Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

"I put this on the list because it’s the best kind of self help book. The reason this book is so good is that Ethan Kross has done decades of empirical research on the voice inside our heads. These are the silent conversations we have with ourselves. It’s something we all do, so it’s widely relevant, and they really matter for our emotions, our performance, and our well being. He makes a distinction between constructive self talk and what he calls ‘chatter,’ which is this repetitive, uncontrolled internal voice that distracts us, makes us feel anxious, and causes us to become socially isolated and reflect unproductively on how we’re thinking. He offers various ways that you can control that inner voice, many of which are really feasible. So one thing he says you can do to stop the chatter is to create psychological distance, which can be as simple as talking to yourself in the second person and using your name. So stopping and saying something like, ‘Michael, you’re actually good at your job. You don’t need to worry about this.’ This presents you in a different light. It enables you to step back from your chatter, the situation that’s overwhelming you, and think about it as if it were someone else. He also talks about changing your environment to prompt different internal monologues and using rituals to remove some of that unproductive inner voice. Another thing he talks about is temporal distancing or mental time travel and asking, ‘How will I feel about this in a week or a month or a year?’ It puts the issue in perspective and removes some of the immediate emotional intensity. So this is a book based on research with stuff that you can actually do. Personally, it made a difference to me when I tried some of it out. Chatter is one of those rare self help books that is empirically grounded and genuinely useful. It doesn’t have to be. He says it’s quite broad. It’s just the thoughts taking the form of words in your mind. So it’s like when you read something and you think internally, ‘That was really interesting. I must do something with that.’ It doesn’t have to be negative. It can be helpful. But obviously, it can become a problem when it gets out of control, when your internal monologue gets away from you and almost takes on a life of its own. That’s when you get into ruminative thoughts and so on."