Living a Complaint Free Life Challenge

I'm starting to realize that I am a complainer.

I don't always do it out loud, because I am actually more introverted by nature. But sometimes it feels like my brain is going 24/7 with worrying or fretting or just outright complaining.

Now I found a book I'd picked up somewhere awhile back about living a complaint free life. Which has a very intriguing concept. You start out wearing something on one of your wrists, like a bracelet or whatever, and every time you catch yourself complaining you move the bracelet or whatever to the other wrist in order to raise a conscious awareness of when you are complaining.

The promise of the book is that you will see big changes in your life just by breaking the habit of complaining for 21 days. If you do complain and have to move the bracelet, the challenge starts over again from that point.

Now I can definitely go for this. I've seen things start to fall apart at work, my weight start to creep up again and overall mood scatter all over the place since I starting picking at everything that was wrong in my life. What the boss did or didn't do. What my coworkers did or didn't go. What my family did or didn't do. My noisy downstairs neighbor, the neighbor who throws his cats on the balcony for several hours in the morning despite the weather.

In a nutshell, I think I've been complaining about pretty much EVERYTHING. And I do NOT like the person I've become in the last month.

So I see nothing to lose by taking a challenge like this.

Although I have to disagree with the author on one point as he says this challenge is to watch the complaining that comes out of your mouth and says at this point, thoughts are free and don't count as dropping the challenge and having to start all over again. As an introvert, I tend to think a lot more than I speak anyway. And as long as those thoughts stay bouncing around in my head, it's just as damaging as if I was saying them out loud. Because I may not be complaining to other people but I am most definitely complaining to myself every time I indulge in one of those critical thoughts.

So I'm starting day 1 today. And for whoever reads my posts, if you catch something that sounds like I'm complaining, please let me know. I need to change my life and this is where it needs to start.