Psychology says people who constantly speak in metaphors may think differently than you realize

Some people say they are “drowning in work,” describe a difficult relationship as a “roller coaster” or explain a stressful period by saying they are “carrying the weight of the world.” Others rarely speak this way, preferring direct, literal descriptions. Why do some people seem to turn almost everything into a metaphor?

Psychology says frequent metaphor use can reflect more than a colorful vocabulary. It may involve the way someone organizes abstract experiences, communicates emotions, makes connections between unrelated ideas and helps other people understand what they mean. But it does not automatically indicate intelligence, creativity or a particular personality type.

Psychology Says Metaphors Help People Make Abstract Ideas Concrete

One of the most influential explanations comes from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, associated with linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.


The theory proposes that people often understand abstract concepts through more concrete experiences. Think about expressions such as “moving forward,” “falling behind,” “grasping an idea” or “carrying emotional baggage.”

These are not simply decorative phrases. They connect abstract experiences with familiar physical or sensory concepts.

Research on grounded cognition similarly suggests that understanding certain metaphors can involve representations related to sensory and bodily experiences. Studies have found, for example, that metaphors involving texture can activate aspects of the brain's somatosensory system.

For someone who naturally thinks this way, saying “I feel trapped” may communicate an emotional experience more effectively than simply saying “I feel stressed.”

Metaphor Users May Be Comfortable With Abstract Thinking

Frequent metaphor use may also reflect a tendency to connect different conceptual domains.

Psychologists Keith Holyoak and Dušan Stamenković, in their review of metaphor comprehension, describe three major approaches to understanding metaphors: analogy, categorization and conceptual mapping. In other words, comprehending a metaphor involves identifying meaningful relationships between things that are not literally the same.

Consider someone describing career uncertainty as “standing at a crossroads.” There is no actual road. Instead, the speaker maps the physical experience of choosing between paths onto an abstract decision. That ability to create such connections can make complicated experiences easier to explain.

Psychology Says Metaphor Use Can Be Connected With Emotional Understanding

One of the most interesting findings comes from research by Adam Fetterman, Jessica Bair, Marc Werth, Florian Landkammer and Michael Robinson.

Across five studies involving 532 participants, the researchers developed a measure of individual differences in metaphor use. They found that people differed relatively consistently in their tendency toward literal versus metaphorical thought and language. Importantly, greater metaphor use was associated with higher emotional understanding in two of the studies.

That does not mean everyone who loves metaphors is emotionally intelligent. But it offers an intriguing possibility: metaphors may provide people with another mental tool for organizing complicated emotional experiences. Someone might say, “My friendship slowly became a closed door,” rather than simply, “We became distant.” The metaphor gives the listener an image of separation while also communicating the emotional meaning behind it.

Some People May Use Metaphors Because Literal Language Feels Too Limited

Emotions can be difficult to describe precisely. How exactly does disappointment feel? What does emotional exhaustion feel like? How can someone explain the strange mixture of hope and fear before a major life decision?

Metaphors offer a shortcut. Research on metaphor in communication suggests that figurative language can help people understand complex subjects and communicate ideas efficiently. Paul Thibodeau has reviewed evidence showing that metaphor can influence thought and communication, while also emphasizing that the effects depend on the metaphor and context.


This could explain why someone repeatedly reaches for phrases such as “I'm walking on eggshells” or “there's a storm in my head.” The metaphor compresses a complicated experience into an image that another person can immediately recognize.

Psychology Says Metaphors Can Also Make People More Persuasive

Metaphorical language isn't only useful for describing feelings. It can influence how messages are understood. A meta-analysis by Pradeep Sopory and James Dillard examined research on metaphor and persuasion. Across the literature, metaphors showed a small overall persuasive effect, with stronger effects under particular conditions. One explanation was that metaphors can help organize information in a way that encourages people to elaborate on a message.

That means the friend who says, “You can't keep putting a Band-Aid on a broken system,” may be doing more than trying to sound dramatic. The metaphor gives the listener a framework through which to interpret the problem.

Metaphor Lovers May Also Enjoy Creative Connections

Metaphor is closely connected with verbal creativity because creating a novel metaphor requires finding an unexpected but meaningful relationship between concepts.

Research has described novel metaphor use as an important form of verbal innovation and has examined its relationship with openness to experience, one of the major dimensions of personality. Still, it would be too simplistic to say that every metaphor-heavy speaker is highly creative.

Someone may use metaphors because they grew up around expressive language, read extensively, work in a creative profession or simply discovered that metaphors make conversations more engaging.

The Psychology Behind Metaphorical Speech Is More Complex Than It Looks

A person who constantly speaks in metaphors may therefore be doing several things at once: translating abstract experiences into concrete images, communicating emotions, creating conceptual connections or making an explanation easier to understand.

The habit can reveal something about communication style and individual differences, but it cannot diagnose intelligence, personality or emotional ability by itself.

In fact, one of the most interesting findings is that metaphor use itself appears to vary meaningfully between individuals. Research suggests that people can have relatively stable differences in their preference for metaphorical versus literal thought and language.

So when someone says, “Life is a marathon, not a sprint,” they may not simply be trying to sound poetic. They may be using one of the mind's oldest tricks: understanding something difficult by comparing it with something familiar.

FAQs

Does speaking in metaphors mean someone is intelligent?
Not necessarily. Metaphor use involves complex language and conceptual mapping, but frequent use cannot be used as a reliable measure of intelligence. People differ in communication style, vocabulary, education and cultural exposure.

Are people who use many metaphors more emotionally intelligent?
Some research has found an association between metaphor use and emotional understanding, but this does not establish that metaphor users are universally more emotionally intelligent.