Negative Self-talk And Depression: Powerful Insights

In this article, we cover the extremely important topic of negative self-talk and depression: how they are linked, the power of negative self-talk in maintaining depression, and, critically, how we can learn to disengage from our negative self-talk to prevent future vulnerability using MBCT techniques.

Here, I’ll be extensively quoting from the book Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression by Segal, Williams and Teasdale. Unless I mention otherwise, all quotes in this article are from this book. Some are translated from the newer, Spanish version, and I indicate this next to each one.

Though I’ve intuited many of these ideas through my decade-long meditation practice, their work ties it all together in a rigorous way. I’d highly recommend reading this book after this article if you want the full details.

I want to make clear right away that there is a solution to the vicious cycle of thought and feeling that overtakes sufferers of depression, one that isn’t based on medication, or distraction, or sheer luck. We’ll cover it in this article.

It’s telling that MBCT is now recommended by UK government as a treatment for relapse prevention in sufferers where standard treatments aren’t effective, and we’re about to find out why.

Quick Summary of MBCT

To quickly sum up this approach and its basis, we can say this: prior episodes of depression make us vulnerable to small changes in mood, which trigger negative thoughts, setting off a spiralling, self-perpetuating cycle of mood and thought, until we find ourselves with symptoms of major depression.

However, if we could switch to “a perspective within which negative thoughts and feelings could be seen as passing events in the mind that were neither necessarily valid reflections of reality nor central aspects of the self”, then we could decentre from our thoughts and dismantle that vicious cycle. This is the key insight of MBCT.

And it works, big time! In gold-standard clinical trials, MBCT has proven to be as effective as medication and standard psychiatric treatment in treating mental disorders.

“Our way of interpreting events and later reacting to them is key to maintaining depression.” (translated)

“establishing a new kind of relationship with negative thoughts has proven to be one of MBCT’s most useful aspects.” (translated)

Mood and Thought

Despite its prior ubiquity as an explanation for depression and relapse, there is no good evidence for the existence of dysfunctional attitudes as persistent traits in depression-prone people.

Curious about the fundamental causes of depression, John Teasdale and others turned to analysing the effect of mood on thinking, rather than the other way round.

They began to trigger negative emotions in experimental subjects and monitor the cognitive effects of these emotions. Their findings would set off a stream of new research that undergirds the latest understanding on the link between mood, thinking and depression.

“Several studies found that when nondepressed people were experimentally induced into mild depressed moods, then they showed negative biases in memory. They were less likely (and took longer) to recall pleasant events that had happened in their lives, and more likely to recall negative events.”

The basic model is that sadness is a normal reaction to certain life events. However, once the sadness is present, it then takes on a life of its own, conditioning our cognition, thought patterns and memory towards the negative. In depressed people, this tendency is strongly exaggerated.

Need a refresher on negative self-talk? Watch my episode on this topic.

Mood and Past Sufferers of Depression

Teasdale and other researchers followed the trail, and eventually came to a series of paradigm-shifting conclusions regarding depression-prone people.

It turns out that a key contributor to depression is the way we deal with sadness. Depression-prone people have cognitive habits that tend to perpetuate and worsen sadness.

“the biasing effects of depression on memory were not simply the result of more negative events in depressed persons’ lives. Such negative events undoubtedly occur, but, to add to the misery, depressed persons must also cope with a mood-induced bias that focuses more on negativity in their lives and less on any positive aspects.”

“the important difference between individuals who had recovered from depression and those who had never been depressed was not in how they thought about things when their moods were fine, but rather, what came to mind when they were feeling sad.”

Now we’re starting to see the importance of negative self-talk. It has the effect of perpetuating and worsening any negative emotions or thoughts that we’re already experiencing, creating a vicious cycle.

Permanent Cognitive Bias

Unfortunately, there is also a learned component to depression: negative inner material becomes ingrained and established when we repeatedly believe in it and allow it to disturb us.

“During an episode of depression, people experience both depressed mood and negative thinking. What if, during an episode, there occurred a learned association between one and the other?… For people who have been depressed in the past, even normal, day-to-day sadness might have serious consequences.”

“Whereas most people might be able to ignore the occasional sad mood, in previously depressed persons a slight lowering of mood might bring about a large and potentially devastating change in thought patterns. These thought patterns would often involve global, negative self-judgments such as “I am worthless” and “I am stupid.””

“Results from a number of such studies… suggested that even when the sadness brought about by the experiment was similar in previously depressed and never-depressed persons, the mood had a more telling impact for those with a history of depression. People who had been depressed before showed an exaggerated cognitive bias.”

“Just a small increase in sadness, for those who had been depressed before, could lead to a reinstatement of the thinking patterns they had experienced when depressed.”

I deduce that depressed people are highly prone to negative self-talk. Mildly unpleasant emotions trigger stronger negative self-talk than in the average person, and their patterns of negative self-talk are deeply embedded. They end up in a vortex of negative, disempowering thinking patterns and emotions, all multiplying and self-perpetuating, and they have no way out.

This topic also has a strong behavioural component, as we might expect.

Ruminative & Distractive

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema discovered two distinct sets of behaviour we can exhibit during periods of low mood: ruminative and distractive.

People who exhibit the ruminative style tend to isolate themselves and wallow in the problems or events that cause their low mood, chewing it over repeatedly to find a mental solution to their problems.

In doing so, they experience and re-experience the triggering events in their mind, along with their emotional reactions to those events. They’re trying to fight their mood from within, but in doing so inadvertently perpetuate it.

“People in such a state of mind spend a good deal of their time ruminating about why they feel the way they do and trying to understand their problems and personal inadequacies… in this state of mind, repeatedly “thinking about” negative aspects of the self, or of problematic situations, serves to perpetuate rather than to resolve depression.”

On the other hand, people who exhibit the distractive style tend to engage in an activity when in low mood. For example, they may go for a walk, or phone a friend, or watch a film, or do exercise. There is a concrete action that is taken to try to improve mood.

Have you ever felt rubbish and decided to stay at home and wallow in your misery? I have, and I know it almost never helps. I just sink further into the pit. I feel heavy and listless, I don’t look after myself, and I wind up chewing over my issues for hours on end. I’m overcome by the emotion and “can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Have you ever felt rubbish and decided to go for a walk in the countryside? I know I have, and it almost always frees me up. My mood improves, I feel lighter, and I gain a wiser perspective on my current situation.

You might wonder: is MBCT a ruminative or distractive response? After all, mindfulness is a kind of non-activity: externally it looks like we’re doing nothing. Couldn’t it be a ruminate behaviour?

I believe that MBCT is a distractive response because you’re still taking concrete action to try to change your mood. The difference is that it’s an action that directly targets the material of the mood itself, unlike reading a book does.

I also have the reservation that distraction might be negative, because we aren’t facing our issues square on. But I’ve realised there are many degrees and forms of distraction.

If distraction serves for us as a form of escape and prevents us from facing at our problems square on, then it’s damaging. But if it helps us get through temporary bouts of pain and then wisely reflect on our issues once we’re in a better state, I consider it fruitful.

Anyways, it’s been proven that people who exhibit the distractive response experience shorter episodes of low mood. Informally, we might speculate that the action or activity cuts through their mood and frees them from it.

I’d also add that this doesn’t justify self-destructive behaviour like alcoholism or drug abuse under the false premise that they’re “distractive”. They numb us, create addiction, and worsen our life siutation over time. I also believe it shouldn’t preclude direct action like mindfulness, which routinely asks us to face the psychophysical reality of our life, moment to moment.

The basic insight of the distractive style is that wallowing in our misery is not a solution to our misery. We must do something different if we want to free ourselves from it.

In summary, there are two reasons why people are vulnerable to depression: their low mood makes negative inner material readily accessible (emotion), and their suboptimal way of dealing with those moods (behaviour).

Indeed, emotion and behaviour form a package, a “whole mode of mind, a configuration or pattern of negative mood/thoughts/images/body sensations”, including “both the easily accessible negative material and the tendency to deal with it by ruminating” and “feedback loops involving the effects of emotion on the body.”

Negative Self-Talk

Let’s look at some more quotes that reinforce everything we’ve learned so far and clarify the role of negative self-talk in depression.

“Early episodes of depression were, indeed, often preceded by significant negative events. However, as more episodes of depression were experienced, stressful events played a progressively less important role. It seemed that later episodes of depression were more and more easily triggered.”

“What remains, once depression is over, is a tendency to react to small changes in mood with large changes in negative thinking.”

During periods of low mood, “thinking runs repeatedly around fairly well-worn “mental grooves”” and “this thinking, itself, intensifies depressed mood, which in turn leads to further thoughts.”

As such, “the task of relapse prevention is to help patients disengage from these ruminative and self-perpetuating modes of mind when they feel sad”.

That’s where MBCT comes in.

The Solution to Depression & Negative Self-Talk

To understand why MBCT is a powerful antidote to depression and negative self-talk, we must understand the concept of decentering. This is the key to it all.

Decentring essentially means experientially perceiving thoughts as objects or things one is experiencing. It has always played a role in standard cognitive therapy, but a secondary one.

It was traditionally assumed that standard cognitive therapy “had its effects through changes in the content of depressive thinking” rather than through the perspective that patients held towards their thinking.

However, “in studies in which cognitive therapy produced significantly better long-term outcomes than pharmacotherapy, the two treatments often did not differ on posttreatment measures of dysfunctional thinking.”

After further research, the authors began to suspect that decentering was actually the mechanism through which cognitive therapy works: “as a result of repeatedly identifying negative thoughts as they arose and standing back from them to evaluate the accuracy of their content, patients often made a more general shift in their perspective on negative thoughts and feelings.”

To be more precise, “patients switched to a perspective within which negative thoughts and feelings could be seen as passing events in the mind that were neither necessarily valid reflections of reality nor central aspects of the self.” This is decentring in a nutshell.

They began to realise that when it came to relapse prevention “the key was whether people could learn to take a decentred perspective on their patterns of thinking. If this were true, then there was no need to change the content of people’s thoughts, but only how they related to this content.”

Isn’t that remarkable? The way to mitigate against negative self-talk is not to change it, but to see it for what it really is. It is just negative self-talk. It’s not who we really are.

This is the key reason that MBCT is now a widespread treatment for a series of mental disorders.

MBCT, Depression & Negative Self-Talk

Let’s be very clear and concise about why MBCT is powerful.

“the core skill that the MBCT program aims to teach is the ability, at times of potential relapse, to recognise and disengage from mind states characterized by self-perpetuating patterns of ruminative, negative thought.”

“This involves moving from a focus on content to a focus on process, away from cognitive therapy’s emphasis on changing the content of negative thinking, toward attending to the way all experience is processed.”

“The basic tool to effect this change of mental modes, or shift of mental gears, is the intentional use of attention and awareness in particular ways. By choosing what we are going to attend to, and how we are going to attend to it, we place our hand on the lever that enables us to change mental gears.”

If you want to learn a meditation method for dealing with negative self-talk, one that is similar to what is taught in MBCT, check out my episode (below) and this article.

On a personal note, what I love about MBCT (and meditation in general) is that it teaches people real skills that help them to see, for themselves, how their psychology works. It’s empowering. They don’t need to helplessly depend on a doctor, or on medicine, or on pot luck. They develop the skills through hard work and dedication. That is how I have developed such great insight into my own mind and self, and I believe medicine needs more solutions of this kind.

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