You can address voices inside yourself the way you would address someone else.

Imagine this: I have a negative voice floating around in my body, with a thought that keeps coming back now and then. Then I speak directly to that voice within myself. Literally.

So I talk to myself as if I’m talking to someone else—but inside.

Also, check in now and then whether you’re saying something kind to yourself.
We live in an age of fitness and driving each other crazy with performance. That means you’ll likely have many voices like: “I still don’t have a six-pack,” or “I’m not losing weight fast enough.”

There’s nothing wrong with those voices or thoughts—I have them too.
But every now and then, throw something sweet into the mix. Say something syrupy to yourself. That you’re crazy about yourself. That you think your body is beautiful. That you are kind to other people.

Make it personal, something that you know about yourself that is beautiful. Maybe you think about others a lot. Maybe you help people without other people realizing you do. Those kinds of things. Flatter yourself. It’s not normal to never be sweet to yourself.

And be careful: the way I’m writing this, I’m actually giving you another task—another thing to be mindful of. So don’t turn it into a job. Just check in once in a while: is everything I’m saying to myself negative?
Why, actually?

Consciousness is your body explaining to you how it works.

Consciousness emerges when you focus on something within your body, and then you and your body explore each other until you realize it's one and the same thing.

You

You are not only the "I," but also every cell in your body. Or, every cell in your body is yours—whatever you want to call it. It's you. It's your body.

Have you ever thought you found a formula for something that would work forever?

For example:

If I run on Monday and Thursday, lift on Tuesday and Friday, and do kickboxing on Saturday, I get jacked—right?

In the beginning, this works. But as you move forward in time and progressively get better, you start to realize that over a long time frame (let’s say a year), some Tuesdays don’t feel like other Tuesdays.

Some Tuesdays, you should skip lifting. And some Tuesdays, you should push through.

This kind of intuition comes with time. It’s more or less a feeling like “meh, not today.” You don’t even know why.

This search for a magic formula that always works—that’s what science tries to do.

But even E = mc² doesn’t work every day.

Some days it does. Some days, it doesn’t. That’s the whole point.

Reality has an unlimited number of variables in it. So this Tuesday is not next Tuesday—and not the one after that. Literally everything changes, in every direction.