“Everyone has a nearly constant stream of thoughts going through their head,” says Sherry Benton, chief science officer of TAO Connect (a digital platform that gives people access to recovery treatments) and professor emeritus of psychology from University of Florida. Some believe that negative self-talk is totally fine, and also one of the human traits that allowed humans to evolve. How you do it says something about your state of mental health, but, on the surface, it seems like not all mental health professionals agree about how much negative self-talk is healthy. Even if it’s not literally “talk,” it’s still self-talk in the psychological sense in that we are communicating within ourselves. He says that we can broaden the definition of self-talk to include, imagery, sensations, and feelings. “Only a small portion of our thinking is in words and inner verbal dialogue,” explains Curtis Reisinger, an NYC-based psychologist and assistant professor at Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra University. And it is absolutely a predictor of how you view yourself, others, and the world.” Of the several psychology experts I consulted with about this topic, all agree with Irwin. “I think the term ‘internal monologue’ is an internet trend,” says Nancy Irwin, a California-based clinical psychologist. So the real question is: What does your self-talk say about your mental health?įirst of all, whether you call it self-talk or internal monologue or just simply thinking, everyone is doing it all the time. What psychologists know is that everyone has self-talk, even if it isn’t in the form of an internal monologue (a la Joe from Netflix’s You - sorry for the morbid example). The discussion, which has now reached the furthest reaches of the web, centers around the possibility that not all humans live with a constant inner voice over. Psychologists the world over were likely exchanging virtual knowing glances a couple of days ago when a thread about the universal existence of inner monologues popped off on Twitter.
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