Break Free of Negative Self Talk to Relieve Stress

If you've seen the movie 'What the Bleep Do We Know' you'll understand that we create our reality by the things we say, mostly to ourselves.

I had a real challenge with my self talk. Often I had tried positive affirmations only to give up on them because I didn't see results that I felt were fast enough. Then, by working with an NLP trained life coach I realised that just saying a positive affirmation wasn't enough. I first had to listen out for and acknowledge negative words that filtered up from my unconscious mind because what had been happening was that I would wake up in the morning, already feeling bad, when nothing had even happened yet! When I became aware of this unconscious self-talk, then I could do something about it.

This realisation was a huge turning point for me because at the time I was suffering depression for the second time in my life. It turned out that the depression was the result of unconscious negative self-talk that had gone on for some time and that had become so prevalent that it was largely ignored. I had allowed it to overtake my thinking without even realising it, thus affecting my mood, my behaviours and my results. Read more about my personal story here.

When depression is a problem, being able to change your mood is very important. There are many ways that mood can be changed with the help of outside influences such as drugs, alcohol or distractions but for me, I wanted to be able to control my mood without the help of outside influences. Hearing and acknowledging those negative WORDS from my unconscious mind, while persisting in positive words with my conscious mind was the magic pill for me. It was difficult at first, in fact I believe it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And I had relapses sometimes too, like if I woke up in the morning feeling bad and not knowing why. I had allowed myself to focus on the FEELING, rather than the words I was speaking and hearing in my mind.

There was nothing I needed to do with those negative words, other than tally them and watch as over days and weeks they interrupted my thoughts less and less often. I did choose to write them down for a while but eventually the need to do that fell away.

As adults we are blessed that we have this ability with our words. Imagine as a child not having this ability because we are not yet able to speak or understand the meaning of words. Children live in the FEELING state until they begin to understand words. Is it any wonder that sometimes our own negative self-talk goes unnoticed when our unhelpful beliefs and emotional patterning began in childhood?

Always remember this: Thoughts become Feelings become States become Actions (or non-actions) become Results.

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