Examining Internal Dialogue

EXAMINING INTERNAL DIALOGUE

Do you ever lie awake at night with conversations going on inside your head? Maybe it's the days events chattering to yourself about what you could have done or planning out what you will do and say tomorrow. As a normal human being, we live in a private world of internal dialogue as well as the external world of language and conversations with other people. This capacity for internal dialogue develops as a child with the creation of imaginary friends, and is intimately connected with your "what it" reasoning process - the ability to mentally rehearse different scenarios.

You uphold your own private world with self talk.

The 20th century mystic Carlos Castaneda argued that we repeat the same choices over and over because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. This noisy chattering takes an enormous amount of energy and is hugely distracting if you're running internal dialogue about situations from a negative viewpoint.

Listen to your internal dialogue, thank it for its positive intentions, and then interrupt the pattern and quieten the words so that you can think calmly and access your more creative intuitive self-that part of you that can come up with new choices. You can break the dialogue through activities such as breathing exercises, meditation, or writing in a daily journal, and by repeating positive affirmations. Simple affirmative phrases such as " I AM GOOD ENOUGH" "i live in a healthy body" and " I CHOOSE MY OWN LIFE" can help you break the cycle. Replacing noisy chatter with a clearer, simpler dialogue can get you back in control