Few people are aware that talking is an important brain exercise.

Rates of talking are declining.

Tweens/teens and those 65-plus both have low talking rates, on average.

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........

© Psychology Today