USING MANTRAS TO CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK

Is it really possible to change the way we think or the way we talk to ourselves? Absolutely.

My guess is, that some of the things you say to yourself you would never, ever even dream of saying to someone else who we care about. Many of the nicest people I know are actually pretty mean to themselves. Let's explore ways that we can start changing those thoughts so that we are just as kind and loving and compassionate to ourselves as we are to our friends.

In order to change any aspect of ourselves, we first have to identify and understand it. One of the questions I most often hear when exploring our inner workings is “why do I think that” or “why do I feel that way?” or even “I have no idea why I do what I do”. These are all natural and valid questions.

There are many many different types of therapy out there and therapists all get trained in different ways and over time, we adapt and modify our approaches as we work with patients. We figure out by experience what strategies tend to be helpful or less helpful. My personal experience and opinion is that spending too much time and energy on exploring why questions is not that helpful. Yes, we can certainly spend some time and attention to why questions, however, it is important to know that understanding why we do something or think something or feel something, doesn’t in and of itself lead to much change. We just might feel a sense of completion or a sense of “oh ok that feels good to know more about why I am the way that I am.” But that is not enough–you have to move on to the next phase which is making the actual changes. A common statement you might have heard is “insight alone does not lead to change.”

If we are going to work on changing how we talk to ourselves, we could spend a lot of time better understanding how is it that we got to be so mean to ourselves in the first place. And that would be a valid undertaking and I certainly wouldn’t discourage you from thinking about that or exploring that, so long as you know that there might in fact be 100 different reasons why you talk to yourself the way that you do, and if you spent 5 years understanding all 100 of those reasons, it would not bring you that much closer to changing how you talk to yourself. If your highest priority is changing how you talk to yourself, then you’ll get the biggest bang for you buck, so to speak, by just focusing on the change.

Think about changing your inner dialogue as have 3 primary steps.

Step one is to just notice your inner dialogue, again you can’t change what you don’t know. There is a very real possibility that you talk to yourself in negative ways alot more than you are even aware. Step one is to spend some time just observing (without judgment) how often you are being negative to yourself. Sometimes I encourage people to get a little journal or start a notes section in your phone and just mark with a check every time that you say something to yourself that is critical or mean or something in general that is unkind.

If you really want to be strategic you could write down if your negative thought has a certain theme, like around your lack of competence/intelligence or themes of people not liking you, or people you care about leaving you or hurting you. If you aren’t sure if there is a common theme, then the best thing to do would be to just start keeping track of the thoughts themselves, the sentences that go through your head, and then you might be able to notice an underlying theme. In therapy we call theseschemas, they are deep held beliefs about ourselves or the world. I can have an abandonment schema and this deep belief leads me to have thoughts about being abandoned, even when that isn’t occurring in reality. Schemas actually are like colored glasses, they distort how we see the world. An oldie but good book is called “reinventing your life” by Jeffrey Young where he talks about schemas and how to change them.

Take your time with this step. You may be surprised as you start to notice your inner negative thoughts that there are many more than you had thought initially. It’s sort of like when you buy a new car and all the sudden you start seeing your car everywhere. You never really noticed it before but now your mind is trained to see it.

Once you feel like you are getting more skilled at identifying them in the moment, and ideally, noticing a theme, you can move on to step 2

Step two is to intentionally modify the negative thought to a healthy, positive or at least more neutral thought.

For example, if you notice during step one that you often say to yourself “I am so stupid I can’t believe I messed that up,” you could modify that to “I am very smart and capable and it was a simple mistake that anyone could have made.”

If you notice that you often have the thought, “They don’t like me, I can just tell,” you could consider changing that to “I have no idea if they like me or not I can’t assume anything” or I don’t like everyone so everyone doesn’t have to like me." Or "It’s ok if she doesn't like me because I have friends who do like me”.

Ideally your healthy thought is a little more believable. Notice just changing she doesn't like me to she does like me, is not particularly believable. A more realistic change that you might agree with are things like “its ok if she doesn't like me.”

Spend some time coming up with realistic challenges to these automatic negative thoughts. Writing them down and saying them out loud is also important. We don't just want to say it internally, we want to activate as many parts of the brain with the healthy thought as we can. Hearing your own voice and writing it down activate different parts of your brain than just thinking it.

Step 3 is then to create visual reminders and practice rehearsing the new healthy thought.There are so many ways to practice this step. You can use sticky notes that you put around your house. You can use washable markers on your mirror in the morning. (That's a good one if you tend to have negative thoughts about your appearance or your body as you get ready in the morning). Creating a collage or using your creative or artistic talents is also very helpful. Again, the more we can activate different parts of our brain the better. When we are creating art we are using the non-verbal parts of our brain.

It won’t happen overnight, but over time and with consistent practice you will notice how you can catch yourself quicker and quicker. The negative automatic thought might still pop up, but you can quickly redirect yourself to the healthier and more compassionate thought.

I personally love usingmantras. A mantra is really just a statement or even a word, that you repeat because it is addressing a core issue within you. Mantras I personally have used in the past are I am enough. I am worthy. Remember in the help, Viola Davis tells the little girl every day

You is smart. You is kind. You is important…those are mantras.

You can also use a symbol, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a word. For example, I am a huge music person and tend to love certain lyrics that are meaningful to me. One of my all time favorite lines from a song is by the Eagles in their song “Already Gone.” It goes “So oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key”. That is so profound for me because it speaks to all of the ways that we limit ourselves or sabotage our joy or all the ways we stay stuck but we could liberate ourselves by stop blaming others and taking ownership of our own joy. I have a tattoo of a key on my ankle and I have jewelry and lots of pictures around my office of keys to help me remember this mantra.

I encourage you to think about a mantra from a song, from a movie, from something someone once told you, anything that you truly want to believe. We don’t have to believe it yet, we just have to want to believe it. With time and practice we can change our inner dialogue so that we talk just as kindly and compassionately to ourselves as we do to all of the people we care about.