“Why are we learning about this now?”
These words, asked in exasperation, came from a student named Arielle on the final day of a seminar I was teaching. For the past three months, I had spent my Tuesday afternoons with twenty-eight University of Michigan undergraduates in the basement of the Psychology Department discussing what science has taught us about people’s ability to control their emotions, including chatter caused by the inner voice. The students’ final assignment was to come to class with questions for me. It was their chance to raise any lingering doubts before the end of the course, and in most cases before graduating and moving on to the next phase of their lives. It was the session I looked forward to the most each semester I taught the class. The discussions always sparked interesting ideas, some of which even led to new studies. Little did I know when I entered the classroom on that sunny afternoon that this particular final session would add a new dimension to my work as a scientist.
As soon as class began, Arielle had shot her hand up, urging me to call on her first. I obliged, but I didn’t understand what she was asking. “Can you be more specific?” I said.
“We’ve spent this whole semester learning ways to feel better and be more successful,” she said, “but most of us are going to graduate this year. Why didn’t anyone teach us about these things earlier, when we could have really benefited from them?”
After you teach a class a few times, you usually know what questions to expect. But this one was new. I felt as if I had just run face-first into a wall I hadn’t known was there.
I deflected Arielle’s question onto the rest of the class (yep: classic professor technique). Students started raising their hands and offering ideas. But I was barely listening. I was stuck inside my head, fixated on what she had said.
The truth was, I didn’t have an answer.
Eventually, class time wound down, I said goodbye to the students, and off they went into their futures. But what Arielle had been getting at lodged itself in my mind like a splinter.
Throughout my career—and throughout that semester too—I have met people desperate to escape their inner voice because of how bad it makes them feel. This is understandable. As we know, chatter can pollute our thoughts and fill us with painful emotions that, over time, damage all that we hold dear—our health, our hopes, and our relationships. If you think of your inner voice as an inner tormentor, then it’s natural to fantasize about permanently muting it. But losing your inner voice is, in fact, the last thing you would ever want if your aim is to live a functional life, much less a good one.
While many cultures today celebrate living in the moment, our species didn’t evolve to function this way all the time. Quite the contrary. We developed the ability to keep our inner worlds pulsing with thoughts and memories and imaginings fueled by the inner voice. Thanks to our busy internal conversations, we are able to hold information in our minds, reflect on our decisions, control our emotions, simulate alternative futures, reminisce about the past, keep track of our goals, and continually update the personal narratives that undergird our sense of who we are. This inability to ever fully escape our minds is a main driver of our ingenuity: the things we build, the stories we tell, and the futures we dream.
It is a mistake, however, to value our own inner voice only when it buoys our emotions. Even when the conversations we have with ourselves turn negative, that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. As much as it can hurt, the ability to experience fear, anxiety, anger, and other forms of distress is quite useful in small doses. They mobilize us to respond effectively to changes in our environments. Which is to say, a lot of the time the inner voice is valuable not in spite of the pain it causes us but because of it.
We experience pain for a reason. It warns us of danger, signaling us to take action. This process provides us with a tremendous survival advantage. In fact, each year a small number of people are born with a genetic mutation that makes it impossible for them to feel pain. They usually end up dying young as a result. Because they don’t experience, for instance, the discomfort of an infection, the burn of scalding water, or the agony of a broken bone, they don’t know the help they are in need of or their extreme vulnerability.
This phenomenon mirrors the indispensability of the harsh side of our inner voice. It can cloud our thoughts with negative emotions, but if we didn’t have this critical self-reflective capacity, we’d have a difficult time learning, changing, and improving. As uncomfortable as it is when I make a joke that bombs at a dinner party, I’m grateful that afterward I can replay what went wrong in my mind so I hopefully won’t embarrass myself—and my wife—next time.
You wouldn’t want to live a life without an inner voice that upsets you some of the time. It would be like braving the sea in a boat with no rudder.
When Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who suffered a debilitating stroke, experienced her verbal stream crawling to a stop, and along with it her chatter, she felt strangely elated but also empty and disconnected. We need the periodic pain of our internal conversations. The challenge isn’t to avoid negative states altogether. It’s to not let them consume you.
Which brings me back to my student Arielle.
What she meant when she asked her question was this: Why hadn’t she learned earlier in her life how to reduce episodes of full-blown chatter? Of course, she, just like all of us, possessed many of the tools she needed to control her inner voice. But until she took my class, she didn’t have an explicit guide for how to manage it, and Arielle’s question made me wonder whether we were doing enough to share this knowledge.
A few weeks after that class, my older daughter, who was four at the time, came home from school in tears. She told me that a boy in her class was taking her toys, which was making her feel bad. As she recounted what happened and I tried to comfort her, Arielle’s question popped back into my head. Here I was, a supposed expert on controlling emotions, and yet my own daughter was struggling. Granted, she was just four, which is when the neural circuitry underlying the ability to control your emotions is still developing. Nonetheless, the thought troubled me.
I wondered about what she and her friends were learning at school and whether they would develop the tools that Arielle felt had been withheld from her until she took my class. And eighteen years later, would my daughter ask a professor the same question Arielle asked me? Or more likely, she’d ask me, which would make me feel even worse.
During the days and months that followed, I reflected on the rich and startling variety of ways to distance, to talk to oneself, to leverage and improve personal relationships, to benefit from our environments, and to use placebos and rituals to harness the ability of the mind to heal itself. These techniques had been hidden in plain sight inside us and around us. And while no specific tool is a panacea, they all have the potential to bring down the temperature of our inner voice when it runs too hot. But these findings didn’t seem to be penetrating into the world.
So I got to work and recruited a group of like-minded scientists and educators to translate what we know about the science of managing emotion into a course that could be weaved into middle and high school curricula.
After traveling around the country and meeting with hundreds of educators and scientists, in the fall of 2017 we launched a pilot study. Its aim was to translate research on controlling our emotions—including how to harness our inner voice—into a curriculum, and to evaluate what the implications of teaching students about this information are for their health, performance, and relationships with others. We call it the Toolbox Project.
And thankfully, our efforts are beginning to pay off.
In the pilot study, a culturally and socioeconomically diverse group of some 450 students from a public school in the United States participated in the toolbox course we designed. The results were exciting: Kids in the toolbox-curriculum classes who learned about techniques such as journaling, distanced self-talk, and challenge-oriented reframing actually used them to a significant extent in their daily lives. And this is just the start. Soon we are planning to run a much larger study with close to twelve thousand students.
The metaphor of the toolbox doesn’t just describe the curriculum my colleagues and I developed. It also describes what I hope you take away from this book.
Distancing is a tool, whether it’s imagining yourself as a fly on the wall, mentally traveling through time, or visualizing yourself and your predicaments as physically smaller in your mind. So is distanced self-talk: You can talk to yourself or about yourself using non-first-person pronouns or your own name, and you can normalize your challenges with the universal “you.” We can be an inner-voice tool for the people grappling with chatter in our lives—and they can do the same for us—by avoiding co-rumination and finding a balance between providing caring support and helping others constructively reframe their problems when their emotions cool. We can also help in invisible ways that ease the strains of people under stress who may feel insecure about their capabilities. These anti-chatter approaches apply to the ways we interact in our increasingly immersive digital lives as well, though there are behaviors online that are just as important to avoid: passive instead of active use of social media, and doing things lacking empathy that we wouldn’t do off-line.
Another subset of tools comes from the complex world around us. Mother Nature is a veritable toolshed for our minds, containing pleasant and effective ways of restoring the attentional tools that are so helpful for reducing chatter and bolstering our health. It can fill us with awe, as can plenty of experiences found not on mountaintops but at concerts, in places of worship, and even in special moments in our own homes (just remembering when each of my daughters said “Dada” for the first time rekindles awe in me).
Imposing order on our surroundings likewise can be comforting and allow us to feel better, think more clearly, and perform at higher levels. Then there are our beliefs, whose malleability can work to our advantage. Through the neural apparatus of expectation, sugar pills that we know are just sugar pills can improve our health, as can the exercise of rituals, both those that are culturally ordained and those we create ourselves. The power of the mind to heal itself is, indeed, magical (in the awe-inspiring, not supernatural, sense).
You now know about these different tools, but it’s critical that you build your own toolbox. That is your personal puzzle, and it’s why subduing chatter can frequently be so challenging, even when we know the research.
Science has shown us so much, but there is still more to learn.
We have only just begun to understand how the various strategies for controlling chatter work together for different people in different situations, or how they work when used interchangeably. Why do some tools work better for us than others? We each need to discover which tools we find most effective.
Managing our inner voice has the potential not only to help us become more clearheaded but to strengthen the relationships we share with our friends and loved ones, help us offer better support to people we care about, build more organizations and companies where people are insulated against burnout, design smarter environments that leverage nature and order, and rethink digital platforms to promote connection and empathy. In short, changing the conversations we have with ourselves has the potential to change our lives.
My interest in introspection came from my dad, and when people hear the story about how he used to encourage me to “go inside” and “ask yourself the question” during my childhood, they often wonder whether I do the same with my children when they feel upset.
The answer to that question is no. I most certainly do not. I’m not my dad. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t talk to my kids about how they can address their chatter. As a parent who wants his children to be happy, healthy, and successful, and as a scientist who knows how important harnessing the conversations we have with ourselves is for achieving these goals, I can’t think of a more important lesson to teach them. I just do it in my own way.
I stick Band-Aids on their elbows when they’re upset and tell them that if they think the Band-Aid will make them feel better, it will. I take them for walks in the splendidly green arboretum near our house when they feel sad, and carefully nudge them to focus on the big picture when they tell me about their latest tiff on the playground or in the classroom. And when they are acting impossibly irrational for the silliest reasons, I ask them to tell themselves what they imagine their mom or I would say to them. And I tickle them.
One of the things that has become clear to me while writing this book is just how influential a role my wife and I play in the conversations that our daughters have with themselves. We ourselves are one of their tools, in the sense that we provide them with chatter support when they need it and we create the culture they are immersed in at home. We are shaping their inner voices, just as they increasingly affect our own.
Often the things I tell my daughters to rein in their chatter help. Sometimes, I’ll admit, they roll their eyes the way I sometimes did with my dad. But over time I’ve noticed that both of them have begun to implement many of these practices on their own, cycling back and forth through the different techniques they have at their disposal in their unique style as they discover what works. In this way, I hope I can help my daughters harness the conversations they have with themselves throughout their lives.
I also remind my daughters and myself that while creating a calming distance between our thoughts and our experiences can be useful when chatter strikes, when it comes to joy, doing the opposite—immersing ourselves in life’s most cherished moments—helps us savor them.
The human mind is one of evolution’s greatest creations, not just because it allowed our species to survive and thrive, but because in spite of the inevitable pain that comes with life, it also endowed us with a voice in our head capable of not only celebrating the best times but also making meaning out of the worst times. It’s this voice, not the din of chatter, that we should all listen to.
I haven’t been in touch with Arielle since our last class together, so she doesn’t know what her question inspired. She will, though, if she ends up reading this book, which has been the other effort that grew out of that final class meeting. This book is another attempt to share the discoveries that science has revealed but that haven’t yet rooted themselves in our culture. In a certain sense, there are too many Arielles to count out in the world—people hungry to learn about their own minds, how they give rise to chatter, and how it can be controlled.
So I wrote this book for them.
And for myself.
And for you.
Because no one should have to pace his house at 3:00 A.M. with a Little League baseball bat.