Overcoming Negative Self-Talk: Silencing the Critic

By: Camden Baucke MS LLP

Much of our lives consist of how we speak with others and how we speak to ourselves. If negative, self-talk can be a persistent and destructive force in your life. While you are not actually speaking to yourself in the mirror, you do have thoughts about yourself and your situation. These thoughts come in the form of words that have negative meaning. The inner critic dishes out self-criticism and negative self-talk, making difficult moments worse. It can go as far as to question your basic awareness, your abilities, and your worth. Whether it’s a subtle buzz of criticism or a bullhorn blast of self-resentment, negative self-talk is damaging. It can have a significant and negative impact on your mental health and quality of life.

Negative self-talk can happen anywhere at any time. For many, it’s not just an occasional struggle, but a constant habit and barrier to a healthy headspace. However, like all habits, it can be changed through practice. Negative self-talk can be debated, disproved, and overshadowed with new positive empowering self-talk. This article will explore what self-talk is, how it comes to exist, its negative impact, and how to address it.

What is Self-Talk?

Self-talk is also known as inner dialogue, a conversation between you and yourself. You don’t hear it with your ears, but you hear it bouncing around in your mind. It can include thoughts about you, your life, your circumstances, or just about anything. Like all languages, the way it’s used matters the most. Self-talk can be positive, neutral, or negative, but it tends to reflect your perspective. Your perspective is often derived from the deeper beliefs about yourself and the world around you. This deep and pervasive process occurs right under your nose every day.

Self-talk often only enters the spotlight when we start thinking about it. Regardless, self-talk influences our emotions, actions, and behaviors in powerful ways. positive self-talk consists of self-supportive and self-encouraging statements, like a great coach or mentor. Positive self-talk leads to better performance, greater fulfillment, and stronger resilience when facing hardship. On the other hand, negative self-talk is destructive. Its purpose is less instructive and more punitive. It deals out harsh criticism, self-doubt, and can undermine every effort in your life.

How Does it Affect Me?

Negative self-talk can have immediate and long-term effects on your mental health. It can influence your life, acutely or chronically, in the following ways:

• Increases Anxiety: Negative self-talk can elevate worry into panic. It can increase feelings of anxious distress, which can minimize positive experiences or make difficult situations that much worse. It can easily lead to gaslighting yourself and creating doubts that only make life harder.
• Increases Depression: Negative self-talk can drag you down and make you believe you’re not capable of getting up. It can convince you that everything awful is your fault, and reinforce the perceived futility of your efforts.
• Damages Self-Esteem: If you treat yourself negatively enough, for long enough, you start to believe that’s what you’re worth. Repeated negative self-talk chips away at your self-worth, damning you to the thought that you will never be “good enough.”
• Hinders Performance: Negative beliefs create negative-self talk, which creates doubt and impacts performance. Less successful performances, due to negative self-talk, only increases negative self-talk, which further impacts performance. Before you know it, your belief may fit the outcome, not due to ability, but due to negative self-talk.
• Spins the Negative Spiral: Negative self-talk often leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, it all can start with one bad performance. One vague sign that your negative self-talk is true and you spiral down from there. This devastating cycle is often difficult to break once it’s already in motion. At the end of the cycle is anger, hopelessness, and utter frustration.

Unfortunately, the effects of negative self-talk are accumulative. Just as positive beliefs and positive self-talk can increase through practice, so can negative ones. Each time it occurs, which can be hundreds of times a day, the negative beliefs are reinforced. In other words, the more you engage in negative self-talk, the more you believe the damaging things it’s saying.

Why Do I Do It?

Negative self-talk doesn’t come from nowhere. The inner-critic is not born within you, but later moves in due to an array of underlying reasons. Negative self-talk typically stems from your personal history and interactions with others and how that influenced your beliefs of yourself. For example:

• Childhood Experiences: Criticism can significantly impact the developing brain of a child. Comments from peers, parents, or teachers can drastically change how a child thinks of themselves. Growing up means discovering yourself, and a negative childhood experience can throw a wrench in developing your sense of self and instill deeply-rooted insecurities.
• Past Trauma: Trauma refers to negative experiences that cause injury and create a protective response. Negative experiences can develop negative self-talk that serve as a perceived method of avoiding future pain, rejection, or punishment.
• High Expectations: Either it be social comparison or perfectionism, expectations mean consequences if you don’t meet them. Unreasonable and unrealistic expectations might have been placed on you, or you might have placed them on yourself to avoid an outcome. Either way, at some point it became adaptive to become your own punitive coach.

Now that you know what negative self-talk is, how it impacts your life, and situations that create it, it’s important to recognize what your specific reaction is. Your reaction being a pattern of negative-self talk that reflects a larger fear. This fear is a perceived danger within yourself that you learned was there.

Common Negative Self-Talk Patterns

Negative Self-talk can come in many forms, but it’s important to identify specific patterns. These different forms of negative self-talk can reflect unique underlying beliefs. Clusters of these negative “automatic thoughts” can be labeled into categories such as the following:

1. Catastrophizing: “This is going to be a disaster” This form of negative self-talk identifies several of the worst possible outcomes. One small domino, such as one little mistake, is perceived as setting a terrible and destructive path in motion.
2. Perfectionism: “It’s never going to be good enough” This form of negative self-talk reflects a futility and presumed hopelessness. It is the anthem of trying to achieve an unachievable goal. This internal voice sees anything less than perfection as a failure, like a class where a 99% grade is still an F.
3. Pessimism: “Nothing ever goes right” This form of self-talk creates a grand sense of futility. It assumes that the cards are always stacked against you and that no matter how hard you try, life will be miserable. With this self-talk comes feelings of helplessness, despair, and defeat.
4. Self-Blame: “Everything is my fault” This form of negative self-talk places the troubles of the world on your shoulders. It assumes that your behavior is directly tied to all the awful things that happen to you and others. Justified or not, you take the blame and feel the consequences.
5. Mind Reading: “Everyone is tired of me” This form of negative self-talk assumes the thoughts of everyone around you. It is believing that others are thinking about you exactly how you expect them to. If you place your own self-criticism on everyone’s minds, then you would understandably feel isolated and judged.
6. Over-generalizing: “I never do the right thing” This form of negative self-talk takes singular or infrequent instances and makes them appear more pervasive than they are. If you make one mistake, it twists that prevalence into “always” which is infinite and inescapable. Such obstacles then appear insurmountable and defeating.

Each type of negative talk reflects a specific response to events in your life. They stem from negative core beliefs and reinforce them over time. The best method of combating these patterns is to identify which of them you experience the most often.

Step 1 – Document & Plan

The first step to overcoming negative self-talk is awareness, documentation, and planning. Because it occurs in your head and yours alone, you are the best reporter on that experience. When you notice any negative self-talk crosses your mind, stop where you are and write it down. Document the negative thoughts, what triggered them, and how they made you feel. This process is reflective, takes a minimal amount of time, but charts a path to combating negative self-talk.

You can journal this for any extended period of time, either it be a week or a month. Once you recognize a pattern of specific negative self-talk, the next step is to plan an effective response. This doesn’t mean bullying yourself for having feelings or negative thoughts. It means you challenge the validity of those thoughts. Imagine they were work proposals you needed to sift through in a job. Here are some questions to start this process:

1. Is this thought based on known facts or assumptions?
2. What evidence do I have to contradict this thought?
3. Is this situation dire, or is it what the situation represents?
4. Would I validate this thought if my friend had it?

Planning “the debate” for your pattern of negative self-talk is key to more constructive thinking. It assists you in shifting your mindset from living with automatic criticism, which is not humility, to thoughtful reflection.

Step 2 – Cognitive Challenging

Once you’ve documented your patterns, planned your response, now it is time for the rubber to meet the road. Cognitive challenging is a powerful tool for debating one’s negative self-talk and silencing the inner critic. It means challenging an automatic thought, one that was previously unopposed, and actively reframing it into a more balanced perspective. Here are the steps for cognitive challenging the inner critic:

1. Identify the Thought: Isolate and focus on the exact negative statement
2. Stop the Thought: Restrain the thought from solidifying, holding it in temporary confinement
3. Analyze the Thought: Ask the questions above, look at evidence that either confirms or denies that thought.
4. Reframe the Thought: Reshape the value of the thought. Balance it to a point of being a neutral or positive thought.
5. Reinforce the Balanced Thought: Celebrate your victories over the critic. Doing so will reinforce your efforts and make your next attempt that much easier.

By cognitively challenging and reframing negative self-talk, you can gradually silence the inner critic. With more practice, you can become more comfortable debating negative automatic thoughts.

Step 3 – Making Mantras

Healthy self-talk goes beyond disrupting negative automatic thoughts. An effective method of making a healthier mindset are positive mantras. These are simple, easy to remember, positive affirmations that directly address negative self-talk. For example, if you experience perfectionist self-talk “I am never enough” an appropriate mantra would be “I am enough.” These positive statements serve as counterpoints and can help foster a more healthy perspective. Here are some examples for each pattern:

• Catastrophizing: “I trust myself to manage whatever happens”
• Perfectionism: “I am enough”
• Pessimism: “I am capable of achieving goals”
• Self-blame: “I am worthy of love and respect”
• Mind reading: “My life matters the most to me”
• Over-generalization: “Mistakes are essential to learning”

While you’re practicing your debate against negative self-talk, take some time to practice these positive mantras. They will become a powerful tool for silencing the inner critic and giving yourself permission to be as you are.

Conclusion

Overcoming negative self-talk doesn’t happen overnight. With patience, courage, and the right tools, you can start the journey towards a healthier mindset. By identifying your negative thought patterns, documenting them, planning your response, cognitively challenging them, and practicing positive self-talk, you can begin to heal from self-criticism. A self-supportive internal dialogue requires practice, but you are more than capable of doing it.

Be kind to yourself, celebrate your successes along the way, and your well-being is worth the effort.

Please Subscribe!

Interesting in Therapy?