Am I Toxic? How to Tell If You’re a Toxic Person

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer and I’m your happiness expert and this week we’re going to talk all about toxic personalities. And you know, there’s a real fundamental component that we almost always find in people who are toxic and that is that they complain. They complain, and they complain, and they complain. And you probably know what this sounds like. It’s the person who talks about their colleagues and says, “Oh, you know, he never does anything right,” and it’s always the same way and it’s bad, bad, bad, bad. And the organization is bringing this bad idea, and that bad idea, and the procedures don’t make any sense. All of which probably has an element of truth on occasion, but we don’t need to hear about it ad nauseam. And complaining can be more subtle too. Sometimes it’s talking with a friend or a loved one and complaining about our spouses. And it’s not geared to being productive, it’s geared to being whiny, and it has a certain tone to it and a certain inevitability about it. There’s no sense that there’s a mission that we’re trying to accomplish or a place of progress where we’re making. That’s complaining and this video is telling you to stop it because it’s toxic. You’re hurting yourself and you’re hurting other people. And there are ways to approach this habit and helping yourself out, so stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So there’s complaining and then there’s debriefing. You know, there’s whining, and bitching, and yapping about, ad nauseum, the things that you don’t like. You have politics, traffic, the local government, your neighbor across the street. And it sounds a certain way. It’s got a lack of productivity or planning to remedy the situation. It’s just venting. And there are times and places when that alone can be helpful. Sure, we need to debrief. But the difference between debriefing and complaining is usually about the duration of the discussion. Complainers have habits and they come back to the same topic over and over again. Whereas debriefing comes and says, “Hey, this happened, I want to share it with somebody. I want to hear my experience spoken out loud so that I can contemplate my own response to it, my feelings, and just what exactly actually happened. What are the facts?” Complaining is static. It doesn’t intend to improve anything. Debriefing or problem solving is dynamic. There’s some solution being sought or some internal resolution being said.

There’s something about neuroplasticity that we’ve talked about on this channel before. Neuroplasticity works like this: your brain has grooves of repetitive thoughts. It’s like your brain has grooves for driving. If you’re over 25 years old and you’ve been driving for a number of years, you’ve got really well fixed paths that help you to drive automatically. Now, we should always be paying close attention, but the reality is, we do this complex task of driving, carrying a conversation on with our person in the car with us or completely daydreaming, and yet we do it relatively safely. And that’s because, through neuroplasticity, we put down pathways in our brain that make that task very easy to do. Well, the same is true for complaining. So that the more we do it, the more we set grooves in our brain that this is the way we think, this is the way we socially interact, and it is very, very harmful to us, which is why we must stop doing it.

And here’s three ways that you can look at this. The first is, time limit your complaining. If you think you’re getting into a debriefing episode but you go on and on and on, you are not debriefing, you’re complaining. If it’s the same topic over and over again, it’s complaining. So think of it this way, here’s what happened, here’s how I felt. We all need to talk about our lives that way. Here’s what happened, “This happened at work today, honey…blah, blah, blah, blah…I felt crappy about it. I’m mad at my boss.” “That’s too bad, honey. What can we do about it?” We stop the complaining, we move to problem solving. And that’s the second, goes to the second thing, check your friends. Are they in the process of complaining or debriefing and problem solving? And if you’ve got a bunch of people in your life who also have a habit of complaining or who bring that habit of complaining into your life, confront them with it. Say that I don’t want to hear the complaints over and over again because it brings me down. It’s not criticism necessarily of your friend, it’s just saying this isn’t a good habit for me to be in and it makes me feel bad. So let’s do something else, debriefing, checking with our feelings, okay, ad nauseum, going on every time you see somebody, a litany of complaints about something, usually the same stuff, that’s not cool, not for you, not for your friends.

And thirdly, look for a solution. If you find yourself in the midst of complaining about something, check and say, “Is there actually something within my control here that I can influence or change to make the situation better?” If there isn’t, stop talking about it. If you’re complaining about the weather or the politics in Brazil or in Ottawa or something like that, you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your life, you’re putting your focus and your neuroplasticity training into an area of your life you don’t want. Don’t be toxic. Stop your complaining and get away from the people around you who do complain all the time. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, subscribe to my channel, you get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching.