Overcoming Negative Self-Talk: the How

Negative self-talk can keep us stuck by robbing us of wins even in the best of times. If we tell ourselves that success is the expectation, then it no longer feels like success. Sometimes we overachieve and then we get boosts of feel-good hormones. We might even set that overachievement as the new standard. This leaves no room for better or even good and a heck of a lot of room below it for disappointment. Living your life feeling like there are any wins or opportunities for reinforcement will lead to plenty of dark places.

When it comes to avoiding this pattern, so many of us are told to simultaneously be think more positively while also eliminating negative thinking. We put honest effort into trying to change. Tell ourselves we’re doing great even when we believe we’re not. It doesn’t stick. This failed attempt makes us feel even worse before we go back to what we know. Despite positive intentions when encouraging people to shift how they speak to themselves, most don’t understand how to achieve this. This writeup will cover my general approach to making this change. The steps include understanding, building our vocabulary, building awareness, and practicing.

Understanding

Whether it’s from high expectations, self-hatred, or something else, critical self-talk has been such a foundation for many of us. It’s how we were pushed as kids, and it’s how we push ourselves as adults. An issue is that it really does often work. By being so critical, we push ourselves and tend to succeed. This brutal view tends to come with stress, anxiety, and depression, but we often feel that the price is worth it. It’s usually when things aren’t going well that people continue to kick themselves when they are down. This drives them lower and lower, and sometimes they seek help to see if there is another way to do it.

I do believe it is something most of us start with good intentions. I don’t think this piece of our brains wants us to suffer. I believe it wants us to do well, but it tramples our self-esteem in that pursuit.

Fortunately, there have been lots of studies on the impacts of critical self-talk and the benefits of reducing it or even introducing a more positive alternative. A big thing to take away is that most of the benefit you will see is going from negative/critical self-talk to neutral. We generally see about 80% of the improvement come from just reducing that critical tone. You would then see another 20% improvement if you were able to introduce more positive thinking, which has added bonuses like boosting cognitive performance.

The last thing to know is that we are aiming to change things steadily. Practice will create habits, and eventually you will catch yourself doing what you’ve practiced automatically.

Building Our Vocabulary

If we are tasked with practicing more neutral or honest self-talk, we have to know what that looks like. Here, I will often ask clients to picture someone that they really love and want the best for. They wouldn’t want to lie to them and pretend that things are fine if they are not. They also wouldn’t kick them unnecessarily when they are down.

I’ll use a sports example. Imagine you are close friends with someone on your team who played a fantastic game of soccer overall but failed to cover an opposing player who ended up scoring the game winning goal.

If you were talking to yourself, what might you say? I expect it to look something like this: “The team lost because of you.” —> Negative

If you were talking to a friend, I suspect it’d be much fairer. “You did well most of the game and weren’t able to cover that last player.” —> Neutral/Honest

There is room to add onto the neutral path. You could include that you feel like a failure. You could be disappointed in yourself. Let yourself feeling those things and even acknowledge them. Just don’t label them as truths about you. Feeling like a failure and being a failure are far different. To practice this, your brain will have a far easier time calling out the parts that are unfair when thinking of applying them to someone you care for.

Once you’ve practiced coming up with what an honest alternative for some of your negative thoughts might be, working to reflect and notice when you are speaking negatively towards yourself is essential.

Building Awareness and Practicing

Most of us can be effortlessly cruel to ourselves. It’s a skillset so rehearsed that we don’t even notice it. Around others, we might disguise it with jokes. By ourselves, it’s often direct and brutal. There are plenty of ways we can begin to notice speaking negatively towards ourselves. The goal here is to create a fork in the road moment. Allowing us the opportunity to choose something different. To choose to say something fair and honest instead.

The two paths I encourage are to simply reflect on whether you can think of times that day that you were harsh with yourself and to set the intention to notice them as they happen. You’ll be on auto-pilot most of your day. That’s okay. Even noticing a few of these negative self-talk moments along with a few others that you reflect on will create more and more awareness within yourself.

That leads to the last part, which is to practice. Notice when you just said or are about to say something negative to yourself. Introduce what you might say to that friend.

“If this was (Friend’s name), I’d say that he made a mistake, and it’s important to pay more attention in the future. And I’m still really annoyed at myself for messing up.”

This example is far from being sugar coated but represents such an improvement. With time, this will become a more automatic process, and you will likely catch yourself being fairer to yourself and even others. With that, self-esteem and motivation are often quick to improve opening so many happier doors beyond them.

Written by Dr. Luke Bieber on July 11, 2025