The Body Doesn't Lie (17 page)

One of the most common ways that people keep themselves in the negative is with their internal dialogue. You may not realize that you have a constant din of negative patter going on inside your head, but chances are you do. Perhaps you believe that things are all black or all white, all good or all bad—and, just your luck, you’ve gotten all the bad stuff. Why? Chances are you’ll zero in on yourself to answer that question, assuming that you “caused” your situation to go bad.

Far too many of us live in a jail of our own creation. Most often, when we’re in Negative Feedback, we’re not talking to ourselves with love; we’re talking to ourselves in a harsh, judgmental way. Chronic negative self-talk triggers an amygdala response and activates the SNS needlessly. And we keep that pattern going every time we have a negative thought. Why do we do this to ourselves? If there’s one place in the world where you should get the benefit of the doubt, it’s in your own mind!

This internal patter is yet another sign of unresolved injury or pain that lives within the brain. At some point, you may have heard and internalized a negative judgment about yourself. Perhaps your mother constantly commented unkindly on your appearance. Maybe your dad called you lazy or teased you in a sarcastic way that stuck. Or maybe a teacher said you weren’t “living up to your potential.” Sometimes comments like this can roll off our backs; other times, the smallest comment can stick with us and make us cringe and squirm years later. The person who made the comment may not have any memory of the words spoken, but their damage was done (and remains). The worst part of this is when you stop hearing those words in
another
person’s voice and they simply become the background noise of your life:
You’re fat/lazy/ stupid/boring.
And if you’ve listened to those comments for years and years, you might not even recognize them anymore—they’ve simply become your truth.

Try this: Close your eyes and imagine that you’re getting dressed to go out for a big night. You look in your closet for something to wear. What are you saying to yourself at that moment? Does it sound something like this?

You’re too fat for that dress, too old for those boots. All your clothes are outdated. You’re going to look like a fool whatever you wear. Why even bother? What makes you think you have anything interesting to say to those people anyway?

Or does it sound something like this?

Wow, you look amazing: Your energy is sparkling right through. The color of that sweater is beautiful on you. The people who sit next to you tonight are going to be amazed by your brilliance. You’re going to be the belle of the ball! Bet you can’t wait to get there!

Did you giggle a little at this last paragraph? Perhaps it seems conceited to think of yourself in those terms? But compare those two paragraphs: They’re roughly equivalent in intensity of tone, though at opposite ends of the spectrum. Why is it so hard to think of yourself in glowing terms, whereas a correspondingly negative attitude seems perfectly normal (if a bit depressing)?

If your thoughts resemble the first paragraph more closely than the last, you must
learn
to stop such thoughts and immediately replace trash talk with positive words. Take a moment to reflect on your internal self-talk and write down in your notebook what you’re saying to yourself. (The mindfulness skills that you worked on during your mindful eating exercise can help you here.) Finish these sentences:

My body is . . .

My mind is . . .

The things I love about me are . . .

The things I want to change about me are . . .

Write them quickly, without censoring yourself.

Once they’re on the page, look at them critically. By noticing these thoughts and trying to capture them while you disengage from the emotional content, you can start to realize how harsh you’re being with yourself.

You don’t have to go all Pollyanna or “I’m great” if it’s uncomfortable—though this thought-swapping likely
will
feel awkward at first—but confronting your interior monologue is the only way to seize control of your unconscious negative thoughts and replace them with powerful attitudes that will give you strength. Consider these thought-pairings:

Simply by reflecting on your negative thoughts—even if you can’t bring yourself to counter them just yet—you’ll begin to see and understand that you
don’t
have to believe your negative assessments; you
can
make an entirely new choice. You are in control; you have the power to change the way you
feel
by changing the words you
think.

This might feel awkward and heavy-handed at first, but thought-switching has been repeatedly proven to reduce anxiety and obsessive thinking, and to improve self-confidence.
¹⁰
In fact, with repeated use of this exercise, you’ll change the actual neurochemistry and structure of your brain to favor more positive thoughts; simply put, you’ll train your brain to be happier and more confident.
¹¹

Table 5.
Time Audit Template

Figure 13.
Sample of Time Audit

Time is the essence of our lives. Time is the one resource we can never get back once it’s gone. But many of us squander much of our lives doing things that we don’t really
want
to do—we just do them out of habit. To see how
you
do in using your time, take a Time Audit, an exercise that tracks your activities. (See the sample in figure 13.)

When you’ve completed your Time Audit, you may be shocked at how much time you spend online, watching television, stalking ex-boyfriends on Facebook, or checking-checking-checking e-mail and Twitter—things you don’t even know you’re doing or really want to do. Be warned: You might get partway through this exercise and be tempted to stop because the results are so surprising (and not in a good way). Many folks realize with a shock that they’ve been simply sleepwalking through their lives, spending next to zero time on projects or people that really matter to them. But, as painful as it might be, calling attention to how you’ve been squandering your time can help bring you back into the present. This dawning realization of the quantity of time wasted is one of the core reasons people unconsciously opt to live in pain: The awareness of the loss of that time can be so devastating that they prefer not to address or accept it.

Again, as with your Food Diary, don’t drastically alter anything about your day-to-day existence while you complete your Time Audit. (Although, inevitably, the mere act of writing down what you do makes you spend your time more wisely—a lesson in itself!) But the objective here is to collect data. You want to see what you’re doing with your time when you’re not focused on just how precious it is.