Voice in your head

do you have an inner monologue?

My friend Mike has what he calls an inner monologue which never shuts up. It’s like a voice over in a film, a continual stream of thoughts and ideas and suggestions. Until recently, he thought that everyone was the same, but they aren’t and, now he knows that, he can find that monologue quite irritating.

I don’t have one. I have a lot of hissing in my head first of all. I listened to a lot of music very loud when I was young, but then so did a lot of people. But it certainly got a lot worse after the great 2008 ear candling disaster. I saw a sign one lunchtime in a Chinese place in Guildford for “ear candling” to remove ear wax. I imagined a sensuous experience - soft Chinese music, maybe a fountain tinkling softly in the background, a smiling young maiden gently administering a fragrant candle, perhaps heated to a tolerable temperature, which would magically cleanse my ears and restore my hearing to its childhood acuity. Instead there was a tubby middle aged bespectacled bloke lying on a grubby bed next to me ramming a stick into my ears and twisting it around violently. No music, fountains, maidens or fragrance. It was extremely painful and I did for a brief moment think that I might die and get melted down to be used in medicines.

But even before that experience, I never had a voice in my head after the age of five. Pre-school I had an imaginary “friend” I called “Me-ey”, except he was an argumentative, querulous little person, always critical and mischievous, trying to get me into trouble. I may be the only child to have hated my imaginary friend.

Now it’s peaceful except for the hissing. I do have thoughts but I’d describe it as a sort of gentle slow-moving swirl, thoughts not verbalised and images blurred and half-obscured. But I can delve into the swirl and pick out something I want to think about and then usually I can focus pretty intently on it - in fact I probably hyper-focus so that I pay dangerously insufficient attention to anything else. It’s literally the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder. ADD sufferers have multiple voices all piping up all the time, as my daughter says like a constant Zoom call in her head where all the little faces are all speaking at once. For me it’s a swirl of blurry faces all on mute, in a zoom call I’m not on.

Inner speech in its broadest sense constitutes silent speech internally experienced by oneself. It is slightly different from self-talk. Everyone talks to themselves sometimes - this could be motivational, even though wholly ineffective - come on Emma, you can win this, you once won a Grand Slam for God’s sake.

As opposed to motivational self-talk, quite a few of us have a negative inner voice, which we may also vocalise under our breath, beating ourselves up. Emma you are hopeless, it must be your new coach’s fault, fire him. It may also intervene to prick brief bubbles of pride or optimism. It may adopt our father’s voice. Aren’t we all subconsciously still trying to impress our fathers?¹

Unsurprisingly, studies have shown that negative self-talk has a strong correlation with depression, and perhaps more surprisingly that minimal self-talk is associated with lower anxiety and anger (but is not correlated to depression), and positively-oriented self-talk is associated with lower depression but higher levels of anxiety and anger.²

We also need to distinguish inner speech from those suffering auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH’s), hearing a voice other than your own, as occurs in schizophrenia and some anxiety disorders. As reported last week in Warmth of the Sun, poor Brian Wilson had voices in his head for 50 years. Mike’s voice is not forever telling him how useless he is, nor that Phil Spector is having him followed so he better hire someone to follow Phil Spector.

The Goat ploughed through a few research papers and the brain swirl and hissing reached painful intensity. In summary, commentators assume that all sentient humans experience inner speech as a necessary tool to enable them to do one or more of the following, in order of popularity: plan tasks, remember, self-motivate, solve problems, plan when to do specific tasks, think, rehearse upcoming conversations, read, write or calculate, study, control emotions, determine what to wear, self-censor, replay past conversations, and daydream.

Self-evidently, we all use inner speech to help us memorise something or rehearse something we need to say. And we will all have occasional episodic memories pop into our head of something we or someone else said. You don’t need a long research paper to tell us that, mate.

One study³ distinguished four types of inner speech: evaluative/motivational inner speech, where inner speech serves to judge or assess one’s own behavior (82.5% did that); dialogic inner speech, or the tendency to engage in inner speech with a back-and-forth, conversational quality (77.2% did that); condensed inner speech - the experience of inner speech in an abbreviated or fragmentary form (36.1%); and the presence of other people in inner speech (25.8%). It’s not clear how many respondents, if any, reported no inner speech at all, just hiss and swirl.

But I struggled on Google Scholar to find mention of a constant narrator of the type Mike has. So I turned to Reddit instead. At last some kindred spirits for Mike. Kev-series always has a "movie" playing in his head. EggplantCheap5306 has an interactive narrator that they sometimes argue with, though it never bothers them, and also comes up with poems and stories in bed with “such natural tone, such natural beautiful turn of phrases” but when they go to write it down they can’t remember it. Yeah, right.

Beneficial-Gap 6974 has no monologue and wonders whether the lack of is why their anxiety is so high. There’s no way to defuse their worries as they're all abstract and vague. But no, EggplantCheap 5306 has high anxiety too, probably because of all those beautiful stories and poems slipping through their fingers.

ErraticErratum has one which narrates in their head what they are about to do because otherwise they’d get confused (i.e. making breakfast: "okay, now I need to grab the cereal box"). They sound like an early homosapiens prototype. SapphireDreams 1024 says “it’s constant. Every thought is said in my head with added commentary.”

SeatSix is like Mike. “You know how in movies sometimes they have the main character as the narrator? Telling what he or she is thinking while the action is happening. It's like that.”

EveninRed goes further. “It's kinda got its own mind and will just say random things that'll send me into trains of thoughts. Or in conversations it's trying to think of the next sentence to say, as if there was a bluetooth headset of someone telling me what to do like I was an important person in front of a live camera. "Now is a fair time to talk about your hobbies, the conversation might die down and get awkward if you say nothing."

Lots of people find their inner monologue annoying, especially people with ADHD who have constant multiple inputs. People struggle to get to sleep because of their inner monologue. On the plus side, some can change the voice to e.g. Patrick Stewart or Christopher Walken.

SamLoves209 has “a constant internal monologue - 100% of the time and 95% with an underscore of music. I only learned recently that not everyone has this. It kinda blew my mind! What is that like? I have not one second of quiet in my head unless in meditation or sleep or super stoned”.

Well, SamLoves209, it’s actually pretty pleasant, though it can lead to appalling absent-mindedness. Thoughts are not articulated, there are just those blurred, half-obscured folders floating around that I can open up. So for significant periods of time I am basically a moron with virtually no cognitive activity registering.

That may sound very dull to you monologuers. I haven’t found any evidence that it correlates to better or worse cognitive performance. Mike came top in the entrance exam to my school and came second out of a thousand for a prestigious job in MI5. Think what he could have done without that voice in his head all the time. Maybe monologues are a good thing and it’s my cerebral wasteland holding me back.

I’d be interested to hear from monologuers or wastelanders. Please let us all know in the comments.

1. My father for example was very good at crosswords and could recite loads of poetry off by heart. He’s long gone but even now I’m pointlessly proud if I finish a crossword or can quote a few words of Shakespeare. He was never critical of me, but never that impressed either - typical 70s dad.

2. This Psychology Today article says you can silence your inner critic by shifting your focus away from yourself and toward others or the world at large. If you detect negativity challenge it and replace exaggeratedly negative thoughts with more realistic statements that move you toward self-acceptance and confidence. And distance yourself from an inner critic, perhaps by naming it and addressing it directly. You can then introduce a new inner voice that is an ally who focuses on more of the good things about yourself.

Easier said than done perhaps.

3. McCarthy-Jones, S., & Fernyhough, C. (2011). The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 1586 –1593. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.005