Changing Your Negative Self-Talk

There is an emotional consequence to negative self-talk, which is negative feelings. Read our blog article to learn how to change it.

We all have negative self-talk at one point or another.  Some seem to experience it more than others.  I think that usually has to do with one’s environment in which they learned these tendencies.  But there is an emotional consequence to negative self-talk, which of course you can guess is negative feelings.  Most of the time people are not even aware that they are doing this but most of the time people feel the emotional results.  That is because the words we use have meaning and have not only an emotional impact but in some cases a physical one too.

I will never forget learning about the power of words in my social psychology class way back in 1998… (wow that was a long time ago :)) The experiment went something like this:  a sample size of 1000+ people were individually brought into a room with a special machine, which measured pressure that one could apply by pushing down on it with your hand.  The subjects were instructed to apply as much pressure as they could with their dominant hand while saying the phrase, “I can’t” over and over for thirty seconds.   The following week the same sample of subjects were brought in and told to do the same thing while saying the phrase, “I can” over and over for thirty seconds.  The results were statistically significant in showing that the outcome of pressure applied when saying “I can” was far greater that the pressure applied when saying “I can’t” when results were compared from one week to the next.  This experiment was one example that impressed upon me the power of words and their effect on human behavior/ability.  We may not always think that expressions or words really mean that much, but they do!