Letting Go of Negative Self-Talk [Ep. #966]

Topic: Negative Self Talk 

Hi everyone and welcome back to our Thursday Q &A show. I hope you’re having a lovely week so far wherever you happen to be in our community. And today we’re going to be talking about letting go of negative self-talk, which is something that is so common for, let’s face it, most all of us. Even though we have this wholeness and this abundance, we get disconnected from it quite easily in modern life. Maybe from the way we were raised, our caretakers didn’t have that deep connection to themselves, even though they did their best. So we grow up in this sort of fragmented way, and we can be really mean to ourselves. I know I’ve been very, very harsh on myself growing up, and it affected my body image, it led to very unhealthy habits and eating disorders. I think years ago I might have been a little bit judgmental and said, wow, that person isn’t very kind or very nice. But from where I see it from my heart’s perspective you realize that the people….

 

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Kimberly explores the pervasive issue of negative self-talk and its detrimental effects on mental and physical well-being. She emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, compassion, and heart coherence as tools for overcoming self-criticism. Through various strategies, including cognitive reframing and creating a positive environment, Kimberly guides listeners on a journey towards self-love and acceptance, encouraging them to embrace their unique essence and foster a more positive inner dialogue.

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Episode Chapters

00:00 The Impact of Negative Self-Talk
06:11 The Role of Self-Awareness in Healing
11:52 The Effects of Negative Self-Talk on Well-Being
18:10 The Power of Heart Coherence
24:07 Practicing Self-Compassion
30:13 The Journey Towards Self-Love

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KIMBERLY’S BOOKS

• The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts 

• Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart
• The Beauty Detox Solution
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• You Are More Than You Think You Are 

OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY!

• How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima [Episode 907]
• How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey [Episode 883]
• How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li [Epsiode 913]
• The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan [Episode #899]
• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard [Episode #877]
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger [Episode #873]
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo [Episode #867]
• How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means [Episode 889]

STUDIES AND RESEARCH

A 2021 study in Cognitive Therapy and Research journal investigated the automatic nature of positive and negative thinking. The research concluded that habitual negative self-thinking is a significant predictor of low self-esteem and increased stress, whereas fostering automatic positive thoughts can serve as a protective factor against stress.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences, this research examined the impact of negative self-talk on athletes’ performance. The study found that negative self-talk was associated with increased anxiety and discrepancies between goals and actual performance, suggesting that such internal dialogue can hinder physical performance.

A 2011 study in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, investigated how negative self-talk influences physiological responses to stress. Participants who engaged in negative self-talk exhibited heightened cardiovascular reactivity during stress tasks and slower recovery post-stress, indicating that negative self-talk can exacerbate stress responses and impede physiological recovery.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, explored the link between negative self-talk and anxiety sensitivity. The results indicated that individuals with higher levels of negative self-talk also reported greater anxiety sensitivity, which is a risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders.

A 2023 study by Cornell University examined the Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Models to assist individuals in reframing negative thoughts. The research found that generating alternative perspectives can help individuals replace negative thoughts with more positive ones, thereby improving mental health outcomes.

A 2014 Study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicated that referring to oneself in the third person during self-talk can provide psychological distance from negative thoughts. This technique has been shown to reduce anxiety and improve emotional regulation.

A 2017 study published in Scientific Reports found that third-person self-talk helps regulate emotions in stressful situations with minimal cognitive effort and help make decision-making under pressure.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Research and Reflections in Education highlighted that positive thinking is associated with effective stress management and improved health outcomes. The study emphasized that individuals who engage in positive thinking experience lower levels of distress and better coping mechanisms.

A 2022 study in the journal Behavioral Sciences explored the relationships between mindfulness, self-compassion, and self-talk. The study found that higher levels of mindfulness and self-compassion are correlated with increased positive self-talk and decreased negative self-talk, suggesting that cultivating these traits can mitigate negative thought patterns.

A 2024 study in the journal of behavioral sciences explored the connections between self-talk, inner speech, mind wandering, mindfulness, self-concept clarity, and self-regulation. The study revealed a positive association between mindfulness and self-regulation, suggesting that mindful individuals are better equipped to manage their internal dialogue and maintain focus.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberly Snyder (00:00.814)
Hi everyone and welcome back to our Thursday Q &A show. I hope you’re having a lovely week so far wherever you happen to be in our community. And today we’re going to be talking about letting go of negative self-talk, which is something that is so common for, let’s face it, most all of us. Even though we have this wholeness and this abundance, we get disconnected from it quite easily in modern life.

maybe from the way we were raised, our caretakers didn’t have that deep connection to themselves, even though they did their best. So we grow up in this sort of fragmented way, and we can be really mean to ourselves. I know I’ve been very, very harsh on myself growing up, and it affected my body image, it led to very unhealthy habits and eating disorders. So there’s the body cornerstone.

of emotionally when we are very negative with ourselves, we can harden up and it creates this shell. I was recently at a conference and I met some other people at the conference who weren’t necessarily very warm and friendly. And I think years ago I might have been a little bit judgmental and said, wow, that person isn’t very kind or very nice, you know, right now. But from where I see it from my heart’s perspective,

you realize that the people that can be very closed are often very harsh with themselves. And so compassion starts to come in, right? As we start to really become aware of what’s happening. And of course this touches our spiritual cornerstone as well, because when we are in negative self-talk, we are disconnected from who we really are, which is this wholeness, this abundance, this real incredible essence at our core.

and we’re hyper fixating on the surface or the egoic identifications and we suffer, we make ourselves suffer. And the fourth cornerstone, food, this adversely affects our digestion, it adversely affects our food choices. Sometimes we engage in fad dieting or restrictive eating, we don’t nourish ourselves as well, or we feel so badly that we give into sugar cravings. It really has this overarching effect.

Kimberly Snyder (02:23.052)
when we are not in alignment with love, with ourselves. So today we’re gonna delve into research and actual tools of dismantling this because many of us have struggled with negative self-talk for many years. And I also want to remind you that on our website, mysaluna.com, that’s with two Ls. If you didn’t realize, my saluna or saluna means sun and moon and the brand is saluna.

but our web handle is MySaluna. So it means this wholeness, which is within all of us. There’s this beautiful rhythm between the night and the day making up the wholeness of a total cycle, right? Of a 24-hour circadian experience. And when we think about our wholeness, we have complexity of feelings. We have all these different interconnected bodily functions.

We see this expression in our body, in our beauty, in our energy that really aligns with our total lifestyle. So saluna is about that wholeness, which is why we talk about all these different topics. Over there, I encourage you to join our newsletter, mysaluna.com. There are amazing programs, including our two-day heart reset program, which include journaling prompts and recipes, meditations and more. There’s the heart align meditation, there are food.

Programs and recipes. mean, there’s just so much other articles I think you would enjoy So please get on our newsletter and please take advantage of all the information and resources for you Let’s get right into our show today. Now. Our topic comes from Jasmine who lives in Arizona Jasmine thank you so much for bringing this to our awareness and you write I’ve noticed that a lot of negative feelings about myself come up and I tend to beat myself up and I’m very critical

when I make mistakes or things do not go well, what can I do to help me be kinder to myself? So Jasmine, once again, thank you. This is not an uncommon phenomena, unfortunately. Many of us are so harsh with ourselves and it’s really seeing things from the egoic mind. In my recent book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, I share how as we…

Kimberly Snyder (04:45.73)
become more coherent, which is this aligning of the heart-brain nervous system. As we come into our hearts more, we start to really see things more clearly. And one of those things that we can see is, wow, I’ve been really mean to myself. And the reason I can be harsh with other people is because it’s an extension of this harshness of this relationship that I actually have with myself.

And this has been very revelatory to me in my personal journey and also healing attachments and feeling like I needed so much externally. And I just started to wake up more and more as my heart started to awaken that I’ve been putting a lot of stock in what other people, how, you know, what other people’s opinions are of me, that I need them to have pay attention to me or validate me for me to feel okay.

And when they didn’t, or left to my own devices, my baseline for my thoughts was often quite negative. And it’s interesting, before we delve into the research, I also want to share that yesterday I had a dear friend come over for tea, and I hadn’t seen her in a little while. And like many of us in Southern California, she had been evacuated with the fires, and we’d been through so much shared experience, and we’d been texting, so.

It felt really good, first of all, to see her in person. And then she was sharing how she had a detached retina and how she couldn’t see for a little while. And it was really challenging for her to go through this. And she’s like in her late 30s, early 40s, but it was something her father had gone through in his 60s. So this was, I if it was genetic or just something that happened much earlier in her life.

but she said she would sit outside in her backyard and because she couldn’t see outwardly, she started to see inwardly and what she saw was her thoughts and she realized that her baseline as well was very negative and very critical of herself. And because she worked in finance and she was really busy all the time before this happened, she hadn’t really paused to notice her thoughts.

Kimberly Snyder (07:06.42)
and she just filled her life with a lot of activities and a lot of work and she was on zoom calls. There’s just so much going on and this pause gave her an opportunity. She said that she really started to understand the word insight, insight. So when we consider this word, this inward sight, we start to turn as Paramahansa Yogananda talks about the spotlight or the headlights of our attention. We start to tune it inward because so much of the time

We’re bustling around, we’re trying to get things done in the world that we’re really outwardly focused and we’re taking in so much information and our eyes are looking out and we may focus on what other people are doing, this is where it becomes easy to judge and to compare. And one of the big things about overcoming negative self-talk and letting it go is that we have to be truly aware of what we believe about ourselves, what we are saying to ourselves.

what we are reinforcing to ourselves, whether that’s in moments when we’re just walking around our house or washing the clothes, or what we say when we look in the mirror, or what comes out of our mouths casually, even when we’re in conversation with other people, which of course reflects what we truly are thinking on the inside. So self-awareness is really huge as we start this conversation and even before we get into the different types of

negative self-talk, one of the things that I would encourage you to do is to make the intention to be aware of what you really are saying to yourself. Sometimes you could do the practice of writing it down in a journal, but for me, it was more about just making that intention to be aware and starting to really see my thoughts separating from them. And that’s where the heart work

became very powerful for me because I was up in my head so much. And one of the things that we teach in the Heart Aligned Meditation, one of the first steps, is you drop down into your heart. You actually shift your attention and your awareness into your heart. We can do it right now while we’re here together on the show. It sounds so simple, but this is how powerful you are. Where you place your attention starts to rewire your nervous system. It starts to open up different neuron pathways. It starts to shift your

Kimberly Snyder (09:31.672)
perceptions, which then in turn starts to shift your very thoughts. So as we shift into our heart, and you can start to do this practice while you’re showering, while you’re cooking, start to be aware of the patterns of your thinking which may come in. So for example, when you go on social media or you’re watching the media or you’re, you know, you’re in line at the coffee shop.

Where does your mind tend to go? What are the types of thoughts that come up? Even if they may be a little bit different, start to follow the pattern. And for me, I noticed there was a pattern of, you know, not fitting in enough, not doing enough. More of this, what I called, I started to label it, I called it hurry energy. And then I could start to be more aware. My body would start to tighten up and I feel sort of tighten my shoulders.

And then I could really identify when this hurry energy was coming in. And when the hurry energy came in, the thoughts were very negative about lack and not enough, again, not doing enough. So the self-awareness is really, really important to dismantling negative self-talk because I know for myself and many of us, we can sail through the day and accept as normal what’s going on in our mind and our head.

So let’s get into some of the research and we’ll circle back to some more specific modalities. But I just want to emphasize how important it is to start to separate from the thoughts and not over identify. And then it can be easier to eradicate them, right? We have to see them first and then we can start to take the next steps. first of all, what is negative self-talk? I mean, we can hear, we know probably the more obvious ones.

If we swear at ourselves, if we call ourselves bad or horrible names when we look in the mirror, even if we don’t say it out loud. But there’s also all or nothing thinking, which is viewing situations in extremes with no middle ground saying, know, you’re such an idiot. didn’t get, you know, the 50 things done on your to-do list. You didn’t do enough, right? Instead of, hey, I did pretty good here or this worked out pretty well.

Kimberly Snyder (11:52.15)
It’s this extreme thinking, which is very mental and very depleting. Then there’s personalization, assuming excessive responsibility for negative events. Are you someone who’s constantly apologizing, constantly taking the hit, taking the blame, saying, you know, gosh, you know, I’m so sorry this didn’t completely work out. It’s like, hey, it’s actually not your fault that there was a rainstorm and

Couldn’t get in on time or that your computer crashed or whatever it is or you got sick and you couldn’t get the project done on time, right? It’s this excessive, me, me, me, referencing back, personalizing. The third is overgeneralization, drawing broad conclusions from a single negative experience. This guy didn’t ask me out on a date. I guess I really am not good enough.

for anyone to want to date long-term. I guess no one will want me. I guess I’m not good enough, right? We interpret these singular or more isolated events and the mind puts the narratives and the stories, which can be so debilitating. And I remember experiences like this. I remember one time I did a television segment for Good Morning America and some people didn’t agree with something I said.

And it really, I beat myself up so much. said, I should have said this instead. Maybe that was too controversial to say. And it went on for so long. And this is how the mind can really trick us. This is how the mind can really bring us down. And also catastrophizing. Catastrophizing, that is how it’s spelled. That’s how it’s said. It’s a really funny word, right? With these catastrophes.

where we expect the worst possible outcome in any situation. It’s like we create our reality. So when we put something out there, we put our resume out, no one would ever hire me. I’m not smart enough. just don’t know enough. There’s probably a million people who are better, right? There’s this just extreme negativity. Even as we…

Kimberly Snyder (14:14.186)
try to extend ourselves and we go for something, a job, a project, something we care about. We go out on a limb and ask someone out to hang out with or we want to be friends with someone or we go on a date and then we sort of degrade ourselves or self-sabotage. Do any of these sound familiar? And I’ll also add to this just all the negative, you know, body

talk, which is really common, especially with us women. We’ve been wired from such a young age to really criticize our bodies and how we look like and our skin. And it’s really horrible because we put so much emphasis on the surface. And again, from a spiritual perspective, we are totally missing who we are, which is this essence, this unique energy, the true self, the heart.

this powerful place of stillness and peace, we can just be ourselves in this fullness. And we don’t have to degrade ourselves or compare or judge. But so often we get cut off because we’re too much in our heads, we’re too much in our minds. We take a heady approach to wellness, we take a heady approach as we move through life. It’s difficult for us to meditate because we’re up in our thoughts. It’s difficult for us to feel any level of peace.

And so of course there’s this baseline of negativity because this is how most of us have lived a lot of our lives. But I’m here to say it very much can be different and we can shift. And one of the most important ways that we do that is coming into our heart coherence. So please check out the Heart Aligned Meditation, which is on our website as well, mysaluna.com, which will teach you more and more that we can live a heart-led life instead of a head-led life. And this is a huge difference.

into more peace, into just feeling so much more here and present instead of up in the thoughts and the picking and the lack.

Kimberly Snyder (16:17.934)
A 2021 research study in cognitive therapy and research found that there was an automatic nature of positive and negative thinking. And what they found was that negative thinking is a significant predictor of low self-esteem and increased stress, while fostering positive thoughts can serve as a protective factor against stress. So when we don’t have stress coping tools,

our minds start to spin and we go into thoughts back to the heart. One of the ways in which we can become resilient against stress is to settle our nervous system and to self soothe and self regulate and to remind ourselves that from within we can create such a connection to our center because we don’t control circumstances. remember, you know, I remember cause it was two weeks ago, feeling so much fear and terror.

watching the fires creep closer to our home, which by the grace of God, I’m so grateful, was saved. And my heart goes out to the many thousands of people who did lose their homes. Such a stressful experience to be through with the power of nature and these fires and just so many things in life, right? But I centered myself as much as I could in my heart. And that’s really how I got through.

I breathed, I took it one step at a time. I tried to focus on what was in front of me, whether that was making a camomile tea or a green smoothie for my kids, a glowing green smoothie, or getting my little one dressed, or playing Legos with my older son, whatever it was, to bring it back to what’s right here in front of us. When we’re future-based, when we’re ruminating over the past, we tend to spin into a lot of negativity. So the presence…

and being in our hearts and practicing the heart align steady in life practice or the heart align harmonize with life practice. are practices in the hidden power of the five hearts, which is based on heart coherence research. We find that we become more more resilient against these ups and downs in life because we’re centered in our core, in our hearts. A 2008 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that negative self-talk was associated with increased anxiety.

Kimberly Snyder (18:39.446)
and discrepancies between goals and actual performance, suggesting that inner dialogue can really hinder physical performance. this is why it spans all the body, all the cornerstones, including body, including how we are in our body, how our body performs. And this is about sports, but I would also say that this also impacts our bodily functions, including digestion and immunity, because negative self-talk

correlates with incoherence, which is like this scattering out of our energy. Our nervous system isn’t aligned. is this entrainment, which is possible between the heart, brain, and nervous system becomes disharmonious. So this means energy becomes very inefficient, and therefore we’re not on par with our sports. We don’t have the focus. We don’t speak as well in a meeting or to our children. We’re not as clear or we can get more easily stressed.

And then in terms of our bodies, I’ve noticed when I’m very negative, my energy is lower. I don’t feel in the fullness of my vitality. And I believe this definitely does affect your digestion and your aging, right? So we wanna be this lift of positivity, not in a fake way. To me, fake positivity comes where we disregard our feelings and we sort of pretend that we’re happy and also…

when we’re hyper-focused on getting confident just from achievements or how we look, which is fleeting and will not be sustained. Of course we want to have great hair days. Of course we want to nail that presentation or that work project. But even deeper than that, we want to really find a sense of confidence. I am that I am, right? Which comes from rooting inward. Confidence, and not in something that can be measured or taken away or something that’s a plaque that you hang on the wall.

but just because there’s no one like you, because you’re alive, because you’re amazing. This being which has been created by God, universe, source, however you like to think of it, and is whole and complete, and is walking around the world learning and growing, and it’s amazing. So please, please come back to presence when these thoughts start to come in. In 2011,

Kimberly Snyder (21:01.014)
study in the International Journal of Psychophysiology found that there’s heightened cardiovascular reactivity during stress tasks and slower recovery post stress. Meaning again, back to how the body impacts how, or just how the negative talk impacts our body’s resilience, our body’s ability to deal with stress, to recover and to keep moving forward.

There’s so much here. Again, the show notes will have links to the research. As I started to go into the research, it made me a little bit sad. I was grieving a little bit because I don’t think that many people really realize how the thoughts that they’re thinking in their head really bring them down, right? They just sort of…

believe it’s the way has to be or it’s been this way for so long or they’re dismissive of it or maybe they really do buy into it so they don’t even think that it’s negative thinking they just think they’re thinking the truth. So one of the things that was studied in a 2008 study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders found that negative self-talk led to anxiety sensitivity which then was a risk factor for elevated cortisol

increased stress, anxiety, depression, weakened immunity, disrupted sleep patterns, increased cardiovascular issues, the heart disconnection, just energetic and spiritual, it’s also physical, behavioral avoidance and social isolation. So what are some of the things that we can do about negative self-talk? To me, once again, the most powerful thing I believe is to get out of your head.

where this issue is, where the thoughts are, the brain up here, and to move quite literally and energetically to placing your attention on your heart, to learn about heart coherence. Again, we have tools on the website, the new book, that empower the five hearts, it’s all about this. For me, this was the golden thread that tied all the cornerstones together, all the eating, all the meditation, the spiritual.

Kimberly Snyder (23:09.918)
practices, everything I had learned about wellness for almost 15 years came together when I came into my heart. And I realized a level of peace and groundedness which I had never felt before. It is priceless and I want you to also have access to this. So I overcame so much negativity and low self-esteem issues and trauma through my heart. So I encourage you to do the Heart Align Meditation and the other heart tools.

Another study or another tool is cognitive reframing. There was a recent study in 2023 by Cornell University finding that if we can learn to reframe our negative thoughts, which becomes a practice, we start to break that pattern and move forward. So for instance, you can ask yourself questions like, is this a thought based on facts or assumptions challenging black or white issues? Now, this is a it’s like turning around the steamship. takes time. I have friends.

and I listen to them and I just, you know, sometimes I just have to intervene. say, do you listen to what you’re saying about yourself? Right? We can point it out, but ultimately we have to be aware within ourselves. Of course, loved ones can be mirrors, these are deep patterns sometimes. So I encourage you again, to get really present and to think about, to consider what am I saying to myself in the first place?

So as we start to question our thoughts, we want to inject this very powerful medicine in of compassion and kindness. Turn those energies into ourself where we may often give them to someone that we’re in line, you know, we’re in line at Target or a friend, we might be really kind with them or patient, but not always with ourselves. So remember that kindness and compassion are very powerful to give yourself to say, wow, I believe this for so

You know, I would never say that to someone else. I’m so mean to myself. And to really have that whole space for yourself and say, wow, you know, I learned this pattern early on. I’m not going to blame my mom or my caregivers or my teacher because they were doing the best they can. I’m an adult here. I’m going to start to break this. What is a kinder way? You know, what is the more gentle way to be with myself? Can I give myself a break? Can I let myself rest?

Kimberly Snyder (25:35.918)
Can I drop this thought? Can I stop beating myself up? There’s another practice called third party self-talk. And this was studied in different research studies, including a 2014 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And it founds that when we speak of ourselves in the third party, we can provide psychological distance from our negative thoughts. So for instance, you can say, know, Kimberly,

was feeling a lot of stress and she made the best decision that she could in that moment. you know, maybe she acted in a hurry. You you get the idea, the sense of detachment. And I’m reading this parenting book right now from Dr. Shafali, who’s been on our show before called The Parenting Map, which by the way, I like very much. And she talks about how there’s so much guilt with parents sometimes.

if they yell, if they raise their voice, if they get frustrated with their child. And one of the things that she talks about is really reassuring herself. In this framework, could say, Diane isn’t a bad mom. Diane is at her wits end. Diane learns some patterns and her ego is flared up or whatever it is, but Diane is going to learn from this.

So just as you would talk to a client or a friend or someone else, when you frame it that way, wow, know, Diane went through a lot in her childhood. Diane had a mother who blah, blah, blah. You can start to really feel like, I’m I’m a person because we have this pattern sometimes for treating ourselves completely differently than anyone else. So this can humanize ourselves.

so that we can give ourselves the level of respect that we all deserve. So it’s interesting how there was research about this and another study from 2017 in Scientific Reports found that this third party talking could actually help better decision making under pressure. So when we feel that overwhelm, you can start to talk on the third party, right, know, Kimberly’s dealing with a lot right now, Kimberly’s juggling the family, Kimberly’s doing this talk, you know.

Kimberly Snyder (27:55.198)
she can take some space to slow down and she’s gonna evaluate what’s the best thing to do here, right? Or however we like to think of it so that we can actually really make some space from the thoughts and march forward with the best possible step. There was a, as you, if you listen to this in real time, I’ll say yesterday, I posted a post on social media with my feet.

walking in the mud in Hawaii. And it was about how we just walk forward every day into the unknown because we don’t control anything. It’s all an illusion. There’s one thing that the fires really taught me. It’s that all this stuff that seems so predictable that we can count on that the road is gonna look like the road that even your house is gonna be there. It’s not how life is, right? There is.

Everything in life is in fluctuation. Everything is unknown. But what we can do is to stay and come into our hearts as much as possible and stay present and make the best possible decision, the best possible step forward that we can in that moment, including what best to eat or what to say on that text or how to be loving in this situation or how we could differently speak to ourselves in that moment. Right? We just need to keep moving forward step by step. And so.

One of the things that we can reframe with negative self-talk is of course positive self-talk. And to me, sometimes people jump to saying things that can feel like a lie, so then there’s that fake inauthenticity. For me, there has to be a pause before we say positive affirmations. Otherwise, it sounds like we’re lying to ourselves, right? So let’s say I’m feeling very, man, I messed up again. I can’t believe I did that.

I can’t believe I forgot that call. Let’s just make this up. So between just saying, you know, I’m very responsible or whatever the affirmation is. For me, there’s this moment of pause at least, where I breathe down into my heart. take deep breaths. I move to a different place from the mind, right? Where the problem is to where the solution can be found in the heart. And I reset. And once I feel neutral, once my heartbeat has calmed down,

Kimberly Snyder (30:13.974)
or I let go of the clenching in my shoulders or whatever it is that sort of signals that there’s something more intense going on. And I breathe down, then I can say a positive affirmation. I’m trying my best. I’m going to keep showing up. I know I’m not perfect, but I’m on my journey and I’m here doing my best and folding each day. Right? So we come to neutral and then we can shift into a more affirmative, positive mindset. But again,

We have a different perspective once we’re in our hearts. There’s 40,000 neurons in the heart. So as we activate the heart brain, quite literally and scientifically, we can shift into a more zoomed out perspective. But if we stay in our mind, we stay locked in the negativity. So it’s very difficult to overcome the thoughts. So we wanna come down first, get neutral, reset, turn on that heart brain, turn on the heart’s power, and then shift into a completely different.

more positive approach that’s based in a solid place of self-esteem, this resiliency of being in our center. And then we can also be sure to surround ourselves with an environment that’s more positive, including the social media feeds we follow, the media that we may have on screens, our friends, the people that we choose to be our roommates, the purple that we let into our WhatsApp groups and our text chains.

We want to be discerning. If people around us are very negative and we’re working to break this negativity, it doesn’t help, right? It’s similar to trying to give up alcohol and being around people that are drinking and partying all the time or people that are gossiping when you’re running to rid yourself of judgment and gossip, right? We want to choose our environments very mindfully and carefully and have that self, give ourselves permission to

shift our time and our friendships. It’s interesting because I’ve had different circles of friends and there was a circle of friends and the fires cleared up so much for me and usually it would be the four of us would hang out. And I reached out to one of the friend members and I just said, I just want to hang out just us. And that felt very nourishing to me. And you know, one of the members is…

Kimberly Snyder (32:37.984)
not just, you know, not right or wrong or bad or good. She just has a different head space right now. And I’m not feeling like it’s nourishing for me to be around. I’m not called to it. So without judgment, without right or wrong, it’s just we start to flow from our hearts and we start to make these very clear decisions to support how we want to feel. We want to feel more positive. We want to feel more uplifted, more peaceful, more joyful. We surround ourselves. We become aware of the thoughts. We

We really dig into these practices. We root into the heart and the heart aligned meditation. We learn about more cognitive reframing or third party thinking that we talked about here today. We journal, we create more awareness. It’s really about awareness, presence, and from that place we shift. From that place. If we’re not aware, if we’re up in our heads, it’s very impossible, almost impossible I could say. Everything’s possible, but far more challenging to shift.

So just remember that you are this incredible, unique being and the negative self-talk is not aligned to truth. You are not in lack. You don’t deserve to be spoken to that way, including by yourself. And the more we step into this different way of talking to ourselves and believing in ourselves, everything can improve, including your relationships, your vitality. You start to feel a different energetic youthfulness.

running through your veins and your bones and your body because there’s this uplifted energy which is the source of all nourishment. That’s the ultimate way to nourish yourself is with more positive thoughts. But we can’t just, you know, think our way there. We have to come into this embodied place of heart, heart led living, right? It just starts to be this different more loving framework and that lovingness, what we call the devoted heart, that’s the fourth heart stage.

of Heart Awakening taught by Swami Sri Yukteswar that I wrote about in the Hidden Power of the Five Hearts book, this love starts to permeate through including into true self-compassion and true self-love. So we really can get there. I say that from someone who’s had a lot of low self-esteem and a lot of criticism in my life towards myself. We really can start to transition into that with these practices.

Kimberly Snyder (34:57.282)
with positive community. So I also encourage you to join my broadcast group on Instagram, which if you don’t know, there is a personal group where I leave voice notes and there’s more community interaction. And of course to follow me on Instagram, at underscore Kimberly Snyder for positive heart led living, right? And to scrub your social media channels, scrub your WhatsApp groups to make sure that it’s up to date with the energy that you want to create.

I am so grateful to be here with you in community and remember that you can always reach out to me. I’m here to support you. I’m here to serve you. whether that means questions for future shows, we tend to rotate around all the cornerstones each month, every few weeks. So I’ll be talking about a food topic next week or a body one. Talk about spirituality and emotional well-being. Again, please join our newsletter over at mysaloona.com.

and please leave a review for the podcast and send the show for anyone that you think would benefit. These are two really powerful ways to support the show, to support the movement, to keep everything going. So thank you so much in advance. I appreciate you so much and I look forward to connecting with you more. Sending you much love.