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

by Ethan Kross

In recent years, a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good.

Chatter consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. It puts our performance, decision making, relationships, happiness, and health in jeopardy. We think about that screwup at work or misunderstanding with a loved one and end up flooded by how bad we feel. Then we think about it again. And again. We introspect hoping to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead.

In recent years, cutting-edge methods that examine how the brain processes information and allow us to monitor behavior in real time have unlocked the hidden mechanics of the human mind. In doing so, they have uncovered something remarkable about our species: We spend one-third to one-half of our waking life not living in the present. As naturally as we breathe, we “decouple” from the here and now, our brains transporting us to past events, imagined scenarios, and other internal musings. This tendency is so fundamental it has a name: our “default state.” It is the activity our brain automatically reverts to when not otherwise engaged, and often even when we are otherwise engaged.

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.

The inner voice was always there with something to say, reminding us of the inescapable need we all have to use our minds to make sense of our experiences and the role that language plays in helping us do so.

your hippocampus, the sea-horse-shaped region buried deep within your brain that creates long-term memories, also helps us navigate and move through space.

mind palace?

A critical component of working memory is a neural system that specializes in managing verbal information. It’s called the phonological loop, but it’s easiest to understand it as the brain’s clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present. It has two parts: an “inner ear,” which allows us to retain words we’ve just heard for a few seconds; and an “inner voice,” which allows us to repeat words in our head as we do when we’re practicing a speech or memorizing a phone number or repeating a mantra. Our working memory relies on the phonological loop for keeping our linguistic neural pathways online so that we can function productively outside ourselves while also keeping our conversations going within. We develop this verbal doorway between our minds and the world in infancy, and as soon as it’s in place, it propels us toward other milestones of mental development. Indeed, the phonological loop goes well beyond the realm of responding to immediate situations. Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves. In the early twentieth century, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was one of the first people to explore the connection between language development and self-control.

Recent research that Vygotsky didn’t live to see has taken his theory further, with studies demonstrating that children brought up in families with rich communication patterns develop this facet of inner speech earlier. Moreover, it turns out that having imaginary friends may spur internal speech in children. In fact, emerging research suggests that imaginary play promotes self-control, among many other desirable qualities such as creative thinking, confidence, and good communication.

Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. 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. Language is integral to this process because it smooths the jagged and seemingly unconnected fragments of daily life into a cohesive through line. It helps us “storify” life. The words of the mind sculpt the past, and thus set up a narrative for us to follow into the future. By flitting back and forth between different memories, our internal monologues weave a neural narrative of recollections. It sews the past into the seams of our brain’s construction of our identity.

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.

Our executive functions are the foundation of our ability to steer our thoughts and behavior in the ways we desire. Supported largely by a network of prefrontal brain regions located behind our forehead and temples, their job is to intervene when our instinctual processes aren’t sufficient and we need to consciously guide our behavior. They allow us to keep relevant information active in our mind (working memory is a part of executive functions), filter out extraneous information, block out distractions, play with ideas, point our attention where it needs to go, and exercise self-control—like helping us resist the temptation to open a new browser tab and go down a tangential Wikipedia rabbit hole. In short, without our executive functions we wouldn’t be able to function in the world.

Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. 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.

Again and again, Rimé landed on the same finding: People feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences. But that wasn’t all. The more intense the emotion was, the more they wanted to talk about it. Additionally, they returned to talking about what had occurred more often, doing so repeatedly over the course of hours, days, weeks, and months, and sometimes even for the remainder of their lives.

Strong emotions acted like a jet propellant, blasting people off to share their experiences. It seemed to be a law of human nature. The only exceptions to this rule were cases in which people felt shame, which they often wished to conceal, or certain forms of trauma, which they wanted to avoid dwelling on.

Research shows that the same brain circuitry that becomes active when we are attracted to someone or consume desirable substances (everything from cocaine to chocolate) also activates when we share information about ourselves with others. In a particularly compelling illustration, one study by Harvard neuroscientists published in 2012 showed that people would prefer to share information about themselves with others than receive money. The social high, in other words, is like a neuronal high, a delicious hit for our dopamine receptors.

Out of sight, in other words, isn’t actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.

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.” 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.

A subsequent experiment took this research even further by showing that teaching couples to distance when they focused on disagreements in their relationships buffered against romantic decline. Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together. If not exactly a love potion, distancing does seem to keep the flame of love from being extinguished.

As our experiments and others later demonstrated, shifting from the first-person “I” to the second-person “you” or third-person “he” or “she” provides a mechanism for gaining emotional distance. Distanced self-talk, then, is a psychological hack embedded in the fabric of human language. And we now know that its benefits are diverse.

Other experiments have shown that distanced self-talk allows people to make better first impressions, improves performance on stressful problem-solving tasks, and facilitates wise reasoning, just as fly-on-the-wall distancing strategies do. It also promotes rational thinking.

Psychologists have shown that when you place people in stressful situations, one of the first things they do is ask themselves (usually subconsciously) two questions: What is required of me in these circumstances, and do I have the personal resources to cope with what’s required? If we scan the situation and conclude that we don’t have the wherewithal needed to handle things, that leads us to appraise the stress as a threat. If, on the other hand, we appraise the situation and determine that we have what it takes to respond adequately, then we think of it as a challenge. Which way we choose to talk about the predicament to ourselves makes all the difference for our inner voice. And unsurprisingly, the more constructive framing of a challenge leads to more positive results.

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.

There is a potent psychological comfort that comes from normalizing experiences, from knowing that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique to you, but rather something everyone experiences—that, unpleasant as it is, it’s just the stuff of life.

When our minds are bathed in chatter, we display a strong bias toward satisfying our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. In other words, when we’re upset, we tend to overfocus on receiving empathy rather than finding practical solutions.

Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions. A vicious cycle ensues, one that is all too easy to get sucked into, especially because it is driven by good intentions.

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.

Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support—turning to different relationships for different needs—benefit the most. The most important point here is to think critically after a chatter-provoking event occurs and reflect on who helped you—or didn’t. This is how you build your chatter board of advisers, and in the internet age we can find unprecedented new resources online.

A study on marriages, for example, found that partners felt more satisfaction about their relationships the day after receiving invisible support. Another experiment found that people were more successful in meeting their self-improvement goals if the support they received from their partner toward those goals was delivered under the radar.

These findings raise a fascinating possibility: that the internal conversations we have with ourselves are influenced by the physical spaces we navigate in our daily lives. And if we make smart choices about how we relate to our surroundings, they can help us control our inner voice.

In the 1970s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, both psychologists at the University of Michigan, had begun to advance an intriguing idea: that nature could act like a battery of sorts, recharging the limited attentional reserves that the human brain possesses. They called it attention restoration theory.

The influence of awe on behavior is so strong, in fact, that others can’t help but notice it. One set of studies found that “awe-prone” people came across as humbler to their friends. They also reported higher humility and had a more balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses—both hallmark features of wisdom—and more accurately credited the role of outside influences on their successes.

What scientists have discovered, however, is that just like Nadal we can simulate a sense of order in the world—and by extension in our own minds—by organizing our surroundings and making sure that our physical environments conform to a particular, controllable structure.