Chatter

by Ethan Kross

  This phenomenon mirrors the indispensability of the harsh side of our inner voice. It can cloud our thoughts with negative emotions, but if we didn’t have this critical self-reflective capacity, we’d have a difficult time learning, changing, and improving. As uncomfortable as it is when I make a joke that bombs at a dinner party, I’m grateful that afterward I can replay what went wrong in my mind so I hopefully won’t embarrass myself—and my wife—next time.

  You wouldn’t want to live a life without an inner voice that upsets you some of the time. It would be like braving the sea in a boat with no rudder.

  When Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who suffered a debilitating stroke, experienced her verbal stream crawling to a stop, and along with it her chatter, she felt strangely elated but also empty and disconnected. We need the periodic pain of our internal conversations. The challenge isn’t to avoid negative states altogether. It’s to not let them consume you.

  Which brings me back to my student Arielle.

  What she meant when she asked her question was this: Why hadn’t she learned earlier in her life how to reduce episodes of full-blown chatter? Of course, she, just like all of us, possessed many of the tools she needed to control her inner voice. But until she took my class, she didn’t have an explicit guide for how to manage it, and Arielle’s question made me wonder whether we were doing enough to share this knowledge.

  A few weeks after that class, my older daughter, who was four at the time, came home from school in tears. She told me that a boy in her class was taking her toys, which was making her feel bad. As she recounted what happened and I tried to comfort her, Arielle’s question popped back into my head. Here I was, a supposed expert on controlling emotions, and yet my own daughter was struggling. Granted, she was just four, which is when the neural circuitry underlying the ability to control your emotions is still developing. Nonetheless, the thought troubled me.

  I wondered about what she and her friends were learning at school and whether they would develop the tools that Arielle felt had been withheld from her until she took my class. And eighteen years later, would my daughter ask a professor the same question Arielle asked me? Or more likely, she’d ask me, which would make me feel even worse.

  During the days and months that followed, I reflected on the rich and startling variety of ways to distance, to talk to oneself, to leverage and improve personal relationships, to benefit from our environments, and to use placebos and rituals to harness the ability of the mind to heal itself. These techniques had been hidden in plain sight inside us and around us. And while no specific tool is a panacea, they all have the potential to bring down the temperature of our inner voice when it runs too hot. But these findings didn’t seem to be penetrating into the world.

  So I got to work and recruited a group of like-minded scientists and educators to translate what we know about the science of managing emotion into a course that could be weaved into middle and high school curricula.

  After traveling around the country and meeting with hundreds of educators and scientists, in the fall of 2017 we launched a pilot study. Its aim was to translate research on controlling our emotions—including how to harness our inner voice—into a curriculum, and to evaluate what the implications of teaching students about this information are for their health, performance, and relationships with others. We call it the Toolbox Project.

  And thankfully, our efforts are beginning to pay off.

  In the pilot study, a culturally and socioeconomically diverse group of some 450 students from a public school in the United States participated in the toolbox course we designed. The results were exciting: Kids in the toolbox-curriculum classes who learned about techniques such as journaling, distanced self-talk, and challenge-oriented reframing actually used them to a significant extent in their daily lives. And this is just the start. Soon we are planning to run a much larger study with close to twelve thousand students.

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  The metaphor of the toolbox doesn’t just describe the curriculum my colleagues and I developed. It also describes what I hope you take away from this book.

  Distancing is a tool, whether it’s imagining yourself as a fly on the wall, mentally traveling through time, or visualizing yourself and your predicaments as physically smaller in your mind. So is distanced self-talk: You can talk to yourself or about yourself using non-first-person pronouns or your own name, and you can normalize your challenges with the universal “you.” We can be an inner-voice tool for the people grappling with chatter in our lives—and they can do the same for us—by avoiding co-rumination and finding a balance between providing caring support and helping others constructively reframe their problems when their emotions cool. We can also help in invisible ways that ease the strains of people under stress who may feel insecure about their capabilities. These anti-chatter approaches apply to the ways we interact in our increasingly immersive digital lives as well, though there are behaviors online that are just as important to avoid: passive instead of active use of social media, and doing things lacking empathy that we wouldn’t do off-line.

  Another subset of tools comes from the complex world around us. Mother Nature is a veritable toolshed for our minds, containing pleasant and effective ways of restoring the attentional tools that are so helpful for reducing chatter and bolstering our health. It can fill us with awe, as can plenty of experiences found not on mountaintops but at concerts, in places of worship, and even in special moments in our own homes (just remembering when each of my daughters said “Dada” for the first time rekindles awe in me).

  Imposing order on our surroundings likewise can be comforting and allow us to feel better, think more clearly, and perform at higher levels. Then there are our beliefs, whose malleability can work to our advantage. Through the neural apparatus of expectation, sugar pills that we know are just sugar pills can improve our health, as can the exercise of rituals, both those that are culturally ordained and those we create ourselves. The power of the mind to heal itself is, indeed, magical (in the awe-inspiring, not supernatural, sense).

  You now know about these different tools, but it’s critical that you build your own toolbox. That is your personal puzzle, and it’s why subduing chatter can frequently be so challenging, even when we know the research.

  Science has shown us so much, but there is still more to learn.

  We have only just begun to understand how the various strategies for controlling chatter work together for different people in different situations, or how they work when used interchangeably. Why do some tools work better for us than others? We each need to discover which tools we find most effective.

  Managing our inner voice has the potential not only to help us become more clearheaded but to strengthen the relationships we share with our friends and loved ones, help us offer better support to people we care about, build more organizations and companies where people are insulated against burnout, design smarter environments that leverage nature and order, and rethink digital platforms to promote connection and empathy. In short, changing the conversations we have with ourselves has the potential to change our lives.

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  My interest in introspection came from my dad, and when people hear the story about how he used to encourage me to “go inside” and “ask yourself the question” during my childhood, they often wonder whether I do the same with my children when they feel upset.

  The answer to that question is no. I most certainly do not. I’m not my dad. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t talk to my kids about how they can address their chatter. As a parent who wants his children to be happy, healthy, and successful, and as a scientist who knows how important harnessing the conversations we have with ourselves is for achieving these goals, I can’t think of a more important lesson to teach them. I just do it in my own way.

  I stick Band-Aids on their
elbows when they’re upset and tell them that if they think the Band-Aid will make them feel better, it will. I take them for walks in the splendidly green arboretum near our house when they feel sad, and carefully nudge them to focus on the big picture when they tell me about their latest tiff on the playground or in the classroom. And when they are acting impossibly irrational for the silliest reasons, I ask them to tell themselves what they imagine their mom or I would say to them. And I tickle them.

  One of the things that has become clear to me while writing this book is just how influential a role my wife and I play in the conversations that our daughters have with themselves. We ourselves are one of their tools, in the sense that we provide them with chatter support when they need it and we create the culture they are immersed in at home. We are shaping their inner voices, just as they increasingly affect our own.

  Often the things I tell my daughters to rein in their chatter help. Sometimes, I’ll admit, they roll their eyes the way I sometimes did with my dad. But over time I’ve noticed that both of them have begun to implement many of these practices on their own, cycling back and forth through the different techniques they have at their disposal in their unique style as they discover what works. In this way, I hope I can help my daughters harness the conversations they have with themselves throughout their lives.

  I also remind my daughters and myself that while creating a calming distance between our thoughts and our experiences can be useful when chatter strikes, when it comes to joy, doing the opposite—immersing ourselves in life’s most cherished moments—helps us savor them.

  The human mind is one of evolution’s greatest creations, not just because it allowed our species to survive and thrive, but because in spite of the inevitable pain that comes with life, it also endowed us with a voice in our head capable of not only celebrating the best times but also making meaning out of the worst times. It’s this voice, not the din of chatter, that we should all listen to.

  I haven’t been in touch with Arielle since our last class together, so she doesn’t know what her question inspired. She will, though, if she ends up reading this book, which has been the other effort that grew out of that final class meeting. This book is another attempt to share the discoveries that science has revealed but that haven’t yet rooted themselves in our culture. In a certain sense, there are too many Arielles to count out in the world—people hungry to learn about their own minds, how they give rise to chatter, and how it can be controlled.

  So I wrote this book for them.

  And for myself.

  And for you.

  Because no one should have to pace his house at 3:00 A.M. with a Little League baseball bat.

  The Tools

  Chatter reviews the different tools that exist for helping people resolve the tension between getting caught in negative thought spirals and thinking clearly and constructively. Many of these techniques involve shifting the way we think to control the conversations we have with ourselves. But a central idea of this book is that strategies for controlling the inner voice exist outside us too, in our personal relationships and physical environments. Scientists have identified how these tools work in isolation. But you must figure out for yourself which combination of these practices works best for you.

  To help you in this process, I’ve summarized the techniques discussed in this book, organizing them into three sections: tools that you can implement on your own, tools that leverage your relationships with other people, and tools that involve your environment. Each section begins with the strategies that you are likely to find easiest to implement when chatter strikes, building up to those that may require a little more time and effort.

  Tools You Can Implement on Your Own

  The ability to “step back” from the echo chamber of our own minds so we can adopt a broader, calmer, and more objective perspective is an important tool for combating chatter. Many of the techniques reviewed in this section help people do this, although some—like performing rituals and embracing superstitions—work via other pathways.

  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. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

  Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you’d give that person, and then apply it to yourself.

  Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we’re experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.

  Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat—something we can’t manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you’ve succeeded in similar situations in the past, or by using distanced self-talk.

  Reinterpret your body’s chatter response. The bodily symptoms of stress (for example, an upset stomach before, say, a date or presentation) are often themselves stressful (for instance, chatter causes your stomach to grumble, which perpetuates your chatter, which leads your stomach to continue to grumble). When this happens, remind yourself that your bodily response to stress is an adaptive evolutionary reaction that improves performance under high-stress conditions. In other words, tell yourself that your sudden rapid breathing, pounding heartbeat, and sweaty palms are there not to sabotage you but to help you respond to a challenge.

  Normalize your experience. Knowing that you are not alone in your experience can be a potent way of quelling chatter. There’s a linguistic tool for helping people do this: Use the word “you” to refer to people in general when you think and talk about negative experiences. Doing so helps people reflect on their experiences from a healthy distance and makes it clear that what happened is not unique to them but characteristic of human experience in general.

  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. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state.

  Change the view. As you think about a negative experience, visualize the event in your mind from the perspective of a fly on the wall peering down on the scene. Try to understand why your “distant self” is feeling the way it is. Adopting this perspective leads people to focus less on the emotional features of their experience and more on reinterpreting the event in ways that promote insight and closure. You can also gain distance through visual imagery by imagining moving away from the upsetting scene in your mind’s eye, like a camera panning out until the scene shrinks to the size of a postage stamp.

  Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days. Really let yourself go as you jot down your stream of thoughts; don’t worry about grammar or spelling. Focusing on your experience from the perspective of a narrator provides you with distance from the experience, which helps you make sense of what you felt in ways that improve how you feel ov
er time.

  Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party. If you find yourself experiencing chatter over a negative interaction you’ve had with another person or group of people, assume the perspective of a neutral, third-party observer who is motivated to find the best outcome for all parties involved. Doing so reduces negative emotions, quiets an agitated inner voice, and enhances the quality of the relationships we share with the people we’ve had negative interactions with, including our romantic partners.

  Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Simply believing that an object or superstitious behavior will help relieve your chatter often has precisely that effect by harnessing the brain’s power of expectation. Importantly, you don’t have to believe in supernatural forces to benefit from these actions. Simply understanding how they harness the power of the brain to heal is sufficient.

  Perform a ritual. Performing a ritual—a fixed sequence of behaviors that is infused with meaning—provides people with a sense of order and control that can be helpful when they’re experiencing chatter. Although many of the rituals we engage in (for example, silent prayer, meditation) are passed down to us from our families and cultures, performing rituals that you create can likewise be effective for quieting chatter.

  Tools That Involve Other People

  When we think about the role that other people in our lives play in helping us manage our inner voice, there are two issues to consider. First, how can we provide chatter support for others? And second, how can we receive chatter support ourselves?