- 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.