How to harness the voice in your head

We all have a voice in our head. We tune into its endless chatter to look for guidance, ideas and wisdom. Except sometimes, this voice leads us down a rabbit hole of negative self-talk and endless rumination.

Ethan Kross, author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How To Harness It.

How often do you really stop to tune into the tone and content of your inner verbal stream? Perhaps you’re highly self-aware and can recognise when this voice starts to derail you. Or perhaps you’ve become so accustomed to the running commentary that it’s hard to step back and notice. Either way, this voice has a significant impact. In fact, studies suggest that what people are thinking about is a better predictor of their happiness than what they are actually doing, which means our inner experiences regularly dwarf our outer ones.

Zooming out

When internal chatter starts to spiral, it usually goes something like this: you find yourself zooming in on a situation you perceive to be a problem; as the inner chatter increases, your emotions flare up and the issue becomes magnified further. As you focus more intensely on the issue, you begin to filter out other, more helpful ways of thinking about the situation, causing you to become consumed and lose perspective. Sound familiar?

Knowing that your inner voice has a powerful impact on your experiences of the world is one thing, but how can you tune it in a way that shapes more positive, constructive experiences?

Research suggests that ‘zooming out’ can help, as this type of psychological distancing is associated with lower levels of activation in the brain regions linked to rumination. “We can use our thought to change our thoughts, by adding distance,” says Kross.

So here are some tools to create space and help you access a wider, more objective perspective:

Distanced self-talk

This is a tool I often share with my coaching clients and uses language to create psychological distance. When you’re facing a tough situation or challenge, simply use your name or the second-person ‘you’ to talk to yourself – for example, ‘trust yourself, you’ve got this.’

We’re often much better at giving advice to others than to ourselves as we’re able to bring a more rational, helpful viewpoint rather than being caught up in the emotion. Shifting perspective in this way, therefore, helps to transform our inner critic into an inner coach.

As with other psychological tools, you need to practise and it helps to start in lower stakes situations and build up. I often give myself an inner pep talk when I’m out running and my legs are screeching at me to stop – saying to myself ‘look how far you’ve come; keep going’ helps to take the edge off the discomfort and push me further.

Practise mental time travel

Another way to create distance is by widening your perspective to imagine how you will feel about your challenge or setback in one week, one month or even one year from now. How important will it be? How much is it likely to affect those things you truly value?

Nudging yourself to remember that the situation will seem much less worrying or distressing when looking back from the future highlights the impermanence of our emotions and can take some heat out of current challenges.

Put your thoughts in writing

A final simple but effective tool is writing thoughts down. Give yourself 15-20 minutes a day for one to three days to write down your thoughts surrounding your challenging experience. Don’t try to edit yourself – just write down whatever arises. Focusing on your experiences from this perspective opens space for you to make sense of your situation.

So next time you notice your inner chatter spiralling, why not try out one of these tools. How could you use distanced self-talk to give yourself the psychological boost to keep persevering? How could imagining yourself in the future help you to move beyond the challenge you’re facing today? Which tool works best for you and in which situations?

Of course, creating psychological distance won’t automatically solve all our problems. However, it increases the likelihood that we’ll be able to find the answers.

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross