Dear Stoics,

Picture yourself walking out of a meeting and saying under your breath: It went fine, it went fine, or catching yourself rehearsing a conversation out loud that may never actually happen. Then you glance around to check whether anyone heard. If any of this sounds familiar, you are in good company, as nearly all of us talk to ourselves, yet so many of us have been taught to feel silly about it.

What is worth remembering is that the embarrassment is learned. Small children narrate everything they do, out loud and without a trace of shame. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Lev Vygotsky noticed this running commentary and argued that it is how children learn to steer themselves. As we grow up, the commentary moves inside our heads, where it becomes the inner voice many of us hear all day long.

It turns out that letting that inner voice out can be quite useful. In one well-known experiment, people searching for an object among many others found it faster when they said its name out loud as they looked. Muttering keys, keys, where are my keys? keeps the thing you are looking for vivid in your mind, so your eyes have something sharper to match against. Researchers at Bangor University found that people who read task instructions aloud concentrated better and performed better than those who read them silently. Seems like hearing your own instruction is a better guide than only seeing it. And memory researchers have shown for years that saying something aloud helps you remember it noticeably better than repeating it in your head. They call it the production effect, and it is one of the simplest study tricks there is.

For us, the most interesting part is what talking out loud does for our feelings. Ethan Kross and his colleagues at the University of Michigan asked people to prepare for a stressful task, such as a short speech, while talking to themselves in two different ways. Those who used “I” felt the full weight of the nerves. Those who used their own name, or “you”, felt calmer, saw the task as a challenge rather than a threat, and were rated as performing better. What explains it? We tend to speak to a friend with more patience than we speak to ourselves, and saying Come on, Mary, you have done this before carries a friendlier tone. That really is enough to change the tone of the whole conversation. Which brings us to one caveat: not every tone helps. Running a harsh commentary on yourself is no better out loud than it is in silence. So, if you are going to narrate your day, do it the way you would for someone you like.

Since talking to yourself turns out to be one of the ways we steady ourselves, here are two small ways to use it the next time you feel nervous or overwhelmed: use your name while you talk (You can handle this, Joe is good enough), and narrate your next steps (First, take five deep breaths…). And remember: the next time you catch yourself mid-sentence in an empty room, do not trail off. Finish the thought, because you were saying something worth hearing.

Yours truly,
The Stoic App Team

P.S. If your inner voice ever feels like it belongs to someone else, or talking to yourself gets out of your control, that experience is worth sharing with a doctor or a therapist. Don’t be afraid that a professional will judge you; they have already heard it all!

Hardly anything in our lives is entirely our own. A kindness we received years ago shows up in how we treat a stranger today; a habit of help we picked up from one friend ends up in the hands of another.

This week’s theme, On Vice Versa, is a look at what travels between us and other people: what we give, what we get back, and the surprising routes it takes. Each day, we will trace one of those routes, so open your journal and start with the last thing someone did for you that you’ve since done for someone else.