The Word Workout

Talking is exercise for our brains.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that you should be walking more steps each day. This advice often accompanies various wearable activity trackers, which both identify a step goal and increase the chances that the wearer meets that goal. I’m wishing we could invent another activity tracker for a different beneficial behavior. My tracker wouldn’t be for walking; it would be for talking. Walking and talking have three big commonalities: They both have proven health benefits, there’s a big range in how much people do them, and they have been declining in our modern society. It’s great that walking has its boosters and activity trackers, but talking also needs a PR campaign and a strategy to increase its prevalence.

Talking Is in Decline

Perhaps you’re skeptical that we need to encourage more talking, especially if you have a relative or coworker who never seems to shut up. Yes, there are still plenty of overtalkers in the world, but when we look across the broader population, we get a different story. A large multi-national study of talking rates shows that while college-aged and middle-aged adults talk a decent amount (saying an average of 12,000 to 16,500 words per day, in these two age groups), tween-teens and people 65 and older average only around 9,000 words per day, barely half of the middle-aged talking rates. And this same study suggests that talking is declining for everyone; we’re probably saying about 3,000 fewer words per day now than 10 years ago. That’s a significant drop.

The Hidden Benefits of Talking

While the value of walking for physical health is well known, the benefits of talking have not been part of our conversation about brain health. We’re so in the dark about the positive effects of talking that I wrote a book about talking’s benefits. I wanted everyone to understand that talking is a mental workout that strengthens our brains. Talking improves attention and follow-through on plans, boosts our learning, helps with understanding our emotions, improves our language comprehension, gives us insight about tricky situations, and more.

Professional athletes are explicitly coached to talk to themselves to reap these benefits and improve their performance. You don’t have to be an athlete to get the rewards of talking, but you do have to talk.

Why Talking Rates Vary

Because talking is so beneficial, it’s important to understand why some groups don’t talk very much. For those 65 and older, a huge factor is retirement, which cuts out all the workplace topics and conversation opportunities that used to come with the job. Unless retirees replace their work-talk with new social activities, they’ll be more isolated and talking will decline. Because low rates of talking are linked to dementia, researchers have staged talking interventions to get older adults to talk more, yielding benefits for both seniors’ mood and brain health.

Meanwhile, teens and tweens often express anxiety about talking and avoid it. Yes, they text, which is also brain exercise, but the addition of texting doesn’t fully make up for the large drop in talking and interaction compared to previous generations of young people. Causes of their lower talking likely include reduced practice of social skills during the pandemic, greater reliance on phones for entertainment, wearing headphones that inhibit interaction, and snowplow parents that do the talking for them. There’s a real crisis here: experts declare that there’s a loneliness epidemic for young people, with huge costs for their wellbeing.

Addressing the Talking Gap

Alas there’s no wearable talking gadget to help us change our talking behaviors. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed steps that senior centers and other groups might take to increase older adults’ talking, and for teens/tweens, a combination of skill building and creating more talking spaces. One small but clever idea that helps both ages is the Call a Boomer program installed in old payphones, which allows young people to call a retiree to chat.

The talking decline requires a multi-pronged approach, which includes more awareness of the importance of talking as important brain exercise. I encourage you to think about how you could help yourself or others to talk more. Perhaps you could call your elderly parents, encourage your teen to tell you about something they’re excited about, connect with an old friend you’ve been meaning to catch up with. If you worry that such steps will be awkward or ineffective, know that studies show that conversations turn out to be more enjoyable than we expect. Go ahead, take the leap, one conversation at a time.