Why Your Self-Talk is Important
Most of the time, we move through life without giving much thought to the voice in our head. Our internal voice comes in the form of our thoughts, and it narrates our day-to-day experiences as we navigate through each experience and every encounter.
However, it’s important to give that voice in our head, or our self-talk, a little more attention and reflection as it can be one of the sneaky culprits behind depression, anxiety, or an upsetting emotion/reaction.
There is a concept in writing called the “unreliable narrator.” This is typically used to describe a first-person narrator in a story who may not be a 100% credible, due to their own inherent biases or limited perspective from their vantage point in the story. In this vein, we can often be an “unreliable narrator” to our own life story, even as we are living it. The thoughts we think to ourselves about any experience or in any moment shapes the “story” we tell ourselves about the experience, and therefore, engenders the emotional reaction we may have to it.
For example: Say we’re visiting the mall. While we’re walking around, we see someone we know. We wave and say hi to them, but to our dismay, they don’t acknowledge us and keep on walking. Person 1 might say to themself, “Maybe they didn’t see me, or were lost in thought. I’ll try texting them later.” They may go about their shopping trip without much internal suffering caused by the incident.
However, Person 2 in the same situation might tell themself, “See? This is proof that people don’t like me and don’t care about me. I’m not even worth acknowledging.” As a result, they start to feel down and depressed.
The situation is exactly the same, but a person’s experience is largely dependent on the story they tell themselves about it, playing a key role in how they end up feeling about it.
Just as we may have biases about other people, we can also have biases about ourselves. For instance, if you hold the belief that, “I am never good enough,” you will tend to see events through those lens and filter in only moments or perspectives that prove that belief to be true, while filtering out evidence to the contrary (this tendency to filter in only evidence that prove our beliefs to be true is also known in psychology as the confirmation bias). The belief of “I’m not good enough” is like the thesis to your story, and as you’re living life, your self-talk is the paragraphs attempting to prove your belief to be true, using “evidence” from your daily experiences.
Which leads us to my original point: Exploring and building awareness of our self-talk is essential. Although self-talk is certainly not the only factor that contributes to depression or anxiety, it can often play a role, and may be the “main role” in some individuals. So if we do desire to feel better about ourselves and our lives, it’s helpful to look at this area and see if or how much it may be shaping our emotional reactions.
How do you start? First, just notice your thoughts when you are going about your day. Particularly when you feel upset about something, take a step back to observe the thoughts you were thinking right before or as you are feeling the emotion in the moment. It may be hard to pick up at first (especially for those of us who are not used to observing our thoughts), but the more you pay attention to your thoughts, the more you will start seeing certain thought patterns. Awareness is key, as that helps us to understand where we can start making shifts in our perspective.
I’ll likely go over in future articles about how we can begin to shift our self-talk. But if you are in the beginning stages, building your self-awareness is the vital first step. And you can remind yourself in the process that it takes time to build that awareness and to make changes to our thought patterns. We all can struggle with unhelpful thoughts from time to time, so you are in good company in your journey toward change.
Photo by Chinmay Singh from Pexels
