How I Conquered Chronic Negative Thinking
Filter all negative voices. But retain the positive.
For most of my life, It seems like no matter what I do, I’m never satisfied and proud of myself.
If I show my creative work to someone, I constantly talk about how some things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to and how I’ll make them different next time. No matter what I do, it’s never good enough.
Through constant journaling, therapy and meditation—I learned that my chronic negative self-talk comes from a place of lack.
Repetition
Our brains learn by repetition; someone or someones kept pounding that vile speech into your head.
How do we learn? By repeating over and over what we need to learn. If you could not speak up for yourself, that crap got stuffed down with more vile speech piled on top of it. The reality is those statements are connected to your hurt feelings. When they show up in your head, they upset you, right?
It is our privilege and responsibility to heal them by accepting them for what they are: emotional wounds we can validate and lie to rest, once and for all. But, pace yourself—healing takes time.
Negative thought awareness
Become aware each time you have a negative thought about yourself and challenge it.
I used to be way worse than I am now about telling myself negative messages. I have been working on this a while and read self help books. The reason we beat ourselves up has to do with lack of self-worth and not loving yourself. People don’t necessarily always glam on to the “you have to love yourself” ideas because it seems ambiguous. And I admit, that concept didn’t really resonate with me until one day, I was watching to a related YouTube video and it clicked. They said every time you tell yourself something negative and you don’t challenge it.
You are reinforcing that message to your subconscious.
So, if you’re going to work on this problem, you need to re-program your subconscious mind. They say the subconscious mind is like an iceberg. The tip, that approximately 10% that sticks out of the water, that’s your conscious mind.
Your conscience mind is your decision-making centre, it’s your active willpower, and it’s where you think logically and critically.
That other 90% that lies beneath the water? That’s your subconscious. It’s the part of your mind that informs the decisions you make with the biases, heuristics, memories, emotions, and beliefs in its storage.
Reprogramming your subconscious mind
Think of your subconscious mind as your internal programming, which informs everything you do.
So to re-program, you need to make your subconscious your best friend. Would you say those nasty things you just said to yourself to your best friend? No, you probably wouldn’t. So why are you treating yourself (your subconscious) so horribly? Be kind to yourself and treat you like you would treat your best friend. Just start becoming aware when it happens. Question the negative self-talk… and correct it.
What I learned to helped me the most was: not reinforcing the neural pathways again with those same negative repetitive thoughts.
I started to rephrase, either out loud or in my mind to negate the unkind thing I just said to myself.
For example, If you stumble and skin your knee do you say to yourself: jeez, you’re really dumb, you can’t even walk 50 feet without getting injured? Nope. Stop. Realise right there, this is not my thought. I would not say this to my best friend. So, I would then rephrase. Ok, get up dust yourself off and say, well, glad you’re ok. You are good. Scabs heal and I will watch where I’m going more carefully.
Bottom line
Be okay with not getting everything done perfectly or the way you’d prefer it to be. Life doesn’t necessarily work that way, and that is perfectly fine. You need to be your own biggest fan, so that someday you can get to that point where you are satisfied with the things you’ve done, and you can be proud of yourself.
Every day is a new opportunity. I won’t let self-doubt or judgement hold me back from the future.
Keep challenging the negative thoughts, and over time, it will get better.
This is such a great concept in theory but it is SO difficult to stop yourself and your thoughts. Especially negative thoughts when they've become second nature. Your post is really good food for thought.