Table of Contents
Negative self-talk has many harmful effects. It makes you feel bad about yourself and can lead to problems like anxiety, depression, stress, low self-esteem, and feeling vulnerable. It can also make things go wrong in your life, affecting your performance and causing problems. For example, a study showed that even healthy teenagers who thought they were overweight were more likely to become obese later on. Other research has found that negative self-talk can make you do worse in school or work, and even make you worse at playing darts.
When faced with stress, negative self-talk is especially linked to higher levels of stress and difficulty controlling your emotions. We have all experienced stress and know how it feels, but to really understand it, we need a clearer definition.
Stress can be understood as a set of physiological responses to something in our environment. The physical symptoms of stress include:
- Muscular tension and pain
- Pain in the upper back, shoulders, and neck
- Elevated heart rate and chest pain
- High blood pressure
- Headache
- Digestive problems such as nausea, diarrhoea, constipation, and ulcers
- Low libido, inhibited sexual function or impotence
- Insomnia
- Tightness in the jaw and teeth grinding, especially while asleep
- Sweating
- Frequent illness (colds and so on) due to a weakened immune system
One idea suggests that stress is similar to the way our bodies react when we need to either fight or run away from danger. This response, called fight-or-flight, developed in our ancestors to deal with specific threats in their natural surroundings. When they encountered a predator, they would become tense, and alert, and their heart rate would increase. Adrenaline would also rise, preparing them to either confront the threat or quickly escape.
As time passed and people started living in cities and towns instead of nature, our environment became more complex. However, our brains didn’t keep up with these changes. We still rely on the same cognitive abilities that our ancestors used when they were hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago. But modern life is very different from the world they lived in. Nowadays, we don’t rely on hunting or gathering food, and we don’t depend on farming to survive. Instead, we earn money by providing valuable services or producing goods. So, anything that threatens our financial well-being feels like a threat to our survival.
In the past, being part of a tribe was crucial for survival. Those who were cast out from their tribe often didn’t survive for long. Therefore, anything that separates us from our close circle of family and friends is also perceived as a threat to our survival, even if we have enough money to support ourselves.
In today’s world, there are many things that can make us feel threatened or stressed. Some examples include the possibility of losing a job, not getting a raise, facing competition, failing a class, losing money from investments, embarrassing ourselves in social situations, or being judged by others for making a mistake.
The problem is that our body’s natural response to these threats called the fight-or-flight response, is designed to handle sudden and short-term dangers, not ongoing and long-lasting ones. So when we experience long-term stress, our bodies react as if the stress will go away quickly, even though it doesn’t. This kind of response can be helpful when we need to quickly avoid immediate danger, like moving out of the way of a fast-moving car. But if we constantly experience these stress responses over a long period of time, it can have negative effects on our well-being. In short, while short-term stress can sometimes be good for us and help us live longer, chronic long-term stress can make our lives shorter and less healthy.
When we engage in negative self-talk, it adds to our stress by distorting how we see challenges and our ability to handle them. In other words, it makes everyday difficulties seem like big threats and makes things appear worse than they actually are. As a result, it makes stress even more overwhelming.
It does this in a few ways. We can break them down into different patterns or ways of thinking.
- Catastrophizing – This means making small problems seem much bigger and worse than they really are. For example, if you make a mistake, you might think you’ve made a complete fool of yourself. Or if you spill some milk on the carpet, you might think it’s a huge disaster. But in reality, everyone makes mistakes and spilled milk can be cleaned up.
- Personalization – This is when you think that everything is about you, even when it’s not. For instance, if your boss forgets to include you in an email, you might think it’s because they’re unhappy with your work. But it could have nothing to do with you at all. Try not to overthink or analyse the actions of others too much.
- Blaming – You might blame yourself or others for things that go wrong. If you’re blaming others, consider that you might also be responsible in some way. If you’re blaming yourself, remember that not everything is your fault. You can only be responsible for the things you can actually control. It’s important to be forgiving to both yourself and others.
- Filtering – This means only focusing on the negative aspects of something and ignoring the positive ones. For example, if you have problems in your relationship, you might only think about the negative qualities of your partner and forget about all the good things they do for you. It’s important to make an effort to balance your thoughts by also considering the positive aspects.
- Overgeneralizing – This is when you think that one mistake or failure defines your whole identity. For instance, if you fail at something once, you might think that you’re a complete failure who can’t do anything right. But that’s not true. One mistake or failure is not enough to make such a conclusion. Instead, try to prove yourself wrong and learn from your mistakes.
- Black-or-white thinking – This is when you think that things are either completely good or completely bad. For example, you might think that if you’re not the best at something, then you’re a total failure. But life is more complex than that. There are many shades of gray and very few things are entirely black or white.
This is not a complete list. There are many other ways our thinking can become distorted, like jumping to conclusions and so on. These distortions are important in treatments like cognitive-behavioural therapy. If you want to learn more about them, you can check out the Wikipedia page on cognitive distortion.
You might be wondering if your negative thoughts about yourself are actually true. What if it’s accurate to focus on the negative? What if things really are just good or bad, and what if you truly are a failure or a loser?
First of all, calling yourself a “loser” is a judgment, not a fact. Judgments can be helpful when making decisions, like whether to buy something or whether someone is a true friend or taking advantage of you. Judgments are also useful for evaluating your own actions and determining if they’re good for you, ethical, and so on.
However, judgments about yourself can be harmful. You can’t simply reject or get rid of yourself because you’re stuck with who you are. You are the only material you have to work with. So beating yourself up is damaging. It will only lead to feeling hopeless and stuck in a negative cycle. This isn’t because you were seeing things clearly, but 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 blog and introspecting. You’re thinking about yourself, thinking about how you think, working out better strategies for self-talk and living, and enacting them to make positive changes in your life. The idea is to base everything on facts, not value judgments. Value judgments are only as true as the facts they’re based on. So start with what you know about the situation. Get the facts right. Know what you want. And figure out how to get from here to there.
Learned Helplessness
Martin Seligman is a psychologist who did famous research on classical conditioning. He performed an experiment that involved delivering small electrical shocks to dogs. Every time he gave a dog a shock, he would ring a bell. The dogs soon came to expect an electrical shock even when the bell wasn’t being rung. (This was in the 60s, so the ethical standards were a bit lax.)
Then he put the dogs in a room divided by a low partition. On one side, the floor was electrified, and on the other side, it wasn’t. He put the dogs on the electrified side. Then he delivered a shock to the dogs through the floor. Now, the partition was low, so the dogs could have jumped over it with ease. But the weird thing was they didn’t even try. In fact, the dogs would just lie down and accept their senseless punishment with stoic resignation.
He tried the same thing with dogs that hadn’t been exposed to any electric shocks. He put them into the same room and delivered a shock through the floor. Those dogs jumped over the partition without hesitation. It’s kind of like how if you leave a horse’s reins draped over a post without tying them, the horse will just stand there. Even though the horse could easily wander off, it’s used to the idea of being tied up, so it just assumes that it can’t go anywhere.
Seligman called this discovery learned helplessness. Later research has linked learned helplessness to depression-like symptoms in animals.
It’s even more messed up than that, though. People with learned helplessness are not as good at solving problems and have lower relationship and job satisfaction. Learned helplessness is what keeps people in an abusive relationships. It’s what keeps some people stuck in poverty even when they have a chance to get out, and it’s what prevents some children from even trying to improve their academic performance. 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.
Do yourself a favour. Consider burning that victim script and completely rewriting it from scratch with positive self-talk. (Inspired from “The Science of Self Talk” by Ian Tuhovsky).
