This week from Austin Scholar...
The antidote to a bad mood is gratitude (& simple ways to get your kid to stop complaining)
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
It’s week seven at Alpha’s summer program in the Hamptons. The life skill of the week is public speaking, and the kids have been learning public speaking directly from top real estate agents at SERHANT., the fastest-growing agency in New York City.
By the end of the week, the students were hosting an actual open house for a 7,500 square-foot, almost six million dollar property. They learned how to price a listing, how to market it, and how to frame a house so that people walking through it can picture their lives inside.
Watching a ten-year-old kid stand in a foyer and confidently walk strangers through a multimillion dollar property after starting the week barely able to get through introducing themselves is guaranteed to completely transform how you think about what kids are capable of.
This week, I wrote the newsletter that I needed to read.
I’ve been feeling so stressed and busy lately. I’ve had a million different tasks to do, and too many tabs open – both in my mind and on my laptop – and I realized I wasn’t able to look at the world through a clear lens anymore. Everything was foggy and clouded, and a low-grade negativity had settled over everything. The heat was annoying. The schedule was annoying. I was annoying. So when I left the centre in the Hamptons for Alpha Summer Tuesday night, I decided to reset before the kids showed up the next day.
I took some quiet time on my drive back to my AirBnB to remember why I’ve been working so hard in the first place – to support all these amazing kids and help them have the best week of their summer. After a burning hot shower, I wrote down the things I was grateful for in my notes app. Only when I put myself in a better headspace did I start thinking about how I could problem solve for tomorrow. Then the next morning, I listened to Taylor Swift while getting ready and walked onto campus with a smile on my face and actual energy for the first time that week.
The reset was great for me, of course, but more important was that the kids noticed the change. The quiet ones who shied away from conversation and high-fives talked to me more that day than they had all week.
That’s what convinced me that I needed to write about this for a newsletter. Because the state of mind I had fallen into is the same one anyone can fall into:
It’s too hot out.
I don’t like dinner tonight.
I’m tired. I’m annoyed. Everything sucks.
None of those sentences seem dangerous. You’re just venting, right?
Maybe, but you’re also practicing negativity, and you get better at whatever you practice.
The idea of “venting,” or more officially “catharsis,” has actually been tested directly, and it’s less effective than pop psychology might lead you to think. In a 2002 study, a group of people who’d been angered hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who upset them. Another group hit the bag while thinking about something neutral, and a third group did nothing at all. The venting group actually ended up angrier and more aggressive than everyone else. The group that did the best was the group that did nothing. Rehearsing and practicing the negativity kept it alive.
The venting spiral is easy to fall into, though, because our brains are rigged for it. Across basically every domain psychologists have looked at, negative events grab more of our attention and stick harder in our memory than positive ones. Roy Baumeister’s famous 2001 review is literally titled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good”. If you go looking for things to be annoyed about, your brain will happily hand you an unlimited supply, and every single one will feel important.
I’m not trying to be cliche, and I can already feel the eye-rolls from your teenagers, but the cure to the brain’s desire to vent-spiral is gratitude.
The most classic proof of this is a study done where one group of people spent ten weeks writing down a few things they were grateful for (basically keeping a gratitude journal), while another group wrote down hassles (basically a complaint journal). The gratitude group ended up more optimistic, felt better about their lives as a whole, exercised about 1.5 hours more per week, and reported fewer physical symptoms.
Even more interestingly, the effects of keeping a gratitude journal last way longer than the habit of actually journaling. In another study, people wrote down three good things that happened each day, and why they happened, for just one week. Six months later, they were still measurably happier and less depressed than the placebo group.
Now, before the bean soup people find me in the comments: I am not talking about curing actual hardship via a journal. Grief, illness, a real crisis, or a genuinely awful situation are not “complaints,” and no one can just gratitude-journal their way through them. I’m talking about the small, daily, this-is-annoying stuff like the weather or the dinner menu.
Which brings me to the rule I’ve started using on myself, and the one I’d highly recommend trying out: every complaint costs one gratitude. If you catch yourself complaining out loud, you have to say one thing you’re grateful for in exchange.
After that, it’s important to think about what’s actually in your control and what is impossible to change. Walk through the specifics:
You can’t control that it’s 95 degrees out. You can control what you wear, whether you bring water, and whether you spend the whole afternoon announcing how hot you are.
You can’t (always) control what’s for dinner. You can control whether you eat it with a good attitude and whether you help pick (or cook) tomorrow’s.
You can’t control other people’s moods, the traffic, or the assignment. You can control your response, your podcast queue, and when you start.
You can’t control feeling stressed. You can control whether you take the reset evening (the gratitude list, the extra sleep, the Taylor Swift) instead of letting the fog sit there for another week.
Almost every complaint is either something you can change (and after identifying that then you can figure out how to change it) or something you can’t, in which case the best solution is to practice radical acceptance, which “allows us to accept reality as it is, let go of judgment, and move toward healing. Radical acceptance does not mean that you like, endorse, or approve of a particular situation; rather, it simply means letting yourself acknowledge the facts of a situation and the difficult feelings it may bring up, rather than resisting the situation or trying to change reality.”
I find this skill particularly useful in regards to dealing with other people’s opinions and actions, because I literally have no control over them. I can just accept the choices they’ve made and do what I can to make the best of it.
I know it sounds kind of bleak and depressing, but as someone who likes to solve every problem and make everything perfect even when it’s impossible, radical acceptance allows me to feel peace when I can’t control everything. This is probably the skill that has improved my disposition the most. And as I talked about before, my disposition and the way I feel about the world impacted the kids’ reaction to me. The moment I walked in with a brighter mood I became instantly more approachable to them.
I understand that this newsletter might not seem as important to implement as the ones I write about academics or life skills, but here’s a question for you: what type of person do you want your kid to be? The one who’s known for finding the worst in every situation, or the one the other kids feel drawn to and want to open up to? That reputation, that magnetism, isn’t something they’re just born with; it’s something they can choose to practice every day.
So, to recap, if you want your kid to stop being a complainer, here’s what you need to do:
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