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

by Ethan Kross

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. It undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. It can also promote violence and aggression, contribute to a range of mental disorders, and enhance our risk of becoming physically ill.

Unfortunately, normal voices that we hear in our heads (belonging, for example, to ourselves, family, or colleagues) can sometimes devolve into abnormal voices characteristic of mental illness.

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.

model self-control for us when we’re children, and their approaches seep into our developing inner voices. Our father might repeatedly tell us never to use violence to resolve a conflict. Our mother might repeatedly tell us to never give up after a disappointment. Over time, we repeat these things to ourselves, and they begin to shape our own verbal streams.

Ankiel’s verbal stream turned into a spotlight that shined his attention too brightly on the individual physical components of his pitching motion, thereby seeming to inadvertently dismantle it. After

One study tracked more than one thousand middle schoolers for seven months and found that kids who were prone to rumination reported talking with their peers more than their low-rumination counterparts. Yet this did more harm than good. It predicted a host of painful results: being socially excluded and rejected, being the target of gossip and rumors by their peers, and even being threatened with violence.

Similar to talking for too long and too frequently to others about your problems, overly emotional posts irritate and alienate others. They violate unspoken norms, and users wish people who overshare online would look for support from friends off-line. Unsurprisingly, people with depression—which is fueled by the verbal stream—share more negative personal content on social media yet actually perceive their network as less helpful than nondepressed people do.

Chronic negative thoughts can also push into the territory of mental illness, though this isn’t to say chatter is the same thing as clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Repetitive negative thinking isn’t synonymous with these conditions, but it’s a common feature of them. Indeed, scientists consider it a transdiagnostic risk factor for many disorders, meaning that chatter underlies a variety of mental illnesses.

When I was in college, I learned a simple formula: Genes + Environment = Who We Are. In class after class, my professors told me that when it came to the shaping of human life, the effects of genes and environment didn’t mix. Nurture was in one box, and Nature was in another. This was conventional wisdom for a long time—until suddenly it wasn’t. To many a scientist’s surprise, new research suggests that this equation couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because you have a certain type of gene doesn’t mean it actually affects you. What determines who we are is whether those genes are turned on or off.

But our brains evolved not just to zoom in when we confront difficulties but also to zoom out, though the latter is much more challenging during times of stress. The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it. If you have a fever, you can take something to bring it down. Likewise, our mind has a psychological immune system: We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.

approaches to battling inner-voice rumination was distraction. Several studies had shown that when people find themselves sucked into negative verbal thinking, diverting their attention away from their problems improved the way they felt. The downside of this approach, however, is that distraction constitutes a short-term fix—a Band-Aid that obscures the wound without healing it. 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.

As he frames it, an inside view limits your thinking to your circumstances. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, this often leads to inaccurate predictions about potential obstacles. The outside view, on the other hand, includes a broader sample of possibilities and thus more accuracy. You’re able to better foresee obstacles and prepare accordingly.

While the students at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University thought that expressing their emotions to others made them feel better, the degree to which they shared their emotions didn’t actually influence their depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms. All that emoting, writing, connecting, and remembering—it hadn’t been beneficial.

collected over eighteen years, scientists found that people reported experiencing lower levels of distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space. Meanwhile, a 2015 high-resolution satellite imagery study of the

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. Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we’re experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation. Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat—something we can’t manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you’ve succeeded in similar situation...

Build a board of advisers. Finding the right people to talk to, those who are skilled at satisfying both your emotional and your cognitive needs, is the first step to leveraging the power of others. Depending on the domain in which you’re experiencing chatter, different people will be uniquely equipped to do this. While a colleague may be skilled at advising you on work problems, your partner may be better suited to advising you on interpersonal dilemmas. The more people you have to turn to for chatter support in any particular domain, the better. So build a diverse board of chatter advisers, a group of confidants you can turn to for support in the different areas of your life in which you are likely to find your inner voice running amok. Seek out physical contact. You don’t have to wait for someone to give you affectionate touch or supportive physical contact. Knowing about the benefits they provide, you can seek them out yourself, by asking trusted people in your life for a hug or a simple hand squeeze. Moreover, you need not even touch another human being to reap these benefits. Embracing a comforting inanimate object, like a teddy bear or security blanket, is helpful too. Look at a photo of a loved one. Thinking about others who care about us reminds us that there are people we can turn to for support during times of emotional distress. This is why looking at photos of loved ones can soothe our inner voice when we find ourselves consumed with chatter. Perform a ritual ...