What is the use of talking to yourself? The 4 main benefits of this habit

These are the advantages of talking to yourself, a behavior that is more common than it might seem.

Even though it's socially frowned upon, everyone talks to themselves. We may do it while we're studying for exams, or when we're doing the dishes or walking around the living room, but everyone without exception talks to themselves at some point during the day.

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

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 ourselves this question: what is the point of talking to oneself? Let's look at it below.

What is the point of talking to oneself? Understanding this psychological phenomenon

To a greater or lesser extent, everyone talks to themselves. Although many are those who would be ashamed to claim that they usually talk to themselves and others would say that only a "crazy" person can talk to himself, the truth is that we all convert our thoughts into words that we address to ourselves.. This is not a bad thing and, in fact, science and recent findings seem to indicate that talking to oneself is one of the best ways to improve our discursive ability, enhance creativity and even help us think better.

Although talking to oneself has been frowned upon throughout history, more and more benefits have recently been revealed, more advantages of this behavior have recently been revealed.. Whereas until not so long ago talking alone was seen as a trait of immaturity, intellectual disability, mental disorder or in the form of a Shakespearean soliloquy, nowadays talking to oneself is being given a certain renown.

History of the usefulness of talking to oneself

The question of what is the use of talking to oneself is not something that has only recently begun to be addressed, although it is only now that this behavior is coming to be better considered. Already in ancient times, attempts were made to see and explain the close relationship between talking aloud and better thinking..

Authors from Classical Antiquity, such as the great orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.), already commented that a good way to prepare a speech or write a book is to talk to oneself, especially when one goes blank.

Moving 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 ultimately generates thought..

In his essay he describes his habit of using oral speech as a thinking tool, and indicates that not if one has trouble discovering or imagining something by thinking silently, one can overcome this obstacle by free speech. Kleist commented that people begin to form a thought in an abstract and ill-defined way but, when we begin to talk about it, this thought takes more shape and gives rise to a brilliant idea. Ideas come as you talk.

Finally, it is not possible to talk about the history of this idea without mentioning Lev Vygotski 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". With the passage of time, this self-talk becomes internalized, turning into that little mental voice that is the "silent" thought or "inner speech" of adults.

Based on the observations of Vygotski and several of his successors, talking to oneself acquires a fundamental mental role in childhood. Children guide their behavior by reminding themselves aloud of what they do and have to do, something that led the Russian psychologist to consider private speech as a crucial stage in child development. However, as they grow older, however, inner speech takes over. and it was interpreted that those who continued to talk to themselves in adulthood were a problem.

Inner speech is not a substitute for talking to oneself

As speaking aloud is traditionally seen as something proper to a child, having an adult do it has been interpreted as a problem even though it is not and is a very common practice. Internalizing the speech is a maturity behavior, but it is not a behavior that replaces talking to oneself.Rather, it is a strategy that is beneficial for certain aspects and is more discreet than speaking out loud. It is clear that not saying everything we think can save us more than one problem on a social level.

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

On the other hand, when we speak for ourselves, we say complete sentences, ideas come one after the other and we think better.. We are more conscious of our thoughts, spinning with coherence and sense the ideas we have in our mind, which translates into development of metacognition and better reasoning. We think as we speak, with the rhythm and intonation of a conversation with another person, emphasizing the pragmatic and argumentative meaning of what we say.

It is thanks to all this that, in case we have been left blank on any issue or 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, the current ones are completed and new, more complex and better formulated ones are created, encouraging the creation of new ideas.The creation of new mental and linguistic connections between them is encouraged.

Talking to oneself by simulating a conversation

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

Of course, we could do this by means of inner speech, imagining a conversation with that person without articulating any spoken words. However, as we mentioned before, thinking without speaking has the disadvantage that we eat words and phrases, in addition to the fact that some ideas may come all condensed and all at once, which makes it very difficult to imagine a natural conversation. In addition, when we talk to other people we do it orally, and practicing it by speaking is a much more realistic simulation than doing it silently.

In addition, talking to oneself motivates action, talking to oneself motivates action.. It is very typical to see in movies and TV series the scene of a person who is preparing what he is going to say to another person. This is not only to prepare for the conversation, but also to motivate him or herself to tell the other person what he or she wants to say, which, in the series, is usually a message that is hard to hear. In real life we use this resource both to motivate us to talk to another person and to dare to start a project or do something that we were afraid of, saying phrases in second person like "You can do it!" or "Come on, it's not that hard".

Summarizing

Although many still believe that talking to oneself is something for crazy people and small children, the truth is that is another behavior that offers us a lot of advantages at a cognitive and social level.. Talking to ourselves we can organize our thinking, turning abstract and unclear ideas into brilliant 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 form.

Although the fact that we talk to ourselves cannot be considered a communicative act in itself, it can serve as a simulacrum 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 course of a spontaneous conversation. In addition, if what we have to say is hard to say and hard to hear, talking to ourselves serves to motivate us to say it at the same time that we practice so that the blow is soft.

Regardless of whether we tend to talk to ourselves a lot, it is clear that this practice is neither a sign of mental immaturity nor a synonym of psychological disorder. is neither a sign of mental immaturity nor synonymous with a psychological disorder.. Many of us talk out loud when we study, do homework or simply to better remind ourselves of what we have to do. It helps us to organize our thinking, which improves our reasoning and metacognition, advantages that complement those of inner speech. Thus, talking to oneself is not for madmen, but for geniuses.

Bibliographical references:

• Ariel, N. (2020). Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking. Psyche. Retrieved from https://psyche.co/ideas/talking-out-loud-to-yourself-is-a-technology-for-thinking
• Maass, Joachim (1983). Kleist: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Vygotski, L. S., Kozulin, A., & Abadía, P. T. (1995). Thought and language (pp. 97-115). Barcelona: Paidós.