Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Hello and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and today I’m joined by Dr. Maryellen MacDonald, the Donald P. Hayes, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Dr. MacDonald is a leading cognitive scientist whose work in psycholinguistics explores one of the most fascinating aspects of being human: how we understand, produce, and learn language. Over the course of her career, she has studied language across the lifespan. From children and young adults to older adults and individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease. And her research spans six different languages. In our conversation, we dive into her book More Than Words and explore how talking doesn’t just communicate ideas, but actually sharpens the mind and shapes the way we experience the world. We discuss the science of why naming emotions can calm the brain, how self-talk can help us to focus and pursue our goals, and why something called “desirable difficulties” in talking are so valuable for learning. We also look at the role of talking in childhood development, education, and even in supporting older adults with mild cognitive impairment. This episode is filled with powerful insights into the way that talking transforms our brains, our emotions, and our relationships. So I’m really excited to share it with you. Let’s go ahead and get started.
Well, Maryellen, welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. We’re very delighted to have you on the show.

Maryellen Macdonald Thanks so much, Shay. I’m really happy to be here.

Shay Good. People might ask, “Wait, why are you talking about talking on a Conversations on Healing podcast?” But what they’ll learn today is, it’s incredibly important how talking impacts things like emotional self-regulation, executive functioning, so there really is a deep relationship to health and healing when they get more insight into your work today. So stay tuned, listeners, it’ll all begin to come together. So, I want to talk about your book that you’ve released. It’s called More Than Words, and in it you describe how talking sharpens the mind and shapes our world. And to begin with, can you share with people who are listening, why talking is so beneficial for us as humans?

Maryellen Right. So you’re absolutely right that people don’t necessarily get that talking is beneficial to the person doing the talking. And I wanted to write this book because those ideas are so hidden. We’re always focused on whether someone else is understanding us, or whether they like us, or so on. But talking- the ability to turn an internal state into some signal, like speech, that someone else can perceive- is a complicated brain process that has these wonderful consequences. In order to talk, we have to focus really hard internally, even if we’re not aware of it. And that focus helps us follow through with our goals, regulate our emotions, sharpen our attention, and many more benefits that we’re just not aware of.

Shay Yes, and I want to talk a little bit about that. So you’ve written that talking really does tune our brains, right? And so, could you explain how naming and verbalizing emotions, as an example, helps to regulate our brains, especially when it comes to calming fear or anger or other intense feelings?

Maryellen Yes, happy to do that. So, when people get upset, they often don’t have a clear idea of what exactly it is they’re feeling. Maybe they are afraid, or they’re angry, or they’re disappointed, or worried, or some combination of all of those. And most of the time, we don’t say exactly how we’re feeling in emotional terms. Why is that? Well, talking is actually hard work, and our face and our voice are carrying a lot of the emotion, and often just instead of saying, “I’m upset,” we say, “It’s so unfair that my brother did blah, blah, blah.” And so, you’re saying the reason why you’re upset and the tone of your voice is conveying that you’re upset. But by not actually carefully naming the emotions we have, we are cheating ourselves out of some clarity about exactly what we’re feeling. Because many people can say they’re upset, but they’re not quite sure exactly what they’re feeling.
If you start listening to people talking about being upset, you’ll sometimes hear them say, “I really can’t explain how I feel,” and that seems very counterintuitive. We usually can explain all sorts of things, but explaining our emotions turns out to be hard. Doing the work of saying exactly what it is you’re feeling helps us get a grip on what we’re feeling. “Oh, it’s really that I’m both angry and disappointed,” for example. And having done that, the act of naming the emotions regulates the limbic system, which is part of the brain that deals with fight-or-flight kinds of situations, and calms down the limbic system so that we’re no longer in absolute panic state and we can think through the consequences and the issues that are all surrounding this upset sort of situation. So it gains clarity and it gains calmness in order to act a bit more rationally rather than utter panic.

Shay Great. And I also want to clarify for our listeners that we often think of talking as speech, but you’ve pointed out in your book that you’re actually including in your definition writing and sign language. And so, I’m curious if you could share more about how you are defining talking in the way that you are using it in your work.

Maryellen Yes. So obviously speech and writing and sign language are different in certain ways, but I group them all together because they all have these talking benefits, and I use “talking” as a way to convey that group. In the scientific field, people call it “language production,” but that sounds sort of yucky in a book for general audiences. So, I decided to call it talking. So writing in a journal, for example, and naming your emotions- “I was so angry when my brother said…” and writing the word angry, that has the same beneficial effect as saying to a friend or a therapist, “I was so angry,” using your speech, and even saying it inside your head, if you can name your emotions and do the full- don’t cut corners like you could sometimes if you’re just talking to yourself, but saying it clearly in your head will have these beneficial effects too.

Shay Yeah, that’s a very important point that you raise in the book is the value of self-talk, or that inner dialogue, that kind of internal mantra that most people- not everyone says they have that happening, but the vast majority of humans seem to indicate that they do. And one of the things you describe is that that self-talk, or inner dialogue actually has a lot of benefits: that it’s been shown to help focus our attention, to improve our executive functioning as I was mentioning, to help us to regulate our emotions as you’re describing, to increase the chances that people will pursue their goals and stay focused on those goals specifically. And so I’d like to hear more about what you’ve learned about the benefits of self-talk and why that’s so important for us.

Maryellen Yes. So, the one place in the general public where the idea of self-talk is pretty widely known, I think, is in athletes, and athletes get special coaching to use their self-talk to say, “Focus on the court, ignore the crowd or keep going, I’m strong, I’m strong, I’m strong” as we’re doing a marathon and there’s all kinds of coaching that tells athletes to do this, and all sorts of research that shows that, in the athletic world, self-talk increases focus and perseverance and tunes athletes to do better at whatever it is athletic events that they are doing. What they don’t do in that research is explain why the self-talk has the effect it has. But, being a person who studies talking, I can look for the other literature and conduct other studies to understand why that happens. It all comes down to the focusing aspects of naming something and talking.

We just talked about it with respect to emotion, but also when we are saying something that isn’t particularly emotional but instructional: “I have to talk to Karen later today” or “I have to finish that report,” or whatever, the act of getting all those words from our memories that we have a hundred thousand or 50,000 or thousands of thousands of words in our memory and getting just those words: “I have to talk to Karen today.” Seven words out of 50,000 or more is real focus activity behind the scenes. Our brain doesn’t let us know how hard we’re working there. And by focusing on that message, we’re more likely to remember it, think about what we want to say to Karen when we have to talk to her later, and so on. So the act of doing the work to get the words, and put them in order, and tell our vocal tract or our hands to do the writing or the talking or speaking, all creates focus in our brain. And that’s been monetized and used in athletics for decades now. But you don’t absolutely have to have a coach to tell you to do that. You can kind of write a post-it note, use self-talk and use it in the grocery store or use it when you say you have to finish the report, and so on.

Shay And your work also has an interesting relationship with listening, right? There’s a lot therapeutically around how we listen, and are we active listeners, and attentive listeners? And one of the things that you point out, that I had not read previously in your book is that it’s actually easier to listen than it is to talk- that it takes a lot more cognitive work and brainpower for us to formulate an idea. And then you even go so far as to describe the different parts of a conversation that take more energy. So, initiating a new thought or idea takes more energy, so we have to kind of prepare, and there’s certain things that the brain does to get you ready for that, whereas the tail end of a statement or thought is a little bit easier. And so, there’s these different ways that the brain is actually preparing itself as we are about to talk. And what’s so interesting is, in therapeutic fields for many years, the focus has been on being a good listener and how we can all be better listeners- which is of course incredibly valuable without a doubt. But your work is raising this whole other idea of how it is actually requiring a lot of energy and brainpower and skill to communicate using talking, and so attention must be paid to that as well. And so, I’d like for you to share what you’ve learned about both listening and then the energy required to talk and communicate.

Maryellen Sure. So, let’s just start for a minute. In the therapist’s office, it’s important to teach people to be good listeners, but definitely often in the therapist’s office, the therapist’s goal is to try to get the person to talk, not to give long instructions about how the client should be thinking about things, but to get the client to name their own path. So, the therapist will say, “And how does that make you feel?” And that’s getting the client to name the emotions and “What do you think about that?” And all of that talking is itself therapeutically beneficial. But, of course we also need to listen. And recently I was reading some work about police officers needing to listen, and one of the ideas in that work was that police officers, by virtue of having kind of a routine- people call the police, they talk to the people who called- the police often think that they know what somebody’s going to say, and they often don’t listen to the end of what the people are saying, because they figure they know it.

But we know from the way talking works that the end of the sentence, or paragraph, or whatever you’re saying, typically contains the new stuff. And it’s exactly what people should be listening to, because that’s the new information that the police officer, or the therapist, or anybody needs to know- because that’s the new thing that they need to be reacting to. And so, listening is so much easier and we often can predict in certain circumstances what people are going to say, that we sometimes short circuit the process and just assume that the person is going to end in a certain way and aren’t carefully listening all the way through. Now, you asked me also to talk about the amount of work it is to do talking versus listening. And we know that talking is both harder and slower, and people can sometimes predict what somebody’s going to say because talking is slower, and the listening is faster, and they have this extra time to guess: “Oh, that’s what they’re going to end with.” And many people listen to podcasts faster than the person is talking, maybe even this podcast. And that’s because talkers talk at a certain rate, and listeners can listen up to 50% faster. It’s just an easier job. So, talking is slow, it’s effortful, and this is what I call and what educators call a “desirable difficulty.” By virtue of being extra work, we get these extra benefits.

Shay And you talk about that desirable difficulty and how that can be used in education: that the very act of working something through strengthens your learning. And so, how do you see that actually playing out in our educational system, some of what you’re learning through your work and how we could as educators, how could people be using that in the classroom as an example?

Maryellen Yeah, it’s amazing how beneficial talking is for learning. Anything you need to learn pretty much is going to be learn better if you talk about it. And I mean I speak about it, write about it, whatever. And yet, our educational system in the United States- and in most countries really emphasizes the student shutting up and not talking. We have this idea that students, by sitting there and paying attention and not talking, are going to have knowledge just poured into their head from somebody talking to them, giving a lecture or reading a book. And the reality is that that’s a really inefficient way to learn. Learning happens not in the moment we’re immediately understanding something, but later over time, if we continue to interact with those concepts. Overnight, a brain structure called the hippocampus will help consolidate what we’ve encountered and heard or read, and put it into our permanent memory.

And the hippocampus doesn’t tell us whether we’ve learned anything or not. When it’s done, its work overnight. And so, teachers and students both think that they’re learning something when they haven’t yet learned it, They’ve understood what the teacher said, and they get this feeling like with learning, there’s this research that’s called “feeling of learning” versus “actual learning” and the feeling of learning research shows that both teachers and students feel that when they’re listening or reading, learning is happening. But it turns out not to be true: it’s the talking, or otherwise doing something with it that is the engine of learning. And so that’s both exciting, because it’s an important way that we could be boosting learning of kids of all ages- and adults too in universities and so forth. But it’s also discouraging, because the educational establishment is really, really focused on not doing that kind of learning.

Shay Right? Absolutely. And you also discuss in the book that there’s a lot of implications here for parenting as well, and that parents are often told that the number of words their child hears is critically important, which it is important. It’s not to dismiss that, and you don’t disagree with that, but you also highlight that a child’s own talking skills are very important and that in today’s world with more devices than ever before, right, it’s often the case that kids aren’t getting as much opportunity to just be talking with other human beings and are very often passive listeners. So, I’m interested to get your take on what can parents do who are listening to this podcast and are saying, “Oh, wait a minute. It’s critical as my child’s brain is developing that they’re talking, that they’re writing, that they’re actively engaged and not passive sponges.” And you talk about this in our older models of infancy and understanding you’re just a sponge and you take everything in, but you actually speak about that in a very different way. So, I want to give you a chance to address some of those points as well.

Maryellen Sure, sure. So, before I start, let me just say that I’ve talked to a lot of teachers in the U.S. in elementary school for little kids and middle school for older kids. And the older ones report- and this is just anecdotal, but it’s very telling, I think- how kid conversation has changed so much. Before- in the old days before everybody had a phone, kids would come into the classroom and they’d be yakking to each other until the teacher said, “Okay, time to get started.” Now kids come into the classroom, and they sit there and they don’t talk to each other. They’re all each looking at their phones and they’re not having these kinds of conversations. When it comes time to actually converse with someone, according to teachers, they’re less practiced at it. And because talking is a skill, it’s a hard thing to do actually, and they really need that kind of practice.

So, as you said, the amount of language input that children, little children and medium-sized children is extremely important. But their own talking practice, many studies are showing- newer studies than the older ones about lots of language input. The newer studies are showing that the child’s own talking is at least a good predictor of their language development in the early years, their readiness for school at around five or six or seven, depending on which kind of school system you’re going to, and their success in learning to read, at least in English, and their school success for years to come. Because, as we said, talking is a brain tuner. It is letting the child do the difficult work of turning their own internal ideas into an external signal, like speech or writing. And so, talking is a learning booster in little kids as well as through formal schooling, as well.

And so, then what is a parent to do? First of all, get a new sense of what’s going on. It’s not just language input or input from watching something on an iPad or on TV. Those are not all equivalent. What really kids need is conversation, and conversation that allows kids to form their own opinions, and offer things, and think of what to say themselves. All of that is the desirable difficulty that’s tuning their language skills, and their ability to think, and their ability to focus on what they need to do, which is an important part of schooling eventually.

Shay And you talk about, with very young children, how babbling and all these things really do serve a purpose, and that there’s this very active process as we’re acquiring and developing the capacity to talk and to communicate that’s occurring, and that it’s very relational, and that parents actually have to pick up on some of those cues. So, I want to give you a chance to talk about that piece of your work as well.

Maryellen Sure. So, we all probably know that little kids, in any language and in any place in the world, say- practice flapping their mouths or their hands or everything. Say- “ba-ba-ba-ba” is a very common phrase that little infants say. And it is both practice, getting all the moving parts of being able to speak, but it’s also really social. And parents don’t always realize that it’s actually a signal to the parents to talk to the kid. And so, the kid says, “ba- ba,” or even says “ba-ba” to a toy, and it’s not directed at another human, but it’s added to a toy. And so, that’s a situation which some parents, who are sensitive to the child’s behavior, will name the toy for them and say, “Oh, that’s your bear, your bear.” And they say it in a way that’s really engaging, and it emphasizes what the thing is. “The bear” is the emphasized part for the child. And these special moments, in which the child has drawn the parent’s attention to something- the bear, the toy bear- and the parents are naming it, are really perfect learning moments for the child. And evidence shows that the more that parents do that, the better the child’s vocabulary grows.

Now, of course, parents can’t spend all of their waking moments naming things for the child, and I’m not suggesting that parents do that. Parents have endless numbers of advice about what they’re supposed to be doing, and parents feel under a lot of pressure these days. And so, I don’t want to add to more pressure there, but it is true that situations in which the child and the adult are going back and forth in a kind of conversation, even when the child is just doing babbling, are really important brain tuning moments. And so, if the parent hands the kid an iPad, or the parent is sitting on a phone, that’s conveying something very different. It’s not giving the child an opportunity to talk, and maybe even suggesting that sitting on a phone is better than the ability to have a conversation, which might not be a message for the kids.

Shay Right. And it also explains what you’re anecdotally sharing about teachers who’ve been in the field for many, many years, noticing the change of how previously many years prior, kids would come in and be chatting with each other, and now they come in much more quiet and focused on a device. And that if they’re not learning from the beginning, that level of interaction in their communication, they might not be building that skill as effectively.

Maryellen Yeah.

Shay You also spend some time in your book talking about other species and how they communicate. And you even give an example of a few special case examples, like one dog who learned how to identify a thousand different toys that had different names, which is impressive. So I’d be interested to hear you share a little bit more about the unique use of language that human beings seem to have, but then what other animals are able to do and where you see some of the distinct kind of differences.

Maryellen So, there’s overlap and differences in the way that we are communicating with each other and the way that other species are communicating. So, I talk in the book about species that learn to eavesdrop on each other and take advantage of another species’ call. So, I talk about, for example, Diana monkeys in West Africa who call about airborne predators like eagles, and on the ground predators, like leopards, and they have different calls. And all the Diana monkeys know to look up when the eagle call is made and look down when the leopard call is made. But there are other monkeys, other species of monkeys in the trees, and even a bird- a Horned Bill that is also inhabiting the same tree, that also learn to take advantage of these calls. And they’re highly motivated to avoid these predators, and they learn, through exposure, hearing the other monkeys call, to actually figure out something about the information in the call of the monkey.

And there are certainly plenty of birds that do this, that make calls that other animals do too. So, it’s a widespread phenomenon of eavesdropping on another species. And what I suggested in the book was that this ability, if you pair it with a lot of training and a lot of motivation, could help certain smart animals learn a bit of understanding human language. And the dog Chaser, that I talked about, who knows the names of over a thousand toys, is a great example of that. And she was a border collie, and she has a huge motivation to herd things. And so, her trainer, who was animal psychologist, trained her to herd and fetch her a thousand toys. And so she learned the names of all those toys because she learned to figure out the signals of another species. And also, there are some apes who have learned some amount of spoken language, and their abilities are characterized by the researchers as being something like what a 2-year-old human does.

And so, those are really impressive. And so, there’s this kind of continuity between our ability to understand language- which is much greater- and these other animals, which is a really decent subset of that. But the difference between the animals comes out in the talking. These animals who were intensely trained to talk- like the apes and the dog- don’t actually say anything in reply. That is, they will do sign language, or push the apes, or push things on a computer program to get something. Like, they’ll make a sign for “banana” to get a banana, and they’ll make a sign for “apple” to get an apple. But even the researchers, who thought who were trying to promote the animals the most say, “Well, it’s just different. It’s like doing a trick. Where a dog has a rolling over trick to get a treat, the apes- being smarter- have a trick for each of the treats they want.”

There’s signing “apple” to get an apple and signing “tickle” to get tickled, because they like that, and that’s a treat for them. So, there’s this difference between understanding, which there’s some continuity between what other species do, and us. A really big difference in the talking side of things, where even animals who can be taught to make some behaviors, like signing “apple” or something, don’t use it in a way that is talking. It’s just to get a treat. And some primate psychologists think that it is some lack of interest or ability to do informing except by their own innate calls. They can make a call for danger that they were inborn to make, but they can’t use anything that they’ve learned from another species, humans, to convey that information.

Shay And I think this will be super interesting as our research and understanding continues to grow, to see what we’ll learn in the future. I know right now, I had read a study recently around whales, and that there was some pretty big breakthroughs in our understanding of what we thought their capacity for communication was, and that now what we’re beginning to see may be their capacity for communication. So, there’s some thinking that I’ve heard around: one, there could be communication happening outside of our auditory range that we’re not aware of because we’re not able to perceive or process that information without some kind of assistance. And, that also some of it, like with the whales, they’re saying that there might be a whole form of communication that we’re just barely getting a handle on. It’s just so different from our own. So, I’m just very interested to see what will this look like? What will this conversation look like in 50 years when we have, hopefully, incredibly more research that has been conducted, and we can understand, hopefully even at a deeper level, what’s happening.

Maryellen Absolutely. And those AI-helped whale studies and other kinds of studies are going to continue to be really interesting. Many of the researchers say, “Don’t say it’s language.” The researchers- I think none of them- say it’s like language, but it’s certainly a complex communication system that’s really interesting. And the more we know about talking and listening across species, I think the more we’re going to benefit from understanding what is, and what is not, uniquely human.

Shay Right. Yeah. There’s also been some other research that I’ve heard you discuss that was conducted with elderly adults who have mild cognitive impairment and depression, who received a talking intervention. It was pretty robust: it was five times a week for three years, and researchers found that those in the talking group had better emotional outcomes and didn’t experience the same level of cognitive decline. So, I’d be interested to hear: like, “Oh, in that case,” Why do you think that talking had such a powerful effect?

Maryellen Yes. So, that is a wonderful study, and that lasted for so many years and really tried to be robust. The only other kind of talking intervention study I’ve seen was only a few months long. And so, it’s great to see research like that. Talking has the effects for people who are cognitively impaired, or just healthy elderly adults, for the same reason. It has effects in infants, and for people who are in middle age, or youth, or whatever. It’s because talking is a desirable difficulty, and it is a brain-training, strengthening, cognition-boosting kind of activity, and it’s really a wonderful thing. But, in many modern societies, elderly adults no longer have that sort of opportunity. They are retired, they don’t go into work and have the work conversations every day, friends move away, or they go off to see their grandkids for two months or whatever it is.

And there’s less social interaction and less opportunity to talk. And, at least in the U.S. there’s not a huge infrastructure to help people continue to do that talking. And that’s why these talking intervention studies are so interesting, because they show that when the elderly adults have the opportunity to talk more- and this intervention wasn’t so much somebody comes to talk to them, although, of course it’s a back-and-forth conversation. The intervention was really the researcher coming and asking them questions- the elderly adult questions- to encourage the elderly adult to do a lot of talking in the hour that they had each day. And it works for all the same reasons. It’s tuning your brain- the focus and the hard work of making an idea come out that you have in your head, and recalling things from memory, and all of that.

Shay Yeah, it’s really fascinating. And another piece that you raised that I think is quite interesting for our listeners, is that this concept: that talking actually intensifies ideas. So, that means if we speak a very negative opinion, or even use hate speech, that it can actually strengthen that position. So, you think about this with social media: there’s a lot of applications of this. And so, given that talking is an intensifier, what can we do individually to kind of slow ourselves down and think very carefully about, “What we do want to amplify?” So, I’d like to hear you discuss this idea as well.

Maryellen Yeah, it’s such a conundrum, because it really is an intensifier, and people who say, “Well, that guy’s a jerk,” really are intensifying their feeling that that guy is a jerk, and so forth. And we do need to stop and think about what it is that we are putting out there, certainly on social media. And I’d like to think that individuals have the opportunities to make better choices, and sometimes we do, but talking is such a spontaneous thing that sometimes it’s really hard and not desirable- in fact, when you’re in the middle of a conversation- to stop yourself and go back-and-forth. So, I would say what an individual could do is, in situations where they can pause- like when they’re posting to social media- it is good to pause and think about whether you are amplifying something that you would not want to hear if you were on the receiving end of it. But also, I think there’s a role for society in terms of moderating discussion boards or social media for things that are truly horrific, like hate speech, and so forth. And some kinds of places are moderated, and some places are less so. And some places have decided that they’re not going to pay to have moderators fact-check or check on things. And I think that is a shame.

Shay Yeah, because on this show, we discuss a lot of ideas that can help people to heal, that can help people to benefit the quality of their life, and hopefully improve how they feel on a day-to-day basis. When we step back and look at your work, we’ve highlighted a few core ideas: things like the importance of self-talk, defining very particular messages that you communicate to yourself can have lots of benefits, including performance. We’ve talked about how talking helps us to focus our attention, how it can improve executive functioning. So, for people that are struggling- especially a lot of young people, teenagers these days are struggling a lot with developing that skill of executive functioning- and recognizing that writing and talking, these are ways that you can actually strengthen your focus, and that can have benefits. And I know there’s a number of other benefits, and so, I’m interested: when you think about, “Here I am on a Conversations on Healing podcast and we’re talking about talking,” What do you identify as some of the benefits of your work that you’ve learned, that you’re like, “I apply these in my own life, or I encourage this with people that I love”?

Maryellen Yeah. Well, I absolutely talk through things a lot more in my head. I like going for a walk, and I talk in my head during the walk. Sometimes I listen to music and so forth, or a podcast, but there’s evidence- it’s not my research, but there’s evidence- that doing some other activity while you are talking to yourself is extremely beneficial. So, walking and talking is very beneficial. I saw an article- it wasn’t a research article, it was something in the newspaper about a therapist who comes to clients’ homes, and they cook together. So, it’s another activity, and then they’re talking. And I don’t know how good the research is about that, but it fits the mold of, while you’re doing this other thing- whether it’s knitting, or working in the wood shop, or walking, or whatever- thinking to yourself about what’s important to you and your goals, and how you might follow through with them.

Those turn out to be really useful. And I try to do that- take advantage of self-talk while doing other things- because I think the research suggests that having another action going on, like knitting or walking, is a good thing. So, that’s one. Another is, I try not to finish people’s sentences when I’m the listener and I think I can predict what they’re saying. I try to recognize it while talking is slower. I want to listen all the way to the end, and I want to not finish their sentences for them. Everybody does it some of the time, but everybody knows somebody who does it- it feels like all of the time, and it’s not very pleasant. I do write down what it is that I am thinking and worrying about. There’s huge, huge research about the benefits of keeping a journal, and physically writing it out, more than just thinking about it in your head, is probably beneficial in terms of follow-through.

Because, if you’re thinking about it in your head, you think, “Oh yeah, I’ll get to that. That’s important, but I’ll get to that.” Whereas, if you have the discipline to sit down 10 minutes every morning, or whatever, and write in your journal about what’s important, it becomes more of an external habit, and you get more follow-through. And I have to confess, I do not write in my journal every day, but I do know the benefits of it. And when the situation is kind of fraught, I definitely take the advantage of writing something down about something that’s important to me. And so, I try to use talking a lot in my head, practicing if I need to, speaking, and then writing it down whenever I feel like I need some extra clarity or preparation or help, because it is a help.

Shay Yeah. Those are all great suggestions and ideas for our listeners. Is there anything else that you feel would be important to share with people that are tuning in today about the power of talking that maybe we haven’t had a chance to cover?

Maryellen How about, let’s talk about finding things in the grocery store. Somebody was just telling me something the other day-

Shay That was fun in your book.

Maryellen -that they wander around the grocery store. Their grocery store decided to reorient everything and moved everything and, “Trauma, where is everything? I’m wandering around, I can’t find what I want.” And they were wandering around saying, “Deodorant, deodorant, deodorant.” Which is a funny thing to say in the grocery store, but they were absolutely convinced that it was helping them to find focus, and find- in this visual changed environment- what it is that they were looking for. And the studies back that up: that actually saying “keys,” if you’re looking for your keys or “deodorant,” if you’re in the grocery store and you want this product called deodorant, that that helps focus, and helps you look in the visual environment more carefully as you’re wandering the aisles or looking on the shelves for what you’re doing. So, that’s part of it- it’s a little fun example of how talking can really focus your attention on the physical world around you. And so, that’s a very short-term effect. And then, we have these longer term effects that we’ve mentioned already, like writing in your journal, and calming your emotions, and so forth.

Shay Yeah. Great. Well, I think your work is really quite fascinating. And the book that you’ve written, More Than Words, it is written definitely for laypeople, You did that on purpose, so it’s not a difficult book to read, and I think it takes a lot of interesting research and ideas and consolidates them in a way that’s very fun to follow. And so, I appreciate you taking a moment today to crystallize some of those ideas on the podcast. So, thanks so much!

Maryellen Thanks so much for having me. It’s been really fun talking.

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