What Is Negative Self-Talk

Do you ever hear voices in your head? My view is as long as it’s your voice we are okay. But that inner voice, that self-talk isn’t always nice. Self-talk combines our conscious thoughts with personal beliefs and biases to create an internal soliloquy that runs in our heads all day long.

Although this dialogue can at the very least be entertaining, it does have an important role in the actions we take as well as our feelings. Self-talk can be supportive, even comforting or it can be negative and wipe your confidence completely out.

Negative self-talk can be quite pessimistic. It slowly but surely erodes your self-esteem and prevents you from pursuing goals and reaching your dreams. Negative thinking makes you feel like you have failed before you even start.

In turn, how you talk to yourself can affect your mental health and your relationships. Negative self-talk will drag you down, or if you are already down it will keep you there and make it very hard to get up. People who struggle with anxiety and depression often report significant amounts of negative self-talk. It goes even future to affect your experience of chronic pain, body image, and sexual confidence.

Negative self-talk can be so powerful and repetitive that it feels like it’s true. Luckily, there are ways to get out of those patterns.

• Take a thought inventory. Become very familiar with how you speak to yourself. Jot them down every once in a while so you can notice any patterns.
• Challenge your thoughts. Most often negative thoughts are irrational, so when they come ask yourself is this thought true? If it is true, where is the evidence to support that?
• Stop sign technique. When you have negative thoughts come up, immediately visualize a big red stop sign and say the word STOP three times (out loud if you can). This will help your brain make the connection with which thoughts you want to stop.
• Replace the thoughts. You want to gently shift into something more positive. This doesn’t have to be a dramatic statement but moving out of the negative into a more positive way.

Take your time with this process. Remember many of these thoughts have been with you for a very long time and it takes a while to reconstruct your neuropathways. When you start to think positively about yourself you will feel optimistic most of the time. You will reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression and improve things like body image.

In addition, letting go of negative self-talk will make you feel like you have more control of your life and motivate you to move through challenges that come up. You are ready to dive in for more on your negative thinking patterns, grab 5 Steps To Change Your Negative Thinking and take control of the voices in your head.