The Power of Talking to Yourself

The performance benefit of self-talk speaks volumes

I talk to myself all the time.

Usually I’m rehearsing things I want to say during a meeting or I’m reminding myself about the million things going on in the waning days of my kid’s school year.

But sometimes I’ll adopt a strategy increasingly used by elite performers: I’ll tell myself how great I am.

This isn’t meant to be hubristic. Self-talk is a motivational tactic. It’s like turning up the volume of the pump-up anthem in your brain. In many cases, it is used to drown out the negative thoughts that can more easily creep in.

It’s not uncommon today to see top athletes muttering to themselves in the heat of competition. Roger Federer, in the fifth set of the 2018 Australian Open semifinal, was caught on camera self-talking so loudly that the chair umpire thought Federer was talking to him.

No, Federer was only talking to himself.

According to a study from Queen’s University in Canada, humans on average have around 6.5 thoughts per minute, or about 6,000 per day (a widely cited figure places the number at 60,000 per day, but that has never been verified). It’s a lot of thoughts. It’s unclear what portion of these running thoughts are negative (again, a widely cited but not-verified figure says it’s as much as 90 percent). But it is safer to say we reflexively give more importance to negative thoughts or experiences, which tend to stick in our memory. Psychologists refer to this as our negativity bias.

For some people, there is a real, quantifiable benefit to overcoming the negativity bias with positive self-talk.

I recently read a study published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology that tested 126 professional Spanish soccer players on how self-talk might influence their performance in a physical task. The athletes were asked to write down and then verbally repeat three positive self-statements (“I can do this”) and three negative ones (“I always stink at this”) before completing a test of their vertical jump.

As predicted, athletes produced higher leaps and greater jumping power following positive self-talk than when they had been self-critical.

A notable qualifier in the study suggests self-talk can’t just be empty self-platitudes, however. Individuals experienced better results if they were actively thinking about and engaging with their directed verbalizations. The athletes who spent less cognitive energy on the self-talk experienced very little benefit from it. So if you’re going to talk to yourself, really listen to what you have to say.

Another way to see better results from self-talk is to get out of the habit of referring to yourself in the first person. People who motivate themselves with second-person pronouns (“You can do this”) or third-person pronouns (“Come on, Roger”) have been shown to perform better at stressful tasks.

This is thought to be because of what psychologists call “emotional distancing,” or “othering” oneself, which can help manage anxiety and distress. One study in 2017 used neuroimaging techniques and found that individuals who silently talked to themselves in the third person were better at harnessing their emotions in stressful settings than those who self-talked with first-person pronouns.

When are the times that self-talk works best for you? And are there certain mantras or expressions that you consistently come back to? Let me know in comments or privately via email.

And, as usual, if you liked this post, please share it by talking about it — or clicking the “share” button.

Talk to you (and myself) soon,

Zach

Links

The secret sauce to a 4 OT hockey game is mustard … Does micro-dosing make you a better athlete? … FIFA-funded study to investigate whether menstrual cycles could be contributing to rise in knee injuries in women's soccer … The Kenyan runner trying to become first woman to break 4-minute mile … How Plant Sciences Research Is Helping BYU Football … The story of a 77-year-old marathoner being studied for the science of aging … The rapid rise of “illegal” running shoes … Decision by Texas high-school football to allow players to use wearable devices could radically transform America’s favorite sport … What it’s like to drink coffee like Dan Campbell for a day

References

Horcajo, Javier, and Rafael Mateos. "The effects of positive versus negative self-talk on vertical jump in soccer players: The moderating role of need for cognition." Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 46.2 (2024): 73-83.

Moser, Jason S., et al. "Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI." Scientific reports 7.1 (2017): 4519.