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

by Ethan Kross

In the most basic sense, introspection simply means actively paying attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings.

In short, our thoughts too often don’t save us from our thoughts. Instead, they give rise to something insidious. Chatter.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, we can create a chronic physiological stress reaction just by thinking. And when our inner voice fuels that stress, it can be devastating to our health.

This happens because our cells interpret the experience of chronic psychological threat as a viscerally hostile situation akin to being physically attacked.

Wisdom involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the “big picture” in several senses: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people’s viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives.

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. Moreover, among those who did choose to express their feelings, the people who shared the most had the highest levels of general distress and worst physical health.

This means that you can bring nature and its sundry benefits into your urban environment—or any environment, for that matter—by glancing at photos or videos of natural scenes. Virtual nature is, incredibly, still nature as far as the human mind is concerned.

compensatory control; he’s creating order in his physical environment to provide him with the order he seeks internally.

In effect, once you believe something, your neural machinery brings it to fruition by increasing or decreasing the activation levels of other parts of the brain or body related to the processes you are forming beliefs about.

In one experiment, six-year-olds who were socially rejected by their peers were more likely to engage in repetitive, ritual-like behaviors than other children in the study who weren’t rejected.

If you think of your inner voice as an inner tormentor, then it’s natural to fantasize about permanently muting it. But losing your inner voice is, in fact, the last thing you would ever want if your aim is to live a functional life, much less a good one.

We can be an inner-voice tool for the people grappling with chatter in our lives—and they can do the same for us—by avoiding co-rumination and finding a balance between providing caring support and helping others constructively reframe their problems when their emotions cool.

Concretely, this involves not only empathically validating what people are going through but also broadening their perspective, providing hope, and normalizing their experience.