Day 16: The Rules
Week 3 Rewiring
I’ve spent a lot of time in the previous lessons telling you what’s wrong with your self-talk and the many ways that people get it wrong. All I have is what people tell me. And that’s where I’ve pieced together these patterns, conversation by conversation, over thirty years of clinical practice.
Putting this all together took some time. In this course, there are both suggestions and techniques that you can use to analyse and then improve your self-talk. I hope you can now see the importance of improving the conversations going on in your head, especially when you want to improve your state of mind, and then hopefully start improving your life.
Looking at the bigger picture and stepping back, just like the importance of regulating and improving our self-talk, there’s also a need to test the rules that we apply when we run and regulate our lives and behaviour every day of the week.
When Self-Talk Becomes the Rules We Live By
Sometimes when our self-talk goes wrong, we become incoherent, irrational. We think in entirely the wrong way. Or we just become far too negative. When we lose harmony with the world around us, our lives themselves become a fight with the world. We become maladaptive, maladjusted. And life becomes a struggle.
When we talk to ourselves in the wrong way, it’s all too easy for irrational ideas to surface. We personalise things. We become too absolute, or too narrow-minded in our beliefs.
Sometimes our self-talk cripples us. We start to live a life restricted by the untruths in our internal rhetoric. Or we start making rules for ourselves to live by which are not true. There are rules people make for themselves that are not true. They spend their lives restricted by untruths that persistent negative self-talk has constructed.
The Rules You Live By
The question to ask yourself is this: has your self-talk constructed a set of rules for you that you use to make excuses? To not go on? To not achieve what you really want?
Many people who work through this course uncover rules they live by which are not true. Some of these you may have unearthed when you’ve analysed your self-talk. Some of these rules may take a while longer to become apparent. I hope that you notice these rules. And you can also see how they’re restricting you.
Sometimes rules can be one big rule. Or a series of very small rules that add up to the same result.
Here are some common rules I hear regularly:
I can’t handle stress.
I’m not good with people.
I need eight hours of sleep or I can’t function.
I can’t do mornings.
I’m just not a confident person.
Each of these sounds reasonable. Each might even feel true. But here’s what they actually are: self-imposed limitations. Rules you’ve created that restrict what you can do, who you can be, how you can live.
How Rules Reinforce Themselves
The insidious thing about these rules is that once you accept them, you start gathering evidence to support them. You notice all the times you can’t handle stress. You ignore all the times you do. You remember the social situations that went badly. You forget the ones that went well.
This is called confirmation bias. And it’s one of the strongest cognitive biases we have. Once you believe something about yourself, your brain looks for evidence to confirm it. And ignores evidence that contradicts it.
So how do you break these rules? The same way you challenge I can’t statements. You question them. You test them. You look for exceptions.
If you believe you can’t handle stress, ask yourself: have I ever handled any stress? Ever? In my entire life? The answer is yes. You have. Multiple times. You’re here, which means you’ve handled every stressful situation you’ve ever faced. You might not have handled them well. But you handled them.
If you believe you’re not good with people, ask yourself: have I ever had a positive interaction with another human being? Ever? The answer is yes. Which means you can be good with people. You just haven’t developed the skill consistently.
See the difference? I’m not good with people is a rule that defines who you are. I haven’t developed my social skills consistently is a statement about what you’ve done. One is fixed. One is changeable.
Fixed vs Changeable
So start listening for your rules. The statements that begin with I am or I can’t or I need or I’m just not. Write them down. Then ask yourself: is this actually true? Or is this a rule I’ve created to keep myself safe?
Because most of your rules are about safety. They’re about avoiding discomfort, avoiding failure, avoiding rejection. And on the surface, that seems reasonable. But here’s the problem: when you avoid all discomfort, you also avoid all growth.
Extreme avoidance can look like a rule from the outside. It can feel safe. But it also means being stuck — and if avoidance has taken over someone’s life to that degree, that’s not a rule to argue with alone. It’s worth proper support, starting with a GP.
Your rules probably aren’t that extreme. But they’re doing a smaller version of the same thing. They’re keeping you safe. And they’re keeping you stuck.
Breaking the Rules
Breaking free from your rules takes practice. You’ve been living by them for years. Maybe decades. You’re not going to dismantle them overnight. But you can start catching yourself. You can start questioning. You can start looking for the exceptions that prove the rule wrong.
Every time you find an exception, you weaken the rule. Every time you act against the rule, even in a small way, you demonstrate that it isn’t actually true. And every time you demonstrate that it isn’t true, it loses a little of its power over you.
The rules aren’t laws of physics. They’re stories. And stories can be rewritten. The question is: which rules are you ready to start questioning?
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Bandler, R. & Grinder, J. (1979). Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Press.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.