There are several ways to help control this inner voice, including meditation and by practising imagery. Meditation can help keep our most fervent critic, ourselves, in check.

Often, many of these negative voices come from our parents or primary care takers, as children we pick up on the negative attitudes that parents not only have towards their children but also toward themselves. Our voices can also come from interactions with peers and siblings, or influential adults.

It is important to try to avoid negative thinking in your internal dialogue. One way to do this is to consciously change what you are thinking. If you ‘hear’ yourself thinking something negative, focus on something positive instead.

3 Unique Techniques for Navigating a Negative Inner Voice

1. Turn down the volume. According to Andreas, remembering an event when a sound moved away from you or you moved away from a sound “elicits the same internal neurobiology that occurred when that happened in the external world.
2. Ask positive questions.
3. Link opposite thoughts with self-acceptance.

Indeed, private speech is more similar (in its form and function) to inner speech than social speech. Unlike inner speech which is covert (i.e., hidden), private speech is overt. Private speech is the use of language for self-regulation of behavior.

The average frequency of inner speaking across those who took part in the research, at 23%, masks a huge range: from 100% – i.e. for some people, every time they were sampled they had some kind of internal monologue or inner conversation going on – to 0% – i.e. some people were never speaking to themselves internally.

For this reason, inner speech plays an important role in self-awareness and self-understanding. Inner speech may play an important role in working memory as well. This suggests that inner speech is linked to the development of language abilities and the advanced mental abilities to which language is linked.

Noun. The subconscious part of the mind. subconscious. mind. psyche.

There is huge variation in the frequency with which people speak to themselves in their mind. In one study with 30 participants that involved ten beeps a day for three days, some reported no instances of inner speaking at all, while others reported inner speaking for 75 per cent of the beeps.

Talking to yourself is a healthy, widespread tendency among children and adults. Research suggests the practice supplies a bevy of benefits, from improved mental performance to greater emotional control. Self-talk is most beneficial when it combines thought and action or reinforces an instructional framework.

Not only is talking to yourself out loud perfectly normal, it’s actually beneficial in a variety of ways — as well as potentially being “a sign of high cognitive functioning,” according to Paloma Mari-Beffa, PhD, a neuropsychologist and cognitive psychologist who has researched the phenomenon of self-talk.