Why Talking to Yourself Feels Weird and How to Start

If you’ve ever pressed record on an audio journal for the first time you probably felt a strange sense of hesitation. What am I supposed to say? Who am I talking to? It can feel surprisingly awkward. This initial friction is the single biggest thing that stops people from starting.

The feeling is universal. It’s not a personal failing or a sign that audio journaling isn't for you. It's a predictable outcome of how your brain is wired. Understanding why it feels weird is the first step to overcoming it. Once you see the mechanism at play it's much easier to work around it.

The Missing Listener

The primary reason talking to yourself feels odd is that your brain is a social machine. For hundreds of thousands of years speaking was a tool exclusively for communicating with other people. It evolved in the context of a tribe where your words had immediate consequences and generated immediate feedback. When you speak your brain expects a response. A nod a smile a question or even a frown.

When you speak into your phone you get silence. This lack of feedback is jarring. Your brain sends out a signal and waits for one in return. When it doesn't arrive the conversational circuit feels broken. It’s like throwing a ball against a wall made of thick foam. The ball just drops. There is no satisfying bounce back to continue the rhythm.

This is a deeply ingrained instinct not a conscious choice. We are not built to monologue into the void. We are built for conversation a dance of call and response. So the first step is to simply acknowledge this. To recognize that feeling weird is the correct biological response. It's not a sign you are doing something wrong. It's a sign your brain is working exactly as it was designed to. You are not trying to fix a flaw you are just teaching an old tool a new trick.

The Performance Trap

Another layer to the awkwardness is the idea of performance. When we speak even to ourselves we often have an imaginary audience in our heads. We have a sense of being judged even if the judge is just a future version of ourselves who might listen back to the recording.

This creates pressure. Pressure to be coherent. To be interesting. To sound smart or insightful. This is the same instinct that makes you rehearse a difficult conversation in your head or carefully craft the first sentence of an important email. You are trying to get the script right before you deliver it.

But thinking isn't a script. Real thought is messy. It circles back on itself. It makes illogical leaps. It's full of half formed ideas and contradictions.

Writing forces you to clean this mess up. You select words carefully and structure them into sentences and paragraphs. Speaking out loud can feel like you're supposed to do the same thing but in real time without a backspace key. This is a trap. It causes you to filter your thoughts before they are even fully formed.

The entire point of an audio journal is to capture the messy part. It's to get the raw material of your mind into the open before you polish it or throw it away. If you try to perform you will censor yourself just as much as you do when writing. This is why many people eventually find that speaking is more honest than writing. They learn to let go of the internal performer and just let the thoughts flow as they are.

How to Get Started

So how do you get past this initial wall of awkwardness? You have to retrain your brain. You do this by systematically lowering the stakes until they are effectively zero.

Don't start by trying to unpack a deep personal problem or outline a grand new idea. That's like trying to learn to swim by jumping into the deep end of the ocean. Start in the shallow calm water where you can stand up.

For your first few recordings pick up your phone and simply describe the room you are in. Just list the objects you see out loud. "There is a wooden desk. A black laptop sits on top of it. Next to it is a white coffee mug." That's it. It’s impossible to get this wrong. There is no performance. You are just observing and reporting. You are teaching your brain that your voice can be used without an audience.

Or try narrating a simple task. Describe your breakfast. Not your feelings about it. Just the facts. "I am eating toast. It has butter on it. I also have a cup of coffee." This seems trivial perhaps even silly but it serves a critical purpose. It gets you used to the act of speaking without pressure to be profound. You are creating a new neural pathway where your voice is a tool for private thought not public communication.

Another powerful trick is to set a timer for just one minute. The only goal is to talk until the timer goes off. You can talk about anything at all. The weather. A show you watched last night. A boring meeting you sat through at work. The low time commitment removes the intimidating pressure of filling a vast empty space. Anyone can talk for sixty seconds.

After a few days of these low stakes exercises your brain will start to adapt. It learns that this form of speaking has a different purpose. It's not for communication with others. It's a tool for your own thinking. It’s like learning to use a hammer. You don't try to impress the hammer with your technique. You just use it to build something. Eventually you can use it for more complex tasks like solving hard problems by talking to yourself.

The weird feeling eventually fades. It doesn't vanish overnight but it does recede. It gets replaced by a sense of clarity and focus. You begin to notice that you can untangle thoughts much faster by speaking them than by letting them rattle around endlessly in your head. The initial awkwardness is just the price of admission for a powerful new way to think. And it's a small price to pay for the clarity it brings.

Give it a try by answering this for yourself.