by Ethan Kross
Uncontrolled emotional sharing isn’t the only type of social repellent that chatter enables. People who perseverate on conflicts are also more likely to behave aggressively. One experiment showed that cuing people to ruminate about how they felt after being insulted by an experimenter who undiplomatically criticized an essay they had written led them to be more hostile with the person who insulted them. When given the chance to administer loud blasts of noise to the experimenter, they did so more than people who didn’t ruminate. In other words, the more I stew over what you did to me, the more I keep those negative feelings alive, and the more likely I am to act aggressively against you as a result. Chatter also leads us to displace our aggression against people when they don’t deserve it. Our boss upsets us, for example, and we take it out on our kids.
But none of this research considers our digital lives. In the age of online sharing, Rimé’s work on emotions and our social lives has acquired a new urgency. Facebook and other social media applications like it have provided us with a world-altering platform for sharing our inner voice and listening in on the inner voices of others (or at least what other people want us to think they’re thinking about). Indeed, the first thing people see when they log in to Facebook is the prompt asking them to broadcast their answer to this question: “What’s on your mind?”
And broadcast we do.
In 2020, close to two and a half billion people use Facebook and Twitter—almost a third of the world’s population—and they frequently do so to share their private ruminations. It’s worth highlighting that there’s nothing inherently bad about sharing on social media. In the long historical timeline of our species, it’s simply a new environment that we find ourselves spending a great deal of time in, and environments aren’t good or bad per se. Whether they help or harm us depends on how we interact with them. That said, there are two features of social media that are worrying when you consider the intense drive we have to air our stream of thoughts: empathy and time.
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. It’s a capacity we evolved because it helps our species survive.
Research shows that observing other people’s emotional responses—seeing someone wince or hearing a quiver in a voice—can be a potent route to triggering empathy. But online, the subtle physical gestures, micro-expressions, and vocal intonations that elicit empathic responses in daily life are absent. As a result, our brains are deprived of information that serves a critical social function: inhibiting cruelty and antisocial behavior. In other words, less empathy all too frequently leads to trolling and cyberbullying, which have grave consequences. Cyberbullying, for example, has been linked to longer episodes of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, as well as several toxic physical effects like headaches, sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal ills, and changes in how well stress-response systems operate.
The passage of time is likewise essential to helping us manage our emotional lives, especially when it comes to processing upsetting experiences. When we identify someone to talk to off-line, we often have to wait until we see the person or until they’re available to chat. While one waits for that person, something magical happens: Time passes, which allows us to reflect on what we’re feeling and thinking about in ways that often temper our emotions. Indeed, research supports the common idea that “time heals” or the advice to “just give it time.”
Now let’s transplant ourselves to the parallel world of digital life and our ability to access it anytime thanks to our smart devices. Social media allows us to connect with others in the immediate aftermath of a negative emotional response, before time provides us with the opportunity to rethink how we’re feeling or what we’re planning to do. Thanks to twenty-first-century connectivity, during the very peak of our inner flare-ups, right when our inner voice wants to rant from the rooftops, it can.
We post. We tweet. We comment.
With the passage of time and physical elicitors of empathy removed, social media becomes a place amenable to the unseemly sides of the inner voice. This can lead to increased conflict, hostility, and chatter for both individuals and arguably society as a whole. It also means that we overshare more than ever before.
Similar to talking for too long and too frequently to others about your problems, overly emotional posts irritate and alienate others. They violate unspoken norms, and users wish people who overshare online would look for support from friends off-line. 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.
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. This has always been the case, but then along came social media to give us exponentially more control over how we do this. It allows us to skillfully curate the presentations of our lives—the proverbial photoshopped version of life, with the low points and less aesthetically pleasing moments left out. Engaging in this self-presentation exercise can make us feel better, satisfying our own need to appear positively in the eyes of others and buoying our inner voice.
But there’s a catch. Although posting glamour shots of our lives may lead us to feel better, that very same act can cause the users who view our posts to feel worse. That’s because at the same time that we are motivated to present ourselves positively, we are also driven to compare ourselves with others. And social media switches the social-comparison hardware in our brain into overdrive. A study my colleagues and I published in 2015 demonstrated, for example, that the more time people spent passively scrolling through Facebook, peering in on the lives of others, the more envy they experienced and the worse they subsequently felt.
If broadcasting our feelings on social media and participating in its culture of self-curation have so many chatter-inducing effects, it’s reasonable to ask why we continue to share. One answer to that question has to do with the trade-off that often comes from engaging in behaviors that feel good in the moment but have negative consequences over time. Research shows that 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. In a particularly compelling illustration, one study by Harvard neuroscientists published in 2012 showed that people would prefer to share information about themselves with others than receive money. The social high, in other words, is like a neuronal high, a delicious hit for our dopamine receptors.
The point of all this is to say that both online and off-line, when we let our chatter drive social behaviors, we frequently crash into a range of negative outcomes. The most damaging one for internal and external conversations is that, quite often, we end up finding less support. This starts a vicious cycle of social isolation, which further wounds us. In fact, if you stop and listen, you’ll notice that many people actually use the language of physical “pain” to describe how they feel when they’re rejected by others.
In languages across the globe, from Inuktitut to German, Hebrew to Hungarian, Cantonese to Bhutanese, people use words related to physical injury to describe emotional pain—“damaged,” “wound,” “injured,” among many others. It turns out the reason they
do so is not just that they have a knack for metaphorical expression. 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 Piano Inside Our Cells
One by one they arrived in our basement laboratory: the heartbroken of New York City.
It was 2007. My colleagues and I had begun a study to better understand what emotional pain really looked like in the brain. Instead of finding just any volunteers to participate—which would have meant finding a method for making them feel bad in the lab in some effective but somehow still ethical way—we sought out forty volunteers who were already hurting: people who had recently suffered heartbreak, one of the most potent elicitors of emotional torment that we know. We posted ads in the subway and in parks looking for people who had just been rejected from monogamous relationships that had lasted at least six months:
Have you recently had a difficult, unwanted breakup?
Still have feelings for an ex-partner?
Participate in an experiment on how the brain processes emotional and physical pain!
In a city of eight million, volunteers were easy to find.
We did do one slightly provocative thing, though. We had them bring a photo of the person who’d dumped them. Having the photos wasn’t gratuitous. By asking the volunteers to lie in an MRI scanner, look at the object of their unrequited love, and recall how they felt during the precise moment of their breakup, we were hoping to obtain a neural snapshot of chatter. But we also wanted to know something else: whether the way the brain processes an experience of emotional pain was similar to how it processes physical pain. To get at the latter, we also applied heat to their arms that felt like a hot cup of coffee.
Afterward, we compared the MRI results from when they looked at the photo of their lost love with those of the hot-coffee simulation. Incredibly, there was a high degree of overlap in brain regions that play a role in our sensory experience of physical pain. In other words, our results suggested that emotional pain had a physical component as well.
These and a host of findings from other labs that emerged around the same time were beginning to demonstrate how admittedly fuzzy concepts like social pain influence what happens in our bodies, especially when it comes to stress.
It’s a cliché of the twenty-first century to say that stress kills. It’s a modern epidemic that contributes to productivity losses in the United States alone that amount to $500 billion annually. Yet we frequently lose sight of the fact that stress is an adaptive response. It helps our bodies respond quickly and efficiently to potentially threatening situations. 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.
Threat includes physical danger, of course, but it also encompasses a range of more common experiences. For example, when we encounter situations that we aren’t sure we can handle: losing a job or starting a new one, having a conflict with a friend or family member, moving to a new city, facing a health challenge, grieving the death of a loved one, getting a divorce, living in an unsafe neighborhood. These are all adverse circumstances capable of triggering a threat response similar to the one we get when we are in immediate physical danger. When the threat trip wire in our brain gets crossed, our bodies quickly mobilize themselves to protect us, much like a country mobilizing its army for a coordinated strike against an enemy invader.
Phase one begins instantly in a cone-shaped region of the brain called the hypothalamus. When your hypothalamus receives signals from other parts of your brain indicating that threat exists, it triggers a chain of chemical reactions that release adrenaline into your bloodstream. The adrenaline causes your heart to beat fast, your blood pressure and energy levels to rise, and your senses to sharpen. Moments later, the stress hormone cortisol is released to keep your jet engines firing and maintain your energy levels. While all of this is happening, chemical messengers are also working to curb the systems in your body that aren’t vital to your ability to respond to an immediate threat, like your digestive and reproductive systems. If you’ve ever noticed your appetite for food or sex disappear when you’re in the midst of a crisis, these chemical messengers are the reason why. All of these changes have a singular goal: to enhance your ability to respond quickly to the stressors you face, regardless of whether you’re actively confronting those stressors in the moment (like seeing a burglar enter your home) or simply conjuring them up in your mind.
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.
Countless studies have linked the long-term activation of our stress-response systems with illnesses that span the gamut from cardiovascular disease to sleep disorders to various forms of cancer. This explains how stressful experiences such as feeling chronically isolated and alone can have drastic effects on 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.
Chronic negative thoughts can also push into the territory of mental illness, though this isn’t to say chatter is the same thing as clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Repetitive negative thinking isn’t synonymous with these conditions, but it’s a common feature of them. Indeed, scientists consider it a transdiagnostic risk factor for many disorders, meaning that chatter underlies a variety of mental illnesses.
But here is what is most frightening about the ways in which chatter feeds stress. When our panic response is prolonged, the gradual physiological erosion it causes can harm more than our ability to fight sickness and keep our body running smoothly. It can change the way our DNA influences our health.
When I was in college, I learned a simple formula: Genes + Environment = Who We Are. In class after class, my professors told me that when it came to the shaping of human life, the effects of genes and environment didn’t mix. Nurture was in one box, and Nature was in another. This was conventional wisdom for a long time—until suddenly it wasn’t. To many a scientist’s surprise, new research suggests that this equation couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because you have a certain type of gene doesn’t mean it actually affects you. What determines who we are is whether those genes are turned on or off.
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 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.
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 att
acked. 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.”
Asset or Liability?
Learning about the effects that our negative internal dialogues can have on our minds, relationships, and bodies can be deeply unsettling. As a scientist steeped in this work, I often can’t help but think how this research applies to my own life and the lives of those I love. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t worry each time I see one of my daughters fretting over something.
And yet, if I look around me, I see examples that offer hope. I see students who go from insecure freshmen drowning in self-doubt to confident seniors ready to make contributions to the world. I see people who face tremendous hardships find ways to connect with others and receive support from their social networks. And I see those who have lived with chronic stress attain healthy lives. As a young woman in Poland, my grandmother Dora escaped the Nazis by hiding in the forest a whole terrifying year, and yet she still managed to live seventy more resilient, joyful years in the United States.
What these important counterexamples bring me back to is that great puzzle of the human mind: how 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. At the same time that our species evolved the inner voice, which can drown us in chatter, we also co-evolved tools to turn it into our greatest strength. Just look at Rick Ankiel, who returned to the major leagues in 2007—not as a pitcher, but as an outfielder who still had to contend with the pressures of playing in front of tens of thousands of fans.