Here is where if this was a self-help book, I would have to talk about positive self-talk and developing a positive narrative. And maybe you should. The problem with this is that when you are in a mind-set of negativity the last thing you want to hear or read is “think positive”, “chin up”, “pull your socks up” or “smile”. When you hear or read words like that when you are feeling low all you want to do is buy an axe to bury into the skull of the positive self-help guru.
The other issue I have about this is those “successful” people that have been coached and trained in positive self-talk so much so that they believe that they are truly the most awesome person on the earth are often some of the shallowest, truly miserable inside and horrible people to be around. They are self-serving and, in my mind, a pointless embodiment of human kind. At least that is how I feel when I am in a negative state of mind and the last thing I want is their help or advice. Especially when I am overtired.
It’s all about balance You do not want too much negative self-talk going on and therefore becoming aware of it and meta cognitive, that’s is thinking about thinking whilst you are thinking ( I know stay with me), stopping or just being aware of the dialogue, analysing it and challenging it and then maybe practicing positive self-talk can help this and can give you more belief and confidence in yourself. But mostly an bring you a more peaceful mind.
Instead of practicing positive self-talk in front of a mirror it would be far better to practice noticing and becoming aware of your thoughts positive or negative as they pass and deciding what to do with them.
Positive self-talk to and insomniac can be so infuriating. People who say that you should think positively about sleeping and about your environment and you will sleep are clearly not people who have ever really and truly lived with insomnia.
So why is the Internal Dialogue So Important to us as Insomniac or Humans?
That’s a good question that just jumped forth from the back of the queue from my own internal dialogue.
Well our thoughts control our feelings and our emotional states, which causes a chemical reaction in the brain which sends out these signals and chemical through the body and changes our very physiological state. This is why you can joy all over your body as well as sadness. When you kiss the one you love for the first time it sends a sensation and chemical reaction throughout your body and you glow. When you hear some sad news, you tend to feel achier and lower, and people can see it in you because your physiological state has changed.
Think about it, when you watch a comedy you feel happy and you laugh you feel good, when you watch a horror movie your chemical reaction is very different, you are tense and jumpy. When you watch a sad film, you feel sad. I am not saying you shouldn’t watch any of these types of films but I am saying what your brain is thinking about changes your moods and emotions and your very chemical state.
The problem is that your body can get addicted to these chemicals just as it can get addicted to narcotics, nicotine, caffeine and so on. Because of this your body can be in constant search of that drug, that chemical. This means if the body becomes addicted to a negative chemical state which is brought on by emotions led by negative thought it will be looking for every situation for validation of that negative narrative or story to cause that emotional and therefore chemical reaction within us. This then becomes a vicious self-perpetuating circle.
As insomniacs we have to be especially aware of this because it can lead to other addictions. For example, we may find that we actually have a night’s sleep if we drink a bottle of wine before bed, or take some narcotic or take a sleeping pill. So, we do it the next night and the night after that and it seems to work for a bit. But our bodies start to become addicted to this new chemical and want it more and so we start to tell ourselves “I can’t sleep unless I drink a bottle of wine a night”. On the other side of the spectrum we may get addicted to caffeine or nicotine or energy drinks because we tell ourselves we can’t function in the morning without them because of our insomnia.
In this situation our insomnia becomes our story our internal narrative to justify the use of an external stimuli to change our internal chemical reactions.
So, our internal narrative and dialogue is so important because it controls and regulates our emotional and physiological states.
The thing is we as humans on a deep subconscious level already know this. We know that our thoughts have this level of control and we know we have so many thoughts passing by us all the time. We often don’t talk about it for fear of sounding schizophrenic because we are admitting to hearing voices. Instead we do our utmost to avoid hearing those voices and change our chemical state in some other way through watching TV and pointless soap operas, listening to emotive music, distracting ourselves through social media and so on.
In fact, we are so busy trying to distract ourselves from our reality that in a recent report it said that social media network are most busy during peak television shows with quite often people facebooking, tweeting and twerking about the shows that are on TV.
This to me is worrying. I have images in my mind of entire families sat round in a lounge watching TV whilst facebooking, twittering and texting and all the time not engaging with each other. They are so busy trying to distract themselves. What makes this worse is that they are engaging with medias that are the very media’s that can add to the negative self-narrative by showing them the very things they “should” strive for, the way they “should” look, what they “should” buy and what their lives “should” look like if they want real happiness.
Again, this turns into a vicious circle deep down we know we want to get away from the beast that encourages this negative self-image whilst all the time we keep feeding it.
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