It's not weird, a lot of people do it. Plus, it has great mental health benefits.
Improve your mental health by talking out loud to yourself
This is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. Last week, I recorded a 55-minute voice memo (alone, in my room) to send to a friend. In the recording, I talked about life, lessons, my convictions about the world, etc… It was an hour long, so I’m sure I talked about anything and everything. When I went to send it, I got a message saying that the file was too large to send. No biggie. But what happened next made me very, very sad.
After I closed out of that message, the entire voice memo was automatically deleted. (Thanks, Apple).
Regardless of whether or not I could actually send it to anyone, I had decided that I wanted to save the voice memo to my phone anyway as something to reflect back on later in life. I had spent nearly an hour recording a session of introspection, and in a flash the entire recording disappeared, as if it had never existed in the first place.
What a complete waste of time, right?
Maybe.
…Or, maybe not.
I was reminded of a talk that I attended during my freshman year of college by a professor whose main hobby was playing guitar.
He told us about a personal project he took on over the summer where, after coming home from work, he would pick up his guitar, start recording, improvise an entire song for an extended period of time, stop the recording, and then delete it. He did this every single day for months.
The point of telling us this story was so that the professor could talk to us about our society’s perception of productivity and how we hold oddly specific standards to measure good and bad uses of our time. Whenever we do something, the world expects—in some way, shape, or form—a deliverable to be the focal point of our activities. There needs to be something to indicate that progress has been made.
The broad, social consensus believes that without a physical representation of our work that can be shared with others, our activities remain meaningless.
The professor giving the talk had produced hours upon hours of recorded music, with some recordings possibly capturing award-winning melodies or tunes that thousands of listeners would have connected with (we’ll never know). But every .mp4 file that professor had to show for his creativity and musical talent was lost to a bunch of 1s and 0s—on purpose.
And yet, the professor didn’t mind, because he wasn’t making music for anyone but himself, and that’s all that mattered.
When my voice memo was automatically deleted, annoyance wasn’t the only thing I felt. I also felt… fulfilled.
Sure, I recorded it with the intention of sending it to a friend. But after yapping out loud to myself about everything in life that was weighing me down in that moment, I came to realize that just verbalizing my thoughts in a way that was meant to benefit no one else but myself was incredibly cathartic and relaxing.
I’d also like to add that talking out loud to yourself is a completely normal behavior that many people partake in, and experts have agreed that there are numerous health benefits to doing it.
A lot of times, in order to “get something off our chest” and relieve ourselves of whatever stress we may be feeling, I think we believe that someone else has to hear what we say. But perhaps they don’t.
When we talk out loud to a room full of no one but ourselves, we’re able to cognitively work through our emotions at our own pace and level of comfortability, in addition to receiving a handful of other benefits:
Increased mindfulness
Reduced anxiety and stress
Self-regulation of thoughts and emotions
Meta awareness—we can ponder our own thought processes
Enhanced problem-solving and creativity—forced to verbalize our thoughts and life experiences on our own
Exercise our critical thinking skills
So, maybe what we crave sometimes isn’t a listening ear but rather language that can reify and bring into existence the innermost thoughts and feelings that we’re having. And that language does not, necessarily, have to be communicated to other people—perhaps it can just be something that we produce only for ourselves.
