Befriending Your Inner Voice
“This inner voice that we have is not something that we want to rid ourselves of. It’s something that we want to harness.”
Have you ever wished for a mental pause button? A moment of quiet amongst our thousands of daily thoughts.
I did, until I met Ethan Kross, award-winning professor and Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan. He offers a refreshing perspective in his highly acclaimed book, Chatter…
“This inner voice that we have is not something that we want to rid ourselves of. It’s something that we want to harness. The challenge is to figure out if you find yourself slipping into the dark side of chatter. How can we minimize that and accentuate the more positive side of the inner voice?”
Ethan offers a suite of tools to cultivate our mindset. These skills not only help us restore and regulate our mental well-being. They play a vital role in our physical health.
“Because we have this amazing ability to replay stressors over and over in our heads, via chatter, that keeps those stressors active in our minds and bodies. What that can do is turn genes involved in inflammation on and turn antiviral genes off. So, you get inflammation, on. Virus fighting, off. This is not a good formula.”
We delve into practices to manage our chatter, from acceptance to temporal distancing and silently saying our name as a calming mechanism. I was especially grateful Ethan shared one to support each other in this pursuit…
“When we experience chatter, we have the temptation to find someone to vent our emotions to. We just want to get it off our chest. The research shows that, on the one hand, that can make us feel really connected.
I call you up…“Oh my God! You’re not going to believe what they said!”
“Oh my God! They said that?! How did you feel?”
Our friendship gets stronger. I’ve shared something with you that’s private. You’re showing me that you empathize.
But, if that’s all we do in the conversation, it doesn’t do anything to help me with the problem I’ve come to you for help with. I still have that chatter provoking event active in my head. The fact that we just spent five to 50 minutes talking about it has thrown logs on the burning fire.
What we know from the science is that the best kinds of conversations do two things to help people with their chatter. If I come to you for help, you do ask me questions about how I’m feeling and I share what was going through my head to some extent. But, at a certain point, you try to help me think about the big picture and look at alternative ways of thinking about the situation.”
Our inner voice influences everything in our life, from our relationships to our well-being and performance. In our conversation, we explore ways it can empower or disempower us and how we can harness it for good.
How can you illuminate the bigger picture for a friend who’s facing a challenge? Where might you adopt a similar perspective navigating your own?
Wishing you peace,
Jenna