EP. 120 How to Stop Negative Self-Talk

When we feel frustrated, it is so easy to get trapped into a pattern of negative thinking. You know, as soon as Debbie Downer offers one negative thought to ruin the party, our brain wants to latch on to all the other negative thoughts. This is how our brains end up in Problemville. And it's really, really common, but we don't talk about it. Enough. We don't understand why we have this negative self-talk. So I want to just talk about negative self-talk. I want to talk about how it affects our weight loss, and I want to talk about why it happens and what we can do to overcome it. You're listening to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast with Jennifer Dent-Brown, episode 120. What if it were possible to achieve your goal weight and stay there permanently without dieting? Welcome to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast, where you will discover the key components that most diets won't tell you because they want you to keep coming back. Not here. This is your last stop on the weight loss struggle bus. I am your host, Jennifer Dent-Brown, life and weight loss coach, and I am going to show you how to stop dieting forever. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey, LuxeLifer, welcome back. If this is your first time listening, I want to just welcome you to the podcast. I am your certified life and weight loss coach, Jennifer, from JenniferDent.com, where I help my clients overcome the constant negative self-talk that derails their weight loss progress. This was a topic that came up in our group coaching call last week. And it's really, really common. And I just wanted to bring this topic to the podcast because it is so common. And I think a lot of us struggle with it, but we don't talk about it enough. We don't understand why we have this negative self-talk. And I think that we judge ourselves really harshly. We're speaking harshly to ourselves. So I want to just talk about negative self-talk. I want to talk about how it affects our weight loss. And I want to talk about why it happens and what we can do to overcome it. So here we go. Do you guys remember, um, that character Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live? If you don't, just go Google Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live. Maybe I'll just put a link to maybe a skit. I remember that first skit with Lindsay Lohan in it. Where is Lindsay Lohan these days? Anyway, I remember the first skit from Saturday Night Live with Debbie Downer, and it was just so funny. But maybe I remember it because I'm like, oh, she sounds like me. So Debbie Downer was this character, right? And she would always be out with her friends. And her friends would be so excited about doing these things. And no matter what they proposed about that, we're going to go do these plans, we're going to go have fun. I think the one that I remember, like, they were at Disney World, and they were going to do all this fun stuff at the happiest place on Earth. And Debbie Downer would always be like, always say what horrible things would happen. And she never had any ideas of her own about, like, how the group can do something fun, but she always made it her business to make sure that her friends knew that their ideas were the worst thing in the world. So I Googled this character, and I forgot there was a theme song that went along with the skit on Saturday Night Live. And here are the lyrics. It says, You're enjoying your day. Everything's going your way. Then along comes Debbie Downer, always there to tell you about a new disease, a car accident, or killer bees. You'll beg her to spare you. Debbie, please. But you can't stop Debbie Downer. So it was literally her business to bring down the mood of everyone by just being negative. And so we all know people like that, right? And we, of course, we can always like point somebody out and say, yep, that person's always so negative. But a lot of us have that same trait in ourselves. Not even a lot of us, we all do. We all have an internal Debbie Downer. And it may show up like, as soon as you muster up the excitement to begin something new, your internal Debbie Downer will spoil your enthusiasm with a snarky thought. For example, maybe you were really considering joining Stop Dieting Forever during the last enrollment period. Maybe you read all of my emails and read all of the details on the website over and over again. And maybe you even sent me a question. Maybe you messaged me with a question and you were excited about the possibility of learning how to lose weight without dieting, but your internal Debbie Downer quickly popped up and offered a bunch of negative thoughts like, you don't have time to do this. And what are you getting all excited about? This just won't work for you. Looks like all the other attempts didn't work for you. Or this isn't going to work because as soon as you start, you know, so-and-so is going to have something to say about it. And stop looking at this because you know you don't like to cook and you know you don't want to exercise, so what's the point? Because the only way you're going to lose weight is if you learn how to cook and you start exercising a lot. Yeah, your internal Debbie Downer. Or maybe your internal Debbie Downer is talking shit to you in ways. Like, you know, you want to go for a promotion at work that you know you're qualified for, but dot dot dot. Or when you are tasked with leading a project with an organization that you belong to, and you know it's going to be really great, but dot dot dot. Or when you have a big win inside your business and you want to celebrate but... Right? Debbie Downer has something negative to say after every but... And many times she doesn't stop at just one snarky comment. It's an onslaught of negativity until any bit of excitement or hope that you had has left your body. And this My friend, is when you give up. This is when you quit on your goal, you quit on yourself, or if you have to keep moving forward, you're very uncertain in what you're doing, which causes you to feel terrible. So I just want you to know that you are not alone. We all have an internal Debbie Downer, and I refer to it in the Stop Dieting Forever process and the trainings that I created. I talk about it as your bratty brain. And I talk about the bratty brain a lot because I want to normalize the bratty brain. I want to normalize Debbie Downer, because when you know that this negative self-talk isn't unique to just you, it allows you to be a little bit more compassionate with yourself. And self-compassion comes from understanding at the end of the day— and you're like, I don't know how to be compassionate with myself, Jennifer. Self-compassion comes from understanding, and what you need to understand is that we are all wired to be negative. We subconsciously limit our potential for our evolution into our 2.0 selves because of our negative self-talk, but we all deal with it. We all have it. The difference between the person who is successful with reaching their goal weight and the person who isn't successful in reaching their goal weight is that the person who isn't successful succumbs to the Debbie Downer. And when they succumb to the Debbie Downer, they end up quitting on themselves. They end up giving up on their goal. But the person who is successful in achieving their goal weight or whatever goals they're working on, they understand and they have normalized that Debbie Downer is just part of the experience. She's just part of the journey. But they don't let that stop them. So when we feel frustrated, it is so easy to get trapped into a pattern of negative thinking. You know, as soon as Debbie Downer offers one negative thought to ruin the party, our brain wants to latch on to all the other negative thoughts. This is how our brains end up in Problemville. We find one problem and suddenly everything is a problem. Like, for example, today's Monday when I'm recording this podcast. I wake up, I'm feeling ready and focused to start the week. I got lots of things I want to accomplish this week, but Debbie Downer wants to remind me, well, you know, there are things that you didn't even finish last week. So what makes you think you're going to get everything else done this week? And you know, it's another Monday. It's another Monday. Away from summer and closer to winter. Another Monday, another week, we're getting closer to cold weather, and we hate the cold weather. And you know, when it gets cold, you're going to have to pull out all of your summer clothes, and you don't have time to do that. You have all this other stuff to do. You don't have time to deal with your clothes. And you know, you really want to buy new clothes, but you don't have the extra money in your budget to buy any new clothes for winter. It's the nonstop onslaught of negative thinking. But here's the difference between me and you. The negative thinking no longer throws me off because I know exactly why it happens. However, others may not know what I have come to understand, and this is what I'm going to explain to you today. Negative thinking and negative emotional patterns are actually hardwired into our brains. It's a survival skill that has its roots in human evolution. I know it sounds crazy, but think about it. Why is it that when we receive dozens of compliments on something that we've done, but there was one person who was less than enthusiastic about it, the reaction of that lukewarm person, that one lukewarm person sticks in our head versus the dozens of compliments we received from the other people. Trust me, when I get a negative review on my podcast, my brain is like fixate on the negative review. And I have like, I think my rating on Apple is like 4.8 out of 5. So I think I have 2 negative reviews and like 50 or so others, but my brain wants to fixate on those 2 initially. And by the way, if you haven't left me a 5-star review, this is a great opportunity. To do so because you're really going to love this episode. But also, I want you to think about, because right now we're in political season and those commercials are running nonstop on TV. And this is why the negativity, right, the negativity, the smear campaigns, this is why they're so popular in politics, because being nasty just makes a bigger impact on your brains. You remember the nasty comment about the specific person running for office more so than you remember the good things that this person has done in the past, right? So this is why you see so many smear campaigns when it comes to election season. So when you find yourself dwelling on an insult or fixating on your mistakes, just understand that the negative events that you're experiencing has a greater impact on your brain than the positive ones. And there's actually a name for why this happens. In psychology, they call this the negativity bias. In layman's terms, it simply means we naturally feel the sting of a negative emotion more powerfully than we feel the joy of a positive one. So our human brains, yours and mine— remember, you are not unique in this— our human brains tend to remember traumatic experiences more so than positive ones. Our human brains wanna recall insults better than compliments. Our human brains react more strongly to negativity, and our human brains are wired to think about negative thoughts more frequently than positive ones. This explains why it is so hard to overcome those past failures at losing weight. Our brain just does not want to remember them because even if you did lose some weight— so just say for example in the past you've lost weight and gained it back— your brain will remember the fact that you gained it back more so than the fact that you actually lost the weight. And I know this to be true because when I did all of those diets in the past, I would lose weight, but I never like was proud of myself for being able to lose the weight, I always just remember how awful it was to gain it back again. This explains— the negativity bias explains why someone making a negative comment about your weight stings more than someone who gives us a compliment, right? Here's a great example, and I know all of us can relate to this. So you may be having a great time at family dinner, right? Maybe you get a holiday family dinner with your all, with your extended family, when your cousin makes an offhand comment about something on your plate that you're eating and you find that irritating, and then you find yourself stewing over his comments for the rest of the dinner. And then the next day when your best friend asks you, well, how was, you know, family dinner? You tell her it was terrible. And you proceed to tell her exactly what your cousin said, even though you actually really did have a nice time at the dinner despite that one comment. The negativity bias is the reason why you lose motivation to lose weight. Listen, rather than focusing on what you will gain if you keep working towards your goal, your brain is more likely to dwell on what you have to give up. To achieve that goal. I coached a client, a member, a couple of weeks ago in our group coaching session. And her dieter's mentality was still— she'd already lost, I think, 10 or so pounds. And she has like 20 more pounds that she wants to lose before reaching her forever weight. And she has just been stalled at that like 10-pound mark. And she's just kind of like, I'm not really interested anymore. I'm not really prioritizing. I don't know why. I know what I need to do. I just don't want to do it. She's completely lost her motivation to continue her journey, her weight loss journey. And so after— like, when I was coaching her, what we got to was that her brain was still linking that she had to deprive herself in order for her to continue to lose weight. Her brain was thinking she had to give up the things that she liked in order for her to lose weight. So of course, she was not motivated to lose weight. She was focusing on what she believed she had to give up to achieve her goal versus thinking about what she's going to gain by losing the additional 20 pounds and using that as a motivation to keep working towards her goal. So when you hear your internal Debbie Downer, raining on your parade, I want you to remember that what is happening is a natural phenomenon. Your brain's bias towards the negative, the negative side of things, leads you to just pay more attention to the bad things that are happening, making them seem much more important than what they really are. I really want you to understand this because when you understand this phenomenon, when you understand what is happening in your brain, it is easier for you to soothe your discomfort caused by the negativity. It is easier for you to— what I say— give yourself a hug from the inside out by telling yourself that this is normal. This is just what brains do, and the negative self-talk doesn't have to impact what you're doing. So I need you to understand that just being aware of your own negativity bias is your first step to being able to give yourself that internal Hug. When you find yourself in Problemville, right, that's when you wake up or you're having like— your brain is focusing on all the problems. I want you to pause, remember this episode, and remind yourself that nothing has gone wrong. Your brain is just on autopilot right now, and you have an opportunity to hit the pause, hit that that mental reset button and start playing a new soundtrack in your head. Shut the Debbie Downer, shut her down, shut her down. The way that you do that is by noticing the type of thoughts that run through your mind. And yes, you can do this by thinking, but it really is much easier, much faster, and much more efficient to Take a pen, take a pencil, piece of paper, and write it down. In the Stop Dieting Forever process, we call this doing a daily brain dump. It is part of the process every single day because when you are beginning your weight loss journey and part of the process, as you know, is getting on the scale every morning, doing that simple act every single day can send your brain into a negative tornado. And doing a daily brain dump after you weigh yourself, it allows you to stop the tornado and it gives you an opportunity to change your perspective. We call this reframing the situation, right? The number is still the same. The number on the scale is still the same, but you can change your thoughts about the number on the scale, reframing the situation. So whether it's the number on the scale, whether it's something that someone said to you last week about your weight or about what you were wearing, whether it's something you are feeling badly about because you ate last night and you didn't plan on eating it, our brains want to perceive all of these circumstances as negative, but we use the model to help us reframe the situation. I teach you all how to use the model when you join Stop Dieting Forever, but the model helps remind us, remind our brains, that all circumstances are not bad. And pushing our brains to reframe the event in a less negative light is so beneficial and so helpful. So when you spend time every single day writing down your problem-filled thoughts and using the model, you can actually help move your brain out of Problemville. And let me tell you, you can move your brain out of Problemville by doing this a lot faster than you can just by thinking about those thoughts. And you can return back to the land of possibility, which is where we want to be. This is where we want to exist as a LuxeLifer. So the constant negative self-talk, the constant berating, the constant beating yourself up, It does nothing for you but get in the way of your happiness. It does nothing for you but get in the way of you achieving your weight loss goal. And to add to that, the stress and the worry that we put on top of the berating because we're judging ourselves for having the negative self-talk, like we're just slowly killing ourselves physically and emotionally. And I remember struggling with this for so long, and I would do all these affirmations and I would write down all these positive thoughts. And I was just so frustrated with myself because they weren't sticking. They were not sticking. And I thought something was wrong with me. And I didn't want to talk to anyone else about it because talking to someone else about it would actually mean that what I was thinking was true. And I didn't want to acknowledge the fact that I was having such awful self-talk. And so I just had this internal battle going on in my head about like, here comes the negative self-talk. Oh my God, I got to like say something positive to erase the negative self-talk. And that, my friends, does not work. We're missing that component of self-compassion in there. So what I want to remind you is at the end of the day, y'all, you control your thoughts. There's nothing outside of you that controls your thinking. It's not the devil. It's not the enemy. You control your thoughts, and your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings drive your actions, and your actions create your results. Now, for those of you who were raised as Christians, as I was, you were taught to believe that the devil would put these thoughts into your mind. The enemy caused the negative self-talk. And what I have learned as an evolved Christian is to see that the negative self-talk is my thoughts. It's not anything outside of me that's putting the thoughts into my head. That's just my Debbie Downer. That's just my bratty brain speaking. Call it the devil, call it what you want, but know that those thoughts are coming from me. But when you understand that there is an evolution, there is a deep programming and wiring, and this is how our brains are wired. When you understand that, you can allow for those thoughts but not allow them to derail what you're doing. When I got that, I was like, okay, I am no longer going to be a victim of my own thinking. So I want to ask you this question. Are you going to continue to be a victim of your own thinking Or are you going to utilize the tools to refocus your energy and your attention on creating the result that you want? The tools being doing a daily brain dump, using the model to help reframe the circumstance. That is your choice. If you want to continue to be a victim of your own thinking, do nothing. Continue on as you are, but just know your Debbie Downer is not going anywhere. Your bratty brain is not going anywhere. It's always going to be there. But your ability to show self-compassion for yourself when the Debbie Downer gets really loud and when your bratty brain gets really loud is going to be the difference between you staying stuck where you are and you achieving your goal. So I'm going to leave you with this simple quote. Actually, I have two quotes. The first one is, a negative mind will never give you a positive A negative mind will never give you a positive life. I don't know who said it, but I love the quote. And to that, I want to add one of my favorite thoughts from my coach. She gave— it was a gift she gave to me, my coach Lindsay Dotzloff, who was on the podcast a couple episodes ago, when my bratty brain was like, on overdrive all the time, she would always say to me, nothing has gone wrong. And for the longest time, I did not understand what she was talking about. I was like, what are you talking about? Everything is going wrong. But she would always say, nothing has gone wrong, Jennifer. And I've taken that. When I finally got it, I still— I've taken that thought, and I use it all the time to comfort myself. To show myself that self-compassion. So the gift she gave to me, I'm going to give to you. I want you to just begin to practice this thought. Nothing has gone wrong. And put your name there. Nothing has gone wrong. That is how you comfort yourself and show yourself some self-compassion when your Debbie Downer is getting really loud and your brain has set up camp in Problemville. And you're struggling, I want you to just remind yourself nothing has gone wrong. And that simple thought right there is enough to pause the negativity, stop the negative self-talk, and give yourself an opportunity to begin to reframe what is happening. All right. All right, Colette, let us stop and celebrate. Play the music. All right, I'm celebrating two things today. The first thing I want to celebrate is me. Yay! I have completed officially Advanced Coaching Certification in Numbing and Buffering with my coach Rachel Hart, and I have to say that that was like one of the best investments I have made thus far in my coaching journey. So the Advanced Coaching Certification in Numbing and Buffering— one, I'm always going to be learning how to become a better coach so I can help you get to your goal faster, so I can help more people get to their goals faster. But with this advanced coaching certification in numbing and buffering, I can now help you understand why fixing your habits of emotional eating isn't going to solve the real problem. I can help you feel your urges to eat And instead of eating and drinking your way through the urge, I can help you feel your way through the urge and help you get to the other side of it faster. And I'll also help you understand what happens when you learn to feel the discomfort of not giving in to your urges. Because let's be real, y'all, we are overweight because we eat too much food. And if you're an emotional eater and you've been depending on following a diet for calorie restriction in order to lose weight, you're missing the point. We've got to learn how to understand what the urges are. We've got to learn how to be able to feel the urges, feel the discomfort of the urges, and we've got to be able to do this without depending on food or alcohol to make us feel better, to soothe ourselves. So that is basically in, in a nutshell what I learned in this advanced coaching certification. So I'm super excited. I got a new little certification logo put on my website. Go check it out, JenniferDent.com. But I also want to celebrate the brand new members who just joined in this last cohort of Stop Dieting Forever. And I'm giving them a round of applause, y'all, because I was thinking about it this morning and I want to celebrate them. And they're just getting started. It's not like, oh my gosh, we're celebrating their weight loss. No, we are celebrating that they said yes. And I want to just make this public. I want to make this celebration public because I know it is not easy to put aside your family and your work obligations to focus on you, to focus on your health, and to focus on your weight loss. But when I think about the lives that will be changed because they had the courage to say yes, and they had the courage to overcome their Debbie Downer and commit to learning the Stop Dieting Forever process, it literally— y'all, like, I have goosebumps right now because they're going to change their lives because they were courageous enough to say, OK, enough is enough. I'm ready to change how I'm thinking so I can create a different result with my health and with my weight. How that they are setting an example for their children and the other people around them, their coworkers. And they're like, it's just, it just gives me the chills when I think about not only will their lives be changed, but the lives of so many other people who will witness their transformation, all because they said yes to $250 of joining and joining the Stop Dieting Forever membership. So I want to celebrate them today. You know who you are because I know some of them had to overcome a lot of negative self-talk to get to this point. So I just want to stop and celebrate the newest members of Stop Dieting Forever. All right, so if you're ready to join Stop Dieting Forever, unfortunately You have to wait, but our— your next opportunity to join is coming up on October 31st, y'all. Halloween. Mm-hmm. We all know Halloween is the gateway to emotional eating. It's the gateway to the eating holiday eating season. So if you want a different holiday experience, if you want to not gain weight during the holiday, and that if that's what you've done before and you want to change that result, October 31st, Halloween in the United States of America, is when enrollment will reopen for Stop Dieting Forever. And that is your opportunity. So go to jenniferdent.com/stopdietingforever to get all of the details. Save the date on your calendar and add your name to the waiting list so you don't miss a thing. All right, share this episode with your BFF because you know she's dealing with her Debbie Downer too. So share this episode, just text her a link, tell her that this episode was amazing. Live Lux, y'all. I love you so much and I will see you in the next episode. If you like today's episode of the Stop Dieting Forever podcast and you want to learn more about creating a life lifestyle instead of following a diet to lose weight permanently, be sure to visit JenniferDent.com. There you'll learn more about my unique weight loss process and how it can work for you. Go to JenniferDent.com to discover what you can do to stop dieting forever.