Internal dialogue or self-talk. Internal dialogue or self-talk
We will not reveal a big secret if we say that all people talk with their own selves. Usually this is a monologue that no one hears, sometimes men and women express their thoughts verbally without having a listener nearby. Paying attention to this feature, you should not panic and think about mental abnormalities. In most cases, according to competent scientists, talking with yourself is not considered a pathology. Rather, it is a natural way to protect yourself from loneliness and verbally throw out the accumulated emotions. However, there are situations when such communication becomes a clear signal of problems with the psyche. How to understand, if a person talks to himself out loud, is this a diagnosis or a norm of behavior?
Features of verbal communication
Many people come to the psychologist with a complaint: "I’m talking to myself!" They seek help from qualified professionals, considering such behavior a sign of serious nervous breakdown. To figure out why a person is talking to himself out loud or mentally, the doctor will conduct a large survey, trying to distinguish the norm from the deviation. Based on the results of the studies, appropriate measures will be taken.
Before drawing conclusions, it is necessary to determine what is called normal behavior, and in which cases we can talk about developing mental disorder.
Internal monologue
For closed introverts, talking to yourself is normal. People of this psychotype are reluctant to make contact with others, do not allow outsiders to penetrate their personal lives, they live in their own harmonious world. They often do not need an interlocutor, preferring to experience all situations mentally, discussing their causes and consequences in their heads.
Outgoing dialogues are also conducted by sociable individuals. A person speaks to himself from childhood, as soon as he has learned to understand the changes around him. Psychologists argue that such conversations contribute to the continuous development of personality, help to put in order thoughts and make the right decisions. During internal communication, the functioning of the brain improves, due to which the information received is quickly perceived and processed, observation and attentiveness increase several times. According to scientists, people who pronounce the problem to themselves are more successful in life than those who are not peculiar to such conversations.
Talking out loud
Talking with oneself is the first sign of loneliness. They replace real communication with a person, but the need for such conversations disappears when an interesting interlocutor appears. Is it normal to talk to yourself out loud?
Experts say that conducting such a monologue is useful - it helps stimulate brain activity, the processes of perception and assimilation of information are rapidly activated. Speaking any problem out loud, a person will quickly understand what actions to take to solve it.
Conversation with an imaginary interlocutor
Much more serious concerns are caused by the situation if a person talks to himself, imagining the interlocutor. He conducts a dialogue with an invisible surrounding opponent, answers questions or asks them independently. This strange behavior is a sign of psychological distress. In a state of psychosis, sick individuals can be a danger to themselves and loved ones, their actions cannot be predicted or controlled.
Auditory hallucinations - the main symptom of a mental disorder
Normally, if a man or a woman declares: "I speak to myself out loud, memorizing educational material, wanting to evaluate my actions or express doubts." This means that they want to fully absorb or understand the information by speaking it. Such behavior among specialists will not cause any complaints.
Another thing is when, not noticing anyone around, a person speaks up - the causes of this phenomenon may be in the incorrect functioning of the psyche. Auditory hallucinations are a false perception of reality, a reaction to an external stimulus, which in reality does not exist. A mentally unhealthy individual hears voices, answers them and conducts a conversation with an invisible interlocutor. These alarming symptoms confirm the need to show the individual a doctor who can make the correct diagnosis by analyzing the patient's complaints and general behavior.
A disease when a person is talking to himself can develop for the following reasons:
- prolonged depression;
- severe stress;
- violation of sleep and rest;
- constant mental stress;
- wrong lifestyle;
- high anxiety;
- lack of joyful events;
- pessimistic attitude.
Persistent auditory and visual hallucinations can be symptoms of serious mental illness - schizophrenia or a split personality. These are serious illnesses, as a result of which men and women lose touch with the real world. However, do not rush to independently diagnose the disease with yourself or your friends. Only a specialist in the field of psychiatry can talk with himself out loud with a disappointing diagnosis.
Differences of schizophrenia from a split personality
These two diseases have similar symptoms and cardinal differences. Schizophrenia is a brain dysfunction. This disease can be inherited or obtained due to the influence of a number of exogenous and endogenous factors. The first manifestations of mental disorder in the male are noticeable in adolescence and at the age of 25 years, in the female - from 20 to 30 years.
A split personality is not schizophrenia. This mental disorder is not congenital, but acquired due to certain negative events in life or injuries received in childhood. Additional personalities arise as a result of the individual’s desire to overcome the consequences of an emotional blow, in severe cases, one of them fully controls behavior, becoming dominant.
Both diseases are characterized by the same symptoms:
- i am talking to myself - an inadequate individual communicates with a fictitious interlocutor;
- manifest in adolescence;
- difficulties in learning and mastering any material;
- distance from reality.
Distinguish schizophrenia and split personality can only be a qualified doctor. Based on the diagnosis, adequate treatment will be prescribed.
How to stop talking to yourself? If your case fits the description of the norm, then you should not worry - the voiced thoughts will only help in solving life's difficulties. Medical assistance should be sought when an imaginary interlocutor “connects” to the dialogues, auditory hallucinations and inappropriate behavior appear.
It's no secret that many people have the habit of talking to themselves. Sometimes this happens in the form of an internal monologue, but there are cases when a person talks to himself out loud. Having noticed such inclinations, you should not be scared and suspect yourself of any mental deviations. Scientists who have devoted a great amount of time to studying this issue agreed that conversations with oneself in most cases are not a deviation from the norm and are in many ways even useful.
Positive sides
The undeniable benefit of such monologues is that they help a person to organize their thoughts, coordinate actions, and analyze the existing problem in detail. Of undoubted benefit, talking with oneself also brings the emotional state of a person. The ability to express aloud, even if alone with you, all the accumulated emotions, feelings, anxiety, anger and other negatives contribute to significant relief. In addition, having thrown out most of the negative during a monologue with himself, a person talking to other people can more deliberately and calmly discuss this problem.
During a conversation with oneself, the work of the human brain improves, since the perception and processing of information is accelerated, attention and observation are increased, as a result of which the person quickly and easily comes to the correct solutions to his tasks. Moreover, the effectiveness, speed and fruitfulness of his activities is several times higher than the results of those people who are not peculiar to talk with themselves. As can be seen from the results of research by scientists, most people who have conversations with themselves are absolutely normal and even more successful in solving some problems.
When to worry
However, in some cases, such conversations along with other symptoms can still serve as an indicator of mental abnormalities. Defining this is quite simple. Most of us, talking to ourselves, conduct a kind of monologue, pondering a serious issue, splashing out negative emotions, and searching for a solution to the problem. In the event of a deviation from the norm, a person does not just talk to himself, he seems to be talking to an invisible interlocutor, answering his questions, arguing, cursing. At the same time, active gestures and facial expressions are often present.
Such behavior can indicate the presence of serious diseases such as schizophrenia, split personality, and more. If, in addition to dialogues with an imaginary interlocutor, a person has hallucinations, inappropriate behavior, isolation, obsessions, emotional disorders, then a visit to the appropriate specialist should not be postponed.
He often went into himself and no one could understand what he was doing there.
Modern aphorism
Do you talk to yourself? Most likely no. Because you think that this is what people who finally “come off the coils” do — they grumble under their breath, arguing with themselves.
But in vain you think so, because talking with yourself is a mandatory practice of a self-actualizing person. It is one thing to “hear voices”, and another thing is to conduct an internal dialogue. I often engage in internal dialogue when I need to understand complex issues, often related to finding a way. Moreover, the path can be as abstract, what we call the “life path”, but also internal dialogue is very helpful in cases where you need to navigate in an unfamiliar area, in a dangerous or threatened situation.
For example, when you are alone lost in the mountains and begins to get dark. In order not to fall into a panic state and not break even bigger “firewood”, an internal dialogue is immediately activated. For example, it might look like this:
Something is syrupy for me, it starts to get dark, but I lost the path under the snow ...
Calm, everything is fine, let's not panic.
Damn, always like that! I see the approaching northern fur animal ...
How many times have you been in such situations? Well, how much?
Yes, many times, many! "A bad head does not give rest to your feet!"
Well, you see - and each time you got out, you weren’t from such an asshole as this one.
But here I am for the first time and it is not clear where, damn it, to go!
So stop it!
Calm down! Put your breath in order.
Good, breathing calmly.
You still have the strength.
It seems so.
Can you get those thickets on the slope?
You can spend the night there.
But the water will have to climb up to that creek under the rock.
Cool.
While light can be reached. But it is necessary to decide - what at first: to reach the thickets in the light, and then in the dark to get water or vice versa?
It’s safer, of course, to run away after the light for water, and before thickets you can stumble through the darkness without haste. I can easily set up a tent with a lantern and in the dark.
Well, OK. Then first for water.
You can, of course, laugh at such a "delusional conversation", but in reality, such a dialogue helps to calm down, outline a plan of salvation and simply survive. I went on solo hikes in the Caucasus and the Kola Peninsula - I know what I'm talking about.
But it is not necessary to fall into extreme environmental conditions or become a hostage to terrorists in order to be forced to calm oneself and lead an internal conversation. It is much more important to use this practice in everyday life - when you are looking for not your own way out of the natural maze, but your own life Path. That is, in order to understand where to move on through life, it is simply necessary to discuss possible options with oneself. For example, like this:
Well, what - it's time to decide: Klava or Zoya?
I do not want to be determined! What for?
You will not be enough for both at once.
Maybe enough for a while ...
Besides, if Zoya finds out about Klava!
Oh, damn it - yes!
Klava's backside or Zoe's chest? That's what!
Of course, Klava’s ass! What are you talking about !?
Well, if Claudia had Zoe’s chest!
Well, and how to choose here?
Maybe let's talk about spiritual qualities?
In the sense?
Well, who do you feel comfortable with?
With Zoe, definitely!
And with whom do you get high?
Of course, with Klava! She is so cool!
We must decide!
I can not and I do not want!
Must choose!
Maybe better for beer?
Decide first, and then beer! As a reward for a difficult choice.
Damn, maybe cast lots, eh?
Throw it, only then you’ll change your mind yourself, because I know you ...
Well, as you know, such a conversation can go on for a very long time. But this is precisely what determines what a person needs in his life. In real life, more often, of course, such things are discussed in conversation with friends (girlfriends). But not all issues can be discussed like that. Alone with yourself, you can talk frankly, in garlic, so to speak. By the way, if you have mastered the art of internal dialogue, then conversations with friends, and even more with therapists, will become much more productive if they (in psychotherapists) still have meaning :-)
So, let's look at a few issues regarding internal dialogue:
Who is talking to whom?
I have a point of view, but I do not agree with her
Modern aphorism
Who, inside us, is conducting these same conversations? After all, we are an integrated personality, possessing a name, identity, integral I, finally! This is probably only schizophrenics, people with a split personality can conduct such dialogues. So, yes not so. In fact, there are many different subpersonalities within us, so to speak, platforms for formulating opinions. Everyone knows such positions as Adult, Parent, Child, proposed by Eric Byrne. In reality, there are quite a lot of such platforms, and you and I don’t need to build a new personality theory to explain who is discussing what. The main thing is that all these positions are what we are. In different, so to speak, incarnations. If you really want to, then of course you can try to identify your different selves, try to describe their positioning. However, it is worth doing this only after you fully master the practice of conducting an internal dialogue. The main thing now is self-confidence. Anyone who has learned to trust himself, is confident in the self-sufficiency of his inner world - will not be lost.
We can also assume that in this way different hemispheres of our brain talk among themselves: the right one about what will happen (intuition knows everything), the left one about what needs to be done right now.
Why engage in this dialogue?
Such an internal dialogue is very therapeutic in itself and really helps to survive in the most extreme situations. In fact, this is a self-help method. But just like prayer, inner conversation works not only in especially dangerous cases. On the contrary, it is in a calm situation that it is more necessary and useful, because helps to choose the right, meaningful life path. Internal dialogue is a technique of awareness, comprehension, finding your own value guidelines. A conversation with oneself is the highest form of internalization of an external dialogue, a conversation with significant others. The presence of an internal dialogue shows that your personality has reached a stage of maturity when you yourself become a significant person in your life. Internal discourse is a tool for shaping one’s true identity, one’s authenticity.
How to use it?
Save yourself and thousands will be saved around you
St. Seraphim
A feature of the internal dialogue is that it does not require translation from a social language to a personal one. The internal dialogue immediately sounds in the format of thoughts and meanings, therefore it is understandable from the fly. Mastering this practice allows you to receive the following bonuses:
Find a way out of difficult and critical situations through control of emotions and a calm analysis of the situation;
Identify life priorities, resolving internal value conflicts and determining the levels of personal significance of certain phenomena;
Discover new meanings and build up old ones;
Reduce the level of aggressiveness and anger, developing your own inner culture;
To master the technique of mental preparation of difficult negotiations;
Effectively conduct public discussions, masterfully mastering the art of asking and answering difficult questions;
To help others control their emotions and find a way out of difficult situations, as Having mastered this practice, you can teach other people how to use it.
Why do people talk to themselves? To understand the reasons for this, you must first highlight how people say it:
- Silently conduct an internal dialogue with themselves.
- Talk to yourself out loud.
- They talk with a non-existent interlocutor from outside or inside themselves.
An internal silent dialogue with oneself.
This phenomenon is completely normal for any person, and especially for an introvert that is closed and silent in its psychotype. A self-enclosed introvert is reluctant to contact the outside world and does not allow anyone outside to interfere in their personal lives. Therefore, living in its own inner world, the introvert silently conducts dialogues with himself.
But internal dialogues do not. Conversation with oneself begins in childhood, when the child is already able to pay attention to his internal psychological processes, and continues until the end of his life. According to Z. Freud, internal speech is a conversation between the three components of the human psyche - the Ego (the conscious and conceptualized part), the Id (the forbidden and crowded out part of consciousness) and the Super-Ego (all manifestations of the Super-I). Therefore, the essence of the internal dialogue is the dialogue of our meaningful consciousness with its unconscious part, the censor of which is the Self. In the process of internal dialogue there is an agreement between these three structures of the psyche, contributing to the process of continuous development of the individual.
In difficult moments of life, an internal dialogue helps a person make the right decision to get out of this situation.
Talk to yourself out loud.
You can talk to yourself out loud. Sometimes people do this from a feeling of loneliness, longing and hopelessness. Talking out loud replaces a person real communication with people, so with the appearance of real interlocutors passes and the need to talk with yourself out loud.
As a result of numerous studies by psychologists, it turned out that in other situations, talking to yourself out loud is useful for improving brain activity. Speaking aloud a problem, a person stimulates the brain and more quickly copes with the task set before him. Scientists attribute this to the fact that speech can significantly enhance brain activity, improve the processes of perception and assimilation of information. This is especially true for such types of people as audio, perceiving the surrounding reality by ear.
Thus, talking with yourself in any form - silently or aloud, helps a lot in solving problems of various contents and complexity.
Talk out loud with an invisible interlocutor.
The appearance of such a conversation publicly, as with those around them, causes at least great surprise. It is strange to see a person talking enthusiastically with some invisible interlocutor. Moreover, the words of an imaginary interlocutor can come for him not only from the outside. Listening to an outside voice within himself, a person answers out loud ... listens - and answers again. How to explain such a strange behavior?
Hello dear blog readers! Imagine a simple life situation that is chronically repeated day after day, from month to month, from year to year. So...
Morning! A new day begins. The alarm rings. It's time to get up, but reluctant to get up, I still want to sleep. With difficulty, we ate by opening our eyes, we get out of bed and go to wash ourselves ... And then HE appears! Appears from nothing, no where, as if from a void. And HE will haunt us all day until the very moment of falling asleep.
It is an internal dialogue, a conversation with oneself, an uncontrolled run of thoughts that occurs exclusively in the head. Almost all thinking people have an internal dialogue. Whoever has it is bigger, stronger, more intense, and whoever has it is smaller, weaker. Lack of thoughts in the head is extremely rare. Dialogue can be about anything. The topics are quite diverse, it can be a continuation of yesterday’s scandal with a spouse, an internal dispute with a boss, discussion and commenting on news, and so on. A webinar or a radio can play in our heads, repeating the same verse from a forgotten song. In special cases, attempts are being made to solve a second-order differential equation.
Why is internal dialogue useful to us? For starters, this is a kind of mechanism for perceiving and analyzing the world around us, drawing up and discussing plans for further actions, accessing memory and storing information, and so on. Very useful thing.
On the other hand, internal dialogue can be a deterrent in making important decisions, a kind of thought-discusser at a time when you have to act very quickly. If it is necessary to focus on something important, the resulting dialogue distracts us from really important and necessary thoughts, making it difficult to focus on the main thing, creates a number of doubts. Imagine a housewife who spent the whole evening thinking about what to cook potatoes: - boiled or fried. As a result, the whole family remained hungry.
According to scientists, our brain consumes 80% of the energy available to the whole body. Most of this energy is spent on a useless mixer, taking away the body’s energy, causing a state of fatigue. In addition, the activation of the inner circle of thoughts before going to bed leads to insomnia. A person goes to bed, tries to sleep, and in his head begins a discussion of the past day, making plans for the next day, scenarios of a dispute with a spouse or boss and so on. There is no time for sleep. And this leads to chronic fatigue. At the highest stage of the riot of thoughts, a person begins to talk to himself, and this from the outside looks ugly. 
Doctor, in my head a little man swears all the time! - So it's easy to fix! $ 10,000 - no problem! “Doctor, do you know what the little man said now?”
When else does an uncontrolled run of thoughts interfere with us? Everyone probably heard about the Subconscious. You can read about it in article 99.
The subconscious is subpersonal, a kind of internal "being" that actively participates in our lives. His task is to help us live a successful, positive, joyful life, achieve our goals, spend less energy on worries and anxieties. In addition, the subconscious mind controls our intuition, tells us what to do in a given situation, how to make the right decision when we do not have the necessary information or knowledge. But we don’t hear him, we try to chat with him, wash away the hint with a stream of all kinds of random thoughts. The necessary thought appeared and dozens of discussing, criticizing, doubting thoughts rushed at it right away, like a flock of cats in a bowl of fish. All valuable thought “died” under the yoke of an uncontrolled word mixer. Those people who know how to listen to their subconscious, that is, to hear their intuition, are more successful and happier in life than those who think for a long time, comprehend, compare, doubt. If you want to become a favorite of Life, you must learn to listen to your subconscious.
I will give you an example. Suppose you are waiting for an important email. Very important letter! Much depends on him in your fate. If you don’t get it in time, then that's it: a complete scribe multiplied by an Achtung Kaput. You sit down at a computer, connect to the Internet, start an email program and wait. And suddenly you felt the urge to play a toy. And not in simple, but in fancy full-screen, with special effects and sound. You play, an hour, two, five ... And already at the third hour of the night you remember that a very important letter should come to you. But you still have not received it, the necessary, vital information has not reached you. EVERYTHING IS LOST! But looking at the mail program, it turns out that the rescue letter arrived, arrived on time, only you did not notice it. And they did not notice because they were engaged in other unnecessary pastime. As a result, they were late and lost! This is the case with intuition: there are valuable thoughts and tips, they appear on time, but we do not notice them and do not use them. Note: there are more losers than lucky ones.
Stop the internal dialogue.
Internal dialogue - one of the many processes taking place in our minds. The complete absence of the thought process is a sign of mental inferiority. Sometimes it is vital, but sometimes it only interferes, boggles the head with all kinds of nonsense, creates doubts and all kinds of obscure conclusions. On the one hand, an internal dialogue is needed, but on the other, no. What to do? We must learn to control this process, that is, consciously, turn it off at the right time, stop the uncontrolled running of thoughts, turn off the word mixer. Fortunately, there are so many ways to do this. You just need to practice. The first time it may not work. Let's try to organize silence in the head.
1. Extrusion or replacement. The flow of chaotic, uncontrolled thoughts is replaced by repeatedly repeated, regular thoughts. It can be mantras, repeating phrases like: “I am delighted with myself” or “I can do it all”, prayers, the score is from 10 to 0, and even better from 100 to 0. The score is kept several times. As soon as we need to stop the mixer, we forcibly begin to repeat the same phrases to ourselves, as if crowding out, replacing them with the unnecessary. After a while, the word mixer shuts down. Now we “remove” the replacing thoughts and for 1 - 2 minutes the silence in the head is ensured.
2. Thinking. Here you don’t need to think anything, you just need to imagine, create a mental picture, a visual image, as a crazy thought appears in your head, and you remove it. There are many options. For example: “aquarium”. Imagine that you are sitting at the bottom of the aquarium, watching the fish, as soon as a thought appears, you put it in an air bubble and send it to the surface. Another thought came up - the same thing: in a bubble and on the surface. The main thing is not to say silently: “here I have another thought, I am sending it”, - the main thing is to present this whole process in the form of a picture, better colored. One can imagine that the head was filled with oil (concrete) and all thoughts in it were stuck. Or imagine that you took a towel and wiped all unnecessary thoughts out of your head. There was a thought - it was immediately erased. Imagine the idea in the form of a dog, as soon as it got out and barked, it was immediately pushed into the kennel. I repeat once again: all this must be presented in the form of a visual image, a mental picture. In no case do not comment!
3. Concentration. We focus on some process or external object. For example, focus on pulsating blood. Take, for example, a palm, concentrate your eyes on it and try to feel how the blood pulsates through it. You can concentrate on the tip of the nose and feel how air enters and exits, and feel all the subtleties of the process. In everyday life, we do not pay any attention to this, but here it is necessary to concentrate. The running of thoughts at the same time stops. It is good to concentrate your attention on the flame of a candle, the flame of a bonfire or on the waves of the sea, most importantly, at this moment there is nothing to think about or indulge in philosophical reasoning.
4. Energy breathing. A very strong practice, allowing not only to stop the running of thoughts, but also to recharge with energy. Imagine that not only air surrounds us, but also some kind of energetic substance that nourishes us with energy. Inhaling the air, we also inhale this substance. We exhale normally, but imagine that we do not externally, as usual, but inside ourselves, through our body. The body, we imagine in the form of an empty container, like a hollow chocolate hare or Santa Claus, which is blown on the exhale. Energy enters with the air, but it does not exit, but remains in the body. We imagine how energy gradually enters our body, slowly and pleasantly fills all its parts and organs. Imagine how pleasantly the body is filled, stored, charged with energy. We get a boost of energy. If something hurts, we imagine and feel how air and energy pass through a sore spot, thereby purifying it. Imagine how pain is displaced by energy from the body and blown out by the air stream. Sensing all this, our internal dialogue is disconnected. Even with this practice, a trance state may occur. And trance is a separate issue ...
5. Trans states. There is no inner dialogue in a trance; there is no running of thoughts. The paradox of this practice is to go into a trance, you must turn off the internal talker. But a trance state can occur in a natural way - the subconscious mind itself will drive our body into it. You probably noticed the following situation for yourself: after a hearty lunch, sit down at the computer, start to do something, but suddenly you feel that your eyes are stupidly fixed on the monitor, your thoughts are absent, and your body is drowsy ... It's not a dream yet, but not awake anymore - this is a trans ...
There are many other practices of stopping the running of thoughts in the head. If you know, describe them in the comments. I will be grateful!!!
I say goodbye to this, see you soon on the blog pages!
