in reality. Worry is the process by which you torture yourself with past could've-beens and future what-ifs- both of which are, by virtue of their imaginary status, impossible to address in the present. They are separate from reality, and separate in time, from anything you can control- all you can control is yourself, in the present. If, with your present self, you choose to worry, all you accomplish is to take yourself out of reality for the duration of your trip.
If your worry is about something that may happen in the future, ask yourself two questions- 1) is there anything I can do about it now? If so, get to it, and 2) isn't this a problem I'll be able to deal with when it comes up?
If your worry is about something that could've happened in the past, ask yourself whether it's relevant in any way to the present or future, and how can you apply questions one and two above to it? ...at that point, you can drop the subject, resolved, until the next time you need to deal with whatever it was that bothered you enough to worry.
Worry is a function of fear, and fear is your subconscious's way of telling you that it is uncomfortable with something- and your subconscious will make you miserable until the problem goes away... but the problem is that worrying doesn't solve anything. The quickest way (indeed, the only way) to resolve something that bothers you is to act in the present, in reality, outside the context of your fear. Inside it's context... you could wrestle with it forever, and it will only make you unhappy and powerless.
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