Listen on Apple Podcasts Now ↗

Listen on Spotify Now ↗

Listen and follow! Add your voice, tap ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ to rate the podcast on Spotify or Apple.

So I'm at Trader Joe's last week, standing in the cheese aisle, and I'm having what can only be described as a full philosophical debate with myself.

Out loud. Not quietly. Full volume.

"Okay, David. Do you really need the triple cream brie? Or are you just emotionally eating because your fantasy football team got destroyed?"

And then I answered myself…

"Both. The answer is both, David. Get the brie. You've earned the sadness cheese."

I look up and there's this woman staring at me like I've just announced I'm the rightful heir to the throne of a small European country. She does that thing where she pretends to be very interested in the Gouda, but she's clearly just trying to create physical distance between herself and the cheese aisle lunatic.

And in that moment, I felt it. That little flush of embarrassment. That voice in my head saying, "Normal people don't do this, David. Normal people select cheese silently like civilized members of society."

But here's the thing.

I've been talking to myself my entire life. In the shower. In the car. While cooking. While trying to figure out why my Wi-Fi router hates me personally.

I always thought this was a character flaw. A quirk I should probably hide. Something that, if discovered, would result in concerned family interventions and possibly medication.

Then I started digging into the research.

Princeton, New Jersey. 1940s.

Picture this old guy shuffling down the street in a rumpled sweater, wild white hair exploding from his head like he stuck his finger in a light socket and decided it was a look.

He's muttering constantly. Words tumbling out in German, in English, in equations that probably only make sense to him and God.

Local kids think he's a crazy homeless person. Some cross the street to avoid him.

That muttering old man was Albert Einstein.

According to everyone who knew him, Einstein talked to himself constantly. Not occasionally. Not under his breath. Constantly. Full conversations, complete with hand gestures and dramatic pauses.

This started in childhood. Whenever young Albert was asked a question, he would slowly formulate an answer, mutter it to himself, and only then repeat his response out loud. It looked like he needed to say everything twice.

His parents were so concerned they consulted a doctor.

The family housekeeper called him "stupid."

But decades later, Einstein's sister Maja wrote about this strange habit. She didn't see it as a defect. She attributed it to her brother's "thoroughness in thinking."

That phrase has stayed with me.

When we think silently, our thoughts jump around at speeds we can't even track. They leap. They skip. They contradict themselves, and we don't even notice. But when we speak out loud, they have to slow down. They have to become words. And words have to actually make sense.

Speaking forces your brain to show its work.

My absolute favorite example of institutionalized self-talk comes from computer programming.

It involves a rubber duck. I am not making this up.

There's a widely used debugging technique called rubber duck debugging, and it's exactly what it sounds like.

When a programmer can't figure out why their code isn't working, they get a rubber duck, put it on their desk, and explain the code to the duck line by line. Out loud.

"Okay, duck, so first I'm declaring this variable. Then I'm checking if the user is logged in. Then I'm calling this function, which returns... Oh. Oh no. That's the problem. Thank you, duck."

The duck doesn't give advice. The duck doesn't respond. The duck just sits there being yellow and rubber and slightly judgmental.

But somehow, explaining the problem to the duck makes the solution appear.

Amazon. Google. Microsoft. Some of the smartest people in the world working on the most complex problems in technology have normalized talking to rubber ducks.

Nobody thinks they're crazy.

Because in that context, we understand that talking out loud is a tool. A technology. A hack for the human brain.

But put that same programmer in a Trader Joe's cheese aisle talking to themselves about brie, and suddenly they're a person to be avoided. The behavior is identical. The context changes everything.

Dr. Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin ran experiments that proved something Einstein would have loved.

He had participants search for objects in a cluttered visual field, like finding a specific item in a messy room. Half searched silently. The other half said the name of the object out loud while searching.

"Banana. Banana. Banana."

The people who talked to themselves found the object significantly faster.

Saying the word out loud activated the visual properties associated with that object, priming the brain to recognize it more quickly.

I call this proof that I'm not crazy for narrating my search for my car keys.

But here's where it gets really interesting.

Dr. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan discovered something that sounds completely bananas but is backed by rigorous science:

The way you talk to yourself, specifically what pronoun you use, dramatically affects your performance.

In one experiment, participants prepared for a stressful public speaking task. Half used first-person self-talk: "I can do this. I'm going to be great."

The other half used their own name: "David, you can do this. David, you're going to be great."

The third-person talkers showed significantly less anxiety, performed better, and recovered faster emotionally afterward.

Kross calls this psychological distancing. When you talk to yourself in the third person, you create space between you and your emotions. You become both the experiencer and the observer.

You're coaching yourself from the outside.

This explains something I've always wondered about.

LeBron James refers to himself in the third person constantly. "I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James," he said in his famous "Decision" interview.

Sports commentators made fun of him for years. They said he was arrogant. Delusional. Narcissistic.

But according to Kross's research, LeBron was doing something incredibly smart.

He was creating distance between himself and the pressure. Between LeBron the person and LeBron the brand. Between his emotions and his decisions.

He was coaching himself from the outside, which is exactly what you need when millions of people are watching your every move.

And LeBron's not alone.

Serena Williams gives herself pep talks on court between points. You can see her lips moving. Michael Phelps talked to himself before every race.

Elite performers across every field use self-talk as a tool. The rest of us just hide it because someone at Trader Joe's might think we're weird.

In medieval Europe, talking to yourself was considered a sign of demonic possession. Seriously. Villages would sometimes exile or execute people for excessive self-talk.

In Victorian England, it was classified as a symptom of "moral insanity." Psychiatrists believed it indicated a weak character or a disordered mind.

This stigma carried into the 20th century. Early psychology textbooks listed excessive self-talk as a symptom of schizophrenia and psychosis.

The assumption was that healthy people think silently. Only disturbed people let their thoughts leak out.

But here's what those psychologists missed.

Everyone talks to themselves.

Dr. Russell Hurlbert at the University of Nevada developed a technique where people wear beepers and report exactly what's going on in their minds when the beeper goes off.

What he found: roughly 30 to 50% of our waking hours involve some form of inner speech. We are constantly narrating our lives to ourselves.

The difference between "healthy" and "crazy" seems to be whether you let other people hear it.

Which is kind of insane when you think about it.

Soliloquy (suh-LIL-oh-kwee): From the Latin solus (alone) + loqui (to speak). It literally means "to speak while alone."

You probably know this word from Shakespeare. It's what Hamlet does when he asks, "To be or not to be?"

A soliloquy is just the fancy theatrical version of talking to yourself.

When Shakespeare has a character deliver a soliloquy, we consider it high art. We study it in school. We pay hundreds of dollars to watch actors do it on stage.

But when someone delivers a soliloquy in the cheese aisle at Trader Joe's, we call them crazy.

The behavior is identical. The only difference is the lighting and whether you bought a ticket.

Let's use it in a sentence:

"When I caught my wife in the shed delivering a passionate soliloquy about whether to organize her gardening tools by function or by size, I asked if she needed a moment. She told me she was having a cognitive breakthrough moment and that Shakespeare himself would approve."

Step one: Find a problem you've been stuck on. A decision you can't make. A project that's stalled. Something where your brain just keeps buffering without reaching a conclusion.

Step two: Find somewhere private. Your car. Your shower. A walk around the block. Anywhere you won't be interrupted.

Step three: Talk through the problem out loud. Not in your head. Out loud. Use your own name.

"Okay, David. Here's the situation. You've been avoiding this decision because..."

Let yourself ramble. Let yourself repeat. Let yourself argue both sides. Give yourself a full five minutes minimum.

Step four: Notice what happens.

I'm betting somewhere in that five minutes, you'll say something that surprises you. You'll articulate something you didn't know you knew. You'll hear yourself say the solution (or at least a next step) that had been invisible when it was just rattling around in your head.

Bonus points: Get a rubber duck. Give it a name. I call mine Dr. Quacksworth, and he has a PhD in listening and an honorary degree in not judging me.

The goal isn't to become the person who talks to themselves in public and makes everyone uncomfortable.

The goal is to reclaim a cognitive tool you've been suppressing since childhood because society told you it was weird.

It's not weird.

It's what Einstein did. It's what LeBron does. It's what programmers at Google do every single day.

You've just been too embarrassed to do it yourself.