For this week’s Mental Sunshine, I want to challenge you.
Can you go for a whole day with zero complaining?
Not a single, teeny, tiny complaint, over the course of 24 hours
Not even silently in your head, or under your breath
Can you do it?
So often we can get caught into a sort of loop of negativity
We woke up late, or we were tired
The weather is not what we’d prefer
There’s traffic on the way to work
Someone gets in our way in the supermarket
The news reminds us of the latest crisis
We don’t need to go looking for reasons to be negative
And it’s really easy to focus on those, to think about them and talk about them
But there are also plenty of reasons to be cheerful in life
And when we choose to focus on the positive, it can help to lower our stress hormones
It can even help to rewire the networks in our brains so that we automatically focus on more positive things as time goes on.
A 24-hour zero-complaining challenge might sound a bit gimmicky or silly
But it will draw your attention to just how often – and how automatically – you complain
You might be surprised at just how automatically negative you can be when you’re not paying attention
You get double points if you can catch yourself about to say or think something negative, and replace it with something positive!
Let me know how you get on!