The Surprising Benefits of Talking Out Loud to Yourself

W hen Ellie Shoja goes for a walk, she slips on her headphones and starts talking—but there’s no other voice ricocheting through the speakers. It’s merely a convenient way to disguise the fact that she’s engrossed in a conversation with herself.

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve talked to myself,” says Shoja, 43, who lives in Los Angeles. “If I’m processing something, I’m 100% talking it out with myself. When I put my earbuds in on my walk, that allows me to gesture and be able to talk a little more loudly, instead of whispering.”

When Shoja wakes up in the morning or hits the gym, that dialogue turns motivational: “You got this. You can do it.” Throughout the day, she talks out ideas for the writing group she runs, as though she were in conversation with another person; when she makes dinner, she chatters away whether someone else is in the kitchen or not. She credits the habit with helping her achieve a state of calmness and confidence. “It slows down your thinking just by the nature of verbalizing something,” she says. “You have language that limits the amount of chaos, because you have to express it. You become more focused, and your anxiety levels and stress actually lower significantly.”

Shoja is far from alone: Many people talk out loud to themselves—which is commonly called external self-talk or private speech, as opposed to inner speech, which is the silent dialogue running through your mind. Yet as Shoja’s headphone strategy suggests, talking to an internal audience can be associated with a perception of, well, strangeness. We asked experts whether that’s warranted—and what they see as the upside of conversing with yourself.

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