Mental Health
Here’s Why Talking to Myself Is Not Crazy But Clever.
I explain the therapeutic benefits of self-conversations for emotional maturity and cognitive flexibility to improve mental health and well-being.
You might think you are losing your mind if you talk to yourself. However, it is far from the truth from my experience and observations.
Self-talk is a healthy habit for therapeutic and creative pursuits. Being our own therapist is a valuable and sustainable practice for mental health.
Gaining emotional maturity is essential for our mental health and physical well-being. Transferring our emotional intelligence to maturity can be a sustainable approach to transforming our mental health.
Our emotions are complex. Sometimes, it is tough to identify their origins. This is because our autonomous and cognitive systems trigger them in different languages. We can get some ideas by observing our thoughts using mindfulness techniques.
Nonetheless, feelings generated by the autonomous nervous system can be difficult to understand. They might manifest in complex emotional expressions.
Our autonomous nervous system receives various inputs from multiple organs and biological systems. The autonomous nervous system operates at the unconscious level, so our cognitive system only notices effects rather than direct information.
Sometimes, we experience multiple emotions. They become even more challenging when they get entangled. Dealing with knotted emotions can be perplexing and impenetrable to handle.
From my observations of my proteges and personal experience, one of the effective ways to gain emotional maturity was to use self-conversations regularly. This approach served as my own therapist.
Wearing the hats of multiple personas, we can ask questions and repeat the responses coming to the conscious mind with naturality, empathy, and compassion based on the tone and intensity of the message.
Initially, this activity may sound unnatural, difficult, or even scary. However, it can be done effortlessly with regular trials when it becomes a habit. It took me numerous years to get used to it.
Nevertheless, I intuitively knew its importance for my mental health and spiritual growth; therefore, I persisted in practicing.
Self-conversations have both tangible and intangible therapeutic values. You can notice the difference after having a few minutes of meaningful, curious, and non-judgemental self-talk with yourself.
The immediate benefit is stress reduction and mental clarity. The long-term cognitive development effect can be seen as intangible, but it is precious for our mental health.
More specifically, the practice of self-conversations can significantly increase cognitive reserves and reduce the adverse effects of mental conditions such as dementia.
In addition, I noticed a remarkable increase in my creativity, especially when I started doing it systematically and asking intricate and a wide variety of questions.
This approach helped me create innovative and inventive ideas that contributed to my personal development and professional growth.
Another tremendous emotional benefit of methodical self-talk is dealing with boredom effectively. Self-talk helped me turn boring times into more exciting ones, making them more productive.
When I start chatting with my childhood self, boredom quickly disappears as I discover fascinating after-effects.
In my case, these effects are typically joyful, but occasionally, they create some poignant points too. I don’t regret experiencing the negative emotions, as noticing and reliving them has evident healing power.
I learned to record my own voice and listen to it several times under different moods at later stages of my life.
For example, when I listened to the recorded conversations in a low mood and an uplifting mood, it created different meanings and gave additional clues that I missed in either mood state.
Like many of my friends, I disliked my own voice initially. It felt unnatural and disturbing. However, after listening to my voice multiple times, I overcame those difficult emotions. They turned out to be natural with conscious acceptance. I hypothesized that neuroplasticity could allow me to love my own voice.
More interestingly, after a few years, I started liking my voice gradually. This made remarkable progress in my emotional maturity and spiritual journey.
Being able to love my voice had a significant therapeutic effect. It helped me become my own friend by unconditionally accepting myself with my faults and weaknesses. Self-love and self-compassion might have extraordinary healing properties.
This transformation, from disliking to liking my own voice, has also produced better responses from my subconscious mind.
When I compared my voice recordings from the past with the new ones, I noticed an astonishing difference in outputs. I gained more insights both from therapeutic and creative perspectives.
When I am out, especially during my long walks by myself, I use the smartphone to record my voice. I use a voice recording application on my personal computer when at home. Both produce different outputs.
I feel more comfortable and obtain more detailed responses at home. Both approaches serve distinctive purposes. Thus, I find both valuable interventions.
I also use voice-to-text conversation software to analyze my words using different data analysis methods, such as sentiment analysis.
These methods provide a different perspective on my inner world. Analyzing emotions in this way is a powerful capability for emotional maturity.
These tools even allowed me to visualize the emotions in a chart format with various colors. This unique technique was instrumental in seeing the entangled emotions, which was an extremely difficult endeavor for me before.
These simple yet powerful tools also depict valuable insights, such as reflecting emotions raised at specific times of the day.
For example, my morning, afternoon, and evening emotions showed significant differences. And comparing morning emotions with other morning times showed valuable patterns.
Self-talk nowadays serves me as an emotional monitoring tool. When I feel an intense emotion, whether positive or negative, I quickly have a self-talk session to understand the originating self-construct and record it in my emotion journal.
This information is invaluable to me as it helps me make necessary therapeutic alterations for specific cases. It also contributes to my self-healing and saves me time and money.
One of the crucial parts of self-conversations is proactively managing my cognitive and emotional health.
For example, when I combined self-talk with dexterous writing, I gained an opportunity to activate both sides of the brain to integrate the left and right lobes for better response.
Besides healing and creativity benefits, regularly using self-conversations and dexterous writing has also postulated valuable language improvement skills.
Using these methods, I identified linguistic issues such as grammar or the misuse of words unintentionally. It was easier for me to fix these issues when I recalled them via these techniques.
I did not notice my errors previously without using these techniques but kept doing them unknowingly. Moreover, I even made the error’s memory stronger in the neural pathways.
Adding self-conversations to my mindfulness toolbox has become an excellent choice, producing valuable results both in the short and long term. However, I benefited from adding self-talk to my daily rituals when they became supportive and beneficial habits.
So next time you find yourself chatting with yourself intimately, remember that you are not a crazy person but an emotionally intelligent and mature individual who takes personal responsibility for mental health and well-being growth.
But, of course, we don’t talk to ourselves loudly in public as this practice is still taboo in some cultures. Besides, our higher self reveals its secrets when we interact with it in safe, quiet, and undistracted places.
Self-talk is part of my braingym, which I introduced in another story.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.
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Disclaimer: My posts do not include professional or health advice. I only document my reviews, observations, experiences, and perspectives to provide information and create awareness.
As part of my creative non-fiction writing goals, I’d like to share a few stories that might warm our hearts with a bit of humor into weighty topics.
Sample Humorous Stories
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