Day 20: Putting It All Together
Week 3 Rewiring
We’ve covered a lot of ground over the last nineteen days. Deletions, distortions, generalisations. Musterbation. Personalising. Labelling. Can’t statements. Rules you didn’t know you’d made for yourself. It’s a lot to take in, and if you’ve been working through this course lesson by lesson, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed by just how much of your self-talk needs attention.
So today isn’t about learning something new. It’s about pulling everything together into something you can actually use, day to day, without needing to remember twenty different techniques at once.
The One Question That Covers Almost Everything
If I had to boil this entire course down to a single question, it would be this: is what I’m telling myself actually true, and is it helpful?
Almost every technique in this course is really just a different way of asking that same question. When you catch a should or a must, you’re asking whether that rule is actually true. When you catch a generalisation, an always or a never, you’re asking whether it’s really true, or just a distorted, edited version of events. When you catch yourself labelling, personalising, or jumping to conclusions, you’re asking the same thing from a slightly different angle.
And the helpful part matters too. Sometimes a thought is technically true but not remotely useful. I made a mistake in that meeting is true. Repeating it to yourself fifty times over the following week isn’t helpful. Recognising both halves of that question, true and helpful, is what separates useful self-reflection from unhelpful rumination.
Building the Habit
You won’t catch every unhelpful thought. Nobody does. The aim isn’t perfection, it’s noticing more often than you used to, and correcting course a bit faster each time.
A good way to build this as a lasting habit is to pick one or two patterns that felt most familiar to you as you worked through this course. Maybe it was the musterbation, all those shoulds and musts. Maybe it was personalising, taking on blame that wasn’t yours to carry. Maybe it was the rules you didn’t know you’d made for yourself.
Whichever ones landed hardest, focus your attention there first. Trying to catch all twenty patterns at once is a recipe for giving up entirely. Getting good at spotting one or two, until it becomes close to automatic, is a much more realistic goal, and from there the rest tends to follow.
Self-Talk Is a Skill, Not a Fixed Trait
Perhaps the most important thing to take from these three weeks is this: the way you talk to yourself isn’t fixed. It’s not a personality trait you were born with and have to live with forever. It’s closer to a skill, or a habit, something you learned over years without realising you were learning it, and something you can relearn, more deliberately, in the other direction.
That takes time. It took years to build the patterns you’re working to change, and it will take more than three weeks to fully rewire them. But every time you catch a distorted thought and correct it, you’re laying down a slightly different pattern. And patterns, repeated often enough, become the new normal.
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.
- 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.
- 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.