Is Your Complaining Making You Sick?

Complaining feels normal.
 Harmless.
 Sometimes even justified.

But what if it’s quietly exhausting your nervous system, reinforcing stress, and keeping old patterns alive?

In this episode of Rise Up, I explore complaining not as a bad habit to stop — but as an unconscious pattern driven by repetition, emotional chemistry, and familiarity. Using neuroscience, language awareness, and lived experience, she reveals why the brain doesn’t distinguish between reality and imagination, how repeated dissatisfaction becomes addictive, and why we often keep people and situations in our lives that give us something to complain about.

This isn’t about silencing your voice or accepting what isn’t acceptable.
 It’s about understanding what complaining is doing to you — physically, emotionally, and neurologically.

If you’re intelligent, self-aware, and still feeling stuck…
 If stress feels less like something you experience and more like who you are…
 This episode offers a moment of awareness that could change how you relate to your thoughts, your conversations, and your life.

No fixing.
 No judgement.
 Just a powerful pause — and a better question.

Here is to your success

Love Vicky

Chapters

• 0:05 Setting The Stage: Complaining
• 0:24 What Complaining Really Signals
• 1:31 The Inner Process Before Words
• 3:46 Reliving Stress Through Language
• 4:50 Complaining As Chemical Addiction
• 7:02 How Familiarity Becomes Identity
• 10:18 Loops, Agency, And Feeling Stuck
• 12:11 Responsibility Beats Blame
• 13:37 Less Negative Thinking, Not Forced Positivity
• 15:02 Awareness, Choice, And Next Steps
• 15:30 Connect And Work With Vicky

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Welcome back to Rise Up Podcast. My name is Vicky Ross and I'm your host. Now, around here in our Rise Up, we do personal growth and development with a sense of humor. Because if you can't smile at what you're doing, it gets really heavy and very boring very, very quickly. So today I want to talk about something that most people don't even realize that they're doing, and that's complaining. So before you think, oh, this is not for me, just stay with me for a moment. But I guarantee you that you're gonna start to realize that you too complain. And the question then comes in, do I carry on? It's whether complaining really helps you or is it quietly harming you? So hang in there and write this wave with me. So for me, complaining is another word for moaning, it's a voicing of dissatisfaction. Underneath that dissatisfaction, there's very often, not always, but very often, a sense of entitlement, and sometimes there's even a level of arrogance. So these are the things I'd like to explore so we can really understand what the complaining is all about. Is it entitlement, is it arrogance, or is it something else? Because you've got to think about complaining carries an expectation that something or someone should be different to how they are, they should behave differently with you, they should speak differently with you, or a situation should be different, and it's not. The result is you're not happy, it doesn't meet your standards, it doesn't match how you think it should be, and so you complain. Now, most people see complaining as their right, a way of showing their standards, it's a way of saying this is not acceptable to me, and I have a right to tell everybody that this is not acceptable to me. And on some level, I would say, yes, fair enough. We all have a right to feel, we all have a right to express, we all have a right to our feelings, all of that. I don't disagree with it, but we do have to ask ourselves a question about is this harming us or is this okay? And what gets questioned in this whole process is the internal process that already happened before the words ever came out. What people don't realize when they're complaining is they think they're just being honest, they think they're just venting, they think they're just saying how things are. But the only way that we can share anything from the inner world, you know, our thoughts, our feelings, our opinions, beliefs, memories is through language. Language translates that feeling, that thinking that we have. So long before you speak, the process has already happened in your mind. You've perceived something, you've compared it to how you wanted it to be, you've decided it's wrong, it's unfair, it's unacceptable, and that's where the complaining begins. So language is just the delivery system. So by the time you're speaking it out loud, your nervous system has already got involved. And here's the part that really, really matters. Your unconscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. So when you imagine what's wrong, replay what's happened, rehearse the conversation, explain it again and again, your nervous system experiences it as if it's happening now, which means every time you complained, you're not just talking about the event, you're actually unconsciously reliving it. So you might say to me, So what? Well, let's let's think about this. If someone was beaten up once and then they replay in their mind repeatedly, they haven't experienced this once, they've experienced it again and again and again, all from the safety and the comfort of their own home. The body doesn't know the difference, and that's what the problem is here. And most people never question that process because they don't understand or know about this. So let's talk about something slightly different because it all ties in at the end. Let's talk about addictions because this is where people start to feel uncomfortable when I talk about this as an addiction kind of thing rather than oh, I'm just complaining, I should stop. Complaining is addictive, so we're all addicts to complaining, we are addicts to the misery, we love our misery, and if I say this to people, people go, No, we don't, uh then why are you doing it? Why do you keep complaining? So I don't mean it in a metaphorical kind of way, but let's talk about addiction as something external. So if we have an external addiction, uh, for instance, alcohol, drugs, smoking, etc., we call those exogenous chemicals. So we have exogenous outside of our body, we bring them into the body, and then there's a reaction with those chemicals and our body, and then that causes an addiction. But we also become addicted to the endogenous chemicals, endogenous chemicals, the ones of our own brain, the ones that our brain produces. So every emotional state creates chemistry. Not certain emotions, but all emotions, good and bad, strong or mild, pleasant or unpleasant, they carry chemical information. And this is what Candace Peart discovered. Every cell in the body has receptors to receive chemical messages and respond accordingly, and that's how the body knows how to behave, how to do something. It learns from this reaction that every time this happens, this is the chemical, this is the information, this is how the body responds. So it's part of that whole programming and learning sort of cycles that the body goes through. And the unconscious mind is very simple. It notices what's familiar and it assumes that if you repeat something, it's because you want it. It doesn't have the ability, it hasn't got like a moral ground to go, oh, this is wrong, this is bad, avoid it. It just goes, Oh, you keep doing this, you must want it. So if you keep complaining, rehearsing uh dissatisfaction, replaying what's wrong, uh, the unconscious goes, ah, it's this again. This must be important. Let's make this an easier thing to access. And therefore, it becomes the habit that reinforces addiction, and therefore, it reinforces everything again and again and again. And this is why sometimes we keep people and circumstances in our lives that generate the dissatisfaction. Now, this is where it sounds really crazy and bizarre, but think about it logically. This is not conscious and it's not deliberate, but because the pattern's already running, if certain person reliably gives you something to complain about, your nervous system may want to keep them in your life, not because you enjoy suffering, but because the chemistry is familiar and the addiction needs to be fed. Familiarity feels safe to the unconscious. So even if it's stressful, and we can feel it, and we say this is stressful, it's not just addiction, it's habit and it's the unconscious mind. So you have it all going on at the same time. Your body needs fix, it knows that if I phone this person sooner or later, they're gonna start complaining. I'm gonna get irritated, I get irritation, chemicals, those go into my body, and my body gets its fix and it goes, Great! She complained again. Thank goodness. Not knowing that this is actually really negative for you. So over time, this stops being something that you do, but it becomes something that you are. And you can again understand this from the point that we look at addicts and we call them they are addicts. We don't say they are people that have an addictive habit or an addictive behavior right now, they are busy engaging in an addictive behavior. We say they're addicts, we call them by that identity. So, in much the same way, you'll become the stressful, you become the complainer, you are the negative person. You're not a person that engages in negative thinking. No, you're the negative person, it becomes part of your identity, and because it's familiar, it feels normal. And this is the big problem is that we don't even realize this because it feels so natural to us. It's what happens every day. So it doesn't feel wrong, it doesn't feel bad, it just feels like me. It feels like huh, this is who I am, without thinking that this is who I am. So people around you can actually predict your responses, they even know how you react before you do. So you'll see this in teenagers, you see this in kids, like when something goes wrong, they are scared to go and tell their mom or their dad because they know how they will react. Now, that knowing that we have for people doesn't change just because we're not children anymore, it's still there. So you have to start thinking about are you being unconscious, are you being in a habit, are you being in a kind of a loop? And do you, if you think about it, know how you'll react before you do? Like if this happens, can you rehearse in your mind? Then you know that you're just playing a program, and this is where agency starts to quietly disappear. In other words, you don't have your choices anymore. So when people feel stuck, they often look for rescue, or they're looking for acknowledgement, or they're looking for agreement. So when they don't get rescued in the way that they want or acknowledged in the way they expect, another layer appears, and it's pity. My life is hard, nobody helps me. Everybody agrees with me that this is hard, yet nothing changes. And I want to be very clear that people don't choose this, people behave the way they know how to behave, how they've been taught and programmed, they do what's familiar, they do what they've been shown and taught, and repeated and created neural pathways, and therefore it's the easiest thing to do. Nobody wakes up and decides to be unconscious, nobody chooses to live part of their day as a victim. But this is normal behavior for humans, and there is comes a point, especially in adulthood, where awareness changes the game, and sadly not for everybody, but awareness changes the game, and because once you see that you've chosen a pattern, you then have to ask yourself a question: Is what I'm doing giving me the outcome that I want? Most people don't even know what they want, so they've never asked the question. But when somebody steps into personal development and they slow down, they slow down their thinking and their life and they start noticing themselves, this moment appears of oh my goodness, I complain a lot. And then the real inquiry begins: Is complaining giving me the outcome that I want? If the answer is yes, honestly, go ahead, complain your asshole, feel good, and be okay. But if complaining stresses you out, if it gives you heart palpitations, if it makes you feel like a victim, if it keeps you in resentment, in fear or blame, then it's not serving you at all. And that's not a judgment, it's just information. So people often avoid responsibility by blaming outwards. They blame the government, their partners, their parents, their in-laws, COVID, the recession, timing, the weather. Because if it's not my fault, I don't have to feel the discomfort of blame and responsibility. Blame feels easier than responsibility, but responsibility is what gives you your choices back in life. It's where you get empowerment and where you get control. Recently I was listening to a conversation between Price Pritchard and Lewis Hughes, and they asked a fascinating question. Is it more important to have more positive thinking or less negative thinking? And the research is very clear. It's not about forcing positivity, it's about reducing the unconscious negative rehearsals. So complaining is one of the most socially acceptable ways that we rehearse negativity, and around 70% of negative thinking goes unnoticed. It's habitual, it's normalized, it's unconscious. And this is why awareness matters so much. This podcast, as you know, from other episodes, isn't about fixing you, it's about helping you notice what you're doing without realizing that you're doing it. There is no right and wrong here. Like I've said this before, and I say this to all my clients, all my training, wherever, there's no good or bad, or right or wrong. There's just one question. Is this giving me the life that I want? So, whatever you're doing, whether you're complaining or the way you're thinking or the way you're behaving, is what I'm doing giving me the life that I want? Because once you see a pattern clearly, it starts to lose its grip. Not through force, but through awareness. So let this be a pause in your week, you know, a moment of noticing, and you might change more than you think by just going, Oh, I complained again. Is this giving me the outcome that I want? Is complaining going to change the situation? Is complaining what I want to do? And if it's no, consciously make the choice to stop. So I wish you well. I wish you a good week. I'd love to hear from you. If you want to work with me, just reach to me through a message or into my website. I am also a speaker and a trainer. So if you want me for that, let me know. For the rest, let's rise up one moment at a time. Here's to your success. Take care.