Negative self talk is when you talk down to yourself in your mind. This usually occurs due to the influences of others, whether it is the media or the community around you.
Negative self talk could have come from many factors.
Your parents could always be putting yourself down, so you may naturally put yourself or others down because of it, causing a rippling effect for other people to put themselves down because you were negative towards them. Or someone could be comparing you to the social media causing you to develop negative self-talk.
If this is the case, negative self-talk has become a habit by now. It is not a habit that you can just break easily because it is the way you talk to yourself. You would need to completely change the way you think about yourself.
How do you overcome Negative Self-Talk?
Notes around your room or bathroom
When you first start to change the way you speak to yourself, it will be difficult because the very issue that you are changing is in your mind, the most intimate space. Your thoughts tend to mix with your negative self-talk. What may help is to put notes around in your room or bathroom that you will intentionally look at.
These notes will be positive statements about yourself that you want to rewire your mind to start to think. This is the beginning of your journey of changing your self-talk. Putting notes around in your room will help remind you of how you should speak to yourself instead.
Take back what you said
Every time you say something negative about yourself in your mind, take it back and say the positive version of it. For example, if you say that nobody will love you because you are not desirable, take it back and say, no, I am desirable, I just need to wait for the right person who will already appreciate me for me.
If you keep repeating these statements and taking back what you said, the new statement will become a habit for you to start thinking rather than the negative statement. Whether you truly believe it or not, repeating it until you kind of believe it will help you believe the statement.
Remind yourself where your self talk came from
Take some time to see where the self talk even came from. Did it come from your parents? Did it come from your community or the media? Identifying where the source is from, helps remind you that it is not truth, it is practiced negativity.
Practice
Keep practicing positive talk. This means constantly taking back what you said to yourself, defending yourself if needed, and starting to positively speak to others. When you start speaking kindly to yourself, you start speaking kindly to others and that may even change the way people feel about themselves.