When you have a conversation with yourself, what does it sound like? Is your inner voice a supportive coach, always encouraging you to do your best and providing consolation when things go wrong? Is it a harsh critic that insults you and repeats your mistakes on an endless loop? Are you even conscious of the messages you send to yourself? At Carolina Dunes Behavioral Health in Leland, North Carolina, we encourage our patients to think about how they talk to themselves and the impact it can have on their mental health.
Benefits of Positive Self-Talk
When you use self-talk in healthy ways, such as reminding yourself how much progress you have already made, how prepared and capable you are, or using a word like “breathe” or “focus” to quiet your mind, it can provide many benefits:
- Heightened motivation
- Increased resilience
- Heightened coping skills
- Better mental well-being, including decreased stress, improved self-esteem, boosted self-confidence, lower risk for depression, improved focus, and enhanced emotional regulation
Better physical health, including longer life span, greater ability to resist illness and infection, better heart health, decreased risk of stroke, lower risk of cancer, and reduced likelihood of respiratory conditions
Athletes are often taught to use positive self-talk to better control their attention and motivation. When they can visualize themselves winning, it’s more likely to happen. When they praise themselves for doing hard things, it makes them more confident, so the next time they face a similar challenge, they will again be able to achieve their goal.
What Negative Self-Talk Looks Like
Negative self-talk can take several different forms, for example:
- Perfectionism: having unattainable expectations for yourself or others
- Filtering: focusing only on the negative, while ignoring all of the positive things you accomplished
- Personalizing: assuming that an undesired outcome happened because of something you did wrong, such as a friend canceling because they had something unexpected come up, but you assume they canceled because they are angry with you
- Catastrophizing: always expecting the worst to happen
- Magnifying: blowing little things out of proportion
- Blaming other people: trying to make someone else responsible for your choices to avoid accountability
Impact of Negative Self-Talk
When we say negative things to and about ourselves, it reinforces:
- Fears
- Negative beliefs
- Poor attitudes
- Feelings of worthlessness
- Struggles to motivate ourselves through challenges
The things we say to ourselves over and over become our reality, regardless of the facts.
Changing Your Self-Talk
When you recognize that you are talking negatively to yourself, you can make changes, such as:
- Increasing your mindfulness. When you find yourself being unkind, you can respond by questioning the validity of what you’re telling yourself and finding more accurate statements such as “Continuing to focus on this upsetting thing that happened is just making me more angry, and it’s not helping me to resolve the problem. I am going to move on to solutions,” or “I am not a failure. I made a mistake. I may be able to correct this mistake, or I can do better next time based on what I learned.”
- Being more compassionate toward yourself. Giving yourself the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, just as you would anyone else. For example, say: “Everyone makes mistakes sometimes,” “I was doing the best I could, with the information I had,” or “It’s okay to be afraid.”
- Preparing yourself when you know something will be stressful. Talking yourself through your feelings and accepting them. For example, “I have done things like this before,” “It will be easier once I get started,” or “It won’t take that long. It will be over before I know it.”
- Praising yourself for a job well done. Building yourself up to be strong, competent, and brave. Tell yourself, “I did it,” “That wasn’t as bad as I expected,” or “I am more capable than I thought.”
At Carolina Dunes Behavioral Health, we offer acute mental health services for adolescents and adults in our inpatient mental health treatment programs. We offer individual, family, and group therapy to help our patients manage things like negative self-talk and replace it with more positive thinking.
