First Step in Dumping NST — Recognize that You Do It

If you've been reading this blog, you know that negative self-talk is a nasty thinking habit; a consistent pattern of frequent, often automatic, critical inner monologues. “I’m a loser.” “How stupid was that move?” “I never handle these situations the way I should.” “I look like a blimp.”

Today I'm suggesting that the first step in breaking the habit is noticing if you have it! Perhaps you don't have the NST habit. It's easy to find out. Just take a minute as you're getting ready for work in the morning, again at mid-day, and at the end of your workday or after dinner to listen to what you inner voice is saying to you.   You might hear the put down message delivered with subtle whispers, a contemptuous tone, or even intrusive inner shouts, which tell the thinker, “You’re not good enough.” Because women define themselves in terms of relationships, their negative thoughts are often about what other people think of them. “Why doesn’t my best friend/ mother/ lover/ boss/ like/ love/ respect me more? What’s wrong with me?”

We often learn the habit as children, listening to our mothers put themselves down about appearance or abilities. “I have such ugly legs.”  “I never could do math and I still can’t even balance my check book.” We also buy in to family labels: the shy bookworm, a total klutz, the airhead. Girls often adopt negative self-talk by imitating older sisters or girlfriends, thinking it’s the way to act mature.
 For many women, the gray ghoul of self-doubt and disapproval dwells within, from the age of eleven or twelve. Over time, negative thinking’s insistent presence creates submission and acquiescence “I know. I know. You’re right. I messed up again.” The misguided mental behavior is repeated. The habit is acquired.

Just notice, without reaction or evaluation. Strategic allocation of attention can focus attention on your self-talk as well as take focus away when you want to detach. Right now you want to focus on it only briefly to see what's there.Then you want to detach rather than analyze or obsess, just as you might notice that there were clouds in the sky, without further interpretation or rumination. It just is!

Do You Play Musical NST with Friends and Family?

Caroline, the oldest of three similar-looking middle-aged sisters, all smart, self-aware, and long-time, experienced negative self-talkers, tells a story about the siblings’ shared habit. The pattern developed over decades, unplanned but predictable. Any one of the sisters would start by putting herself down, while the other two jumped in rapidly to reassure her that none of her self-criticism was true. In fact they would comment that the negative self-talker was smarter, prettier, thinner, more talented, funnier than the reassuring sisters. One of the reassuring sisters then moved on to self-denigration, and the other two became the reassurers. The musical chairs continued with different sisters occupying different roles as the pattern played on.

 The three were looking at recent photographs, when the middle sister, JoAnne, said to the youngest, “You said I looked great in these pictures. How could you say that? Look at my fat cheeks. Uck! And my hair looks terrible. I look fat and matronly.” Alert for the usual volley of disagreement and reassurance, she faced an awkward pause instead. Then Caroline said, “JoAnne, you’re pointing at the picture of me, not you. You’re saying all those nasty comments about me, not you.” A moment of shock followed, then a jolt of laughter. Suddenly they confronted the ridiculous ritual that the negative self-talk habit had generated. JoAnne would never have been critical about Carolyn’s appearance. Because she thought the photo was of her, not JoAnne, she reflexively jumped into negative self-talk mode.

A bad habit — shared by many American women who engage in the common, harmful negative self-talk habit; a consistent pattern of frequent, often automatic, critical inner monologues. “I’m a loser.” “How stupid was that move?” “I never handle these situations the way I should.” “I look like a blimp.” We allow it to rule our thoughts and feelings, to take over our common sense and self-worth, to misdirect our behavior. If you do it, you're wasting time and energy, self-esteem and productivity.

Time to get a grip and dump the NaSTy habit. Stay tuned or read back to the beginning for more info, suggestions, clarification!

Are Internal or External Stressors the Real Cause of Your Stress?

I propose that for many women, inner stressors such as unrealistic demands and expectations of themselves, communicated through harsh negative self-talk, create greater and more frequent pressure than external stressors. For example, you've invited friends over for dinner Saturday night. You've got a busy day as most weekend days are with the kids activities, house stuff like weeding or finding outdoor furniture, but you figure you can make it work. Maybe you can get to the Farmer's market and have burgers, corn on the grill and a big salad  — on the patio. Oops. It starts raining mid-day. Your 2 year old is grouchy. The house is messy.


What’s the major cause of the stress? The external or the internal stressors? The chaos itself or your negative self-talk about the chaos? The icy road or the self-criticism? The deadline ahead or the inner critic? I'd like to know your response. Please send me your comment, particularly if you disagree.

Just Dance. Don't Think.

Darcy Kistler, retiring from the New York City ballet tells of Balanchine’s early message to her. Just dance. Don’t think. Kistler adds, “He knew people better than anybody. He probably thought that I was an overthinker. Maybe he didn’t want me to get in my own way.”  (NYTimes, Arts, 6/27/2010)

The quote follows along with last week’s post; another great example of strategic allocation of attention.

Sometimes it’s best to not pay attention to what we are thinking. Why? Because our self-talk, even if it’s instructional or positive rather than negative, can interfere with the flow of our instincts, movement and action. Being ”in the zone” is a form of detachment; a state of mind where we are focused in the moment, mostly in our right brain, paying no attention to what’s going on in our left brain. We allocate attention to now, rather than to our thoughts about past, present, future, evaluation, information, or instruction.

 For example, rather than thinking as I start to write this post, “Does this article make sense? I wonder if anyone else is interested in strategic allocation of attention. Maybe this is boring,” I just write without thought at the moment, in the same way tennis player Rafael Nadal just serves without thinking. He thought before the game started and he will think later after the game is over, but during the game Nadal, like many other successful athletes, are only "now" in their head. Later I will go back, and move into instructional mode and action. “ Stick to one concept Judy.” “The post needs more white space.” “Add some links.”

Less is More — At Least in Terms of Attention to Negative Self-Talk

The negative self-talk of most women who "overthink" focuses on relationships and appearance.

• "I'm sure Joan's mad at me. I gave her way too much advice. You'd think I'd learn."
• "This wrinkle looks like a canyon on my forehead. It makes me look ten years older."

And that's just the beginning. Negative self-talkers often take one seed thought and grow it into a tenacious vine, which sends out aggressive tendrils that grab on to other thoughts and produce bigger, expanded negative messages.

• "Joan will probably tell everybody what I did. Then they'll all be annoyed, if they aren't already. Maybe that's why I wasn't told about the coffee at Andrea's last week."
• "Actually, my skin looks gray and kind of dry and blah. So does my hair. And that double chin doesn't help either. I'm a wreck."

Once you're aware of your negative inner voice (demon, devil, critic, vampire), it's best to get rid of it as fast as you can. Rather than rewarding the undesirable NST behavior, by spending attention on it, focus your attention elsewhere — anywhere that will keep your neurons far removed from their self-criticism connections.

The new and desirable behavior can be any form of distraction that works for you; a work or house project, a book, TV, writing, painting, singing, walking, listening to music, playing solitaire on your iPhone, talking to friends about fun stuff. Whether the reallocation of attention works for 11 minutes or 2 minutes, it stunts the growth of NST, allows a pause in the action, produces a time slot for you to remember what you already know:

  •  NST won't help you feel good or perform well. It won't help improve relationships or appearance.
  •   The only useful purpose served by NST is to move you to problem solving thinking, when the situation is something over which you have control.

The less attention you pay to the negative self-talk, the more quickly it will fold, fade, and fail.
The more attention you spend on the negative self-talk, the faster it will bloom and send out runners.

If Positive Thinking Isn’t the Antidote to Negative Thinking, What Is?

But First — A Quiz!

Identify which of the following statements or questions are examples of negative thoughts, positive thoughts, or some other kind of thinking. Answers below.*

1.    What’s wrong with me?
2.    Get a grip, girl!
3.    Just keep breathing.
4.    My dreams will come true.
5.    I can’t handle this.
6.    He must think I’m an idiot.
7.    Next time, I’ll be assertive.
8.    I’m a lovable person.
9.    I can attract love that will solve my problems.
10.    I’m going to avoid this discussion now.

Some of these examples of self-talk are based on judgments, neither with concrete evidence, whether they are negative or positive. The negative self-talk lowers self-esteem, decreases future performance, and keeps women stuck in a rut. The positive self-talk may boost self-esteem momentarily by increasing hope that the good stuff will happen, but it also keeps people stuck in wishing, hoping, believing, without taking solid steps towards a goal.

“Some other kind of thinking”, which I refer to above, is what I call realistic thinking: it is instructional, rather than judgmental. It is neutral, rather than overly positive or overly negative. It moves you forward.
Here’s an example:

Negative self-talk:  “I’ll never be an A tennis player. I just don’t have what it takes.”
Positive self-talk:    “I can do it. Yes I can. Next year I’ll be the club A tennis champion.”
Realistic self-talk:    “I’m going to get coaching on my backhand to strengthen my game."
           
It can be tricky. What is your take on realistic thinking?

*Answers: N, R, R, P, N, N, R, P, P, R.

N-negative
P-positive
R-realistic

When positive thinking is used as an antidote to negative thinking, when they coexist, the negative thinking wins out most of the time. If there's no negative self-talk that you're trying to counter, then positive thinking won't hurt you. Realistic thinking never hurts! It may not give you a quick high. It won't give you a bummer low. But it will move you to choices, decisions, actions to solve problems.

Is Women's Lateral Thinking Illogical? What Do You Think?

OOPS! I promised last week that I’d blog this week about women and parallel thinking. Soon after, I realized the term that Dorner (author of The Logic of Failure) had used was lateral thinking. Then I realized I know nothing about either topic, but that didn’t discourage me. I ‘m hoping some intelligent readers out there know more than I do and can contribute some enlightened comments.

I have to say that reading the following information, from a web site discussing Edward de Bono’s theory and books and putting it together with Dorner’s opinion that women’s lateral think may well be better for the new world than men’s parallel thinking, I’m wondering if this is a strange back-handed compliment —  particularly the first definition about “illogical”.

 Here’s the definition from Edward de Bono’s authorized web site.

“Lateral Thinking is:
    seeking to solve problems by apparently illogical means
    a process and willingness to look at things in a different way
    a relatively new type of thinking that complements analytical and critical thinking not part of our mainstream education - yet
    a fast, effective tool used to help individuals, companies and teams solve tough problems and create new ideas, new products, new processes and new services.
    a term that is used interchangeably with creativity"

Yes, I am perhaps a more defensive woman than many, but because we often think differently than men doesn’t mean our thinking is illogical. It’s just different.  Because men generally are invested in the status quo, or, their historical ways of thinking, women’s way of thinking can be perceived by them as “less than". I have to say I find that seriously bothersome.

Then again, when I think of the techniques that I suggest for getting rid of negative thinking, such as detachment, there's a certain counter-intuitive, maybe illogical thinking that's in effect after all. H-m-m-m.

 What do you think?

Bad Thinking Habits — Groupthink and Riskcreep, plus NST and PST

David Brooks' May 28, 2010 article (http://tinyurl.com/39yuc5s ) in the New York Times, which starts out with the Deepwater Horizon explosion, resulting oil leak, and political maneuvers related to the catastrophe, moves quickly into recognition that ". . . the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology." The concluding paragraph, referring to psychologically generated thinking errors notes, "There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest. This isn’t just about oil. It’s a challenge for people living in an imponderably complex technical society."

True and very reasonable, as always David. But from my perspective the psychosocial society in which we live is even more complex, harder to predict, manage, or fix than that of the technical society. If we take each of us as human systems, we can't predict, manage or fix ourselves, nor often can others, professionals or not, predict, manage or fix themselves — or us.

A major part of the individual human system is our self-talk. It's a tool of our thinking process which sometimes is accessible to others directly through our "out loud" talk, or indirectly to others by the inferences made from what we say. To add to the complexity, when we're in a group, of two or ten, we're subject to outside as well as internal sources of influence plus the pressure to conformity, or opposition, created by group membership and interaction. 

That whole subject led me to remember a book I'd read a few years ago, The Logic of Failure (1997) by  Dietrich Dorner, a German psychologist and professor. The subject  of the book is the nature of thinking required to solve complex problems. Dorner notes that feelings and affect, values and motivations are always a major part of the context of thinking.  He dismisses the idea that there are any secret mental techniques that will enable the human mind to solve complex problems. ". . . there is no magic wand or hidden treasure that will instantly make us deep and powerful thinkers. Real improvements can be achieved, however, if we understand the demands that problem solving places on us and the errors that we are prone to make when we attempt to meet them. Our brains are not fundamentally flawed; we have simply developed bad habits."

OK. Finally, a sequé to my stuff about the NaSTy thinking habit — and also the bad extreme positive thinking habit. What fits so well is Dorner's explanation that our failures are not caused by a fundamental flaw, but a little mistake here, an unspecific goal there, an occasional overgeneralization, a too elaborate plan, a forgotten step in the implementation. 

We women too are trying to solve complex problems, often interpersonal rather than technical, and if we think of our NST as a bad habit rather than a neurosis, not at all a failure, but a continuing series of small mistakes in thinking, it seems much more manageable and easier to change.

PS Doerner also says parallel female thinking is best to deal with complex problems. Hurray! Let's use it not lose it. More about this thinking strength in the next lighter blog post!

 

The Secret? The Law of Attraction Invites Delusional Thinking

"I just read The Secret, so I'm feeling very positive," she told me. "I'm going to put my wish out to the universe and attract the relationship that I want." 

What? My friend is a smart, successful businesswomen, experienced with life, love, and the active pursuit of a good life. I didn't want to be a wet blanket, a negative crimp in her style, a realistic pain in the neck, but I couldn't just sit there and say, "What a great idea?" I restricted my comment to, "I think The Law of Attraction is BS." "It is?"she said, her tone expressing surprise and disappointment.

I didn't go on to crush her with reality and logic which she clearly didn't want to hear at that moment.
Later I found a terrific article on the topic by Paul Sloane, a British Twitterer. http://is.gd/aN3AL   

 Here is an excerpt from his writing.

"The Law of Attraction as expounded by Rhonda Byrne in her best-selling book, The Secret, and by her many followers claims that all you need to do is to think about the things that you want in your life and the 'Universe' will supply them in abundance - whether they are positive or negative. So if you think about money you will get money; if you focus on your debts you will stay in debt. If you think about being slim you will become slim whereas if you constantly worry about how fat you are you will stay fat. Unfortunately for the proponents of this law there is no scientific evidence to support it.  (Bolding is my addition. Smart people generally look for evidence of truth and fact.) There are plenty of anecdotes from people who believe the law worked for them but for each of these stories there are many other possible explanations. No one has carried out a controlled experiment showing that the so-called law actually works.

Furthermore the law runs up against some very practical difficulties. What if several people all want the same promotion and think about it furiously? How can they all get the same post? The law implies that whatever difficulties you have in life are the result of you thinking the wrong thoughts. So it appears that an abused child, a rape victim or a prisoner in a concentration camp was somehow to blame because they thought negative thoughts. This is offensive to victims and flies in the face of common sense."

Mary Karr, NST in the Extreme, and Prayer with Resistance

Here's an interesting add-on to the earlier post about prayer. Mary Karr, author of Lit, describes the extremely nasty self-talk she generates as she is recovering from alcoholism.

“ . . . my inner monologue—what you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on it —went, Oh shit, stupid bitch. What’ve you done now? Fuckup fuckup fuckup . . . “

Later in the book, she notes with self-aware surprise, that prayer ultimately helped her to reduce the negative self-talk and moved her toward recovery, despite her long-term resistance to the Higher Power tenet of AA.

Prayer is really a form of cognitive restructuring, changing what you're saying to yourself, a big category of techniques that are useful in breaking the negative self-talk habit.

Prayer, Religious Upbringing and NST

Comment from a reader: 
"How much of our default to NST as intelligent adult women begins with training in childhood? I'm suspecting it's a practice embedded deeply for girls and all the more entrenched with religious upbringing. In my case NST was couched as almost virtuous behavior - humbling yourself before God - I'm a bad person, forgive me, being the proper way to pray."

At the "Break the Negative Self-Talk" presentation ten days ago, the topic of prayer was also brought up as a potential, subtle, and unintended form of negative self talk. e.g. "God, help me to stop being so selfish, mean, and angry all the time." The prayer is saying, "I'm a bad person," exactly as the reader comments above. How could this prayer be restated, acknowledging a need for improvement, but not dumping on one's self? "God, help me to be a caring, kinder, calmer, woman." That's a good example of plain old cognitive restructuring, changing what you're saying to yourself.

Yes, it's a small difference, in perspective, but it isn't a self- put down. You're asking for help to be a better person than you already are, rather than asking for help because you are a bad person. Even if you just say those two sentences out loud right now, as if you were saying them to a friend, a therapist, a partner, or a higher power of any kind, the latter will feel better than the former.

Break the Negative Self-Talk Habit is the name of Dr. Judith Tingley's presentation on Wednesday, April 21, 12 noon at the Commons on Bainbridge Island. The Commons is a part of the Senior Center, across the street from Waterfront Park.

Even though there's a "negative" in the title, the talk will be upbeat, informative, and entertaining!

An Admitted Negative Self-Talker — And an Accomplished Smart Woman

I posted the article below, originally in Seattle Woman, July/August 2009, because it's such a great example of an amazing woman, who clearly announces she's no role model for a balanced life, and shows us equally as clearly that she too is plagued with the negative self-talk that most of us deal with. You'll see a great example in the second to the last paragraph which highlights the negative self-talk in blue. In the final paragraph, some neutral, cognitive restructured self-talk is highlighted in red.

Carol Cassella, M.D., anesthesiologist, author of Oxygen, spouse, and mother of two sets of twins, ages 12 and 13, seems to personify the 21st century ideal of the woman who does it all, has it all, and is it all, balancing her many roles with grace. She disputes the suggestion that she’s a role model and says, “It’s not true. There is no balance: like being on a bongo board, there’s never a static point. I’m always adjusting, seeking equilibrium — which isn’t there. The last year has been the most stressful of my life.”

Welcome to the Intelligent Women Only blog

I'm currently developing this blog and will begin posting in mid-March 2010. Thanks for visiting, I look forward to your comments!

Dr. Judith Tingley