The venting culture — The WORST way to deal with Negative Emotions
You can take all the time in the world to vent and the problem will still be there.
Whenever I see a close friend posting a story on Instagram lamenting about work and life, it reminds me of the unique Taiwanese venting culture, which people have the habit of posting “venting stories” and “venting posts” to seek comfort, support, recognition or simply to “vent”.
I have always been interested in the venting behavior, specifically why people do it. Although I have never joined the club, there were certainly times when I was prone to vent or mimic a similar behavior on social media. Yet, I always hit the cross button in the end (after putting all the effort to write about it urh), because venting is just “not helpful”.
Waste of time
I’m pretty sure we all have that experience of surfing on social media mindlessly, and when we finally return to the real world we are like: “shit two hours have passed”, and this is the exact same outcome with venting. Every minute spent on venting adds to the opportunity cost we can spend on solving the problem and liberating ourselves from the suffering. So often, I regret a venting act afterwards, I always internally cry that I just wasted X much time pulling a venting talk show at home, and it does not help in any way to get things done.
Venting does not solve the issue
Venting may make you feel good, temporarily. After all, you still need to face the cause of venting. You can take all the time in the world to vent about your discontent, the shitty annoying colleague whatever, and the problem will still be there. Instead of spending the time writing about how badly you were treated, how terribly the day went, why not use the time to try to solve the problem.
You may be screaming inside: “But it’s not that easy!” and I agree with you, it’s extremely difficult to act cool after a fierce battle. If things are too heated to move on to the next step, cool off with other methods alternative to social media. I find writing it down on paper extremely useful, in fact it’s one of the best ways to organize thoughts. Paper-writing helps us be offloaded from stimuli and screen, and thought organization also facilitates the problem-solving process, best of the both worlds isn’t it?
Getting to the problem is the only way we can clear the source of anger, frustration and other associated negative emotions.
Not venting. Problem-solving.
It leaves you feeling… Worse
Although I don’t vent on social media, I certainly pour all my complaints to my family (especially my mom, poor her). And I have learned through bitter lessons that complaining does no good but makes one even more hurt and discouraged afterwards. This is because the listener may disagree with your opinions, or worse criticize and sometimes question your abilities. This is exactly what happened many times with my mom, she would become frustrated and caution me to work on my pitifully poor mental strength — she had a point, and oftentimes it’s my incompetence that causes the problem.
When you vent, especially in the aim of seeking support and comfort, it’s like playing a risky bet. You might receive the opposite of what you expected, and this always leaves me wonder why the heck did I even vent in the first place. If the emotions are too much to bear, I’d suggest either talk to a close friend (they are able to be candid and euphemistic at the same time) or just self-talk. Both can help understand what’s bothering us and even lead to light bulb moments.
Life is full of challenges, many days we are hit hard by the rock, and venting, seems to be the most appealing and gratifying rescue in the moment. However, looking at the long-run, venting slows down progress, deteriorates motivation to work and increases stress. The real game-changer here is to shift the mindset to a “problem-solver mode”, because this is the only way we can completely free ourselves from the calamity we are going through.
Play the long game.
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