Cultivating Supportive Self-Talk For a Healthy Mind

“How you talk to yourself, about yourself, is important.”

How we talk to ourselves influences how we feel and take action, and subsequent thoughts about ourselves. Think about the times you’ve experienced self-doubt and unhelpful thoughts about yourself. It may have left you feeling down and unempowered. Instead, consider times you experience more empowering thoughts. It can inspire action and motivate you to achieve more.

Our thoughts aren’t the whole picture when it comes to supporting mental health and confidence, but it does play a role. Replacing unhelpful thoughts with more helpful or balanced thoughts is an important practice to support a healthy mind. Here are some steps to start practicing more supportive and kind self-talk.

Step 1: Develop an awareness of how you talk to yourself

Develop an awareness of the unhelpful thoughts you experience, and also how they impact how you feel and behave. You can grab a pen and paper and write down what comes to mind:

What unhelpful thoughts do you experience?

In what situations do they more frequently appear?

You may experience more unhelpful thoughts in performance or evaluative situations such as when speaking in front of an audience, playing sport, or in social situations. Understanding where these unhelpful thoughts are most likely to appear, helps understand why they are there and what fears bring them to light.

Step 2: Practice unhelpful thought stopping

When you notice an unhelpful thought, stop it in its tracks. Sometimes it is helpful to have a trigger word (e.g. stop) or action (e.g., shake head, click fingers, make a fist) which acts as a prompt to eliminate the negative thought and reaffirm your decision to not re-engage with it.

It’s important to replace unhelpful thoughts with more helpful or balanced ones, because we cannot stop ourselves from thinking.

Step 3: Reframe unhelpful thoughts

Reframe or replace unhelpful thoughts with more helpful thoughts.

Example:

Unhelpful thought: I am not good at this.

Reframe: I am new to this. The more I practice, the better I will be.

Unhelpful thought: If I don't score the goal, my friends will think I am bad at soccer.

Reframe: My friends are here to support me and enjoy the game. It's okay if I have an off day.

Tip: Plan ahead

It can be valuable to write a list of your most frequent unhelpful thoughts, along with a more helpful way to interpret the experience. Thinking this through ahead of time may allow you to engage in replacing unhelpful thoughts with more helpful one’s more quickly, and therefore reduce the negative consequences of unhelpful self-talk on how you feel or act (i.e. sport performance during competition time). The more you practice engaging in helpful and balanced thoughts, the more automatic this will become.