Hanna:

Hey all! What’s new and good!? 

I used to begin all my coaching calls with this question. Tell me what’s new and good. I don’t know if you know this but I have training and certifications from a few different schools not just The Life Coach School, and one of them is very near and dear to my heart, The Health Coach Institute, which was founded by two of the most epic coaches I’ve ever worked with, Carrie Peters and Stacey Morganstern. And they teach this question: What’s new and good? As a way to open any coaching conversation and my style is definitely a little

more down and dirty these days but I will pull that question out of my back pocket every now and again. And I like this question when I feel like somebody is stuck in a negative thought loop that isn’t often disrupted. 

So what IS new and good for you today? 

I want you to take a second and think on purpose what is new and good in your life now.

Maybe you came here to this podcast because  you just want to listen for entertainment or to understand more about the brain and that kind of insight is fun for you or maybe you just like that I say fuck a lot and give zero ducks about it. 

But a lot of people come to me or to listen in because they have a problem. Right? Seeking a life Coach or therapist or a podcast about thought work and personal development or mental health, it’s usually because there’s a problem. We all have problems. I have a coach and I go into my sessions every week and I have something to talk about every time. She’s like do you know what you want coaching on today? And I’m like, Um, well yeah! I am rarely like oh I dunno everything is just great I don’t have anything to talk about. Even if it’s about something that IS great, my brain can find something wrong with what’s great too. Yeah?

So we do this negativity bias thing that I’ve talked about where the brain registers and reacts to perceived negative situations or interactions much more readily than it does to positive ones and also dwells on and gives more time and value to the negative than positive. So like if someone says “great job today”, you might think about that for a few moments. Your brains like oh he said I did a good job that’s great I did a good job and move on. But then if someone says to you “wow you really aren’t good at that”, you continue to think about it and tell yourself you’re not good at that and you really suck for a much longer period of time and maybe even adopt that thought as your own factual account of yourself forever. And we keep talking about it. We keep thinking about it. And then it’s a problem because we get into a negative thought loop. 

We hear “how’s it going” or “what’s up?” And we default to the negative. And we want to just talk about our problems and defend WHY it’s a problem. 

And this CAN become a problem for some of us when we are using a more conservative and traditional therapy model in my opinion and it’s also a problem with only talking to friends and family about issues. And we’re going to talk about this today. 

The idea of venting. 

And before we get into the meat of this podcast i want to preface by saying that I did a post about this on my Instagram stories a few months ago and it stirred up a ton of conversation. And most people who were feeling put off had comments like “are you saying that we should just keep everything bottled up!?” And “it’s important to talk to people and get things off your chest”.

So I just want to address this here and now that I believe that honestly and completely sharing your struggles and problems is necessary to live a full and evolved life. 

There is a HUGE difference though between being honest and sharing fully about your struggles and repeating your quote problem over and over again and essentially honing the skill of strengthening the negativity bias. 

Why do we vent? To “get things off our chest” right? But what does that really mean? We want someone else to feel the feelings that we are having so they too can feel the misery and agree that it’s miserable so that we can feel better. I’m not wrong, Just think about it. You have a bad day at work. Let’s pretend someone at work said something that you think was nasty and so you go home and tell your partner about it. This person said something nasty to me. 

What does the person you vented to do? They say ugh thats awful. Im so sorry. Let’s have a drink. 

That’s awful = agree with you.

I’m sorry = feeling this way is unavoidable.

Let’s get drunk = let’s do something to create a false pleasure so we can stop talking about this/I don’t have any tools to help you so let’s do what I do when I’m upset which is try to use something to forget about it until the next time it happens and I just vent about it all over again. 

I’m not saying that you should keep feelings and thoughts inside. No. It is not healthy not to express your struggles. In fact, subscribe to a list of 10 paradigms to feel better created by Brooke Castillo of the Life Coach School and the first one is that we must reveal our problems and struggles in an honest and complete way. If you are hurting, pretending that you are not hurting is also false. Right? 

Being secretive about your pain is not going to improve your situation. Trying to suppress it or ignore it, unhelpful. 

And just telling someone what is going on with us so that we can voice our struggles aloud is beautiful. 

But this is NOT what I consider venting. Revealing your struggles to someone you trust in search of solutions, processing, peace and better understanding of what’s really going on is not venting. 

Venting is the repeated toxic storytelling with the intent of feeling validated and with no intent to solve. 

Venting can be harmful and it’s a form of buffering. Just like over-drinking or obsessive working out or gambling or scrolling social media to try to avoid or suppress feelings venting, as I’m thinking about it gives us some temporary relief but it actually makes things worse in the long run.

If you think about what happens when you’re venting—and once again I’ll say I’m not talking about talking through something with a trusted friend or family member or like having a conversation to help sort through your feelings. True venting, when you’re doing that what happens is it increases your level of stress, it actually creates more tension, it’s a way of offloading personal responsibility so it creates disempowerment for you, it primes your brain to get upset and vent about situations in the future that feel similar even if they are totally unrelated and it doesn’t change the situation at all with respect to how you’re showing up.

Vikki Brock, a coach whose doctoral dissertation had a major influence on the coaching profession, says that “Coaching came into existence to fill an unmet need, which coincided with the shift away from a model of psychological illness and toward the humanistic ideal of wellness. And growth.”

Wellness and Growth. Those two cannot be had if we continually default to venting as I’ve defined it here. There is no wellness in repeating a toxic story. How does that produce wellness? The repetition of complaining or seeking validation for why you’ve been wronged or the world is against you just creates more of the same, not a magical shift to gratitude or happiness or peace. And it for sure doesn’t jump start any growth. If anything it get’s us more deeply in bed with our brain. You’re brain’s like yeah, the world sucks, I told ya so. And it’s just the literal definition of emotional childhood. Believing that everything else or everyone else is responsible for how we feel and there is no power there. There is no way to grow out of that childhood when we continue to buffer against our emotions by seeking the false pleasure of negativity camaraderie. 

Because that’s where people will argue about the positive attributes of venting. People are like but it helps me to feel better to get it out. I’m going to just offer that if we really look at whether the act of venting is helping us to feel better the answer is no because it gives us a release and that feels good in the moment but it doesn’t actually help us to feel better in the long term. 

It’s like creating an addiction. I do this because it gives me relief in the moment but now I need to do it more to create the same feeling and now I have to do it always and now I’m stuck in this loop. I want to talk about the stuckness that happens with venting. Venting ultimately really displays one of the most fascinating examples of how our brains work with repetition. When we hear and repeat the same thing over and over again—and I’m talking about the same ideas applied to different circumstances. Because that’s what we do with venting right? It’s not always the same thing we are upset about but when we get in the habit and patterned behavior of venting it sounds exactly the same each time. You could take away the facts completely (your job, your husband, your friend, the chick at the grocery store) and the vent rant will sound more or less like the same old song and dance.

And that’s how neural grooves work: your brain believes and attaches to what it hears over and over again and it keeps you stuck and perpetuates the cycle of venting. And the act of venting becomes familiarized in your mind and your body. Your body too! I see it in your body when you are venting it’s like this familiar tension and posturing and even down to the facial expressions and muscular direction that while it may look uncomfortable or strained, has actually becoming a practiced ritual that your body just drops into. Think about this next time you’re listening to someone vent or you yourself are venting. What postures are ingrained? Because remember the brain doesn’t like to change. The primal brain prefers if you’d just keep on doing what you’re doing even if it kinda feels like uncomfortable, at least it’s familiar uncomfortablility. 

So this idea that venting actually paralyzes our growth efforts really struck me when I was beginning this work and I still think a lot about what I am consciously trying to stifle when I see myself trying to choose into venting. And I think, “ how I can choose to share struggles with a coach or a friend or my sister or with Michael without defaulting to a state of just perpetuating my bad feelings and unsolved issues?”

So you really need to vent? 

Why do you think you need it?

And how will you find the line for you between harmful venting and sharing your struggles with a trusted person in a beneficial way? 

I’d love to know your thoughts on venting and if you’d like to try something new and break the venting cycle, come to coaching where we will have honest conversations about your struggles, we won’t commiserate about them, and we will create new thought patterns to foster wellness and growth.