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.

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

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 key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively.

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.

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.

In a sense, then, our inner voice makes its home in us as children by going from the outside in, until we later speak from the inside out and affect those around us.

Present-day research with more advanced technology has shown that our dreams in fact share many similarities with the spontaneous verbal thoughts we experience when we are awake.

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.

The explanation for why these skills fail ultimately relates to how the conversations we have with ourselves influence our attention.

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.

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.

It is a lasting example of how our environments play a pivotal role in shaping what we think, feel, and do and the importance of actively taking control of our surroundings for our own benefit.