Whenever you ask yourself a question, you are venturing out into a strange loop.
You can answer every question that you phrase in order to ask yourself - no matter how dearly you are interested in the answer - with the very same sentence:
In order to answer this question, I would have to talk to myself.
You can simply stop asking yourself questions. If you stop looking for answers in yourself first, you will lose nothing of your intelligence. On the contrary, you free yourself from a mental blockade - a deadlock.
If you ask yourself a question, you expect the first response from yourself – but there is a strange problem in that: You just asked yourself earnestly for the answer.
You are striving to say illuminating things to yourself, while you listen eagerly in joyful anticipation of what you are about to say next. If you have ever spent time looking for a guide to make yourself crazy - that's the way.
You ask yourself out of ignorance. You answer yourself out of stupidity.
Or are you answering yourself rhetorical questions only?
Both of these are stupid.
Anything you can tell yourself is nonsense. It is not 90% or 99%, but 100% nonsense. Of course you can tell yourself your name, and on what day your birthday is. But didn't you know that before?
People who believe that they eventually will learn something from what they say to themselves, will never manage to stop their internal discussion.
Have you ever asked yourself: "Why am I listening to myself when I am talking?"
If you use your inner voice to speak to yourself, it has become independent from you. You don't speak through your voice anymore. Your voice speaks through you.
You can rattle around in your head with words, but your perception will not become illuminated.
Many people feel they must always know a sensible answer right away. They bridge the time that their brain takes to process information with self-talk. If they accidently come up with something useful, despite their self-talk, they believe it is the courtesy of their own self-interrogation. They spend an awful lot of life-time and energy with their self-talk.
They imagine they see problems entirely dialectically from all sides. However, they know only one point: their own. They think of themselves as reflecting critically, but that is just another delusional thought. They have an outside world and an inner world. Both are not the same and do not necessarily have something in common.
Just imagine that the voice in your head is a crazy prompter, invisibly whispering cynical and ironic comments on the weird theater piece in which you take part. You can have a funny conversation with him, but you should never take it seriously. The internal prompter is a charlatan.
Perhaps you find it hard to stop with the self-interrogation. I prophesize to you, as soon as you give up the hope to learn the all-important words from your own voice, you've drawn a line under the conversations with yourself.
If you no longer feel the urge to tell things to yourself, you will no longer hear yourself talking all the time.