Healing Power Of Self Talk
Let your body speak it’s mind!
During the first few days after receiving my diagnosis of a brain tumor a good friend visited me in the hospital bearing a gift. He knew know how much I loved to read and his gift was the book “It’s not about the Bike” By Lance Armstrong. I had been feeling quite depressed and my mind was certainly full of fear about my health. To take my mind off my own sad circumstances, I plunged into the book and devoured each chapter. The more I read, the more I became inspired by this remarkable man. By the time I finished the book, I knew that I had to turn my thinking around and adopt a similar, positive, relentless attitude towards my own battle with cancer.
Working in a competitive business world, I was used to leading teams of people and providing “pep talks” to build morale and motivation. But fighting off a brain tumor was going to require me to dig a lot deeper into the power of “self-talk”.
As we experience the ups and downs of life, we talk to ourselves about the things that happen to us; we constantly feed our minds with a variety of explanations for these good or bad events. The explanations can be positive and empowering or conversely, create anger, feed our frustration, or lead us to depression and despair. I had felt myself falling into a state of despair over my diagnosis and my fear of it, I had been feeling sorry for myself, but after reading this book I knew my “self- talk” was going change.
“If life gives you lemons, then learn how to make lemonade!”
I don’t know who coined this phrase, but I’ve always liked it. So I used it to transform my brain tumor into a lemon. I know it sounds a little too simple, but usually the most effect things are simple. I’m a very visual person and at that time I didn’t know what my brain tumor looked like. The visual of a lemon was perfect because I could literally see myself squeezing all the juice out of this lemon and that felt empowering! I adopted this phrase as my own personal metaphor. From that point on, I always referred to my Tumor as my Lemon! Every time I thought about it in that context, I instantly felt better. My sense of humor returned as I shared these thoughts with my family and friends. I felt powerful and in control again. A strong sense of optimism and hope filled my mind and I remember my body feeling “awake” stronger and re-vitalized as I continued this self talk about “my lemon!” I didn’t realize it then but “My body was speaking my mind!”
What I learned is if you can change the way you think and talk to yourself, you give yourself the opportunity to improve your physical and emotional well-being. Your body responds in positive ways. I think most health & wellness experts would concur. The mind does have healing power, but you have to feed your mind with positive “self-talk”.
Continuous, automatic chatter in our heads never stops and sometimes we are not even aware of how these thoughts can shape our mood. Fighting Brain Cancer has taught me how to quickly recognize these thoughts and how specific negative thoughts lead to different types of bad moods. For example:
- Thoughts of loss like, “I’ve lost everything—my job, my home, or my friends” is often followed by sadness or depression.
- Thoughts of unfulfilled expectations such as, “Why didn’t I get that job?” can lead to frustration, anger and stress
- Thoughts of possible danger or threat such as, “What if I cannot recover from this illness?” lead to anxiety and worry.
Train yourself to be on guard. Negative self-talk is destructive and unhealthy. If you are constantly saying to yourself, “I’m not going to recover from this,” or “I won’t ever get to achieve that,” you probably won’t. That’s because learning something new to help you turn things around doesn’t fit with what you are telling yourself and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You become a prisoner of your own beliefs
For a short time I was trapped in my own prison of negative thoughts, fear and worry about my health. During those first few days after the diagnosis, not knowing if I was going to live or die, my self talk was an endless chatter of doom and gloom. Instinctively, as an optimist, I knew that being trapped in these thoughts was not going to help me fight cancer. With a little help from the gift of Armstrong’s book, I realized that I could break down the walls of my own prison.
HOW?
I put on the rose-colored glasses
I am and always have been a “glass is half full” type of person; an optimist, most of the time. Usually I do believe I have the ability to influence events towards a positive outcome. This may well be a distorted notion that’s not grounded in any kind of reality, it’s simply my own “self talk”; My internal coach telling me positive stories about what I’m capable of. Maybe a particular notion is much greater than reality (I can cure cancer), but our self-talk is usually not true anyway. Through self talk we tell ourselves inaccurate stories, positive and negative and then believe these stories as though they were true. So if you’re going to distort reality, why not distort it positively? It’s healthier to be an optimist.
What makes an optimist?
Optimists seek out, remember, and expect positive experiences. Optimists learn to:
- Be selective, remembering mainly the positive events in the past.
- Focus on the present. Live in the moment.
- Can Do! See the future in terms of what can be done instead of what can’t.
- View difficulties as challenges—problems to be solved.
- Believe that their actions make a significant difference and have a positive impact on others or events.
- See the possibilities that come with change
Optimistic thinking doesn’t mean misfortunes don’t happen or you never have a negative thought. Even optimists don’t feel great all the time, I am certainly an example of that. No one enjoys losses and setbacks, but you don’t have to be demolished by them either. I continue to catch myself with negative thoughts, but they don’t dominate my thinking or control it for very long.
Optimistic, healthy thinking is a behavioral trait that can be learned with practice. It helps you cope better with whatever life throws at you and helps you recover faster too. I’m an optimist and as such, I will defeat my cancer. It’s been four years since I first heard the words “you have a brain tumor” and I know today my body is still speaking its mind.
Karin Somogyi
