Rather than coming up with a more clear, objective solution to a problem. Typically it’s when you find yourself rehearsing the same things over and over again. How can you recognize the difference between your normal stream of consciousness and when you are starting to go into a chatter spiral? It can involve perseverating about the past, which we call rumination, perseverating about the future, we call that worry. Chatter refers to those negative thought loops that characterize that experience of being stuck. When we experience problems, we often turn our attention inward to make sense of them.

“I’ve always been passionate about translating what we know for others so it’s not just scientists talking about it.” Meredith Heuer quiet minds: Ethan Kross, author of Chatter, wanted to “really get out what we know about what chatter is, why we experience it, and how to deal with it,” he says. I spoke to Kross via Zoom about how we can define mental chatter, what goes on in our brains during a chatter spiral, and, of course, how to control that nagging, looping voice in our heads. You can never be certain what he was thinking, Liz. And a way to gain that perspective is to talk to yourself as if you were another person.

The best medicine for being stuck on a problem is to gain perspective on it. A key strategy is “distanced self-talk,” using language to create mental distance from yourself. In his new book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, Kross walks readers through a number of different strategies to control mental chatter. Those inner voices can take us to whole other worlds, allow us to imagine different pasts or exciting futures, but they can also trap us in a hell of our own making.

That would be a bad thing.Īccording to Kross, our inner voices can be one of our greatest strengths-when we can control them. The goal is not to stop talking to ourselves. Not the voices of mental illness, mind you, just the little voice we all have, cheerily (or naggingly) narrating our lives as we go about our days. The voice in our heads goes from an ally to a vicious nag, just looping uselessly over the same things, again and again and again.Įthan Kross, an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, wants to teach us how to control the voices in our heads. He was always so patient when I was growing up. Stuck in our own heads, fixated on a two-minute conversation from three days ago.

Chatter voice in your head