Talking out loud to oneself isn’t, generally speaking, a socially acceptable way of processing thoughts. But unless you’re viciously berating yourself, “self-talk,” as researchers call it, actually has a whole host of benefits. Whether you’re talking through a demanding task like running a marathon, or calming yourself down in an anxiety-inducing situation, self-talk might be the best unrecognized tool in your mental toolbox to amp you up, chill you out, or simply fill the time.
Internal versus external self-talk
While solitary, audible conversations may be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of self-talk, a majority of the self-talking we do is in our heads. Most researchers agree that self-talk is made up of complete — rather than fractured or half-formed — thoughts that either pass silently through our minds or which we then speak out loud to ourselves.
As it’s defined, self-talk would be the conversation I have with myself about what I should eat for lunch: “Looks like we have this tuna salad, and it’s really delicious, but I could really use the fiber of an actual salad. Ugh, but I don’t want a leafy green salad! Whatever, maybe I’ll just make myself a slice of toast instead.” Other fragmented thoughts that pass through my mind, such as passively noting that we have farmer’s market pickles in the back of the fridge, would not typically qualify as self-talk.
While most of our self-talk, by volume, occurs in our own heads, talking to yourself out loud is pretty common, too. Judy Van Raalte, a professor of psychology at Springfield College whose research focuses on self-talk in sports, says that we don’t know exactly how often people talk to themselves internally and externally, but she did a study recently that gave her a good preliminary idea for what’s going on in people’s heads — or at least in the heads of golfers.
Van Raalte’s researchers provided the golfers with beepers that went off at random intervals between 25 and 50 minutes long, both while the golfers were competing at tournaments as well as when they went about their daily lives. When the beepers went off, the golfers recorded in a small notebook what they were doing internally, such as coaching themselves on game strategy or worrying about an opponent’s skills. The study found that internal self-talk was six times as common as verbal self-talk.
“Some people talk to themselves much more than others. And there wasn’t consistency across environments,” says Van Raalte. “So some people talk to themselves when they’re playing golf, but not really that much in their everyday life, and some vice versa.” All of which is to say that however much you talk to yourself, whether out loud or internally, is probably normal and nothing to worry about.
Different modes of self-talk
Much of the research on self-talk has been done on athletes, for whom it’s particularly important to distinguish between motivational self-talk (“Come on, you can do it! Just one more mile!”) and instructional self-talk (“Don’t forget to breathe. Lengthen your pace a little bit, there you go.”) since the type of self-talk they use in training or competitive circumstances could impact their performance. “When motor athletic skills require precision and technique, then instructional self-talk is said to be more effective than motivational self-talk,” says James Hardy, a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at Bangor University in Wales. “When skills are more endurance-based, it’s the other way around.”
And then there’s positive and negative self-talk, which are pretty clear in their definitions: “Hell yeah, I am absolutely kicking ass today!” versus “I’m such a loser, I can’t even run a few miles before getting out of breath.”
Each of these forms of self-talk has its own benefits or, in some cases, drawbacks. A 2011 meta-review of how self-talk affects performance in sports found that motivational, instructional, and positive self-talk all benefited performance.
Instructional and motivational self-talk were found to be particularly good for “precision-based tasks,” that is, focusing on specific movements required for the activity. For example, if I’m at the rock-climbing gym, I might instruct myself to “reach for that horseshoe-shaped foothold to your left — but don’t pull yourself up! Lift from your legs. You got it! Yes!” This mix of instructional and motivational self-talk will likely better my performance climbing the wall.
The review suggested that while motivational self-talk improved confidence in participants, positive self-talk didn’t. This makes sense to me: If I’m struggling during a yoga class, insisting to myself that I’m incredible at yoga doesn’t often get me anywhere. But if I tell myself that if I lower my shoulders a fraction and remember to inhale, then I’m a lot more likely to nail the next position.
The review also found that in 40% of the studies included, negative self-talk didn’t have much of an effect at all on performance. The researchers hypothesize that in sports or activity situations, players might interpret this negative self-talk as motivational, thus moderating its potentially discouraging effects.
“Even negative self-talk can on occasion be ‘healthy’ or motivational; imagine giving yourself a telling off after you’ve made a stupid mistake,” says Hardy, who participated in the review. “However, generally negative self-talk should be discouraged as it can undermine one’s confidence and esteem.”
Those with anxiety and depression may be particularly prone to the harmful effects of negative self-talk. “Negative self-talk is quite automatic in stressful situations and can then become chronic over time,” says Jason Moser, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University whose research has focused on self-talk.
‘Angela is nervous about her deadline… ’
While almost everyone experiences some negative self-talk, for some people, it can turn into rumination, in which these self-talk thoughts become repetitive and obsessive. But there’s a way to break through that pattern: self-talk in the third-person. According to Moser and his colleague Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, this unconventional method could help to more easily evaluate and neutralize negative self-talk.
The two researchers discovered that people who were instructed to self-talk in the third-person (“Angela is nervous about her deadline for this article”) were better able to control their emotions than those instructed to self-talk in the first-person (“I am nervous about the deadline for my article”). Because you often have better clarity, objectivity, and empathy when it comes to other people’s experiences than with your own, third-person self talk enables you to evaluate you thoughts as if they were another person’s.
Moser does this when he flies: “I’m saying, ‘Jason really doesn’t like turbulence. Jason thinks the plane’s gonna crack in half, Jason thinks we’re going to nosedive into the ground and explode and die.’ And just by doing that, I then start just naturally saying, ‘Well, you know what, Jason goes on a lot of flights. And Jason knows that air travel is even safer than car travel.’”
Moser ends up talking to himself as if he were a friend. While the conversation is not explicitly about encouraging himself to get over it and calm down, by getting perspective on his anxieties, he’s able to control that repetitive negative thinking spiral.
Though it can be an effective way to level out anxiety and stop intrusive, repetitive self-talk, Moser notes that it might not work for everyone. He says that Kross and his team at the University of Michigan are currently looking into using the second-person — that is, “you” — in self-talk to see how it compares to first-person and third-person versions. What they theorize so far is that, while the third-person helps people get a friend-like perspective on their thoughts, the second-person might allow them to view their thoughts from a more general or universal angle. If you don’t feel like third-person self-talk is working for you, says Moser, try thinking to yourself in the second-person to see how it compares.
If you’re worried that your self-talk is overwhelmingly negative or repetitive, such as not being able to look at yourself in the mirror without telling yourself (either in your head or aloud) how fat you are, it might be a good idea to talk to a therapist or psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder.
But go ahead and talk to yourself as you cook dinner or assemble your kid’s new dollhouse. It’s funny, sure, but it also works.
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