by Ethan Kross
When he was drafted right out of high school, a seventeen-year-old with a ninety-four-mile-an-hour fastball, scouts and commentators believed Ankiel had the potential to be one of the best pitchers the game had seen in decades. His debut in the majors two years later didn’t disappoint. During his first full season in 2000, he struck out 194 batters, racking up eleven wins to help his team reach the playoffs. Everything pointed to a spectacular career. It was no surprise, then, that he was chosen as the starter for game one against the Braves in the playoffs that October. All he had to do was the thing he did best in life: throw a baseball.
Ankiel tried to forget the wild pitch. It was an anomaly for him, and there was nothing to worry about. It was only the third inning and his team had already jumped to a dramatic 6–0 lead. On top of that, the pitch hadn’t even been that wild; it had just ricocheted off the ground the wrong way and gotten away from his catcher. He’d felt good going into the inning, so he would just shake it off. And yet a prickly nettle of a thought lodged itself in his mind as he gathered himself on the mound. Man, he said to himself, I just threw a wild pitch on national TV. What he didn’t know was that he did have something to worry about.
Moments later, after reading the signs from his catcher, Ankiel uncoiled his explosive, left-handed windup and…threw another wild pitch.
The crowd oohed a bit louder and longer this time, as if sensing something were off. The runner on second ran to third base. While the dark-eyed, twenty-one-year-old Ankiel chewed his gum and kept an unreadable facial expression, inside he was anything but composed. As his catcher retrieved the ball again and the seconds passed beneath the afternoon sun, he felt his mind slipping out of his control and into the hands of what he would come to call “the monster”—his cruel inner critic, a stream of verbal thoughts so vicious they could undo years of hard work, its voice louder than the fifty-two thousand fans in the stands.
Anxiety. Panic. Fear.
His own immense vulnerability—a young player with everything on the line—was something he could no longer ignore.
Ankiel might have looked like the shining embodiment of the American dream—a small-town kid from Florida making good on his exceptional gift—but his childhood belied such a picturesque narrative. The son of a verbally and physically abusive father who was both a petty criminal and an addict, he knew depths of emotional pain beyond his years. Which is why baseball was more than just a career for him. It was a hallowed, safe place where he felt good, where things were easy, where a kind of joy was built in, unlike his family life. Only now something strange and seemingly uncontrollable was starting to happen, overwhelming his senses and flooding him with terror.
Still, he was determined to rally. He narrowed his focus in on his weight, on his stance, on his arm. All he had to do was make the machinery of his windup click into place. Then he wound up again.
And threw another wild pitch.
And another.
And another.
Before the Cardinals gave up any more runs, Ankiel was pulled out of the game. He disappeared into the dugout accompanied by “the monster” inside him.
His showing on the mound that day was both embarrassing and unexpected. The last time a pitcher had thrown five wild pitches in one inning had been more than a hundred years earlier. But it wouldn’t have retrospectively gone down as one of the most painful-to-watch performances in baseball history were it not for what soon followed.
When Ankiel was called on to pitch against the Mets nine days later, the same thing happened. The monster reappeared and he threw more wild pitches. Once again, he was pulled from the mound, this time before the first inning was over. And yet the humiliation didn’t end there, though his brief career as a major-league pitcher effectively did.
At the start of the following season, Ankiel pitched a few more games during which he had to drink alcohol to stay his nerves before taking the field, but even the liquor couldn’t help calm his mind. His pitching didn’t improve. He was sent to the minors, where he spent a dispiriting three years before deciding to retire from baseball in 2005 at the tragically premature age of twenty-five.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he told his coach.
Rick Ankiel would never pitch professionally again.
Unlinking and the Magical Number Four
Rick Ankiel isn’t the first elite athlete to lose his superpower—to suddenly have the skill he was best at stop being a skill altogether. Time and again, people who have spent years mastering a talent watch it break down like a decrepit old Chevy when chatter hijacks their inner voice. This phenomenon isn’t restricted to athletes. It can happen to anyone who has become skilled at a learned task—from teachers who memorize their lesson plans, to start-up founders with rehearsed spiels they pitch to investors, to surgeons who perform complex operations that took them years to master. The explanation for why these skills fail ultimately relates to how the conversations we have with ourselves influence our attention.
At any given moment, we are bombarded with information—countless sights and sounds, and the thoughts and feelings that these stimuli spark. Attention is what allows us to filter out the things that don’t matter so that we can focus on the things that do. And although much of our attention is involuntary, like when we automatically turn toward a loud noise, one of the features that make humans so unique is our ability to consciously concentrate on the tasks that require our attention.
When we find ourselves overwhelmed by emotion, as Ankiel did on that fall day in 2000, one of the things our inner voice does is harness our attention, narrowing it in on the obstacles we encounter to the exclusion of practically everything else. This serves us well most of the time, but not when it comes to exercising our attention to wrangle an automatic, learned skill, as pitching was for Ankiel. To understand why this is, it’s useful to look at what goes right when athletes’ automatized behaviors lift them into the most impressive heights of performance.
On August 11, 2019, the American gymnast Simone Biles made sports history when she became the first woman to ever land a triple-double flip at an official competition during her floor routine at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships. As one commentator wrote, “It’s a move that requires incredible, almost superhuman strength, coordination, and training.” To execute it by deliberately thinking about each movement would be impossible, because everything happens in the air, where the laws of physics play out in an instant—gravity versus a body.
The seemingly impossible move Biles pulled off required her to spin her body around two axes at the same time and do two backflips while also spinning three times, hence the name triple double. We can think of her perfect execution of the move as the culmination of all the automatized movements her brain had mastered over the years: running, jumping, handsprings, backflips, twists, and landing. To achieve her triple double, she linked into one breathtaking feat a set of movements that took years to learn but that eventually stopped needing her brain’s conscious control. Biles’s inner voice didn’t direct her every action, though it likely rejoiced as the crowd went wild.
Like all athletes, Biles built her triple double out of a series of individual behaviors that she linked together through practice. Eventually, the separate elements in the chain of movements merged into one seamless action. Her automatic bodily mechanics, spurred by her brain’s ability to link them together (combined with fabulous DNA), propelled Biles into sports history. Until Ankiel’s meltdown, he seemed as if he were on a similar trajectory, with flawless movements and a preternaturally strong arm. So, what happened that day on the mound?
He unlinked.
Ankiel’s verbal stream turned into a spotlight that shined his attention too brightly on the individual physical components of his pitching motion, thereby seeming to inadvertently dismantle it. After throwing the first few wild pitches, he mentally stepped back and focused on the mechanics of
his throw: the choreographed movements that involved his hips, legs, and arm. On the surface, that seems wise and intuitive. He was calling on his brain to fix a scripted behavior it had previously successfully carried out literally tens of thousands of times. Which is precisely where things went wrong.
When you’re completing your taxes, it pays to double-check your calculations to make sure you’ve done everything right, even if you’re an experienced accountant. 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.
Chatter ruined Ankiel’s career as a pitcher, but automatic behaviors aren’t the only kind of skill that can backfire when our inner voice betrays us. After all, one of the things that distinguishes us from every other animal species is our ability not just to execute automatic behaviors but to use our mind to consciously focus our attention.
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.
Our executive functions are the foundation of our ability to steer our thoughts and behavior in the ways we desire. Supported largely by a network of prefrontal brain regions located behind our forehead and temples, their job is to intervene when our instinctual processes aren’t sufficient and we need to consciously guide our behavior. They allow us to keep relevant information active in our mind (working memory is a part of executive functions), filter out extraneous information, block out distractions, play with ideas, point our attention where it needs to go, and exercise self-control—like helping us resist the temptation to open a new browser tab and go down a tangential Wikipedia rabbit hole. In short, without our executive functions we wouldn’t be able to function in the world.
The reason your brain needs this type of neurological leadership is that paying attention, reasoning wisely, thinking creatively, and executing tasks often require you to leave automatic mode and exercise conscious effort. And doing this asks a lot of your executive functions because they have a limited capacity. Like a computer that slows down when it has too many programs open, your executive functions perform worse as the demands placed on them increase.
The classic illustration of this limited capacity, known as the magical number four, has to do with our ability to hold between three and five units of information in the mind at any given time. Take an American phone number. Memorizing the number 200-350-2765 is much easier than memorizing 2003502765. In the first instance, you’ve grouped the numbers, so you’re memorizing three pieces of information; in the latter, you’re trying to memorize an unbroken string of ten pieces of information, placing more demands on the system.
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.
All of us are familiar with the distractions of a negative verbal stream. Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources. The problem for most of us, however, is that usually we’re engaged in activities with much higher stakes than retaining information in a book. We’re doing our jobs, pursuing our dreams, interacting with others, and being evaluated.
Chatter in the form of repetitive anxious thought is a marvelous saboteur when it comes to focused tasks. Countless studies reveal its debilitating effects. It leads students to perform worse on tests, produces stage fright and a tendency to catastrophize among artistic performers, and undermines negotiations in business. One study found, for instance, that anxiety led people to make low initial offers, exit discussions early, and earn less money. This is a very nice way of saying they failed at their jobs—because of chatter.
On any given day, the keel of our inner voice can be thrown askew by an infinite number of things. When this happens, we have trouble focusing our minds to address the inevitable daily challenges we face, which often produces still more turbulence in our inner dialogues. Quite naturally, when we’re floundering like this, we look for a way out of our predicament. So, what exactly do we do?
That’s the question a middle-aged, mild-mannered psychologist became intrigued with some thirty years ago. His research would raise profound questions about the costs of chatter that go far beyond our ability to focus our attention. Our inner voice affects our social lives as well.
A Social Repellent
In the late 1980s, a bespectacled Belgian psychologist named Bernard Rimé decided to examine whether experiencing the kinds of strong negative emotions that characterize chatter lead people to engage in a very social process: talking.
Over the course of several studies, Rimé brought people into his laboratory and asked them whether they talked about negative experiences from their past with others. Then he turned his focus to the present and asked people to record in diaries over the course of several weeks each time they confronted an upsetting situation and whether they discussed it with members of their social networks. He also ran experiments in which he provoked participants in the lab and then watched if they shared their reactions with others nearby.
Again and again, Rimé landed on the same finding: People feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences. But that wasn’t all. The more intense the emotion was, the more they wanted to talk about it. Additionally, they returned to talking about what had occurred more often, doing so repeatedly over the course of hours, days, weeks, and months, and sometimes even for the remainder of their lives.
Rimé’s finding proved true regardless of people’s age or education level. It was characteristic of men as well as women. It even carried across geography and cultures. From Asia to the Americas to Europe, he kept finding the same thing: 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 consistency in a finding was stunning, though it may sound like a confirmation of the obvious. As we all know, people talk a lot about intense emotions. It’s not as if we go around calling friends to say, “Hey, I feel fairly normal today.” It’s the highs and lows that leap from the verbal stream in our minds to the words that leave our mouths.
While this sounds normal and harmless, repeatedly sharing our negative inner voice with others produces one of the great ironies of chatter and social life: We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that talking to others about your problems is harmful per se.
But it highlights how chatter can transform an otherwise helpful experience into something negative.
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.
For a heightened example of how this process of progressive social isolation operates, we can look to that widespread emotional tumult known as middle school. One study tracked more than one thousand middle schoolers for seven months and found that kids who were prone to rumination reported talking with their peers more than their low-rumination counterparts. Yet this did more harm than good. It predicted a host of painful results: being socially excluded and rejected, being the target of gossip and rumors by their peers, and even being threatened with violence.
Unfortunately, in this case, what is true of preteens and teens crosses over to adulthood. Furthermore, it turns out it doesn’t matter much even if you have a legitimate reason for venting; overvoicing your chatter can still push people away. One study that focused on grieving adults found that people who were prone to ruminate reached out for more social support after their loss, which is normal. The uncomfortable twist, though, is that they reported experiencing more social friction and less emotional support in their relationships as a result.