Agreed; I switch between them as well. When I have a monologue running, the most common content is trying out and editing drafts of sentences meant to express thoughts or feelings that have arisen without words. I've worked as a technical writer for somewhere around half of my career. I wonder if that career and my frequent self-editing are somehow causally related (in one direction or the other).

Also, I occasionally seem to stop thinking entirely and just experience sensations, perceptions, and sometimes emotions. I rather like those intervals, and am prone to try to sort of savor them. They generally don't last very long before thoughts start popping up again.

I went to a Buddhist college for a while, and the curriculum included quite a lot of meditation. I wonder sometimes if those episodes without apparent thought are related in some way to the many hours of sitting I did (and still sometimes do). I don't really know, though. Maybe all that sitting taught me how to allow thinking to peter out. Or maybe it taught me to notice when it does and not interfere with the process. Or maybe it's completely unrelated.

I find that I primarily am in the abstract, and the way I think of it is "sub" language. If I want to, I can try to translate the abstract into language, but the more abstract the thought the more difficult that translation becomes, especially in considering what context is necessary for that communication

I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.

Me too. Sometimes I notice my internal monologue is slowing me down, so I turn it off and let the thoughts flow without converting them into words. Other times, I feel like the abstract thoughts are coming too quickly, so I'm like "woah, slow down there!" and work my way through the same thought process again in words, to assure myself that I'm not skipping steps and jumping to conclusions.

This is interesting, because this is close to how I'd describe my thoughts. Occasionally I can go fully abstract with good focus, but most of the time I'm monologuing. Do you ever find yourself struggling to switch over to abstract thought because the monologue is just a duplication of effort?

I'm like that but when I go to thinking abstractly world I struggle with interacting socially and sometimes even with navigating physical space. I also sometimes need to voice my thoughts out loud if I'm in that state.

I agree. If preparing a talk or ”testing” sentence, I can turn on the internal monologue to do a quick check on how it sounds. My default is non-verbal, however.