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"A blog! Isn't that great, I get to share the things I know and help people!" "A blog? What if I can't think of anything to say, and isn't that a lot of work?" This is the first blog post for Summit County Therapy! For today's topic, I chose to discuss self-talk and how important it is in our everyday lives; it influences things like working, relating to other people, and even starting a blog. It's pretty clear that the two messages above about starting a blog will result in very different feelings. Depending on the message I decide to believe, blogging could be either exciting and uplifting, or scary and overwhelming. If you have heard of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), you might already know that our thoughts about a situation impact our emotions, and these in turn impact our behaviors. If we change our thoughts, we can change the way we feel and act.  Thoughts can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think about this example; have you ever spilled coffee on yourself while driving to work? What goes through your mind? Maybe it's something like "great, now everyone is going to see coffee on my shirt and think I'm an idiot." Starting your workday with these thoughts will almost certainly put you in a negative mood, and you'll probably be on the lookout for people treating you like an idiot. When we see this (and we will, due to something called Confirmation Bias), the thought "everyone thinks I'm an idiot" will be reinforced in your mind, leading to feelings like insecurity, self-doubt, irritability, etc. If, instead, you think you're a normal person who makes mistakes, you'll probably go about your day feeling very differently. So how do we get away from negative self-talk? It's as simple as changing our thoughts. I say simple, because the idea is simple. In practice it is so much harder. We start with awareness and recognition of our negative self-talk. There are lots of tools that can help us become aware of our thoughts, from mindfulness meditation to journaling, from talking with friends to therapy with a professional. Next, we come up with reasonable alternative thoughts. This does not always come naturally to us. One way to approach this is asking yourself what you would tell a friend in your situation. After figuring out what other thoughts would be helpful, we practice, practice, practice thinking these thoughts as a dispute to the original thought. The negative self-talk has probably been with you for a long time, and changing your self-talk won't happen overnight. Lastly, and often forgotten, we re-evaluate. Check in with yourself, find out how the new self-talk feels, and how you're acting as a result. As we know, changing our thoughts will change our emotions and behaviors. Are these changes that you want?  CBT therapy is a technique that is backed by many scientific studies. In fact, it has been deemed an "evidence-based practice" for a huge number of mental health issues; things like depression, anxiety, substance abuse and addictions, interpersonal conflict, anger, eating disorders, personality disorders, the list goes on and on. So many of the problems we experience come from our self-talk, and CBT is one of many effective ways to deal with changing these experiences.
(If you're a research nerd like myself, please see more about the findings here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/) For myself? I'll chose to keep believing that blogging is great; that I get to share my expertise and help people, and I will keep feeling excited. What different thoughts can you tell yourself to bring yourself to a place of feeling excited or happy or peaceful?
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