Change Your Words, Change Your Life

We think in words.

There was a time when we didn't, before we learned our native language, and not many experiences from back then are stored in our memory. Except for traumas, and let me tell you, pre-verbal traumas are a bitch. All traumas are a bitch, but pre-verbal traumas are extra-specially bitchy.

Anyway. Now that we have learned our native language, we use words to organize and understand everything. We have running commentaries in our heads, narrating our lives. We automatically translate what we experience into words, both for storing in memory and for sharing with others.

The process is called articulation -- choosing what words to use, how to say it, how we want to tell the story, and the words we choose affect how we think & feel about the experience.

People tend to be lazy about this. Maybe school wasn't really their thang, and building a vocabulary of the nuances of our language seems like an endeavor for stuffy literature professors. Or, they just don't think it's their particular talent, so they leave it to the poets and writers to use the "right" words.

But they're wrong. They are writers. Every day, they write the story of their own life, inside their head.

And it makes a difference, how you say it. When your boss does something aggregious, thinking "what an idiot" produces a whole different set of mood chemicals in your body than thinking "what a mistake."

This is not the same as "positive thinking." Positive thinking, in its common, distorted and greatly maligned form, is denying reality. Don't do that. Denying reality doesn't help and causes a host of other psychological problems.

I'm talking about the opposite of denying reality. Articulating things differently is about being more accurate. Your boss isn't an idiot, he or she is just making a bad call. We all make bad calls. Acknowledging the bad call is fine, but adding judgment and insult to it will bring you down.

Here's something else people do a lot: "I'm just kidding." This is basically an excuse for being lazy with language. Kidding is a passive-aggressive way of saying something without having to take responsibility for it. You can't stop people from doing it, but if you'd like to feel better about yourself and your life in general, start checking the habit in yourself.

One simple trick to being more articulate is to focus on behavior rather than people. Like in the boss example, it isn't the person you find objectionable so much as the action. So focus on the action. When you talk about it in your head, make it about what-they-did, not who-they-are. This lifts the energy tremendously.

When you get cut off on the freeway, rather than "Jerk!" or "Asshole!" (which seems to be the default bad-driver insult), it can be "Rude! Rudeness! Don't be rude!"

"He's a friggin flake" can become "He's jerking me around."

"Bad girl" can become "Bad choice."

"They're completely incompetent" can become "What a mess."

It's more accurate, and it releases fewer stress chemicals into your bloodstream. So embrace your inner storyteller, and fashion a cleaner, lighter tale for your friends and brain cells.