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Clinical psychologist Faust Ruggiero discusses his article “How to rewire your brain with positive language.” Faust explains how the words we use internally shape our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and why negative self-talk can reinforce cycles of anger and dissatisfaction. He introduces a simple but powerful two-step process: consciously shutting down angry thoughts as they arise and replacing them with positive statements. Faust emphasizes that this is a neurological retraining program, requiring repetition and patience, but over time it can shift self-perception, improve relationships, and foster lasting emotional resilience. Listeners will gain practical strategies for breaking negative thought cycles and cultivating a more positive, productive mindset.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Faust Ruggiero. He is a clinical psychologist, and today’s KevinMD article is “How to rewire your brain with positive language.” Faust, welcome back to the show.

Faust Ruggiero: Kevin, it is a pleasure to be back with you. Thanks for inviting me.

Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us what this latest article is about.

Faust Ruggiero: Kevin, and it is the latest book also. I decided I am looking at the way people are thinking, and I keep. As I talk to people, I say, “We think with language.” So common sense would tell us what we are doing in our heads alone is going to translate into how we think and our self image, how we portray ourselves to the public, how we behave. So getting that language into a more positive way, a positive delivery is a really nice thing to do when you want to feel good about yourself.

Kevin Pho: All right, so give us an example of what you mean or how does that play out in action.

Faust Ruggiero: Well, there are two ways we can introduce the language. Something happens and I am with my boss or I am with my significant other, and they do or say something that gets me a little angry. Now I can confront it real quickly, really nicely, or I can start spinning it in my head, which many of us do. We do not get our thoughts out.

Now we start playing the whole scenario out. And this is what they said. And then for some of us, we will even have an internal conversation go with what we think is going to happen if we confront them. We have already told ourselves what they are going to say and it gets very negative. Now we feel the anxiety, now we feel the stress and the anger, and either we swallow it and it keeps on repeating, or when we do introduce it, it comes out in a way that is not so productive.

Kevin Pho: All right, so the way people process language, is it something that is innate or genetic? Is it something that is learned? Tell us the reason why sometimes people process language more negatively than others.

Faust Ruggiero: I think a lot of it is learned. I always talk about how we train our brain. You know, and regardless of what day it is or how we think about life, every day is a new training experience for the brain. It is going to be presented with new stimuli, and that is going to be assimilated and accommodated in our brain. And so the key here is to try to make that training experience a conscious one.

Instead of just acting on autopilot, something happens, it triggers me, and the thoughts start going. I might want to pull back and say, “This happened. Let me look at this and think and decide how I want to think about it and what I want to do with it.” Instead of automatically spinning, applying that conscious thought retrains the brain to get away from automatic negative internal dialogue and points it in the direction of something that is a little bit more controlled by the person.

Kevin Pho: So give us an example of that. So let us say someone receives language or hears language and comes up with a thought that can be perceived as negative. So you said that we need to be more intentional in terms of how we process that. What would that exactly look like?

Faust Ruggiero: It is the great question. I am glad you asked it. You know, something happens. And OK. Someone does something, or it is just a condition in my life that I keep on playing in my head. I have two options to go with it. Or if I am going to be conscious about it, I am going to take a three-step process: I am going to say to myself consciously, “I am not thinking about that anymore.” Not going to do that, then I am going to switch my topic. Instead, I am going to think about it this way, or I am going to think about this other thing. And then step three, I am going to develop that conversation in my head.

Now, when you talk about a training program for your brain, you just did exactly what you need to do. You stopped the negative, you have decided on a new route. You are now developing that. Now, your brain, over time, will normalize that linguistic pattern instead of the automatic negative conversation. And if you keep on doing it, it will not happen in a week or a month. You know how that works with neurology.

It is going to take a little while, but if you keep on doing it, eventually your brain will adjust to it. And the important thing I tell people is, you are not going to do this and automatically it is going to stop. What you are going to find is it is going to reappear and then you repeat the process, and you repeat it as many times as you have to to get yourself thinking about something new or thinking about it in a different way.

Eventually you start to realize, “Hey, I am pretty good at this. I can stop that thought.” Because the other part is this is that the body kind of likes to chime in too. And when you get negative and you get anxious, the body gets stressed and now you get tight and everything is working against you. So you are also calming your body down. If you want to do some breathing exercises or something, take a little walk, get your body out of the picture. That is a good idea too.

Kevin Pho: Now if you do this enough and you successfully rewire your brain, it can also help individuals build more positive relationship and improves things like self-confidence and self-image, right?

Faust Ruggiero: Absolutely. Our feeling about ourselves, think about it. If I am in my head every day and I am negative, it is not just going to be about the outside world. I am not going to like my world. I am going to have a negative view of myself, first of all, for the very fact that I am in my head and I am negative, but then I am supporting that whole negative world. If it gets positive, that is what I experience every day.

You know, I tell this with angry people all the time. You can get angry at someone, go get them, but in the meantime, you experience that whole process too. So the more positive we can be, and this is not just throwing things out. OK. That hurt me. I am just not even going to think about it. No, you can think about it, but have some control over how you are going to do that. Be a little bit more deliberate. Look at the facts. Say, “OK, this is how I want to deal with this,” as opposed to just letting it fly. And once it flies, it repeats. It is like a cycle in the brain over and over and over again. And sometimes we do not even realize we are in the conversation. We stop ourselves and I am walking around, I am pacing. I am talking to this person who is not here. Nothing changed. Doing it this way gives you a chance to change it.

Kevin Pho: What challenges do people typically face when they first try to shut down negative thoughts, just from your experience?

Faust Ruggiero: That it comes back. I am going to shut this down. They will come back. You know, when I am seeing people in the office and they will say, “I have been doing that, and it is a little better, but the thoughts keep coming back. It is not working.” And I said, “Actually it is. You said it was a little bit better. If you keep on doing it, you will come back next week and say it is just a little better again.” I want people to understand how the brain works. The brain does not learn fast. It learns in increments.

Little by little. That is how learning, that is why we go to school for many years. If our brains learned really quickly, we can go for two or three years and get the whole story, but our brains learn very step by step by step. So, the more you do it, the more often you do it, the more attention you put into it, the greater the results will be. And that is just the way learning is. Just keep doing it. Be consistent. That is all.

Kevin Pho: Can you tell us a story or an example of someone that you have helped with this method? Obviously it does not have to be a real patient, it could be an amalgamation of patients, just so we can kind of see what is in life. Give us a before-and-after picture of a particular client.

Faust Ruggiero: Sure. I just had a fellow that I just stopped about a month ago. I stopped working with him. Came in because he is just with his wife, lots of road rage. You know, and it could be something, it was not a horrible thing. Somebody was driving too close to him. Somebody pulled out, did not see him, and the language would fly and the window would open up and the finger would go out the window. And when we looked at it, I said. “That is all that gets you that angry.” So, and she says, “No, he is that way all the time. He is always got negative language going.” So I said, “Let us not focus so much on road rage. Let us focus on your internal dialogue. Let us start talking.”

Thinking about what you are thinking. Well, a little bit of an abuse history. Drank a little too much. And was a guy that just trained his brain over the years without even knowing it to fly off the handle and just let out whatever was on his mind. So we attacked all this and said, “Let us take a step back. Every time you get angry, take a step back and say, ‘OK, do I want to be angry? What do I want to do here?'” Now we got conscious thought in the picture. Then we said, “OK, if you are going to, if there is something has to be addressed calmly, address it. Let us do that and let us spin positive thoughts in your head.”

I am not talking about wonderful pictures. I am just saying on this thing with your wife, if she did not do something you asked her to do, instead of getting angry, let us talk about it. OK. She has got things to do, other things to do. How can I handle this with her? How can I do this in a way that is going to be a little bit better? In about two months he had taken half, easily half of the negativity out. The internal language was still going. And then we started working on those steps. I just said, “Let us disengage from this. Let us move to this thought. Let us develop that.” He came to me for about a year and about two months ago finally we discharged. And I will do follow-up calls a month after, where I said, “How are we doing?” He said, “Actually, I am doing really well. I cannot believe how something as simple as me spinning all this in my mind was taking control of every part of my world. Work, relationships, friendships, my marriage, my kids, driving, everything. I was just a guy that was primed and ready to go because in my head I was just spinning it and I was prepared for whatever, and I let it fly.”

Kevin Pho: Now, if someone wanted to start today and rewire their brain with positive language, what would be the first practical step to implement that approach successfully?

Faust Ruggiero: If I am counseling them, I am going to want to get a history. I mean, certainly, the thing I tell people is go to the doctor first. Let us make sure that your thyroid is where it needs to be, hormones are all that kind of thing. No hypertension. Let us get those, let us get the physical first, because I can tell you to do all these things mentally, but if you have got hypertension going and your high blood pressure is 140 over 120, we are going to be in a physical danger to begin with, but that is going to be hard to calm down and you will get negative. Thyroid, same thing.

So let us get those things out of the way. Once we do that, we have the history involved. Then we are going to start looking at how you think. OK. You tell me in your mind how that thought develops. You tell me what kind of language you are using in your head. And some of them will know and some of them will not. For the ones that do not, I say, “When you spin, when you are at home and you spin it, write it down. I said this in my head to this guy. I thought this way. I was revengeful.” Put those, write them down. Next time we get together, we are going to start looking at those things and systematically take them all out of your internal dialogue.

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Faust Ruggiero. He is a clinical psychologist. Today’s KevinMD article is “How to rewire your brain with positive language.” Faust, let us end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Faust Ruggiero: You know, for everyone, I love to tell them, first of all, admit to yourself that you talk to yourself. No one likes to do that. They will say, “You talk to yourself.” We all do. Again, think about it. If you are thinking, you are thinking with language. OK. So know that you are doing, we are all doing it. Then take stock and be honest with yourself. Is the next part. Am I getting a little angry? Am I a little more negative than I want to be?

How do we measure that? Am I happy every day? If not, then probably that internal stuff is a problem. So let us look at that. And then the third step is you try to work the things I am telling you, if you cannot, go get some help. Go talk to someone. Get those internal thoughts out of your head with someone you can trust, a friend, a family member, a counselor, a professional, whatever. But get the thoughts out of your head. Get a fresh set of eyes on them to help you see what you are doing and if there are some changes that need to be made.

Kevin Pho: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show.

Faust Ruggiero: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.