Why Venting Is Always A Bad Idea

today we're going to talk about why venting is a bad idea now this sort of came to my attention recently when I've noticed that there's an increasing trend of content creators to like vent about what's going on in their life on Twitter like influencers and stuff kind of do this stuff they're like yeah you know like life is so hard like this I'm going through this I'm going through this and everyone is like oh my God like this guy's so brave like this girl is so brave like so great like people are like sharing their

feelings and stuff and then it also does something really cool right because we tend to do a lot of what other content creators do so if they start buying this thing or playing this video game then I'm going to start buying that thing or playing that video game right that's how the Creator economy runs and so this is also really great because once like content creators share their mental health struggles like we're all inspired to share the same right yeah this is great like this is a big part of what we do in this community

right the problem is that like this doesn't really work out well kind of scientifically and so like let me tell youall what I'm talking about this kind of reminds me of a situation where let's say I'm in a room and I feel really uncomfortable on the inside because I'm full of gas right and then what I end up doing is I like I got to let out the Badness so I got to literally vent the gas so I end up farting and then everyone's like wow like look at this person like farting is so stigmatized

you know like we're not allowed to fart but everybody farts and everyone else is like yeah like I'm inspired let me vent my gas and I'm in this room where this one person is farted and everyone has started clapping and everyone else is like you know what I'm going to fart too I need to fart too and then they all start farting and then before you realize that you are in a room where everyone is passing gas and so each individual person feels a little bit better but you are in a room that smells literally

like and this is what the internet has become like right can we all agree that like it's become a cesspool of venting with like no one doing anything about it so I'm all for sharing your feelings as a psychiat interest as a content creator we even help content creators with that kind of thing we've got you know programs where we've supported over 500 content creators to vent their feelings and then do something about it because that's really what venting is about so let's take a quick look at why psychiatrists and therapists are all for venting

so when someone comes into my office right and they start venting about something if I'm in my opinion a good psychiatrist it doesn't end with the venting the venting is a step right so let's understand so like when I'm filled with negative emotion it can be very hard for me to see clearly so if I go and I talk to a therapist or a psychiatrist I vent that negative emotion but then as the psychiatrist or therapist hopefully what they're doing is they're not looking for you to come back week after week after week just to

vent whatever is going on in your particular day what they're hopefully doing is venting so that you can start to do things about what you're unhappy with right so as a psychiatrist when someone comes in and says oh my partner is like not loving and they're abusive and they're this or they're that or they have a drinking problem or whatever so I'll like validate them for a while I'll talk to them about wow that sounds genuinely very difficult and it sounds like you really love this person and at the same time like they can really

turn into a real monster when they've been drinking like that must be so hard for you so we as psychiatrist this is why we do this right so we actually like speed up the venting process through validation so we're like let's get this moving okay I'm going to tell you why your life is so hard I'm going to validate validate validate and then 100 minutes of venting turns into 30 minutes of venting and then is the psychiatrist what I do is I say okay now we're what what are we going to do about it right

so what we do the reason we encourage venting and the reason we use validation is to speed it up is to decompress that emotion so you can take appropriate action the problem with venting is that it's a form of emotion focused coping and the problem with emotion focused coping is that over time it doesn't actually lead to good things so let's take a quick look at venting and understand what it is and how it works so venting is a form of something called emotion focused coping and here's what we know about a emotion focused coping

so this is a from a paper about maladaptive coping mechanisms developing in childhood so children facing chronic and uncontrollable stress uh less often cope by actively attempting to solve problems and managing their emotions okay so in fact active attempts to intervene in uncontrollably stressful situations lead to to undesirable social outcomes so what does this mean this means that when you're a child growing up if you try to fix a problem like your parents are fighting and they're going to get divorced it doesn't end well instead what children learn how to do is manage stress through

acceptance they don't tend to do a whole lot of cognitive reframing but they tend to focus on their emotions right so I can't fix mom or dad because that's not going to happen but what I can do is make myself feel better by playing a particular video game and so we tend to is that this form of coping emotion Focus coping where I can't fix the outside world I can just fix my emotions it works but the problem is that this pattern of findings um of Reliance on an efficacy of avoidance right so the problem

is that when we focus on avoidance of the problem which is what emotion focused coping is it actually works the problem is that it doesn't work for very long so however while adaptive for chronic stress Reliance on avoidance does not equip children to cope with all the circumstances they will encounter in life and places them at risk for mental health problems so what does this mean this means that basically we know that emotion focused coping or venting is effective if you can't do anything about the problem because when there's nothing you can do all you

can do is vent hey just a quick note a lot of people will ask us what do I do next and that's why we built Dr K's guide It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years years of my experience both as a monk and as a psychiatrist and it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs so if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life check out the link below here's what we know about the science of emotion Focus coping as kids learn to be avoidant because

they can't fix the problem it actually leads to more problems later in life because as you grow up your ability to do things actually increases but if all you've ever done is vent or manage your emotions instead of actually fixing problems it starts to create more problems in life and so it can be adaptive if you have no control but as your control increases it becomes more maladaptive and so this is why we got to be careful about venting because with a psychiatrist it can work really well but when we do it on our own

it creates all kinds of problems so as we look at venting we begin to see there's another key problem with it which is that the purpose of venting is to get rid of negative emotions right and this is the main thing that we need to understand the most powerful motivators of our Behavior are actually negative emotions when you get incredibly angry it is easy to act when you feel very very ashamed of your appearance it's very hard for you to leave the house and you may say but hold on a second doesn't that make my

life hard no what is the shame actually motivating you to do it is a very powerful motivator to stay home and so this is why there's kind of an interesting balance with venting because what tends to happen with people who vent a lot is that they vent about the problem but they never actually do anything about it and you may know people in your life who are like this who have this almost habitual way of venting and maybe a mom or dad or sister or whatever who are constantly griping about the same thing oh my

God my life is hard this way and this way and this way oh my God this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks and then they never end up doing anything about it because if you really pay attention there is a correlation be between how much you about something and how little you actually do about it and the reason for that is very simple neuroscientific it is as we vent the negative emotion we actually disable our motivation to fix the problem which is why it works if I'm a child in an abusive household

because I can't fix anything anyway but then it sabotages me later in life when I am able to fix things but instead I keep on leaking out my emotional energy there is even a more subtle problem at play here which is something that we're going to learn from the yogic tradition which is something called a vasana so as we mentioned earlier we know that there are these people who will vent about the same thing over and over and over again and this is particularly Insidious not just because of the motivation but because of the mental

habit it creates now this is what aasa is so to illustrate this I'm going to give you all an example so I had a patient who came into my office I was their eighth or ninth therapy IST they're about 48 years old okay so they've been in therapy since they were 15 or 16 and what they would do is they'd come into my office and they'd vent about their day I'm sad because of this and this thing went wrong and this thing went wrong and I was like a second year or thirdy year Psychiatry resident

so I was just like I just finished two years of training so I'm like okay this is what Psychotherapy is I'm here to listen to people talk about how sad they are like that's me being supportive right then a couple months went by and then I was like bro is this helping and he's like what do you mean is it helping and I was like is this actually helping you and he's like well like I don't know I mean I'm like do you feel better than you did 6 months ago and he's like no I

mean my life hasn't improved at all and but he's like isn't this what therapy is supposed to be like aren't I supposed to come here and like talk about my feelings and that's when I started to realize wait something is going something is off here and that's when I actually like so usually when I don't understand something in Psychiatry I'll read Psychiatry stuff but then I also read like yogic stuff and I stumbled upon this idea of a Vasa so a Vasa is a mental habit and the big problem with a mental habit is that

once you start venting in a particular way your neurons kind of get concrete about that sort of thing you develop literally a mental habit where all it takes is a tiny trigger for your mind to go through this well rehearsed form of thinking which frequently venting is so if you want a good example of this you can go to like dating forums or incel borums where these are people who let's take incels I'm not trying to bash incels let's just look at what it is okay so these are people who you know went on a

couple of dates many a few maybe a few years ago and yet they go on the internet every single day and they will type about how alone they are how alone they are how alone they are and you can't argue with them or anything like that but they spend hours and hours and hours in their own head thinking about how alone they are and the really weird thing is if we sort of look at life for a second okay so like let me let me give you all kind of a quick example of this so

let's take a look at let's understand vasas okay so aasana is a mental habit now here's the tricky thing if we're looking at people like incels or someone who gets triggered to vent so what you've got is you've got one kind of exposure and once you trigger the once the exposure triggers this exposure can even be less than 5 seconds so this can be something as simple as I logged to the internet and I saw a happy couple smiling and then this triggers a venting response and this can be like minutes to hours and if

you know people who have vasas you know what I'm talking about because you can trigger that pattern of thinking and they will say the same damn thing over and over and over again right so I play the game of Dota 2 maybe I'll play League of Legends and sometimes something is overpowered and the moment that I see that every time I lose to this particular hero I I log on the forums and I rant this hero is so overpowered and I spend 35 minutes of my life because I played one game of DOTA because I

saw this particular person and then now I'm off track I see someone else playing that that person that particular hero I start ranting and raving the Vasa triggers the mental habit triggers and the real problem with triggering vasas is a 5sec exposure can cost you 30 minutes and now let's look at what our life looks like if we have a bunch of ASAS so 5-second trigger 30 minutes another 5-second trigger 30 minutes another 5-second trigger 30 minutes another 5-second trigger 30 minutes and you'll notice this if you go on these places that are kind of

like safe spaces on the Internet it's a bunch of people constantly venting and so even though my exposure in life has only been 20 seconds two negative things I have created 2 hours of negativity in my mind this is what a Vasa is it is a mental habit and the more that we vent the more our mind gets into the habit of venting and the more that we get into the habit of venting the easier it is for our mind to go to that particular place and then all we need is a single trigger to

knock us off on this kind of rant which I I don't know if yall had this but like you know my mom is like this where she has like particular rants that she likes to go on I have family members that have particular rants that they like to go on even I like to go on particular rants these are all vasas and the real problem with venting is not only does it decompress our negative emotional energy but it trains our mind to think continuously negative thoughts that's what venting is if we never go about fixing

the problem because then what happens the circumstance is here triggers the venting and then no emotional energy and then I don't actually change anything so then the circumstance triggers again and again and again and again and then my mind gets better and better and better at venting venting venting venting venting until all I'm doing is farting all day and never actually fixing the problem so I encourage you all to be very careful about venting and here's the right way to do it the first is if you work with a professional hopefully you find one that

is helping you vent for the sake of actually doing something and even if you're not working with a professional you can do that yourself so here's the main question I've got for youall when you vent what do you do to fix the problem after you vent if the answer is absolutely nothing now you know why you're constantly venting because you're never actually doing anything to fix it so the next time you vent do something about it do something even if it's minuscule if it's insignificant spend 5 minutes actually addressing minimum of 5 minutes addressing the

problem that you're venting and you may say but there's nothing I can do about it stop and think for a second oh my boss doesn't like me I'm venting about my boss venting about my boss venting about my boss why doesn't your boss like you because they give me they criticize me well maybe you could do slightly better at your job do you think that could make a difference no I've tried that it doesn't work that is a Vasa you see how quickly it jumps up no I've tried it it doesn't work I've tried it

it doesn't work I've tried it doesn't work oh I see you tried it how many times I've tried it a million times it never works chances are you've tried it a couple of times and it doesn't work and then you've started to form a Vasa of when I try things they don't work and then you get stuck in this particular way so now we get to the Vasa this is the third thing that you can do observe the mental habit of your mind observe that when you are in a particular situation all it takes is

a trigger and then watch how your mind is as soon as you hit the play button it's like an unskippable ad where now that we've strapped ourselves in and we've started this video we're going to have to sit through this 15 minutes of BS and just notice wow look at my mind this all you need to do to melt a Vasa is observe the automaticity of it so wow now my mind is off on that track now my mind is off on the track now my mind is off on the track holy crap Let It

Go like Let isn't literally like let it run its course and watch it and don't don't stress about it now if you guys want some of these techniques of how to observe and things like that I definitely recommend you check out our meditation guide we'll teach you about a lot of this mental training but all you need to do is observe the Vasa so at the end of the day youall need to be a little bit careful about venting venting can be absolutely healthy if it precedes action if it helps stabilize you because too much

negative emotion is overwhelming we want to modulate that negative emotion down to where we still have enough emotional energy to motivate to act this is what a therapist does but if you don't do this if instead you just vent for the sake of venting and then you vent again and vent again vent again you're forming a mental habit and then the real problem with that mental habit is that mental habit will make it harder for you to do something because now your body has a habituated response when this problem happens how do I deal with

it I about it so now it becomes harder and harder and harder it's kind of like you know once you train yourself to be right-handed it's it's hard to start writing with your left hand so once once your mind trains with a particular Vasa of this is how I'm going to deal with this problem I'm just going to about it it becomes harder and harder and harder to work with your left hand to actually do something about your problem so be careful about venting and observe your [Music] vasanas