What’s The Point Of Talking To Yourself? The 4 Main Benefits Of This Habit

Even though it is socially frowned upon, everyone talks to themselves. We may do it while we are studying for exams, or when we are washing dishes or walking around the room, but without exception we all talk to ourselves at some point during the day.

It is assumed that when we speak we do so to communicate with other people, so speaking for ourselves would not be considered a true communicative act since, in principle, we would only be verbalizing our thoughts orally.

However, taking into account that it is a common practice and that, despite prejudices, it is something that mentally healthy people also do, it is inevitable to ask this question: What’s the point of talking to yourself? Let’s see it below.

What’s the point of talking to yourself? Understanding this psychological phenomenon

To a greater or lesser extent, everyone talks to themselves. Although many people would be ashamed to say that they usually talk to themselves and others would say that only a “crazy” person can talk to themselves, the truth is that everyone we turn our thoughts into words that we address to ourselves It is not a bad thing and, in fact, science and recent discoveries seem to indicate that speaking for oneself is one of the best ways to improve our discursive capacity, enhance creativity and even help us think better.

Although talking to yourself has been very frowned upon throughout history, Recently, more advantages of this behavior have been revealed While until not long ago talking to oneself was seen as a trait of immaturity, intellectual disability, mental disorder or in the form of a Shakespearean soliloquy, today dialogue with oneself is gaining some renown.

Story about the usefulness of talking to yourself

The question of what is the point of talking to yourself is not something that has begun to be addressed recently, although it is now that we are coming to have a better consideration of this behavior. Already in very ancient times, attempts were made to see and explain the close relationship between speaking out loud and thinking better

Authors of Classical Antiquity, such as the great orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), already commented that a good way to prepare a speech or write a book is to speak to yourself, especially when one goes blank.

Going to more recent times, one of the most interesting figures who addressed the usefulness of talking to oneself was the German Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) in his essay “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (On the gradual formation of thoughts while speaking, 1805). In this text he indicates that It is not thought that produces speech, but speech acts as a creative process that ends up generating thought

In his essay he describes his habit of using oral discourse as a thinking tool, and indicates that if you have trouble discovering or imagining something by thinking silently, you can overcome this obstacle through free speech. Kleist commented that people begin to form a thought in an abstract and poorly defined way, but when we begin to talk about it, this thought takes more shape and gives rise to a brilliant idea. Ideas come while talking.

Finally, It is not possible to talk about the history of this idea without mentioning Lev Vygotsky and his studies in the 1920s This Russian psychologist observed that children talk to themselves, telling themselves what they are doing and what they are going to do.” As time goes by, this talk with oneself ends up being internalized, becoming that little mental voice that is the “silent” thought or “internal speech”, typical of adults.

Based on what was observed by Vygotsky and several of his successors, talking to oneself acquires a fundamental mental role in childhood. Children guide their behavior by remembering out loud what they do and have to do, something that led the Russian psychologist to consider private speech as a crucial stage for child development. Nevertheless, As you grow, your internal discourse takes over and anyone who continued talking to themselves into adulthood was interpreted as a problem.

Internal speech is not a substitute for talking to yourself

Since speaking out loud is traditionally seen as something typical of a child, having an adult do it has been interpreted as a problem despite it not being a problem and being a very common practice. Internalizing speech is typical of maturity, but it is not a behavior that replaces talking to yourself, but it is a strategy that is beneficial for certain aspects and is more discreet than speaking out loud. Not saying everything we think can clearly save us more than one problem at a social level.

However, it also has its problems, problems that are solved by talking alone. The main disadvantage of internal speech, that is, thinking silently, is that we do it faster than we would with verbal speech. When we think, it is common that we do not think in complete sentences, we eat words or even think about a lot of ideas at the same time, which, faced with such a mental disorder, overwhelms and frustrates us. Our thinking can become very disjointed, condensed and partial, even without suffering from a mental disorder.

Instead, when we speak to ourselves we say complete sentences, the ideas come one after another and we think better We are more aware of our thoughts, weaving the ideas we have in our minds with coherence and meaning, which translates into the development of metacognition and better reasoning. You think as you speak, with the rhythm and intonation typical of a conversation with another person, emphasizing the pragmatic and argumentative meaning of what is said.

It is thanks to all this that, in case we have been left blank on a question or that we are not very clear about an idea, the fact of verbalizing it orally allows us to see what its weak point is and even encourages creativity and imagination, filling that mental gap. Pre-existing ideas are recovered, current ones are completed and new, more complex and better formulated ones are created encouraging the creation of new mental and linguistic connections between them.

Talk to one simulating a conversation

Talking to ourselves also increases our dialogic capacity. While it is true that talking to ourselves we do not interact with another person, the fact of talking to ourselves helps us actively build the image of the person we want to talk to This behavior activates our theory of mind, that is, it makes us think about the other person’s mental states, imagining how they will react to what we are going to tell them, what they might not understand or if they are going to ask us a question.

It is true that we could do this through internal discourse, imagining a conversation with that person without articulating any oral words. However, as we have mentioned before, thinking without speaking has the disadvantage that we consume words and phrases, in addition to the fact that some ideas can come all condensed and at once, which makes it very difficult to imagine a natural conversation. Furthermore, when we talk to other people we do it orally, and practicing it speaking is a much more realistic simulation than doing it silently.

Besides, talking to yourself motivates action It is very typical to see in movies and television series the scene of a person who is preparing what he is going to say to another. He does it not only to prepare for the conversation but also to motivate himself and tell him once and for all what he wants to tell her, which, in the series, is usually a hard message to hear. In real life we ​​use this resource both to motivate ourselves to talk to another person and to dare to start a project or do something that scared us, telling ourselves phrases in the second person like “You can do it!” or “Come on, it’s not that difficult.”

summarizing

Although many continue to believe that talking to oneself is something typical of crazy people and small children, the truth is that It is another behavior that offers us a lot of advantages on a cognitive and social level By talking to ourselves we can organize our thinking, turn abstract and unclear ideas into bright and complete ones, reflecting better by saying things out loud than doing it silently. It is very difficult to organize a thought that comes to us in a partial and condensed way.

Although the fact that we talk to ourselves cannot be considered a communicative act in itself, it can serve as a simulation to maintain a conversation with someone to whom we want to say something that is complicated and that is not easy for us to think of in the moment. course of a spontaneous conversation. Furthermore, if what we have to say is hard both to say and to hear, talking to ourselves helps us motivate ourselves to tell it while we practice so that the blow is soft.

Regardless of whether we usually talk to ourselves a lot, it is clear that this practice It is not a sign of mental immaturity nor is it synonymous with psychological disorder Many people talk out loud when we study, do homework, or simply to better remind ourselves of what we have to do. It helps us organize our thinking, which improves our reasoning and metacognition, advantages that are complemented by those of internal speech. So, talking to yourself is not for crazy people, but for geniuses.