Doyou suffer from a constant stream of negative self-talk? Maybe it’s an overly harsh inner voice constantly judging and criticizing yourself? Or it could be an unrelenting flood of worries about everything that could go wrong in the future?
Negative self-talk can be a crushing burden to live with, and it’s one of the main drivers of depression, anxiety, and chronic anger. And in addition to the effect it has on our emotional lives, negative self-talk also affects our outer world—disrupting relationships, sabotaging new goals, and impairing our ability to work.
Luckily, no matter how or where your negative self-talk originated, with a little bit of practice and perseverance, it is possible to free yourself from it. But before you can move beyond your negative self-talk, you must learn to identify it and see it clearly. And the best way to do that is to familiarize yourself with the most common patterns of negative self-talk.
Mind Reading
Mind reading is assuming we understand what other people are thinking without any real evidence. While giving a presentation at work, you notice your boss looking at her phone and say to yourself: She’s so bored. I knew I shouldn’t have volunteered for this.
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization means making predictions about the future based on isolated and incomplete pieces of evidence from the present. After being passed over for a new position at work, you think to yourself: I’ll never get offered a promotion… I should just look for a new job.
Magnification
Magnification is when you take your mistakes or flaws and exaggerate them. Often magnification takes the form of catastrophizing—taking small negative events and turning them into disasters in our minds. After feeling a small heart flutter, you think to yourself: Is something wrong with my heart? Am I having a heart attack? I need to get to the ER now!
Minimization
Minimization is the mirror image of magnification and involves being dismissive of our strengths and positive qualities. After a word of praise from your spouse for helping your child, you say to yourself: He probably would have figured it out on his own, anyway.
Emotional Reasoning
Emotional reasoning means making decisions based upon how we feel rather than what we know to be true. After a long day at work, you get home, briefly consider going for a run, but decide not to, reasoning to yourself: I just don’t have any energy to run today. Hopefully I’ll feel more motivated tomorrow.
Black & White Thinking
Black and white thinking is the tendency to evaluate things in extreme dichotomies. It shows up most commonly when we evaluate our own personal qualities and characteristics this way. Thinking back on a recent date that seemed to go badly, we think: Ugh… I’m so awkward!
Personalization
Personalization involves assuming excessive amounts of responsibility, especially for things that are outside our control. After our child makes a crucial mistake at the end of a basketball game, we think to ourselves: If I had practiced with her yesterday when she asked me to she would have made that shot!
Fortune Telling
Fortune Telling is the mental habit of predicting what will happen based on little or no real evidence. After a date that finished quickly, we say to ourselves: There’s no way she’s going to call me again.
Labeling
Labeling is when we describe ourselves or others in a stereotyped way. After a fight with our spouse, we tell ourselves: He’s just a dumb frat boy.
Should Statements
Should Statements are a form of self-talk in which we hold ourselves to unreasonable or unhelpful standards and expectations. After missing an important call from our boss, we tell ourselves: I should have known he was going to call about the Johnson account this evening.
Once you learn to see these patterns of negative self-talk in yourself, you’ll start to gain a new perspective on them. They’ll start to feel less like an intrinsic part of who you are and more like a bad habit—something powerful, for sure, but capable of being changed.
To begin undoing the habit of negative self-talk, follow these four steps:
- Acknowledge. The first step to quieting your negative self-talk is to accept that you can’t control whether certain thoughts enter your mind or not. Instead of criticizing yourself for your negative thoughts, simply acknowledge them. Tell yourself that even though you can’t control whether they show up or not, you can decide how to move forward.
- Validate. Once you’ve acknowledged your negative thoughts, avoid getting into a fight with them, which only makes them stronger. Rather than insisting that they go away or being critical of yourself for not keeping them out, practice a little self-compassion and validate your negative thoughts as your mind’s confused attempts to help you.
- Externalize. Once you’ve acknowledged and validated your negative thoughts, the next step is to get them out of your head and into the real world. Take out a scrap of paper, open a notes file on your phone, or even send a text to yourself transcribing word-for-word the content of your negative self-talk. If you can’t write them down, just say them out loud.
- Flex. The final step in reversing the habit of negative self-talk is to flexibly generate alternative, more realistic thoughts. For each negative thought you write down, come up with two or three alternative thoughts that are slightly more realistic or objective.
Negative self-talk is a habit. And while powerful, habits can always be changed. Learn to identify your negative self-talk patterns and then reframe them using the following steps:
Acknowledge your negative self-talk without being critical of it.
Validate your negative self-talk with self-compassion.
Externalize your negative self-talk by writing them down on paper.
Flexibly generate more realistic alternative thoughts.
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