image courtesy of ironchefbalara

Last week I had dinner with one of my best friends, who holds a leadership position at a local organization which does amazing work. Like many workplaces, hers is also plagued by drama: mammoth egos battling for power, nonsensical rules for all but the top people, and hidden agendas lurking beneath every innocuous-seeming conversation.

So when I asked her how work was going, I was expecting to hear the usual entertaining yet horrifying tales of woe. Instead, she told me that she has a new policy where she doesn’t talk about work outside of work because, what is the point of getting worked up over it? Since making this decision, she told me, she’s noticed that not only does her mood stays sunny, but she’s also able to focus on the big picture and do her job—which she loves and whole-heartedly believes in—with more vision and focus and creativity.

I was impressed by her new resolution and decided to try it out for myself (again). Now, I’m the first to say that I’m a tremendously lucky person, and most days I am a ridiculously happy camper. But there are still things that bother me more than they should. Idiots in traffic, the disrespectful way certain people communicate—it’s little stuff, sure, but if I let it, it can ruin my mood for the whole day. Why allow that to happen, especially when I am so freakin’ blessed? And why inflict a blow-by-blow of the day’s annoyances on the people I love?

Gretchen Rubin writes about this in The Happiness Project. One of the best ways to be happy, she writes, is to make other people happy, and the converse is true, as well—being happy yourself contributes to the happiness of the people around you. This is a truth she learned from St. Teresa the Little Flower, who recognizes her demeanor is her spiritual responsibility: ““for the love of God and my Sisters (so charitable toward me) I take care to appear happy and especially to be so.”

This gets into tricky territory, because it’s a fine line between making the best of a bad situation and glossing over it in denial. Lots of issues are big and wrong and need to be brought out into the light of day. And many times we genuinely need others’ help to understand something that is bothering us. But that’s all different than venting, which comes down to amplifying our complaints by continually giving them airtime in our consciousness. It’s like running non-stop ads for bullshit in your brain.

Conventional wisdom says that getting our issues out of our hearts and into open air will help, but experience tells me different. I recall how another friend of mine spent years complaining about a horrible boss—years!—saying that she just needed to get the bad vibes off her. But putting so much energy into ranting about work actually seemed to make her situation worse. It both fueled the fire of her discontent and drained her of the energy she needed to do something productive about it.

Then there are the tiny, dumb annoyances that pop up several times a day. Usually, these are so insignificant and inevitable that complaining about them is almost as tiresome as dealing with them. Yes, it’s criminal that so few drivers seem to know how to properly navigate a 4-way stop sign, but how many times do I need to get upset about it? Eventually I will change the structure of my life so that I don’t need to drive so much, but for now, this is just a part of reality, and any emotional energy I put into it is simply wasted.

Since that dinner with my wise friend, I’ve once again been paying attention to what I choose to talk about, what I choose to give energy to, and I see that the less I bitch and moan, the less I have to bitch and moan about. Whatever I give attention to grows in my attention. Why not use that observable truth to give momentum to what I’m excited about rather than fan the flames of what pisses me off?

43 Folders’ Merlin Mann writes a lot about how important it is to guard our minds from the time- and soul-sucking influences all around us. One of his great lines—“Your Brain Needs a Dad”—reminds me that it’s my responsibility to protect the precious currency of my attention so that I have plenty of it to pour into that which is truly important.