Silence Negative Self-Talk With This ONE Easy Trick

We all deal with negative thoughts and judgmental voices in our heads from time to time, but what if you could learn to silence that negative self-talk with one easy trick?

The exercise we will share with you in this article can help you to achieve a peaceful state of mind, while also balancing your emotional health. Our minds often run on autopilot, and we don’t really tune into the thoughts playing over and over again until they become self-destructive. This exercise can help you to pinpoint the negative thoughts as they happen, and deal with them directly.

Silence Negative Self-Talk With This ONE Easy Trick

NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, can help you to manage those negative thoughts, and even reform them into more positive ones. It helps you to change the way you look at the world by first dealing with HOW you interpret it through your mind. Developed in the mid-1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, it’s used in many different fields, such as trauma recovery and sports coaching. By utilizing the foundations of the exercise, Bandler and Grinder believe that anyone can achieve personal excellence and heal from a variety of conditions or phobias.

How does NLP work?

Basically, it involves connecting neurological processes, behavior, and language in order to change certain aspects of your life through reprogramming pathways in the brain. The founders believe that this set of techniques can work for anyone, as it simply involves removing processes that don’t help you achieve your goals, modifying existing programs, and installing new ones if necessary.

If you think of your brain like a computer, you will understand why this exercise works so well. Just like a computer, you can reprogram your mind based on the software that you put into it. Of course, the software is simply what thought patters you replay in your head each day. We either knowingly or unknowingly program our minds every day based on what we think, so you can easily reprogram your brain in order for it to function at its best.

A computer program helps us to do certain things, such as use Microsoft Word to type a document. So, think of the computer program as helping us to achieve a goal of typing, editing, and saving a document. In the same way, the thought processes we “install” in our brains can help us to achieve a goal as well, or they can actually hinder us from reaching the goal.

Basically, NLP involves having the perfect programs running in the brain in order to achieve maximum results, so if something doesn’t produce the desired result, we can simply “uninstall” it from our minds. Today, we’ll talk about modifying an existing program, however, to give you an idea of how you can transform negative thoughts into positive ones.

NLP Technique for Transforming Negative Self-Talk

1. Picture someone you love talking to you in a compassionate, understanding voice. How does that make you feel?

2. As you think about this, notice everything about how the voice sounds – the pitch, tone, rhythm, and volume. Become aware of all the qualities of this voice.

3. Now, put that on the back burner, and turn your thoughts towards the negative self-talk you sometimes notice in your mind. How does this voice sound, and how does it make you feel? Simply listen to it without judgement for a second…

4. Now, as you replay this voice in your mind, try to imagine these things being said in the compassionate voice of a loved one.

5. Now, replaying the destructive words again, imagine them being said in a silly voice, like that of a cartoon character.

6. Notice that just the tone of the voice in your mind can change your perspective, even if the WORDS themselves still seem negative.

7. Keep on adjusting the voice in your mind so that you can try out different perspectives.

You could switch from celebrities to cartoon characters to a loved one to anything else that you want – just keep in mind that you must play with the qualities of the voice in order to achieve the desired results.

8. Once you feel yourself having a positive breakthrough, you can then listen to the voice and see if it seems as negative as before.

Final Thoughts on Decreasing Negative Self-Talk

Chances are that your thoughts will have at least slightly transformed just because you repeated them so many times in different voices, and you know now that the voice plays just as important a role as the words being said.

This type of exercise can allow for the release of toxic thought patterns and emotions, as it draws awareness back to our minds and bodies. Once you recall the negative voice, try to see if you remember it the same way. Since you changed the voice so often, you probably won’t remember the original voice, which means your perspective changed since the beginning of the exercise. If you feel less upset than the first time you heard the negative self-talk, then that means you have made progress in transforming your negative thoughts to positive ones.