As A Man Changes His Mind
by Tom Henry, LPC, LAC

In a previous article, I talked about our “mind maps.” How the way we perceive ourselves and our world colors what we do and how we respond to each other. With this article, I like to continue the discussion. By changing our minds we can change our maps.

We talk to ourselves constantly throughout the day whether we are aware of it or not. In fact, the average adult has around 800 random thoughts per day. It is called “self-talk.” And it is this self-talk that can make you your own best friend or your own worst enemy. As we go through our days, we comment on everything we do and everything that happens around us, whether we are listening to music, driving in our car, working on a big project, or enjoying dinner with friends. We tend to see things not as they are, but as we are.

Being alert to people’s dialogues and self-talk, I help smart folks discover new ways of framing their sense of reality using their strengths and to practice these ways for lasting change. By going beyond helping people resolve their current crisis, I facilitate learning new paths of thinking that will enhance the meaning and quality of their lives and connect them more deeply to their values, loved ones, and community.

It is easy to think that situations and people are the cause of our responses and feelings – and the source of our stress – but taking a closer look, it becomes clear that no one and nothing can make us feel stressed, angry, sad, envious, or inadequate except ourselves and the way we make sense of things in our “mind map.”

When someone does or says something and you get mad about it, it is typical to say to yourself, “Who does that jerk think he is! He has no right to do that! He should mind his own business!” But think about it, can we rightly claim that he made you mad? You could just as fittingly say to yourself, “Poor guy, he’s really having a bad day,” and let it go.

Some self-talk can really get us going physically, causing our heart to pound, palms to sweat, muscles to tense, voice to raise and even our actions to aggress or withdraw. This kind of self-talk can be labeled “mal-adaptive,” because it does not help us adapt in productive ways to situations and the people around us (reality) – especially our loved ones. Other kinds of self-talk can help us resolve conflicts, understand lucidly, deal with ambiguity, go with the flow, and get through life’s inevitable problems without making them worse. We call this self-talk, “adaptive.”

How do we identify mal-adaptive self talk and adopt adaptive ways of talking to ourselves? The next time you begin to feel stressed out, take a deep breath and pay attention to your internal dialogue. What is your “map” telling you about the situation you are in? Ask yourself, “Is the situation really that awful?” “What can I learn from this situation?” “How does this situation make me a bad person?” “What are my options in this situation?”

Sometimes there is only a subtle difference between an adaptive thought and a mal-adaptive one. Nonetheless, this small difference can make a big difference between getting all stressed out and remaining calm and alert, between causing discord and getting along with others, between pushing others away and keeping them close, between going raving mad and managing effectively. Remember, you are in charge of your “mind map” and you can choose how you think about yourself and your world.
 
Stress is not caused by something that happens to us; it is something we talk ourselves into.