Change Your Brain Every Day - What Your Subconscious Mind Hears When You Talk Negatively to Yourself

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

You may not realize this, but when you talk to yourself, your subconscious mind is listening, and what it actually hears and registers may not be quite what you’d expect. In the first episode in a series on the power of words, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss how the subconscious mind processes your self-talk, how it differentiates between different type of language, and why the words you choose matters.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome, everybody. We are so excited to have you with us, and this is the week we talk about the words you use matter because your mind is listening to everything you think and everything you say.

Do you have a testimonial? Should we start with that since we're talking about words? I do, but you may have to actually read it. And it's a good one. I like it. We love these, by the way. So please send them in because they're very special to us. And what's the question for the week?

It's what are the most common words you use that run around your mind that either help you or hurt you? Testimonial from Debbie. C333. testimonial from Debbie, C three, three, three. Thanks Daniel and Tana for your short podcast. Yes, because I have a short attention span.

I'm a busy mom and short is the only way I'm able to listen. I've read a number of your books trying to help my adopted ADHD high-functioning spectrum child. I had to laugh when Tana said that it takes 30 days for a kid to starve to death. Yep. I struggled with getting my kid to eat, but I appreciate the encouragement to stick to my guns and not cave in when all he wants to eat is junk food. One other helpful thing I recently heard on the podcast was we aren't stuck with the brains we have. I hope soon to be able to bring my son in for a brain scan to see the best way to help him. Well, Debbie, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you. We are so grateful for people who listen to the podcast. And it's been growing. So thank you so much. So when you hear about this topic, what are the words that come into your mind? Well, the first thing that I wanted to mention is this became important to me a long time ago because I used to not use very nice language with myself. And when I heard this one thing, it made me at least begin to work on it.

Your subconscious does not have a sense of humor. And so when I heard that, I went, whoa. Okay. So in other words, what you say, your subconscious just begins to listen to. It takes it seriously. If you say, I'm a fill in the blank and it's not a nice word, your subconscious just begins to, I'm a jerk, I'm a whatever. Or you are, or you call someone else that, your subconscious begins to take that on and begins to just find reasons to make that true. So it's not helpful. Even if you think you're just kidding, your brain just goes, okay, well, I'm going to find evidence that that is true.

And so your life begins to take on that color. So when you use words to describe an experience or to describe yourself or to describe another person, what ends up happening is that becomes the experience. Those words become the experience because we use language to describe things. And pretty soon your subconscious just says, okay, well, that was how it was. Even if it wasn't necessarily how it was, but you've used, you've chosen those words to describe it. Hence why four people can watch the same experience occurring. They all write it differently or say it differently and they all have four different experiences, right? So it's very interesting to me. And that's why it became so important to me many years ago. So it's what I talk about in my books.

We talk about ants, automatic negative thoughts thoughts that this type of ant is called labeling right that whenever you label yourself or someone else with a negative term you lump them with all of the people you've ever known that were jerks or idiots or borderline people. And you then are not dealing with them. You're dealing with all of them. Yeah. At once. Well, and one of the things I think is even worse.

So story when Chloe, who's now 15, when she was little, she was like eight, maybe nine, something like that. I heard her, she'd been fussing with me about something. And all of a sudden I heard her outside my room, sort of not yelling, but like talking pretty roughly. And she was saying, I hate you. You're so stupid. I thought she was talking to me.

And it irritated me at first. I was like fairly annoyed. So I walked out, she'd never done that before. And so I walked outside my room and she was standing in front of the mirror in the hallway and saying it to herself. And instead of being annoyed, I just was heartbroken. And so I had to sit her down and explain this to her and just go, you know, that, that's just the only thing worse than you saying that to someone else is you saying that to yourself. And it just made me cry because, and I had to explain to her, if you begin talking to yourself like that now, that's going to take on a whole life of its own. That's going to, that's going to begin to grow

and manifest itself. And it's going to taint your life. It's going to color your life in a way that's not going to be a good. And so we started, we started working on that with her and her anxiety when she was really young, because when she would get anxious and she couldn't do something well, she would just beat herself up and then she really couldn't do it well. And so what would happen is the more she said that to herself, the harder it got. So you obviously, and I obviously never said those things to her. No. So where do you think they came from? You know, I'm not exactly sure, but she's a perfectionist, an extreme perfectionist. Now, we've seen her brain.

She's got a busy brain. Now, we've talked about epigenetics in the past, that, you know, your thoughts, your habits, your experiences turn on or off certain genes that make illness more or less likely in you, but also in your babies. Well, and it's true. I certainly... Was it true you were a bit of a perfectionist? Oh, dear Lord. And I used to beat myself up really badly. A little differently than she does, but still, I beat myself up a lot and I definitely was a perfectionist. And maybe it's different when you see your child doing it. You don't remember it the same way with yourself um it's more heartbreaking when you see your child doing it so so yeah so I'm just really fortunate that I did that work before you know it was time to deal with that with a child I had done that work on myself so that I could actually help her so but the epigenetics came from you, but also from a biological dad, but also from your family and your biological father's family.

And so you can just see how complicated. Sometimes the words you use about yourself and others are not yours, that they actually can be from generations. I mean, one of the things that's happening now in Syria that just breaks my heart is these children are being raised in war with chronic stress. And so you wonder the impact that's going to have on the words they use for themselves, but also the words they use about other people. And then how is that going to impact their babies and their grandbabies? But no matter where you got these words from that you're telling yourself, one of the things we get really excited about is you can change it. You can change it.

Once you recognize it, ask yourself, is it helpful? Is it getting you what you want or is it hurtful? And does it fit the goals you have for your life? Well, and I know when this became apparent to me, I started actually taking a sincere and serious inventory. What kind of language am I using? It was very disempowering. It was, it was not helpful at all. It wasn't getting me what I wanted for sure. Um, it was not helpful. It was, I was meaner to myself than anyone else had been. So here we blame other people. We get

angry at other people for how they treat us. But if you really step back and you look at yourself and how you talk to yourself and how you treat yourself, oftentimes it's worse because here's the truth. If you saw yourself in a positive light, if you used empowering language with yourself, it's highly unlikely you would make room for other people to treat you badly, right? You would see yourself differently. You would hold yourself in different esteem. It's not very likely you would make that room for other people to treat you badly, right? You would see yourself differently. You would hold yourself in different esteem. It's not very likely you would make that room for other people to treat you poorly.

So it was interesting when I did that and I started to really do serious work on that and I started choosing empowering language and there's a reason that I consciously choose warrior language, right? I started doing that a long time ago, practicing martial arts, choosing empowering language because it works for me.

It's a metaphor that works for my life. When that started to happen, not only did I treat myself differently, other people saw me differently. They started to treat me differently because you hold yourself completely differently. Your energy is different. Everything about you becomes different. Well, and don't you think that if you're really hard on yourself, you look in the mirror and you notice all of your flaws. Oh, my gosh.

Wait, wait, wait. Wait. If you're hard on yourself, then if someone makes just sort of a side comment, it's like, oh, you've gained a few pounds. All of a sudden, that can cause an avalanche of negativity in your head and maybe an emotional reaction to the other person who actually may think the couple of pounds look good on you, that it can then cause a war in your relationship. And in the next podcast, we'll talk about words in relationships. But for now, we're talking about words with yourself. If you're chronically using negative, hostile, demeaning words about yourself, then you're so sensitive that anytime people can just give you a side glance,

not say anything. Right. They just look at you. And all of a sudden, it can damage the quality of your relationship. How often have you done that? You are walking down the street. Someone actually looks at you. They may be thinking, wow, those are really cute shoes.

Or wow, that's a really nice outfit. But because you were in the mirror staring at yourself, berating yourself, you're like, Oh, I knew it. I knew it. I knew that I looked terrible. I, you know, and you begin to like make this whole story up because the truth is the language we use creates our experience and it, it becomes a lens we see the world through. So it's really interesting. So what positive words do you use about yourself? Well, like I said, I actually have chosen this warrior mindset, this warrior metaphor. And so I actually consciously do that on a daily basis. So, you know, like, well, let me see if I agree.

So I'll make you an example where I used to feel very disempowered. So let's just use the example of when I'm working. So if I'm going to go on stage and I'm going to speak, I have this sort of mantra that I do. I'm a warrior. I'm a black belt. I'm, you know, I do all these things, um, because that helps put me in the mindset. So the same thing that I use to prepare for my black belt test, I will use to prepare to go on stage because it gives me the energy that I want before I walk out. Um, I'll also say a quick prayer and I'll pray that this isn't about me. This is about even if there's one person in the audience that needs to hear this message, it's not about me, it's about them. Let that person hear it. And so those two things make

it not about me. And yet I have the right energy to walk out there and do that. So it becomes more about helping others. And yet I have a warrior mindset so that whatever happens on stage, I can handle it. And so that's just one example. Well, I have words for you. Do you? I don't think we should say them on the air. Absolutely. They're totally G-rated.

Yeah, I know you tell and when it's coming up in the next segment we're going to talk about how the words you use can make your relationships amazing or can really ground them into the dirt think about the one thing you learned during this podcast post it on any of your social media channels, hashtag BrainWarriorsWayPodcast. We would be so grateful. And at the BrainWarriorsWayPodcast.com, leave reviews and ask us questions. We're going to start answering more questions in the podcast as we go forward. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it,

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