It seems like all anyone ever does these days is complain. “Men are toxic!” “I got body shamed!” “We had consensual sex but he was bad in bed and I feel dirty for sleeping with someone I just met so it was assault!” On and on and on. Oh wait, sorry, did I say all anyone does these days is complain? I meant, social justice warriors. All SJWs do these days is complain. It’s like living with a three-year-old. Actually, no, scratch that. I actually do live with a three-year-old and he’s much more enjoyable to talk to.

It turns out there may be an actual scientific explanation for why SJWs just can’t deal. It’s called “neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity is the word scientists use to describe the fact that the brain is malleable. Until fairly recently, scientists believed that the adult brain was immutable. But this isn’t true at all. Research in the past ten years or so has proven that our thoughts can literally reshape our brains. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself, says that the brain can “rewire” itself to “cure previously incurable obsessions and trauma.”

So, what does this have to do with SJWs? Well, apparently complaining is one of the things that rewires your brain — for the worse. Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuroscientist who authored the book Buddha’s Brain, explains that “negative stimuli produce more neural activity than do equally intensive positive ones. They are also perceived more easily and quickly.” This is sometimes called “negativity bias,” meaning that our brains give more weight to negative things than positive ones.

The more you complain, the more you want to complain, and believe there’s something worth complaining about. This type of fixation on things we perceive as negative is called “rumination.” Margaret Wehrenberg, a licensed psychologist and author of The 10 Best-Ever Depression Management Techniques, explains that rumination is “repetitively going over a thought or a problem without completion.” She says that the brain creates “neural networks” to help us remember things. When we begin to fixate on something negative, the brain lights up what Wehrenberg calls the “‘woe is me’ network” and we begin to wallow in negativity. “Brain chemistry makes it hard to switch to another perspective to find the way out of problems, so rumination intensifies. Both anxiety and depression are then reinforced,” says Wehrenberg.

Now, obviously these scientists aren’t actually studying SJWs, but you’ve got to admit all this “negativity bias”/“rumination” stuff sounds a lot like them, right? I mean take Jana Schmieding, for example. She’s a “comedic writer, performer and educator” who has devoted her entire life to complaining about how her fatness is other people’s fault. In an article for HuffPost, she goes on at length about how unfair it was that she got kicked off a ride at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter because she was so fat that her safety belt couldn’t click into place properly. “While ‘safety’ is often the given reason that fat people are excluded, it’s clear to us that companies are actually just keeping the general public safe from our fatness,” she writes. (She gives no evidence for this in her article.)

Schmieding hosts a podcast (with an accompanying live show) called “Woman of Size” in which she discusses “the discrimination against fat women’s bodies.” She also writes about her fatness on a variety of sites. Surely this level of commitment to a complaint — the world is unfair because I am fat — would qualify as rumination! And it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to suggest that Schmieding — and so many other SJWs like her — are dealing with the effects of the brain’s neuroplasticity. They have literally complained themselves into believing that the world looks the way they wish it didn’t.

The only way to break the negativity cycle, experts say, is to start thinking positively. For SJWs, I think that would mean: 1) stop blaming everyone else for your problems, 2) stop fixating on tiny slights, and 3) think about what you can do to feel more content. So, basically, I guess we’re screwed. I recommend ear plugs.