Top highlights from Chatter
The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that theyre a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from whats bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of the inner voice. This might explain why pregame rituals abound in sports, providing a distraction at the most anxiety-filled moment.Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control. For example, we cant control what will happen to our children throughout their lives, and we can protect them only to a limited degree, which is a source of chatter for many parents. But when they are born, we can baptize them or perform any other of a variety of birth rituals that provide us with an illusion of control.
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If we scan the situation and conclude that we dont 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.
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When were upset and feel vulnerable or hurt or overwhelmed, we want to vent our emotions and feel consoled, validated, and understood. This provides an immediate sense of security and connection and feeds the basic need we have to belong. As a result, the first thing we usually seek out in others when our inner voice gets swamped in negativity is a fulfillment of our emotional needs.
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Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how theyll 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.
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Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when youre experiencing chatter involves language. When youre trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person you to refer to yourself.
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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 thoughtsby adding distance.
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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. Given all this, it is not surprising that increasing peoples sense of control has been linked to benefits that span the gamut from improved physical health and emotional well-being, to heightened performance at school and work, to more satisfying interpersonal relationships. Conversely, feeling out of control often causes our chatter to spike and propels us to try to regain it. Which is where turning to our physical environments becomes relevant.
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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.
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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.
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When supporting others, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock.
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But stress stops being adaptive when it becomes chronicwhen the fight-or-flight alarm fails to stop signaling. And sure enough, a main culprit in keeping stress active is our negative verbal stream.
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The same brain circuitry that becomes active when we are attracted to someone or consume desirable substances (everything from cocaine to chocolate) also activates when we share information about ourselves with others.
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Although we generally associate wisdom with advanced age, because the longer you live the more uncertainty you will have experienced and learned from, research indicates that you can teach people how to think wisely regardless of their agethrough gaining distance.
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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 dayor night, ratherthey are simply stories in the mind.
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people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. Thats one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends dont.
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Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how youll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that youll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and itll seem much less upsetting.
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However it manifests itself, when the inner voice runs amok and chatter takes the mental microphone, our mind not only torments but paralyzes us. It can also lead us to do things that sabotage us.
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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.
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But social media doesnt just provide us with a platform to (over)share the thoughts and feelings streaming through our head, and the ways it derails our internal dialogues dont exclusively relate to empathy and time. Social media also allows us to shape what we want other people to believe is happening in our lives, and our choices about what to post can fuel other peoples chatter. The human need to self-present is powerful. We craft our appearances to influence how people perceive us all the time.
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The study revealed that helping without the recipient being aware of it, a phenomenon called invisible support, was the formula for supporting others while not making them feel bad about lacking the resources to cope on their own. As a result of receiving indirect assistance, the participants felt less depressed. In practice, this could be any form of surreptitious practical support, like taking care of housework without being asked or creating more quiet space for the person to work. Or it can involve skillfully providing people with perspective-broadening advice without their realizing that it is explicitly directed to them.
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Other experiments have shown that distanced self-talk allows people to make better first impressions, improves performance on stressful problem-solving tasks, and facilitates wise reasoning, just as fly-on-the-wall distancing strategies do. It also promotes rational thinking.
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When our chatter is buzzing, it drains us of the neural resources we need to focus, get distance, and regain control of our inner voice. Yet distanced self-talk sidesteps this conundrum. It is high on results and low on effort.
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Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of supportturning to different relationships for different needsbenefit the most. The most important point here is to think critically after a chatter-provoking event occurs and reflect on who helped youor didnt. This is how you build your chatter board of advisers, and in the internet age we can find unprecedented new resources online.
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Offering advice without considering the persons needs can undermine a persons sense of self-efficacythe crucial belief that we are capable of managing challenges. In other words, when we are aware that others are helping us but we havent invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some waya feeling that our inner voice may latch on to.
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We can also go outside for a walk, attend a concert, or simply tidy up our living space, and each of these seemingly small actions can have surprising effects on our chatter.
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To put it another way that only slightly exaggerates, green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.
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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 accomplishmentsif we know how to control them.
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What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing.
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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.
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The bottom line is that we all have a voice in our head in some shape or form. The flow of words is so inextricable from our inner lives that it persists even in the face of vocal impairments. Some people who stutter, for example, report talking more fluently in their minds than they do out loud.
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We often think of fight or flight as the main defensive reaction human beings turn to when faced with a threat. When under stress, we flee or hunker down for the impending battle. While this reaction does characterize a pervasive human tendency, researchers have documented another stress-response system that many people engage in when under threat: a tend and befriend response. They seek out other people for support and care.
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When our internal conversation loses perspective and gives rise to intensely negative emotions, the brain regions involved in self-referential processing (thinking about ourselves) and generating emotional responses become activated.
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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, isnt actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.
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Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story. The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice.
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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.
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Distance, then, helps us deal better not only with the big emotions we experience from upsetting situations but also with the smaller yet crucial daily emotional challenges of frustration and boredom that come with the important tedium of work and education.
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One way to think about this is to imagine that your DNA is like a piano buried deep in your cells. The keys on the piano are your genes, which can be played in a variety of ways. Some keys will never be pressed. Others will be struck frequently and in steady combinations. Part of what distinguishes me from you and you from everyone else in the world is how these keys are pressed. Thats gene expression. Its the genetic recital within your cells that plays a role in forming how your body and mind work.
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Our inner voice, it turns out, likes to tickle our genetic ivories. The way we talk to ourselves can influence which keys get played.
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Research
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In 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. Using the mind to engage with our thoughts and feelings in the wrong ways can lead professional athletes to lose the skills theyve spent their careers perfecting. It can cause otherwise rational, caring people to make less logical and even less moral decisions. It can lead friends to flee from you in both the real world and the social media world. It can turn romantic relationships from safe havens into battlegrounds. It can even contribute to us aging faster, both in how we look on the outside and in how our DNA is configured internally. In short, our thoughts too often dont save us from our thoughts. Instead, they give rise to something insidious. Chatter.
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As our experiments and others later demonstrated, shifting from the first-person I to the second-person you or third-person he or she provides a mechanism for gaining emotional distance. Distanced self-talk, then, is a psychological hack embedded in the fabric of human language.
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Rituals are infused with meaning. They are charged with significance because they have a crucial underlying purpose, whether its putting a small rock on a cemetery headstone to honor the dead, engaging in a rain dance to nourish crops, or taking Communion. 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.
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A study published in 2010 drives home this point. The scientists found that inner experiences consistently dwarf outer ones. What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing. This speaks to a sour experience many people have had: Youre in a situation in which you should be happy (spending time with friends, say, or celebrating an accomplishment), but a ruminative thought swallows your mind. Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.
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We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.
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As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isnt just play or imagination; its a sign of neural and emotional growth.
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With our defenses down and our civilized propriety turned off while we slept, he thought, our demons came out and romped around, revealing our desires. Then came early neuroscience, which took out all the dark and naughty romance of psychoanalysis and replaced it with the cold no-nonsense attitude of the physical workings of the brain.
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Out the door went sexual symbolism, which was entertaining if a bit loony, and in came the mechanics of neurons, which was more scientifically grounded (and not at all salacious).
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Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves.
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It turns out that our waking verbal mind converses with our sleeping one. Fortunately, this doesnt produce Oedipal wish fulfillments.
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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 taskthe task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, thats how chatter divides and blurs our attention.
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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.
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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.
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In fact, spontaneous thoughts related to goals are among the most frequent kind that fill our mind. Its our inner voice alerting us to pay attention to an objective.
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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.
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Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves. In the early twentieth century, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was one of the first people to explore the connection between language development and self-control. He was interested in the curious behavior of children who talk to themselves out loud, coaching themselves along while also doling out self-critiques. As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isnt just play or imagination; its a sign of neural and emotional growth.
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study conducted by a different team with more than 900,000 participants found that children who grew up with the least exposure to green spaces had up to 15 to 55 percent higher risk of developing psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety as adults.
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Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character. Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity.
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Strong emotions acted like a jet propellant, blasting people off to share their experiences. It seemed to be a law of human nature. The only exceptions to this rule were cases in which people felt shame, which they often wished to conceal, or certain forms of trauma, which they wanted to avoid dwelling on. Such
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It is a mistake, however, to value our own inner voice only when it buoys our emotions. Even when the conversations we have with ourselves turn negative, that in and of itself isnt 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.
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Normally, using ones own name is associated with eccentricity, narcissism, or sometimes mental illness, but I didnt identify with any of these. For me, at least in that moment of crisis, I had somehow managed to subdue my inner voicewith my inner voice.
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