Reply To: Tough time listening to myself

[Blue Yugo]

Yes and yes…  It’s worse when I’m tired.  There’s times I realize I’ve been speaking a while and I wonder if I’m even speaking English or have any clue what I’m saying.  Not only when I’m tired, but if my attention is derailed by too much noise, a nearby loud voice or music, etc.  A mouth in motion tends to stay in motion.

One thing I find my brain echoing for me on my good days when I can suspend the chatter is, “You have nothing to say, stop talking.”  I hear it in a Canadian actor’s voice who said it because I got it programmed into my head years ago, and I assigned it a practical use.  I find it useful to latch onto things in other people’s voices saying advice because tricking the brain into accepting it from an external source mimics someone telling me to shut up with all the emotional pain that goes along with someone actually doing so.  I don’t always follow my advice or remember to “listen” to that line, but when I do, it’s a mini triumph.

One other success I tend to have with a practice I adopted more recently is to preface things I say to people with “Feel free to stop me if I’ve said this before….”  To get in the habit of saying that, say it more often than you really need to so maybe you can program your thought stream to remember to say it.  Don’t take offense if the person says “Yes, you’ve told me that a million times!”  Or more often they might just be nice and remind you that you already said something.

Hope you find some of this useful or inspiring to apply to the matter as you experience it.

– Viv

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