True story time! When I was in my early twenties, I went through a bad breakup. I was profoundly unhappy, and, even before the breakup, had a pretty negative opinion of, well, everything. My nickname when I was in high school was The Cynic. I got that nickname from
my teachers.
The break-up forced me to do a bunch of soul searching. I was talking to a friend at the time, and she told me (in a kind way) that she thought of me as a sarcastic, negative person. I was always looking for something bad to say about the situation.
That wasn't ever how I wanted to appear to people, and I resolved to fix it. I didn't know how to change my actual personality, so I came up with a simpler rule: I just wouldn't vocalize negativity. Instead of opening my mouth and saying something bitter or cynical, I'd keep it shut.
The next couple of weeks were actually pretty rough. All of my normal conversational habits got broken and I ended up in a lot more awkward silences.
Then a funny thing happened. Those awkward moments incentivized me to start coming up with positive things to say. I really wanted to be able to hold normal conversations again, so I needed to build up a stock of good observations to fill those silences with. So, throughout the day, I found myself looking for good observations I could use later.
And, lo and behold, once I started looking for the good in the world, I found it damn near everywhere. And once I started realizing how much good there was all around me, I started feeling better. Then I discovered people around me started feeling better too, because now I was someone who brightened their day instead of souring it.
Of course, I'm not saying I never complain. Sometimes when you're suffering, the most important thing to do is to let people know. And being more positive is a lot easier for me because I've had a pretty amazingly lucky life so far.
But this has had a huge long term impact on my quality of life and to some degree the lives of those around me. And all I really did was stop complaining.