How To Overwrite Negative Self-Talk & Retrain Your Brain

Imagine if you had a shadow narrator follow you around everywhere you went and transcribe every little thing you said to yourself. What portion of your daily monologue would consist of negative self-reflection? How many times would you want to hit backspace to erase your self-criticism? How many times would you want to edit out your moments of self-doubt? 

Sometimes we don’t recognize the harm we do to ourselves and our mind until concrete proof is laid out in front of us. This is because a lot of our self-destructive narrative originates from our belief system in our subconscious mind. 

Your Brain Is Your Computer… Or Your Iceberg

Remember Sigmund Freud’s famous iceberg theory? Just like an iceberg, the majority of your mind lies deeeep, deep down under the surface, in the depths of your subconscious.

Conscious & Subconscious: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Your conscious mind, the tip of the iceberg, makes up only about 10% of your mental landscape. It handles logical thinking, planning, and strategizing. But beneath the surface lies the subconscious, accounting for around 90%. This powerful storehouse holds your stored memories, habits and values systems, and your emotions and intuition that are all built from past experiences. 

Think of it this way: your subconscious is like a computer’s hard-drive. 

It saves and stores every bit of information you feed it, both good and bad. It doesn’t discriminate between useful knowledge and harmful negativity. Once our subconscious mind learns and stores information, it uses this knowledge base whenever it is required. 

Just like practicing how to do a handstand, your subconscious learns through repetition. At first try, your body isn’t quite sure what balance and body awareness are. Repetitive practice feeds your brain new data to overwrite the old, stored information with new, updated information. 

Eventually, practice will program automatic muscle (or neural) memory. Even years later, these muscle and neural memories are still etched into your brain, and they’re not easily erased. 

Imagine how this process works when you tell yourself, “Ugh, I’m so dumb”, over and over and over again. Your negative self-talk gets carved into your subconscious mind, and it’s not easily undone.

BUT luckily for us, neuroplasticity, the brain’s amazing ability to change and adapt, exists. And we can retrain our brain to overwrite old thought patterns with new, healthier, and happier patterns. 

Retraining Your Brain: A 3 Step Guide to Positive Thinking

Everything is rooted in practice. If you’ve spent years feeding your brain’s negative inner critic, it’s going to take more than a month to reverse negative though patterns. But just like any skill, reprogramming your thoughts is possible with patience and the right tools.

Imagine your brain as a muscle. The more you exercise it with affirming positive self-talk and mindful practices, the stronger it becomes at filtering out negativity. 

Here is a 3 step guide to retrain your thought patterns: 

1. Bring Awareness to Your Thoughts 

The first step is admitting that you have a problem, right? Think of a cluttered desk. Before you can organize it, you need to acknowledge the mess.

Once you take notice of these harmful patterns, it’s easier to acknowledge where you want to change. 

As Abraham Hicks eloquently put it, it’s pretty impossible to flip a switch and instantly force engrained negative thoughts to become positive. However, if you focus first on quieting the mind, you can bring awareness to your thought patterns. 

2. Quiet the Mind

Remember your brain is your computer.

A computer system becomes exhaustively slow when 10 windows, 5 apps, and 2 search engines are running simultaneously. The system becomes overloaded, and so does your brain. 

When you quiet the mind through mindful practices, such as meditation and intentional breathing, you bring yourself back to a calm and rational mind.

Meditation is like hitting the restart button on your brain. It allows you to observe your thoughts without judgment, letting the negative float away. 

3. Challenge Negative Thought Patterns

From here, you practice changing one thought at a time. For example, if you constantly tell yourself that you’re “behind in life”, aim to rephrase that thought to, “I am exactly where I am meant to be in life.”

The first time you tell yourself this, it’s likely that your bullshit radar will go DING DING DING. But this is why repetition is key. Affirm these statements to yourself every single day.

The more you say it, the more you will believe it. Water the seeds, and the plants will grow. 

Overtime, your brain becomes familiar with these new thought patterns and starts to rewire itself. This is neuroplasticity. Neural connections rewire and build upon positive experiences to build new neural pathways. Eventually, positive thinking becomes automatic.

4. Practice Morning Gratitude Daily

Starting your day with gratitude sets your mind to a more positive state. Wake up every single morning, and list 3 things that you are grateful for. This can be thought, spoken, or written. 

There’s power in writing because it forces you to actively engage with your positive thoughts. Starting your day immediately with gratitude is an easy and quick way to shift your focus to all that is going right in your life and set the tone for a happier day. 

We sometimes don’t recognize how lucky we are because our reality becomes normalized. But reminding yourself of all of the good surrounding you influences you to carry that energy in your day, and you feel happier and more satisfied overall.

When you get caught in the storm of self-victimization, remind yourself of all of the things that are working in your favor. 

Confirmation Bias: Where You Look For The Positive, You Find The Positive

Our brains have a natural tendency towards negativity. Many, many years ago, our ancestors needed this negative bias as a constant vigilance against danger to survive. In fact, that is why we all have a limbic system, our operating system that triggers our “danger” alarm until it’s cleared.

This primal alarm system, while still important, can sometimes cloud our judgment and interfere with positive thinking.

Confirmation bias comes into play when we favor information that confirms our existing beliefs, often overlooking evidence to the contrary. As Dr. Shahram Heshmat defines it, “When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true” (Heshmat, 2018). 

Let’s compare two scenarios:

Sarah wakes up and feels immediate defeat. Her fitness class got canceled last minute. She goes back to sleep, frustrated that she isn’t going to workout, and wakes up late to her next alarm. She turns to anger and blames the canceled class for sleeping in. She stops at Starbucks on her way into work, but they’re out of her favorite brown sugar syrup today. “UGH why can’t anything go right today!?” she silently yells to herself.

Sarah’s overall feeling: Defeated, stressed, and unlucky.

Kim wakes up and sees her fitness class got canceled last minute. “Oh well,” she says, “it’s the perfect day for a walk outdoors.” She decides to listen to a motivating podcast on her walk to put a positive spin on the change in her day. When Kim stops at her local Starbucks on her way to work, they’re out of brown sugar syrup, her favorite. “No problem! I’ll try the new sugar cookie flavor instead,” she says. She discovers that sugar cookie syrup is now her new favorite.

Kim’s overall feeling: Empowered, optimistic, and open to new experiences.

Both Sarah and Kim experienced the same inconveniences, but they’re reactions drastically differed. Kim focused her energy on what she could control and found the good in her situation, while Sarah took the day’s mishaps personally and allowed them to dominate her day.

We ALL have bad days. And it’s okay to feel frustrated, but we shouldn’t dwell in the shitty parts of a situation that we can’t control. Feeling sorry for ourselves won’t reverse what happened, but it can steal the joy of new possibilities. 

Key Takeaway: If you look for a red car, you will find 5 red cars. If you look for the good, you will find hidden gems in unexpected places.

Summary: Silence Your Inner Critic And Rewire Your Brain for Happiness

Remember: You are in control of your thoughts. You have the power to choose your focus. You have the power to create a life filled with happiness and self-fulfillment. Like an artist is the creator of a blank canvas, you are the creator of your day-to-day.

Shift your mindset towards the positive, and you’ll be surprised at the abundance of good that you can find in every day.

Your job:

1. Choose one negative thought pattern to challenge today. Start with a small micro-habit and build momentum.
2. Pick a mindful practice that resonates with you. Meditate, journal, or spend time outside to help quiet the mind.
3. Write down 3 things that you’re grateful for, every morning. Make it a daily ritual to create happiness. 

Use these steps to silence your inner critic, rewire your brain for happiness, and unlock a more fulfilling life. There’s no waiting for tomorrow. You start today!