My friend is trying to complain less.
So he taped a note to his bathroom mirror. It says: complain less.
At first this struck me as intentional. He noticed something about himself. He decided to change it. He put it somewhere he’d see it every single morning, before the day had a chance to start without him.
That’s more than most people do.
Then it struck me that he was focusing on the wrong thing.
If someone tells you, don’t think of an elephant. You immediately think of an elephant. Every morning, the first thing he sees is the word complain. The thing he’s trying to move away from is the thing he’s looking directly at.
Complaining less is a good goal. But it doesn’t tell you what to replace it with.
All that energy that was being used to complain, needs a new path to focus on.
Because complaining isn’t just a habit of speech. It’s a habit of attention. It’s a practice that has spent years getting very good at scanning for what’s wrong. That energy doesn’t disappear because you told it to stop. It’s still running. It still has to go somewhere.
And if there’s no new path for it to travel, it goes back to the one it knows. The sticky one. The one worn smooth from all the times before.
So I suggested he swap the note to say: Enjoy more.
Same intention. Different direction. Now the reminder points at what he wants more of instead of what he wants less of. Now the first thing he sees in the morning is the word enjoy.
Here’s the honest part. Some people love complaining. If that’s you, it’s giving you something. You wouldn’t keep doing it if it wasn’t. Maybe it feels like a safe place to find connection with others. Maybe it confirms a narrative you believe about the world or yourself. Maybe it takes you off the hook for accountability.
For the people who love complaining, “enjoy more” might not actually redirect anything.
But it might do something else.
It might open the aperture. Widen it enough to let other things in. Things that pull you into the moment, into reality, instead of putting you in conflict with it.
Because that’s what complaining is. A quiet, ongoing conflict with what happened, or didn’t happen, or might happen, or might not happen.
And all conflict wastes energy.
Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes the conflict is the whole point, and you’d be a coward to avoid it.
But often it’s just energy leaking out of you all day long, spent on a fight you didn’t realize you chose to focus on and can’t win. Energy you could have used for something else.
The note on the mirror isn’t the point. It’s just a note.
What matters is where it sends you when you read it.
P.S. What’s the note on your mirror? Is it pointing you toward what you want, or away from what you don’t?
