Addressing Negative Self-Talk

We have all heard the phrase, “You wouldn’t talk to others the way you do yourself”, right?

And while all of us can shake our heads in agreement, knowing that is true, we continue to say such shitty things to ourselves. Why? Well, our brains are creatures of habit and over time, the more we do something, the more our brain tries to automate it. It just happens. We aren’t sitting there thinking of mean things to say…they just, sort of appear. And because we are used to it, it doesn’t seem mean or shitty, it just seems like your norm.

So what can we do? Like any habit, it takes both insight and action to start to break it and wire our brains to do something different.

How do I know if I have negative self-talk?

The short answer is, you do. We all do. AND, let’s run a little experiment to help you see it. Think about the last day or week of your life and make a list of everything you said to yourself during that time — all of the thoughts you have running in your head. Think about all of the different roles you have, and tasks you performed and write down all of the different thoughts that came up for you and how you treated yourself in looking back. For real, make a list. I’ll wait.

Whether you type them out or write them on paper, get them out of your head and put them down somewhere you can look at them.

Now, when you finish that, I want you to go through and do 2 things with this list:

• Label every thought as +, -, or neutral.

  Ex. positive thought: “I kicked ass on that presentation this afternoon” or “I am a good cook”

  Ex. negative thought: “I should have gotten more done today” or “I should have been more productive” or “I feel like I am such a shitty parent sometimes”

  Ex. neutral thought: “I got everything done on my list today” or “I am tired”

This is every thought you wrote down…even ones not about you. Having negative thoughts about traffic and how it is affecting your day are also important to take note of.

• Second, I want you to go through and label each thought as “Fact” or “Opinion”.

  A fact is “a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” Facts cannot be challenged.

  Ex. of a fact: “I finished everything on my to-do list.” or “I forgot to do ‘X’ today.”

  An opinion is “a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter.” An opinion is how someone perceives something, and this view may be unique to them. Opinions can be biased, inaccurate, mistaken, and/or unhelpful.

  Ex. of an opinion: “My boss hates me” or “I should be faster at ‘X’ by now” or “Everyone was looking at the pimple on my face.”

When you finish that assessment, take note of how many items on your list are negative opinions. And particularly, how many of those negative opinions are directed towards you.

Now, before you go about judging yourself for this and going down another negative self-talk cascade…don’t. It’s not helpful. The point of this is to bring awareness and insight. Judgment only perpetuates negativity and more negative self-talk. We are just getting curious about our thoughts. Right?

Why are our thoughts important to talk about?

The way we talk to ourselves creates a feedback loop in our brain that feeds back onto itself with regularity. The more I talk positively about myself, the more my brain looks for and finds positive things. The more I talk negatively about myself, the more my brain hunts for negative things. We will talk more about this in a little bit but for now, the point I want you to take away is to know that how we talk to ourselves influences our self-esteem, confidence and interactions with the world. It enhances or limits our creativity, assertiveness, openness and ability to “show up” fully to our lives. It is one of the most important areas for growth I work with clients on all of the time.

Now, it is also important to note that not every day will be the same. Some days, depending on our circumstances, mood, energy, how many F*CKS we have let in our account, will be riddled with more negative opinions and evaluations than others. Some days might event be predominantly positives or neutral facts. The question you have to check in with yourself is, how do these thoughts affect my everyday life, my feelings about myself and my place in the world, and the actions and behaviors I take every day?

Where do they come from?

Are you familiar with core beliefs (if not, check out this blog post here). Essentially, core beliefs are the beliefs we hold about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. For the vast majority of us, those beliefs are that we are inherently unlovable or unworthy…UNLESS [fill in the blank]. Our core beliefs lead our brains to try and strategize ways we can make up for our ‘deficiencies’ in order to be valuable or worthy in the world. Over time, those rules become so ingrained in us, they become automatic thoughts. We have to look a certain way, act a certain way, have the ‘right’ job, do all the things…we start performing to try and secure connection and belonging with others by being the version of ourselves our core beliefs think will correct our perceived flaws.

Okay, so what’s the problem? Well, the more rules we have about how to show up in the world, the more our brain is trying to juggle and it is inevitable that sometimes, we will fall short of these rules or miss something. This is where negative self-talk shows up. If I have rules about needing to be perfect, needing to be in the right job, in the right relationship, looking a certain way, dressing a certain way, acting a certain way ALL OF THE TIME…it is exhausting. And contrary to my core beliefs thoughts, it is not sustainable. I can’t be everything for everyone all of the time. I can’t be liked by everyone all of the time. I am not always going to look a certain way or act a certain way. Sometimes my “to do” list will get longer rather than shorter in a day. And all of these discrepancies between perfection and reality are what birth our negative self-talk.

Where does that disconnect from perfection and reality get created?

Our core beliefs are formed throughout early childhood, and as such, this is where much of our self-talk begins to take shape as well. The main influences of our beliefs and as such, our self-talk, have to do with the culture and community (family, town, friends, etc) we grow up in, the values that are put upon us by that culture and community, and the interpersonal relationships and interactions we have throughout our formative years. How we make sense of the world shapes the way we paint our picture of our ideal selves in it.

Now, it is not merely a result of culture and community that affects whether or not our self-talk is positive, neutral or negative. It is the experiences we have interacting within our communities and relationships that shape it. Situations and experiences such as abuse/neglect, feeling as though you cannot meet others’ standards and expectations of you, the response people around you have to aspects of your identity, being on the receiving end of others distress and even technology can impact the direction our self-talk takes. Each experience we have is seen as part of a larger research study our brain is leading on how to optimize our presence in the world. And the more instances where our needs go unmet or we are left without in some way, the more we feel as though we do not belong, feel othered, or are “less than” those around us, or are treated in ways that reinforce those thoughts, the greater likelihood our thoughts will turn negative.

To be clear, this is not just about extreme cases of abuse or neglect. This is feeling like you don’t fit in with a friend group at school or getting glasses or braces and people making fun of you. This is about not getting picked for a team sport or getting lower grades and having people respond with disappointment. This is about fearing sharing your sexual orientation or gender identity in the world because you don’t feel safe. This is about hearing too many times about the ways we need to do and be better without hearing about the things that we do well or about being a good person.

It is usually a culmination of thousands of little experiences that on their own would not be enough to make someone feel unworthy or see themselves negatively, but in accumulation, feels like it is the only conclusion we can draw.

Why can’t I just stop?

Wouldn’t that be great? If we could just stop our negative thinking and self-talk and move to a place we felt more solid within ourselves. The good news is, you can…AND it takes a little more work than that. Why? Because we have 3 main barriers in our brains we have to overcome in order to do that:

1. Biased Expectations

2. Negative Self Evaluations

3. Cognitive Distortions

Biased expectations are your preemptive assessments of how you will do or how things will go in a future situation. It is about a job interview, presentation, difficult conversation with a loved one, or even going out to karaoke with your friends and assuming it will go poorly or you will not do well. It is the limiting thoughts you have about yourself without any evidence it will go poorly. It is just an assumption rooted in bias that things will go bad. The problem with this? How often have you been anxious or nervous and assumed something wouldn’t go well? Anyone ever take a driver’s test? Were you anxious? Did you worry about parallel parking? Or, in my case, backing up in a straight line…don’t judge me haha! Do you think the test went as well as it could of if you told yourself you were going to fail? Correct. It did not. Why? Because preemptive distress dumps stress hormones and poisonous chemicals into your body that change our reaction time, limit our ability to think logically, and affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors about the event.

Negative self-evaluations are the post-event, activity, or interaction evaluations. It’s that feeling you get when you leave a networking meeting or a gathering with your friends and you immediately start thinking about what you did wrong, what you should have said or what you wish you had done. It is about rewriting an experience through tainted lenses that put you as the problem of the narrative and get in the way of you seeing things from a neutral space. I do this a lot when I leave speaking events or other workshops I lead where my brain will immediately try to find all of the ways I screwed up. The problem is that it tries to coax me into letting it go there, saying that it is about “finding ways to be better and to grow as a speaker”. BUT, that’s not really true and we both know that. So now, my rule is that I cannot think about a speaking event, try to assess places to grow or what I did well until a minimum of 48 hours after the event. Why? Because then all of those chemicals that have been dumped in my body before, during and after the event have been cleared out of my system and I can think about things from a more neutral space.

And finally, cognitive distortions are tinted lenses that make it hard to see the world from an accurate lens or picture. These distorted ways of thinking make us minimize positive experiences, bring about an endless list of should and musts, take every negative experience and expand it to feel like everything sucks or we are terrible, and it does what is called “all-or-nothing” thinking which means that our brain sees only in extremes - if I can’t be perfect, I shouldn’t do it at all; if one person thinks I suck, everyone things I suck…and more. These thoughts, like our self-talk, are automatic and feel rational and logical because it is the main way we have come to view the world.

Well, what can I do?

In the webinar I offer on Negative Self Talk, there are way more strategies you can use to start to make the changes in your thoughts. For today, I decided to chunk it up and give you 4 next steps you can begin to work on. If you want more, don’t worry. I included a link to the webinar and other information on where to go next below.

1. Make it a daily practice to write down your self-talk. And then, get curious about it. Remember, judgment does nothing but keep us stuck in our negative self-talk. Simply ask yourself how that thought is serving you? What does it do for and against you? And with that, try to get clear on where the thought comes from? What incident or incidents led you to create these rules or hold this judgment? Was it from you or someone else? And is that person reliable? Putting your thoughts on paper gets them out of your head (the source for shame, self-doubt, fear, etc) and into a neutral zone…on paper. And then, the more time we can spend investigating and going deeper with our thoughts, the more we begin to create the insight needed to do the rest of the work.

2. Understand your relationship with control and ambiguity. For most of us, we long for over-control and work to diminish any ambiguity or uncertainty. The problem? We cannot control everything in our lives. We cannot plan for everything that will or could happen and no matter what, uncertainty and ambiguity will always show up. So, check-in with yourself about why control feels so important to you. What fears do you have about being ‘out of control’? What evidence do you have that this will happen? And then check in with how you can be more flexible in your expectations, thinking and actions to allow the normalcy of live - uncertainty, unpredictability, change and circumstance to take up space without self-judgment.

3. Give your negative self-talk a name. That’s right. It is a process called externalization of the problem. If it feels like it is us then it feels harder to change. My negative self-talk voice? Henrietta. And man, she is a bitch sometimes. By creating this entity of what she looks like, where she came from, how she shows up, etc, she can be a character in my narrative but not the writer of my story. Separate yourself from the version of you that is filled with negative self-talk and begin to think about how to let go of that relationship.

4. Ask yourself if that judgment or thought is an appropriate response to the situation at hand. Remember, we have very distorted lenses through which we view ourselves and our place in the world. So, ask yourself…is it really fair to assume everyone hates me if I just had one negative interaction? Is it fair to say that I never do anything right because I made a mistake today? Might I be jumping to mass conclusions versus saying “I made a mistake today and that was hard” or “This person may not like me, and that is okay.” Take the all-or-nothing power out of it and work on crafting a response that is equal to the situation. 


Ready to go deeper?

As I mentioned, I have a webinar on Negative Self Talk that goes deeper into the “now what” phase. You can also be sure to check out the Cognitive Distortions webinar which will walk through the different lenses through which we see the world and how to challenge those.

Feeling like you want to go all-in with starting to do this work on addressing your thoughts and then figuring out where to go from here? Check out the other resources I have related to this goal here.

And as always, if you have other questions, have an AHA moment or can think of ways I can help you in the next steps of your journey, email me!