“What makes you think you can do this? You have never been an athlete and certainly aren’t one now.” I stubbornly refused to respond, but the conversation continued. “Face the facts, you are out of shape, overweight and middle-aged. What makes you think you can cycle 3,300 kilometers? You will never do it. Give up now and go home.”
It was 2019, and my inner voice was eroding my confidence and attempting to sabotage my goal of cycling the length of New Zealand. I struggled to change the negative narrative that looped through my head, but the relentless headwinds and physical exhaustion left me depleted. Maybe the voice was right.
The judge inside my head hijacked my reason and ignored my experience. If not for my partner’s intervention, I might have quit. Reflecting on this story, I realize I almost gave up on achieving an important goal, and I was missing out on enjoying an amazing experience. The relentless thoughts running through my head became my reality, blinding me to the beautiful landscape I was riding through.
Everyone Does It
It turns out I am not alone in the challenge of managing our inner monologue. Tennis star Rafael Nadal was once asked, “What is the hardest thing you struggle with on the tennis court?” He replied, “The hardest thing is to battle the voice inside my head.”
Ethan Kross, an expert on emotional regulation, describes the phenomenon of self-talk as a “universal human experience.” These internal conversations allow us to tap into our “inner coach” to motivate and cheer ourselves on, but they can also become a negative saboteur, affecting our mood, straining our social connections and even impacting our health.
Kross uses the word “chatter” to describe the experience of an inner voice that holds us hostage to a negative inner monologue. When chatter takes hold, it consumes our attention and narrows our focus, becoming the only thing we can think about. You might spend your Saturday at the beach with your kids, but all you can think about is that conversation with a veterinary client on Friday that didn’t go so well.
Research reveals a non-linear pattern to our chatter. When we are ruminating on a person, problem or situation, we move back and forth between ideas quickly. Our mind moves from one negative thought to the next and merrily hops down those dark rabbit holes of rumination.
Multitasking
Before exploring the tools to sedate the rabbits, we must remember that our inner voice serves a purpose. Kross describes our inner voice as “the Swiss Army knife of our mind,” a valuable tool that allows us to use language silently and supports our ability to:
- Retain information: Our inner voice is part of our working memory system. Forgot a grocery list? Your inner voice can help retrieve it.
- Simulate and plan: Our inner voice helps organize our thinking. Overbooked and understaffed? Your inner voice allows you to run through scheduling options before verbalizing them with your team.
- Control ourselves: Our inner voice is a private coach in emotionally charged situations. When a challenging client walks through the door, our inner voice can remind us to proceed with caution.
- Make sense of our world: Our inner voice helps us make sense of our experiences and create narratives to better understand ourselves.
It can be hard to break free when we find ourselves stuck in the spiral of negative chatter. Negative emotions are part of the human experience, and we feel them for a reason. They serve as cues or information to avoid making mistakes, and they help us learn from our experiences. Start by paying attention to your thought patterns to recognize when they are leading you down a destructive path. The goal is not to avoid negative emotions but to manage their amplitude and impact on your performance and well-being.
Consider these nine evidence-based techniques to redirect your inner monologue and find your way back to a more productive and healthy state of mind.
1. Shift to Distanced Self-Talk
When the chatter starts, try using your own name or the second-person pronoun “you.” Instead of saying to yourself, “I am feeling defeated and exhausted,” try, “Elaine is feeling defeated and exhausted.” The subtle shift puts you in an adviser or coach mode and adds some distance from what you are going through. Such a response gives us an opportunity to be more objective and deliberate when we think about our challenges.
2. Activate the Power of Imagination
Another way to create psychological distance is to conjure mental imagery of an event from a third-person perspective as if you were a passive observer. This lowers the emotional intensity of events we are reliving as well as those we anxiously anticipate. It allows us to see the event differently and work through the experience more objectively.
3. Engage in Mental Time Travel
Temporal distancing is a tool that helps you shift how your current worry is impacting you and consider how it will feel in the future. By asking, “How will I feel about this in six months or a year?” and “How do I want to feel about it in five years?” we participate in a form of mental time travel. The technique reminds us that whatever we are dealing with now will eventually be in the past.
4. Stop Thinking and Start Writing
Putting the narrative inside our heads on paper gives our thoughts and emotions a private place to land. It helps us organize our mental clutter. By writing down our thoughts, we start to see them as just that, thoughts, not absolute truths.
5. Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body
Studies have shown that having a regular meditation and mindfulness practice can reduce the number of negative, intrusive thoughts that pop into our head. The benefits are well documented, and exploring them in detail is beyond the scope of this article. As a former skeptic turned fan, I encourage you to explore the power of meditation and mindfulness for yourself and find the tools that resonate with you.
6. Find Your People
One of the best ways to manage our inner monologue is to make it a dialogue. Find a trusted partner, or better yet, a board of advisers who will listen, support you and challenge you to expand your thinking frame. Consider a certified coach as a professional who can help you explore your thinking patterns and identify tools to help manage your inner voice.
7. Manage Your Media Consumption
Mindlessly scrolling through newsreels and curated social media feeds can trigger negative chatter for many of us. Set healthy boundaries for media consumption, and instead of engaging passively, use these technologies to connect and interact positively with others.
8. Help Others to Help Yourself
When we offer our skills or knowledge in service to helping others, we are reminded of the value we bring to our community. Helping others shifts the focus from ourselves and gives us a new perspective on our problems.
9. Activate Awe
Awe is difficult to define, but it might be described as those moments that fill us with wonder, transcendence, amazement and a deep sense that we are part of something vast and much bigger than ourselves. Awe quiets the chatter by activating a different part of our brain, allowing us to shift our inward focus outward. It is not only big life events, like the birth of a child, that activate awe. We can experience awe every day by slowing down and taking the time to appreciate the world around us.
Success
With a little self-compassion and a lot of determination, I cycled the length of New Zealand and overcome my most significant barrier: myself. Along the way, I learned that changing the way I talk to myself changes the way I see myself — “I am a cyclist, and I can do hard things!”
Learning to manage the conversations we have with ourselves is foundational to managing all the other conversations we have. By recognizing the negative effects of chatter and practicing simple techniques to shift our internal narrative, we can transform our maladaptive ruminations and gain new perspectives to move forward with more understanding, clarity and positive self-regard.
I invite you to play with the tools and find what practices or combinations of practices work best to train your inner critic to become an inspiring and compassionate inner coach
UNHELPFUL CHATTER
Writing in Forbes, Dr. Alice G. Walton said, “Meditation does exactly what it’s been said to do for thousands of years.” She added: “It’s probably worth giving a try — especially for those of us who have trouble quieting the ongoing commentary in our heads.” Learn more at bit.ly/4jzviK1