What Is Negative Self-Talk? - Deep Psychology

Let’s talk about negative self-talk: what it is, how it affects us, how to become aware of it, and how to detach from it.

If negative self-talk seems abstract or foreign to you, I hope you’ll discover that it’s one of the most common experiences we have as human beings, regardless of who we are.

And if you already understand how powerful it is, you’ll learn a powerful meditation technique to start to observe it and free yourself from it.

First, let’s define negative self-talk.

Definition

Fortunately, negative self-talk is easy to define. And since it dominates our lives, we’re all very familiar with it.

Negative self-talk is any mental chatter that is critical and self-directed. In my upcoming article on examples of negative self-talk, we’ll look at many types so that you know exactly what I’m referring to it.

This is different from negative chatter or negative mental talk, which includes any and all negative thoughts.

If this negative mental talk gets intense, we then sometimes start speaking out loud to ourselves in the same way.

As humans, we have all kinds of mental chatter or mental talk. We think about all kinds of things, all day every day, and most of us have no idea we’re doing so.

We chatter internally about our past, our future, other people, places we’ve been, what we like, what we dislike, what’s right, what’s wrong. Our mental talk is so ubiquitous that we can’t see it for what it is.

In fact, we can chatter about any experience that we have ever had or can imagine. We also have mental images, and they tend to buttress and reinforce our mental talk, creating a convincing inner mental world.

Often events in our lives trigger it, too: if we fail an exam or make a mistake at work, our negative self-talk tends to flare up.

And, amazingly, it’s not only kicked into action by events in our lives. It’s actually our default experience. It starts up on its own, over and over again throughout our day.

Our Default Experience

I want to reveal something shocking to you.

You might read the description of negative self-talk and conclude that it constitutes a minor part of your life. After all, why would we walk around criticising and tormenting ourselves all day, lamenting our lives?

But that is exactly what we do. A landmark study at Harvard University showed that, when our attention is unoccupied, we quickly become absorbed in wild, random, negative internal chatter. That is, we default to it.

We chatter internally all the time about ourselves, and much of the time, it is negative. If you don’t believe me, start a meditation practice and face your mind square on. You’ll be shocked at how much negative self-talk you have both during meditation and during your day.

Observe yourself, and you’ll realise that you’re often in this state when you’re doing things, when your attention is supposedly occupied. It’s almost as though we need a significant level of input to be taken out of zombie mode. Being occupied temporarily turns it off. Otherwise, it would always be on!

How many times have you got in your car, driven from A to Z, and had no memory of the journey? It’s likely you were lost in your thoughts that were completely unrelated to the situation. They completely hijacked your attention.

What’s more, those researchers also measured the brain activity of participants when “at rest”: when their attention wasn’t occupied. They found that certain parts of the brain were active when they were absorbed in their negative inner talk, but inactive when not. This led the researchers to conclude that the brain has a Default Mode Network, to which it defaults when our attention isn’t absorbed in anything.

Think about that: our default mode is not to be looking at what’s around us, or hearing, or feeling, or even to deliberately thinking about things. It is to be lost in negative thoughts.

That’s right: our default mode – the default human experience – is random, negative thoughts.

Sure, it’s not always self-directed negative chatter. But observe yourself carefully and you may find that you spend a significant amount of time in negative self-talk: criticising yourself, flagellating yourself, telling yourself all kinds of negative stories.

In fact, negative rumination is inextricably linked to depression. As Segal, Williams and Teasdale concluded in their book on Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, insatiable negative thinking is one of the symptoms of a depressive mind, and awareness and detachment from our thoughts is a crucial way to prevent relapse in depressed people.

the task of relapse prevention is to help patients disengage from these ruminative and self-perpetuating modes of mind when they feel sad

zindel Segal, j. williams & john teasdale

Though we’re not all clinically depressed, the Harvard study suggests we’d do well to ask ourselves how much torment our mental habits cause us.

My Conclusions On Negative Self-Talk

After spending a long time observing my own negative self-talk, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is largely:

catastrophic (in a study, researchers recorded participants’ negative predictions for their future, and 90% of them never came to fruition);
depressive (it’s repetitive and critical),
disempowering (it drains you, leaves you feeling hopeless, and overrides your decision-making abilities),
untrue (that’s right, it’s mostly BS, unconnected to reality in any way), AND
useless (it serves no real purpose).

I consider myself a fundamentally happy, upbeat person, yet I can see how it influences my life in myriad ways.

And ultimately, I’ve realised that though my thoughts appear to create a coherent self-identity, they really aren’t who I am. I am much more than my thoughts. Thoughts are just “stuff” that I experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

Your Task: Illuminate Your Negative Self-Talk

It’s really no use reading this article, agreeing with it, then moving on with your life. To understand what negative self-talk is and how it impacts your life, you must see it for yourself. You must witness it and its damaging effects.

There are two fundamental approaches to this:

Mindfulness of Thought: Learn this powerful meditation for negative thoughts;
During daily life: In that article, after explaining the technique, we look at how to take it into your daily life. If you do this, you may be shocked to discover how all-consuming your mental chatter is.

Mindful awareness gives us invaluable intel on our inner life and how we actively maintain negative states. These are powerful skills you can use for the rest of your life, and you can start building them today.

By doing this, you are both going an awareness of negative self-talk and learning how to detach from it, to see that it’s just mental activity, and that you don’t have to listen to it. Once you have a basic awareness of your internal talk, you can then begin to journal, spot patterns, and start rewiring it.

And if you practice Mindfulness of Thought enough, to the point you can maintain razor-sharp focus on your thoughts, you’ll eventually come to realise that thoughts are: