by Ethan Kross
We talk to ourselves.
And we listen to what we say.
Humanity has grappled with this phenomenon since the dawn of civilization. Early Christian mystics were thoroughly annoyed by the voice in their head always intruding on their silent contemplation. Some even considered these voices demonic. Around the same time, in the East, Chinese Buddhists theorized about the turbulent mental weather that could cloud one’s emotional landscape. They called it “deluded thought.” And yet many of these very same ancient cultures believed that their inner voice was a source of wisdom, a belief that undergirds several millennia-old practices like silent prayer and meditation (my dad’s personal philosophy). The fact that multiple spiritual traditions have both feared our inner voice and noted its value speaks to the ambivalent attitudes to our internal conversations that still persist today.
When we talk about the inner voice, people naturally wonder about its pathological aspects. I often begin presentations by asking audience members if they talk to themselves in their heads. Invariably, many people look relieved to see other hands shoot up alongside theirs. Unfortunately, normal voices that we hear in our heads (belonging, for example, to ourselves, family, or colleagues) can sometimes devolve into abnormal voices characteristic of mental illness. In such cases, the person doesn’t believe that the voice issues from their own mind but thinks it comes from another entity (hostile people, aliens, and the government, to name a few common auditory hallucinations). Importantly, when we talk about the inner voice, the difference between mental illness and wellness is a question not of dichotomy—pathological versus healthy—but of culture and degree. One quirk of the human brain is that roughly one in ten people hear voices and attribute them to external factors. We are still trying to understand why this happens.
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. Deaf people who use sign language talk to themselves too, though they have their own form of inner language. It involves silently signing to themselves, similar to how people who can hear use words to talk to themselves privately. The inner voice is a basic feature of the mind.
If you’ve ever silently repeated a phone number to memorize it, replayed a conversation imagining what you should have said, or verbally coached yourself through a problem or skill, then you’ve employed your inner voice. Most people rely on and benefit from theirs every day. And when they disconnect from the present, it’s often to converse with that voice or hear what it has to say—and it can have a lot to say.
Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud. To put this in perspective, consider that contemporary American presidents’ State of the Union speeches normally run around six thousand words and last over an hour. Our brains pack nearly the same verbiage into a mere sixty seconds. This means that if we’re awake for sixteen hours on any given day, as most of us are, and our inner voice is active about half of that time, we can theoretically be treated to about 320 State of the Union addresses each day. The voice in your head is a very fast talker.
Although the inner voice functions well much of the time, it often leads to chatter precisely when we need it most—when our stress is up, the stakes are high, and we encounter difficult emotions that call for the utmost poise. Sometimes this chatter takes the form of a rambling soliloquy; sometimes it’s a dialogue we have with ourselves. Sometimes it’s a compulsive rehashing of past events (rumination); sometimes it’s an angst-ridden imagining of future events (worry). Sometimes it’s a free-associative pinballing between negative feelings and ideas. Sometimes it’s a fixation on one specific unpleasant feeling or notion. 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.
Which is how you find yourself peeking out the window of your living room late at night holding a comically small baseball bat.
The Puzzle
One of the most crucial insights I’ve had during my career is that the instruments necessary for reducing chatter and harnessing our inner voice aren’t something we need to go looking for. They are often hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to put them to work. They are present in our mental habits, quirky behaviors, and daily routines, as well as in the people, organizations, and environments we interact with. In this book, I will lay bare these tools and explain not only how they work but how they fit together to form a toolbox that evolution crafted to help us manage the conversations we have with ourselves.
In the chapters ahead, I will bring the lab to you while also telling stories about people who combat their chatter. You’ll learn about the mental lives of a former NSA agent, Fred Rogers, Malala Yousafzai, LeBron James, and an indigenous South Pacific tribe called the Trobrianders, as well as many people just like you and me. But to begin this book, we will first look at what the inner voice really is, along with all the marvelous things it does for us. Then I will take us into the dark side of the conversations we have with ourselves and the truly frightening extent to which chatter can harm our bodies, damage our social lives, and derail our careers. This inescapable tension of the inner voice as both a helpful superpower and destructive kryptonite that hurts us is what I think of as the great puzzle of the human mind. How can the voice that serves as our best coach also be our worst critic? The rest of the chapters will describe scientific techniques that can reduce our chatter—techniques that are rapidly helping us solve the puzzle of our own minds.
The key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively. Fortunately, both your mind and the world around you are exquisitely designed to help you do precisely that. But before we get into how to control the voice in our head, we need to answer a more basic question.
Why do we have one in the first place?
Chapter One
Why We Talk to Ourselves
The sidewalks of New York City are superhighways of anonymity. During the day, millions of intent pedestrians stride along the pavement, their faces like masks that betray nothing. The same expressions pervade the parallel world beneath the streets—the subway. People read, look at their phones, and stare off into the great invisible nowhere, their faces disconnected from whatever is going on in their minds.
Of course, the unreadable faces of eight million New Yorkers belie the teeming world on the other side of that blank wall they’ve learned to put up: a hidden “thoughtscape” of rich and active internal conversations, frequently awash with chatter. After all, the inhabitants of New York are nearly as famous for their neuroses as they are for their gruffness. (As a native, I say this with love.) Imagine, then, what we might learn if we could burrow past their masks to eavesdrop on their inner voices. As it happens, that is exactly what the British anthropologist Andrew Irving did over the course of fourteen months beginning in 2010—listened in on the minds of just over a hundred New Yorkers.
While Irving hoped to gain a glimpse into the raw verbal life of the human mind—or rather an audio sample of it—the origin of his study actually had to do with his interest in how we deal with the awareness of death. A professor at the University of Manchester, he had done earlier fieldwork in Africa analyzing the vocalized inner monologues of people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Unsurprisingly, their thoughts roiled with the anxiety, uncertainty, and emotional pain produced by their diagnoses.
Now Irving wanted to compare these findings with a group of people who surely had their woes but weren’t necessarily in aggrieved states to begin with. To carry this out, he simply (and bravely!) approa
ched New Yorkers on the street and in parks and cafés, explained his study, and asked if they would be willing to speak their thoughts aloud into a recording device while he filmed them at a distance.
Some days, a handful of people said yes; other days, only one. It was to be expected that most New Yorkers would be too busy or skeptical to agree. Eventually, Irving gathered his one hundred “streams of internally represented speech,” as he described them, in recordings ranging from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half. The recordings obviously don’t provide an all-access backstage pass to the mind, because an element of performance might have come into play for some participants. Even so, they offer an uncommonly candid window into the conversations people have with themselves as they navigate their daily lives.
As was only natural, prosaic concerns occupied space in the minds of everyone in Irving’s study. Many people commented on what they observed on the streets—other pedestrians, drivers, and traffic, for example—as well as on things they needed to do. But existing alongside these unremarkable musings were monologues negotiating a host of personal wounds, distresses, and worries. The narrations often landed on negative content with utterly no transition, like a gaping pothole appearing suddenly on the unspooling road of thought. Take, for example, a woman in Irving’s study named Meredith whose inner conversation pivoted sharply from everyday concerns to matters of literal life and death.
“I wonder if there’s a Staples around here,” Meredith said, before shifting, like an abrupt lane change, to a friend’s recent cancer diagnosis. “You know, I thought she was going to tell me that her cat died.” She crossed the street, then said, “I was prepared to cry about her cat, and then I’m trying not to cry about her. I mean New York without Joan is just…I can’t even imagine it.” She started crying. “She’ll probably be fine, though. I love that line about having a 20 percent chance of being cured. And how a friend of hers said, ‘Would you go on a plane that had a 20 percent chance of crashing?’ No, of course not. It was hard to get through, though. She does put up quite a wall of words.”
Meredith seemed to be working through bad news rather than drowning in it. Thoughts about unpleasant emotions aren’t necessarily chatter, and this is a case in point. She didn’t start spiraling. A few minutes later, after crossing another street, her verbal stream circled back to her task at hand: “Now, is there a Staples down there? I think there is.”
While Meredith processed her fear about losing a beloved friend, a man named Tony fixated on another kind of grief: the loss of closeness in a relationship, and perhaps even the relationship itself. Carrying a messenger bag down a sidewalk scattered with pedestrians, he began a self-referential riff of thoughts: “Walk away…Look, suck it up. Or move on. Just walk away. I understand the thing about not telling everybody. But I’m not everybody. You two are having a goddamn baby. A phone call would have been good.” The sense of exclusion he felt obviously cut him deeply. He seemed to be poised on a fulcrum of sorts, between a problem in search of a solution and pain that could lead to unproductive wallowing.
“Clear, totally clear. Move forward,” Tony then said. He used language not just to give voice to his emotions but also to search for how best to handle the situation. “The thing is,” he went on, “it could be an out. When they told me they were having a baby, I felt a bit out. I felt a bit pushed out. But now maybe it’s an escape hatch. I was pissed before but, must admit, not so pissed anymore. Now it could work to my advantage.” He released a soft, bitter laugh, then sighed. “I am certain that this is an out…I am looking at this positively now…I was pissed before. I felt like you two were a family…and you two are a family now. And I have an out…Walk tall!”
Then there was Laura.
Laura sat in a coffee shop in a restless mood. She was waiting to hear from her boyfriend, who had gone to Boston. The problem was, he was supposed to be back to help her move to a new apartment. She had been waiting for a phone call since the day before. Convinced that her boyfriend had been in a fatal accident of some sort, the night before she sat in front of her computer for four hours, every minute refreshing a keyword search of the words “bus crash.” Yet, as she reminded herself, the eddy of her compulsive negative worrying wasn’t just about a possible bus crash involving her boyfriend. She was in an open relationship with him, even though this wasn’t something she ever desired, and it was turning out to be very hard. “It’s supposed to be open for sexual freedom,” she told herself, “but it’s something that I never really wanted for myself…I don’t know where he is…He could be anywhere. He could be with another girl.”
While Meredith processed upsetting news with relative equanimity (crying at a friend’s cancer diagnosis is normal) and Tony calmly coached himself to move on, Laura was stuck with repeating negative thoughts. She didn’t know how to proceed. At the same time, her internal monologue dipped back in time, with reflections about the decisions that took her relationship to its current state. For her the past was very present, as was the case for Meredith and Tony. Their unique situations led them to process their experiences differently, but they were all reckoning with things that had already occurred. At the same time, their monologues also projected into the future with questions about what would happen or what they should do. This pattern of hopscotching through time and space in their inner conversations highlights something we have all noticed about our own mind: It is an avid time traveler.
While memory lane can lead us down chatter lane, there’s nothing inherently harmful about returning to the past or imagining the future. The ability to engage in mental time travel is an exceedingly valuable feature of the human mind. It allows us to make sense of our experiences in ways that other animals can’t, not to mention make plans and prepare for contingencies in the future. Just as we talk with friends about things we have done and things we will do or would like to do, we talk to ourselves about these same things.
Other volunteers in Irving’s experiment also demonstrated preoccupations that jumped around time, braiding together in the patter of the inner voice. For example, while walking across a bridge, an older woman recalled crossing the same bridge with her father as a girl just as a man threw himself off and committed suicide. It was an indelible memory, in part because her father was a professional photographer and snapped a picture of the moment, which ended up in a citywide newspaper. Meanwhile, a man in his mid-thirties crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and thought about all the human labor it took to build it, also telling himself that he would succeed at a new job he was about to start. Another woman, waiting for a late blind date in Washington Square Park, recalled a past boyfriend who cheated on her, which ended up sparking a reverie about her desires for connection and spiritual transcendence. Other participants talked about economic hardships that might await them, while the anxieties of others centered on a looming event from a decade earlier: 9/11.
The New Yorkers who generously shared their thoughts with Andrew Irving embody the wildly diverse, richly textured nature of our default state. Their inner dialogues took them “inside” in vastly different ways, leading them down myriad streams of verbal thought. 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.
The New Yorkers had these things in common, but their monologues also emphasized something else universally human: 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.
While we undoubtedly have feelings and thoughts that take nonverbal forms—visual artists and musicians, for instance, pursue precisely this kind of mental expression—humans exist in a world of words. Words are how we communicate with others most of the time (though body language and gestures are clearly instrumental too) and how we communicate with ourselves much of the time as well.
Our brain’s built-in affinity for disconnecting from what is going on around us produces a conversation in our minds, one that we spend a significant portion of our waking hours engaged in. This begs a critical question: Why? Evolution selects qualities that provide a survival advantage. According to this rule, you wouldn’t expect humans to have become such prolific self-talkers if doing so didn’t add to our “fitness” for survival. But the inner voice’s influence is often so subtle and fundamental that we are rarely if ever aware of all that it does for us.
The Great Multitasker
Neuroscientists often invoke the concept of neural reuse when discussing the operations of the brain—the idea that we use the same brain circuitry to achieve multiple ends, getting the absolute most from the limited neural resources at our disposal. For example, your hippocampus, the sea-horse-shaped region buried deep within your brain that creates long-term memories, also helps us navigate and move through space. The brain is a very talented multitasker. Otherwise, it would have to be the size of a bus to be large enough to support every one of its countless functions. Our inner voice, it turns out, is likewise a prodigious multitasker.
One of the brain’s essential tasks is powering the engine of what is known as working memory. Humans have a natural tendency to conceptualize memory in the romantic, long-term, and nostalgic sense. We think of it as the land of the past, teeming with moments, images, and sensations that will stay with us forever and constitute our life’s narrative. But then there’s the fact that every minute of the day, amid an ongoing rush of stimulation that can be quite distracting (sounds, sights, smells, and so on), we have to constantly recall details to function. That we’ll likely forget most of the information after it’s no longer useful doesn’t matter. For the brief time that information is active, we need it to function.