Why Do We Talk to Ourselves?

You are looking for your keys and you hear yourself say, out loud, “Okay, where did I put them?” Or you are about to take a penalty kick and you mutter “Eyes on the ball.” Or, more quietly, a voice in your head rehearses what you will say before you knock on a teacher’s door.

Talking to ourselves is so ordinary that we rarely notice it. Psychologists have studied it for decades, and the research suggests it is less a quirk than a tool the brain uses to steer itself.

Inner speech and self-talk

Researchers use two overlapping terms. Inner speech, also called covert speech or verbal thinking, is the silent, inner voice many people experience. Self-talk is generally used more broadly for things we say to ourselves, silently or aloud. In sport psychology it often means cue words or statements that people choose on purpose to guide what they do.

How often do we use inner speech? Estimates vary with the method. In one approach, people carry a beeper and describe exactly what was in their mind at random moments. Using that method, researchers found that inner speaking occurs in many, though certainly not all, moments, with large individual differences in how often people experience it. The researchers behind this method estimate that inner speech occurs in around 20%–25% of random samples, a figure much lower than other estimates. The authors of a major review point to their own research that questions this figure, so the true frequency is still debated. So not everyone has a constant inner narrator, and that seems to be normal.

It starts out loud

One influential theory, from the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, proposes that inner speech begins as social speech. Young children talk to themselves out loud while playing or solving problems, which researchers call private speech. In Vygotsky’s view, conversations with caregivers are transformed into an internalized “conversation” with the self. There is evidence for this sequence: private speech peaks around age 5 and then declines in parallel with a growth in inner speech.

As adults we may still slip back into speaking aloud. One model proposes that inner speech is usually condensed, more like thinking in shorthand, and becomes fuller and more speech-like under stress and cognitive challenge. That is a hypothesis, but it fits the everyday experience of muttering your way through a hard task.

What the brain is doing

Inner speech seems to use much of the same machinery as speaking out loud. Activity in Broca’s area, or left inferior frontal gyrus, has been observed during both overt and silent articulation of words, and inner speech also involves posterior temporal regions linked to hearing and understanding speech. In people with brain injuries, impaired performance on inner speech tasks correlated with lesions to the left inferior frontal gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus.

There is also evidence that inner speech helps with control. In experiments where people must repeat a meaningless word aloud, which blocks inner speech (a method called articulatory suppression), this consistently disrupted performance by increasing the “switch cost” when people had to alternate between different arithmetic rules. One interpretation is that we use inner speech to remind ourselves of the current rule, like a quiet set of instructions.

Does self-talk improve performance?

Sport psychology has tested deliberate self-talk most directly. A 2011 meta-analysis of 32 studies yielding 62 effect sizes found a positive moderate effect size (ES = .48). Self-talk helped more for tasks involving relatively fine, compared with relatively gross, motor demands, and for novel, compared with well-learned, tasks. Interventions including self-talk training were more effective than those without it.

A systematic review of 47 studies found beneficial effects of positive, instructional, and motivational self-talk, but also challenged two popular beliefs: negative self-talk did not impede performance, and evidence that instructional and motivational self-talk work differently depending on the task was inconsistent. The reviewers called for designs that can test how self-talk produces its effects.

Talking to yourself by name

A newer line of research asks whether the words you use matter. In a set of seven studies with 585 participants, people who reflected on themselves using their own name or “you” instead of “I” were rated by observers as performing better when making first impressions and giving a speech, displayed less distress, and appraised upcoming stressors in more challenging and less threatening terms. Brain recordings from the same research group found that third-person self-talk reduced a marker of emotional reactivity within the first second of viewing aversive images, without enhancing a marker of cognitive control, which the authors interpret as a relatively effortless form of self-control.

Not every test has worked. In a randomized study registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, with 292 participants, people held a hand in very cold water while using third-person or first-person self-talk. The authors concluded that third-person self-talk does not seem to have a meaningful effect on physiological and psychological pain variables, although a small effect could not be ruled out.

What is still uncertain

Inner speech is hard to study because it is private. Researchers must rely on people’s reports or on indirect methods, and different methods give very different estimates of how common it is. Many self-talk studies involve short lab or sport tasks, and an overall effect size does not tell us how much any one person will benefit. Several of the distanced self-talk studies described here come from one research group, and results so far seem to depend on what is being measured: stress and emotion in some studies, but not pain tolerance in the cold-water study.

The takeaway

Talking to yourself is normal, and it appears to grow out of the way children learn from conversations with others. Inner speech uses brain systems shared with ordinary speech and seems to help us hold rules in mind and switch between tasks. Deliberate self-talk has a moderate average benefit in sport, especially for precise or newly learned skills, and some evidence suggests that addressing yourself by name can make stressful situations feel more manageable, though not every study agrees. The next time you hear yourself muttering instructions, one interpretation is that your brain is simply doing what it learned to do in childhood: guiding itself with words.