Changing Your Self-Talk Will Change Your Emotions Every moment that you are not asleep, you are engaging in self-talk, the thoughts with which you interpret the world. If your thoughts are rational and realistic, you function well. If they are irrational and unrealistic, you experience stress and emotional disturbance.
Imagine that you greet your boss one morning; she walks purposefully past you without responding and then slams her office door. An irrational self-talker thinks, "Oh, no! My boss must be mad at me! What in the world did I do to make her be so rude to me?" The feelings of worry and irritation will serve as the basis for the response to the situation, which may well include fretting, groveling, or some subtle retaliation. A more rational self-talker thinks, "Goodness! The boss must be having a rough morning! I am curious about her behavior and maybe later she'll let me know what her problem is." The feelings of curiosity and mild concern for the boss's welfare will influence a less distressing response.
The critical point is that the same thing can happen to two people with two widely varying results. The emotions we have are not caused so much by the events in our lives, but what we tell ourselves about those events. Two destructive forms of irrational self-talk are "awfulizing" and "absolutizing." "Awfulizing" is making a nightmarish interpretation of an experience. A brief chest pain is a heart attack and your child leaving for college is an unthinkable anguish. The emotions that follow are awful, too, because they are in response to an awful description of the world. "Absolutizing" is peppered with such words as "should, must, always, and never." People and things must be a certain way and any deviation from that standard is bad. This brings about a particularly high level of stress and disappointment because the standard itself is irrational. We can change our irrational self-talk by stopping irrational thoughts and reframing them.

Irrational:	It is horrible if someone gets mad at me or doesn't like me.
Rational:	I don't like everyone, so why should I expect everyone to like me? People have a right to all of their emotions, including anger.
Irrational:	I must be rigorously competent and almost perfect in everything I undertake.
Rational:	I am not perfect and I never will be. I can learn valuable lessons from every mistake that I make.
Irrational:	It is terrible when people and things are not just as I want them to be.
Rational:	We all have different ideas about how things should be and I can learn to appreciate the diversity. I am not in control of all events nor other peoples' lives.
Irrational:	We all have different ideas about how things should be and I can learn to appreciate the diversity. I am not in control of all events nor other peoples' lives.
Rational:	It is true that my past has influenced me, but no matter where I have been, I am responsible for the person I become and where I go in the future.
Irrational:	If I felt better about myself, I would behave better. My low self-esteem is why I don't do the things I should do.
Rational:	I can't wait until I feel good about myself to do what I need to do in life. Good self-esteem follows esteem-worthy actions, not the other way around.
Irrational:	It is wrong or bad to be selfish.
Rational:	No one in the world knows my needs and wants better than me and no one else is responsible for my happiness. I accept that responsibility.
Switching from irrational to rational self-talk does not happen overnight; lifetime habits are difficult to shed. The first step is to recognize irrational thoughts and be willing to give them up. Only then can we begin to catch ourselves mid-thought and reframe the messages we give ourselves about the world.