[specialist]

> Any tips on how to improve?

How you talk changes how you think.

Ages ago, desperate to stop being angry, and completely out of any other ideas, I decided "Fine, I'll just fake being happy, positive."

Shockingly, after about 3 years, what started out as mostly sarcastic, actually mostly worked. From my reading since, I stumbled onto techniques known to academics, practitioners.

To get a sense of the mechanics, imagine having the habit of swearing all the time, and wanting to stop. Habits can be replaced, not unlearned. So I literally scripted responses, practiced saying them, tried to use the new script in place of my old script, and caught myself when I goofed. Both in my head (internal dialog) and interacting with others.

It got easier over time.

Backsliding is super easy. Even now, decades later. You can't dwell on that. Just acknowledge it and get back to the program. (Get back on the horse.)

It helps to have "positive" people in your life that you don't want to disappoint. For instance, I'm mostly able to avoid trolling here on HN because I really value u/dang's approval and efforts and it'd kinda hurts me emotionally to disappoint him. Find people IRL to serve in that role.

And avoid other people displaying the habits you're trying to not do yourself.

Forgive yourself. Choose to become the best version of yourself. Be kind to yourself.

Good luck.

[JohnFen]

This is so true. I once had someone explain the problem very concisely: we tend to believe the things we hear frequently, even if we're the ones saying them. So we need to pay close attention to how we talk to ourselves.

[newsbinator]

Could you suggest some common negative expressions to map to more positive ones?

It'd be great if we could put together a list/gist.

[specialist]

Ya. Now that you point it out, that's a glaring omission.

It was a great deal of effort to monitor myself, flag the negative stuff, dig down to determine my actual root goal, and then figure out some kind of alternate positive framing.

Complimentary to this was learning that all negatives can be stated as a positive. (Something I got from an in-house corporate communications seminar, if you can believe that.)

My go to example from parenting is to say "Please walk" instead of "Don't run!". It was super effective!

(Transformed my parenting. Used my son as my guinea pig. I hadn't yet learned about positive reinforcement, which is really too bad.)

So. I'll start journaling expressions, as I remember them.

Thanks.