For many, talking to yourself is weird. Why the hell would I talk to myself? I’m me and I already know what I’m thinking, duh. Fair enough, but you’re actually really missing out. Talking to yourself has its perks.

Because of the constant flow of failures (yes we all have them), we live in a world of better-than-us-ism. Who is it that you see on the big screen? A scrawny, overweight, unintelligent, too short, too tall individual like yourself? No, it’s the hero of the movie— the Superman or the Mary Sue. The problem with humans is that we’re just so suggestible.

For example, I was watching a movie and the protagonist grabbed a drink, so I grabbed my drink. He raised his hand after lowering the drink, so I raised my hand in exact same fashion. The crazy thing is that I didn’t even know I was doing it! Maybe it’s just me being easily influenced, but I think this isn’t as rare we think it is. We’re constantly sympathizing with characters in movies and feeling for them, even though none of it is real. Because of all this, we’re constantly comparing ourselves to impossibly incredible characters and walking away with these unrealistic expectations.

That isn’t even to mention the fact that we mostly hear about stars instead of regular people. But anyhow, I digress. We should talk to ourselves to combat what we hear externally as well as internally. When you’re good at something, people tell you that you have a certain quality that allows you to be good at it; the implication is that it came naturally. Dr. Carol Dweck talks about this in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success. We constantly take for granted the effort we have to put into getting to where we want to be.

We each live through hard days and that’s part of the human condition. There’s no escaping work; we just have to live with it. If we can help it, we should find a way to think more positively— therefore we should inject our lives with our own positivity. This is my argument for it. I’ll get into how later.