How To Break Your Negative Self-Talk Cycle

Hi, I’m Mark Marino.

“Individuals that demonstrate positive self-talk are thought to be more confident, more motivated and more productive”.   …Mark

But it’s not always easy to be positive, Is it?

Today, I’m going to discuss how to break your negative self-talk cycle.

The person you speak to most during your day is …yourself.

So be nice”.

But we usually don’t do this. Do we?

We can be unbelievably hard on ourselves. We say things to ourselves that we would never say to anybody else. If you heard someone else talk to a friend, the way you talk to yourself, sometimes you would be offended.

You see statistics show that we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day, and that if you’re stuck in a negative thought cycle, that 80% of these thoughts can be negative. And we usually repeat our thoughts from day to day.

You see, very often we don’t see the effects that negative self-talk can have on us. And there are different kinds of negative Self-talk.

One is catastrophizing:

That’s when we say, what if THIS horrible thing happens to us? And what if THAT horrible thing happens to us?

This has a tendency to increase our levels of stress and anxiety. The what if THAT?  What if THIS?  What if that…over and over and over again.

Then there’s blaming:

We have a tendency to blame ourselves for our own pain. And sometimes we blame ourselves for other people’s pain as well.

Or we can blame external sources for our pain and everything that’s happening to us. This takes our power to affect change in our life away.

And then there’s Rehashing or Ruminating:

This is when we go over a past event, either a physical trauma or a psychological trauma, and we go over it again and again and again, and think about how it could have gone differently and why that affected us so much.

And then there’s worrying over a possible future event:

that hasn’t happened yet and going over it again and again, and playing out all the different negative scenarios that could unfold even know they haven’t happened.

Now you may have heard me talk about the mindset loop. Now this is a neutral loop that starts with your thoughts and beliefs about yourself. Now your mindset is a set of beliefs, our way of thinking that affects your behavior and your behavior or your actions and how you respond to things.

So in the mindset loop we have our thoughts and behaviors that affect our actions. And then our actions done repetitively, become our habits. And our habits are what gives us our results.

Now our self-talk is in the thoughts and the beliefs part of the mindset loop. So if we have negative self-talk and negative beliefs about ourselves, that’s going to give us negative actions. Those negative actions done repetitively are going to give us negative habits, which in turn are going to give us negative results. And this is a cycle that we don’t want to be trapped in.

What we want to have is positive self-talk, which is going to give us positive thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. This is going to give us positive actions.  Positive actions done repetitively are going to give us positive habits. Positive habits are going to dictate positive results.

“So Positive Change In Your Life Starts With Positive Thinking”.

…Mark

So how do we stop this negative self-talk cycle?

First, listen to yourself and become aware:

Become aware of when you are using negative self-talk.  You will start to recognize the negativity like a red neon sign, and you will notice its effect on yourself.

Then second, analyze your self-talk.

Are you being too hard on yourself? Are you being harsh? Are you generalizing things and stereotyping, are you labeling yourself with words like stupid, idiot, fat, hopeless, anxious, stressed, always late. I never, I can’t. These are things that label yourself and your brain starts to get in the habit of negatively labeling and identifying with those words.

• facebook
• linkedin

Are you using absolute thoughts? Like…always or never, or good and bad or black and white. You see events in our lives are rarely just black and white. We know there are varying levels of gray within these spectrums.

And third, you want to reframe your negative self-talk to the positive.

“You want to biased your thoughts towards positivity production progress, and towards reaching your goals”…Mark

You want to flip the switch? Well, very often, it’s not just, flipping a switch. It might be more like a dimmer switch becuase it doesn’t happen immediately. This is something that you have to work on.  And for some people, it takes more work than others, but it’s worth the effort.

Now here, some examples. And I’m going to use these words only because it’s an example of how to improve it.

You went with the negative self-talk you would say something like,…

“I’m such an idiot…I can’t believe I messed up like that”.

And the correction to that would be,

“I can do better next time. What could I do to improve this situation in the future?”

Now another example would be… “I could never get in shape. That’s impossible”.

And you can change that to…

“Now getting in shape would be great for my health and wellness. What are the different things that I can do to improve right now?”

And here’s one last example.

“Those positive thinkers are ridiculous. I’ve always been a negative thinker. I could never be a positive thinker”.

Well, how about we change that to… “You know, learning to be a positive thinker would be really great for me. I’m going to give it a try”.

You see that great thing about working on your self-talk and your mindset to be more positive is that there’s no downside. It’s a win-win.

The only thing that could happen is that you’re going to enhance your mindset to have positive thoughts and beliefs about yourself. These positive thoughts and beliefs about yourself are going to give you positive actions. Those positive actions done repetitively are going to give you positive habits and those positive habits are going to produce positive results.

I want you to have a great day and remember as always…

Be Positive, Be Motivated, Be Focused and Be Well,

When you sign up to receive his blog updates via email.