As it turns out, Venting is bad. It might feel good in the moment but its actually unhealthy, most of the time.
Source
HealthyGamerGG aka Dr K, who unlike me, is a licensed psychiatrist.
The main issue is that whenever we Vent, we’re not doing it properly. A Good therapist, will allow you to vent, usually by empathizing and validating your experience which should make you vent faster (spending less time in a negative state is always a good idea) and then they’ll ask you “what are we going to do about it?”
Usually, when we vent, we’re just doing to have that feel good release and we often make a habit out of it. Occasionally releasing can be good and its called “emotion focused coping” but this type of venting isn’t good at dealing with chronic stress. If we’re doing with high levels of stress, we need to make sure we’re not making a habit out of venting and to make sure we’re taking action to prevent the negative event that caused us to vent. Even if the event is unsurmountable, there’s usually always something that you can do, to make progress. Lots of 1% improvements overtime, actually tend to make a difference. When venting on our own, we need to try to catch ourselves and limit the time we spend in a negative state and try to come up with an actionable goal.
You should also be the role of the Good Therapist for your friends and don’t let them vent at you. Generally, try to avoid being surrounded by negativity. As a human, It will affect you and you cannot stop it, you must avoid it.
If your friends or colleagues are constantly bitching and moaning about something, its a sign they need to do something about the problem.
The Brain is weird
Aside from training your brain to react negatively to specific events and overall bringing your mood down because of the negativity. Another interesting side-effect of venting is that you trick yourself into thinking venting is solving the problem. But what you’re actually doing is offloading so you can “stop thinking about it” but when you think about it again, you’ll likely start venting again.
Also the reason we vent, is interesting and is a learned behavior from childhood. When we’re young and most things are out of our control, and so venting is a mechanism to deal with negative emotions and feel better. But as an adult, this is mostly counter productive, since we are in control and we can do something about it.
Dr K said a whole lot more about it then what I’ve written here, would encourage watching his video on the topic.