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

by Ethan Kross

introspection simply means actively paying attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings. The ability to do this is what allows us to imagine, remember, reflect, and then use these reveries to problem solve, innovate, and create. Many scientists, including myself, see this as one of the central evolutionary advances that distinguishes human beings from other species.

Introspection definition

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.

Chatter definition

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. To put this in perspective, consider that contemporary American presidents’ State of the Union speeches normally run around six thousand words and last over an hour. Our brains pack nearly the same verbiage into a mere sixty seconds. This means that if we’re awake for sixteen hours on any given day, as most of us are, and our inner voice is active about half of that time, we can theoretically be treated to about 320 State of the Union addresses each day. The voice in your head is a very fast talker.

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

Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves.

the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

Moreover, it turns out that having imaginary friends may spur internal speech in children. In fact, emerging research suggests that imaginary play promotes self-control, among many other desirable qualities such as creative thinking, confidence, and good communication.

Emerging evidence suggests that dreams are often functional and highly attuned to our practical needs. You can think of them as a slightly zany flight simulator. They aid us in preparing for the future by simulating events that are still to come, pointing our attention to potentially real scenarios and even threats to be wary of. Although we still have much to learn about how dreams affect us, at the end of the day—or night, rather—they are simply stories in the mind. And sure enough, in waking life, the inner voice pipes up loudly about the most foundational psychological story of all: our identities.

When we find ourselves overwhelmed by emotion, as Ankiel did on that fall day in 2000, one of the things our inner voice does is harness our attention, narrowing it in on the obstacles we encounter to the exclusion of practically everything else.

All of us are familiar with the distractions of a negative verbal stream. Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources. The problem for most of us, however, is that usually we’re engaged in activities with much higher stakes than retaining information in a book. We’re doing our jobs, pursuing our dreams, interacting with others, and being evaluated.

Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray.

It’s worth highlighting that there’s nothing inherently bad about sharing on social media. In the long historical timeline of our species, it’s simply a new environment that we find ourselves spending a great deal of time in, and environments aren’t good or bad per se. Whether they help or harm us depends on how we interact with them.

Research shows that observing other people’s emotional responses—seeing someone wince or hearing a quiver in a voice—can be a potent route to triggering empathy. But online, the subtle physical gestures, micro-expressions, and vocal intonations that elicit empathic responses in daily life are absent. As a result, our brains are deprived of information that serves a critical social function: inhibiting cruelty and antisocial behavior. In other words, less empathy all too frequently leads to trolling and cyberbullying, which have grave consequences.

Social media allows us to connect with others in the immediate aftermath of a negative emotional response, before time provides us with the opportunity to rethink how we’re feeling or what we’re planning to do. 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.

our results suggested that emotional pain had a physical component as well.

Indeed, not having a strong social-support network is a risk factor for death as large as smoking more than fifteen cigarettes a day, and a greater risk factor than consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, not exercising, being obese, or living in a highly polluted city.

When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections. Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.”

What these important counterexamples bring me back to is that great puzzle of the human mind: how our inner voice can be both a liability and an asset. The words streaming through our heads can unravel us, but they can also drive us toward meaningful accomplishments…if we know how to control them.

We can think of the mind as a lens and our inner voice as a button that zooms it either in or out. In the simplest sense, chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on something, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective. This dramatically narrowed view of one’s situation magnifies adversity and allows the negative side of the inner voice to play, enabling rumination and its companions: stress, anxiety, and depression.

We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.

At the time, one of the dominant 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.

If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.

The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: 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.

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.

A subsequent experiment took this research even further by showing that teaching couples to distance when they focused on disagreements in their relationships buffered against romantic decline. Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together. If not exactly a love potion, distancing does seem to keep the flame of love from being extinguished.

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.

By focusing on our experiences from the perspective of a narrator who has to create a story, journaling creates distance from our experience. We feel less tied to it.

There is a potent psychological comfort that comes from normalizing experiences, from knowing that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique to you, but rather something everyone experiences—that, unpleasant as it is, it’s just the stuff of life.

In study after study, Rimé found that talking to others about our negative experiences doesn’t help us recover in any meaningful way. Sure, sharing our emotions with others makes us feel closer to and more supported by the people we open up to. But the ways most of us commonly talk and listen to each other do little to reduce our chatter. Quite frequently, they exacerbate it.

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.

Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions. A vicious cycle ensues, one that is all too easy to get sucked into, especially because it is driven by good intentions.

Harmful co-ruminative dynamics emerge out of otherwise healthy, supportive relationships because our emotional, inner-voice mechanics aren’t actually like a hydraulic system, as Freud and Aristotle and conventional wisdom suggest. Letting out steam doesn’t relieve the pressure buildup inside.

When we focus on a negative aspect of our experience, that tends to activate a related negative thought, which activates another negative thought, and another, and so on. These dominoes continue to hit one another in a game where there is a potentially infinite supply of tiles. That is because our memories of emotional experiences are governed by principles of associationism, which means that related concepts are linked together in our mind.

The associative nature of memory, combined with the bias we have to prioritize emotional needs over cognitive ones when we’re upset, is why talking often fails to lift our troubled internal dialogues into a more tranquil state.

While all of these strategies apply to how you help the people in your life manage their inner voices, they can also help you make better choices when selecting the people you go to for emotional support. After they’ve made you feel validated and understood, do they guide you toward brainstorming practical solutions? Or do they excessively extract details and revive the upsetting experience by repeating things like “He’s such a jerk! I can’t believe he did that.” By reflecting after the fact, you can often determine if someone helped you immerse or distance. Most likely, it’ll be a combination of the two, which can be a starting point for a dialogue about how the person can better help you next time. By thinking through other experiences with your “chatter advisers,” you can also narrow in on which people are right for which problems.

research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support—turning to different relationships for different needs—benefit the most.

Research shows that there’s a danger in trying to dole out unsolicited advice, no matter how skilled you are at blending the strengths of Kirk and Spock. When we give advice at the wrong time, this too can backfire.

Offering advice without considering the person’s needs can undermine a person’s sense of self-efficacy—the crucial belief that we are capable of managing challenges. In other words, 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. A long history of psychological research into self-efficacy has shown that when it is compromised, it damages not only our self-esteem but also our health, decision making, and relationships.

Further research has yielded insights into the circumstances in which such invisible support is most effective: when people are under evaluation or preparing to be. For example, when they’re studying for exams, preparing for interviews, or rehearsing the talking points of a presentation. During such times people feel most vulnerable. In contrast, when people want to manage their chatter as quickly and efficiently as possible, it’s not necessary to be subtle or crafty in how you support. In this case, direct advice that blends Kirk and Spock is most needed, appropriate, and likely to succeed.

Our surroundings are inseparable from the human beings who inhabit them, and when we use the resources that are available to us in our relationships with others, the benefits are powerful. But other people are only one facet of our environment that we can harness to improve our internal conversations.

green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.

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.

Awe is the wonder we feel when we encounter something powerful that we can’t easily explain.

me two years later. 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 tendency to structure elements in our environment as a buffer against chatter goes beyond contexts in which our performance is being evaluated. It extends to any of the spaces that we occupy. As a result, humans infuse order into their external surroundings—and by extension their minds—in a variety of ways.

The desire to have control over oneself is a strong human drive. Believing that we have the ability to control our fate influences whether we try to achieve goals, how much effort we exert to do so, and how long we persist when we encounter challenges.

Our minds are sometimes as powerful as modern medicine.

Our minds can cause emotional distress while simultaneously and covertly reducing that distress.

When a doctor tells you that you’ll feel better, this provides you with information you can use to predict how you’re actually going to fare over time, especially if she has fancy medical degrees, wears a white coat, and talks with authority. That’s not a joke. Research shows that features that you might think are peripheral—if a physician wears a lab coat or not, whether she has acronyms attached to her name placards, and even whether the pills you take are referred to as “brand-labeled” or generic—subconsciously strengthen our beliefs.

In fact, mounting evidence indicates that placebos can act as enhancers, supercharging the benefits of certain medicines and treatments.