49 | The Way You Talk to Yourself Is Training Your Anxiety

Do you talk to yourself like your inner voice is your enemy?
Have you started believing the harsh labels you say when you are stressed?
What if the fastest way to calm anxiety starts with changing your words?

Negative self-talk can feel like venting, but your brain treats it like training. When you repeat phrases like “I’m stupid,” “something is wrong with me,” or “I’m such an anxious person,” your mind starts collecting proof to match the story. Over time, those words shape how you see yourself, how you show up, and how hard it feels to try again.

In this episode, Jessica Davis breaks down how language turns into identity, why diagnoses and labels can stick in the wrong way, and how to shift your words without forcing fake positivity. You will learn how to replace identity-based statements with grounded truth, how to build an “emotional home” you want to live in, and how to interrupt spirals by focusing outward through contribution.

If anxiety hits fast and you want something simple to guide you, the free Anxiety Survival Toolkit is linked in the show notes.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode
 • Why your brain treats repeated self-talk like truth, not frustration
 • How identity statements make anxiety feel permanent
 • Why “something is wrong with my brain” keeps you stuck
 • How labels, including diagnoses, can shape behavior in unhelpful ways
 • Why body-image self-talk trains your eyes to search for flaws
 • The difference between “I am anxious” and “I feel anxious”
 • What an “emotional home” is and how your words build it over time
 • A simple check-in to spot whether your words drain you or refill you
 • One underrated tool to interrupt spirals by shifting focus outward
 • How to replace harsh language with words that build resilience and self-trust

RESOURCES:
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This podcast was created by Davis-Smith Mental Health, offering counseling for teens & young adults in Illinois (only). We accept BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, and self-pay clients.

Links: 
Anxiety Survival Toolkit:
https://www.blockoutthenoisepodcast.com/anxiety-survival-toolkit/

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https://blockoutthenoisepodcast.substack.com/welcome

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https://tidycal.com/blockoutthenoise/confidence-coaching

⚠️ Disclaimer:  Block Out the Noise provides personal insights and practical stra...

Transcript

The Cost Of Self-Trash Talk

Jessica N. Davis 0:06

Do you ever talk to yourself like this? I'm so stupid. There's something wrong with my brain. I hate how I look. I'm such a mess. Your brain doesn't know the difference between describing yourself and training yourself. When you say I'm so stupid, your brain doesn't hear that as frustration. It hears it as fact, as who you are, and it starts collecting evidence to prove you right. You're not venting, you're programming. Hi, and welcome to Block Out the Noise, a space to quiet the noise of anxiety, self-doubt, and overthinking. I'm Jessica Davis, licensed therapist, mindset coach, and the creator of the Courage Method. I specialize in helping teens and young adults build confidence, courage, and purpose. If anxiety ever hits fast and you wish you had something simple to guide you through it, there's a free anxiety survival toolkit linked in the show notes. It is made for moments when your thoughts start spiraling and you need something steady to hold on to. Also, a quick reminder: this podcast is here to support and guide you, but it is not a replacement for talking to someone in real life. If you're struggling with your mental health, please reach out to a therapist. And if you're in crisis, contact emergency services or a local health line. You don't have to go through it alone. Today we're going to challenge those thoughts and we're going to work on changing our language. You probably use phrases about yourself that you didn't even choose. You pick them up from either friends, social media, from the way people around you talk. Think about how many people you know who say things like, I ruin everything, I can't do anything right, or I'm the problem, it's me. What's the point? I'll fail anyway. I can't. And maybe at first it was kind of a joke, something everyone says, but here's what happens. You hear other people talk that way, you start talking that way, and slowly, without noticing, you start feeling that way. Because language isn't just describing your reality, it's creating it. Let me break it down this way there's something wrong with my brain. I hear this one all the time. And I get it. When anxiety is loud or you're struggling to focus, or your emotions feel hard to control, it really does feel like something is broken. But when you say there's something wrong with my brain, what are you actually telling yourself? You're saying, I am the problem. You're saying this is permanent. You're saying you can't change this because it's built into who you are. And now every hard day becomes proof. Every struggle confirms it. Every time you've messed up, your brain goes, see, told you something's wrong with you. You're not describing your experience. You're locking yourself into it. This is why sometimes I will not tell clients their diagnosis. Personally and professionally, I feel like diagnosing is just a way of describing the symptoms that someone has. And ultimately the sentence is more important than the actual diagnosis. But for clients, especially teenage clients and young adults, they can latch on to a diagnosis and feel like this is who they are and start to change their behaviors because of it. I'll never forget a client who read the neuropsych testing for themselves. And from the results of that, they started to change their behavior on submitting work. I remember asking this client, why are you doing this? Like you have historically turned your work in. What has changed? And they stated that they felt like the results had indicated that they struggled and comprehension or something like that. And so they decided not to turn their work in. And so I challenged that thought process of this is just someone's view and snapshot of you at this period of time, but this is not who you are. This is not describing and defining you, and you're allowing it to define you. And again, it was just words on paper. But for this client, they decided to almost embody what the paperwork said instead of choosing to be who they've always been. And thankfully, that client only took one conversation for them to get back on track and continue to understand who they are. But there are lots of situations where diagnosing can help, but it also can take you away from just being who you really are and seeing yourself as a whole person instead of just these traits. Another example that I want to use is I hate how I look. This one's heavy because most people say it like it's nothing, like it's just what you say. But your brain is always listening. Every time you look in the mirror and think, I hate this, you're training your eyes to find what's wrong. You're teaching yourself to feel bad in your own body. And here's the thing: hating yourself won't turn you into someone you love. Let me say that again. Hating yourself won't turn you into someone you love. That's not how it works. The path to feeling better in your body doesn't start with tearing yourself apart. It starts with changing what you say when you look at yourself. And it seems simple. It seems small to just shift that. But it's actually difficult to change some of these things. But the alternative of staying in it is so unhealthy that why not give it a chance to just change the way you see yourself? Why not give yourself a compliment when you look in the mirror versus tearing yourself down? Small changes like that that you are consistent at will eventually change how you view yourself. And it all starts with changing your words. Another one I hear people say, I'm such an anxious person. Notice the structure of that sentence. I am, right? That's identity, that's permanent. That's who you are at the core. Now compare it to I feel anxious a lot, or anxiety is something I deal with, or even I'm learning how to work with my anxiety. Same experience, completely different relationship to it. One makes anxiety your master, the other makes it something you're learning to navigate. I heard someone recently, I believe this was on a YouTube video with Alex Ramosy and Tony Robbins. And I believe Alex Ramosy said, he wanted to find a goal worth suffering for. And on the surface, that sounds kind of inspiring, right? Like you're willing to work hard. You're not afraid of struggle. But here's what actually happens when you tell yourself that. As Tony Robbins pointed out, you suffer because you've made suffering part of the goal. If your brain believes that meaningful things require suffering, it will make sure you suffer. It will find the suffering. It will even create it if it has to. Pain is part of life, yes, and hard things absolutely happen. That's unavoidable. But suffering, suffering is what happens when you tell yourself a story about the pain that makes it worse. And a lot of us have been telling ourselves that story for so long, we don't even hear it anymore. We don't even notice how much it has changed us. So don't find something to suffer for. Find something to live for. Here's a concept I want you to sit with. You have an emotional home. It's the feeling you keep returning to, the baseline you default to when you're not paying attention. For some people, that home might seem as if it's anxiety. For others, it's anger or numbness or sadness. And the thing is, you built that home. Not on purpose, not consciously, but every time you said, I'm so stressed, you added a room. Every time you said, I can't do anything right, you're decorating in a sense. Every time you said, this is just how I am, you moved in a little bit more. The words you repeat become the home you live in. And right now, I want you to ask yourself, what emotional home have you been building? Is it a place you actually want to live? I originally had an idea, concept written out that I'm like, no, I'm just gonna scrap it because I just didn't like it. But I'm gonna use an example from a recent session that I feel like is more powerful. And we were working on this exact piece of how you describe ourselves and how it impacts us. And with this client, one of the tools that I used was depicting how when we talk to ourselves like this all day long, we have nothing to pull from. We are constantly running on empty. And we don't know how to fuel ourselves and give ourselves energy so that we are on a full tank. And the problem becomes when you are constantly on empty, when life throws different things at you, you feel as though it is harder to handle. It might feel as if life is throwing this at you and you're unprepared, or you constantly feel as though you are missing tools to navigate life. And I wanted to point out to this client that they weren't. It was just how much they were feeding themselves negative things, led it to be that every day they were running on empty. And yes, of course, there are positive moments that this client would have and wins, but they wouldn't last long and they surely wouldn't get them to a full tank. And when we change that perspective, the client was able to recognize wow, just by shifting that view set of, I get to decide how to fill myself. And I should be every single day trying to help fill myself up with things that are providing me energy, excitement, life. That's what makes life worth living. So, for example, some things that might fuel someone is waking up and thinking of positive things, having a meal that they love, laughing with friends, or setting plans up to see them, reading books, enjoying music, driving with the windows down, running their hands through grass, playing a sport or a hobby, working towards their future goals, there could be a thousand of different ways to fuel yourself. And the more you're in tune with how you want to fuel yourself, the better outcome you will have. And the same thing with your words, right? If your words are constantly draining you because they're so negative, if we work on shifting how we're saying things, then we will feel better, you will wake up better. And it's all just from this switch. So I'm gonna challenge you to do that, to ask yourself am I filling my tank or am I draining it with how I'm talking to myself, with how I'm showing up, with how I'm speaking about my day. But I want to provide another tool as well, because I think it's one of the most powerful, underrated things that people don't use enough. And once people unlock this tool, this strategy, they a thousand times see improvement, which is one of the fastest ways to break the cycle of negative self-talk is to stop focusing on yourself entirely. When you're stuck in your head, telling yourself you're not enough, you're a burden, you ruin everything, you're completely focused inward. And the more you focus inward, the louder those voices get. But when you shift your focus outward onto someone else, something changes. You might end up holding the door for someone, you help a stranger carry their groceries to the car, you give someone a genuine compliment, you actually listen when your friends are talking instead of waiting for your turn to speak. These feel like small things, but here's what's actually happening: you're proving to yourself that you have value, that you have impact, that your presence in someone's day actually mattered. And that's hard to argue with. Your brain might be able to convince you that you're worthless when you're alone in the room at 2 a.m. But it is a lot harder to believe that when you have just made someone smile, pouring into other people pours back into you. Not because you're keeping score, but because contribution reminds you of something your negative self-talk wants you to forget. You matter, you make a difference. And you don't have to do anything big to prove it. So go out and volunteer. Offer a helping hand to your friends, your family. Work on being more conscientious at home. If you are a teenager, a young adult, help your parents because honestly, they've helped you probably more than you can count. And of course, there's always outliers in this, but when you start to pour into other people, you will be shocked on how other people respond to you. And you will feel lighter, happier, more engaged because you're engaging with life. You're not sitting focusing in on your own pain or what's wrong or what you're not doing right. You're giving. And when we give, we get. Here's what I want you to take from this whole entire thing. The words you use are not just expressing how you feel. They're training you how to feel. Every time you say I'm broken, you're teaching yourself to feel broken. Every time you say I can't, you're making it harder to try. Every time you say this is just who I am, you're closing the door on who you could become. And the cool part is the opposite is also true. Every time you say I'm figuring this out, you're teaching yourself to problem solve. Every time you say this is hard, but I can handle hard things, you're building that muscle and resiliency. Every time you say, I'm more than my worst moment, you're opening up yourself for so many other opportunities. You don't need to be perfect. You don't have to be positive all the time. You just have to be aware of how you're training yourself and what you belief system you're creating about who you are. Because the story you tell yourself about yourself, that becomes the story you live. Let me say that again. The story you tell yourself about yourself becomes the story you live. Choose your words carefully. Don't call yourself derogatory names. Don't speak about yourself in a way that is harmful or unhelpful. It doesn't build you up, it's just tearing you down. Start building the home that you really want to live in. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And truly, I appreciate every one of you for taking the time out of your day to hear this message. Until next time, keep moving forward. Trust yourself, and never forget you have what it takes to block out the noise.