Ethan Kross Quotes

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.

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.

When supporting others, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock.

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.

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.

When we’re 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.

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 thoughts—by adding distance.

Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll 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.

But stress stops being adaptive when it becomes chronic—when the fight-or-flight alarm fails to stop signaling. And sure enough, a main culprit in keeping stress active is our negative verbal stream.

The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s 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 can’t 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.

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.

Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting.

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.

people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t.

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 age—through gaining distance.

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 people’s 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.

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.

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.

It turns out that our waking verbal mind converses with our sleeping one. Fortunately, this doesn’t produce Oedipal wish fulfillments.

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 accomplishments…if we know how to control them.

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.

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 day—or night, rather—they are simply stories in the mind.

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.

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.

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. In other words, when we are aware that others are helping us but we haven’t invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some way—a feeling that our inner voice may latch on to.

Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support—turning to different relationships for different needs—benefit the most. The most important point here is to think critically after a chatter-provoking event occurs and reflect on who helped you—or didn’t. This is how you build your chatter board of advisers, and in the internet age we can find unprecedented new resources online.

But social media doesn’t 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 don’t 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 people’s chatter. The human need to self-present is powerful. We craft our appearances to influence how people perceive us all the time.

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.

In a recent study done with functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), researchers found that the same brain networks light up when you're burned with hot coffee and when someone you love leaves you. That is to say—there is no categorical difference between physical and emotional pain in the brain. The University of Michigan's Ethan Kross, PhD, says, "Heartache and painful breakups are 'more than just metaphors.'"7 If we don't address the pain of our past, we may not have peace in the present.

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.

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 they’ve 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 don’t save us from our thoughts. Instead, they give rise to something insidious. Chatter.

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 isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

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 ones own knowledge, becoming aware of the various contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people's viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives.

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.

Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves.

Telling your story. All forgiveness must begin by facing the truth. You can write down in a journal or tell a trusted friend what happened. Telling your story also allows you to integrate the memories in your consciousness and defuse some of your emotional reactivity. To help heal the memories and avoid retraumatizing yourself, it is helpful to imagine that you are watching the event happen in a movie. This way you may reduce the chances of triggering the brain’s neural stress response. One scientific protocol by Ethan Kross and his colleagues suggests recalling your experience this way: Close your eyes. Go back to the time and place of the emotional experience and see the scene in your mind’s eye. Now take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to a point where you can watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event, the distant you. Watch the experience unfold as if it were happening to the distant you all over again. Observe your distant self. Naming the hurt. The facts are the facts, but these experiences caused strong emotions and pain, which are important to name. As you watch the situation unfold around your distant self, try to understand his or her feelings. Why did he or she have those feelings? What were the causes and reasons for the feelings? If the hurt is fresh, ask yourself, “Will this situation affect me in ten years?” If the hurt is old, ask yourself whether you want to continue to carry this pain or whether you want to free yourself from this pain and suffering. Granting forgiveness. The ability to forgive comes from the recognition of our shared humanity and the acknowledgment that, inevitably, because we are human we hurt and are hurt by one another. Can you accept the humanity of the person who hurt you and the fact that they likely hurt you out of their own suffering? If you can accept your shared humanity, then you can release your presumed right to revenge and can move toward healing rather than retaliation. We also recognize that, especially between intimates, there can be multiple hurts, and we often need to forgive and ask for forgiveness at the same time, accepting our part in the human drama. Renewing or releasing the relationship. Once you have forgiven someone, you must make the important decision of whether you want to renew the relationship or release it. If the trauma is significant, there is no going back to the relationship that you had before, but there is the opportunity for a new relationship. When we renew relationships, we can benefit from healing our family or community. When we release the relationship, we can move on, especially if we can truly wish the best for the person who has harmed us, and recognize that they, like us, simply want to avoid suffering and be happy in their life.

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: You’re 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.

Normally, using one’s own name is associated with eccentricity, narcissism, or sometimes mental illness, but I didn’t identify with any of these. For me, at least in that moment of crisis, I had somehow managed to subdue my inner voice…with my inner voice.

There’s a classic finding in psychology called the frequency illusion. It describes the common experience of, say, learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it seemingly everywhere you look. In reality, the word—or whatever recent new observation you’ve had—has always been present in your environment with an ordinary frequency; your brain just wasn’t sensitized to it before, so this creates a mental illusion. Something

There was already a term for talking about oneself in the third person, “illeism,” which was frequently used to describe the literary device Julius Caesar had employed to narrate his work on the Gallic Wars, in which he had participated. He wrote about himself by using his own name and the pronoun “he” instead of the word “I.

When a person is in a threat state, their vasculature constricts, leaving less room for their blood to flow, which over time can lead to burst blood vessels and heart attacks. In contrast, when people are in challenge mode, their vasculature relaxes, allowing blood to move easily throughout the body.

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.

They ask us to relate what we felt and tell them in detail what occurred. And though they may nod and communicate empathy when we narrate what happened, this commonly results in leading us to relive the very feelings and experiences that have driven us to seek out support in the first place, a phenomenon called co-rumination. Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions.

This is because when it comes to our inner voice, the game of dominoes provides a more appropriate metaphor. When we focus on a negative aspect of our experience, that tends to activate a related negative thought, which activates another negative thought, and another, and so on. These dominoes continue to hit one another in a game where there is a potentially infinite supply of tiles.

傷害自己的事：歷史上，心理學家曾以不同用語指稱看來相似的小對話相關過程（例如「芻思」、「事件後處理」（post-event processing）、「慣性負面自我思考」（habitual negative self-thinking）、「慢性壓力」和「憂慮」）。雖然在某些情況中，這些不同的重複性負面思考有微妙不同（例如，芻思的焦點往往是過去，而憂慮則是未來導向），但科學家在討論時往往將它們視為屬於同一個單一構念，即「固著認知」（perseverative cognition）或「負面重複思考」。我在本書中以「小對話」一詞表達這個概念。這些議題的相關討論請見Jos F. Brosschot, William Gerin, and Julian F. Thayer,“The Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis: A Review of Worry, Prolonged Stress-Related Physiological Activation, and Health,”Journal of Psychosomatic Research 60 (2006): 113–124；and Edward R. Watkins,“Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought,”Psychological Bulletin 134 (2008): 163–206。

We discovered that placebos can directly help people with chatter. A spray with nothing chemically meaningful in it could work like a painkiller for the inner voice. It was both strange and exciting: Our minds can cause emotional distress while simultaneously and covertly reducing that distress.

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.

Rituals are infused with meaning. They are charged with significance because they have a crucial underlying purpose, whether it’s 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.

Trees and grass seemed to act like mental vitamins that fueled their ability to manage the stressors they faced. As it turned out, Ming’s findings were not a fluke. In the years since her study, more green revelations have followed. For example, using data from more than ten thousand individuals in England collected over eighteen years, scientists found that people reported experiencing lower levels of distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space.

The natural world delicately captures our attention with artifacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals. We may glance at these things, and approach them for greater appreciation like that musician playing on the corner, but we’re not carefully focusing on them as we would if we were memorizing talking points for a speech or driving in city traffic. Activities like those drain our executive-function batteries, whereas effortlessly absorbing nature does the opposite: It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.

This tendency to structure elements in our environment as a buffer against chatter goes beyond contexts in which our performance is being evaluated. It extends to any of the spaces that we occupy. As a result, humans infuse order into their external surroundings—and by extension their minds—in a variety of ways.

Research

people who are overventing and inadvertently alienating those around them are less capable of solving problems. This makes it harder for them to fix the breach in their relationships, begetting a vicious cycle that can end with a toxic outcome: loneliness and isolation.

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. That’s gene expression. It’s the genetic recital within your cells that plays a role in forming how your body and mind work. Our inner voice, it turns out, likes to tickle our genetic ivories. The way we talk to ourselves can influence which keys get played. The UCLA professor of medicine Steve Cole has spent his career studying how nature and nurture collide in our cells. Over the course of numerous studies he and his colleagues discovered that experiencing chatter-fueled chronic threat influences how our genes are expressed. When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections. Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.

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.

a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good.

The operative power of awe is its ability to make us feel smaller, nudging us to cede control of our inner voice to a greater grandeur. But there is another lever that our physical environments can pull to improve our internal dialogues that is the opposite of giving in to life’s wild vastness—a lever that doesn’t help us cede control but rather helps us regain it.

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.

There is a potent psychological comfort that comes from normalizing experiences, from knowing that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique to you, but rather something everyone experiences—that, unpleasant as it is, it’s just the stuff of life.

Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support—turning to different relationships for different needs—benefit the most.

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.

In fact, emerging research suggests that imaginary play promotes self-control, among many other desirable qualities such as creative thinking, confidence, and good communication.

When it stops working or operates suboptimally, our capacity to perform even the most ordinary daily activities (like bugging your kids to brush their teeth while making them pack lunches and also thinking about what meetings you have later that day) fails. And connected to working memory is the inner voice. A critical component of working memory is a neural system that specializes in managing verbal information. It’s called the phonological loop, but it’s easiest to understand it as the brain’s clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present. It has two parts: an “inner ear,” which allows us to retain words we’ve just heard for a few seconds; and an “inner voice,” which allows us to repeat words in our head as we do when we’re practicing a speech or memorizing a phone number or repeating a mantra.

Our working memory relies on the phonological loop for keeping our linguistic neural pathways online so that we can function productively outside ourselves while also keeping our conversations going within.

In a sense, then, our inner voice makes its home in us as children by going from the outside in, until we later speak from the inside out and affect those around us.

Sometimes the voice sounds like normal speech, and sometimes it’s a torrent of idea fragments and half-formed thoughts. In his book Chatter, the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross reports on one study suggesting that we talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words a minute out loud. About a quarter of all people hear the sounds of other people’s voices in their heads. About half of all people address themselves in the second person as “you” often or all the time. Some people use their own name when talking to themselves. By the way, the people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively. If you’re able to self-distance in this way, you should.

Cole and others have found that a similar set of inflammation genes are expressed more strongly among people who experience chronic threat, regardless of whether those feelings emerge from feeling lonely or dealing with the stress of poverty or the diagnoses of disease. This happens because our cells interpret the experience of chronic psychological threat as a viscerally hostile situation akin to being physically attacked. When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections. Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.

While doing the research for this book, I interviewed many people—seminar leaders, conversation facilitators, psychologists and focus group moderators, biographers and journalists—whose job it is to ask other people about their lives. I asked these experts how often somebody looks back at them and says, “None of your damn business.” Every expert I consulted had basically the same answer: “Almost never.” People are longing to be asked questions about who they are. “The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross. A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it.

I asked these experts how often somebody looks back at them and says, “None of your damn business.” Every expert I consulted had basically the same answer: “Almost never.” People are longing to be asked questions about who they are. “The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross.

The specifics of their private conversations were as idiosyncratic as their individual lives. Yet structurally, what happened in their minds was very similar. They often dealt with negative “content,” much of which sprang up through associative connections, the pinging of one thought to another. Sometimes their verbal thinking was constructive; sometimes it wasn’t. They also spent a considerable amount of time thinking about themselves, their minds gravitating toward their own experiences, emotions, desires, and needs. The self-focused nature of the default state, after all, is one of its primary features.

It is our ability to reason logically, solve problems, multitask, and control ourselves that allows us to manage work, family, and so many other crucial parts of our lives with wisdom, creativity, and intelligence. To do this, we have to be deliberate and attentive and flexible, which we are capable of doing thanks to what we can think of as the CEO of the human brain—our executive functions, which are also vulnerable to the incursions of an unsupportive inner voice.

Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray. To make matters worse, when this occurs, the people who are overventing and inadvertently alienating those around them are less capable of solving problems. This makes it harder for them to fix the breach in their relationships, begetting a vicious cycle that can end with a toxic outcome: loneliness and isolation.

But for well-worn, automatic behaviors that you’re trying to execute under pressure, like pitching, this very same tendency leads us to break down the complicated scripts that we’ve learned to execute without thinking. This is exactly what our inner voice’s tendency to immerse us in a problem does. It overfocuses our attention on the parts of a behavior that only functions as the sum of its parts. The result: paralysis by analysis.

Yes, we can create a chronic physiological stress reaction just by thinking. And when our inner voice fuels that stress, it can be devastating to our health.

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.

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. That’s gene expression. It’s the genetic recital within your cells that plays a role in forming how your body and mind work.

Our inner voice, it turns out, likes to tickle our genetic ivories. The way we talk to ourselves can influence which keys get played.

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.

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. Language is integral to this process because it smooths the jagged and seemingly unconnected fragments of daily life into a cohesive through line.

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

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.

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 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.

Minimize passive social media usage. Voyeuristically scrolling through the curated news feeds of others on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms can trigger self-defeating, envy-inducing thought spirals. One way to mitigate this outcome is to curb your passive social media usage. Use these technologies actively instead to connect with others at opportune times.

Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t.

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

It’s hard to overstate the importance of empathy both individually and collectively. It’s what allows us to forge meaningful connections with others, it’s one of the reasons why we so often find ourselves venting (we seek the empathy of others), and it’s also one of the mechanisms that holds communities together.

Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray.

Unsurprisingly, people with depression—which is fueled by the verbal stream—share more negative personal content on social media yet actually perceive their network as less helpful than nondepressed people do.

One of the most chilling discoveries I’ve had in my career is that chatter doesn’t simply hurt people in an emotional sense; it has physical implications for our body as well, from the way we experience physical pain all the way down to the way our genes operate in our cells. The

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, isn’t actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, spontaneous thoughts related to goals are among the most frequent kind that fill our mind. It’s our inner voice alerting us to pay attention to an objective.

As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

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.

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.

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).