5 Ways to Banish Negative Self-Talk for Good
By Sarah Elizabeth Richards
for Life
by DailyBurn
Erica Bartlett has spent most of her
adult life saying horrible things to herself. As a heavy teenager, her greatest
hits included: "I'm so ugly. No one will ever be attracted to me. I can't
stand to see how big I look in the mirror. I have no
willpower around brownies."
She started gaining weight after struggling
with loneliness and low self-esteem, and her own put-downs just made her feel
worse, fueling a vicious cycle. At age 24, she carried 259 pounds on her
5'0" frame. It was her mother's unexpected death from cancer around that
time that made Bartlett think about mortality and motivated her to get healthy.
Her goal: To climb Katahdin, a 5,200-foot mountain in Maine that her mother
loved and spread her ashes. Yet, as she lost 130 pounds over the next couple
years by eating better and exercising, Bartlett still kept up the self-hate:
"Why does so much loose skin hang off my arms? I'll never be athletic. I
still look ugly."
"I discovered that having such a
negative focus was really exhausting," says Bartlett, now 39, a software
product analyst and health coach living in Portland, Maine. "It takes a
lot of energy to constantly criticize yourself."
We've all been guilty of dwelling
on the negative. However, when that gloomy self-talk becomes a habit, over time
it can make you depressed,
anxious and stressed. Or it leads to destructive behavior, such
as stress
eating. "If you do it over and over, it
becomes automatic. It becomes hard-wired in our brains like bike riding,"
explains Mort (Doc) Orman, MD, a Baltimore-based stress relief expert and
author of Stop Negative Thinking: How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Stress and
Become a Happy Person Again.
Even though all that pessimistic
pondering can feel like it's got a stranglehold on our psyches, it's
surprisingly not that hard to change the habit. "We grow up with parents
and teachers constantly correcting us," he says. "So we have to work
at bringing
out the positive things in life."
Here's how to deflate the power of those
toxic negative thoughts.
5 Ways to Erase Negative Self-Talk
(and Start Being Kinder to Yourself)
1. Know your triggers.
It's important to identify what makes you
sink into a shame spiral. One of the most popular methods of squashing negative
thinking is called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is based on the idea
that thoughts influence feelings, which then influence behavior. The goal is to
recognize your unhelpful thought patterns, so you can challenge them and create
a new habit. "Doing this work empowers clients to be able to make desired
behavioral changes," explains Jeff Riggenbach, PhD, a counselor based in
Oklahoma and author of The CBT Toolbox: A Workbook for Clients and Clinicians.
Start by thinking back to your most
recent down-in-the-dumps episode: Did thoughts of "I'm not pretty
enough...social enough...or funny enough" make you feel insecure at a
party? And did that, in turn, make you want to drink
too much wine? With enough awareness, you can interrupt
that defeating thought next time -- before it does damage.
2. Explore the opposite reality.
Make it a game. For example, if
you're thinking "I'll never lose weight," flip it around and tell
yourself, "I
can lose weight." You'll end up surprising yourself by
finding evidence to back up your new position. "All you have to do is
think 'Could I see anything that would make this valid or true?'" says
Orman. "Maybe it's 'Well, I did lose 20 pounds a few years ago, so I know what
changes to make.'"
Taking that extra step to prove it to
yourself is more effective than just telling yourself "I can lose
weight." By thinking though arguments that challenge your original
position, you can start to whittle away an automatic belief.
3. Put an end to black and white
thinking.
Watch out for thoughts containing the words
"always" or "never." They're usually distorted and don't
give you an accurate view of what's happening in your life. Classic examples:
"I will never succeed" or "I always mess up my workouts."
Absolutes, such as "if I can't do it all, none of it is worth doing"
or "I just ate a cupcake and now my diet is destroyed," are
dangerous, too.
"We encourage people to take a bigger
picture perspective," says Riggenbach, who suggests this
healthier approach: "I had a setback one day, so I need to learn from it.
But I have stuck to my plan nine days out of 10."
4. Play out the worst-case scenario
in your head.
Don't just think about the negative
consequences of whatever is causing you anxiety.
Play out the scenario in your mind like a movie with lots of details. You'll
start to realize that the consequences of your action probably aren't quite so
extreme.
That's the finding of a new Boston
University study that asked 20 people suffering from generalized anxiety disorder
and 19 healthy students to repeatedly imagine positive, negative and neutral
events. The chronic worriers didn't add a lot of details, whereas the control
group could better articulate what they thought might happen. "The
worriers were stuck in a more abstract negative idea of the future. They
couldn't think their way out of a negative scenario," explains lead author
Jade Wu, a clinical psychology doctoral student.
She gives this example: Worried about money?
See yourself at your desk in tears over a pile of bills. What would you do when
you stopped crying? Would you pick the most urgent bill? How would you problem
solve? "By really fleshing it out, you can feel the worst of it and snap
out of the feeling." When it comes to dieting, eating an extra cupcake
might screw up your calorie-counting that day -- but it's not going to sabotage
your weight loss goals. You'll do better tomorrow.
5. Grill yourself.
Remember the Socractic Method from
college -- when teachers would question you to stimulate critical thinking?
Well, a recent
study by psychologists at Ohio State
University showed that patients who were questioned by their therapists to
challenge their beliefs felt less depressed over time. Researchers asked 55
patients who participated in a 16-week course of cognitive therapy for
depression to fill out a questionnaire at the beginning of each session about
their symptoms. The more Socratic questions the therapists used, the better
patients felt.
For example, if a patient said, "I'm a
failure because I'm divorced," the therapist might ask: "Is everyone
who experienced divorce a failure? Can you think of anyone for whom that is not
true?" The idea is to teach patients to ask themselves such questions when
they slip into negative thought patterns.
As for Bartlett, she felt better
about herself when she re-framed
her negative thoughts into more positive ones. Instead of hating
her body, she reminded herself of all the amazing things her body could do.
"Sure, some of my skin is loose, but I can hug another person, taste
delicious foods, walk for miles and play in the sand. These are gifts I still
have," she says. "If you can turn your negative thinking around and
focus on what's good, you have a
lot more energy."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/life-by-dailyburn-/5-ways-to-banish-negative-self-talk-for-good_b_8474608.html?ir=Healthy%20Living?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003
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