Language is a powerful internal influencer. You use language to communicate with yourself, just as you do with others. Language is the byproduct of what you think and helps create, define, and redefine the way you think. An angry person is more likely to have negative thoughts. If your internal language is negative about yourself, the people in your life, or your environment, you may come to believe what you are thinking and may adopt that as the default way you think about others, the world you are living in, and yourself.
If you make a conscious effort to talk to yourself using positive language, your words can help you create positive feelings about yourself. The way you think and the way you feel are so intimately interwoven. Likewise, how you think and feel usually equals how you behave. So, the language you use, primarily with yourself, will eventually translate into who you are and how you represent yourself to the rest of the world.
Language describes what your brain thinks and feels and often tells your brain what to think and feel. Language can tell your brain to feel good about something or someone or define your world using aggressive and negative terminology. Sometimes those thoughts are consciously applied, but over time, the way you speak to yourself can become your personal linguistic autopilot. Past undercurrents that can cause you to be angry create an internal language that, though it may not focus specifically on those past events, uses that negative energy to create an internal dialogue that can be negative and angry.
Positive internal language, conversely, paves the way for the type of thinking that coincides with a positive self-image, respect for others, and a productive way of living that sets the stage for warm and loving relationships and personal productivity. It is not influenced by past traumas and angry undercurrents and routine attempts to access positive energy. Positive internal language looks at the brighter side and always attempts to arrive at solutions to life problems.
For as long as you have been using angry internal language, you have provided your mind with the time it took to adjust to this linguistic format and the angry actions that may follow. Your brain did not simply begin to speak in angry terms and then you began to display angry behaviors. This has been a neurological training program that you have provided for your brain, and your brain will learn what you want it to do and help you live that way.
The method to stop the cycle is to retrain your brain to think in ways that are not angry. This is a two-step process:
- As angry thoughts enter your mind, consciously say, “I am not going to think about this,” and then shut that thought down.
- It is important to replace the angry thought with something more positive like a statement that describes something positive in your life or where you are at that time.
The approach seems simple, but when you think about it, this is exactly the opposite of what you have been doing for so long. Initially, you began to think angry thoughts and did not challenge those thoughts. Your mind may have developed simple angry statements into much longer angry internal conversations. To reverse the process of continuing to think angry thoughts, the logical first step is to quickly stop that particular thought. Instead of developing it, you terminate it. Expect it to start all over again, sometimes very soon. When that happens, you simply repeat the process. In the beginning, you will do this repeatedly. As your mind adjusts—and it will—you will need to do it less often.
To help your mind adjust to its new way of thinking, you need to replace the thought you are terminating with something more positive. This allows your mind to stop thinking the angry thought and directs your mind to a new thought without angry overtones. You are asking your mind to produce positive linguistic energy. Doing these two steps repeatedly over time can help you train your brain to move away from negative thinking, replace it with more productive thoughts, and help you reduce the urge to turn angry thinking into angry behavior.
Practicing these two steps will not change much initially. The key to any training format, one that is designed to help you learn a new approach, is something I have been teaching for many years. Learning is a function of repetition over time. You are not going to change your angry thinking quickly. Angry thoughts do not begin to occur overnight, and you will not change them overnight. As your mind needs time to adjust to your angry language, it also needs time to adjust to your new approach. If you remain committed to repeating these two steps consistently, your brain’s learning time can be significantly reduced, and you will begin to think and feel better about yourself and your world.
Faust Ruggiero is a clinical psychologist and author of The Fix Your Depression Handbook.
