Journal Prompts for Personal Development
Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
10 Habits for a Healthy Life
How to Change Your Self-Talk
Self-Talk
Many people are conscious of an inner voice that provides a running monologue on their lives throughout the day. This inner voice, or self-talk, combining conscious thoughts and unconscious beliefs and biases, provides a way for the brain to interpret and process daily experiences.
Our self-talk can be cheerful and supportive or negative and self-defeating. Self-talk can be beneficial when it’s positive, calming fears and bolstering confidence. Human nature, unfortunately, is prone to negative self-talk, including sweeping assertions like “I can’t do anything right” or “I’m a complete failure."
Why Self-Talk Matters
Some people believe they can credit their success to having a strong inner voice. In some cases, even a critical inner voice can push individuals to achieve by raising awareness of internal and external obstacles to achievement. Over time, though, that type of self-talk can take a toll on one’s confidence, fostering shame and limiting personal growth.
Is it OK to talk to yourself?
Many people use self-talk, either internal or aloud, to motivate themselves, and research shows that it can be beneficial, if done properly. In a study, people who used the first-person when talking to themselves before a task were less effective than those who spoke to themselves in the second- or third-person. Creating psychological distance in our self-talk, then, can help us calm down and face challenging moments.
How can I make my self-talk work for me?
You can make your self-talk work for you by closely monitoring it. It’s easy to allow self-talk to become critical or dwell in second-guessing. When this happens, research shows, we become less successful at finding creative solutions for problems—and others may come to doubt us as well. Correcting your self-talk when it’s unconstructive can keep it focused on boosting you.
What are the most useful kinds of self-talk?
When self-talk focuses on how we can thrive, and not just survive, it can provide essential motivation to achieve goals. Self-talk that helps us take a wider view of our lives and opportunities, rather than narrowly focusing on threats, and self-talk that acknowledges and directly addresses our doubts and fears, have been shown to promote happiness, well-being, and success.
How can I keep my self-talk positive?
Self-talk can veer toward the negative when we think back to past situations in which things did not go well—and when we ponder a future full of things that could go wrong. Research finds that when self-talk focuses on the present moment instead, and on seeing that moment and its opportunities as valuable, it more effectively helps us reach our goals.
The Danger of Negative Self-Talk
The problem with negative self-talk is that it typically does not reflect reality, and so it can convince people, wrongly, that they are not only not good enough, but that they can never get better, paralyzing them into self-absorption and inaction.
People with depression and anxiety frequently experience destructive and dysfunctional self-talk; the internal chatter they hear may be incessant and overly critical. Overwhelmed by the negativity, they can wallow in painful rumination, attacking themselves ceaselessly. In severe cases, this type of inner dialogue can be curtailed with professional treatment, such as cognitive behavioral therapy.
Why do we allow ourselves to be self-critical?
People who believe negative self-talk is valid often imagine that it is honest; that it limits their ego; that it prepares them for disappointment; or that they simply deserve it. Considering whether they think it would be useful or fair to speak to a good friend the same way can help them understand why they should stop justifying their self-criticism, and instead work to silence it.
How can self-talk affect your sexual confidence?
Negative self-talk can infiltrate every aspect of a person’s life, including sex. When people are critical of their looks, fitness, or sexual skill, it can lead to performance anxiety and encounters that are unsatisfying for both themselves and their partners. Cutting off self-criticism when it starts to interfere with a sexual experience, and replacing it with mindful or self-compassionate thoughts, can help restore sexual self-confidence.
How does negative self-talk affect body image?
The technique of reframing negative self-talk can be especially valuable when those thoughts focus on people's bodies or appearance. When such thoughts arise, one can remind themself, “Everyone feels like this sometimes, but how I feel about my appearance does not determine my worth,” for example, or “These are the legs that move me around in the world and the arms that hug the people I love.”
How to Change Your Self-Talk
Even harsh self-talk can be effectively challenged and sidelined. Becoming consciously aware of its role is the first step. Then, some simple and straightforward self-help techniques can be useful, such as rehearsing a more constructive inner voice with more positive tones, and learning to address oneself in the third person. Using one’s name instead of “I” during moments of inner dialogue, research has found, can create useful psychological distance from the emotional intensity of the self, enabling one to avoid rumination and move forward with greater perspective, calm, and confidence.
What Doing the Work Looks Like
Optimal Arousal, Hyperarousal, & Hypoarousal
14 Day Minimalism Challenge
De-escalation Techniques
Powerful Ways to Release Emotions Trapped in the Body
A Guide to Practicing Mindfulness for Anxiety
One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Swami Satchidananda, once said that there is nothing in this world more valuable than your own peace. The first time I heard that statement the words sank so deeply into my being I was changed forever. I feel grateful when I am mindful enough to remember this simple wisdom in a moment of worry or frustration.
What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is an acute awareness of the present moment. This means being as fully conscious as possible of all feelings and sensations. By choosing to maintain your alertness in ever-finer degrees of precision, you are able to process the sights, sounds, and smells that reach your senses with refreshing clarity. You are able to observe your thoughts with a kind of compassionate objectivity. Through the diligent cultivation of loving awareness, mindfulness improves the probability that you will be able to respond without reacting if something unexpected or upsetting happens.
Mindfulness Opens and Allows
Incorporating mindfulness exercises into your daily routine can open your heart in a powerful way. The ability to practice mindfulness naturally encourages gratitude, a feeling I believe to be a kind of secret prerequisite for bliss—one of the most elusive (and amazing) feeling states there is. If you are able to put down judgments long enough, your heart starts to appreciate life. When you can cultivate sincere reverence for life for more than a moment or two, transformation can occur and the spiritual essence of love and bliss starts to flow.
Realistically speaking, you don’t necessarily find blissful love-nectar on the first or even the 31st attempt at mindfulness. It is a sacred and mysterious energy. It is associated with opening your heart, being present, feeling grateful, and loving all of life exactly as it is. Mindfulness offers you a continuous opportunity to practice allowing and focus on accepting the now. After accepting comes the possibility of forgiving. After forgiving comes the possibility of loving. After loving comes the possibility of transcending.
When you realize that the things happening in your personal world are quite small in the grander scheme of things, you can focus less on your tiny little sphere of immediate reality. When this happens, you have the unique opportunity to identify with the collective consciousness—the rest of reality. You can expand. In these moments you are growing—spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally. It only takes a single moment of mindfulness to pull yourself out of a habitual, unconscious pattern of reaction onto a brand-new trajectory where choice is possible.
In this way, mindfulness ultimately grants freedom from overpowering feelings and emotions.
Applying Mindfulness to Reduce Anxiety
Freedom is what all anxiety-sufferers seek! Discipline, unfortunately, is a trait that many anxiety-sufferers lack. You may not associate discipline with freedom, but when it comes to mindfulness, the two are connected. It takes discipline to precisely observe your thoughts. It takes discipline to choose not to over-engage a spiral of negative thoughts or over-react to an irritating event. It takes discipline to choose to respond compassionately to the judgmental impulses or string of worries in your mind.
By practicing mindfulness techniques, you can become precisely aware of yourself becoming anxious and lovingly observe the sensations happening in your mind and body. Feel your shoulders tightening, your heart rate rising, and your breathing becoming shallow and rapid. These are physiologic components of anxiety. Mind and body are intimately connected, so if you are able to regulate one, it absolutely influences the other.
Observe and Move Your Body
By practicing mindfulness for anxiety, you will mindfully recognize when you are breathing rapidly or shallowly. You can then have compassion for your anxiety and take a deep breath. If you sit down and put your bare feet on the ground (preferably outside), you can stabilize your physiology pretty quickly. Add some relaxing music or recorded sounds of nature (if live nature sounds aren’t available) to encourage the shift. Playing singing bowls, chanting a mantra, and even humming a soothing melody can also help the body recover a harmonious physiological state.
Conscious or mindful movement, including dance, Tai Chi, and yoga are additional practices that can help the physiology center and reset. The practice of “shaking” (systematically shaking out arms, legs, and then whole-body) is my personal favorite for quickly releasing tension. It is basically the same technique that animals use in the wild if they survive a life-threatening chase. Shaking seems to help both animals and humans process and diffuse lingering stress hormones.
Without mindfulness, you wouldn’t realize you needed to do these things. You’d just be unconsciously swirling in your own anxious confusions (and delusions)! With mindfulness, you have the option to slow the spin of dysfunctional energy and stabilize it yourself. It’s empowering!
Take a Step Back
With mindfulness, you step back a minute. Once you are aware you are excessively repeating a series of fears (or things to control) and negative emotions, you have the option to stop. Awareness is the first step in making a change (in almost any area of life). So, you can realize you’re spiraling, lovingly have compassion for that, and then choose to take your mind in a different direction. As Swami Satchidananda taught, you can choose to keep your peace.
If choosing peace is not quite enough, then I suggest offering yourself this thought in a moment of worry or anxiety: “I choose to trust that the right outcome for all involved is the one that will happen.”
This sentence is a perfect encapsulation of the surrender necessary to permanently change your relationship to your own suffering. Healing stress and anxiety and panic takes time and effort, consistent practice, and plenty of compassion. It involves modulating your physiology and reprogramming your mind. Fearful, controlling thoughts have to be replaced with loving and trusting ones (such as the statement above). The breath and body must be brought back to a neutral, relaxed state.
Finer Details
Ultimately the question to mindfully ask yourself, if your anxiety is bad, is “Can I be okay with this?” And let “this” be almost anything. Can you be okay with your own anxiety? Start with that. The answer, if you want to get better, is “yes.” Yes, you can be so loving and compassionate to your own self that you can be okay with anxiety. You can honor it and nurture yourself in ways that help stabilize your body and mind.
Anxiety Is a Wonderful Teacher of Self-Nurturance
Worry is basically synonymous with fear, and anxiety is usually about your need to control a situation over which you have no dominion. This is why a key ingredient for healing anxiety is letting go. What else can you do? Hang on, try to control, stress incessantly, drive yourself crazy, and create illness in your body and mind? That is one option, but mindful, compassionate surrender practiced repeatedly is the way to healing, the way to freedom, and the way out of stress and anxiety to the higher frequencies of love and trust.
Practicing mindfulness to help anxiety and surrender does not magically mean only good things happen. “Bad” things still happen. This is life! This is Earth! This is a realm where souls seem to come to learn things. How do you know all that your soul intended to do here? Or what is the best outcome for all involved? You don’t! But, you can be compassionate of your vulnerability and choose peace.
Putting This into Practice
Mindfully notice yourself becoming anxious in mind and body.
Compassionately forgive the anxiety.
Deepen your breath. Connect to the earth (consciously think about and intend to connect to the earth).
Take supportive steps to further stabilize and nurture your mind and body (put bare feet on the ground, repeat a mantra, empty your mind, meditate, move your body gently (think dance, yoga, and Qi Gong), listen to relaxing music, play music, sing, create art, and write.
Speak to yourself. Ask yourself if you can release your need to control the outcome regarding the thing that sparked your worry. Ask yourself if you can trust the universe to create the most appropriate result for all involved, humbly realizing that you cannot truly understand what “most appropriate” even is (it’s above your level of operation).
Be courageous and committed to finding your way no matter what. Belief in your own resiliency is one of the most powerful antidotes to anxiety I have found.
Still your mind. Release all thoughts. This takes practice, practice, and more practice. (Meditation is made for this step. It will help you have the skill needed to quiet your mind quickly when anxiety hits.)
Open your heart to the mystery. The ultimate healing of anxiety or panic is true and full surrender to whatever could happen—even your own death. When you can surrender to the fact that the path of life is unknown, you have the option to feel free. When you mindfully, compassionately embrace the unknown with pure, unconditional love, you can transcend anxiety and dwell in peace.
Mindfulness is an ancient technique for regaining control over the contents of your mind and the state of your physiology. It involves patience, observation, acceptance, and surrender. It is simple on the surface but far more nuanced in the face of distress.
There are scientific studies coming out regularly about the many benefits of mindfulness. For example, positive results have been found for mindfulness as a way to cope with anxiety, stress, cancer diagnosis, burnout, depression, and more. Two of the most commonly cited benefits of mindfulness in the medical literature are reduced negative judgments (of self and others) and increased forgiveness. It is heart-warming and hopeful that people exposed to this technique are becoming empowered to see themselves as a source of compassionate self-acceptance. Love is the medicine we all contain. Mindfulness reminds us that peace is not just a concept—it is born from the love inside our own hearts.
What is Body Dysmorphic Disorder?
A self-love reminder
Trauma Responses: Flight, Fight, Freeze, Fawn
Self-care when you feel stressed
The Anxiety Cycle
6 Tips for Professionals with High-Functioning Anxiety
Dr. Kathleen Isaac, a clinical professor at NYU Langone Health, started a support group for doctors amid the pandemic, but attendance was limited. She explains this in a recent NY Times article, "I think there's a sense of 'I'm fine, I know what I'm doing,'" she said. "There's such a culture of perfectionism, and it's so competitive that people want to present their best self. It's harder to admit they're struggling."
High achievers maintain their professionalism at all costs, even when feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious on the inside. High-functioning anxiety is not unique to doctors; this form of pressure occurs in many professionals working in intense environments where results are valued over self-care.
People with high functioning anxiety pride themselves on being hardworking, detail-oriented, and helpful, but these traits can be a recipe for burnout. They maintain a wall; there simply isn't time to process emotions. These professionals may blame themselves for the irritability, poor sleep, and decision fatigue that accompany burnout.
How to recognize high-functioning anxiety
Hardworking professionals sometimes have a hard time slowing down, even outside of work. There is no off switch. High achievers may fear failure and often have difficulties setting boundaries between work and home time.
A detail-oriented coworker planning a project can be a dream for a team member, but detail-oriented can also lead to overthinking or procrastination. Another example would be an online entrepreneur who spends time creating content that is never perfect enough to post.
High achievers with anxiety are especially helpful and often work in healthcare or other caregiving roles. It is not unusual for them to get overwhelmed with projects, taking on more and more to keep peace and make other people happy. They can't say no.
People pleasers put others' needs first
Professionals receive little training on self-care. The culture of medicine still values working through lunch or not drinking water during a shift to limit bathroom breaks and be more available for patients. Self-care isn't just a bubble bath at the end of the day; self-care is an attitude of self-awareness and self-reflection that allows someone to set appropriate boundaries to prevent burnout.
Living with high-functioning anxiety
Practice gratitude. Consistent journaling is a challenge; here, gratitude refers not to a list but to the ability to accept one's perceived faults as human. Imperfections are unique opportunities to learn rather than defects that fuel impostor syndrome. Books like Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are can be life changing.
Get rid of the "shoulds" in favor of more realistic expectations. Think of the "shoulds" like ants, one or two of them are no big deal, but a whole bunch together can carry you away like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie.
Thoughts are just thoughts. Your real identity and value are inherent to you as a person and not contingent on success. Your negative thoughts about yourself and your worth are not the truth.
Leading with high-functioning anxiety
Your vulnerability is also your strength. The self-awareness and willingness to share difficult times and what you learned is often more helpful than recounting wins.
People with high-functioning anxiety are often self-critical and believe this internal dialogue is necessary to perform. The danger is this negative self-talk can detract from the joy of wins. Think of a professional athlete who can't celebrate their victory because they focus on a missed shot. Ahimsa is a yoga concept of non-violence or "do no harm." It is why many yogis choose a vegetarian diet, but ahimsa can also refer to self-compassion. Treat yourself with kindness.
Non-attachment is a difficult concept for people in results-focused industries and environments like healthcare. Non-attachment doesn't mean that you no longer care about the outcome; with non-attachment, your emotional state is not tied to the result.
Final Thoughts
Professionals with high-functioning anxiety can continue to strive for perfection without being perfectionists. By practicing these mindfulness concepts, high achievers can find greater contentment in their work and life while mitigating burnout.
