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

by Ethan Kross

Humans weren’t made to hold fast to the present all the time. That’s just not what our brains evolved to do.

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

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.

Time and again, people who have spent years mastering a talent watch it break down like a decrepit old Chevy when chatter hijacks their inner voice. This phenomenon isn’t restricted to athletes. It can happen to anyone who has become skilled at a learned task—from teachers who memorize their lesson plans, to start-up founders with rehearsed spiels they pitch to investors, to surgeons who perform complex operations that took them years to master. The explanation for why these skills fail ultimately relates to how the conversations we have with ourselves influence our attention.

And although much of our attention is involuntary, like when we automatically turn toward a loud noise, one of the features that make humans so unique is our ability to consciously concentrate on the tasks that require our attention.

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.