An old professor of mine once demonstrated to me that if I described a headache out loud—its color and shape, what substance it was made of, what it would say if it were a 6-year-old—it would often diminish in intensity, and sometimes evaporate altogether.
In other words, if I could concretize and get it outside of me by translating it into spoken words instead of silent suffering and formless feelings, it didn’t hurt as much. My professor told me that people who process their feelings verbally, rather than silently, experience shorter emotional episodes and faster recovery because the voice turns chaos into narrative, the narrative creates understanding, and understanding has a soothing effect.
Maybe this is partly what people are after who talk out loud to themselves.
As long as you don’t turn self-talk into a headache by judging it as weird or neurotic, thinking out loud is associated with enhanced cognitive functioning, problem-solving, memory, and even self-control. It isn’t a glitch; it’s an upgrade.
Neuroscience researcher Kyle Cox, for instance, has found that people who narrate tasks out loud complete them 25 percent faster and with fewer errors than silent workers, because doing so creates a feedback loop that catches mistakes and maintains focus.
In one study, basketball players performed faster and better when they talked through their moves out loud (and in a positive rather than negative tone of voice).
In a University of Wisconsin-Madison study, participants were asked to search for different objects, like a picture of a fork, among a set of random photographs. When they spoke the name of what they were looking for out loud—that is, when they kept its visual appearance active in their minds as they were searching—they did the task much faster than when they didn’t. This might translate handily to finding your car keys or your glasses.
Similarly, talking out loud helps strengthen memory, because memory tends to be better for spoken words than silent ones. When I need to remember a phone number or license plate, it helps to recite it aloud a few times.
Computer programmers are known to use “rubber duck debugging” to solve coding problems. They literally put a rubber duck (the bathroom variety) on their desk, and whenever they run into a thorny coding problem, they explain it to the duck, thus talking through the problem to help themselves solve it.
“Talking out loud to yourself summons up the image of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly,” says Nana Ariel at Tel Aviv University, “allowing you to question yourself more critically by adopting an external perspective on your ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in your arguments.”
Talking out loud to yourself, of course, both violates and challenges the assumption that talking is something you do only with other people, unless you’re a small child. (Even then, talking to yourself tends to diminish after age 6 or 7, when kids get into school, and it’s labeled as weird or disruptive.) But generally, there are no circumstances in which you can say, “I’m sorry, I can’t come right now, I’m busy talking to myself.”
On the other hand, I’ve discovered that one of the benedictions of living in this wired world is that I can now talk out loud to myself in public or in my car—which I’ve always done—and people just assume I’m on the phone, or using earbuds. It’s terrifically liberating.
The fact is, most people talk out loud to themselves from time to time. Usually, it’s just some random commentary on your surroundings (“Wow” or “Whoa”), or on the exasperations of daily life (insert profanity of choice), or the idiocies of fellow commuters (“Dude, pick a lane”). But in my own case—being a writer and teacher—thinking aloud is also a tool of the trade, and a good way to hear how my ideas are likely to sound to an “imagined listener,” as well as help me catch awkward phrasing, off-putting tones, and gaps in my logic.
This is the case whether I’m recording thoughts for a writing project, rehearsing material for a speaking gig, or preparing for a challenging conversation.
It’s also a way to lower my internal temperature. When I’m frustrated by something—say the politics of the day—I often stomp around the house making fiery declarations and stabbing the air with my fingers, which I find helps burn the emotion clean rather than allowing it to build up soot. There’s something very cathartic about hearing it out loud, if not loudly. Most of us have heard ourselves let out an expletive when we’ve dropped a plate on the kitchen floor or missed our exit on the freeway. It’s kind of a quick-release mechanism.
Also, because talking is slower than thinking, talking to myself slows me down, promoting mindfulness and self-awareness, helping me better understand my thoughts and feelings, unpack complexities, pop myself out of mental loops, and transform vague ideas and feelings into concrete statements that I can examine and cross-examine. And it’s simply easier to even know what I think when I can hear what I say.
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Besides, when you talk out loud to yourself, at least you know someone’s actually listening.