“You are manually breathing now.”
“Your tongue is sitting uncomfortably in your mouth.”
Words like these have the weird ability to hijack how we perceive ourselves, often to our own discomfort. Sensations that are often ignored, you feel so aware of. Feel the rise and fall of your chest. The way your clothes fall and touch your skin. The texture underneath your fingertips.
For being only 2% of our body mass, our brain consumes 20% of all of our energy. Being such a resource-hungry organ, it has systems in place to be more efficient. Thoughts repeated often are myelinated (reinforced), making them the brain’s default response. So, when a situation arises, your mind reaches for the most energy-efficient response. Which means the thoughts you repeat eventually become the ones your brain chooses first.
My Mass-Produced Message
I love Panda Express. Perhaps this love is rooted in nostalgia from getting the lo mein and fried rice in large to-go boxes for dinner back in middle school, or it being my default cheap but filling meal whenever I’d go to the mall. However, my favorite part is really just getting my fortune cookie. Tear, snap, eat, and read the reveal.
Now, do I believe these mass-produced messages for a corporate entity can dictate and foretell my fate? No. Do I take pleasure in seeing which random message I happen to pull? Yes.
About a year ago, I visited a Panda Express hungry and seeking respite. Opening up the fortune cookie that came with my meal, I read the message: “Your words have the power to shape reality, remember to speak with intention.”
For some reason, that one stuck. I tucked it into the back of my phone case between Ginkgo stickers, and it’s lived there ever since. A reminder that I can choose the way I narrate my life.
While certain behaviors and thoughts can feel habitual, they were once just the first time. The first time, you said you’re bad with names. The first time you called yourself clumsy. The first time you tied your shoes a certain way, or traced the alphabet. Harmless origins can lead to deep grooves. Eventually, those grooves become parts of your identity you can’t remember choosing.
But we do choose, and we can choose again.
Where is the Threat?
If you’ve ever spoken in front of a crowd, you’ve probably felt that feeling of dread. The racing heart and shaky voice. This reaction is completely natural. The raw data affirms that around 75% of the general population fears public speaking (source). Our brains perceive social rejection as physical pain (source), so the alarm bells can go off even when the “threat” is simply an audience looking at you.
In summer 2024, while interning at the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists, I agreed to give a brief worship talk. I told myself, and everyone else, that I loved public speaking. Now, have I done much of any public speaking? No. However, I love talking about things I am passionate about, so how different could it be?
My father had me do a mock presentation in the auditorium a day before, and with just my father in the audience, I was confident and breezed through it. The next morning felt different, my heart pounding and mind racing.
“I enjoy public speaking,” I reaffirmed to myself, “I am safe and this is excitement, not fear.”
I felt it in my voice when I began to speak, a shakiness that seemed to invade every word. I could feel the anxiety creeping in, but I love public speaking. The presentation went well, but even towards the end of my speaking, the shaking in both my voice and hands hadn’t subsided. Afterward, I asked my mother if she had noticed. She hadn’t, and likely no one else had. Turns out, the only one who could see it and feel it was myself.
I could have let that moment confirm a limiting belief, but instead, I let my own words work on me. I kept choosing the belief I wanted, that I love public speaking. And honestly? I really do.
Limiting Beliefs
That same summer, an online friend who was a psychology student in Brazil challenged the way I talked about myself. Whenever I slipped into limiting language, he’d call me out on it. Phrases like “I have a bad memory,” “I’m not good enough,” and “I’m just unmotivated” felt harmless at the time, but they were beliefs I kept repeating. Once a statement is spoken often enough, either by you or someone else, the neural pathway strengthens until that statement feels like truth.
As a kid, we are taught not to call other people “stupid,” but no one really teaches us not to say it to ourselves. I spent years drowning in self-criticism, duct taping my self-esteem together and calling it grit. After my Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis, I remember sobbing, “I wish I was normal,” over and over. I wanted more than anything to focus and follow through, but the executive dysfunction felt impossible to fight unless fueled by deadlines and panic.
Therapy helped, but the biggest change came from building another internal voice. Not to silence the critical one, but to balance it out. The kinder voice acknowledges the fear behind the criticisms and answers with truth. With time and repetition, that kinder truth has become the path my mind often reaches for first.
Jungle Path or the Bullet Train
The mind is essentially an algorithm. It learns what scares you, what brings you joy, and feeds you more of the same. That is why limiting beliefs can feel like facts, because your brain has learned to default to them.
Default thoughts are just “bullet trains” your mind has invested in for the sake of efficiency. Choosing new thoughts can feel like cutting your way through a thick jungle forest with a machete. It can be exhausting, painstakingly slow and feel easy to abandon. Be patient with yourself as you take the time to carve new paths and reinforce them with your footsteps over time. The more you walk the path, the easier they will get, and eventually your brain will pick up the memo and decide they’re worth investing in (Let’s go myelination!)
If you happen to walk onto the old bullet train out of habit, don’t beat yourself up over it. That's just your muscle memory. Keep showing up to the path you are working to build and keep doing so until your consistency turns it into truth.
My catalyst was a random fortune cookie message, but yours might come from a conversation with a friend, a lyric from a song, or any other random place.
No matter where the source comes from, the message remains the same: Your words have the power to shape reality. Remember to speak with intention.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.