Mindset - Self-Talk

Imagine sitting with your family on a plush picnic blanket in a beautiful meadow on a lovely spring weekend alongside a basket of delicious bread, cheese, and wine.

It is possible to be in this setting and feel completely racked with crippling stress, fear, and panic.

Perhaps you loathe public speaking more than anything in the world, and you have to give a speech in the coming week in front of your whole company. Even in the setting of having a picnic with the people you love most; you’re thinking about your speech: “I’m so screwed. Why are they making me do this? I hate public speaking. I'm going to embarrass myself in front of everyone.” These thoughts will cause your brain to produce elevated levels of the neurotransmitters epinephrine and norepinephrine, which will make you feel stressed and anxious.

It is of course, also possible to be in that very same picnic setting and feel filled to the brim with joy, gratitude, and peace. If you are thinking about how grateful you are to have the family you always dreamt of or of how lucky you are to have this moment together, your brain will produce the neurotransmitters oxytocin and serotonin, which will make you feel content and connected.

This demonstrates the first foundational principle of self-talk: our emotions are created by our thoughts, not by our situation.

In the exact same situation, your thoughts can make your happiness soar to the highest of highs or plummet to the deepest depths of despair.

This leads to the second principle of self-talk: while our thoughts lead to our emotions, our emotions lead to our actions.

In the same picnic example, when you feel stressed, panicked, and consumed by thinking about your upcoming presentation, you’re going to act distant, aloof, and cold toward your family. When you feel content and at peace because you’re thinking about how grateful you are for the moment, you will be fully present with your family and act kindly and warmly. Different emotional states lead to different actions.

Roman emperor and stoic Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of our life is determined by the quality of our thoughts.” This is exactly right because our thoughts lead to our emotions, and our emotions lead to our actions.

Enter self-talk. Self-talk is defined as the voluntary thoughts we think to ourselves. You can also think of your self-talk as your inner voice.

We have two types of thoughts; voluntary and involuntary. When you are meditating and the thought, “Would I rather reincarnate as an ostrich or an emu?” pops into your mind, that’s an involuntary thought. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t try to think it. It just appeared. When you rehearse a presentation in your head, that is voluntary; it is self-talk. You are intentionally trying to think of a specific word or series of words.

Self-talk consists of intentionally thinking (either once or over and over) a word or phrase that helps you keep your thoughts positive, so you can create positive emotions and positive actions. Here's an example from a guy I know from his experience in SEAL training:

“When I was in hell week, I found my mind being constantly bombarded with negative thoughts. ‘This is too hard. I can’t keep going on like this. How am I going to make it three more days.’ These negative thoughts made me feel stressed, hopeless, and like I wanted to quit. I know if I kept thinking these thoughts, I would be ringing the bell in no time. So, I just started repeating to myself over and over and over; ‘A few days of pain for a lifetime of pride. A few days of pain for a lifetime of pride.’ No matter what turmoil was going on around me, I just kept repeating the words.”

Holding a plan: ‘A few days of pain for a lifetime of pride.’

Freezing my ass off in the ocean: ‘A few days of pain for a lifetime of pride.’

The instructor screamed at me and told me what a loser I was: ‘A few days of pain for a lifetime of pride.’

Repeating this thought over and over to myself caused two things to happen:

1.     My mind couldn’t think about how sorry I was feeling for myself, how daunting the week was, or how maybe the instructor was right that I was a loser because my mind was occupied with repeating my self-talk mantra over and over. Because the mind can only focus on one thing at a time, my thoughts had the effect of crowding out all other others. It was like my self-talk was creating a forcefield in my brain keeping out all the negative thoughts that nearly broke me.

2.     I felt my emotions and energy levels transform. Because my mind was focused on something positive and inspiring – having an entire lifetime filled with pride for what my teammates and I had accomplished and endured – my brain produced helpful neurotransmitters like dopamine, which made me feel more motivated, energized, and capable. The more I repeated the phrase, the better I felt.

This is a great example of self-talk. His involuntary thoughts were crushing him. Negative thoughts were leading to negative emotions (doubt, fear, anxiousness), which led to negative actions (poor performance and wanting to quit). So, he switched his thoughts off autopilot, took control of the steering, and used self-talk to intentionally and repeatedly think a positive thought, which led to positive emotions (motivated and focused) which led to positive actions (completing Hell Week).

So that’s what self-talk is. But why is self-talk part of this series? Why do we need it to optimize our mental toughness and mental health?

Three reasons:

Reason 1: our involuntary thoughts are drunk and shouldn’t be given the keys to drive.

Our involuntary thoughts are out of control. They are often random, irrational, nonsensical, and utterly useless.

You can think of your involuntary thoughts like your really drunk friend at the bar. They're wandering all over the place and they won’t shut up. Professor and author Brene Brown calls her involuntary thoughts “the gremlins.”

Remember that our thoughts are what drive our emotions and our actions. So, allowing your involuntary thoughts to run wild – without closely observing and monitoring them – is like giving your car keys to your drunk friend. It's a terrible idea. Just as the friend will drive your car into the bushes, your involuntary thoughts will drive your mood and actions on a wild emotional roller-coaster of ups, downs, and nauseating sharp turns.

Self-talk is the tactic we can use to grab the keys from our involuntary thoughts. With self-talk, we can turn off autopilot, and rather than allowing our random involuntary thoughts to dictate our mood and actions, we can intentionally choose to fill our mind with positive thoughts that will cause positive emotions and positive actions.

So, the first reason we need self-talk to maximize our mental toughness and mental health is simply that our involuntary thoughts can’t be trusted to do it for us. Sometimes they’re helpful but oftentimes they lead to stress, distraction, and unhappiness. So rather than being puppets controlled by our involuntary thoughts, we become the puppet masters controlling our thoughts.

Reason 2: our involuntary thoughts have a natural negative bias

Not only are our involuntary thoughts out of our control, but they are also usually negative because of how the human brain evolved. Imagine it’s the time of early humans and two people, Bob and Fred, need to cross a lake to meet up with the rest of their group. Bob thinks, “This sure would be a nice day for a swim” and jumps right in the water and starts swimming. Fred thinks, “What if there are predators in the water? It's so dark and murky, I can’t see if anything is in there. If I jump in, I might get eaten by a crocodile. Even though it’s longer, I better walk around the water rather than swim through it.”

Back in the time of early humans, Bob would’ve been eaten by a crocodile and Fred would’ve survived. As a result, humans who constantly worried about threats survived and passed on their genes. Carefree, happy-go-lucky humans got eaten by hyenas and killed by other tribes.

We have inherited this neural framework, and our brains are still designed to constantly think about everything that could go wrong. This is meant to help keep us alive, but in the modern era where very few threats to our survival exist, this just makes us anxious.

So, we often need to use self-talk – the act of consciously choosing to think positive thoughts – because if we don’t, our minds will be filled with mostly negative ones. It's just our nature. And if our minds spend most of the time being filled with negative thoughts, our days will mostly be filled with negative emotions like stress, anxiousness, frenzy, fear, and unhappiness.

Reason 3: It’s pretty much impossible to prevent or quash negative thoughts.

We wouldn’t need self-talk if we could prevent negative involuntary thoughts from occurring. But we can’t. While consistently meditating and improving your levels of mindfulness will decrease the frequency of negative involuntary thoughts, you can’t get rid of them entirely.

When a negative involuntary thought arrives like, “I'm not good enough. I can’t do this. I don’t deserve to be here. I'll never make it.” - it’s extremely difficult to just make those thoughts disappear. In fact, often, the more you try to make a thought go away, the more you end up focusing on it.

Given we can’t prevent our negative involuntary thoughts or just will them into going away once they arrive, the solution that does work is to replace them. As we’ve discussed, your brain can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. So, if you give your brain another thought to focus on, it literally won’t be able to keep thinking about the previous thought. When you involuntarily think, “I'm so screwed. I have so much to do today.” You make that thought immediately and entirely vanish by thinking, “One step at a time.” you can also make that thought to vanish by thinking, “Gophers usually walk backward when they’re inside their tunnels because they navigate with their tails.” The point is – thinking one thought prevents you from being able to think another one. So, self-talk allows us to replace whatever thought isn’t serving us with a thought that will – or, in the case of the gophers, at least with a thought that, while it may not be terribly productive, at least won’t continue to cause us stress or unhappiness.

So many people are happy when things are going “well,” stressed when things are “hard,” and unhappy when things are going “poorly.” By learning to master self-talk, you will come to realize that our emotions and actions aren’t the result of the situations we find ourselves in. They are the result of our thoughts. By training yourself to think positively in any situation, you will unlock the ability to feel and act calmly, effectively, and happily in any situation. Your mood and actions will no longer be dictated by external forces.

Don't underestimate the power of thoughts. Every product, industry, war, and wonder of the world was created with a thought. And just as thoughts were the foundation of your mental toughness and mental health. By learning to master the quality of your thoughts, you will, as Marcus Aurelius said, learn to master the quality of your life.