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Chatter
Your inner voice is your ability to silently use language to reflect on your life. Chatter refers to the dark side of the inner voice. When we introspect, we often end up having conversations with ourselves. We ask ourselves questions: Why am I feeling this way? What’s going on? Effectively, when we turn our attention inward, we often tap into this inner voice. Sometimes, this inner voice can be the source of enormous inspiration. You can do it. Here’s what you’re gonna do. We’re gonna get through this okay.
But sometimes when we turn our attention inward, in particular, to make sense of our problems, strong, negative emotional experiences that we’re grappling with, we don’t end up finding solutions, but we end up spinning instead. So, we end up ruminating, worrying, catastrophizing, focusing really intently on trying to use language to make sense of what we’re experiencing, but not finding a solution. We get stuck in a negative cycle of thinking and feeling that takes this remarkable tool that we possess, this inner voice, and it turns it into a curse rather than a blessing.
Three Negative Impacts
What are three ways that chatter can undermine your ability to perform well at work and have high-quality relationships? Well, the first thing, is chatter can make it really hard for you to focus on your job. Think about a time in which you’ve been worried or consumed with some, a problem, you’ve been experiencing chatter, and you’ve tried to read a few pages in a book. You get to the end and you can’t remember anything that you’ve read. The reason for that is, your mind was consumed with the chatter, not with the words on the page.
Chatter can also create friction in your relationships because you’re talking about your problems over and over again and not being a great listener to others. And chatter can also make us more irritable and lead to something called displaced aggression. So, we’re consumed with our own problems, and then someone we know or love comes to us with a harmless request, and we take out our angst on them. That’s another way that chatter can really undermine how well we interact with others.
And then finally, we know that chatter can have severe and negative physical health effects on us. You’ve probably heard that stress kills. That’s not exactly true. A stress response is a really adaptive response. You wouldn’t want to live your life without the capacity to experience stress. What makes stress toxic, is when we experience a stress response but then it remains chronically elevated over time. So our stress response goes up, and then it remains up as we go about our lives. This is precisely what chatter does. Because we experience a stressor in our life, it then ends, but in our minds, our chatter perpetuates it because we keep thinking about that event over and over and over again. And that keeps that stress response active in ways that can predict things like cardiovascular disease, various problems of inflammation, and even cancer.
Managing Your Chatter
What are the steps for beginning to think about how to manage your chatter more effectively? Step one is to become attuned to when you experience chatter. You’ve gotta be able to recognize it, in order to take steps to manage it. Familiarize yourself with the different tools that exist for harnessing your chatter. There are things we can do on our own. There are ways of harnessing our relationships with other people. And even ways of interacting with our physical spaces that can help us harness this remarkable tool we possess, this voice inside our head.
And science has done a good job at identifying what the individual tools are and specifying how they work. But what we’ve not yet done, is figured out how different combinations of those tools work for different people in different situations. We’re doing that work right now, but there’s no need to wait for us to come up with the answers. While we’re doing that work, you can begin to self-experiment, to try out different tools and see which of the tools work for you and which don’t. Which are the combinations that work for you and which do not? Start building your own chatter toolkit to help you deal with it when it activates in your life.