I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When you have social anxiety, you eat and drink a lot of things you don’t want to consume. The thought of possibly offending someone or being rejected is so nerve-racking that rather than sending food back or saying you don’t like something, you suck it up and pretend everything is fine. So if I’m at my in-laws’ and allergic to the main dish at dinner, I’ll try to secretly load up on sides while strategically putting bits of the food I can’t eat onto my husband’s plate so it looks like I’m all good. Or if I’m at a bar and order a margarita but get served a gin and tonic, I’ll drink that gin even though I don’t like it (sorry, gin lovers, I had a bad experience with it back in the day).
Why do I do this? I have social anxiety, which means my mind is plagued by a constantly rotating carousel of thoughts, worries, and heightened fears about how others are perceiving me. So I might think things like If my in-laws see me not eating, they’ll think I’m a rude, spoiled bitch, and they won’t love me anymore, and then they’ll tell my husband not to love me. Or I’ll have this thought running through my brain: Don’t send this drink back; the bartender doesn’t care if you hate gin. Don’t make this her problem; she’s superbusy tonight and if you add your complaint to her life you’re making her job harder and basically not supporting women!
This extreme fear of social rejection means I end up eating and drinking things I don’t want or don’t like all the time. It’s embarrassing but true.
I’m used to carrying around this fear of social situations and the tape of self-deprecating thoughts that runs through my head to scold me into avoiding any kind of rejection. I’ve had this tape my whole life (hence my calling it a tape—cuz I was born in the eighties, when we actually used tapes!); it’s kind of like having a really mean friend in your brain at all times. A friend who says things like this: You’re a mess. She thinks you’re an idiot. You’re not doing enough. He thinks you’re ugly. You’re gonna show up to this party at the wrong time. You’re too much for most people. You’re a bad friend and so on. I thought this harsh inner monologue was an immutable part of me, but a book called What to Say When You Talk to Your Self by Shad Helmstetter says it’s possible to retrain that mean-friend voice to start saying some nicer things.
According to the book (which we lived by during season two of By the Book), this kind of inner berating is called negative self-talk. And self-talk gets more negative over time because from the moment we’re born, we’re bombarded with messages about what we can and can’t do. These messages come from every direction—from our parents, peers, teachers, social media, television, and society at large. We absorb these messages and use them to create the story of who we are.
As we go through life we collect the observations, values, and judgments of others. We take these stances on as though they are reality—because we’re little babes simply trying to figure out the ways of the world and don’t know any better! Each outside opinion we take on as truth is like a pair of tinted glasses we glue to our faces. Over time we put on all sorts of colored glasses, each one tinted with a different rule about life. One tint tells you who is smart and who is dumb, another tells you what your body should look like, another tint constantly reminds you to say sorry for taking up as much space as the dude next to you . . . The list goes on and on.
We take on so many of these beliefs that we end up walking around with hundreds of pairs of tinted glasses glued to our sweet, shining faces, and all the colors meld into dark, impenetrable blinders. We lose sight of ourselves and instead see a list of inadequacies that we’re always aiming to fix. This is negative self-talk.
Here is some of the negative self-talk I often say:
I often think of these things as facts, but they’re really just someone else’s biased opinions, not immutable truths. In fact, I can list every person I heard these annoying opinions from. See?
From living by What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, I learned that we hear negative messages (stop kicking that, don’t raise your voice, you can’t go in there, and so on) more often than positive ones, and they tend to be more specific, too. And a lot of the time we need those messages. I probably wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t been taught “Never touch that electrical socket!” or “Stop flipping the bird every time a driver cuts you off!” So I’m very glad these restrictive messages have stuck in my head and kept me safe.
There’s a problem with this system of message storage, though. Not all negative messages save our lives. Some are just dumb opinions and don’t need to be stored as rules in our little baby brains, but they get stored away nonetheless. So things like “Your hair is too curly to be considered pretty” or “Boys can’t play with pink things like that” end up holding the same weight as their life-prolonging counterparts.
As I’ve grown and matured, I’ve collected, filed, and set in stone many of these admonishing rules. They run my life at this point. They keep me on time, they keep me from walking into traffic, they even remind me to pee after sex so I don’t get a UTI. But they also torture me with stupid rules based on shame, bias, or misinformation. Things like, oh, you know, I guess everything listed a few paragraphs earlier. These internal scolding messages feel like rules I have to live by that make my life harder, but they aren’t rules. They’re just things I say to myself that I heard from unreliable sources.
So how do we get our self-talk to be kinder? How do we sort through all the rules we’ve learned about life, weed out the unhelpful ones, and start taking on kind tints that complement one another and together make a rosier outlook, so we can enjoy life more?
Helmstetter says that it’s possible to reprogram our thought patterns and undo all that negative self-talk with some new, positive messages. When we lived by What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, Kristen and I tried many ways to reprogram our thoughts to be more positive.
This was pretty easy for Kristen. She already consciously tries to say nice things to herself. But you should know this wasn’t always the case; it took her years to become as good at this as she is. Not unlike many girls growing up, she spent years feeling horrible about her body and putting herself down, both out loud and in her head. But over time and with lots of work, she slowly started accepting compliments, saying nice things about herself, and eventually believing all these kind words.
I, on the other hand, had never given much thought to what I say to myself until we lived by this book. But after I had tracked how I talk to myself for a day, it became clear I had a self-talk problem. Over the course of twenty-four hours I didn’t say one positive thing about myself or to myself. This was heartbreaking; I would never hang out with someone who talked to me the way I talk to me, and I became determined to change this.
So I dove headfirst into the book’s different self-talk exercises. Over two weeks I had kind conversations out loud with myself in the shower, wrote kind mantras over and over in a journal, and listened to affirmation podcasts—and the whole time it felt incredibly stupid to have conversations with myself while I washed my hair, and getting caught by my partner listening to recorded affirmations while I was cooking was profoundly embarrassing. Every time I said something complimentary to myself or about myself I felt like a ridiculous fraud who dealt in lies and counterfeit.
At the end of living by What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, I wasn’t sure I was doing it right. Forcing positive self-talk wasn’t feeling natural, and I worried that maybe I was too broken or anxious for the book’s advice to work. But then something surprising happened. The night we finished living by that book, I was served a very flat glass of prosecco while at a bar in Brooklyn celebrating a friend’s birthday. Since prosecco is my go-to drink and my overblown fear of social ridicule means I never send anything back, I drink my fair share of flat prosecco. But that night, without even thinking twice, I just strutted up to the bar and with a self-assuredness I didn’t know I had, I asked the bartender for another glass, this time with bubbles.
Whether I felt it working or not, I’m convinced my two weeks of forced positive self-talk helped me do something with confidence that my social anxiety would normally prohibit me from doing. So I consider that a damn good (and bubbly) start.
Dear Kristen and Jolenta,
I’ve tried practicing positive self-talk, but every time I do, I feel like a liar. What’s the point in saying nice things to myself if I don’t believe what I’m saying?
—SH
Dear SH,
Believe us—we feel your pain. As Jolenta was just saying, she didn’t use to believe the sunny affirmations she said to herself either. She still struggles to. And yet, positive self-talk still seemed to make a difference in her life. Before living by What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, she felt unable to speak up when she was served flat prosecco. After, she did.
The point here: Maybe she didn’t have to consciously believe all the nice things she said to herself for those nice things to make a difference. Maybe she just had to let them wash over her like the sounds of advertisements on TV, songs on the radio, and all the other noises in the modern world that tell us what we should think about ourselves, even if we’re not consciously listening.
For me, the path to being kinder to myself was driven by my desire to be kinder to others. As is the case with a lot of girls in America, my childhood habit when complimented on my appearance was to reply with “No, my skin looks horrible” or “I can barely fit into this dress, I’m sure I look like a sausage.”
At one point, someone I admired said to me, “Will you please just say ‘Thank you’ when people compliment you? Every time you deny their compliments you’re essentially saying they’re idiots with no power of observation.” Another person I admired put it more bluntly: “You sound like you’re fishing for more compliments every time you deny someone’s kind words.”
I was mortified. Was I really coming off as such a jerk? I didn’t mean to be. I was just trying to be honest. I really and truly believed I looked like a monster most of the time.
But driven by my desire to be kinder to others, I began to accept compliments more graciously. Over time, that led to me internalizing what some of those complimentary words were saying. And it also led me to a realization: I never complimented myself. I talked to myself like I was the worst, ugliest, most unworthy person on the planet. I talked to myself as I would never talk to anyone else. And thank god for therapy and good friends for helping me to realize I could do better.
My point: Accepting compliments also felt like a lie to me in the beginning. But I did it to be kind to others. And that kindness to others eventually led to me being kinder to myself. I worked with the lie, until it became the truth. And now I know what the real lie was.
—Kristen