The shower is undefeated as a debate venue. You're three minutes into rinsing your hair and suddenly you're delivering the precise, devastating, reasonable-but-firm response to the thing your manager said on Tuesday. You've got the pacing right. You've got the pause before the closing line. Your manager, notably, is not in the shower. The conversation you're winning does not exist.
Almost everyone does this, and almost everyone suspects it's a little unhinged. It isn't. Communication researchers have been studying these private productions since the late 1980s, when James Honeycutt founded a whole research program around what he called imagined interactions: the daydreams in which we run conversations with people who aren't there, complete with dialogue, tone, and imagined comebacks.
your brain runs simulations
Honeycutt's work catalogued what these mental screenplays are actually for, and the list is longer than "reliving arguments." Imagined interactions help us maintain relationships, work through conflict, understand ourselves, vent feelings we can't vent anywhere else, and stand in for conversations we'll never get to have, with someone who died, say, or someone who stopped answering. But the function most of us know best is rehearsal. Job seekers run imagined interviews before real ones. Speakers rehearse talks against imaginary audiences. In later work on inner speech, Honeycutt connected these simulations to the running verbal channel most of us live with all day, the narrator that never quite shuts up.
Seen this way, the shower argument is a flight simulator. Crashing in the simulator is free. You get to test the angry version of the sentence, notice it sounds cruel, and file the calmer draft instead. You get to hear the other person's likely objection before they make it. A rehearsed conversation that stays reasonably close to the real one is preparation in the truest sense.
The trouble is that nobody's simulator comes with an off switch.
when the simulator turns on you
There's a version of this that clinicians know well, and it isn't preparation. In the research on social anxiety it's called pre-event rumination, and a review by Erika Penney and Maree Abbott in Behaviour Change describes the shape of it: in the days before a social event, anxious minds replay past stumbles, conjure images of failing, and assume the worst, so that by the time the actual moment arrives they walk in already flooded, scanning the room for proof that it's going badly. The rehearsal doesn't prepare them for the conversation. It pre-ruins it.
What's striking is how sticky the habit is. In a 2018 randomized trial, Matthew Modini and Abbott told people with social anxiety they'd have to give a speech in four days, then instructed half of them to "ban" rehearsing it, using a technique called detached mindfulness: notice the worry arrive, decline to engage, let it pass. The banned group reported rumination that was less frequent, less distressing, and easier to control. But the researchers' quieter finding was that pre-event rumination is durable. Even people actively trying not to run the simulation kept finding themselves inside it.
And even for the non-anxious, over-rehearsal has costs. Psychologist Mark Travers argues in Forbes that the imagined conversation can work as a false resolution: your brain treats the simulation as if it happened, the pressure drops, and the real conversation quietly never occurs. You already said it, after all. Just not to them. And when you do show up, the script becomes a cage. The other person fails to say their assigned lines, and you're so busy steering back to your rehearsed material that you stop listening.
give it an ending
So the difference between rehearsing and ruminating isn't the content. It's whether the thing ever ends. A rehearsal has a final take. Rumination is the same scene shot forty times with no director to call it.
One honest way to force an ending is to get the conversation out of your head entirely, once, at full volume. Say the whole thing out loud, start to finish, and let yourself hear it. Spoken words move at a fixed speed and then stop, which is exactly what looping thoughts refuse to do. This is part of why we built Joice, a voice journal you talk to like a friend: the fortieth mental take of a conversation usually just needs one real performance, with a listener that asks what you actually want to happen, before your head is willing to move on.
The usual caveat applies. If the rehearsals are running your evenings, or the dread has a clinical weight to it, that's a conversation for a professional, not an app or an essay.
But the ordinary shower argument? Keep it. It's your brain doing something old and clever: practicing being a person before it counts. Give the scene one good take, say the last line like you mean it, and let the water carry the rest of the production away.