The Surprising Science of Complaining: When It’s Actually Good for You

In most workplaces, it’s treated like a social pollutant. Leaders discourage it. Colleagues avoid it. High performers learn to swallow it. And if you ask most leaders, they’ll tell you it’s a productivity killer and, consequently, something to shut down before it spreads.

But complaining can serve a purpose. When done well, it helps you regulate emotions, make sense of what’s happening, and turn friction into forward motion. When done poorly, it spreads stress, entrenches cynicism, and creates a culture where problems are rehearsed rather than resolved.

So, the difference is not whether you complain, it’s how you complain.

Complaining isn’t one behaviour

Professor Robin Kowalski defines complaints as expressions of dissatisfaction that can serve emotional, interpersonal, and practical goals.

In other words, complaining isn’t a single habit. It’s a bundle of motives.

In workplaces, it’s helpful to distinguish between two common types:

• Instrumental complaints aim to change something: fix a process, clarify a decision, or address a risk.
• Expressive complaints are aimed at releasing emotion or seeking validation: “This is unfair”, “I’m fed up”, or “This is exhausting”.

Both can be legitimate.

The problem is that most of us blend them together, delivering emotion with no request, or making a request with so much heat that no one can hear it.

Related: We Don't Grow by Avoiding the Heat

Why complaining can help

Constructive complaining can be surprisingly useful for three reasons.

First, naming emotion reduces its intensity.
A large body of work on emotion regulation shows that identifying and labelling feelings can dial down emotional reactivity.

One well-known study found that expressing feelings in words was associated with reduced threat responses in the brain.

In practical terms, starting with “I’m frustrated” (and then getting specific) can be a form of emotional calibration, not emotional chaos. It gives you enough steadiness to choose a response, rather than defaulting to a reaction.

Second, we are wired to make sense of emotions with other people.
People don’t just have emotions in private. We process them socially.

When something gets under your skin, it’s natural to want to talk it through, not to create drama, but to work out what happened, whether your reaction makes sense, and what to do next.

A good conversation helps you organise a messy experience into a clearer story. It also reminds you that you’re not alone, which takes the edge off the feeling.

Additionally, when it’s done well, the sharing becomes a steadying process because it turns a spike of emotion into something you can name, understand, and respond to with greater choice.

Third, complaints can be early warning signals.
In organisations, many complaints aren’t “negativity”. They are information, just delivered without a neat wrapper.

The complaint is often someone pointing out a snag in the workflow, a customer impact, a safety risk, a culture issue that’s starting to bite, or a decision that hasn’t been properly tested. The frustration is real, but underneath it is something useful: a signal that something isn’t working as well as it should.

When people raise concerns to improve outcomes, it’s not just venting. It can be a contribution because they’re highlighting what the system can’t easily see from the top.

When you pay attention early, you can address small issues before they become costly. In that sense, a complaint can be the organisation’s early warning indicator and feedback loop.

Related: Lost in January KPIs? Here's How HR Can Step In

Why venting often backfires

Here’s the uncomfortable twist: not all complaining is cathartic.

Decades of research challenge the popular belief that “letting it out” reduces anger. In a classic set of experiments, people who vented anger (including by hitting a punching bag) became more aggressive, not less.

More recently, a meta-analysis of 154 studies found that activities that increase arousal (such as aggressive venting and many high-arousal outlets) generally do not reduce anger, whereas arousal-decreasing strategies (such as breathing and mindfulness) are more effective.

Complaining can also slip into what psychologists call co-rumination: repeatedly revisiting the problem, replaying the details, speculating about motives, and keeping the emotional temperature high. It can feel bonding in the moment, but it often leaves people more agitated afterwards, not clearer.

In the workplace, this is the loop where the conversation keeps returning to the same point, but nothing changes, and no one acts.

Lastly, in teams, mood spreads. One person’s frustration can quietly set the tone for the room. Others pick up on the edge in a voice, the eye roll, the tension, and they respond in kind. Over time, that can shift how people show up, how they treat each other, and how safe it feels to speak honestly. Unfiltered complaining doesn’t just affect the speaker. It can shape the whole group.

How to complain so it helps, not harms

When you feel the urge to complain, treat it as a signal. Something matters. Something feels off. The move is to slow down just enough to give your frustration structure, so it helps rather than harms.

I use a simple guide: CALM.

C: Start here: clarify what you’re feeling and what actually happened.
A simple opener like, “I’m frustrated, and I want to sanity-check something. Here’s what happened…” does two things at once: it names the emotion without dumping it, and it anchors the conversation in facts.

Keep it clean. One word for the feeling is enough.

Describe what you observed and what was said or done. Steer clear of sweeping statements like “always” or “nothing ever changes,” because they tend to trigger defensiveness and derail the discussion.

A: Aim for one outcome before you speak.
Before you speak, decide what you want from the conversation.

Do you need to be heard? Are you looking for a perspective to help you reframe it? Do you want help solving the problem? Or are you seeking a decision or a change?

If you don’t choose, you’ll often reach for all of them at once, and the other person won’t know how to respond.

Clarity here is kindness, to both of you.

L: Limit the dose by setting a boundary so you don’t loop.
This is where constructive complaining differs from emotional spillage. Set boundaries so the complaint doesn’t become a looping story or your default conversational mode.

Choose the right person, ideally someone who can help, not just someone who will agree.

Time-box it: “Can I take five minutes?” is a surprisingly effective circuit breaker.

And keep it to one loop. If you’ve told the story three times, you’re no longer processing; you’re rehearsing, rehashing and ruminating.

M: Move to a request or a next step to finish with a pathway.
A constructive complaint ends with a “therefore.” It turns frustration into forward motion.

You might ask, “What am I missing?” or “What would good look like here?”

If action is needed, be specific: “Can we agree the next step is X by Friday?” Or, if you’re weighing options, “I have two approaches. Which is better?”

The point is to finish with a pathway, not just a punchline.

Taking the CALM approach helps you turn frustration into influence with integrity because your emotion becomes information, and information becomes action.

What leaders should do with complaints

If you lead people, your job isn’t to eliminate complaining. You want to convert the noise into a signal.

Start by rewarding the behaviour you want. When someone raises an issue, acknowledge their courage and contribution, then ask, “What outcome are you aiming for?” That question alone upgrades the conversation.

Second, create legitimate channels for concerns. People complain in corridors when there is no safe, effective path to raise issues and get traction. Where norms and psychological safety are strong, people are more likely to speak up early, before problems harden into resentment.

Finally, be careful what you normalise. If leaders bond through cynicism, the organisation learns that negativity is the social currency. If leaders model CALM, people learn that clarity and follow-through are the currency.

The bottom line

Complaining is not a leadership failure. It is often a sign that someone cares, notices, and wants things to be better.

The discipline is to stop treating complaints as a moral flaw and start treating them as raw material. Refine them. Shape them. Use them.

Because the goal isn’t a complaint-free workplace. It’s a workplace where frustration becomes insight, insight sparks action, and action drives progress. That’s leadership with intentional impact.

Republished with courtesy from michellegibbings.com.

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