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

by Ethan Kross

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.

Thanks to twenty-first-century connectivity, during the very peak of our inner flare-ups, right when our inner voice wants to rant from the rooftops, it can. We post. We tweet. We comment.

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.

If you go to the movies to escape the adversities of real life, your problems are still there waiting for you when you leave the theater. Out of sight, in other words, isn’t actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.

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.

If other people got through this hardship, our internal dialogue now reasons with us, then so can I. What felt extraordinary, it turns out, is in fact ordinary. This offers relief.

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.

The key to avoid rumination is to combine the two Starship Enterprise crew members. When supporting others, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock.

when we are aware that others are helping us but we haven’t invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some way—a feeling that our inner voice may latch on to.

In one particularly compelling study, the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich had found that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery who were assigned to a room that faced onto a small cluster of deciduous trees recovered faster from their operations, took fewer painkillers, and were judged as more emotionally resilient by the nurses caring for them than patients whose rooms looked out onto a brick wall.

The brain is a prediction machine that is constantly trying to help us navigate the world. The more we are able to bring our prior experiences to bear on what is required of us, the better we should be at this.

Over the course of our lives, we develop automatic beliefs about how certain objects and people influence our health. Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, we see a pill and we reflexively expect that consuming it will lead us to feel better, often without even knowing what it is or how it works.