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It’s dusk in the backyard, and I’m juggling a soccer ball, counting: 40, 41, 42. Then the ball clips the outside of my boot and skitters into the bushes. Time to start over. I could go inside and call this practice done. But I don’t. Because a voice in my head has decided that 42 is not a number a serious person stops at, and that stopping at all, ever, is the first soft symptom of becoming someone who loses.
I was maybe 14.
For most of high school and college, this inner monologue ran on a constant loop: harder, faster, better, more. Whether it was soccer, school, or working out, there was no quota it would ever sign off on. Not enough service hours. Not enough time in the gym. Not enough sprints, not enough free kicks bent at the top corner of the net, not enough A’s, not enough hard classes stacked on the hard classes I was already drowning in. I’d hit the target. And then the target would move.
It seemed to work. The voice opened doors, so I never questioned it. You don’t audit the thing that’s winning. And because I credited every good outcome to that perfectionist voice, it got to take a bow each time, whether or not it had done any of the actual work.
That’s the question I couldn’t answer for a long time: Did the achievement happen because of that voice, or in spite of it?
Inner voice vs. chatter
Ethan Kross runs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and he has spent much of his career on the thing in your head that talks. Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist, calls the useful version the inner voice : the ability to use language, silently, to think. This inner voice lets you rehearse a hard conversation before you have it. It keeps a phone number alive in your head while you find a pen. It’s the thing that says don’t you dare send that text a half-second before your thumb presses down.
And then there’s the other version that’s less helpful and less healthy. Kross calls it chatter : “the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing.” This kind of negative self-talk can create friction in your relationships because you’re ruminating on your problems instead of listening to others, and it may lead you to become more irritable or to displace your aggression.
The stress caused by chatter can also lead to negative physical health effects.
“What makes stress toxic is when it remains chronically elevated over time,” Kross says. “This is precisely what chatter does. We experience a stressor in our life, it then ends, but in our minds, our chatter perpetuates it. 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, chronic inflammation, and even cancer.”
Chatter, in case you could not tell, is a near, dear friend of mine. Your sharpest mental functions (focusing, planning, regulating how you feel) run on a limited supply of attention. When chatter sets in, you end up doing two things at once: the task in front of you and the running commentary of the pained voice narrating it. Kross describes it as jamming your executive functions with a “dual task.” It’s the same wiring that gives athletes the yips .
A working inner voice solves a problem and then lets you close the loop. Chatter, on the other hand, never lets the loop close. So a voice that generates a lot of output but never, not once, lets enough be enough is a drive that has slipped its leash. During high school and later in college, I mistook the constant refrain of “do better and more and do it now” to be my source of work ethic. But my achievements came from the work, not the beration. Chatter’s whole trick was to fuse the two so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart, so that the thought of dropping the lash felt like dropping the achievement. Lose the cruelty, lose the results. That was the implied threat. It was also a lie.
Turning down the chatter
You can’t out-argue chatter from the inside. You’re standing too close. Many of the tools in Kross’s “chatter toolkit” boil down to: step back far enough to see the voice as one voice instead of the only voice that speaks the unquestionable gospel truth.
I’ve written before about this tool: talking to yourself by name, in the second person, the way you’d talk to a friend who was running himself into the ground . Danny, what do you actually need to do here? It sounds fairly ridiculous. But temporarily shifting perspectives from ‘I am experiencing’ to ‘someone else is experiencing’ lowers the temperature and creates enough objectivity to take a clinical, calculating eye to the situation.
The above is a tactic, and the long-term strategy is to undercut the story underneath it . “Harder, faster, better, more” was a narrative I downloaded at some point and then never questioned whether or not it was true. I unwittingly welded my sense of self-worth with my achievements, and it took a lot of work to learn and then believe that I didn’t have to lash myself bloody to do good, hard, serious work. That I didn’t have to obey the voice casting me as Sisyphus, demanding I roll the boulder up the hill one more time to prove I was worthy of it.
I would love to tell you the chatter is gone for me. I really would. But chatter still shows up in my life, usually right before something that matters. It comes in whispering its old line about how this, finally, is the moment I’m exposed as someone who doesn’t do enough. The difference is that now I can hear it land and I can name it: there it is again. That half-second of recognition is the whole skill. It buys just enough distance to notice the chatter and decline to listen to its monologue. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic : Chatter, you are allowed to be a passenger in the vehicle of my life but “above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”
I’m still in the backyard some nights, counting. The difference is that now I can hear the counting for what it is. And some nights — not all, but some — I let myself stop at 42.
This article What a psychologist taught me about the cruelest voice in my head is featured on Big Think .
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