The Hilary Silver Podcast - #109: Neuroscience Hack To Think Better Thoughts (RERUN)

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Your mind can become the harshest place you live unless you learn how to challenge the voice that keeps telling you you’re not enough. We’re revisiting one of Hilary’s most useful conversations on self-doubt, overthinking, perfectionism, and the mental habits that keep women stuck in stress, shame, and second-guessing. She breaks down why your thoughts feel so believable even when they are tearing you apart, and why that inner voice is often old conditioning on repeat. If the same thoughts keep dragging you down, maybe the problem is not you. Maybe it is the script. Hilary does what she does best here: she tells the truth plainly. The voice in your head is not automatically wise, accurate, or worth trusting just because it is familiar. If you would never say those things to someone you love, why are you letting that voice run your life? This conversation pushes you to get honest about the way you speak to yourself and the cost of letting those thoughts go unchecked. She also gives listeners a way to start changing it. Notice the thought. Challenge it. Choose a better one on purpose. This is where the neuroscience comes in - your brain can learn a new pattern, which means you are not stuck with the one you have been practicing!  Hilary brings the tough love, the clarity, and the relief all at once in this very important message. Episode Highlights: Why most of your thoughts run on autopilot How your inner critic got so loud A 3-step process to think better thoughts Why affirmations often don’t work How repetition rewires your brain Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Why So Many Women Stay Stuck in Self-Doubt 03:05 The Subconscious Patterns Running Your Life 05:55 How to Start Rewriting the Script 08:43 Simple Steps to Change Your Thoughts ✨ I’m Hilary Silver, LCSW, former psychotherapist turned master coach and founder of Ready for Love. I help high-achieving women show up in love as confidently as they do in their careers. 💡 Through this podcast, I share my WOMAN-centered, SELF-centered approach—time-tested methods that blend psychology, brain science, relationship skills, and no-BS dating advice. 🎙️ Since 2017, we’ve helped over 10,000 women with a 98% success rate, making Ready for Love the #1 program in the world for women who’ve tried everything else. ✨ Ready to stop repeating the same patterns and finally create the love you deserve?  🎯 Watch my free masterclass to learn the proven 4-step Ready for Love Method: https://readyforloveinc.com/masterclass 💬 Apply for a free Love Breakthrough Call with my team: https://readyforloveinc.com/apply Hilary’s Substack: https://readyforlove.substack.com/podcast Subscribe for additional insights and reflections from the podcast. Watch to learn more: How I Changed My Brain in 90 Days

Do you have trouble making decisions, tend to overthink things or doubt yourself? Maybe you second-guess yourself in conversations, replay things that you said in your mind and hope you didn't say the wrong thing. Maybe you beat yourself up when you've made a mistake and have trouble forgiving yourself or letting things go. Or maybe you lean towards perfectionism and feel like nothing you do is ever quite good enough and you just can't give yourself a damn break. If any of that sounds familiar, this episode is for you because that is a good. just no way to live. So today I'm going to show you how to free yourself from all of that so you can stop being your own worst enemy and instead become your own best friend.

Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Ready for Love podcast. Did you know that your conscious mind, while powerful, only accounts for about 5% of your thinking? So this includes all that happens in your prefrontal cortex, your executive functioning, things like logical thinking, decision making, problem solving, impulse control, you're actively thinking and choosing and managing something in real time. That means that the other 95% of your brain activity is happening subconsciously. Your subconscious stores everything you've ever experienced and it informs and drives all of your beliefs and thoughts and feelings and your habits and even your perception of reality. This is programming that you didn't choose and likely you aren't even aware of, but it is running the show operating on autopilot without you even realizing it.

So this is where we have to begin to change all that stink and think in that is holding you back and actually exhausting you. So the first step is to start really tuning in and hearing what it is that you're saying. Your constant stream of thoughts running through your mind all day long is so familiar you don't even hear it. but it's always there, narrating your life, shaping your choices, and defining who you believe that you are. It's that voice in your head that tells you what to say, what not to say, what's possible for you, what's wrong with you, what you should be doing better. But here's the thing. You did not choose that voice. You learned it. Most of the thoughts that you think today, the way you speak to yourself and judge yourself and doubt yourself, are echoes of what you heard growing up,

parents and teachers and coaches and religion and culture, even the most well-meaning parents can be critical, demanding, or even emotionally unavailable at times. And if you were constantly corrected or criticized or doubted or expected to perform, you learned early on that there is a certain way to be to earn love, acceptance, and approval. So you internalize those voices and now you're doing it to yourself. You learned to speak this way to yourself. That inner critic that says, why did you say that? And you should be more like this or you should be more like that or you should do more, do better. All of that is not just critical.

What you are saying to yourself is actually verbal abuse. And you've been doing this to yourself likely your whole life. Take that in for just a minute. Verbal and emotional abuse. And you're doing it to yourself. If you were to say some of those things out loud to a friend or even to a friend, or even to a stranger, you'd probably be horrified. You would never speak to someone else that way. But because it's happening silently inside your own head, it goes unchecked. So the first step

is to start listening. Slow down and actually tune in and hear what it is that you are saying to yourself. Notice the tone. Notice the words. Ask yourself, would I say this to someone that I love? because if not, then it has no business being said to you. The way you talk to yourself is not how you speak to someone you actually love, is it? That is a very big first step because once you hear it, it's pretty motivating to want to change it. So now we're going to pattern interrupt. You're literally going to call yourself out on all your own BS. The moment that you start going down that same old path, the self-doubt, the self-criticism,

instead of it letting take over like usual, you're going to stop and breathe and you're going to remind yourself, I don't talk to myself that way. That isn't actually true. That alone is really powerful because every time that you do that, you're weakening the old neural pathway. You're saying, not this time. I choose differently now. And that leads me to step two. Decide what you want to believe and think instead, you decide what you want to believe and think about yourself. This is your adult self choosing what you want to believe about yourself. This is a conscious choice, deciding how you want to talk to yourself and what you want to believe about yourself. We're turning off the autopilot and reprogramming what it is that you want to be thinking and

believing and saying to yourself on purpose. This is not just a flimsy affirmation that you don't really believe, but a declaration, which has a different energy behind it. It has intention behind it. It has power behind it. It's a statement that you must accept as true, such as, I can make mistakes and still be good enough. I don't have to be perfect to be loved. How about this one? It's okay to relax and do nothing. You're not trying to fake positivity. You're just practicing a new way of relating to yourself, one thought at a time. So here is what I want you to understand before we move on to step three. Your beliefs and thoughts are not fact. We often treat our beliefs as fact, but they aren't. They are nothing more than sentences and statements that we have heard

and then said to ourselves so many times that we believe it now. And over time, that repetition forms the neural pathway in your brain, which means it's a default fallback pattern and habit. But our brains can change. This is our human superpower. Neuropasticity means we can learn new things. And we do this by making new connections in the brain, taking two previously unconnected neurons and connecting them together over and over and over until they fuse together. Maybe you've heard this phrase before. Neurons that fire together, wire together. That is what we're going to do now.

So repeating what you choose to believe over and over and over again. Repeat it until you believe it. So my process for creating new beliefs and new habits and forging new pathways in your brain means a new constant repetition. You must repeat your chosen belief and repeat them over those statements over and over and over again it becomes forged. This is what it means to rewire your brain. I know you've heard that before. You have to let that new belief take root by practicing it every day. It's part of your new daily practice every morning and any time that you catch yourself falling back to the old ways.

When that old voice creeps in and when you feel tempted to default to self-doubt or criticism, you remind yourself the new thought. And slowly, this becomes embedded as you're, your new belief. The more you repeat it, the more natural it becomes. Until one day, it's not just something that you're trying to believe and making yourself think. It's just who you are. If you want the how-to, the structured method and accountability for making this happen, that is what the daily journal is. I created the daily journal. It literally changed my brain, and it's worked for thousands of my clients too. I will put the link to that program in the show notes and in the description below.

If you're ready to actually rewire your brain and you want the exact structured method and accountability to change your thoughts, your patterns, and your life, go to hilarysilver.com forward slash journal. The Daily Journal is where mindset meets method. You'll get my proven framework for brain rewiring, daily prompts to build new beliefs, and the consistency to finally stop spinning

and start living fully self-centered. So if you're serious about changing how you think, feel and show up in your life, this is where you start. Hilarysilver.com forward slash journal. So let me just give you a quick recap here. To change your brain and rewire those deeply embedded and stubborn habitual thought patterns, first you have to decide what you want to believe instead. Second, you accept it as true.

And third, you repeat it until you do. Those are the three powerful steps for changing your brain and changing the way that you think. It really happens through conscious decision about what you want for yourself and then repetition. I hope you found this conversation helpful. If you want to learn more on this topic about my story and how I developed this method, you can listen to that episode or watch on YouTube how I changed my brain in 90 days. I'll make sure to put the link in the show notes. Thanks for being here and I'll see you next time.