“Teenagers are incredibly vulnerable because their prefrontal cortex is behind their emotional system,” AP Psychology teacher Jason Knowles said. “Teenagers especially have to be very, very careful about complaining to the point where it’s going to literally change their brain, like drugs or alcohol. Getting into a constant negative explanatory style is going to really impact your brain development.”
Complaining is a daily habit for many people. It is frequently used both as a coping mechanism and as part of normal human communication. However, continuously having a negative outlook can have lasting effects on the brain.
Naturally, there are many stressful things that teenagers have to deal with that prompt them to complain. “I complain a lot as a joke but I don’t actually b*tch about a lot. It’s junior year and I’ve just kind of accepted that school and athletics are a lot to deal with,” junior Evan Chopra said.
“I feel like I complain a decent amount, usually somewhat prompted,” freshman Norah Scheible said. “I complain about school mainly, teachers, and workload in particular, sometimes sports and coaches.”
Voicing one’s troubles can provide a form of emotional release and relieve stress. Senior Nora Sainz explained that she mostly complains about school and can get annoyed with her parents as well. “If it’s like a small thing, [complaining] helps, I’ll get over it a bit. But if it’s a major problem that I’m complaining about, it’ll last for a hot minute before I stop complaining about it. But I feel like at the moment complaining helps me,” Sainz said.
“I think I definitely complain as a vague coping mechanism. Just to kind of make whatever is going on a bit more tangible. Being like, ‘I don’t like this or like, I think this could be improved.’ Like, it just makes it feel a little bit better in my brain,” senior Olivia Tantisira said. “I kind of use it as like a justification, or like an expressing of my feelings. This is how I feel right now, and I acknowledge that, but I’m not necessarily truly hateful or angry about this one thing,” they added.
Though it’s common, just using complaining as an occasional coping tool can reinforce a sense of hopelessness. “Because of the neuroplasticity of teenagers’ brains, when you start complaining and it becomes your default setting, then your brain is going to wire itself to almost physically respond to anything by complaining. You create what’s called a habit loop—that’s just going to be your default setting,” Knowles explained. “Because humans are patterns-seeking animals by default, you might notice, or you might think, that there is a pattern in the world that the universe is out to get you.”
“It can be a really dangerous habit. It’s a defense mechanism, but when it becomes your default setting—especially as a teenager whose brain is continuously pruning and myelinating—you’re going to create a pattern of seeing everything as negative, and that’s very detrimental to your physical health, as well as your psychological and emotional health,” he added.
Basically, your brain is still developing in your teenage years. The process of myelination is the addition of a fatty insulation called the myelin sheath around nerve cell axons—functionally increasing the speed of brain signaling. Different ideas trigger electrical signals across the synaptic cleft (the space between neurons), and repetitive triggers can cause synapses to grow closer together. This means that through repeating certain thoughts, you could be creating a permanent fast track in your brain for your default state.
Your thoughts literally reshape your brain’s structure through neuroplasticity, so your generally negative outlook could kill you. An obvious consequence of complaining is elevated stress, which will release the hormone cortisol. Elevated levels of this hormone have both physical and psychological effects including decreased bone density, impaired memory, heart disease, and metabolic disorders. Over time, this stress also increases risks for depression, mental illness, and lower life expectancy.
It’s not just this “fast track” that makes complaining so easy, though. Through conversations with others, especially those going through a hard time, humans display biological empathy. Empathy, mostly thought to be facilitated by mirror neurons, helps us to understand others’ experiences as if they were our own. Spending time with constant complainers, then, could make similar pathways in your brain. As social creatures, humans seek connection—but the company matters. Being around people who are constantly cynical is draining, both mentally and neurologically.
Senior Robby Higareda explained that while he understands frequent complaining, in the long run, he finds it unhelpful if there are no changes to behavior. “[They keep complaining about the same topic] because they want to do something deep down inside. They just probably don’t have the motivation. They’re like, ‘I want to, I’m so, whatever,’ but they don’t do anything to change it,” Higareda said. “I’ll be there for the first couple of times. But if it keeps going, I’m like, ‘Girl.’”
Knowles explained that generally negative outlooks also impair memory function and academic performance. “If you see a test or a quiz or an essay, and if you see that as something to complain about, then it’s going to elevate cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and you are going to forget what you have learned, because it impairs your hippocampus,” Knowles said. “Then it’s going to have a deleterious effect on your academics, because you’re not going to be able to apply what you’ve learned. You’re not going to remember what you learned, because that’s what stress does—cuts off the memory and puts you in the moment. That’s an evolutionary reaction on our part,” Knowles said.
Although complaining can be useful as a way to cope sometimes, it’s important to interrupt negative thought patterns to form healthier habits. “In the realm of what’s called cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to interrupt [negative thoughts] by having a conversation with yourself. Let’s say you’re sitting in traffic and you go ‘Sh*t, what are all these people doing here?’ You know you can think that, and you know when you live in a state with 40 million people, traffic jams are part of life in the Bay Area. It is not going to make the cars move any faster. It’s not going to instantaneously vaporize 20,000 people to get them off the road so you can go,” Knowles said.
Knowles’ advice to students struggling with chronic complaining: “Have a conversation with yourself, like, ‘Is this really that bad? You know, I can turn on my radio. I can listen to music longer,’ start taking deep breaths to kind of simmer yourself down a little bit. You can disrupt that. But that takes a lot of practice. It’s not something that just happens.”
