{"id":111094,"date":"2020-02-04T08:11:26","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T14:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=111094"},"modified":"2026-02-23T10:49:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T16:49:17","slug":"the-3-simple-steps-to-stopping-negative-self-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/character\/behavior\/the-3-simple-steps-to-stopping-negative-self-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3 Simple Steps to Stopping Negative Self-Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m an idiot.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m such a loser, and I always will be.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I failed at this goal, just like I failed at all the others.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo one will ever love me.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The above are all examples of negative self-talk.<\/p>\n

You might have said these kinds of things to yourself, or have your own flavor of condemnatory scripts that you use. Whatever your negative self-talk looks like, you know it\u2019s not helping you move forward and make progress in your life. It\u2019s also making you feel like crap.<\/p>\n

But stopping negative self-talk can be hard. It\u2019s a pattern of thought that\u2019s likely very well established in your brain and follows a track of well-worn ruts. As does the pattern of trying to break this habit: you may have attempted to stop negative self-talk in the past but failed . . . which likely triggered more negative self-talk about being a failure . . . and on the dismal cycle goes.<\/p>\n

But there is hope!<\/p>\n

In my podcast with performance expert Dr. Don Greene<\/a>, he laid out the super simple way to stop negative self-talk in its tracks. Below I walk you through it.<\/p>\n

The Crippling Power of Negative Self-Talk<\/span><\/h3>\n

Before we get to how to improve your self-talk, let\u2019s first discuss why the way you talk to yourself is so important in the first place.<\/p>\n

While we\u2019ve all got a conversation happening in our heads, it carries on so constantly that our minds have learned to ignore it for the most part. We might not be consciously aware of this internal voice, but it has a powerful influence on the way we view the world and how we decide to act.<\/p>\n

You might think that berating yourself harshly helps you be motivated to do better — tough love and all that. But in fact, cognitively punching yourself in the face has precisely the opposite effect:<\/p>\n

Negative self-talk hurts performance.<\/strong> The nature of self-talk has frequently been a research subject for sports psychologists who\u2019ve wanted to figure out how mental chatter affects physical performance. These studies have found that athletes who talk negatively to themselves perform worse than athletes who speak to themselves more positively.<\/p>\n

Negative self-talk makes you depressed.<\/strong> The fancy psychological word for recurring negative self-talk is rumination. Studies have shown that rumination can contribute to depression. Even if it doesn\u2019t develop into full-on depression<\/a>, it\u2019ll bring you down in the dumps.<\/p>\n

Negative self-talk makes you anxious.<\/strong> Studies have shown that negative self-talk makes people feel more anxious. Feeling anxious sucks in and of itself, but it also gets in the way of doing our best at tasks we want to succeed at, whether tests, sporting events, or social interactions.<\/p>\n

Negative self-talk makes you less resilient.<\/strong> When we engage in negative self-talk, we typically make personalized, permanent, and pervasive statements about ourselves. These types of statements are also called \u201cMe\/Always\/Everything\u201d statements<\/a>, and they create a globalized indictment of our character; e.g., \u201cI\u2019m always messing everything up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides Me\/Always\/Everything statements, our negative self-talk tends towards catastrophization<\/a>. We\u2019ll take one little setback and mentally make a series of seemingly logical jumps that ultimately end up at an illogical conclusion. For example, if you fail a college class, your self-talk might go something like this:<\/p>\n

I failed this class, which means I\u2019ll get kicked out of school, which means I\u2019ll never get a college degree, which means I\u2019ll never get a good job, which means I\u2019ll always be poor, which means I\u2019ll be living with my parents forever, which means I\u2019ll never be able to date, which means I\u2019ll never get married, which means I\u2019ll never have kids, which means I\u2019ll die forever alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Each jump is small and seemingly reasonable enough to keep the train of thought chugging, but together they end up taking you to a dark, and ridiculously implausible, place.<\/p>\n

Me\/Always\/Everything thinking and catastrophic self-talk make you less resilient because you start to believe that your efforts are worthless and change isn\u2019t possible. The result is a paralyzing feeling of helplessness and stagnant inaction.<\/p>\n

The irony of negative self-talk is that in spending so much time focusing on your flaws, you never progress into actually addressing them.<\/p>\n

Listen to our podcast with Ethan Kross about getting a handle on the voice in your head: <\/strong><\/p>\n