How We Talk to Ourselves

SBS Australia

10-07-2025

LISTEN TO
SBS Audio
10/07/2025 39:56 English
Credits
Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic
Producers: Rune Pedersen at Onomato People, Stefan Delatovic
Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic
Artwork: Wendy Tang
Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY
SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Guests: Dr. Chris Cheers, Psychologist, Author & Educator. Corinne Ooms contestant on Alone Australia.
Thabani Tshuma, Poet, Writer & Performer.
Stefan
How humans talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri country we pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations.
Stefan
Rune, huge news. It's episode eight, the final episode of the season. We've looked at all kinds of ways that humans talk, and now I think it's time for the final frontier. How do humans talk to themselves? I think we should explore inner monologs, intrusive thoughts. We could look at wellness practices, look at ways that we, sort of, you know, use language in our own sense of self to form our identity. Because obviously, you know, you can't sort of look out onto the street before you tend your own garden. As it were… [fades out]
Rune Pedersen
I wonder, did I brush my teeth this morning? And why are my hands so sweaty? UGH! Oh, man, I forgot to listen. I can't ask him now what he's been talking about. He's been talking for way too long. I'm really in my head today for a guy hosting a podcast on communication. I really do spend a lot of time talking to myself. I wonder if that's normal, am I? Is that normal?
Chris
It's absolutely normal. Everyone has self talk, you know, because we all have thoughts, right? And effectively, when those thoughts become about ourselves, which everyone has thoughts about themselves. That's what we might call self talk. So we all do it, and we all just do it in different ways.
Rune Pedersen
Dr Chris Cheers is a psychologist, educator and author who focuses on mental health, gender affirmation and intimacy, and I just know from his work that he'll be able to shed some light on this whole talking-to-myself-business.
Chris
Some of them might, you know, some of us might say it out loud, but some of us it remains a very internal sort of process, but we all do it, and that's because it has an evolutionary advantage, right? Like self talk helps you make sense of yourself. It helps you make sense of the world around you, and it pretty much turns what is happening around you into language. And as soon as we do that, we make meaning of it. So if we don't self talk, it's really hard for us to make meaning of ourselves or the world around us.
Rune Pedersen
Actually, that's a little bit of a relief.
Chris
Good, good. I'm, I'm glad to relieve you so early.
Rune Pedersen
Yeah, because it's like, of course, like, it's, it can feel embarrassing. If I will, particularly have it if I've done something where I feel like, oh my god, that was embarrassing, and I'll chew myself up thinking about it for days and weeks, even years after, I'll find myself in a situation in the shower and reliving it and then just repeating that, trying to conquer the moment almost again. But it sounds like that, that is just normal.
Chris
It's normal. But what you're talking about there, it might be useful to bring up another term, rumination here. So it's good to actually differentiate between self talk and rumination. In the psychology research we normally, you know, separate between those two things. So self talk is normally about the present or the future. So and self talk is normally about motivating you to do something, or talk about the future or talk about what's happening right at this moment, or, you know, telling yourself that you can do it or you can't do it. But it's normally about the present or the future in terms of rumination, though, that's normally about the past. So if you are sort of going over things from the past and sort of in your head, kind of going over and over them, and telling yourself that you did bad or what you did bad in the past, that's less likely to be good. You know, that's less likely to be useful for your well being to kind of ruminate for days and days. A little bit of rumination can be useful to learn. But if that rumination is going over days and days, that that can have a negative impact on your well being, whereas positive self talk, that's normally about motivation for the future, can really have a positive impact on your well being.
Rune Pedersen
Well, that brings me, then, into the different ways that we talk to ourselves. Could you, yeah, could you elaborate a little bit on the different forms?
Chris
I would say the most useful thing to understand when we start thinking about self talk or or thoughts is to really just normalise that all of our brains are pretty anxious. All of our brains, from an evolution perspective are sort of set up to focus on the environment and to focus on threats to kind of keep us safe, right? So, from a, you know, if you think about evolution, the cave person who just thought about butterflies and good things all the time and just told themselves that they were going to be great, you know, are likely to be eaten by the lion, you know, the person who was, you know, look. Working out, where are the threats, where are the lines they're more likely to survive? So there is an evolutionary advantage to keeping this ability to focus on threat in our environment. So that's why, often our self talk can move to the threat. The issue is, when you're an environment that may be pretty safe, like if you've got good housing, or you don't have immediate threats in your environment. Over time, our brains have kind of developed this really annoying part in some ways, which is your frontal cortex, which is the part that's able to imagine and able to have abstract thought and all these wonderful creative things, but it's also the part of your brain that's able to imagine threats that aren't even there. And our brains are very good at doing this. They imagine threats are not here or talk to ourselves about like, if we had a dinner party last night. Our brains aren't built to think about all the positive aspects of that dinner party. Our brains are built to think, what did I do wrong? How can I learn from that or and that rumination can really be about thinking about threat or thinking about social threat in future environments. So it's really normal for all brains to focus on threat. So that's why our self talk can often go to the negative. And separating between, I guess helpful self talk and unhelpful self talk is probably a useful way to look at it. So it's very likely you might have unhelpful self talk that focuses on what we call self criticism. This is often called the critical inner voice, or self critical thoughts, or the inner saboteur. You know, we have all these terms for when our self talk becomes negative about ourselves, and that's really common, but that can be really unhelpful. Thinking about positive self talk is normally about, it motivates, it regulates or it causes us to take perspective. So they're kind of the three things that positive self talk tend to do. They tend to so if your self talk is about, you know, I can do this. Or for me, like Chris, you can do this because there's actually a lot of research that actually using your name in the third person, like Chris, you can do this, is more effective than just saying, I can do this okay. So that kind of positive self talk can be really useful. It can also regulate us to say, you know, we're going to be okay, or we've been through things like this before, you know, Chris, you'll be okay. That can regulate our emotions. And also when our self talk allows us to take another perspective, like, hang on, what would else? What would someone else think in this circumstance? You know that that sort of self talk could be really useful for our well being as well?
Rune Pedersen
Okay, well, I want to dive a little bit into, then, the negative aspects of it. I'm really curious about how self talk can contribute to an experience of anxiety in our lives.
Chris
I i think the negative aspects of self talk are all about when we are talking to ourselves in a way that's self critical, basically, or or we're focusing our self talk on only the negative aspects of of what has happened or what will happen, like our brain is very bad at predicting the future, and what it does is it tends to predict a bad future, especially when we're feeling anxious. And this is probably good to bring in that idea of that cognitive behavior therapy has really given us, which is the idea that our thoughts and our behavior and our feelings all relate to each other. So if we change our behavior, it can change the way we think and feel. If we change our thoughts, it can change the way we behave and way we feel. So if our thoughts are negative, it's very likely that we're going to have anxiety or negative emotions, and we're also probably going to behave in a way that's not very good for our well being, so avoidance or just not doing the things that we would normally enjoy. So that's why negative self talk can have a really negative impact on our mental health and wellbeing, because the way we think changes how we feel and changes how we behave. So in terms of negative self talk, it's it's good to notice that, you know, as I was talking about, because our brains are focused on threat and focused on anxiety, our negative self talk once it goes negative, once our self talk is about a threat, like once you leave a dinner party and your brain goes, I can't you said such stupid things and everyone hated you at that dinner and and then the brain tries to fix that problem. And unfortunately, the way it tries to fix it is to think about it in a way that if I just think about it enough, I'll be able to work it out, and I won't feel anxious anymore, when, in actual fact, it's quite the opposite. The more you think about it, if you're in that negative space, the more anxious you're gonna feel, because there's no answer to be found, because you can't change the past. So that's why it's really important to notice that your self talk when it's negative, if your body is going to react like it's a real threat, even though it's made up, even though your brain is just giving you thoughts. If we can catch that moment, if we can help you, catch that moment where you get to notice your self talk, and you get to notice that it's not necessarily true. True or that it's quite negative. If you can catch that moment, you can then really change the anxiety or the stress response that might come from that.
Rune Pedersen
How can we practice the catching of the light bulb moment, so to speak?
Chris
Well, journaling is a useful way to kind of first practice this. So when, if you as someone that tends to ruminate on past experiences, or tends to have anxious self talk or self critical self talk. Write it down, you know, write down some of some of your thoughts. Write down your self talk and start to notice it. And just even just that process of noticing your self talk, by writing it down, you will automatically start to evaluate it, because now it's written down in front of you. Now it's not just this thing in your head that feels real. Now it's this thing written down on the page. And as soon as the sentence is written down on the page, you're much more likely to be able to have perspective and to be able to have distance from that thought, to be able to go, oh, hang on, I'm only focusing on the negative here. Or hang on this thought is not necessarily true, or why all these thoughts are ignoring all the positive aspects of last night. So if we can first write down the thought, we can get distance from it, and then the next step, and this is where therapy comes in, is, how do we challenge some of that kind of negative self talk or and then how can we change it? So, but that process, if there's one, one skill that you can work on in life, and this is shown in the research, the main skill that improves your mental health and wellbeing from a self talk perspective, is the ability to notice it, because then that allows the rest of the process to challenge the thoughts, or, you know, to come up with different perspectives to start, but if you don't notice it, you really can't start the rest of the process. They might change it.
Rune Pedersen
I'm curious, then, how does self talk play a role in reframing your personal narrative?
Chris
Well, if we take a narrative therapy perspective, so narrative therapy is a type of therapy that works with the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about you know ourselves and who we are and who we will be. Changing our stories can directly change our mental health and well being, because if we can start seeing a different future for ourselves, if we can start building a bit of a different narrative for ourselves, it can really change, I guess, our how our anxiety. Because if we can change the narrative, we can change what we think our future will be, and if we can make our future seem a little bit more positive, we're going to feel a little more positive right now as we're thinking about it. One way to think about this is, in childhood, you develop ways of looking at the world, and those lenses and schema therapy calls these schemas, right? So in childhood, you develop schemas which are like mindsets or way of looking at the world, and depending on your childhood, depending on your experiences, depending on how your needs were met and your emotional needs were met, those schemas could be quite negative. You know, those schemas could and quite negative itself. So, for example, I work a lot with with, you know, queer population, the transgender verse population, a lot of the time, their childhood and their teenage years have experienced homophobia, transphobia, or basically experiencing a culture or a family that is telling them there's something wrong with you, you know, there's this part of you that's wrong, and also that you're wrong, or you're what you believe. You know you're a sin, or you're evil or or just you're wrong. There's something wrong with you. And if you hear that message enough, you start to internalize that as, oh, there's something wrong with me. I'm faulty, I'm, you know, I'm not worthy. I'm, you know, I'm not good enough. I'm worthless. These schemas or these ways of looking at yourself really develop, and once those schemas have developed, it means that in your adult life, your self talk tends to be negative, because it your automatic negative thoughts or your self talk tends to come from those schemas. Tends to come from those those mindsets that developed in your childhood. So where therapy comes in is trying to first learn that and notice that and understand where did this negative self talk come from? It, it didn't just come from nowhere. Normally, that negative self talk, you can see how it relates to past, you know, negative experiences, or where needs weren't met as a child, or relates to some sort of core belief or or schema, the way of looking at the world. So that learning about that can be the first step to then trying to change it. You know, we kind of need to understand something before we can change it. And that process of and I've worked with clients where there's an amazing sense of validation that comes from the work we do together, for them to be able to say, Oh, hang on, I'm not faulty, you know, and there's not something wrong with me. I grew up in a system or a culture or a family that told me there was something wrong. With me, so then I internalise that belief. But that belief is not necessarily true, and this negative self talk is comes from that belief. So if we can challenge that belief, so people can believe I am worthy, I'm not faulty, it can really start to change that negative self talk.
Rune Pedersen
I've been thinking a lot about how how my child don't have a voice yet, so it's my role to give them a self loving voice. And I say that by when I say I love you, when I say jails, that's the Danish version. My thought with it is, yes, I I do, but I know you don't understand me, but my hope is that that, that I'm teaching the child that to say that to themselves, is that a meaningful exercise in this, in sort of self talk?
Chris
Yeah, that's beautiful to hear and to think about the impact that will have on the child's life. You know, as they, as they grow and become an adult, because I often say to parents, and I don't mean to terrify you, but you're having way more influence on this little person's life than you will ever be able to comprehend. Parents often focus a lot on what they're saying. Like to say the right thing, but it's a lot less about focusing on the words you say, and a lot more about focusing on who you are as a person around this child, because they are perceiving everything. They're perceiving your facial expressions, your tone of voice, your how you move through the world, how you treat every person that you're around. They're just these sponges, just taking it all in, and most importantly, they're working out how to view themselves through you, you know, and how to understand themselves through you. There's no greater impact on an adult than what their experiences were like as a child and especially how their needs were met by a caregiver, how that caregiver responded to them, or how much they were there for them, is when they start to internalise things. Because unfortunately for kids, until sort of later in life, like teenage years, really, your whole world is your parents or caregivers and your family. So when things go wrong, or when you, you know, sometimes I when I used to work with in family therapy when there was a divorce or a separation of parents, when kids are young, like, you know, I was working with 7,8,9, year olds, it was incredibly sad how often kids thought that divorce was their fault, because the only way they make sense of the world because they're quite egotistical. They haven't quite worked out how to take other perspectives or understand other other people's perspectives. Yet they just understand things through their little world, which is just them. So if something terrible happens, their only way of comprehending that is because it's something that I did. So those understanding as a parent, as a caregiver, that you're having a huge impact on how a kid sees themselves and and how they perceive themselves. So if, if, as long as you can get forward that idea that you are loved, you are good, yes, you do bad things. You know, this isn't about just accepting kids behaviors all the time, but it's that, that really hard thing, but that really important thing, of of how it is for you as a parent to stay regulated, to listen to your child and their needs, to to sit with them in their discomfort, and also when they do something bad or unsafe, that you're able to say that what you did was bad, but you are good. You know, because that message, what you did was bad, but you were good, turns into later in life. As an adult, the self talk of, I am worthy, I am good enough, verse, If what they just hear is, you know, I can't believe you've done this again, like you just do this every time. They're gonna grow up with that idea that I am bad and that becomes, then as an adult, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I'm unlovable. And that becomes that negative self talk that that that adult may experience all the time.
Rune Pedersen
So we got some of the psychology down, the language of schemas and core beliefs and cognitive loops, and I'm very relieved to hear that talking to myself isn't a sign of madness, actually, if anything, it's just how we stay sane, although it can spiral a bit. So I really wonder what happens when you then strip away the noise of modern life, no screens, no one to talk to, and it's just you alone for 70 days, perhaps in the Tasmanian wildlife. That's exactly what Corinne Ooms did. She took part in the SBS Alone Australia, surviving completely on her own, far away from the rest of the world. So I caught up with her over the phone to hear her perspective.
Corinne
I don't think we realise how noisy our thoughts and our life is until we step out of it. But it's so difficult to step out of it, because our phone is just right there, and our emails is right there, and it's so easy if you're bored, rather than just sitting and sitting and being with yourself and connecting with yourself, it's so easy to distract yourself through Doom scrolling and just jump on social media and and distract yourself. And then with that, I think I didn't realise how much influence that had in my thoughts and my narratives. Like we're like a sponge, and despite our best efforts, we get influenced by all these different things, friends, families, social media, movies, telling you what you have to be and what to think and how to dress and how to act, and until it's like what's what is mine? What's my thoughts? What is my narrative? And what do I actually want out of my life for myself, not what's expected of me, and what's, you know, societal expectations.
Rune Pedersen
What did the process look like for your thoughts, then, from going from one narrative to the next narrative, like, how did you go from from the different narratives to then coming out on the other end? Was there a moment?
Corinne
It was more it was more like I was a slate, that was wiped clean. So I went out there full of distractions, full of noises, full of external pressures and external narratives, and then I went in there, and it took a while for that to just kind of empty away, and for those thought patterns and those thought habits to to break out of them, and it was almost like a reset. I was able to slowly rethink about what I did actually want in life, from a new almost like a blank slate.
Rune Pedersen
Did you have moments out there where, where you know you had to sort of give yourself an inner pep talk or similar, and, and how did that look like for you?
Corinne
Yeah, I wouldn't say I gave myself an inner pep talk, but I definitely did remember situations and scenarios from my past or how I wanted myself to be like I did visualise that. So for example, I would remember my mum a lot, and my mum died when she was 46 and she was ill most of her life, and she was an incredibly strong woman, and you wouldn't guess she was sick because she was, she hid it well. I would remember her, and I'd remember how she approached life and her, how she was playful and took joy out of the small things. And yeah, that that filled me with strength, without needing to pep talk myself, that just remembering that and imagining myself doing the same, you know, getting powering through and enduring the suffering to come out the other side with, with a smile and enjoying The small things again, and also i i know that pain is temporary, whatever I suffer, whatever suffering I was experiencing out there, I knew it was temporary, so I was able to look at myself almost as in a third person, and almost like a it was almost like an experiment, because I was experiencing feelings and thoughts and changes to my body that I had never experienced before. And that was fascinating. If you remove the me, the i from it, you know, and that the pain is happening to me. It was actually quite, really, quite interesting to observe. So, yeah, I started looking at the hard times as a, with curiosity and an interest and like hmm and wonder how far I could go? We're not designed to be alone. And even being an only child that grew up in the Highlands of Scotland with I spent most of my childhood playing alone. Even I got lonely out there and started creating imaginary friends with quals and and cameras were not designed to be alone, and that was part of my realisation when coming out there just how important community and friendship and connection is to me. And I think that's a really lovely takeaway to have.
Rune Pedersen
However compelling the thought most of us don't really have an option to retreat into the wilderness, not for an extended period at least, so instead of stepping away from the noise, what if we step directly into it, slow it down, shape it or even transform it into something beautiful, and that's exactly what Thabani Tshuma does. As a poet, writer and performer. Self talk is more than survival. It's where he finds his meaning. So I sat down with Thabani and slowed down time for just a moment. The podcast is about communications and how humans talk, and then this episode in particular is about how humans talk to themselves, and I would love to hear your take, you know, on being a writer and a performer in writing poetry, what kind of self talk you have in that process? What, how do you talk to yourself in that process?
Thabani
I think for me, a lot of, a lot of my poems are parts of me just chopped up and re-written into stanzas, and I think poetry does a really good job of like reflecting parts of you and showing them to other people.
Rune Pedersen
Writing poetry feels like a version of self talk, and you say, yeah, it's a chopped up version of yourself,
Thabani
yeah. And I guess it's about exploring kind of that inner dialog, poetry, for me has always been a really clear space and a really safe space where I can, just like, play with ideas and play with thoughts, play with feelings, see the different shapes that they can take. It's a little like sandbox environment for feelings and for kind of that inner narrative. And I think with self talk, it is. It's not something we're ever taught to articulate or even to like frame. It's like, where do we where do we learn how to talk to ourselves. It's never, there's never, like a formal instruction. We kind of just pick it up along the way. So I guess poetry has become my method of self talk, or I guess my method of understanding my internal dialogue.
Rune Pedersen
Great, let's say you're, you're writing on a particular topic that you're sort of working on. You're, you're working it through the poem. Do you change your perspective? Do you evolve somehow by going through that process?
Thabani
Yes, I think so. It depends on the poem and depends on the feeling. Because I think there is always a sense of discovery in the journey. I feel like it was a piece of writing advice that I got years ago. I can't remember who said it, but they said that you should always try to have your poem end somewhere different from where it began. And I think I. Taking that approach to writing a poem, for me, always creates a sense of discovery, because it's like, Okay, say I'm anxious about something, and I'm like, oh, I want to write a poem about this anxious feeling. I start in that space of anxiety, and then in the process of writing the poem, it's like, Okay, where is it gonna take me? And it's not necessarily, like, always a resolution of that feeling. Sometimes it's just like a reframing of the feeling. And then I think my favorite part is sharing the poem with someone else, because that always offers a new set of eyes, and that always leads to something that I wouldn't have seen or didn't see, and it's like, oh, I didn't think of it in that way, but now that you but now that you mention it, I intentionally wrote it that way because I'm a genius.
Rune Pedersen
Yeah, I think a lot about, you know, the sentence like, you know, don't talk. Just do like, you know, we live in a society that's like, very focused on on that. Like, you know, there's parts of me that's like that situationally as well, right? But for being a host on the podcast, it's about communication. I also just think that communication is action. Talking is action, right? Writing the words is, that's an action. That's an action? Yeah,
Thabani
100% and I think that's why I find myself always returning to poetry, because I, I see that intrinsic value in words. And I'm like, how, how can you not see just how beautiful and like, magical this stuff can be?
Rune Pedersen
What's the magic of language?
Thabani
Everything? It's the the alchemy of it is words take an experience, a feeling, and they transmute it into something else, which like it's it can only be described as magic, like It blows my mind every time that like I'm taking something that happened to me, I'm turning it into a poem, and then speaking that poem, or sharing that poem. And then you are taking your experience, and your experience is blending with my experience through the poem, and that's creating a secret third experience that you know, neither of us would have experienced without that conduit of words or poetry that connected like our two distinct realities, and then words are the portals that break down the illusion of self and reveal to us that, oh, I'm just like You, and you're just like me and we're all just in this cosmic soup together.
Rune Pedersen
That was beautiful. It's really a very powerful thing.
Thabani
I think words and like communication is this powerful magic that we have access to but a lot of us aren't using it with intention and using it with care. I wish more people would see just how powerful it is, and I think that would really shift the way we not only talk to ourselves, but talk to each other, is in knowing like if you if we could fully see just what a magical thing we are wielding, we would use it with a lot more consideration and as an extension of that, we would do a lot more magical things and connect in a lot more magical ways, the way that we talk to ourselves and how that influences not only how we perceive the world, but how. How we behave in the world. It's like with self fulfilling prophecy. You know when, if you tell yourself you are this, then eventually you become that, just through affirming that narrative.
Rune Pedersen
Have you lived that yourself?
Thabani
Yeah, so I was addicted to various substances. A lot of the work that we do in recovery is about reframing your internal narratives and looking at what motivates your behaviors? Like a big question is like, what's the payoff? Over the years, I've learned to see addiction as a response, you know, it's a response to the problem. And for me, the problem was perception, my perception of self in the world. So as a response to that perception problem, I would use substances to try and solve that so in that journey, I went to rehab, which was the greatest thing I've ever done, not at the time, at the time, I hated it deeply, but coming out on the other side, I feel like I learned so much about myself, and to kind of bring it back to poetry, it's that freedom to explore all parts of myself without without any judgment, without any like labels or any any constraints. It's like a free space of self exploration, which I think is really cool.
Rune Pedersen
And the voice in your head, how did it sound? Sound pre rehab and post rehab?
Thabani
Pre rehab, absolute chaos. Just imagine like a loud, screaming child running around the room. And post it sounds more like I do now, calm, grounded, connected, a lot slower. I think, I think that's been one of the biggest takeaways, is I'm a lot more patient with myself, and the voice in my head is a lot more patient and a lot slower. If you think about it like from a fundamental like perspective. The world is shaped by language. It's shaped by how how we label things, how we categorise things, how we create processes, how we create like systems of functioning. It's all rooted in language and how we communicate those ideas to each other. Analogy, it's like we literally have the power to re-write our reality, and we just don't. Through language, through words, we can reshape and redefine what we collectively say is real, and in that, we can change our entire realities and change the way the world operates, in the way that we operate, which is just like infinite possibilities.
Rune Pedersen
How humans talk is produced and written by Rune Pedersen from Onomato People, and Stefan Delatovic. Post Production and Sound Design was done by Dom Evans and James Custer at Earsay. The SBS team is Joel supple, Max Gosford and Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang.
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