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

by Ethan Kross

We spend one-third to one-half of our waking life not living in the present.

The inner voice is a basic feature of the mind.

Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud.

Sometimes it’s a compulsive rehashing of past events (rumination); sometimes it’s an angstridden imagining of future events (worry).

This pattern of hopscotching through time and space in their inner conversations highlights something we have all noticed about our own mind: It is an avid time traveler.4

Our brain’s built-in affinity for disconnecting from what is going on around us produces a conversation in our minds, one that we spend a significant portion of our waking hours engaged in.

In fact, spontaneous thoughts related to goals are among the most frequent kind that fill our mind.19 It’s our inner voice alerting us to pay attention to an objective.

Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves.24 The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character. Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity.

What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing.

Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.

When you’re completing your taxes, it pays to double-check your calculations to make sure you’ve done everything right, even if you’re an experienced accountant. But for well-worn, automatic behaviors that you’re trying to execute under pressure, like pitching, this very same tendency leads us to break down the complicated scripts that we’ve learned to execute without thinking. This is exactly what our inner voice’s tendency to immerse us in a problem does. It overfocuses our attention on the parts of a behavior that only functions as the sum of its parts. The result: paralysis by analysis.

Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity.13 Verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us. In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a “dual task”—the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, that’s how chatter divides and blurs our attention.

While this sounds normal and harmless, repeatedly sharing our negative inner voice with others produces one of the great ironies of chatter and social life: We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most.

Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray.

One study tracked more than one thousand middle schoolers for seven months and found that kids who were prone to rumination reported talking with their peers more than their low-rumination counterparts.22 Yet this did more harm than good. It predicted a host of painful results: being socially excluded and rejected, being the target of gossip and rumors by their peers, and even being threatened with violence.

People who perseverate on conflicts are also more likely to behave aggressively.

Word!

the more I stew over what you did to me, the more I keep those negative feelings alive, and the more likely I am to act aggressively against you as a result.

Chatter also leads us to displace our aggression against people when they don’t deserve it.25 Our boss upsets us, for example, and we take it out on our kids.

Research shows that observing other people’s emotional responses—seeing someone wince or hearing a quiver in a voice—can be a potent route to triggering empathy. But online, the subtle physical gestures,31 micro-expressions, and vocal intonations that elicit empathic responses in daily life are absent. As a result, our brains are deprived of information that serves a critical social function: inhibiting cruelty and antisocial behavior. In other words, less empathy all too frequently leads to trolling and cyberbullying, which have grave consequences. Cyberbullying,32 for example, has been linked to longer episodes of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, as well as several toxic physical effects like headaches, sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal ills, and changes in how well stress-response systems operate.

With the passage of time and physical elicitors of empathy removed, social media becomes a place amenable to the unseemly sides of the inner voice. This can lead to increased conflict, hostility, and chatter for both individuals and arguably society as a whole. It also means that we overshare more than ever before.

Unsurprisingly, people with depression—which is fueled by the verbal stream—share more negative personal content on social media yet actually perceive their network as less helpful than nondepressed people do.35

Indeed, not having a strong social-support network is a risk factor for death as large as smoking more than fifteen cigarettes a day,

Genes + Environment = Who We Are.

When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections.56 Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.”

chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on something, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective.

when we find ourselves stuck on our problems and lose the ability to flexibly zoom out—to gain perspective—that’s when our inner voice turns into rumination.

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.

If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.

Distance, then, helps us deal better not only with the big emotions we experience from upsetting situations but also with the smaller yet crucial daily emotional challenges of frustration and boredom that come with the important tedium of work and education.

Wisdom involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the “big picture” in several senses: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people’s viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, has written that one of his most informative experiences involved learning how to avoid an “inside view” and adopt an “outside view.”34 As he frames it, an inside view limits your thinking to your circumstances. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, this often leads to inaccurate predictions about potential obstacles. The outside view, on the other hand, includes a broader sample of possibilities and thus more accuracy. You’re able to better foresee obstacles and prepare accordingly.

We found that whether people “distanced” or “immersed” when thinking about problems in their relationships influenced how they argued. When an immerser’s partner argued calmly, the immerser responded the same way—with similar patience and compassion. But once their partners began to show the slightest hint of anger or disdain, the immersers responded in kind. As for the distancers, when their partners talked calmly, they too remained calm. But even if their partner got worked up, they were still able to problem solve, which eased the conflict.

the ability to strategically time travel in one’s mind can be a tool for creating positive personal narratives that reroute negative inner dialogues.

Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective.

By focusing on our experiences from the perspective of a narrator who has to create a story, journaling creates distance from our experience.44 We feel less tied to it. Tracey journaled for years, and it helped her immensely.

There was already a term for talking about oneself in the third person, “illeism,” which was frequently used to describe the literary device Julius Caesar had employed to narrate his work on the Gallic Wars,

Illeism

All of which is to say, talking to oneself using first-person-singular pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my” can be a form of linguistic immersion.

When a person is in a threat state, their vasculature constricts, leaving less room for their blood to flow, which over time can lead to burst blood vessels and heart attacks. In contrast, when people are in challenge mode, their vasculature relaxes, allowing blood to move easily throughout the body.

When we’re dealing with chatter, we confront a riddle that demands solving. Inhibited by our inner voice run amok, we at times need outside help to work through the problem at hand, see the bigger picture, and decide on the most constructive course of action. All of this can’t be addressed solely by the caring presence and listening ear of a supportive person. We often need others to help us distance, normalize, and change the way we’re thinking about the experiences we’re going through. By doing so, we allow our emotions to cool down, pulling us out of dead-end rumination and aiding us in redirecting our verbal stream.

The people we seek out for help respond in kind, prioritizing our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. They see our pain and first and foremost strive to provide us with love and validation. This is natural, a gesture of caring, and sometimes even useful in the short term. But even if we do signal that we want more cognitive assistance, research demonstrates that our interlocutors tend to miss these cues.

In practice, co-rumination amounts to tossing fresh logs onto the fire of an already flaming inner voice. The rehashing of the narrative revives the unpleasantness and keeps us brooding. While we feel more connected and supported by those who engage us this way, it doesn’t help us generate a plan or creatively reframe the problem at hand. Instead, it fuels our negative emotions and biological threat response.

The most effective verbal exchanges are those that integrate both the social and the cognitive needs of the person seeking support.15 The interlocutor ideally acknowledges the person’s feelings and reflections, but then helps her put the situation in perspective.

This is where a certain art in talking to other people comes into play, because you must walk a tightrope to take upset people from addressing their emotional needs to the more practical cognitive ones.

Behavioral Change Stairway Model, a progression of steps to guide negotiators: Active Listening → Empathy → Rapport → Influence → Behavioral Change.

Yet some interventions continue to focus on in-depth emotional venting as a tool for mitigating chatter. Case in point: psychological debriefing,20 an approach that emphasizes the value of emotional unburdening in the immediate aftermath of negative experiences despite overwhelming evidence arguing against its benefits. The take-home point is that if you find yourself needing more than a conversation with a friend or loved one to deal with your chatter, given what you now know, have a conversation with your prospective mental-health providers to learn about their approach and find out whether it is empirically supported.

Affectionate touch is so potent, in fact, that one set of studies found that a mere one second of contact on the shoulder led people with low self-esteem to be less anxious about death and feel more connected with others.

Indeed, many scientists consider the skin a social organ.

Your attention has been gently reeled in by a process the Kaplans called “soft fascination.”

Activities like those drain our executive-function batteries, whereas effortlessly absorbing nature does the opposite: It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.

Secondhand exposure to the natural world through photos and videos also restores attentional resources.