Self-Talk in Running - Getting to know the voice in your head.

Negative Self-Talk

Let’s start with how impactful negative self-talk can be; studies have shown that 12 positive experiences are needed to equal one negative experience! Think about that for a moment, so every time you say something negative to yourself or perecieve an as experience as negative, you have to say 12 positives or have 12 postive experiences to counteract the negative one!

Yorkshire Brass Monkey

I’ve got to know the voice in my head that tries to throw me off balance, tip me over the edge as it tries it’s hardest to shove me to the sidelines; and it reared it’s ugly head just yesterday.

I’m running the Yorkshire Brass Monkey in York on Sunday, it was one of my first half marathons 18 years ago and over the years it’s become a really popular event on the northern race calander with the 17500 places selling out in less than an hour.

The Chocolate City

As I was looking up my race times from 2006 I thought I’d glance at the results from last year; an impressive course record of 1hr 2mins and a cut off time of 2hrs 45min, I heard the familar negative voice, a whisper at first, suggesting that this race was too fast for me! That I shouldn’t drive all the way up there, the weather is going to be awful……you get the idea.

Luckily, and with years of practice I soon squished the voice, shut it down, poured lots of positives all over it! I’ve learnt to ignore the doubting voice, I’m not going to let it spoil my fun of being fortunate enough to not only secure a much sought after place but also be able to run in my home town once again! Twice in less than 6 months!

But what happens if you listen to the negative self-talk and it disarms you into running paralysis?

Self-talk refers to what you say to yourself, either out loud or internally.  We all have an internal dialogue with ourselves which most of the time we’re not even aware of.   Building on this series of Mind/Body connection blogs, we’ve established the strong links between, thoughts, emotions, and actions so it makes sense that we should understand the importance of regulating our inner voice and how it might impact our runs. 

A War in your own head

At times it can feel like there is a war being raged inside our head, should you go out for a run, should you do a hard interval session, push yourself or take the easy option.  And even when you are running, how far should you push yourself, or when to let go and slow down.  Do you even recognise the voice in your head? Is it your best friend trying to keep you safe or the worse kind of “frenemy” who appears friendly despite the obvious dislike by the unkind things that are being said.

How do you speak to yourself?

Think about any thoughts you may have had recently before you started your run, during your run or a recent race that you’ve had and then write them down, it might be helpful to classify them as.

Unhelpful thoughts

Helpful thoughts

 When we write things down in black and white it can be quite startling to see how we internally speak to ourselves and how much we put ourselves down, sometimes we’re not very kind to ourselves.

If your talk is positive your thoughts and feelings will be positive, don’t say I don’t have a chance today, say I’m going to try my best today.

Positive self-talk helps keep your mind strong and your body going, especially when your body starts to weaken.  As your body wears down in training and races, regardless of how long you’ve been running for, it will communicate to your mind that it has had enough – you might say to yourself “I’ve had enough, I need to stop now”, and if your mind listens to your body and responds with negative self-talk, like “I’m really tired, I didn’t sleep well last night, I haven’t eaten enough or I’m rubbish at running or I can’t go on, this hurts too much to continue” your body will take over your mind, your body and your mind will give up and you will fail to achieve your goals. 

Positive self-talk can help your mind assert itself over your body, so when your body is yelling at you to stop, your mind can say no keep going.  And your body will almost always keep going.

 How do you retrain your self-talk?

Positive self-talk is a simple, but not easy, strategy.  It’s simple because all you must do is replace your negative self-talk with positive statements, but it’s not easy because your negative confidence muscles are more than likely strong and your positive confidence muscles are weak.  The first step to retraining your thoughts is to identify any triggers where you tend to be negative; this could be a painful interval session or doing a session/run that takes you out of your comfort zone.

What are your triggers?

Write down your triggers and choose some positive self-talk with which you can replace your usual negative self-talk. For example

“I give up, this is too hard, I’m not a runner!”

Replace with

“This is difficult, but I’m going to keep trying”.

Negative self-talk can be ingrained, you might have to constantly remind yourself to be positive, it might not happen straight away, and you may slip back to your old negative ways, but just accept it as part of the process and return to being positive when you realise it.

One thing we’re not very good at is learning to reward ourselves when a run or a race goes well, or even if we managed to get out of the front door when we didn’t want to.  It’s about tipping the scales of more positive than negative talk because it’s human instinct to focus on the negative.  Always congratulate yourself when you’ve achieved something you found tough.

Once you’ve learnt to balance the scales by increasing your positive, you should see a reduction in the negatives and an increase in your overall performance and generally how you feel about running. It might be worth asking yourself why you are so hard on yourself and in the long run does any of the negativity help you or hurt you.

 For more support download the Self-Talk Resource using the link below