If you have ever caught yourself talking out loud while hunting for your keys, you most likely looked around immediately to check whether anybody saw you. Psychology says that is the wrong reflex. Saying things out loud is not a sign something is wrong - it is part of how human thinking normally works.

Psychologist Izaskun Bastera puts it plainly: talking to yourself is part of how the brain operates. When you say something aloud, areas tied to language, attention, working memory and executive function activate - the same capacities involved in planning, problem-solving and impulse control. In other words, the mouth helps the brain sort itself out.

The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. An emotion in your head is disordered - it is a ball of feeling, image and fear all at once. To say it out loud, you have to turn it into a sentence. And a sentence demands order: first this, then that, therefore this. That moment of ordering is the step that sits between the feeling and the action. People who skip that step react impulsively, because they had nowhere to pause.

There is one condition and it is decisive - the tone. "If we use positive inner dialogue, it is easier to reduce the emotional intensity, name what we are feeling, process it and react less impulsively," Bastera says. The same technique with brutal self-criticism produces the opposite effect. Repeating out loud how incapable you are is not processing the emotion - it is amplifying it.

It works for decisions too. When the alternatives stay only in your head, they circle round and each one looks equally bad at three in the morning. Spoken, they have to be lined up side by side and the differences surface. "Verbalising an idea forces us to organise the information, consider alternatives and carry out a more reflective process," Bastera explains.

In the Balkans there is an entire culture built around thinking out loud - it is called coffee with a friend, and it is exactly that: taking the tangled ball out of your head in front of somebody who listens. The problem is that the ritual is slowly shrinking into sending a message, and writing is not the same thing. One distinction is worth making: if the voices are experienced as somebody else's rather than your own, that is no longer this mechanism and it calls for a professional conversation.