Positive thinking: Stop negative self-talk to reduce stress | Hacker News Reader

Positive thinking: Stop negative self-talk to reduce stress

mayoclinic.org

50 pointscebert17 comments

Every time a character in the Once Upon a Time series does an evil thing, their heart darkens.

Good and evil is not how I see the world (by the way, you get the back story of Once Upon a Time's evil characters and you understand why they are like this). But I picture this whenever I rant (when writing a comment or a message, or orally). It's much worse when I criticize someone. Conversely, I notice when I say something positive (but saying positive does not usually "cancel" the darkening - the darkening is there forever).

I still rant and occasionally say bad things of people, but I'm compelled to do it less and less because I kind of feel bad whenever I do it, and I'm also compelled to say positive things more often.

I do think life is easier, simpler and more enjoyable when you avoid this negativity. At least for me.

Ranting is still needed. Somehow you may need to emotionally express things that concern you to manage your emotions (catharsis). But maybe you can keep it to a minimum, for example by saving them to your confidant(s) only.

If someone acts in a way that compels you to say bad things of them, maybe stop and try to understand their point of view instead. You could learn interesting things and avoid gratuitous negativity.

But not fighting back when someone bothers you is out of the question, and some negativity can be helpful. I try to feel how much someone is pissed off by something I did to understand how much they care, and how much effort I should provide to avoid this in the future.

For me ranting and being negative is easy to do and I’ve done this several times in the past. However, there’s so much negativity out there one of my new goals is to strive to be positive. There’s enough negativity out there already, no one needs more negativity from me.

It's also probably good for you. I believe the brain learns to do what you are used to do "better". If you spend a lot of time ranting, you'll probably rant more. You might eventually end up wired to rant against anything showing up.

A relative of mine is like this, they are annoying with this. It probably only makes them less happy and this person seems to be annoyed by anything [new]. There's no upside to this. I personally want to avoid being like this at all cost. It's so much more enjoyable to be around someone who finds joy in insignificant things instead. I probably won't be this person but becoming closer to this is probably nice.

You probably don't want to be someone who is positive at anything, even shitty stuff, but there's usually some margin.

I agree, a naive view might be that if you have a lot of bad things around you its only natural to have a negative response, but we as humans can only handle so much capacity to handle bad things without becoming twisted. Call it delusional, or American toxic positivty, or optimism or whatever but I need to mentally put a thumb on the scale for positivity, real world be damned.

The subject matter of a rant is more often than not a response to an imagined narrative. Accounting for the complexities and nuances of reality does not make for a good narrative and therefore does not make for a good rant.

What I try to do is take some imagined narrative that is causing an emotional reaction and use that as a starting point for artistic creation.

For example, I just wrote most of a folk song in the style of a murder ballad about a man who is laid off via a Zoom meeting, tracks down and murders the boss man, and is then found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

Care to take a guess about the real-world motivations? The reality is that the people responsible for these layoffs are very different from the people in my emotionally charged imagination. The key is to use both our emotions and our inherent narrative drive in a productive manner.

Funny enough, I wrote this song a few years back while still employed:

  C
  Stricken with terror
                      F
  Do they still wanna pay?
                    C
  How easy is it to let go
           G              C
  What you don't see everyday?
  
  CHORUS:
          F        G     C
  And the search begins anew
          F           G   C
  A phone screen, an interview
          F            G       C
  Are the plans really falling through?
      F              G          C
  Just sign here, the papers are due
  
  Onsite or online
  Do they even know my name?
  If I were to leave here tomorrow
  Would the place stay just the same?
  
  CHORUS
  
  Working remote
  Does it always feel this way?
  And way back a long time ago
  Did they feel the same as today?
  
  CHORUS
  
  INSTRUMENTAL
  
  CHORUS

On one hand, headlines like this come off as so cliche as to be a literal Twitter joke—"Oh you're depressed? Why don't you just cheer up?"—but on the other hand, I think that people dismiss the potential of cognitive techniques to help their mood and stress levels.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but I do have clinical depression, and I would never advise anyone that you can simply think/meditate/hack your way out of it. HOWEVER, I have been having what feels like success with the following, very simple CBT-style thought exercise:

When you find yourself having a negative thought, "respond" (inwardly) with a constructive and proportional "but" statement. Example: "[After eating a bunch of junk food late last night] I'm so unhappy about how weak and out of control I was last night... BUT I now have more information that I can use to make better decisions in the future."

The point here is NOT that you are logically convincing yourself that the bad thing is actually good. The effect is much stranger than that. Simply doing the exercise itself will improve your mood. A cynic might say "well you're just saying the glass is half full instead of half empty, but I still know that it's empty." My counter to this is, no, you've missed the point entirely. The life of every non-depressed person you know is filled with half-empty glasses. But part of the reason they are not depressed is that they are not in the habit of letting that fact get them down.

Crucially I am not advising that you ignore your problems or allow them to fester unresolved. Rather, I recommend "demoting" your bad feelings. Instead of giving them a dominant position in your awareness and decisionmaking, pull them back to a more proportional place. It feels counterintuitive, but you may find that you're actually more able to face these problems, even the serious ones, when you strive to worry less about how bad they are.

I found it helpful to break the pattern of struggle and accept that thoughts are random, or at least consistently erratic, and not a to be taken too seriously. Once you stop trying to control your thoughts and learn to refocus on things you value you paradoxically gain some control back over them, since you start treating them like chatter on a radio and not 'you'. Its the automatic reactions to things that have to be intercepted at the stem, and while you can certainly imrove things I think seperating the sense of self from the self-talk gives you more patience. From that perspective putting a positive spin on thoughts is totally an option, but if and when it does not succceed or result in permanent changs, you have plan B (let it be, let it go, its just a thought, whats next on the agenda).

The World Health Org has an illustrated guide that includes a more validated *how* practice to reduce stress. Their terminology is different. They discuss how to unhook from distressing thoughts and feelings. It seems like a better approach. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003927

There are audio exercise clips as well, in multiple languages. https://terrance.who.int/mediacentre/audio/MSD/WHO-AUDIO_Str...

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

Many (most?) people like wallowing in negativity; it is somehow addictive. It really helps just not doing that, at all, ever. It takes some training to really force yourself to leave those thoughts, but it will make life a lot better. In my experience anyway. Took me about 3 years to really be able to do it.

IMO most thought patterns are caused by the state your body is in.

Low blood sugar? I’ll be in a negative mood, both at myself and others. I eat and it goes away.

Stressed? I’ll want to close off and do something mindlessly. I go exercise, and the desire to be productive/be social comes back.

Probably TMI, but I have to take synthetic thyroid. I was taking too much when I started. As a result, my thought patterns were very anxious and debilitating. Once I realised how it was impacting me I reduced the dose and I went back to my usual self.

That isn’t to say that negative self talk is caused purely by the above. Breaking judgemental thought loops using CBT is important!

The alternative: take the red pill, try to see the world as it really is, and resist the cult of positive thinking. We are all flawed, some of us more than the others. That's a reality we ought to accept, hopefully with stoic grace. Positivism [1] above positivity.

You don't need to be delusional about the present to be hopeful about the future.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

I must be unusual but I've never (within memory) had negative self talk. When I first heard about it, I thought people were joking, as in, why would someone willingly talk shit about themselves? As I asked more people though, apparently people do call themselves dumb or stupid or even worse, and I just don't get it. Could anyone explain if it happens to you and why?

My dad was hyper-critical and verbally abusive. My negative self talk is in his voice, using his language. I can't speak for everybody else, but for me the question of "why" seems rather straightforward.

Unlearning that is hard. You probably make mistakes from time to time, as do I. Only, that's an invitation for my dad to show up with some useless invective. It's completely involuntary, and I eventually learned to fight back -- essentially, telling my dad to shut up and go to hell -- and that's what helped me reduce it to near zero.

The sad thing is that my dad was a pretty cool guy, if we ignore the bad, and I liked him a lot. But the good parts of him don't live on in my subconscious in such a visceral way.

I grew up in a perfectionist and competitive environment. Its not that people were overtly negative to each other- but imagine if you only received compliments that imply you were previously somehow inadequate- “did you lose weight” or “I like your new haircut”. You internalize that there is a very narrow path to being accepted by your community.

>Self-talk is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head

What?

So, how can we spend this current phase!! Any ideas??

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