Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It

by Ethan Kross

Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. “I was able to see the argument more clearly,” wrote one person. “I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation.” Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story. The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice. Soon after, in more studies, we and others discovered that zooming out in this way also reined in people’s fight-or-flight cardiovascular response to stress,13 dampened emotional activity in the brain,14 and led people to experience less hostility and aggression when they were provoked—the kind of situation that is fertile ground for stoking chatter.15 We also found that this distancing technique worked not just with random collections of college students but also with those struggling with more extreme forms of inner-voice torment.