Tim Ferriss informs me of the following lifestyle experiment:
And it was. The author was Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister who had recognized—as I have in a previous post—that word choice determines thought choice, which determines emotions and actions. It’s not enough to just decide you’ll stop using certain words, though. It requires conditioning.
Will designed a solution in the form of a simple purple bracelet, which he offered to his congregation with a challenge: go 21 days without complaining. Each time one of them complained, they had to switch the bracelet to their other wrist and start again from day 0. It was simple but effective metacognitive awareness training.
Please read Tim's entire post here. Very interesting, and definitely worth a try I think, no matter who you are. I think that the basic premise is this: complaining doesn't help, and only causes grief and anger, and so there's no place for it. Replace it with actions or suggestion, and the outcome will be better. Would the world be a better place if everyone stopped complaining? I'd believe it.