How to Handle Negative Self-Talk on a Date

Here's the problem with dating: You don't usually know the other person so well. So you have no idea what they’re really thinking.  If you’re at all self-conscious, it’s easy to assume the worst.

Today I’m going to show you some really useful techniques for keeping your cool on a date. But first, let me tell you a story. It's one I got from Dr. Aaron Beck, an elder statesman in the mental health field, and the father of what’s now called cognitive therapy. 

A Classic Example of Negative Self-Talk

This story involves a young woman Dr. Beck treated when he was just starting in practice sixty years ago, way back in the 1950’s.

She happened to be quite sexually adventurous and slept with a lot of men. Given that this was the 1950’s, that raised a lot more eyebrows than it would today. She’d often fill the sessions with vivid descriptions of her most recent sexual encounters.

At the end of one such session, Beck thought to ask her how she was feeling. She said she was feeling very anxious. Beck suggested that maybe she felt anxious about telling him all this intimate stuff.

“Actually,” she said, “I was afraid I was boring you.”

It turned out the main reason she’d been filling the hour with all these sexy stories was because otherwise she was pretty sure he’d think she was very boring. It didn’t matter whether she was on a date, or in therapy, or anywhere else. The thought, “I’m a boring person” was never far from her mind.

Now negative self-talk really works

We humans seem to have a natural tendency to assume the worst about ourselves. Negative self-talk just seems to be in our DNA.

Once Dr Beck recognized this, he went on to found a whole school of therapy—cognitive therapy. It's centered around something called Automatic Negative Thoughts and how to change them so they don’t cause so much trouble.

Automatic Negative Thoughts makes a great  acronym—ANTs. ANTs can ruin a good date just like real ants can spoil a picnic.

Negative self-talk just seems to be in our DNA.

ANTs don’t come with labels attached that say, “This is an ANT.”  Instead, they usually come with labels that say, “This is REALITY.”  That can be pretty scary.

The first thing is to remember what Dorothy’s dog Toto did in The Wizard of Oz. He pulled back the curtain revealing that The Great and Powerful Oz was not in fact a wizard at all, but just a little guy pulling levers and speaking into a microphone.

In other words, not reality, but just an ANT playing at being reality.

Recognizing negative self-...

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