Do you sometimes talk to yourself in your head?

It’s called thinking. When you’re thinking, you’re talking to yourself or — in a better metaphor — you’re answering the questions you asked yourself.

The difference is that some people can only have one perspective, and some others can have multiple at the same time.

It’s what scientists call Metacognition.

Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”, “thinking about thinking”, and “knowing about knowing”. It’s the highest form of cognition – which is to be aware of the awareness itself.

A person with a high level of metacognition is able to become aware of his or her thought processes and view them from a fresh perspective. This allows them to analyze and judge their ideas, knowledge, and skills more accurately compared to people who are having difficulties with Metacognition.

It was my tactic in essay-based examinations to have my imaginary subject teacher sitting in my head criticising me about one thing or another, and generally encouraging me to do it better. This helped a lot as it stopped me losing focus/confidence halfway through a question paper.

When I’m angry with myself for something, I often mentally criticise myself and then try and reason with my ‘inner-me’. This does help sometimes to see when I’m being unreasonable, or whether I have actually done something foolish.

The most useful thing about this is…

Writing essays! Seriously, bear with me on this one. Essays are designed to be read, and so they need to be coherent. Imagine you were reading one of your essays out to a crowd of people in a busy city. How many of them would be interested? How many of them would follow? How many of them would walk away?

My favourite method is to actually ‘speak’ the essay to myself as if I were giving a lecture on the subject. As long as you can follow your trail of thought then the examiner/marker should be able to as well.

You can be your own best critic!

Contrary to what people tell us, there’s really nothing wrong with talking to yourself. As long as inner-you doesn’t encourage you to kill yourself. If that happens, it’s probably not a good idea to talk to inner-you very regularly (at least not on a bad day). Often you are the only intelligent interlocutor to talk to.

Moral of the story: If you’re under influence, resist the urge to talk to yourself in your head