Why You Should Talk to Yourself Every Day

You are an amazing miracle of physics. Digesting food, walking around, and taking in sights and sounds through your eyes and ears are all deeply fascinating and intricate processes on the cellular level. As a neuropsychologist, I can tell you that there’s a lot to appreciate about what your brain and body are doing every moment of every day.

But here’s one weird quirk to this system of yours: most of your body has no idea what your conscious brain is thinking.

What I mean by this is that the conscious parts of your body only consist of a few areas. Areas that don't even include the entire brain, as it turns out.

Depending on what sort of scientist that you ask, only a select few regions of the brain contribute to your conscious thought processes. These areas include areas responsible for “executive functions.” These include your abilities to make plans, to make decisions, to initiate and stop tasks, to shift attention between things, and other functions along those lines.

But those executive functions only take up a portion of the front part of your brain, not even close to a third of your brain mass. The rest of the brain and body are just taken along for the ride with whatever the conscious part of your brain decides to do.

This is not an ideal system. The other parts of your brain and body are still capable of feeling stressed out. Depending on the body part, it may also be able to feel other things, such as pain (in the body), fear (in deep parts of the brain), and unease (visceral nerves in the body, such as those in your gut).

And because those parts don’t have access to all of the information that your conscious brain does, they often find themselves panicking in a way that is disruptive to your goals as a person. Even if conscious-brain-you understands the meaning and intent behind the pain, fear, anxiety, and unease, that doesn’t mean the entirety-of-you understands.

For example, if you are about to do some public speaking in front of a crowd, your gut may become extremely uneasy. It feels like you are in danger. The conscious part of your brain knows that there isn’t any real danger, but how can your brain tell that to your gut?

That’s my point: thinking isn’t enough. To calm down the parts of your brain and body that are less conscious than the other parts, you need to speak their language.

For the less-conscious parts of the brain, you can literally say the plan out loud in order to get your brain more organized and on the same page. Forming a plan and saying it out loud every time you need to feel more at ease will activate more regions of the brain, creating more unity in your brain’s mission and easing the fear or anxiety.

For the even less conscious parts of the body, you may need to get physical. Consider rubbing your own belly or other regions. The act of touching in this way is calming to your viscera, probably because on some level those nerves know that if they are being gently massaged, then they are in less danger than they presumed.

If you get in the habit of talking to yourself every day in order to get the myriad pieces of yourself working together on the same goal, then you’ll find that you and the rest of you make a pretty darn good team.