Self-talk - The oddly fascinating habit of verbalizing inner monologues
There are so many things in my life I would deny but talking to myself is not something I would ever dream of denying. I do and I am not ashamed of that fact. However, I don’t quite understand why I do it, I just know that I do.
Therefore, today I want to explore the reasons as to why I talk to myself even though I have the possibility of just thinking about it. I also want to try to remember why I started to talk to myself in the first place and if I would continue doing so in the future.
Many may believe that I am just verbalizing my inner monologue or thought process as I like to call it. However, I do believe that there is more to it than just the verbalization of a thought process running through my mind.
In a way, I believe that I could never be able to verbalize my thought process because my inner monologue races past me so fast that my physical self could in reality never be able to verbalize anything without cutting out important details.
Therefore, I believe that in a weird sense of the way, I am having a conversation with myself. I know this just sounds absurd because conversing with oneself is just a symptom of a mental illness. Trust me, I checked and that is not the case most of the time.
To a certain extent, I guess, I am just giving a voice to a second opinion so I can find the best solution to the problem I am currently facing since just one opinion on a matter is never enough to make the solution good.
Let me explain. Whenever I am faced with an issue (most of the time scientific issue), I like to analyse it from all angles however the only angle I could hear was the one in my mind. Even if that voice lists many angles, it never lists them in a way so I can compare all of them.
Therefore, with two voices, I can hear two angles somewhat simultaneously. I know it sounds weird and like I am mentally insane but it just helps me with dealing with a problem I have been pondering for some time.
Frankly, I am not the kind of person who would shut down an idea just because it sounds insane. If that idea is efficient and helps me with my problem solving then I would gladly look insane in the eyes of society because I am not doing the one thing I hate to do. Procrastinate.
Funnily, I would also respond to the voice in my mind whenever it tells me to do something. I have to verbally tell my mind that I am resting and that resting is normal otherwise that voice is not going to go away.
Sometimes, verbalization just helps me get the job done and some other times it just helps me see reason. Sometimes, hearing what I need to do also makes me take the task more seriously because I sometimes hate listening to the voice in my mind and I just tune it out since it drives me crazy.
Sadly, for documentation purposes, I forgot when I started with this unusual habit of mine. It probably started when things got complicated i.e., probably during secondary school. Things just got so bloody messy that I needed to hear a voice of reason through that chaos.
My mind is very emotional and overthinking a lot hence it is just good to see past the emotions to the facts which is the verbal part of my thought. Somewhat a literal separation between emotions and facts to not blur the lines.
Research has also found that talking to yourself in the third person can help with managing your own thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. As mentioned, talking to yourself in the third person separates the emotional from the rational.
Another possible reason is that sometimes it feels as if I am the only one I can talk to openly and intellectually and actually feels as if I was being understood. Talking to other people about my problems just seems as if they are trying to grasp the conceptual problem I am proposing.
You know what they say, when you want to have something done right, do it yourself because only you truly know what you are going through, and you don’t have to feel embarrassed or ashamed to share it with anyone else.
No offence to the people who try to help me but sometimes a situation is so layered, and I don’t remember whom I told what, therefore sometimes it is just easier to not try to explain the problem. Sometimes trying to explain the problem solves it but most of the time… not really.
To a certain extent, I also believe that hearing something written makes me understand or spot mistakes more easily. For instance, I reread all the articles I wrote out loud because my mind has the tendency to skip over words.
In all honesty, I am not dyslexic but sometimes after reading long texts, my mind just scrambles the text preventing me from continuing. One neat trick is reading the text to myself so my mind can also comprehend the text before me.
Scientifically, it also has been proven that using multiple senses while learning helps with remembering unlike just using one sense. I can´t find exact data but you tend to remember 10% of what you read and 50% of what you read and hear.
This is also the reason why I try to teach myself certain things in the third person. Trying to verbally instruct myself to do certain things. Or trying to verbally explain a topic to myself that I don’t understand.
No matter how often I talk to myself during the day, I would still feel somewhat ashamed when people walk in and find out I am not on the phone. They would usually ask “who are you talking to?” and that is just when the embarrassment starts.
There are two options in this situation and neither of them is particularly good. The first one is that I would lie and claim that I am just repeating something to myself because that is frankly considered a normal thing to do.
With the first option, people would be suspicious, but they would eventually just drop because what evidence do they have? Most of the time, they won´t look for evidence to prove me wrong because that would make them look like the crazy person.
The second option is just straight out confessing and that is not ideal either. From that moment on, the person would just think that you are crazy. There is no turning back. Once they think you are crazy, you will forever be crazy in their eyes.
Most of the time, that idea of people believing something about you which is not true just annoys me so much. Not being able to shed this upheld opinion of your own self just frustrates me. Therefore, I have the tendency to avoid that all together by lying throughout life.
However, now that I am thinking about it, I wonder why I should. Not as if lying would shorten my lifespan or anything (because I would then be dead by now) but I was just wondering. Why am I lying when self-talk is quite common?
Most of the time, I believe that many people still believe that talking to yourself, whether it is encouraging yourself or trying to understand something, has something to do with mental health or more precisely mental illness namely schizophrenia.
Let me explain. For people with schizophrenia talking to themselves is part of a hallucination. Those hallucinations cause them to see, hear, taste or feel things that are not there but only in their mind. Hearing voices and responding verbally, is a common hallucination.
From a scientific standpoint, the brains of people with schizophrenia experiencing hallucinations react to these voices in their minds the same way that the brain reacts to talking to real people in real life. Which is fascinating and totally beside the point.
To a certain extent, I believe that people talking to themselves is just a sign that someone has gone mentally insane. Therefore, many, like myself, deny the fact that we do therefore we just sit still and pretend nothing is wrong. It is a risk-reward analysis and the risk (being called crazy) outweighs the reward (of not lying).
Thinking about self-talk, just made me remember a video that I watched some time ago. This just got me wondering and the thought is just fascinating (and probably wrong or unprovable). The video I am talking about is a video made by CGP Grey called “You are two”.
Maybe this whole self-talk schtick I am doing has something to do with the fact that there is a muted brain hemisphere (namely the right one). My left brain hemisphere is just responding to the muted right one. I know it sounds crazy but I have already been crazy in this article so just bear with me.
The thoughts in my mind are always so emotional and irrational sometimes. The verbalized second opinion has always been more rational and more responsible. Matching the tasks of each brain hemisphere.
The left brain hemisphere has always been considered the more rational, logical, analytical and orderly hemisphere and coincidentally also where the language processing and speech “centre” (technically the areas related to speech) is located in most people.
The right brain hemisphere has always been considered the more creative, emotional, spontaneous, and intuitive. To my knowledge, the right brain hemisphere does not have areas related to speech so, in other words, the right hemisphere is to a certain degree “mute”.
However, that is just speculation, and I could be terribly wrong. I just can imagine how cool it would be if that is actually the truth or at least some part of it because that would explain this habit of mine which existence has been sending me on a wild goose chase since I can´t explain why I talk to myself sometimes.
Since I don’t quite understand why I am talking to myself sometimes, I would not be able to understand how to stop. Treating the symptoms of an issue is useless unless the core of the habit has been tackled.
Frankly, however, I don’t quite want to get rid of this self-talk habit since I found that I have been working more efficiently with than without it and there is nothing I adore more than being able to work efficiently.
At this point in time, I don’t believe this self-talk has done any harm. There are no negative (or positive) remarks made toward myself and I am not doing anything that causes any harm to anyone. Therefore, I don’t see a point in getting rid of an asset.
To sum up everything in this article, I can´t remember when or why I started talking to myself. There are many plausible theories trying to explain why I am talking to myself from time to time but none of them has ever been proven true or false.
Last but not least, I don’t believe that I need to get rid of something that is not having any negative impact on my life. It might have a negative impact in the eyes of society but up until now, I didn’t care and I still don’t. I would lie anyways so… who knows what is true.
It is normal to have internal monologues while performing a task to help with thought and emotion organization. It is time to destigmatize this completely normal habit that people have and maybe talk more openly about mental health so no one has to hide.