On sending voice memos to your friends as a form of therapy
If you are struggling with something but aren’t
journaling about it
meditating on it
or going to therapy for it
then it might be time to start. Each of these tools works because they allow us a way in to ourselves. They slow us down, and invite us to take a breath and take in what’s going on in our minds and bodies and process the emotions that come up. Which is why it’s called emotional processing.
When we’re not journaling, meditating, or talking to a therapist, we still emotionally process, but it’s often left to the slices of downtime between tasks—taking a shower, driving to our destination, waiting for an espresso. These moments are brief and, because we haven’t carved out intentional time to process, we get softly and effortlessly derailed as we reach our threshold of too-uncomfortable-to-think-about.
But even if we were able to stay with our thoughts the entire time, it’s not enough time.
There is another option to process your emotions that doesn’t require quite as much intentionality.
It’s called sending voice memos to your friends.
The year is 2010. HeyTell is released on the Apple and Android app stores. It quickly blows up as an asynchronous “walkie-talkie” app. You simply hold down a button and send audio memos of up to 20 seconds each, maxing out at three messages until the other person responds. At the time, this was mind-blowing and game changing. A few years later, WhatsApp added this to their app without the audio limits and practically killed HeyTell overnight. You could now send an audio memo as long as your finger could physically hold the button down (they eventually allowed you to slide the button up to lock it in record mode, which naturally resulted in people sending much longer messages).
This was a game changer for how I communicated with the people in my life.
It started with my mom. She and I live on opposite coasts and that three hour time difference makes it difficult to stay in touch without scheduling in advance. She wakes up and I’m still asleep. I’m on my way to work and she’s back to work from lunch. I’m getting off work and she’s already in bed. Or watching Netflix and ignoring my calls.
But with voice memos, I could update her anytime it was convenient for me, and she could check in anytime it was convenient for her. And she could actually hear my frustration at how people still couldn’t understand the finale of Lost—rather than simply imagine it in my texts.
From there, I bullied/convinced several of my close friends to download WhatsApp and give voice memos a try.
Over a decade later, we’re still sending them constantly and all the time. In my social circle, I’m kinda known for sending voice memos. Everybody needs a hobby, I guess. Some people love it and respond with their own memos back. Others pretend it’s not happening and respond with text.
My voice memo record is 20 minutes and I’m not sure if I should be proud or imprisoned.
As I attempt to write out what I’m thinking, I wish I could, instead, talk out loud to explain it. Which is kind of what I’m trying to explain—talking out loud allows us to process our thoughts. Our brains are thinking constantly but thinking is silent. And silent thinking is compressed—there’s a sense of coherence but as anyone who’s ever told a story for the first time can attest, that coherence is ambiguous. You start to explain your “hilarious” story, and are forced to uncompress it, which is a bit sloppy. As your brain processes the audio of your thoughts, it compares it with the silent thinking that was swirling around, and the mismatches are reconciled and streamlined into a more coherent story for the next time you tell it.
This is essentially how stand-up comedians workshop material or how you have a difficult conversation with your friend by venting to six other friends beforehand.
We don’t just rehearse to memorize our lines, we rehearse to find out what our lines even are.
I love this process. I love processes. I love processing. I love talking with friends about our lives, but since it’s not quick to meet up in person, not always the right time for a phone call, and not always practical to text on-the-go, sending an audio memo can be the next best thing. And in some cases, even better. Respond now, respond later, whenever you can, with what you can. Listen as my scrambled thoughts unscramble themselves in real-time, and enjoy being in the presence of these thoughts, even if we can’t be in each other’s presence physically.
And then send your own audio therapy session back because I’m so ready for it.
It’s more off-the-cuff than journaling. More free-wheeling than meditating. And more affordable than therapy. Yet these memos touch on the same mechanisms: making our vague and unstructured inner worlds a bit more concrete and known—both to others, but also to ourselves.
So what are you waiting for? Send me a voice memo.