What does it mean when someone talks to themselves

Why Do People Talk to Themselves? The Impacts of Self-Talk

Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors

Why People Talk to Themselves

It’s more common for people to talk to themselves than to not. According to one study, 96% of adults say they have an internal dialogue. While self-talk out loud is less common, 25% of the adults say they do it.

Many people talk to themselves in everyday situations. There’s a stigma around talking to yourself out loud in public, but doing it can help you understand the world around you. When you talk to yourself you’re intentionally taking in your surroundings.

Inner dialogue usually sounds similar to the way you would speak to others. This kind of self-talk can occur quietly inside your head or be spoken out loud. Either way, it’s a passive activity – simply listening to your own thoughts.

Another type of internal self-talk happens when you’re debating something with yourself – not just listening to your thoughts. Some people feel their inner dialogue come from a specific place in their body. This could be in their chest or certain parts of their head.

Self-Talk and Mental Health

When people talk to themselves, they may be working problems out in their minds and speaking them out loud. This is also known as “self-explaining.” Talking out loud helps people work through their thoughts.

This is a healthy problem-solving tactic. There have been studies that show when people talk through what they’ve just experienced, they’re more likely to learn from it and understand it.‌

Self-talk refers to the way that you talk to yourself, whether positively or negatively. Positive self-talk can help you hype yourself up and feel confident before a situation. When you talk to yourself this way you’re able to motivate yourself and pay more attention to your thoughts.

The mental and social benefits of self-talk have long been debated by philosophers. Self-talk can help you make decisions more easily and motivate you to do things you may be putting off. Keeping a positive outlook and talking to yourself kindly can have great impacts on your overall mental health.

Mental Health Conditions

There are some cases where talking to yourself can be a sign of a mental health condition. Muttering and speaking random sentences out loud could be a sign of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia affects many people worldwide. It’s more common in young people when they’re going through major transitions in their life.

Schizophrenia is more common than Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. It can affect men in their mid-20s and women a bit later in life. Schizophrenia in children is rare.

This condition doesn’t have an exact cause, but certain things make someone more prone to developing it. These could include brain chemical balance, genetic causes, and environmental issues. Drugs could also play a part.

One of the main symptoms of schizophrenia is disordered thoughts. Your thoughts may feel blocked or jumbled. When you speak them out loud they may not have a logical order. When you talk to yourself you might make up new words, repeat single words or phrases with no context, or give new meanings to words.

If caught early, schizophrenia can be treated and managed.

Is talking to yourself normal? What it means for mental health

Researchers have widely studied the act of talking to yourself, concluding it is a common and normal behavior. People refer to talking to yourself as self-talk or self-directed talk.

Although people often associate self-talk with mental health issues, healthcare professionals consider it normal at all ages and even beneficial in some circumstances.

In this article, we explore why a person might self-talk. We will also look at its benefits and when it may indicate a mental health condition.

Researchers have been studying self-talk for a long time. In the 1880s, scientists were particularly interested in what people say to themselves, why they talk to themselves, and the purposes of self-talk.

Research defines self-talk as a verbal expression of an internal position or belief, meaning it expresses inner feelings, non-verbal thoughts, and intuitions about a situation through speech. The person only intends to direct their speech at themselves.

While children often talk to themselves, it should not be a cause for concern for parents or caregivers. It is a way of developing language, staying stimulated during a task, and improving performance while completing tasks.

The habit of self-talk may continue into adulthood and is generally not a problem.

Self-talk may have several benefits. It causes no significant health risks unless a person also experiences other symptoms of a mental health condition, such as hallucinations.

While performing a task with a set of instructions, self-talk may improve control over the task, concentration, and performance. It may also enhance problem-solving skills.

A 2012 study examined how self-talk affects visual search tasks. The findings suggest that self-talk while looking for a particular object, such as a lost item of clothing or set of keys, or trying to find products in a grocery store, may help a person find them sooner.

Research also suggests there could be benefits to engaging in self-talk during sport, depending on how the person self-talks and what they say.

For example, self-talking in a motivational or instructional way could improve performance. However, although negative self-talk may increase motivation in sport, it may not improve performance.

There are three categories of self-talk that differ depending on the tone of voice. These include:

Positive self-talk: Encourages and reinforces positive beliefs about a person. Engaging in positive self-talk may decrease anxiety and improve concentration and focus.
Negative self-talk: Usually involves critical and discouraging dialog.
Neutral self-talk: This type of self-talk is not significantly positive or negative. People may use it to give instructions themselves rather than reinforcing or encouraging a particular belief or emotion.

People may also refer to talking to yourself as overt and covert self-talk. Overt talk is self-directed speech that other people can hear. Covert talk is speech that occurs internally that no-one else can hear, for example, by mouthing speech rather than speaking out loud.

There are several reasons why a person might self-talk, including:

Regulating emotions

Self-talk may help regulate and process emotions. For example, if a person self-talks about feeling nervous or angry, it could help them by:

directing their focus to improve their nerves or anger
controlling their emotions
thinking about how to respond to their feelings at that moment

Reducing anxiety

A 2014 study suggests that people with anxiety, including social anxiety, could benefit from engaging in self-talk.

The researchers found that people referring to themselves in the third-person could distance themselves from their distressing feelings and process, regulate, and analyze these emotions to help reduce anxiety. Engaging in self-talk may also decrease anxiety after stressful events.

If self-talk interferes with a person’s life, there are ways to reduce this behavior.

Writing down self-talk in a journal may help a person transfer thoughts from their mind, organize thought processes, and manage stress and anxiety.

Maintaining a journal can help people identify everyday situations that cause them to self-talk and become more aware of what could trigger these scenarios in the future.

Practicing the shifting of self-talk to internal thoughts when they occur or mouthing speech instead of vocalizing it may also reduce self-talking.

People may find their self-talk affects their mental health if they are negative and self-criticize when they talk to themselves.

In these situations, they should speak with a mental health professional to find ways to improve self-esteem and adjust self-talk to focus on being more positive and encouraging.

Schizophrenia

If a person self-talks as part of a hallucination, they should seek help from a healthcare professional. Self-talk and hallucinations may indicate a mental health condition, such as schizophrenia.

A person with schizophrenia may experience changes in their behavior and thoughts, such as hallucinations or delusions. Hallucinations cause a person to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel things that are not part of the world around them and are only present in their mind.

Hearing voices and responding to them is a common hallucination in schizophrenia. These voices and sensations seem real to the person experiencing them. Healthcare providers state that the brain reacts to these voices in the same way as if they were engaging in a conversation with a real person.

People with schizophrenia may also withdraw from the world, losing interest in everyday interactions with friends and family and finding it hard to express emotions.

For most people, talking to yourself is a normal behavior that is not a symptom of a mental health condition.

Self-talk may have some benefits, especially in improving performance in visual search tasks. It can also aid understanding in longer tasks requiring following instructions.

Self-talk is not a harmful act to engage with, and parents or caregivers with children who often talk to themselves should not be worried.

It is natural for a person to have an internal monologue while engaging with tasks and processing thoughts and emotions. They may choose to verbalize this inner monologue, which is common.

Why it's okay to talk to yourself and how this habit can make you more effective

Everyone does it: they do an internal monologue. It is part of the constant stream of consciousness that cannot be absent when we are awake. How to learn to talk to yourself correctly, our friends from the Reminder project tell.

“Okay, romantic moment, tell her something. Tell me how you crushed a pony. No, she likes ponies, I guess... Ask how long ago she had tests. What the hell is in my head? Lord, what a huge leg she has, tell her about it. No, don't talk, shut up! So, the pause dragged on, we must at least say something. Approximately such internal monologues were scrolled in the head by the protagonist of "Clinic", one of the most believable medical series.

Like him, many talk to themselves or hear an inner voice—when they are alone in a car, when they get bored in line, when they try to sleep, and so on. I sometimes talk to myself out loud - most often these are sarcastic comments if I did something ridiculous, or voicing what I should do, for example: "Now I'll do the dishes, and then I have to get dressed and go to the store." Sometimes all this makes you wonder: is it okay to talk to yourself if we invented speech to communicate with others?

It's embarrassing for many to admit it, but talking to yourself is completely normal and very common, says psychotherapist Laura Dabney. This is not something you “need to grow out of” and certainly not a sign of psychological problems. Moreover, psychiatrists call internal (or voiced) monologues a healthy practice. Firstly, they can be a way to get rid of negative emotions, such as fear, nervousness, anger or guilt. And secondly, they help organize thoughts, plan actions and consolidate memory.

The “inner voice” has been studied since the beginning of psychology. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky made the observation that young children begin to talk to themselves at the same time that they learn to talk to others, and first they do it out loud and then to themselves. Such behavior - an internal monologue that sometimes breaks into speech - we retain for life.

Over the past few decades, we have learned that when talking to yourself, a person makes the smallest movements with the muscles of the larynx, and Broca's center is activated in the brain - the area responsible for the motor organization of speech. If the work of Broca's center is disturbed, the ability to conduct an internal monologue is also violated. That is, the same tools in the brain are used for internal conversation and articulated speech.

Another confirmation of this is the operation of the efferent copy mechanism. This is a signal that helps the body to distinguish the processes that we cause ourselves from external stimuli. A prime example is tickling: if we try to tickle ourselves, the brain “predicts” that the touch is due to our own movements, and the tickling sensation is extinguished.

The same signal operates when we talk to ourselves. Experiments have shown that the brain "mutes" the effect of other external sounds when we speak aloud.

Another interesting experiment found that the inner voice seems to help us to cope better with everyday tasks. Animals performing tasks to correlate two stimuli (the so-called matching tasks - tasks when the subject is shown an object and then asked to choose the same one from those in front of it) activate different parts of the brain depending on whether the stimulus was visual or auditory . We, humans, “turn on” several areas of the brain, regardless of the stimulus perception system.

But if a person is asked to mumble some meaningless word under his breath, for example, "blah blah blah" - and therefore deprive him of the opportunity to use his inner voice - he will behave (in a sense) as animal. That is, when performing tasks with visual or auditory stimuli, zones in his brain are activated that are responsible for either vision or hearing.

Interestingly, speaking thoughts out loud may have a different effect than speaking them silently. In one small experiment, psychologists at Bangor University in the UK asked one group of volunteers to read instructions for a task to themselves while another group read aloud. Those who read the instructions aloud performed better than the participants who sat in silence.

This is why it is not surprising that many people use self-talk to get things done. For example, this is what athletes do (very often tennis players), who, at critical moments, cheer themselves up with motivating (“Come on, you can!”) Or instructing phrases.

Unfortunately, although the inner voice can help us control our behavior and improve our results, it can be a problem. For example, it can interfere with sleep just when it is needed. And self-digging, rumination (constant scrolling in the head of the same thought) and negative words about oneself are associated with the development of depression. In addition, people suffering from depression cannot stop the flow of thoughts in their head, even when they need to focus on something else.

It turns out that, on the one hand, we need conversations with ourselves, and on the other hand, the ability to use them to our advantage is important here, that is, to get rid of useless thoughts and include those related to current tasks. It takes time to learn how to do this, but the goal is quite achievable. Here are some tips that psychologists give. More precisely, not even advice, but ideas that should be remembered.

Talking to yourself is normal. The internal monologue is part of a constant stream of consciousness that cannot be absent when we are awake. According to some estimates, the speed of internal speech is up to 4000 words per minute, 10 times faster than oral speech. If a person really has serious psychological disorders, for example, schizophrenia, he can also talk to himself, but there is a difference: he is talking with voices that he perceives as outsiders, while in a normal internal monologue we know for sure that the author is this is us.
Negative self-talk is also normal, but up to certain limits. Usually psychologists call to get rid of negativity in conversations with oneself, to eradicate thoughts like “I can’t do it”, “I don’t deserve this”, and so on. But some experts point out that in principle there is nothing wrong with thoughts with a negative coloring, because evolution taught us to do so. “Two-thirds of our daily thoughts are negative,” says Sherry Benton, a former professor emeritus at the University of Florida. “They warn us of danger, help us analyze past actions, and help us understand who we are. All this gave us a chance to survive when we were hunters and gatherers. If 1/3 of the internal dialogue can be called positive and self-affirming, then you are doing a great job.
However, an excessive amount of self-criticism and reproaches in the internal monologue is an alarming sign. The internal narrative is connected with emotions, and if it is gloomy, it can lead to anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.
The internal monologue will be useful if it is neutral. If he relies on facts, if mistakes are perceived not as a disaster, but as something that can be avoided next time, if the feeling of guilt for small misconduct passes relatively quickly. This is not the same as positive thinking. It is better to replace negative phrases in a conversation with yourself not with positive statements, but with neutral and “applied” ones. For example, pronouncing immediate plans or instructions on how best to do this or that job.
Self-talk should not be avoided; on the contrary, it can be made into a good habit. They can become a kind of mindfulness technique if you chat with yourself after a stressful event or on the eve of an important day.

In summary: if you learn to talk to yourself correctly, this process does not distract you from business, but, on the contrary, stimulates cognitive activity and efficiency in general. The one who mumbles something under his breath is not necessarily a mad scientist: he may be a genius, using all resources to optimize the functioning of the brain.

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Why does a person talk to himself out loud - the norm or deviation | Lifestyle

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Why does a person sometimes talk to himself out loud? The opinion of psychologists on this matter is quite unambiguous, many people talk to themselves from time to time, however, not everyone focuses on this. Surely you have noticed more than once that someone purrs a song or a rhyme under his breath. This is not exactly a conversation out loud, but also from that series. In some cases, a person is not aware of this and is caught by the sound of his own voice. Let's listen to the opinion of psychologists, is it normal to talk to yourself out loud, and also in what situations can this be considered the norm? Why do people talk to themselves About 70% of their time, a person talks to himself, and this is considered normal. This is how most adults act, and there is even a special term for this - "egocentric speech". Most often, this is an internal dialogue that we have with ourselves. We ask ourselves, we answer ourselves, and we do not pay much attention to it. It is a completely different matter when a person begins to speak out loud, and voices his thoughts or actions. Why a person talks to himself, the reasons for this phenomenon can be very diverse.

With a heavy load and intense mental activity, a person can sometimes pronounce his actions so as not to make a mistake. The brain is so arranged that when we hear a speech, we can imagine it visually. When visualizing (and voicing), errors become visible, and they can be identified and corrected in time. When constructing sentences, the logical chain becomes slimmer, and the problem is solved faster and more correctly. Thus, voicing your actions is a way to make a decision. Extraneous thoughts cease to interfere, and the brain focuses on what is expressed in voice. An excess of emotions sometimes overwhelms and overwhelms. In order not to explode, these feelings can result in angry tirades directed nowhere. They are simply voiced, and this emotional discharge helps not to accumulate negativity in oneself, thereby saving one from nervous overstrain. Sometimes this is a way to get away from the conflict, but for internal calm, you can continue the argument, and "defeat" the opponent, even if he does not hear it. This is a little trick, but if it saves you from conflict and a major quarrel, then why not? Most people have a need for communication. Once in isolation, a person has no one to contact with, but it is necessary to hear at least someone's voice. He begins to play theater, and in this case, he can talk with inanimate objects, and be responsible for them. This also fits into the norm, if a person realizes that this is just a game. You can talk to your reflection in the mirror, with a TV, with a coffee maker or a closet, but it is important to realize that this is just a conversation with yourself. A person talking to himself out loud is a possible diagnosis. There are certain types of mental disorders in which a person talks to himself aloud with you. Psychiatrists make a diagnosis only after examination, in combination with other accompanying symptoms. After all, it is important to find out why a person talks to himself, and in what cases is this considered a deviation?

When a person simply speaks out his problem in order to voice it, he does not wait for advice, but he himself is looking for a solution. With deviations, the patient "sees" the interlocutor, and for him this is not a monologue, but a dialogue. In his head there is an interlocutor invisible to other people with whom he talks, sometimes argues or even swears. Schizophrenia or a split personality have similar symptoms, and only a specialist can distinguish between these two different disorders. Self-diagnosis is unacceptable, in both cases, if the conversations and monologues of a loved one cause anxiety, it is not worth delaying a visit to a psychologist. Talking to yourself can be a symptom of the following diseases: psychosis; bipolar disorder; split personality; alcoholic delirium; obsessive-compulsive disorder; hallucinations of various etiologies. There are many other mental illnesses in which a person begins to speak out loud, without interlocutors. In most of these cases, the conversations are caused by delusions, visual or auditory hallucinations. Without treatment, mental disorders progress, and it is important not to start the disease. In cases where an elderly person talks out loud to himself, special attention should be paid to the nature of these conversations. Older people often lose hearing, and auditory hallucinations can occur against this background. It seems to them that someone is talking to them and they just answer. And if you add poor eyesight to this, then an elderly person may well mistake a chair for a neighbor who came to chat. As a rule, after some time they realize their mistake, which is why they are embarrassed and upset. If this is just a coherent conversation, and not nonsense, you should not worry. Since cerebral circulation in older people often does not work in the best way, the part of the brain responsible for memory and concentration suffers. In order not to forget something important or even your daily activities, an elderly person needs to say these actions out loud.

Talking to yourself aloud is not considered a pathology and the opinion of psychologists in this regard is unanimous. Stress, depression, lack of sleep and general overwork can exacerbate many mental disorders. Self-talk is not an aberration, but it can be an important signal not to be ignored. If conversations were not inherent before, but suddenly appeared, then the issue must be resolved, if possible without delay. How to stop talking to yourself out loud. Many children talk to themselves, and for them it's a game. These games should not be interrupted, because children tend to live in a fairy-tale world up to a certain point. This period ends, as a rule, in the very first school years, and conversations with oneself stop. You need to worry only if the child insistently claims that he has an interlocutor. A fictitious friend who exists only in the imagination of a child is not a good signal. The child is lonely and has no one else to talk to, except for a fictional character, and he believes in his reality.

Students during the session are often at the limit of their abilities, and at moments of the highest tension, they may even start talking. Of course, this is not good, but it is temporary stress that is difficult to avoid. While studying, young people still do not know how to properly allocate their time, and this results in overwork, both physical and mental. As a rule, the disorder passes, but with too frequent stress, the habit of talking to yourself out loud can take hold.

In the beginning, a person is not aware that he is speaking aloud, and people around him more often pay attention to it. Only by catching a frightened or bewildered look on himself does a person begin to realize that he is voicing his thoughts out loud. helps to focus on the problem, you can try to start a diary. After all, the presentation of thoughts on paper is the same visualization. Especially this method helps creative people who are looking for non-standard solutions. Writing out words in beautiful handwriting, decorating letters with curlicues helps to concentrate and grab the right solution by the tail. The same method is also good for dealing with loneliness when there is not much to talk to. With a diary, you can share your worries, dreams, complain about life, and speak out. However, you need to understand that the problem is still in the lack of communication, and not in talking out loud, and the diary is a temporary measure until this communication is established. Live contact with people is the best medicine. In some cases, when you are not sure that you can keep your mouth shut, regular chewing gum will help. It is very difficult to chew and talk at the same time, and chewing gum will certainly remind you of this. If you notice that you are starting to speak involuntarily - toffee is a good solution.

Is it always worth getting rid of the habit of talking to yourself? After all, as a rule, it stimulates the brain, increases mindfulness and concentration. If a person's work is associated with the performance of complex tasks, you should not fight this habit. Unless, you cannot control this process, scare others or are afraid to spill confidential information. Any person is a harmonious person or strives to become one. After all, everyone has their own ideal of perfection, and we all strive for it. When harmony is lost, the brain begins to look for a solution how to fix it. Most often, either bored lazy people or focused workaholics talk to themselves.

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