You can change your self-talk by using the ABC technique as you should dream lots of beautiful dreams 🙂

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One particularly effective way of handling negative self-talk is the so-called ABC technique, developed by the psychologist Albert Ellis. This technique involves three steps: adversity, belief and consequence.

First, it’s important to monitor yourself in order to observe the link between adversity, belief and consequence in your life.

Consider this everyday example:

ADVERSITY: A love interest doesn’t return your phone calls.

BELIEF: He or she doesn’t like me. My jokes are not funny. I’m ugly.

CONSEQUENCE: You feel depressed all day.

But it’s not always easy to recognize these ABCs in your own life, as most of our self-talk is unconscious. Nevertheless, you should try to listen to your self talk and find at least five ABCs, so you can observe their negative effect on your life.

To do this, try to record all three ABC components when examining your negative self talk.

Adversity can describe any challenging event: an argument with your partner, a speeding ticket, or forgetting to buy groceries on your way home from work.

Belief concerns how you interpret such situations. Here it is important to distinguish thoughts from feelings (as feelings are consequences). For example, a belief can be: I’m a bad parent; I’m incompetent; I did a good job; My memory is terrible.

When it comes to consequences, you should consider what you did as a result of A and B, and how you felt. For example, did you cry? Were you miserable? Did you shout and get mad? Were you embarrassed?

Once you have found a few ABCs in your life, you are then in a position to change them. It’s crucial to realize at this point that the beliefs you’ve recorded will largely determine the consequences.

Pessimism and optimism are both habits of thinking, i.e., self-talk, which can be learned.

Our explanatory style derives from our individual experience. Depending on our life experiences, we become either pessimists, believing we have no control over our fate, or optimists, feeling a sense of control over our destinies.

Human thinking habits also are learned, mostly during childhood and mainly from parents and schoolteachers.

Children usually imitate their parents’ behavior, so if those parents tend to explain negative events pessimistically, their child will be more likely to employ the same explanatory style.

The most important takeaway is that, since our explanatory style is learned, we can change the way we “talk” to ourselves: even if you’ve acquired a pessimistic style in childhood, you’re not condemned to use it forever.

Optimists have a better immune system and are generally healthier.

The positive effects of an optimistic outlook are far greater than most of us assume. For instance, compared with their pessimistic peers, optimists are generally healthier.

Why is this?

Firstly, on a cellular level, optimists often have a stronger immune system. For example, studies that induced a state of inescapable helplessness in rats have shown that their immune systems produce fewer T-cells — cells that are crucial to immune system response.

Other studies have shown that changing our explanatory style, and the relief from the feeling of helplessness that this provides, can even enhance the immune system of cancer patients.

Secondly, because optimists tend to be more active than pessimists, they’re more likely to take good care of themselves.

This is because optimists believe that their actions have a positive effect, so they’re more likely to adhere to a health care regimen. Pessimists, on the other hand, tend to think that nothing they do matters, so they have no reason to even try to change their lifestyles, however unhealthy they may be.

Also, optimists encounter fewer negative life events than pessimists do, a phenomenon that researchers explain in terms of a pessimist’s passivity due to their conviction that they can’t change anything. So if you’re a pessimist, encountering an abundance of negative events, your body will have to suffer a lot of stress, which in turn can lead to disease.

Thirdly, optimistic people find it easier to sustain friendships, and friendship is beneficial to our health. This is because having a friend that you can confide in and discuss anything and everything with actually eases the stress generated by negative life events.

So when you’re going through a rough patch, confiding in someone who is close to you can help immensely. Often, because such people know us so well, they’ll have insightful, useful ideas about what we can do to improve our situation.

As we’ve seen, optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles have a huge influence on performance. One area where this is particularly true is competitive sports. Given two teams that are equal in every other respect, the optimistic team will always outperform the pessimistic team, especially after a prior defeat.

Even if you’re not a big-shot athlete, you’re more likely to overcome the challenges in your life if you use an optimistic explanatory style.

This benefit can be seen even in children, as those with an optimistic style do better in the classroom than their pessimistic peers.