Self-Talk
Daily Meditation #165–8/6/2022
This will come across, initially, as absurd or humorous, but I talk to myself probably over an hour each day.
My stereo went in my car nearly two years ago and I’ve never felt like repairing it, so instead, I’ve begun talking to myself.
This is the manner through which I formulate my thoughts and ideas — verbally.
Even as a child, I was always talking to myself. Having no siblings meant in most cases I was reading, playing with LEGO, drawing or — you guessed it — talking to myself.
I fell out of the habit as I progressed into school and through early adulthood, but over the last few years have really begun to get back into it.
Here’s why:
The mind is a wonderful gift.
Consciousness is as equal a blessing, in my estimation.
But — as with many things — it is a double-edge bastard sword.
Razor sharp, heavy, unwieldy.
It is a burdensome tool and weapon. While it can be used artfully by the skilled, it can cut its wielder to the bone, as well.
For many of us, we are full of great ideas, concepts, desires, and motivations.
But, these ideas are prone to drifting too freely when we only think about them.
How many of us can say we’ve had an anxiety — our finances, for example — and we sit, thinking and perseverating on them each day?
We go to work with the simmering pot of this anxiety in our mind.
We come home with it.
We cook and eat supper with it.
We go to sleep (or try to) with it.
Thought is heavy and burdensome. It is also all too erratic.
The anxiety about the finances ricochets wildly about your mind, triggering an anxiety about something else, tangential — your health, your children’s grades, or if your spouse is seeing someone else.
This is where talking to oneself comes in.
You can sit in a chair, pace your home, or do it while driving (my favorite), but just start. Pretend you are talking to your spouse or best friend, and just talk.
You’ll find it awkward, initially, but when you get into it, that fades and you will quickly notice that speaking out loud is far more useful, organizationally, to thinking that pure “in-the-head” thinking.
This is because speech must operate in a linear fashion.
The mind is too free to go off in every direction.
Now, speech can go off on tangents (much like I am prone to), but it has an ability to come back to the original lane of thought.
It’s not much unlike a freeway. Our anxiety over finances are the “fast lane” far to the left. We can easily move into the other, slower lanes and weave around the other thoughts and ideas, but we are still loosely moving in the same direction.
As you move along the anxiety, you’ll likely root out the primary issues and benefits of your current mode (in this case finances). You may also feel compelled to grab paper to take notes or bullet things out. Each bullet can be a further point you can dig into for self discussion.
However, even if you right that moment don’t “solve” whatever the problem may be, talking to yourself, out loud, about it will leave you feeling much more relieved.
This is because you’ve made it “real.” Or at least more real than when it was just a simmering anxiety in your mind.
Finally, the other benefit of it is that it improves your general competence in how you speak.
You become better able to choose the right words. Picking words with precision is like operating with a scalpel instead of a kitchen knife.
You become more fluid.
You become more able to specify and articulate your exact thoughts precisely.
So, talk to yourself!
Much like a beginner of any craft — painting or fencing or lifting weights — feels foolish initially, so too will you with this…
…But, much like a master of these crafts, they transcend that being the fool to eventually achieve a level of mastery.
So, go out and master the ability to better organize your thoughts by verbalizing them.
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
