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

by Ethan Kross

Why are some people able to benefit from focusing inward to understand their feelings, while other people crumble when they engage in the exact same behavior?

Do the countless “voices” of others we encounter on social media affect the voices in our minds?

We talk to ourselves. And we listen to what we say.

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.

Humans have a natural tendency to conceptualize memory in the romantic, long-term, and nostalgic sense.

Yet we frequently lose sight of the fact that stress is an adaptive response. It helps our bodies respond quickly and efficiently to potentially threatening situations. But stress stops being adaptive when it becomes chronic—when the fight-or-flight alarm fails to stop signaling. And sure enough, a main culprit in keeping stress active is our negative verbal stream.

Studies show that we don’t see our memories and reveries from the same perspective every time.

Distancing shortened both negative and positive experiences. In other words, if you got a promotion at work and stepped back to remind yourself that status and money don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things and that we all die in the end anyway, your well-deserved joy would decrease. The takeaway: 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.

Research shows that distanced self-talk leads people to consider stressful situations in more challenge-oriented terms, allowing them to provide encouraging, “you can do it” advice to themselves, rather than catastrophizing the situation.

No matter what time of year, the nature stroll helped their attention more than the urban one did.

When you’re in the presence of something vast and indescribable, it’s hard to maintain the view that you—and the voice in your head—are the center of the world.

When you feel smaller in the midst of awe-inspiring sights—a phenomenon described as a “shrinking of the self”—so do your problems.

I also remind my daughters and myself that while creating a calming distance between our thoughts and our experiences can be useful when chatter strikes, when it comes to joy, doing the opposite—immersing ourselves in life’s most cherished moments—helps us savor them.

The human mind is one of evolution’s greatest creations, not just because it allowed our species to survive and thrive, but because in spite of the inevitable pain that comes with life, it also endowed us with a voice in our head capable of not only celebrating the best times but also making meaning out of the worst times. It’s this voice, not the din of chatter, that we should all listen to.

“Why” is just a source of pain. Leave it alone, finish your homework, ride your bike with your friends. Cherish the life you have.