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

by Ethan Kross

What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing.

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.

We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough.

researchers at Cambridge found that teaching people to “see the big picture” reduced intrusive thinking (the kind that drains executive functions) and avoidance of painful memories.

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.

Psychologists have shown that when you place people in stressful situations, one of the first things they do is ask themselves (usually subconsciously) two questions: What is required of me in these circumstances, and do I have the personal resources to cope with what’s required? If we scan the situation and conclude that we don’t have the wherewithal needed to handle things, that leads us to appraise the stress as a threat. If, on the other hand, we appraise the situation and determine that we have what it takes to respond adequately, then we think of it as a challenge.

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.