Anxiety & Negative Self-Talk

Anxiety is often known for its debilitating physical symptoms like racing heart, tense muscles, excessive sweating, insomnia, and loss of appetite. But there’s a mental and emotional component to anxiety that can be more insidious; a voice that amplifies worries, fuels self-doubt, and pushes the worst case scenario as the most likely or even inevitable outcome. 

The narrative this internal voice spins becomes a prison of our own making, constraining our thoughts, feelings, and behavior in an attempt to keep us safe, when in reality our internal voice itself is causing us to feel unsafe and reinforcing a negative self concept that keeps us stuck. 

Separating Yourself From Anxiety

Perhaps the most challenging step in this process is the first one: realizing that this negative, critical, or sometimes fearful voice that comes from anxiety within us isn’t us, and it isn’t reliable. 

We all have what psychologists call a “schema” through which we view and make sense of ourselves and the world. This is a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that we have related to a core belief about ourselves and the world around us. For example, a schema organized with anxiety might look something like “I can’t do anything right” or “I’m a failure”. 

Once we’ve developed a certain schema, it’s often difficult to override that stigma, or as psychologists put it “assimilate” new information–meaning that if we encounter a situation that doesn’t align with our expectations, we shift our expectations or amend our narrative to take this new data into account. 

More often than not, we tend to reject or downgrade any information we encounter that doesn’t fit into our schema, which then becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re certain that you can’t do anything right, for example, even when you do appear to do something right or accomplish a task as you intended, you might dismiss it as “not a big deal” or say it “didn’t count” or even find something no matter how small or insignificant that we didn’t do as well as we would’ve liked and hold this as proof that our schema is still correct. We do this even when it’s self-deprecating, illogical, and the least reasonable way to respond to the information in front of us! Any new information or experiences we have, rather than evaluating them for what they really are, we tend to sort into our pre-existing notions about ourselves and the world and use them to reaffirm what we already know–which can become an increasingly negative cycle. 

Challenging Your Negative Self-Talk

It’s important to recognize what schemas you’re applying to yourself and the world around you and be critical of them: where might they come from? How might they have functioned well for you in the past, and how might they be limiting you or hurting you in the present?

These inner judgements and fears we may feel are not facts, though they may seem very convincing to us. Being thoughtful about this on its own can be so effective–just the act of realizing your anxiety might be speaking this way to you and separating that from the truth of what’s happening creates enough space to become intentional about which narrative you want to choose to take in. 

Anxiety most often feeds us the worst case scenario. And while we can’t always eliminate this possibility entirely, it can help considerably to direct an equal amount of attention to the other possibilities that are equally as likely–including the best case scenario as well as everything in between. 

Responding to Anxiety With Compassion

Anxiety might say things to us like “I can’t do this”, “I’m not good enough”, or extremes like “I’m a failure”. These narratives reinforce feelings like helplessness, which often lead to lower performance, lower engagement, and more negative social consequences. Negative self-talk isn’t just a byproduct of anxiety; it can exacerbate it. 

The more we berate ourselves, the more anxious we become, and the more anxious we become, the more we berate ourselves. 

Not only is it cruel to speak to yourself with such disparaging language, but it’s just flat out not effective. If someone were to ask you to do something and then continuously put you down the entire time, you wouldn’t be likely to do a good job. In fact, you might not even want to do it at all.

Alternatively, if someone were to ask you to do something and give you gentle encouragement, you would likely feel more inspired and willing to follow through. And this is exactly how you should respond to yourself in moments where negative self-talk is coming through.

Consider responding to your anxiety as if you are reassuring someone you care about like a close friend or family member. If your inner critic says “You're a failure”, you might respond “Even if I do fail this time, that doesn’t make me a failure. I can try again”. If it says “You can’t do this” respond by saying “I’m feeling overwhelmed, and that’s ok. I will give myself a small break or take this slower if I need to.” 

It’s Ok To Feel Anxious

Feeling anxious won’t kill you (though it may feel like it!) It’s not dangerous, and it’s not inherently a problem. Anxiety is simply a feeling that tells you you’re dealing with unknown variables and uncertainty. That’s it.

If you start to notice yourself getting into your cycle of negative self-talk, see if you can remind yourself that you must be feeling anxious, and take a moment to think about why you might be feeling that way. Sometimes simply being able to validate the anxiety is enough to get it to simmer down a bit, and even if it doesn’t, you’ve at least managed to separate yourself from the cycle. The more you can get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable and staying in a space of not-knowing, the better you’ll be able to cope with anxious feelings.