Change Your Self-Talk

In every moment of every day of your life, your thoughts are determining how you feel and behave. Given they have such enormous power over your life, you’d better make sure your thoughts are facts because, more often then you realise, they are not.

- Sonia Zadro

“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame in that?” ~ Epictetus

What essentially makes you depressed or anxious or angry? Most would say it’s what happens to you that determines how you feel. You were retrenched from work today and are devastated. You were abused by a friend and feel angry and sad. You were ignored by your partner and feel rejected.

Many people, however, including psychologists, now recognise life events play only a small role in how you feel and behave. The real culprits are your thoughts. It’s not what happens to you but how you interpret and think about what happens to you that matters.

Many of our interpretations of events are distorted and this is where cognitive therapy comes in. Cognitive therapy is not about positive thinking. It’s about rational thinking. It’s about learning to identify our interpretations of events, otherwise known as our self-talk, and then learning to challenge the self-talk by examining the cold hard evidence. In effect, we are using our rational brain as a weapon to fight the distortions we are prone to in our everyday thinking.

The idea that our thoughts influence our feelings and behaviour is not a new one. The Greek Stoic philosopher Epictitus, born 55 CE, once famously said, “Men are disturbed not by things but by the view which they take of them.” Twenty centuries later, American psychiatrist Aaron Beck founded the most highly researched and applied therapy of recent times based on this idea. Beck called it cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), cognitive being another term relating to thoughts.