- I think chatter is
one of the big problems we face as a species. We spend between one-third
and one-half of our waking hours not
living in the present. And what do we do
during that time? We're talking to ourselves. Your inner voice is your
ability to silently use language to reflect on your life. Chatter refers to the dark
side of the inner voice. When we turn our attention
inward to make sense of our problems, we don't
end up finding solutions. We end up ruminating,
worrying, catastrophizing. We get stuck in a
negative cycle that takes this remarkable tool that we
possess, this inner voice, and it turns it into a curse
rather than a blessing. My name's Ethan Kross, I'm a professor of
psychology and management, and I'm the author of the book, "Chatter: The Voice in
Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It." In terms of whether there's
an evolutionary purpose to the inner voice, many scientists believe
that language is a tool that helps us navigate the world, and our ability to use language not only to communicate
with others, but to communicate
with ourselves, provides us with
a survival advantage. It's an incredible
problem-solving device. At the most basic end of the
spectrum, our inner voice is part of what we call our
'Verbal Working Memory System.' It's a basic feature of the
human mind that helps us keep verbal information
active in our heads. Our inner voice also lets
us simulate and plan. So before a big presentation,
I'll go over in my head what I'm gonna say, what
are the different talking points that I'm gonna
run through- I'll hear what questions the
audience is gonna ask me, and then I'll respond in turn. I'm simulating that exchange,
and I'm using my inner voice to help me do that. Our inner voice helps
us control ourselves. Think about the last time
you may have wanted to reach for a treat late at night, but
then you think to yourself, "Don't do it, you'll
regret it in the morning." That's your inner voice. And then finally,
the inner voice helps us 'storify' our lives. Many of us turn our
attention inward to come up with some narrative that
explains our experiences in ways that give shape
to our understanding of who we are, our identity. So sometimes this
inner voice can be an incredible source of
help, but at other times it can really sink us. First, it makes it incredibly
hard for us to focus. Chatter consumes our attention. Chatter can also create
friction in your relationships because you're talking
about your problems over and over again, and not being
a great listener to others. It can also make us more irritable, and lead to something called
'displaced aggression.' Finally, we know that
chatter can have severe, negative, physical health effects. You've probably heard
that stress kills- that's not exactly true. A stress response is a
really adaptive response. What makes stress toxic
is when it remains chronically-elevated over time. This is precisely
what chatter does. We experience a
stressor in our life, it then ends, but in our minds
our chatter perpetuates it. We keep thinking about
that event over and over and over again. And that keeps that stress response active in ways that can predict things
like cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation,
and even cancer. It's hard to overstate how
negative the implications of chatter can be. The good news is there is
a science-based toolkit that you can use to regain
control of your inner voice. There are things we
can do on our own, ways of harnessing our
relationships with other people, and even ways of interacting
with physical environments. One really great example
of these tools are rituals. We love having control. When you experience
chatter, you often feel like your thoughts are
in control of you. One of the things that we've
learned through science is that we can compensate for
this feeling out of control by creating order around us-
rituals are one way to do that. A ritual is an ordered sequence of behaviors that you rigidly
perform the same way each time by engaging the same sequence of behaviors every
time the same way. That's giving you a sense
of order and control. That can feel really good
when you're mired in chatter. The tennis great, Rafael Nadal, he said the hardest thing
that he struggles to do on the tennis court is manage
the voices inside his head. He engages in rituals. During breaks between play
he goes over to his bench. First, he takes a sip
out of one water bottle. Then he takes a sip
out of another. Then he puts each water
bottle back exactly where he picked them up from
on a diagonal to the court. It's a ritual he does
to manage his chatter. There are no individual tools
that work for all people in all situations to
help manage your chatter. Instead, the real
challenge is to figure out what are the unique combinations of tools that work best for you? Are you weaker for
experiencing chatter? Absolutely not. You are human for
experiencing chatter, so welcome to the
human condition.
