The Science of Self Talk: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence and Stop Getting in Your Own Way (Master Your Self Discipline Book 5)

by Ian Tuhovsky

So a constructive kind of self-talk would be any kind of self-talk that leads you in the right direction, toward your goals and toward becoming a better you. Dysfunctional self-talk would be any self-talk that bogs you down in unproductive, stale, repetitive patterns, especially if those patterns make you feel miserable and helpless.

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Researchers studying depression have figured out that people with clinical depression have a kind of compulsive destructive self-talk.[1] Psychologists call it rumination, and its characteristic is repetitively going over symptoms of distress, like a scab you keep obsessively picking at. Its other characteristic is passivity. You don’t focus on solutions but problems.

Research

while short-term stress can actually benefit health and longevity, long-term chronic stress causes us to live shorter, less healthy lives.

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Negative self-talk increases that stress by distorting our perception of challenges and our ability to meet them. In other words, it makes routine difficulties look like threats. It makes things seem worse than they really are. Thus, it makes stress even more stressful. It does this in a few ways. We can break them down into a number of broad patterns or cognitive distortions. Catastrophizing – Also known as “making a mountain out of a molehill,” catastrophizing refers to making bad situations seem much worse than they are. You didn’t just make a mistake; you made an utter fool of yourself. You spilled some milk on the carpet. You’ll never get it out; what a disaster! Well, not really. Everyone makes mistakes, and spilled milk can be cleaned up. Personalization – This is also sometimes called personalizing. It means automatically referring everything to yourself, imagining it has something to do with you. Your boss forgot to CC you on an email, so you imagine it’s because they're unhappy with your work. In reality, it could have nothing to do with you at all. Beware the trap of thinking too much and over-analyzing the actions of others. Blaming – You could be blaming yourself or others. If you’re blaming others, consider how you may bear some of the responsibility. If you’re blaming yourself, consider that not all problems are your fault; you’re not in control of everything, so you’re only to blame for the things you could have changed. Be forgiving to both yours...

Types of negative thinking

Well, first of all, “loser” is a value judgment, not a fact. And, yes, value judgments are extremely useful—indeed indispensable—if you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy something, or whether or not you want to get to know someone, or whether that person you think of as your friend is really a friend who's there for you when you’re in need or is just a mooch who’s taking advantage of you. Value judgments are also useful for weighing your own habits, decisions, and actions and deciding whether or not they’re good for you and the people you care about, whether they’re ethical, and so on. But value judgments are worse than useless when they’re global judgments of yourself. Because, for better or worse, you’re stuck with yourself. And you are the material you have to work with. So, since you can’t just reject yourself, it’s damaging to beat yourself up. You’ll just end up in a rut, feeling hopeless. And that won’t be because you were seeing things clearly. It will be because you blinded yourself to the truth. Or as the highly recommended former trader and risk and probability expert Nassim Taleb put it in his book Anti-fragile: A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. But that’s not you, because you’re here, reading this book and introspecting. You’re thinking a...

Well said..

Well, first of all, “loser” is a value judgment, not a fact. And, yes, value judgments are extremely useful—indeed indispensable—if you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy something, or whether or not you want to get to know someone, or whether that person you think of as your friend is really a friend who's there for you when you’re in need or is just a mooch who’s taking advantage of you. Value judgments are also useful for weighing your own habits, decisions, and actions and deciding whether or not they’re good for you and the people you care about, whether they’re ethical, and so on. But value judgments are worse than useless when they’re global judgments of yourself. Because, for better or worse, you’re stuck with yourself. And you are the material you have to work with. So, since you can’t just reject yourself, it’s damaging to beat yourself up. You’ll just end up in a rut, feeling hopeless. And that won’t be because you were seeing things clearly. It will be because you blinded yourself to the truth. Or as the highly recommended former trader and risk and probability expert Nassim Taleb put it in his book Anti-fragile: A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. But that’s not you, because you’re here, reading this book and introspecting. You’re thinking a...

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Learned helplessness makes you neglect the things in your life that you need to change. That’s because you’re constantly telling yourself that you can’t change and you can’t improve things. Negative self-talk is a symptom of learned helplessness. It’s the voice in your head that says I can’t and It’s no use.

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The absence of the negative is actually a hidden, silent positive.

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But the absence of negative emotion is itself a good thing and worth working toward.

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it’s good to experience stress sometimes because it improves your health and makes you live longer. In fact, if you never experienced any stress at all, it would mean you weren’t challenging yourself enough, that you weren't stepping outside of your comfort zone, that you weren’t giving your life any of the kind of friction it needed to generate heat, energy, and growth.

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Self-leadership is pretty much the same as the self-agency we talked about earlier: taking authorship of yourself and your life. They defined positive or constructive self-talk as “characterized by accurate self-analysis, well-grounded beliefs, and an encouraging orientation” and negative self-talk as “a tendency to focus on and perseverate about the negative aspects of challenging situations.”

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Positive self-talk is curious, action-oriented, and probing; it’s interested in feeling out the texture of life and learning how to work with it practically. It frames things, not in a naively optimistic way, but in a realistic cost-benefit analysis. By weighing the pros and cons practically, positive self-talk helps you make better decisions.

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The thing that the Matthew effect or the Pareto distribution shows us is that things naturally take an unequal shape. They naturally tend to asymmetry. And that asymmetry appears because of momentum. So, as psychologist Jordan Peterson emphasizes in his talks, if you make an effort to improve yourself just a little bit every day, every improvement will build on the previous one. That will become the basis for the next improvement, until it becomes exponentially easier. It will have a runaway parabolic effect. “For to everyone who has, more shall be given.” This doesn’t happen by all at once. You don’t jump from the 80% to the 20%. Instead, you accumulate before you climb. I said you accumulate, and, in a certain sense, that accumulation is gradual, but it’s effects will be largely invisible until suddenly they’re not. That can be seen from the shape of the Pareto distribution in the image above. There’s a very small, gradual rise, so gradual that you might not even notice it, like watching a plant grow. Then growth takes off dramatically.

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Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to someone you love.

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