I’ve tried to stop talking to myself, but I haven’t had much luck. I’m referring to the silent internal conversation that accompanies almost every waking moment when my attention is left on its own. I’ve often wondered why the talking has to keep going.
Listening with Awareness
As part of dealing with depression, I’ve worked a lot with the techniques of cognitive therapy, and I’ve learned some of the methods of mindful awareness. Both help me become more conscious of the flow of self-talk that keeps running through my head. I’ve learned to observe what I say to myself and either correct its depressive symptoms of self-blame or accept its flow as the chatter of the moment and nothing more.
These are good skills that have benefits for relieving depression, enhancing awareness of life moment by moment and sharpening the neural networks that underlie everything we experience. So far so good. I don’t need to take at face value everything I think about myself, and it helps to be able to gain some control over where I focus my attention.
But I still talk to myself – most of the time silently – and I wonder why I need to keep doing it. Who am I talking to when I’m talking to myself? I usually talk as if I’m sharing a thought or explaining it to someone. Who is that? I don’t need the words to know what my own thoughts are.
Reaching Out with Words
After all, thoughts are pre-verbal. They seem to arise from a half-conscious mix of primordial feelings, intentions, memories, beliefs and ideas that coalesce in a silent sense of knowing. It’s only after they’ve formed that I put them into words. Coming up with the words is a much slower process.
If I’m trying to solve a problem or make a decision or write a blog post, it helps to slow down thought, refine its meaning in words and give it a test run. But often, the flow of thought isn’t that purposeful, and putting each little detail into words feels unnecessary. They start to sound like empty chatter because I already know what I’m thinking.
It’s not that I need to hear the words but that I need to communicate with someone. When talking to myself, I’m imagining that I am expressing an idea or feeling, to someone, even if I don’t have a particular person in mind. Often I’m explaining something, enjoying a funny moment – or whatever it might be – and I need to tell someone about it. The bare thought isn’t quite enough.
I guess the drive to feel in touch with other people is so strong that talking to myself is the constant reminder that I need to reach out. The spoken thought needs a response from another human heart to feel complete.
Attunement
Daniel Siegel refers to a process of attunement that brought all this to mind. In The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, he says:
Interpersonal relationships have been shown to promote emotional longevity, helping us achieve states of well-being and medical health. I am proposing here that mindful awareness is a form of self-relationship, an internal form of attunement, that creates similar states of health. This may be the as yet unidentified mechanism by which mindfulness promotes well-being.
Mindful awareness is usually contrasted with the ceaseless chatter in our inner streams of consciousness, but the idea of attunement to oneself strikes me as a basic need that we’re trying to fulfill all the time.
Most of us lack the discipline of mindfulness to calm a wild mind. The daily chatter could be the impulsive, crude way of trying to get in touch, to integrate the various parts of inner lives so that we have a sense of wholeness – a person we can resonate with.
The Need for Connection
Depression tends to break that whole person into unrelated parts that don’t match up comfortably. We can see a self there, but we don’t like what we see. The internal talk becomes abusive, and we can’t attune with who we are.
As Siegel puts it in Mindsight, we have no “me-map.” No surprise, then, that we can’t attune with others and create what Siegel calls the “we-map” of relationship.
Talking to myself has been a healthier and more cheerful experience as I’ve been learning how to live well again. I’ve also come a long way in talking to my partner and lots of other people as well.
I never used to articulate the everyday moments, impressions, reactions that make up the day because they seemed pointless, or worse – more of the gray background of depression. I had a hard time connecting in this simple way.
Talking to myself is often a rehearsal for talking to another person, but most of the time, I need it to connect with myself. Perhaps it’s a way to give voice to all the feelings and impulses I have and help them hold together.
Who do you talk to when you talk to yourself?
I agree with most of the people who have commented above. Talking can make your life a lot easier. It helps in taking out the negative emotions which could be hurting you.
You are right!
Talking to one ownself can help a lot. Even if it does not do anything else, it definitely helps in venting out the feeling of anxiety and frustration. After getting these feelings out, you can actually feel relaxed.
Excellent analysis and insights John! I share a lot of your experiences, but I’ve always viewed the talking to myself as kind of pathological, not therapeutic. I suppose it can be helpful.
I grew up pretty emotionally isolated from my parents and 2 sisters– I rarely shared my thoughts and never my feelings. So I made a habit of sharing with myself. For me the process of thinking was having this inner conversation. It was like I was narrating something for– I don’t know who. I still do it, at least when I’m not talking to my parakeet!
Hey John.
( -_-)7 *salutes*
be blessed.
I come from a long line of self-talkers…at least they talked out loud to themselves. I don’t talk out loud to myself but I do find it difficult to turn off the constant inner conversations. For me, they are more like rehearsals of what I want to tell other people so I will “get it right.”
Alright! I am a lifetime “talker to myself-er” though as an only child maybe I did this at first just to have company that wasn’t a parent. I still do it as a way to think – me and my brain.
I totally agree that it is a sign of sanity….
this is a great blog, keep the posts coming!
Yes, I talk to myself. I think that in some ways talking to yourself is a sign of sanity not insanity. For when I talk to myself I am usually correcting a wrong thought (“no, you are not a failure Wendy!”) which means I am aware that my thoughts need correcting and so it is a good thing.
When I was a teacher I used to teach lessons in my head before presenting them. This was a great exercise for me. It was preparation.
Other times I talk to myself to simply calm myself. “You are going to be okay Wendy. You are just tired. This is not a major depressive episode, you are just tired. So go to bed, rest, watch some mindless TV and try again tomorrow.”
So, talking is correction, preparation, and therapy. What a cheap way to accomplish those things. No trips to the gym or to the psychiatrist. No lengthy phone calls to friends looking for advice. Just simple self-talk – works for me!
What a wonderful post, giving me lots to think (and talk 🙂 ) about. I talk to myself often, sometimes out loud, and for me, it seems to be a way to organize my thoughts a nd determine if what I’m saying “sounds right” or would make sense to others. When I write, I often reread my writing out loud, just to hear how it sounds. Often, that will bring about changes. So when I talk to myself, I do believe I’m talking to me, with the purpose of “preparing” my thoughts for the outside world.