Proofread your self-talk like it’s a caption going public. Half of it wouldn’t survive the edit.

You already own an editor, and you only ever use it on things other people will read. Turn the same standard inward and most of the running commentary fails at once, because it is unsupported, exaggerated, or phrased in a way you would never allow near an audience. Privacy is what lets it through, not accuracy. Nobody is checking, so nothing gets checked.

Take one sentence you say to yourself often and edit it as though it were going out under your name. Cut whatever you could not defend. What survives is usually true and considerably smaller.