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.

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.

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.

As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

Kris’s later talks about how deaf children sign to themselves, which speaks to how fundamental self-communication is in the development of self, regardless of circumstance details

We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

“Devoid of language and linear processing,” she wrote, “I felt disconnected from the life I had lived.” Most profoundly of all, she lost her identity. The narrative her inner voice had allowed her to construct over nearly four decades erased itself. “Those little voices inside your head,” as she put it, had made her her, but now they were silent. “So, was I really still me?

What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing. This speaks to a sour experience many people have had: You’re in a situation in which you should be happy (spending time with friends, say, or celebrating an accomplishment), but a ruminative thought swallows your mind. Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.

When Ankiel was called on to pitch against the Mets nine days later, the same thing happened. The monster reappeared and he threw more wild pitches. Once again, he was pulled from the mound, this time before the first inning was over.

The classic illustration of this limited capacity, known as the magical number four, has to do with our ability to hold between three and five units of information in the mind at any given time. Take an American phone number. Memorizing the number 200-350-2765 is much easier than memorizing 2003502765.

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.

Other books have described how the frontal lobe is engaged in executive function, and it receives less blood flow in fight or flight states of stress. This is potentially a different contributing mechanism than the neuron bandwidth explanation provided here in Chatter. Perhaps both are at play

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. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough.

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.

Distance doesn’t solve our problems, but it increases the likelihood that we can. It unclouds our verbal stream.

We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it. My colleagues and I refer to this bias as “Solomon’s Paradox,” though King Solomon is by no means the only sage who could lend his name to the phenomenon.

“Distance” and an outsider view mean we can help solve other people’s problems but are blind to our own

You can also benefit by mentally time traveling into the future, a tool called temporal distancing. 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. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.

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.

I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.

The people who shared their thoughts and feelings about 9/11 right after it happened didn’t feel better. In fact, on the whole, they fared worse than the people in the study who didn’t open up about how they felt. They experienced more chatter and engaged in more avoidant coping.

The study revealed that helping without the recipient being aware of it, a phenomenon called “invisible support,” was the formula for supporting others while not making them feel bad about lacking the resources to cope on their own.

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. This changes the synaptic flow of your thoughts in similar ways as other distancing techniques we’ve examined. In the case of awe, however, you don’t have to focus your mind on a visual exercise or on reframing an upsetting experience. In this sense, it’s similar to saying your own name: You just have the experience, whatever it happens to be, and relief follows. When you feel smaller in the midst of awe-inspiring sights—a phenomenon described as a “shrinking of the self”—so do your problems.

Many people also develop their own idiosyncratic lucky charms. For instance, the model Heidi Klum carries a tiny bag filled with her baby teeth when she flies and clutches it during turbulence. (Weird, I know, but it helps her.) Michael Jordan wore his college shorts beneath his Chicago Bulls uniform during every game.

Over the course of the twenty-one-day experiment, the participants who were educated about the science behind placebo effects and then informed that they were taking a placebo displayed fewer IBS symptoms and greater relief compared with people who were educated about placebos and didn’t receive any pills. Understanding how a placebo could make their IBS better actually did just that.

The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us;

Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control.

The power of placebos and rituals doesn’t reside in supernatural forces (though some people believe it does, and that in no way diminishes the benefits of such practices). Their benefits lie instead in their capacity to activate chatter-fighting tools that we carry inside us.

if we didn’t have this critical self-reflective capacity, we’d have a difficult time learning, changing, and improving.

Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you’re experiencing chatter involves language. When you’re trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person “you” to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you’d give that person, and then apply it to yourself.

Take care of yourself and advise yourself

Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state.