Reframing

Your brain is like a muscle. Whenever you place demands on it, it responds by physically strengthening itself to meet those demands. If you often drive in a city with complicated streets without using GPS, your brain will get better at mapping out the streets and planning your routes. If you practice playing the piano, your brain will make it easier for you to control your fingers. If you learn a new language, your brain will shape itself to make using the language easier over time. In each of these cases, the changes in your brain are large enough to be seen on neuroimaging scans.

Of all the organs in your body, your brain is the most responsive to your behavior. Behind anything in your character that seems fixed, there are behaviors you have repeated, and your brain has adapted itself to facilitate these behaviors. They end up feeling natural to you. Not without reason has habit been called a “second nature”!

If you want to change a habit, you’ll need to make special demands on yourself to get your brain to start changing. If you’ve always spoken English, spending a few minutes on an app may not be enough to get your brain to start making the requisite changes. But if you raise the challenge, perhaps by immersing yourself in a place that requires the language you’re trying to learn, your brain will readily adapt. How much your muscles grow depends on how much you challenge them; in the same way, how much your brain grows and adapts depends on how much you challenge yourself.

Ultimately, you are in charge of how much your brain grows and adapts, because it is always being shaped by your behavior. When you challenge yourself, forming new patterns of acting, your brain makes habits out of those behaviors. It has an unlimited potential to support your growth. But your brain can also shape itself in ways you wouldn’t want. Of all the bad habits you can develop, however, there is one that stands out in its power to change your brain for the worse. There is one bad habit that can turn enjoyment into bitterness, and can lead you to feel pain even when everything is pleasant. It’s the basis for anxiety disorders and depression in individuals, and it explains how these conditions spread like a contagion through social networks. It dims your intelligence, hampers your ability to focus, and makes it hard for groups to work together. There is even evidence that it makes you more likely to suffer colds and develop cancer. The habit we’re talking about is complaining.

But why is complaining so uniquely opposed to human flourishing and growth? Remember that the only way for you to grow is by placing demands on yourself — this is what leads your brain to adapt, to make those demands easier for you. This presupposes a positive view of the challenges you face: you see them as opportunities for growth, learning, and practice. You engage them, and in time, as your brain adapts, you get better at them, and they become more enjoyable.

When you complain, you’re concentrating on the difficulty of a challenge — on what you don’t like about it, on what is disagreeable, uncomfortable, or missing. Without realizing it, you are training your brain to get better at noticing what you do not like. You may also be training yourself to share these observations with others as soon as they come to mind.

When you complain to someone else about something, you’re making it more likely for the other person to start noticing things to dislike. Complaining spreads like a contagion among people, training everyone to notice how hard or uncomfortable the present challenges are. It can therefore be called viral negativity.

Even within a single person, complaining can be called viral negativity. As soon as you complain about one thing, you’re more likely to notice more things to complain about. Having a negative appraisal of a present challenge has an unfortunate neurological effect: it dampens the part of your brain that handles deliberate behaviors, and activates the part that handles automatic behaviors. It’s as if your brain reasons that, if things are bad, it should be ready to notice more bad things and then act fast. As a result, you’re more distractible and impulsive.

When we anonymously analyzed data from OptimalWork.com, we found that a person’s propensity to complain is the most powerful predictor of his or her overall well-being. A strong habit of complaining interferes with your ability to thrive on challenges in work and life.

For the same reason that taxi drivers’ brains have a greater ability to make maps, and piano players’ brains have a greater ability to control their fingers, chronic complainers’ brains have a greater ability to see the negative side of any challenge. This ability is called the negative processing bias. With this bias, negatively charged experiences get more efficiently processed by your brain, and are given greater power to attract your attention. This one change is the neurological basis for most psychological disorders, especially anxiety disorders and depression. The brain always adapts to the practice you give it.

The habit of complaining leads you to automatically view all challenges as threats. And yet, challenges are the only way for you to grow! Recognizing this fact is the opposite of complaining: it’s called reframing. Reframing is the process of deliberately discovering the opportunity for growth, learning, and practice that a challenge is offering you. By reframing, you can transform any challenge from a threat into an opportunity.

Think about climbing a mountain right now. If you’re not in top shape, chances are that your muscles would be pretty sore afterwards. What impact would complaining about the soreness have on your experience climbing the mountain? The more you complain about it, the more you will notice it, and the harder it will be for you to climb.

But what if you could reframe the soreness, recognizing it as the best opportunity to shape yourself and grow stronger? Then you’d be more likely to welcome it when it occurs, and keep on going up the mountain. You’d even be able to say, “Bring it on!”

Reframing does not mean deceiving yourself into thinking that something is fine when it really isn’t. In fact, reframing makes your judgment more true. While complaining trains you to see a challenge as a bad thing, which it is not, reframing helps you see the challenge as a good thing, which it really is. By reframing, you are more able to judge correctly that challenges are good because they give you unique opportunities for growth, and that they give you these opportunities precisely because they’re challenging.

The challenges that are hard for you are hard precisely because they require growth, and, like the sore climber, the discomfort you feel when you engage them is, in fact, the growth taking place. Without soreness, our muscles would never grow stronger; without challenge, we would never improve.

But if we can easily reason that challenge is a good thing, why is reframing sometimes so difficult? It’s for the same reason that we often steer clear of the gym, even though we know exercise is good for us: because of the effort required. Your view of challenge is closely linked to your view of effort — whether you embrace effort or avoid it. Engaging challenges always takes effort, and that effort is precisely what yields the growth. When you embrace effort, you embrace challenges and become stronger. Put another way, discomfort is the price you pay for growth.

Reframing means discovering the opportunity for growth in the present challenge so that you can eagerly embrace it, to the point of saying, “Bring it on! The harder the better.” But reframing does not consist in simply repeating words in your head. It requires shaping your attitude toward challenge and recognizing the good it offers you.

Imagine what your life would be like if you could reframe anything — if every challenge you faced always felt like an opportunity. This is attainable. Like any skill, reframing can become second nature with practice. How would your life change?

You’d be much less likely to become anxious or depressed, because you’d be continually practicing the behavior most opposite to the negative processing bias. Rather than wanting your work to be easy and free from challenge, you would focus on attaining excellence in your work, turning it into an opportunity to better love and serve others.

You would live with more confidence and optimism, as you continue to grow by engaging challenges; and so you would feel less need to control the situations and people around you. When you face difficulties, in work or in relationships, your first instinct would be to think, “How will this bring out the best in me?” Over time you would see how every challenge that you face is actually the perfect one for you, highlighting the area where you most need to grow.

To see yourself as capable of this kind of growth through any challenge gives you a new freedom from circumstances and events that lie outside of your control. It gives you the freedom to welcome, embrace, and even seek out challenges. Instead of just reacting to events, you will find yourself with a new ability to engage challenges, to shape anything you set your mind to — starting, of course, with yourself.

Happiness is not the result of winning the lottery, a mixture of luck and circumstances. Happiness comes from learning to thrive on any challenge you face, so that they continually bring out the best in you. And that’s all the work of reframing.