Rewiring Your Brain

Research shows that most people complain once a minute during a typical conversation. Complaining is tempting because it feels good, but like many other things that are enjoyable -- such as smoking or eating French fries for breakfast -- complaining isn’t good for you. You can’t blame your brain. Who’d want to build a temporary bridge every time you need to cross a river? It makes a lot more sense to construct a permanent bridge. So, your neurons grow closer together, and the connections between them become more permanent. Scientists like to describe this process as, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.
And here’s the kicker: complaining damages other areas of your brain as well. Research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus -- an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought. Damage to the hippocampus is scary, especially when you consider that it’s one of the primary brain areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s.
Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future -- so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it.

Complaining is also bad for your health

While it’s not an exaggeration to say that complaining leads to brain damage, it doesn’t stop there. When you complain, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol shifts you into fight-or-flight mode, directing oxygen, blood and energy away from everything but the systems that are essential to immediate survival. One effect of cortisol, for example, is to raise your blood pressure and blood sugar so that you’ll be prepared to either escape or defend yourself.

All the extra cortisol released by frequent complaining impairs your immune system and makes you more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. It even makes the brain more vulnerable to strokes.

It’s Not Just You...

Since human beings are inherently social, our brains naturally and unconsciously mimic the moods of those around us, particularly people we spend a great deal of time with. This process is called neuronal mirroring, and it’s the basis for our ability to feel empathy. The flip side, however, is that it makes complaining a lot like smoking -- you don’t have to do it yourself to suffer the ill effects. You need to be cautious about spending time with people who complain about everything. Complainers want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. Think of it this way: If a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers.

The solution to complaining

There are two things you can do when you feel the need to complain. One is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. That is, when you feel like complaining, shift your attention to something that you’re grateful for. Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the right thing to do; it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California,  found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood and energy and substantially less anxiety due to lower cortisol levels. Any time you experience negative or pessimistic thoughts, use this as a cue to shift gears and to think about something positive. In time, a positive attitude will become a way of life.
The second thing you can do -- and only when you have something that is truly worth complaining about -- is to engage in solution-oriented complaining. Think of it as complaining with a purpose. Solution-oriented complaining should do the following:

1. Have a clear purpose. Before complaining, know what outcome you’re looking for. If you can’t identify a purpose, there’s a good chance you just want to complain for its own sake, and that’s the kind of complaining you should nip in the bud.
2. Start with something positive. It may seem counterintuitive to start a complaint with a compliment, but starting with a positive helps keep the other person from getting defensive. For example, before launching into a complaint about poor customer service, you could say something like, “I’ve been a customer for a very long time and have always been thrilled with your service...”
3. Be specific. When you’re complaining it’s not a good time to dredge up every minor annoyance from the past 20 years. Just address the current situation and be as specific as possible. Instead of saying, “Your employee was rude to me,” describe specifically what the employee did that seemed rude.
4. End on a positive. If you end your complaint with, “I’m never shopping here again,” the person who’s listening has no motivation to act on your complaint. In that case, you’re just venting, or complaining with no purpose other than to complain. Instead, restate your purpose, as well as your hope that the desired result can be achieved, for example, “I’d like to work this out so that we can keep our business relationship intact.”

Bringing It All Together

Just like smoking, drinking too much, and lying on the couch watching TV all day, complaining is bad for you. Put my advice to use, and you'll reap the physical, mental and performance benefits that come with a positive frame of mind.

6 Health Benefits of Yoga

Yoga can often be quite esoteric to explain. Concepts such as prana, chakras and koshas are not necessarily the most straightforward to express.

For those who are more scientific-minded, explaining the many benefits of yoga can be difficult. Many people who are skeptical about the practice may also be skeptical about the many mysterious, “feel-good” benefits such as “opening the heart center” or “calming the mind.”

However, more and more Western scientific research is studying the very tangible physical effects of a yoga practice on the physical and mental bodies. The following is a list of scientifically researched, studied and proven health benefits of yoga.

1. Increases Flexibility

One of the most obvious side effects of a yoga practice is a lengthening and loosening of the muscles and the connective tissue (such as fascia) of the body.
As you stretch and move within your practice, you undoubtedly improve your level of flexibility. You may notice as you lengthen the hip flexors that your lower back pain starts to decrease, or as you stretch and relax the neck, your headaches seem to disappear.
Yoga is a perfect teaching of unions, and it reminds you that the entire physical body is connected and that all of this is also connected to your psyche.
You cannot isolate tight hips without having them “pull” on the lower back, creating tension, tightness and potential pain there. Nor can you isolate your bad mood from the tension it creates in your physical body. So, the practice of yoga works to connect all of these elements to increase flexibility in both the body and the mind.

2. Builds Muscle Strength

Strong muscles work to protect the body and (ideally!) keep it free from injury. Muscle strength helps prevent conditions such as lower back pain or arthritis.
For example, strong muscles help your body to align the skeletal system keeping space and integrity in the vertebra of the lower spine. The beauty of yoga is that as you build strength within the muscles, you simultaneously create flexibility.
This simple balance of strength and flexibility helps to keep your body safe to maintain longevity in your practice as well as in your body’s overall health.

3. Improves Posture

As just noted, yoga builds equivalent strength and flexibility within the body. This action creates a more aligned stacking of your bones in their natural and intended positioning.
As a result, this lengthens and extends your spine back into its meticulous configuration, recreating the natural curvatures of your whole spinal column.
Not only does this action make the load of your body weight much easier for the muscles to bear (and thus creating less tension, tightness and strain), it also improves your ability to breathe fully and deeply.

4. Increases Lung Capacity

A major component of a yoga practice is pranayama, or breath work. These different exercises teach the practitioner to deepen and lengthen the breath.
With the ideal stacking of the skeletal system, lung and diaphragm capacity can work to its maximum intended reach. Practices such as deep diaphragmatic breathing and inhale and/or exhale retention systematically teach the body to increase the lung capacity and the intake of oxygen spread throughout the bloodstream.

5. Protects Bone Health

It is well documented in Western science that weight-bearing exercises increase bone stability and strength. The physical yoga practice is chock-full of weight-bearing poses in which you use your own body weight to strengthen and train the bones.
Poses such as Plank, Chaturanga, Down Dog, Up Dog, Handstand and many, many more, are weight-bearing postures that help to strengthen the bones (particularly within the arms where we don’t normally bear weight) which may also help to prevent osteoporosis.

6. Maintains Joint Health

Healthy joints all have one thing in common: they are often used and moved. Movement within the joints stimulates the production of synovial fluid (a viscous liquid that lubricates the joint, removes debris and reduces the friction between the articular cartilage of the joint).
Without the production of synovial fluid, the cartilage within the joints can be worn down, causing deterioration and pain. A well-rounded yoga practice moves the body through the full range-of-motion within the major joints of the body.
These actions within the body stimulate the production of synovial fluid to keep the joints safe, mobile, and stable to be able to maintain a lifelong practice.

Yoga is a beautiful practice that teaches practitioners to work from the inside out. It draws your attention inward and teaches you to focus on the breath. The physical practice works and moves the body in intelligent ways to strengthen and lengthen, which (hopefully) also transcends to the mind.