Hello. Welcome back to the Social ly motivated Podcast. I'm your host, Jake Haw I want to thank you for tuning into this podcast. If you're new here, this podcast is all about bettering your mindset and mental health. Do you on a daily basis deal with some form of anxiety, depression, or other related conditions?
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On today's episode, we're gonna be discussing negative self-talk or negative self thoughts, and what I mean by this is that. Everyone has once in their life had something they've negatively said about themselves at least once, guaranteed multiple times, even multiple times a day, might have negative self-talk.
So examples of this would be being like, I can't do anything, right? I shouldn't even try or nobody likes me. I should stop trying to make friends, or I should stop trying to please people, or I'm stupid, I'm fat. Those type of examples that are directed towards yourself, the negative self think process that you embed into your brain or embed, embed into your mind that.
You keep there and let it saturate for so long that it tears you apart every single time you even have it come across your mind that it's still there, that it still negatively affects you on a daily basis. So on today's episode, we're gonna discuss, how do you go about trying to limit or fix the problem of these negative self-inflicting wounds that you put on yourself?
I. So to give you some more context on this, we are basically hardwired, or we as our brains are biologically have been put into this evaluation to always be focused on the negative genetic makeup has made us to where we have always been negative. And this is traced back to very like prehistoric times.
When it was survival of the fittest, you had to be able to register threats to avoid danger and increase survival rates. Individuals who were more attuned to danger stayed alive longer and passed on their genetics to their next generation, to the next generation, to finally us and over time. We have never tried to fix these genetics.
We have never tried to figure out a solution to why are we this way and how can we fix this to not be so negative all the time. Now, this is not to say that being positive 1000% of the time. Is the best solution. So if you're just like, okay, Jake, so you're saying that I should just be always positive, never have a negative thought cross my mind, and I'm gonna sit there and say, no, that is not what I'm saying.
If you're like, oh, I'm stupid. So Jake, that means that if I'm saying that to myself, then I should not say that and I should be like, oh, I'm the smartest person alive. But you still in the back of your mind feel like you're stupid, but you're just like, oh, Jake told me to be positive. We as humans need to have a balance between the negatives and the positives, and having these negative thoughts keeps us humble and having positive thoughts gives us hope.
So the biggest thing that I want people to understand about these. Negative thoughts and how do you go about, of trying to limit the damage on these is if these negative thoughts start to enter your brain, how do you decipher or how do you fix this? So I want to give you another example of not just the preso times.
So if you're training to become a first responder or an officer, you know, a police officer. You are trained to always be focused on how do you prevent, you know, danger? How do you fix a solution if you ever encounter it? So that's a good example is that we're certain jobs and certain careers, you are trained to always think of the negative that could potentially happen to help you positively if you ever encounter it, and how can you fix that issue.
So going back to. The personal issue or the personal problem. If, for example, you sit there and say, oh, I'm ugly, or, oh, I'm fat. So I want you to take a look at that from a lens of the whole picture. If you're saying, I am fat, then why do you feel that you are fat? And why do you feel like. Planting that in your mind that, Hey, I I'm fat.
I'll never be worth anything. So are you feeling like you're fat because you see these Instagram models that are, you know, thin, they're so, you know, skin and bones, you want to be like them? Or is it, you know, most of my family's skinny and I'm the one that's fat, or whatever it is. So what is really causing you to feel like you are.
You know why you want to feel negative about your certain situation, so how do you decipher it, take it, you know, one step at a time? Understanding how and why do you feel this way is a huge step into trying to limit the damage that these negative self thoughts and negative self-talk is affecting you.
So one of the biggest aspects of understanding the negative thoughts, and the biggest part of why I'm trying to share this with people is that you know how on a daily basis you might hear when you're checking out at the grocery store or checking out at Walmart or Target or a restaurant and someone asks you, Hey, how's your day going?
And. Pretty much everyone on the planet has that one response that is pretty generic. Pretty automated of, oh, how's your day going? Good. But in a sense, not every day is good, but yet you just say it. You just say, oh, it's good. But you might have had the worst day of your life, but. You as the individual kept to yourself and let that seed in your mind grow of the negative thought.
So instead of saying, oh, it was okay, or, oh, it's been pretty bad, you sit there and you mask up and you never share to the world. Your negative thought, you are solely gonna leave this implanted in yourself, and you're gonna let that tear you apart and you are gonna, you're not gonna probably do anything about it.
So to think about this in a good context is if you are not gonna show or share this to the world, then how are you going to be positive? So, Here's an example that I really found interesting, or not an example of sorts, but a video I saw by a person called, there's a video by a guy named Jay Shetty that did an experiment with females that were, that had siblings and maybe cousins or friends, and Jay Shay did an experiment.
They, he sat these girls in a room, so one girl's in one room and the other girl's in the other, and it's a really incredible video to see the emotions. So, Of what? It goes on to this experiment. So me explaining it, does it No justice. So seeing the video, it's called, you know, if you wanna look it up on YouTube, it's called Jay Shetty.
Uh, we're all guilty of this and it's a really, really interesting video and really interesting experiment. So to give you just a glimpse of it, it, he sits these girls down and asks them to write down their negative thoughts. And they write down these negative thoughts that have in, they've encountered, in their, their minds over the, the years or over time.
And he asked them to read it out loud to him. And some of them really kind of opened up and they started to kind of show their emotions of like, Wow. You know, it sounds okay in my head, but it doesn't sound okay when I have to share this out loud or share it to people. And then he brings in the, the younger sibling or the cousin or friend, and he asked them to sit there or stand there and to share what they said.
You know what? They wrote down those negative thoughts and you know, Share it to their friend as if it was directed towards them. And all of 'em had the shocking face of like, no, I would never do that. So the whole experiment was to share why is it okay for you to have these negative self. Inflicting wounds to yourself when you wouldn't even dare to share it to your friend, your younger sibling, or anything of that matter.
And the other part of it was that those people that were sitting, the, the, the other siblings or the younger siblings that were waiting, waiting, they. Already had written down the positive th the already had written down like the positives of the individual that was being questioned for the negative thoughts, and they were shocked to hear these positive responses to them.
And that goes to show you that we're overthinking and that we are being too critical of ourselves. We're putting self-inflicting wounds on ourselves that shouldn't be there. So I'm not saying you should never be negative, but to understand that these negative thoughts have a purpose and for you to understand that, hey, there is some way that I can fix this.
Let me diagnosis this. Am I overthinking something? Is this a little outta my control? Should I get help or something? But to let that just sit in your mind and. Just grow into a bigger problem than what it should be, then that is gonna affect your mindset. You are always gonna encounter positive thoughts.
You're always gonna encounter negative things in your life. That's just life. But to understand that these negative thoughts have a purpose to understand that there's. Greater good than just always being negative towards yourself. So to kind of wrap this up, the the, the generic saying of treat others like you want to be treated yourself by yourself.
So if you are always negative, shouldn't that mean that you should always be negative towards other people? But in a sense, you never do that. You always hide it behind yourself. You always have a different version of yourself. You will never show the negative, just self-hatred for yourself to other people.
But you will be positive to other people, which really doesn't make any sense. So the saying really should be, So the biggest takeaway from that is that the quote should always be different or should be kind of the opposite of what you think it should be. Treating yourself with the same love and respect you want to show others, so having the positive thoughts become more prevalent in your mind.
You want to be more of a positive person, you need to be more positive towards yourself. As we conclude, I want to thank you for tuning into the Socially Motivated Podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this podcast so far and you have not done so yet, please leave a rating, share, and subscribe to this podcast.
This podcast is available to download on all major streaming services. So you never will miss a feature episode. You can follow me on social media, specifically on Twitter and Instagram at Socially Motive. That is at socially motiv, all one word. As always, I'm gonna leave you with this motivational quote.
A life of fear will only hold you back, step out of your comfort zone. I will catch y'all on the next episode.