Self-Talk is the running commentary in your head. It's what you tell yourself inside your head. If you close your eyes right now and look internally, what is the thought you can hear or the visual you can see? This is your self-talk.

Inner Voice, Inner Dialogue, Inner Critic, Inner Hero

Self-Talk is your mind communicating with you, telling you things about what’s happening to you and what you should do.

No. While some of us “hear” our self-talk, others “see it” or “feel it”

Our past experiences, beliefs and trauma play a huge role in our current self-talk. Self-Talk is basically our subconscious interpreting what we are going through right now and what’s good and bad for us.

Negative self-talk is thoughts that trigger difficult emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression etc. Being self-critical is a type of negative self-talk.

All or nothing thinking, Catastrophizing, Negative Labeling, Mind Reading, Minimization of the positive and Overgeneralization are some of the ways we end up thinking negatively in any situation.

While negative self-talk per se is not bad for your mental health, prolonged negative self-talk and hyper self-criticism are shown to create an imbalance in emotional wellbeing making you feel anxious, depressed and low in many life situations.

When a situation or a trigger makes you think negative instantaneously, these thoughts are called ANTs. ANTs are the product of subconscious.

When a negative thought keeps occurring multiple times in your mind, its called RNTs. RNTs are found to be a transdiagnostic factor in mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression etc.

Your self-talk is an aggregation of your past experiences, trauma and actions. It’s a subconscious process. You can impact your self-talk through emoitonal exploration on a medium to long term time-frame.

Feeling negative doesn’t necessarily mean your self-talk is overtly negative. It could also mean that you are not aware of your positive self-talk like self re-affirming and self-managing thoughts. You can use the self-talk pattern test to see how your self-talk is at any point in time.

While positive reaffirmation can have a short-term impact on your emotions, on the long-term it's effects are not proven. Your self-talk is an aggregation of your experiences and while repeating positive statments can have an effect, the effect does not become permanent without emotional exploration and self-talk reframing.

Through Emotional exploration and reframing.

Your inner voice is your self-talk communicating to you through verbal, visual or feeling based sensory information.

1. Be aware of your self-talk 2. Explore your emotions behind your self-talk 3. Ask yourself the right questions to break unuseful self-talk and reframe your emotions

Journaling, Meditation, Mindfulness etc.are all ways you can impact your self-talk through emotional exploration

By talking through the situation, you recruit additional auditory memory to be aware of your self-talk and make sense of the underlying reasons behind your emotions.

1. Psychologist Dr. Thomas Brinthaupt has identified four different dimensions to the way we talk to ourselves inside our minds. 2. Storytelling is found in research studies to be a powerful resource to process our emotions and achieve wellbeing 3. Negative self-talk is found by research studies to increase in frequency during times of stress, crisis and natural disasters 4. James W Pennebakser, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has shown that storytelling can help mend lives broken by trauma.

Research finds that stress, crisis and natural disasters such as covid-19 pandemic can trigger elevated negative self-talk in individuals.

Your self-talk has a direct co-relation with your mental health. Whenever your self-talk is imbalanced and becomes overtly negative, you will experience more difficult emotions such as anxiety, depression etc. By tracking and managing your self-talk, you can manage your emotional wellbeing better.

Professor Thomas Brinthaupt has identified four different dimensions to the way you talk to yourself at anypoint in time. This is the chatter or self-talk pattern and you can find your self-talk pattern by taking this test.

Your self-talk, which is an aggregate of your intelligence, tells you what to do, how to react, and respond in any situation. If your self-talk is imbalanced, you will think negatively and experience negative emotions a lot, there by directly impacting your quality of emotional wellbeing.

Yes. Professor Thomas Brinthaupt has identified four different dimensions to the way you talk to yourself at any point in time — Socially Assessing, Self Critical, Self Managing, and Self Reinforcing.

When you are highly socially assessing, you give a lot of value to how people around you act and behave. More specifically, you spend time thinking about people’s actions in relation to how it affects you.

When you are self-critical, you spend a lot of time focusing on your weaknesses and ways you could improve. When this becomes high, you end up having negative generalizations about yourself that affects your wellbeing and quality of life.

At this stage, you know how to absorb information from the world and from within you in a way it helps with your goals.

At this stage, your self-talk is rich with positively reinforcing statements that focus on your strengths and capabilities.

Today, we try to understand and manage our mental health by tracking our emotions. While emotions can be useful, they don’t give you the entire picture. Our self-talk pattern is the engine that drives our emotions and actions. By measuring and tracking your self-talk, you can get a stronger hold on your emotions and behaviour.

Sportspersons and top athletes have been using the power of self-talk to improve their cognitive and athletic performances for some time now. This research and knowledge are now trickling down to everyone in the world with Konvos.

Emotional Intelligence is our ability to use our emotions to understand, use, and manage our own emotions in ways that are useful to us.

Embodied cognition is an approach that broadens the traditional definition of cognition limited to Mental processes, to include bodily processes and movements.

Our ability to think with our bodies also provides us with ways to improve our emotional wellbeing such as Yoga, exercise, running etc.

On Konvos app, you have a series of “embodied cognitive” states that provides you with a visual of how you might be feeling right now. By choosing the state that vibes with you, you can start going through our “self-talk” triggers that help you understand your emotions better.

Emotions and moods can tell you how you have been feeling. But they don’t necessarily indicate how your Mental Health has been. Your ability to act in ways that are in line with your goals indicate how your mental health is right now.

Improving your self-talk means that you are aware of how you are talking to yourself within you and using this insight to think in ways that are useful to your life and goals.

No. Our past experiences and trauma and our current life situations play a huge role in being highly self-critical to oneself. Fortunately, there are science-backed ways to break out of this negative loop.

Negative generalizations are a result of life experiences, trauma, and stress turning our attention excessively inwards. We look into ourselves for improvement constantly because we are not able to control things outside us. When this self-talk pattern becomes excessive, you start feeling negative about yourself all the time.

Chatter by Ethan Kross, Self Talk : How to change the way you think about yourself by Erik Smith are some relevant books on the subject