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

by Ethan Kross

Rituals can also help with meeting goals. One experiment found that engaging in a ritual before meals helped women who struggled to eat healthier consume fewer calories than women who tried to be “mindful” about their eating.

Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves. They simultaneously serve to broaden our perspective and enhance our sense of connection with other people and forces.

While many cultures today celebrate living in the moment, our species didn’t evolve to function this way all the time. Quite the contrary. We developed the ability to keep our inner worlds pulsing with thoughts and memories and imaginings fueled by the inner voice. Thanks to our busy internal conversations, we are able to hold information in our minds, reflect on our decisions, control our emotions, simulate alternative futures, reminisce about the past, keep track of our goals, and continually update the personal narratives that undergird our sense of who we are. This inability to ever fully escape our minds is a main driver of our ingenuity: the things we build, the stories we tell, and the futures we dream.

Even when the conversations we have with ourselves turn negative, that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. As much as it can hurt, the ability to experience fear, anxiety, anger, and other forms of distress is quite useful in small doses. They mobilize us to respond effectively to changes in our environments. Which is to say, a lot of the time the inner voice is valuable not in spite of the pain it causes us but because of it.

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.

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.