Reframe Your Internal Dialogue And Take Control Of Your Self-Talk

Artwork for podcast Social Skills Coaching

25th October 2022 • Social Skills Coaching • Patrick King

If you’ve picked up this book, there’s a good chance that you’ve noticed that your own internal thought processes are . . . not what they could be. Pervasive negative thinking is the kind of problem that initially seems to fly under the radar. A person with a predisposition to interpret everything in a negative light can convince themselves for a long time that they are completely neutral and objective observers, and the negativity simply lies in what they’re observing. That there seems to be an awful lot of negativity “out there” only dimly arouses their suspicion!

Pervasive negative thinking is like having a poisoned pot in your kitchen, so that everything you cook in that pot becomes poisoned, too. You think you have one problem: Everything you eat seems to make you sick! But in fact, you have another, perhaps more serious problem—you continue to use the poisoned pot.

If you regularly find yourself saying things like, “Everything is awful,” then you can be pretty sure that you have a poisoned pot in your mental kitchen. So much personal development and self-help material out there is designed to help you fix the problems that your mind has told you are there:

How do I stop being so lazy and unmotivated?

How do I get over being so fat and out of shape?

How do I stop being such a loser?

But you can see the problem. The solution you really need is to be curious about the mindset that allows you to think that you are a fat, lazy loser in the first place!

You already know that the way you think influences how you see yourself, the world, and everyone around you. But it goes even further than this. How you think doesn’t just influence your life, it is your life. If the mind is the means by which we tell our story, interpret those stories, and ascribe meaning to our experiences, then the mind is more or less in charge of all of it.

The way we think determines what we believe is possible, how we solve problems, what we can expect in the future, and how to plan for it, and therefore how we act.

The way we think tells us why our experiences happened and what they mean, and therefore our value in that story, i.e., our self-worth.

The way we think highlights certain events as all-important and allows us to forget others so that we reinforce not what is most real, but what most fits our assumptions.

The way we think even decides what enters our conscious awareness in the first place and determines which parts of the big, wide world we never even realize are right there . . .

So, if your thinking is heavily skewed to the negative, you have a serious problem. Humankind has long recognized the possibility of having so warped and distorted a mental filter that the person is assumed to have lost touch with reality entirely. We know that people in severe depressive episodes or those with psychosis or paranoia have not just made a misinterpretation of reality—they cannot see it at all. And yet, how many “normal” people are walking around with a head full of thoughts that are just as unconnected to reality?

If a paranoid schizophrenic says, “I’m queen of the moon and I need to find my way back there before the mole people catch me,” we can easily recognize the claim for what it is—nonsense. But if a friend tells you, “I can’t come with you to the speed dating thing tonight; that kind of thing just doesn’t work for me. Plus, I’m too old,” then you might not only take their word for it, you may even start to behave as though it’s one hundred percent true! But if you look closely, this second claim has no more evidence to support it than the first. What’s more, the second claim can wreak havoc just as surely as the first one can—perhaps, it can cause even more damage.

As you embark on the approaches and techniques covered in the rest of this book, you’ll be trying to do something you may not have done before: think about how you think. This is called metacognition. Trying to change negative thinking is a peculiar task because we are attempting to change our minds . . . using our minds. If we bring negativity to the process, we only amplify the problem of negative self-talk rather than address it at its root. Therefore, as you read, try to bear a few things in mind:

• You will need to think in ways you haven’t thought before. This means that the exercises will necessarily feel unfamiliar, awkward, uncomfortable, or even wrong. This isn’t a problem or a sign that you should stop. It’s only proof that you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone.

• You are not broken or unique in your tendency to think negatively. In fact, the preference for focusing on the negative has been hardwired into your brain over thousands of years of evolution (more on this in our final chapter). So, you don’t need to feel ashamed, and you certainly don’t need to feel negative about how negative you feel!

• From this moment on, you will no longer take your own word for it. In other words, you will make a deal with yourself that from now on, you will understand thoughts for what they are: thoughts. Not reality, not truth, not fate or destiny. Just thoughts. Just electrochemical activity in your brain.

• Finally, at no point in the chapters that follow are you required to be relentlessly “optimistic.” Changing the way you think is not about self-deception, denial, or believing comfortable lies. To say it another way, being a negative thinker is not the same as being more intelligent, more realistic, or more pragmatic.

We will explore each of the ideas above in more detail as we go along, but for now, it’s enough to simply be aware of one thing: Our ability to genuinely change our thought patterns is not some superhuman ability reserved for just a few people. It rests on two things:

1. honest awareness, and

2. a willingness to take conscious and inspired action.

That’s all. Just those two things. That means that no matter how negative your thought patterns currently are, and no matter how trapped and frustrated you currently feel, it IS possible to change. In fact, by beginning this book, you have already made the first small step in the right direction. Well done!

Problem 1: The All-or-Nothing Disease

Your brain is great at what it does. Its job is to make the world navigable for you—it creates shortcuts, rules (“heuristics”), and predictions so that you can make sense of the events unfolding around you. Your ancestors survived precisely because they were able to do this and, putting it bluntly, make sweeping generalizations and apply stereotypes. And you do it too.

Let’s say one day you try Nepalese cuisine and find it absolutely disgusting. You make a conclusion: “I don’t like Nepalese food.” This conclusion prevents you from repeating the unpleasant experience, and, at least from a neurological perspective, you can be said to have learned and expanded your experience of the world. However, there’s one inconvenient problem: Your conclusion isn’t true.

Our mental shortcuts, assumptions, biases and stereotypes are great at saving time and effort but are not one hundred percent accurate one hundred percent of the time. When we take a single experience and extrapolate our conclusions to apply to other experiences we haven’t actually had yet, we gain a sense of control and mastery over the situation . . . but at the risk of losing accuracy and nuance. Our world becomes more manageable, but that’s because it becomes smaller. So, the truth may be that you only dislike around sixty percent of the most common Nepalese dishes, but you’ve rounded this up to “all Nepalese food” and carried on with life, none the wiser that you’ve oversimplified reality in this way.

Whenever you use the following words, oversimplifying reality is exactly what you’re doing:

Never

Always

All

None

Forever

Never

To counter all-too-common black-or-white thinking, people are told to drop these words from their vocabulary. This is a good start, but it’s not the words you need to be on guard for, but the sentiment behind them. Any time we overextrapolate from one experience to other experiences we haven’t had, we are making an error.

Thinking in extremes is a problem because it’s inaccurate, yes, but the bigger problem is that you are living as though it is true. And this goes far beyond what words you use or don’t use.

For example, Jenna finds socializing difficult and is having trouble making friends in a new city. After a few weeks of trying unsuccessfully to join Meetup groups or connect with people at her gym or church, she says the following to a friend back in her hometown: “You know how it is. It’s harder to make friends in your thirties, especially if you don’t have kids. People just don’t have time to socialize. Everyone stays in their own little clique and it’s impossible to get to know them.” Jenna’s friend agrees instantly. Wouldn’t you?

The trouble is, although Jenna hasn’t used the words “never,” “all,” or “always,” she is still extrapolating to an enormous degree:

Step 1: My current experience is XYZ.

Step 2: Therefore, XYZ is the way it is for all people, in all times, and will forever be.

Jenna could have said, “I’m having a little difficulty these first few weeks trying to meet people,” or “I haven’t really connected with anyone at the gym yet.” Instead, she concocts a broad theory about all people everywhere. In fact, she makes a pronouncement so grand and all-encompassing that it seems to speak to the human condition as a whole. People just don’t make friends in their thirties. Can you see how she makes this statement as though it were as naturally obvious and true as the law of gravity?

It isn’t a natural law. But what Jenna has done is created a world in which it is. Then she lives in that world. She behaves as though it were true. Without even knowing it, she begins to lessen the effort she makes to meet people. She goes through all the motions, but at the back of her mind is this little theory of human nature that she has created, which says, “People aren’t really interested; you cannot join their little clique, as hard as you try.” So, she tries, but not really, and it doesn’t go anywhere. People don’t respond to her lukewarm efforts, and this reflects her own ambivalence.

Et voila—Jenna finds herself living in a world that looks suspiciously like how she said it would look. This is the natural result of thinking in extremes, using all-or-nothing language, and making grand theories off the back of one or two personal experiences: a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we talk about the world as though it’s either black or white, all or nothing, perfect or abysmal . . . then that is precisely the way it becomes.

Problem 2: “Out of Power” Language

Let’s stay with Jenna’s example, in particular her claim that, “Everyone stays in their own little clique and it’s impossible to get to know them.” You have probably heard people say things like this before—or maybe you say them yourself! Things like this:

“Look, I’ll give it a try, but you know how these things go.”

“It’s always such drama trying to get a straight answer out of these people . . .”

“Well, I’ve come down with the flu, so the whole week’s a write-off.”

Let’s be honest. We live in a world that can be incredibly difficult and trying. There’s a lot going on out there, and with a twenty-four-hour news cycle hellbent on reminding everyone of the near-constant catastrophes unfolding all around us, it’s no surprise that most people’s default setting is a mild (or not-so-mild) pessimism.

But words have power. When you speak, you are not only saying, “This is how the world is,” to those around you, you are saying it yourself. “This is the way I am.”

When Jenna says, “Everyone stays in their own little clique and it’s impossible to get to know them,” she is actually saying a lot more. She is saying:

The situation cannot be changed, i.e., it’s hopeless.

She doesn’t have any real control over how it plays out, or any agency to change the outcome.

This is true not just for some people, but for all people, including those she hasn’t met yet.

Life is largely determined by other people’s choices, not her own.

The entire friends-making endeavor is, at its core, a negative experience.

Pretty heavy, huh? Jenna takes all this and carries it with her to every single Meetup and get-together. It impacts her ability to perceive whether people are being kind and friendly to her or not. It changes the way she responds to rejection—or imagined rejection. It alters how she thinks of other people (self-absorbed, kind of mean) and herself (an outsider, passive). In fact, Jenna echoes this very sentiment to someone new she meets at gym one day. “Oh my gosh, it’s so nice to finally meet someone cool! People in this town can be a little uptight, don’t you find?”

Very subtly, she tells the other person exactly what her world is like. Without knowing it, and perhaps without the other person knowing it either, that feeling of hopelessness, negativity, and passivity is quietly shaping her world, and not in good ways. Jenna wants to communicate, “I’m having a hard time meeting people at the moment,” and instead communicates, “People don’t meet my standards. I’m subtly judging them for not including me.” If you were the person in the gym, which attitude would you find more attractive and appealing?

Any time we use “out of power” language, i.e., language that is passive, self-victimizing, doubtful, angry, unconfident, fearful, excuse-making, or pessimistic, we send out powerful messages to ourselves and others. And these messages come back to us—we can see our attitude reflected to us in the way we feel about ourselves, the way people respond to us, and the way our life is unfolding in general. If all we see and experience is negative, there’s a good chance that we are the likely common denominator (remember the poisoned pot?).

Habits of speech reflect thought patterns, but in time, they become our choices and actions, and these change and shape our world so that it literally conforms to the thoughts we have about it. This is powerful stuff. Like a sculptor who creates a statue with each scrape of the chisel, you are bit by bit creating your own reality with every word, thought, and action. Luckily for us, though, destructive habits can be identified and replaced.

Try it yourself right now.

It’s easy to see the principle in hypothetical Jenna’s life—but what does it look like in yours? There’s a good chance you don’t even know. The most damaging and stubborn thought patterns are those that we’re not aware of. That means our first task is to become aware of them! You can’t look inside your head. But what you can do is monitor your language and infer the contents of your head.

Your verbal habits will tell you everything you need to know. For the next twenty-four hours, commit to (neutrally!) observing the language you use to talk to and about yourself. Like a scientist, just gather data for twenty-four hours and refrain from interpreting or judging it. Notice the words you use, the way you frame things, and the things you don’t say. Notice the images you use, the subject and object, and, yes, the content, too. Note any assumptions and guesses. What patterns keep appearing?

What to Do about It

Earlier we said that the only things you need to combat negative thinking (or any bad habit) is honest awareness and the willingness to take action—in that order. We will consider many ways to approach both these tasks in later chapters. But for now, see if you can note down in a journal the various verbal habits you’ve noticed in yourself. Once you do, you can start to gently take action in a different direction.

Everything that is passive is reframed to emphasize your agency and conscious choice. Everything that is imprecise or inaccurate is made specific and realistic. Everything that radiates an energy of hopelessness is replaced with an attitude of mastery, self-command, and purpose. Here’s how.

1. “Reframe forward”

It’s a question of focus. You could talk about what you can’t, won’t, or don’t do, but why not focus instead on what you can? You could choose to talk about what isn’t working or what you don’t like, but why not choose to talk instead about what you love, what excites you, or what you want to create and build?

“I’m an introvert. I hate big crowds,” becomes, “I really love one-on-one conversations.”

The first is closed, static, and negative; the second is open, alive, and dynamic.

2. Embrace shades of gray

To combat overextrapolating and the all-or-nothing disease, get comfortable with nuance, ambiguity, and degree. Be willing to accept that you are seldom in a position, existentially, to make any all-encompassing statements about the nature of reality. Instead, just be curious and open-ended. This will allow you to take a peek into the “other side” and see what’s there . . .

“All the good men are taken,” becomes, “I wonder where all the single guys hang out?”

“If a woman hasn’t gotten married by forty, it’s a red flag, beware!” becomes, “I wonder what kind of person she is and what she cares about.”

3. Talk to yourself like you talk to a loved one

Negative self-talk can naturally lead to low self-confidence. Your inner critic is simply the voice of negativity directed at you as a person. It’s no different from physical self-harm, though. Most of us wouldn’t dream of insulting our friends, family, or colleagues, yet we readily do it to ourselves daily. It’s one thing to pause and consider if the thought you’ve just had is accurate, useful, or true. But sometimes, the harm of a thought lies in its tone.

Check yourself by asking if you’d say the same thing to someone you love or even just care about. No? Then don’t say it to yourself. It’s not about what you say but how you say it. If it’s rude to deliberately hurt another person’s feelings, it’s just as bad to hurt your own.

“You’re a nasty fat pig and nobody will love you unless you sort it out already,” becomes, “you are overweight, but you’re still loved and you deserve support and kindness while you try your best to be better. And you’re making real progress every day. Well done!”

Note that framing things in kind, gentle terms doesn’t mean lying or ignoring the truth. It means talking about the truth with love.

So, once you’ve gathered twenty-four hours of data and gained a glimpse into your unique style of talking to yourself, pick a single idea or theme from that data and try to apply the above three approaches. For example:

Recurrent thought: I hate this job, but I’m stuck doing it if I want to keep paying this stupid mortgage!

Alternative thought: It’s true that this job isn’t a breeze all the time, but I choose to do it because it allows me to pay for a home I love. I’m talented and hardworking, though, so I can always choose to do something else.

This alternative is “reframed forward” (all about conscious choice and agency: you are not stuck; you love your home), phrased in less absolute terms (the job is difficult, but only some of the time) and with more kindness (focusing on strengths and possibilities). Now you try it!

How to Identify Your Cognitive Distortions

So far, we’ve spoken of “negative thinking” as though it’s all one solid, indistinguishable mass. In the novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoy begins with the line: "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It’s arguably the same with thought patterns—positivity tends to manifest in a unform way, whereas there seem to be about a million ways for thoughts to be “negative”!

In the last chapter, you monitored your thought processes for just one day and worked on reframing a single thought or idea that stood out to you. In this chapter, we’ll continue on this path and take a closer look at some of the kinds of negativity we’re likely to encounter when we pay attention to our “thought traffic.” In other words, if negativity is a distortion of reality, then this distortion can manifest in several different forms. Learn to identify these forms, and you’ll become better at spotting distortions rather than being taken in by them.

A cognitive distortion is an incorrect belief, perception, or thought.

Of course, nobody is perfect and infallible, and we’re all wrong sometimes, but persistently distorted cognition is a problem. Where do these distortions come from? For the time being, assume that every mental twist and warp served a purpose at one time. Typically, distortions help us overcome trauma or loss in the past—however, if they continue long after the threat has passed, they tend to undermine rather than protect us.

We’ve already explored one major and very common distortion: all-or-nothing thinking. This is when we overextrapolate and break the complex world down into two either/or polar extremes and force ourselves to pick one of them (a decision we don’t notice that we ourselves have insisted on). This kind of distortion is characterized (but not always—ha!) by absolutist terms like always, never, everyone, none, etc.

“If you don’t agree with me, then you’re part of the problem.”

Let’s look at some more distortions you may uncover as you gain awareness.

Mental Filtering

This is basically like having a sieve in your head that only allows you to perceive and engage with certain data, while whatever doesn’t “fit” is allowed to pass right through as though it doesn’t exist. Once you’re done filtering, the only things left in the sieve are those things that align with the preconceived worldview you started with.

Consider the example of Carrie, who has a severely distorted idea of what she looks like (sadly, all too common in a world that stands to gain by her insecurities). Carrie goes out shopping for clothing one day and enters the changing rooms of several different stores. Three of the four mirrors reflect a fairly flattering image, while the final place she visits is a store with extremely poor light.

Carrie gets home after the shopping trip and says, “Well, that was a waste of time! I don’t know why I thought I’d find anything that looks half decent on me . . .” She completely forgets about the three flattering changing rooms and only remembers the one where she didn’t look good. Her mental sieve is shaped in such a way as to catch and collect all those experiences that align with the conclusion she has already come to about herself—she is unattractive—and completely disregards anything that challenges this conclusion.

In Carrie’s world, it’s as though those flattering reflections never even existed. If a friend points this out, she might reply, “Yeah, sure, but those mirrors artificially make people look better so you buy their clothes!” In other words, Carrie’s distortion is this: Only the negative is true or to be focused on; the positive is insignificant or an illusion. This is connected to another distortion that’s called “disqualifying the positive.” Here, we may be aware of data that doesn’t fit the preconceived idea, but we make up some story about why that data doesn’t matter.

“Oh, it was just a lucky break/beginner’s luck.”

“The ten times I’ve succeeded so far were just a fluke; this most recent time that I failed was the real deal. That was all me.”

“People don’t mean it. They’re being polite/kind/their opinions don’t count.”

If Carrie’s friend says, “You forgot about all those lovely dresses we tried on earlier and how nice you looked in them!” Carrie might say, “Well, you would say that because you’re sweet and you’re my friend.” In fact, Carrie might go as far as to find something negative in the positive, secretly thinking, “I bet she pities me and is just trying to make me feel better by pretending I look better than I do. It must be even worse than I thought!”

Later in this book, we’ll look at how Carrie’s tendency, although extreme, is actually a fairly common phenomenon called “negativity bias,” which has evolutionary roots.

Personalization

Mental shortcuts and biases exist because the brain is trying to explain to itself why something happens, and to make sense of events. Call it an existential self-centeredness, but human beings can sometimes imagine that random things have more to do with them personally than they actually do. In the realm of negative thinking, this can look like assuming that anything negative must be somehow your fault or reflect poorly on you.

While filtering can make you zoom in on the negative or imagine that it’s there when it isn’t, personalization is where you perceive a genuine negative but incorrectly ascribe its cause or source as yourself. It’s as though you say, “There’s a bad thing over there, and I’m a bad thing over here . . . so we must belong together somehow.”

One day, Carrie goes to a friend’s wedding and is obsessing all morning about whether the outfit she has chosen looks okay. When she gets to the event, the friend is hurried and busy and says in a lighthearted way, “Well, we haven’t had any disasters yet, but let’s just say not everybody seems to know what semi-formal means these days, if you know what I mean . . .”

Carrie immediately thinks that this comment is aimed at her and that her friend is implying that she isn’t dressed properly. In other words, she has correctly noticed the stress and fluster of her friend, but has incorrectly ascribed the cause to herself, passing it again through the same filter, which only ever allows one conclusion: You look awful. Similarly, when Carrie’s boyfriend cheats on her later that year, she doesn’t skip a beat before concluding that he has done so because the other woman was better looking.

Jumping to Conclusions and Mind-Reading

Closely related to the above distortion is the tendency to make assumptions about other people’s intentions and motivations, in the absence of any evidence. Carrie automatically assumes that she is the only one at the wedding that the friend could possibly be referring to, and also assumes that her own mental filter exists in her boyfriend’s head, too, who couldn’t think anything else but, “Carrie is unattractive.” Mindreading is unconsciously filling in the blanks and assuming that others’ thought processes must broadly be in alignment with our own. This is easy to do when you consider how infrequently we stop to actually communicate and check what people really are thinking!

In fact, rather than thinking about the situation from many perspectives, Carrie weaves an elaborate tale in her head about his cheating: He finds her unattractive and always has, and as soon as someone better looking came along, he went for her . . . and who can blame him? In assuming that his cheating is purely to do with her, Carrie is not just personalizing but mindreading. Without having a stitch of evidence, she “knows” that he thinks this. Her distortion blinds her to a more likely interpretation: Her boyfriend cheated because he’s a dishonest and disloyal person. Or he’s immature and made a foolish mistake. Or, just maybe, he himself has no idea why he acted as he did . . .

Catastrophizing

Also known as magnification or minimization, depending on which direction your distortion wants to go! Basically, this is the tendency to exaggerate. Carrie never says she’s plain or average looking but full-on hideous. She’s not just unattractive, but the most unattractive person who ever lived. And the fact that she’s hideous also implies the worst possible outcome, namely that nobody will ever love her and that she’s doomed to an ugly, lonely life where small children burst into tears upon seeing her in the street.

Minimization can be just as distorting as magnification, though. Carrie could spend an hour getting ready one morning, doing her hair, fixing her makeup, and dressing in beautiful clothing, only to announce at the end of it, “It makes zero difference; I still look the same.”

Negative thinkers tend to exaggerate the size of a threat while, at the same time, downplaying their own resilience, their resources, their strength, and their ability to cope with that threat, real or imagined. The negative gets amplified and carried to extremes, while the glimmer of hope is reduced to nothing.

Carrie sits alone one evening and imagines that her life is over. The negativity around her appearance has become so all-encompassing that it takes on the feeling of a catastrophe. It doesn’t matter that she has a fascinating job, lots of caring friends, a happy family, and countless talents and interests. The perceived faults in her appearance are magnified so much that they eclipse all these things and reduce them to insignificance while she sits to the side, completely powerless to stop any of it.

“Shoulds” and Labels

Here’s where it gets interesting for Carrie. When she starts becoming more aware of her own thought patterns and habitual negativity, she realizes that much of her perception comes from comparing herself against an idea of what she should look like. Her hair is wavy and fluffy—but it should be straight and silky. She is on the taller side, but she should be more petite. Her eyes are black when they should be blue or green or at least hazel.

Now, this book is not about to ask where Carrie got all these expectations from (although most of us can probably guess). Instead, it’s about the fact that comparison against some real or imaginary standard is so often the source of negativity. Many of us are perfectly happy with our lot . . . right up until we start to see how we measure up against everyone else. Only then do we feel a lack.

Closely related to this is the idea of labels. We can think of labels as a whole collection of “shoulds” that have coalesced into one. The label “beautiful woman” is then a checklist of shoulds. A beautiful woman must be X, she must be Y, and she must be Z. This is not reality, however, but an arbitrary rule we create about reality . . . and then we suffer because we don’t align with that rule. If you doubt this, consider how all the women with straight hair would love to have curls, and all the women with curly hair would love for it to be straight!

If Carrie’s example seems superficial to you, then consider something a little more serious. Imagine that Carrie’s friends are all intelligent, successful, and independent young women who are more than aware of the burden of beauty standards and the effect they have on mental health. One day, she opens up and says that she has always hated her appearance and wishes more than anything that she could look like those beautiful women she sees in social media.

How do these friends respond? They dismiss it. “You should love yourself! You shouldn’t pay attention to that garbage, and anyway, physical appearances don’t matter. People should value one another for what’s on the inside.” Sounds nice. But it’s also a kind of cognitive distortion. Clearly, appearances do matter. Instead of making Carrie feel better, this is the kind of thing that’s likely to make her feel worse—not only is she now unhappy about her appearance because she should look prettier, she’s now also unhappy about her own unhappiness because she should be confident and self-accepting enough not to care . . .

Comparing against some assumed normal or correct standard is a little like arguing with reality. Sometimes, we put ourselves in the role of CEO of the universe, there to unilaterally decide what happens and when, putting labels on things according to our own (flawed) understanding. So we say things like, “A beautiful woman is supposed to be dainty and small,” or, “A confident woman shouldn’t have those kinds of insecurities.” Says who? When you say “should,” then what usually follows is a judgment—usually not in your favor!

As you can see, a really juicy cognitive distortion doesn’t limit itself—it can be all of the above and more! Carrie’s distortions are a complex cocktail of a range of different biases and assumptions. But each of them is working in the same way, reinforcing a negative worldview and completely destroying the chance of arriving at a more realistic, healthy one.

But consider this: What would happen if Carrie’s mind wasn’t working so hard to undermine her at every turn? What if instead, its powers of critical thinking, conscious awareness, and intelligent choice let her live a completely different kind of life? Once you’ve identified your cognitive distortions and seen all the many ways they can show up in your stream of self-talk, then you’re going to naturally start wondering . . . what does life look like without all these distortions?

How to Challenge Your Inner Critic

You don’t need a formal introduction to your inner critic—you are well acquainted and have probably heard from it several times already today! This is the “voice” inside that criticizes, judges, and condemns. Your anti-cheerleader.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“That’s nowhere near good enough.”

“Everyone’s talking about you.”

“You may as well just give up.”

“Who do you think you are?”

We’ve looked at a few ways to reframe your perspective, embrace shades of gray, and adjust how you speak to yourself so it’s closer to how you’d speak to a loved one. But a funny thing happens once you start paying attention to your inner critic—it starts to feel like it’s everywhere! Now what?

Step 1: See thoughts as thoughts

This is the most important step. When your inner critic says, “This is hopeless,” you hear it, but you can say to yourself, “My inner critic is telling me that it’s hopeless.” Big difference. Your negative self-talk is not reality. Simply remind yourself of this and you’ve drastically reduced its power over you. Your thoughts are just thoughts. They come; they go.

Step 2: Gain distance

Make it really obvious to your brain that these are thoughts and that they are separate from reality and from who you really are at your core. Give your inner critic a name. Maybe imagine that it’s literally an annoying little bug standing in the corner, trying to get a rise out of you. There’s an enormous shift in perspective when you go from, “Everything is hopeless and terrible,” to, “Look at that, here’s the Depression Fairy again coming to visit. Hey, Mildred, how are you doing?”

Step 3: Be compassionate

One temptation is to rail against the inner critic when you find it. You might want to argue viciously against it or perhaps feel shame that it’s there at all. Resist this temptation. Instead, treat the inner critic with civility, attention, and kindness. Imagine yourself pulling up a chair at the table and feeding your inner critic a meal just the same as you would your inner defender. When we are compassionate, we normalize negativity and take away its sting. “You’re feeling sad right now. That’s okay. You do feel sad sometimes, but you’ve also had lots of joyful experiences, too.”

Step 4: Do nothing

Yes, really! This one is easy—refuse to act while guided by your inner critic. It can be a passenger in the car, but it certainly doesn’t get to drive! We can’t always help how we feel, but we can make conscious choices about how we act and what we say. Own that power. Refuse to act from your inner critic—act instead from that part of you that is aware, healthy, and realistic. “Yes, Mildred, I know you want to pick a fight right now, but instead, we’re going for a walk!”

What Positive Self-Talk Actually Looks Like

Positive self-talk is not just the absence of negative distortions. It has its own quality and character, and you’ll know what these are by the way you feel when you talk to yourself in this way: calm, hopeful, curious, grateful, stable, confident.

Positive self-talk doesn’t mean we are constantly giving ourselves an over-the-top pep talk about how utterly fabulous we are—this is, after all, just another distortion. Rather, there is a kind of dignified willingness to face reality as it is, and the confidence that comes with owning your free will and acting in ways that align with your values.

So, when something unexpected and unpleasant crops up, you think, “Huh, look at that! This is going to be challenging, but I wonder how I can get around it? I’m not sure yet, but I’ll find a way.” When something new and promising pops up, you look it square in the eye and say, “Wow, I never thought about this before—let’s follow it and see what happens!”

Positive thinking is not just content—it’s feeling. As you get into the habit of pausing to notice what’s in your head, don’t just look at the concepts; look at your attitude and emotional state. This will also help you avoid the common pitfall of “toxic positivity”—approaching your positive self-talk from a place of anxiety, self-hate, and avoidance!

In your comfort zone is the way you’ve tended to always think, and outside of it is the way you could think—a potentially better way. Separating the two is a line, which at some point, if you want to evolve, you have to cross. If you’ve been a negative thinker for a long time, your automatic response to everything we’ve explored so far might be, “Sounds fine, but that will never work for me,” or, “That’s too simple; the real world is a lot more complicated!”

The thing is, before we go any further, be aware that at some point, you have to take a leap of faith and cross that line—even if you don’t have evidence yet that it will work. All the positive affirmations and mindfulness exercises in the world will do nothing if you’re making the unconscious decision to never cross that line.

Before we move to the next chapter, challenge yourself to one final exercise.

For the next twenty-four hours, act as if you are a person who thinks positively all the time. It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not yet, just try it out and, for twenty-four hours only, let go of any doubts and suspicions. Bring a sense of humor to it, if you want to. Then, at the end of the twenty-four hours, pay attention to how you feel.

Once you can actually feel for yourself, in your own experience, the power of positive thinking, you will no longer be engaging with the techniques and exercises on a purely superficial level. You will no longer be satisfied with staying on this side of the line, only peeking over to the other side without ever taking the leap.

Summary

• How you think creates your life; negativity poisons everything in your world.

• Changing negativity requires a degree of metacognition (thinking about thinking) and a leap of faith to do something that hasn’t been done before. Anyone can change their thought patterns; it requires only honest awareness and a willingness to take conscious and inspired action.

• Our mental shortcuts, assumptions, biases, and stereotypes are great at saving time and effort, but are not one hundred percent accurate one hundred percent of the time. The “all-or-nothing” disease is when we overextrapolate from one experience to other experiences we haven’t had; we are making an error.

• Words have power, and our speech reflects our thought patterns. “Out of power” language is passive, self-victimizing, doubtful, angry, unconfident, fearful, excuse-making, or pessimistic, and can create a self-fulfilling prophesy.

• Become aware of your internal verbal habits. Then focus on what can be done, embrace nuance and shades of gray, and speak to yourself like you would a loved one.

• A cognitive distortion is a persistently incorrect belief, perception, or thought—for example, mental filtering, personalization, jumping to conclusions, mind-reading, catastrophizing, and using “should” statements and labels.

• Positive thinking is not just the absence of distortions, but thinking that helps you feel calm, hopeful, curious, grateful, stable, and confident.

• To challenge your inner critic, commit to not allowing your thoughts to dominate you. Gain psychological distance by labeling the thoughts as thoughts, not reality, and have self-compassion.

• Change happens outside your comfort zone, so realize that at some point, you’ll need to take the leap and try something new.

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