Positive self-talk
What is positive self-talk?
How we talk to ourselves has a massive impact on our mental health, and positive self-talk, while not always easy to do, is a great skill to develop. We talk to ourselves often both about ourselves and about situations. Positive self-talk can be used to turn around any "catastrophized" statement. For instance, if you find yourself saying "things will never go back to normal," find a way to reframe that statement and make it more positive. A great quote from our One Book One Community Book, Turtles All the Way Down is "Your now is not your forever," and that's the truth. Just because things are challenging currently doesn't mean they will always be this challenging. Life is always going to have ups and downs, and it's important to remember when things are down that they will eventually go back up and level out again. Important aspects of positive self-talk include gratitude exercises and positive affirmations.
Why is positive self-talk important?
How we think about situations and ourselves leads to either positive or negative feelings, which drives our behavior. If we are able to have more fewer negative thoughts, we would be able to experience fewer uncomfortable feelings.
Gratitude exercises
When experiencing challenging times, it can be easy to focus only on the negatives and forget about the positive things that we have to be grateful for. Gratitude exercises encourage us to recall things that we have to be grateful for, and in some cases, express the gratitude to others. While it can be difficult sometimes to remember positive things when our brain wants to focus on the negative, that’s the point! In doing so, you’re re-training your brain to have less of a negative filter. Things to be grateful for don’t have to be elaborate – they can be things that many of us take for granted such as being grateful for certain friends and family, being grateful for health, grateful that the weather is nice, grateful for a certain meal or snack, or grateful that your favorite artist released a new song. When engaging in gratitude exercises, try to end the grateful statement with a period rather than a "but." For instance, try not to let the statement "I'm grateful for my friends" turn into "I'm grateful for my friends, but I wish I had more of them." Your gratitude time is the time you should be setting aside to allow yourself to focus on the positive.
positive affirmations
As a golden rule, we should not be saying things to ourselves that we wouldn't say to our best friends. We should be our own biggest cheerleader, but oftentimes we're our own worst critic. The way we talk about ourselves to ourselves can affect our self-esteem and general sense of well-being, so try to challenge negative thoughts about yourself to be more positive. Going along with this, try changing "I can't" to "I can" and/or "I will." Telling ourselves we can't do things that we can do is setting us up for failure because when we say "I can't handle this" and we have no choice but to handle whatever "this" is, that is automatically going to translate into negative thoughts. After all, we're telling ourselves we can't do something that we have no choice but to do. Instead, we should be telling ourselves, "this situation isn't ideal" or even "I don't like this situation, BUT I can handle it." Positive affirmations, telling ourselves that we can do things, we are worthy, enough, etc. are a great way to begin to practice better positive self-talk.