Written by: Phillipa Brown, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The average human has thousands of thoughts in a single day. These thoughts entail a mixture of positive and negative, where the balance is different for everyone. Self-talk is the internal dialogue running alongside these thoughts and usually runs on autopilot.
Evidence-based research suggests that much of your self-talk depends on your innate personality formed in childhood and your environment. It also indicates that if you’re generally an optimistic person, your internal dialogue will reflect this to be more hopeful and positive. The opposite is true if you tend to be a pessimist.
But upbringing and your environment aren’t the only factors influencing your thoughts; you also need to account for an evolutionary aspect of brain development. Research has shown that the human brain evolved to react much more strongly to negative experiences than positive ones because our ancestors had a better chance at survival if they paid attention to anything bad and dangerous.
This is called the negativity bias, which is a tendency to register negative stimuli more readily than positive. The capacity to outweigh negative input so heavily has been shown to play a powerful role in everyday life. It should come as no surprise to learn that humans tend to remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones, recall insults better than praise, think about negative things more frequently than positive ones and learn more from negative outcomes and experiences. As a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena, “bad is stronger than good.”
From an evolutionary perspective, humans seem to already be on the back foot when it comes to thinking positively. Although negative thoughts are not regarded as useless, you simply don’t require them as frequently as you once did. In fact, positive thinking is now considered to be one of the most powerful tools you can harness if you are willing to do the work. Research led by Ciro Conversano and colleagues in 2010 from the Institute of Behavioural Sciences University of Siena, suggested that positive thinking can be an effective stress management tool and can provide you with a better quality of life and better physical wellbeing. Outcomes for those who were more optimistic were attributed to having mental skills that allow for better problem-solving, and being more efficient in coping with hardships or challenges.
In order to think more positively, there are a variety of different techniques that have been shown to be effective. However, before you can learn to practice more positive self-talk, you must first identify negative thinking.
To help you identify negative thought patterns, here are four categories your thinking styles may fall into:
1. Personalising: is a cognitive process where you assume responsibility for a negative or stressful event.
2. Magnifying: Cognitive distortions of magnification and minimisation is where you tend to magnify the negative and minimise the positive in your life.
3. Catastrophising: is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with minimal information or objective reason to despair.
4. Polarising: a cognitive distortion or irrational thought pattern characterised by the “all or nothing” principle. People with this unrealistic expectation do not see grey areas, only black or white in most situations.
Once you have established your type of thinking, you can begin to work towards changing them into positive ones or at least begin to prevent or reduce the negative response.
Some helpful ways to begin your journey to more positive thinking might start with the following:
1. Catch your inner critic: Learn to notice when you’re being self-critical and identify self-talk traps when you see yourself falling into negative thought patterns.
2. Change negativity to neutrality: Some people feel a level of deceit when attempting to shift a negative thought directly into a positive. For example., if your mind has a negative tendency to believe “I am bad at this,” it might be difficult to suddenly convince your mind to think, “I am good at this.” Instead, try shifting your inner dialogue to reduce the negative thought to “I am willing to work on this to get better.” Try neutralising a few critical thoughts to be increasingly more encouraging and uplifting.
3. Think like a friend: When you catch yourself speaking negatively in your head, make it a point to imagine yourself saying this to a treasured friend. Only say to yourself what you would say to a friend.
4. Surround yourself with positive people: Your mind is like a supercomputer that will process its own data and will also input data from around it. It does this automatically, so if you’re surrounded by positive people, it will begin to re-program itself to emulate its environment where the opposite is true if you surround yourself with negative people.
If you find that you’re not successful on your own in changing your thought patterns and have ongoing concerns, it might be helpful to speak with a therapist to help shift your inner dialogue.
Phillipa Brown, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
"Phillipa is a psychologist, entrepreneur and mother. She has a passion for helping people work through issues to construct positive and meaningful life changes. She believes the essential component of an effective relationship in therapy is forming a safe place to enable the mind to engage in transformative processes such as curiosity and self-exploration.
Phillipa is the founder of MeHelp Psychology, an online therapy platform focused on empowering people to access psychological support through digital methods. Before starting her business, Phillipa’s psychology journey began 15 years ago, and she has since worked across various settings in community mental health, volunteer organisations, schools, universities and private practice. When she is not working from her Melbourne base, she enjoys spending time with her young family in the Victorian countryside, where she has deep family roots. "
