A Helpful Way to Hear Your Negative Self-Talk So You Can Change It

Adults with ADHD often report higher levels of negative self-talk, low self-esteem, and self-criticism than neurotypical people.

Our inner critics love to pile on when we’re struggling to get things done, taking longer than everyone else, feeling stuck at the starting line, and in many other situations.

Idiot.
Why can’t you just..
Everyone else manages….
You never learn…
It’s not that complicated…
What’s wrong with you?

We speak to ourselves in ways that we would never speak to others. And we might continue to speak this way to ourselves even after we’ve stopped tolerating this type of talk from others.

Why It’s Hard to Change Your Self-Talk

The common advice is to “stop speaking to yourself this way.”

The problem is that in order to change our self-talk, we must be aware of it. And when it comes to this negative self-talk, we often don’t hear it.

Much of our self-talk is an internalized version of the way others spoke to us, especially in our formative years. The messages we receive when we’re still developing are more likely to stick. The more they are repeated, the more they are reinforced.

After years of repeated negative feedback, criticism, and judgment from others — especially people in positions of trust and authority — we become so acclimated to these messages that we don’t even hear them.

When you’ve been talking the same way to yourself for years, it becomes normalized for you. You don’t pick up on what you’re even saying, so you can’t change it.

A Way to “Hear” Your Self-Talk So You Can Change It

I recently stumbled on a way to “hear” my self-talk and see it in front of me.

Sometimes I dictate things to AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude while I’m working through an issue. I might use voice dictation to spill out everything in my head, just to read the transcript or have it reflect back to me what I said.

Giving myself free reign to speak without filtering and seeing it reflected back to me has been eye opening — and horrifying.

This exercise is less about having the AI “do” something with what I say. It’s really about allowing myself to be unfiltered. In theory, you could do this with a voice recorder. But somehow I don’t get the same effect when I simply record into my recorder app. Speaking “to” something external — even if it’s AI — changes the energy.

If you want to change your patterns, you need to see them first.

If you’re struggling with negative self-talk, give this a try.