Talking to oneself, a sign of good psychological health

Talking alone is something that we have mistakenly associated with madness and abnormality. We have the idea that language is used to communicate with others, and that when speech is not directed at anyone it is a sign of suffering from a mental disorder.

However, almost all of us do it, at least when we are alone and no other people are around to hear us.

Talking alone is normal

In psychology, speaking alone is called self-directed speech.private speech, or egocentric speech in children.

According to Lev Vygotsky (1962), a specialist in developmental psychology, this type of speech is part of a natural process. One of the aspects that perhaps distinguishes children and adults is not the presence or absence of this type of speech, but that with the passage of time, private speech normally decreases and becomes internalized to constitute internal speech or verbal thought, which tends to include more whispering and muttered speech, rather than aloud.

Private speech improves our understanding

One of the positive effects of talking alone is that the action of speaking requires transforming the information and organizing it into a monologue or dialogue form.and therefore the inner language is an instrument that allows us to process information in a way that makes it more tangible and manageable for ourselves.

By placing the information of our context and our thoughts at an approachable level to our possibilities, it allows us a greater understanding and a better control and performance in our actions.

Helps us organize our thinking

Alexander Luria (1980), an influential physician and neuropsychologist, supported the important role of language beyond its social function. According to him, it also fulfills the function of directing our cognitive processingthat is, to control and monitor our thoughts, and to guide our behavior.

Vygotsky pointed out that in the youngest children it occurs accompanying the actions that are being carried out, so it has a rather descriptive role. But over the years, language anticipates action, saying what is going to be done before doing it, and it also acquires the ability to plan.

Increase our awareness

This process of directive speech begins when we are approximately two years old, but then we are only capable of responding to the language of others, who are the ones who direct our actions. Little by little it continues to develop until when we are five years old we are also capable of responding to our own verbalizations, being able to begin to self-regulate ourselves.

Because of the role it plays in our ability to self-regulate, it has an impact on another level: that of consciousness.. By better understanding the information we mentally process and having greater control over how we plan our behavior, we become more aware of what our thoughts are. In fact, a technique in therapy is the use of self-instructions, which consists of repeating different messages to ourselves internally in order to self-regulate our behavior, reducing our anxiety or motivating ourselves.

Improve our attention

These verbalizations that we make to ourselves, therefore, help us to consciously direct our behavior, and improve our attention and working memory performance. This type of memory is short-term and is the one that helps us perform tasks and retain the necessary information during that process.

This is based on the directive role of language on cognition and behavior, and its function as an external reinforcement that helps us maintain inhibitory control, that is, managing distractions and irrelevant stimuli, and therefore helping us to maintain our attention. That’s why, when we have to remember a phone number, we tend to repeat it out loud several timesso we keep our attention on what we are trying to learn.

Facilitates learning

In addition, the fact of verbalizing what we want to learn makes it easier to remember, by providing our brain with a new sensory pathway that adds to the memory. For example, if we read a sentence and say it out loud, we are more likely to remember it.

In fact, it is said that there is no better way to learn something than trying to explain it to someone else, and in this case it is by explaining it to ourselves. This is because it favors comprehension and memory, and also allows us to detect which strategies we carry out successfully and what difficulties we encounter in solving certain problems.

Help in solving problems

Sometimes we find ourselves speaking out loud when we are performing a complex task or when we encounter difficulties in what we are doing. In fact, several studies have shown that the more difficulties we find in what we have to solve, the more we resort to the use of language as a strategy to facilitate its resolution.

This is because spoken discourse is a tool for planning, guiding, and directing activity in problem solving, and has the ability to organize, execute, and evaluate our behavior and cognitive functioning.

When the problems we face are personalwe can make use of self-directed speech, particularly in these cases it can help us to speak to ourselves in the third person to adopt another perspective and reduce the feeling of being blocked.

So when is it bad to talk to yourself?

When what you verbalize is not serving you as a resource to improve your day-to-day tasks, when you continuously transmit negative messages to yourself, when your internal speech interferes with social speech in communication with others and this isolates you, or when you are unable to control it whether in the presence of others or not.

It is possible that in certain cases, you consider that speaking is having more of a negative impact on your life instead of the positive effects mentioned above., and that this may be associated with other types of problems. In that case, it would be necessary to explore with a professional what it is due to. But in general, talking to yourself is totally normal and even healthy.

Bibliographic references:

Frauenglass, MH and Diaz, RM (1987). The self-regulatory function of infant private speech: A critical analysis of recent discussions of Vygotsky’s theory. Childhood and Learning, 37, 103-114. Ramos, C., Pérez, C. and Lepe, N. (2016). Inhibitory control, monitoring and self-directed speech in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Wimblu, 11 (1), 73-97. San Martin, C. and Torres, E. (2004). Study of the emergence of private speech in a children’s communicative game situation and its relationship with the communicative conflict. Yearbook of Psychology, 35 (1), 71-85.