It's true that complaining can become a bad habit that's hard to kick, overshadowing all the good things in your life and causing people to avoid you. However, I'm not saying you should stop standing up for what is right in your life. There is a difference in complaining and being aware of the choice you can make. Sometimes airing the truth in a situation is necessary and healthy. It's important to do it in a manner that's effective and doesn't put the other person on the defensive or start to create blame. Follow along as I share some tips on how to voice a legitimate awareness.

First of all, it's important to consider the opposite side of your complaint. No matter if it's a small issue or a big problem, taking time to think about the rationale for what it is you're not happy with is necessary to determining if you have a valid complaint. Question what you are seeing. Seeing things from another perspective and employing empathy is always a wise move. It can also open up an awareness about the situation that you may not have considered. So think it through and try to figure out why a policy or decision has been made in a particular manner before moving forward with your gripe. Is this something you have done again and again, or have contracted your being to do over and over that you need to release and reject for all eternity?

It's important to know the reason for what you are feeling. Essential aromas that can help bring about clarity are Basil, Bergamot, Birch, Cardamom, Black Pepper, Clove, Coriander, Frankincense, Ginger, Rosemary, Spruce and again, all of those wonderful citrus expressed oils. Sure, sometimes in the second of reaction things can be annoying. You might feel a bit better for venting about your frustrations. However, regularly complaining about things that are minor or that can't be changed will likely gain you a reputation you don't want to have. If you stop, smudge some Palo Santo, or load up some aromatherapy and breathe, you can make a break in the cycle. As we've discussed in previous posts, it also starts to become a habit by creating neural pathways in your brain. In addition, complaining about things that aren't particularly significant probably won't lead to anything being done about the issue. You'll just wind up feeling more frustrated. You lock yourself into a moment, rather than being in the moment and moving forward.

When you've decided to move forward and to make your complaint, be sure it doesn't come across as whining. Your tone and the words you choose can go a long way toward ensuring this isn't the case. When we're frustrated, it's easy to raise our voices, use strong words that provoke and speak in a whiny or condescending tone. All of these are counterproductive toward complaining in an effective and legitimate way. Your recipient isn't likely to want to listen to you if you come across as whiny or hostile.

Perhaps the most effective thing you can do to lodge a legitimate complaint is to come prepared with some ideas to solve the issue. As we've covered, complaining for complaint's sake really doesn't serve anyone. The person or people listening to your complaint will take you more seriously if you have a proposed solution to the problem. They'll also appreciate it and will probably be more willing to work with you, rather than to be on the defensive. Having a plan in mind shows you've thought the matter through and taken some effort, that you're serious about your complaint.

These are just some suggestions of ways to make a legitimate complaint. Perhaps they will help you to voice your frustration with others in a more meaningful way than simply moaning and groaning about all that upsets you.

There is great benefits when we are choosing to be content, and working in the moment. Contentment doesn't come naturally to everyone. Being mindfully aware of what we are doing is not a natural state in this abstract dimension. In fact, our neurons are actually wired to seek out all energy, and it will latch onto the negative side of things more readily than the good.Perhaps it is because we tend to make those negative thoughts carry so much weight from lifetime to lifetime, from moment to moment. They are what change the epigenetic expressions from grandparent to parent to us. However, now that you are aware of all the ways in which choosing fulfillment over lack can impact your life for the better, I want to share with you one powerful tool to help you reach your goal. I'm talking about being grateful for all you have. There's definitely power in gratitude. Join me, and I'll explain just what I mean.

Let's start by defining gratitude for our purposes. There are lots of contexts in which this concept comes into play. It goes beyond simply uttering the words, "thank you," or expressing our thankfulness during appropriate times. Gratitude is a complex emotion. It's a state of being and attitude. This topic plays an important role in the field of positive psychology, in which it is seen as a deep appreciation that leads to lasting positive results. Gratitude is acknowledgement of a gift that is given to you. This gift can be something tangible received from a friend or it can simply be the good things in your life.

The acknowledgement and recognition of the gifts you possess is key to the power of gratitude. Various fields embrace the concept of being grateful and recognize its benefits. Self-help gurus, psychological researchers, religious leaders and philosophers are among these groups. As a reminder from yesterday's discussion, I'd like to re-visit some of the main advantages that come from having a grateful heart. Essential oils that can open you up to inviting gratitude in can include Bergamot, Roman Chamomile, Clary Sage, Spruce, and of course all of the citrus oils are very uplifting and releasing for the energetic emotions that you may be holding onto.

Making a conscious effort to feel gratitude has a powerful direct effect on your contentment. The reason is that being grateful allows you to move the focus from yourself onto other aspects outside of that narrow scope. Expanding your view lets you truly appreciate more than you would when you're obsessively centered on you and all that is being done to you or happening to you in a negative manner. Whether you're acknowledging the good in others or recognizing your life's blessings, this focus outside of yourself is significant in increasing contentment and well-being.

See how gratitude benefits you and helps you to feel more content across the board? Cultivating those feelings of thankfulness takes practice, but it's an endeavor that pays out in the long run. Give it a shot to see the benefits for yourself

What can you invite into your life right now, that will bring an awareness that disallows complaints to control your being?

Congruency is the act of being in the moment. Any day now you will start understand the ways in which the brain changes in response to regular complaining. You're also aware that these patterns can be changed, making positive thinking come more naturally with practice. While it won't be easy to break the complaining habit, it might help to understand the benefits of choosing contentment, and congruency, over complaints. When you make a proactive decision to kick complaints to the curb, you'll start to see a number of good things happen.

One of the first things you may note is that you feel more relaxed. Letting go of gripes about things you probably can't change anyway will lead you to feel less stressed. Complaining on a regular basis can cause you to feel frenzied and on edge. Deciding to try to change your perspective when things don't go your way can increase your relaxation and lower your stress.

Ending the complaint cycle is likely to lead to greater happiness. When you consciously decide to make a change, you usually engage in some self-assessment. You take a hard look at what's bringing you down, what's at the root of your dissatisfaction. Not to mention the ways in which your brain begins to restructure itself. Your neurons will begin to form efficient connections toward more positive thinking, and your levels of the stress hormone cortisol will begin to decrease. Happier feelings are just around the corner when you start to complain less.

Speaking of connection, your relationships with other people will surely improve when you drop the Paula Pouting routine. People will be more enthusiastic about connecting with you. No one likes to be around people who are negative all the time. In addition, once you begin to make a conscious effort to lessen your moaning and groaning about others, you'll naturally feel more empathy and compassion toward them. This type of understanding goes a long way toward strengthening bonds between people.

As you begin to achieve some success when you reframe your complaint into a statement of the moment or even into a question, you'll start to feel more confident and secure in yourself. It's empowering to know that you're in charge of your feelings and actions. This boost in self-esteem is likely to build on itself, allowing you to feel stronger in other decisions across your life. It's amazing how making one small change can be the catalyst for making even bigger alterations to your life.

These are merely a few of the ways your life will improve when you choose contentment over complaints. I'm excited for you to discover all the great things that are yet to come

So, we touched a bit upon the relationship between complaining and your health. You learned that constant negativity and stress related to chronic complaints can lead to changes in the brain and body. I'd like to follow up on the ways in which this process affects your brain. Complaining has actually been shown to rewire the circuitry in your brain, along with influences other changes within this organ that controls so much of how your body functions. Let's take a deeper look. 

Your brain thrives on efficiency. It works to make things run as expediently and effortless as possible. Therefore, the neurons in your brain respond to repeated events of any kind by closing in on each other so that the firing of synapses is easier, making communication more efficient. Complaining is one such activity to which such a response occurs. What you are essentially doing is creating a loop or repeated pathway in your brain that makes future complaints more likely to occur because the connection has been well established. In fact, there's a saying for this - "Neurons that fire together, wire together."  Those sensory neurons are responsible for collecting sensory data, and with aromatherapy the data is collected via smell. This data is called an odor molecule, and can create a positive reaction to help before you start complaining and start releasing hormones like cortisol into your system. You can use aromatherapy at anytime, and anywhere.

Cortisol is a hormone whose production is increased during times of stress, including the stressful response caused by chronic complaining. It is this hormone that triggers a "flight or fight" response within your body. It shuts down all systems that aren't deemed absolutely necessary. Both blood pressure and blood sugar are elevated during this process. A frequent surge of cortisol also lowers your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to health issues like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and high cholesterol, along with strokes. 

The hippocampus is the part of your brain that's responsible for cognitive functioning and problem solving. The activity in this region is important to long-term memory, spatial navigation and emotion regulation. Therefore, you can imagine damage to it would be quite detrimental to your well-being. Complaining on a regular basis has been proven to impair the production of new neurons within the hippocampus, eventually leading to its shrinking in size over time.

As you can see, complaining really does do a number on your brain. It goes as far as to actually change the structure and functioning within your mind. These patterns are then cemented into place, becoming entrenched and making it harder to move from a habit of negativity to a more realistic and hopeful path. The good news is that the pattern can also be reversed. Changing your thoughts to more positive ones can help create new neural connections that make it easier to continue along that vein. Don't despair. We'll continue discovering ways to increase positive energy, curb your complaints and gain contentment.

Over the next short while, we'll be covering a great deal of information to help you kick complaining to the curb in order to reveal your more harmonious being. This may seem like a tall order and even a bit overwhelming, but I'll be breaking the material down into manageable pieces, so don't worry.

As we hit each area, we'll examine a new aspect of ditching the complaints in favor of contentment. There are lots of concrete steps you can take to banish complaining for good. It just takes a little practice and effort to break old habits.

Complaining can become a very destructive habit, and energetically it will invite more to complain about because energy aligns to it. When you learn to curb your complaints, you'll notice a shift in your life. Learning to lessen the frequency of your complaints doesn't mean that you'll never feel negative emotions again or that things won't ever upset you. However, making a concerted effort to stop complaining is about your overall mindset and the frequency with which you complain. Frequency of course is not just how often, but also what energy level you are creating within your being, and around your being.

Changing your ways and adopting a new mindset won't happen overnight, but it's definitely worth the effort. Constant complaining can become a cycle that's hard to stop. People will begin to form an impression of you based on your moaning and groaning. Unfortunately, that impression is usually a negative one.

There are tons of benefits to adopting a cheerier disposition. In addition to leaving a better impression on others and improving your reputation, you'll simply feel better as you develop a more positive mindset. People who complain often feel that they have no choices or that life is something that just happens to them. They don't feel in control of their circumstances. When you shift that mindset, you'll start to feel empowered and in charge. Taking a proactive approach to your life puts you in the driver's seat.

Ditching the complaining and trying to look on the bright side isn't just fluff. It truly will bring good things to your world. You'll start to notice less anger and hostility, along with the host of negative emotions that go along with them. Everything won't seem to overwhelming and difficult. When you take on a more positive view by making real efforts to limit your bemoaning, optimism is a natural result.

You'll simply feel more content in every aspect of your life. No, it won't be easy. However, if you join me over the next month, I am confident you'll see that change is possible. Let's dive in and begin to explore the ways you truly can turn complaints into contentment.

To start we begin our journey toward turning complaints into contentment. I want to talk about the ways in which spreading constant negativity is harming your life. From your personal relationships to your career, complaining can take a toll and cause damage to all of the things you hold dear. This also includes your physical and emotional health. It's important to understand just what a high price you pay for complaining if you truly want to overcome this destructive habit. Let's look at just some of the ways your life suffers at the hands of complaining.

People don't like to be around complainers. Hearing nothing but negativity from a friend or loved one is a huge turnoff for most folks. Constant complaining can be contagious. Have you ever noticed that it tends to be easy to slip into a habit of moaning and groaning when you're around a Negative Nancy? Unfortunately, it's possible that you're the bad influence. If this is the case, it's likely your circle has taken notice. Most of us make an effort to avoid spending time with toxic people because we know it's bad for our own mental health to surround ourselves with their bad attitudes day in and day out. Being a daily complainer will probably be a fast track ticket to losing some of the important people in your life.

Your professional reputation is one of the most valuable things you have. Not only must you be topnotch at your job in order to move ahead in your career, but you also need to possess soft skills like good communication and strong listening ability. Your people skills are definitely noticed when it comes to your work life. How you conduct yourself, get along with and lead others all play into your success. If you're known as a constant complainer, you can pretty much guarantee yourself career stagnation. Those who never seem happy and are always griping aren't known to be good leaders. No matter how skilled you are at your position, you probably won't excel if you gain a reputation as a complainer. Positive and content professionals are what managers look for when it comes to hiring and promotions.

Your physical and emotional health may face the biggest impact when it comes to constant complaining. In fact, it's been shown that your brain actually rewires itself for negativity when faced with regular bouts of griping. That's because neural pathways form to accommodate activities such as complaining. Soon, these habits become ingrained into your neural functioning, making it easier to come back to these patterns again and again. Chronic complaints have also proven to shrink the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is responsible for problem solving, and to increase the hormone cortisol, known as the stress hormone. Cortisol affects a wide range of bodily functions, including the regulation of blood pressure, memory formulation, metabolism, inflammation, blood sugar and immune system.

As aromatherapists,we can fill an incredibly supportive role in helping people move through the challenges they face in their journey through life.  In my opinion, there are no blanket solutions for anything.  Instead we need to understand all nuances of the situation the individual is facing including the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects.  While this can be a lot more work than just saying “oh you have a headache, use this lavender”, when one takes the time to consider all aspects of an individual, as well as their life situation and lifestyle, the synergy and protocol created are unique for that person, allowing incredible possibilities to unfold for them.

I also believe it is very important to remember that essential oils are NOT substitutes for pharmaceutical drugs, nor should we be trying to recommend or use them in this.  We should also always remember that when it comes to a disease or a condition, as aromatherapists we NEVER treat the disease or condition.  What we do is consider the whole person, what are their concerns, what are their challenges, what is their lifestyle, what are their physical needs, what are their psychological needs.  Once we have this information we can come up with a unique synergy for that individual, as well as a plan of action for how that synergy is to be applied.

The work of an Aromatherapist is considered CAM or Complementary Alternative Medicine, where we use essential oils to help improve emotional wellbeing and relieve the symptoms of ill health.  A CA or CCA does not diagnose conditions, but when taking a full health record with a client you can recommend oils that will relieve the symptoms of the whole body using aromatherapy. Someone may have a headache and you look at them holistically and recommend True Lavender because it's very relaxing and you see that they have a very stressful lifestyle. That is not treating the headache, it is aligning to their lifestyle. The scope of our practice will be to educated the client on use of oils, and give choices based on clinical data and career/educational experience to support any needs of the client's well being. 



The Aromatherapy Industry in the US is hard for a CA to work with because there are NO standards of the scope of your practice. I tend to follow the lead of the UK Council that Aromatherapy is the systematic use of essential oil in holistic treatments to improve physical and emotional well being. There is so much research (including clinical) showing that when essential oils are applied to the skin, inhaled, or absorbed into the bloodstream and metabolized into the body they are effective for stress-related problems and a variety of chronic conditions. Their Aromatherapy Council states: 

 Clinical trials have shown that when applied topically, some essential oils, including Tea Tree oil, have antibacterial and [antimicrobial/antiseptic] properties (Hay et al. Arch Dermatol. 1998; 134:1349-1352) and that Peppermint oil may optimise/maintain a healthy digestive system (Stevensen C.J. Fundamentals of CAM, Churchill Livingstone 1996:137-148). There are many studies that demonstrate how essential oils can positively affect mood and the sense of well-being.  Buckle J. Alternative Therapy  Health Med.1999 (5):42-51 states that “studies suggest that essential oils …. induce mood changes”. Essential oils also impact on brain wave activity, creating either stimulating or relaxing effects (Stevensen 1996).

So it's important to remember you cannot diagnose a condition, but you can support treatment for the symptoms using essential oils and aromatherapy practices.