By Patrick Robinson
This isn’t an original idea, but everyone, including you, has that voice in their head. Sometimes we go on automatic and just perform tasks as routine without talking ourselves through it. But more often than not, and especially when it comes to learning something new, trying something unfamiliar, looking back at past mistakes, thinking about relationships, or just dealing with the cascade of chemicals that our own bodies produce in our brains… We talk to ourselves.
But as we are forming our personalities, science says largely before age 6, we pick up lessons about how to think, behave, respond, and interact. Those lessons, often in the form of words from our parents or siblings, stay with us and get reinforced over time. We are trained to be that way and those words, and the feelings that go with them become a well worn brain pathway.