Change Your Self-Talk to Reduce Stress
By Troy Rampy, Editor, The Wellness Blog™
“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”
— Mohandas K. Gandhi
Researchers now know that our negative beliefs are the source of much of our stress. This is because our beliefs, both negative and positive, literally shape our experience of the world.
Here’s how it works. Our beliefs shape our self-talk, which in turn shapes our sense of self, which eventually shapes the quality of our life.
If you change your beliefs, you can change your self-talk. Change your self-talk and you can change your life experience.
One way to change your beliefs is to first discover what they are by tuning in and learning what it is that you are constantly saying to yourself through your self-talk. I know this may sound a bit circular, but stay with me. It gets easier.
Your self-talk, as the name implies, is the internal conversation that you have with yourself. It’s that on-going, ever-present background monologue in your head. Some of your self-talk is positive and supportive; some of it is negative and self-limiting.
When your “positive voice” is uppermost, you naturally tend to feel confident and capable. That’s when you feel good about yourself and, not surprisingly, that’s when good things start to happen … quite frequently.
But when your “negative voice” (sometimes referred to as your “inner critic”) takes charge, you tend to feel insecure and inept. And then, through the Law of Attraction, you are more inclined to magnetize yourself to some “negative” experiences.
The research on self-talk began about 40 years ago. According to psychologists, our self-talk starts in childhood. Since children are new to the world and have yet to discover their relationship to it, they rely heavily on what their parents, siblings, friends, and teachers believe and say. This is how children primarily form their own basic beliefs about the world and themselves. (Children are also greatly influenced by what they watch on television. Yikes!)
For example, a child whose family struggles financially is likely to have beliefs about money that are quite different from a child whose family is financially secure. Each child then takes those beliefs into adulthood, and those beliefs form the basis for their self-talk. So the on-going, unconscious self-talk of an adult who came from a financially struggling family is more likely to be, “I can’t afford it”, or “I don’t need the fancy one. I’ll just take this less expensive one.”
But here’s the really scary part … our childhood self-talk is likely to continue into adulthood, unconsciously in the background, regardless of our current circumstances. That means that even if the child from the poorer family becomes more financially secure him or herself in later years, their self-talk is still apt to keep them in a state of belief that it could all fade away at any given moment. They will generally have this gnawing feeling that they are still financially insecure, even though their checkbook states otherwise.
The first step toward changing your self-talk, and ultimately your beliefs, is to become aware of its existence in the first place. If you aren’t aware of your self-talk, it’s easy to let your actions be guided and controlled by that inner voice because you probably don’t even realize that you have other options. So start today by becoming aware of your own self-talk … the conversations you have all the time with yourself in your own mind.
Awareness is always the first step toward any type of self improvement. Once you become aware of your self-talk, you can begin to take charge and shape it.
There are many ways to do this. Meditation is probably the best. Meditation will help you to observe the self-talk from the detached position of a neutral “observer” or “witness”.
As you get a little more separation between your habitual, unconscious self-talk and who you really are from the perspective of a neutral “witness” who is calmly and patiently observing your life along with all its ebbs and flows, then you are not so much at “the effect” of the events and circumstances of life.
That’s when you’ll start to realize that there is wholeness, and innate wholesomeness, to your life … and to you! You’ll also start to realize that the seemingly “negative” events of your life are simply transitory occurrences within an otherwise extraordinary life that is unfolding for you.
And when you realize that, then you are on your way to becoming the master of your own experience. And incidentally, that’s when you’ll start to truly reduce the stress in your life.
