The first wild pitch seemed like a fluke.
It was October 3, 2000, game one between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Atlanta Braves in the first round of the National League playoffs. The Cardinal pitcher Rick Ankiel watched the ball he had just thrown bounce off the ground past his catcher and then hit the backstop. As the runner on first jogged to second, the crowd made a sound of modest, almost supportive surprise—he was, after all, playing on his home turf at Busch Stadium in St. Louis—though there was no reason to think his wild throw presaged any shift in the balance of the inning. In baseball, pitches occasionally get away from even the best pitchers, never mind the fact that Ankiel wasn’t just any pitcher.
When he was drafted right out of high school, a seventeen-year-old with a ninety-four-mile-an-hour fastball, scouts and commentators believed Ankiel had the potential to be one of the best pitchers the game had seen in decades. His debut in the majors two years later didn’t disappoint. During his first full season in 2000, he struck out 194 batters, racking up eleven wins to help his team reach the playoffs. Everything pointed to a spectacular career. It was no surprise, then, that he was chosen as the starter for game one against the Braves in the playoffs that October. All he had to do was the thing he did best in life: throw a baseball.
Ankiel tried to forget the wild pitch. It was an anomaly for him, and there was nothing to worry about. It was only the third inning and his team had already jumped to a dramatic 6–0 lead. On top of that, the pitch hadn’t even been that wild; it had just ricocheted off the ground the wrong way and gotten away from his catcher. He’d felt good going into the inning, so he would just shake it off. And yet a prickly nettle of a thought lodged itself in his mind as he gathered himself on the mound. Man, he said to himself, I just threw a wild pitch on national TV. What he didn’t know was that he did have something to worry about.
Moments later, after reading the signs from his catcher, Ankiel uncoiled his explosive, left-handed windup and…threw another wild pitch.
The crowd oohed a bit louder and longer this time, as if sensing something were off. The runner on second ran to third base. While the dark-eyed, twenty-one-year-old Ankiel chewed his gum and kept an unreadable facial expression, inside he was anything but composed. As his catcher retrieved the ball again and the seconds passed beneath the afternoon sun, he felt his mind slipping out of his control and into the hands of what he would come to call “the monster”—his cruel inner critic, a stream of verbal thoughts so vicious they could undo years of hard work, its voice louder than the fifty-two thousand fans in the stands.
Anxiety. Panic. Fear.
His own immense vulnerability—a young player with everything on the line—was something he could no longer ignore.
Ankiel might have looked like the shining embodiment of the American dream—a small-town kid from Florida making good on his exceptional gift—but his childhood belied such a picturesque narrative. The son of a verbally and physically abusive father who was both a petty criminal and an addict, he knew depths of emotional pain beyond his years. Which is why baseball was more than just a career for him. It was a hallowed, safe place where he felt good, where things were easy, where a kind of joy was built in, unlike his family life. Only now something strange and seemingly uncontrollable was starting to happen, overwhelming his senses and flooding him with terror.
Still, he was determined to rally. He narrowed his focus in on his weight, on his stance, on his arm. All he had to do was make the machinery of his windup click into place. Then he wound up again.
And threw another wild pitch.
And another.
And another.
Before the Cardinals gave up any more runs, Ankiel was pulled out of the game. He disappeared into the dugout accompanied by “the monster” inside him.
His showing on the mound that day was both embarrassing and unexpected. The last time a pitcher had thrown five wild pitches in one inning had been more than a hundred years earlier. But it wouldn’t have retrospectively gone down as one of the most painful-to-watch performances in baseball history were it not for what soon followed.
When Ankiel was called on to pitch against the Mets nine days later, the same thing happened. The monster reappeared and he threw more wild pitches. Once again, he was pulled from the mound, this time before the first inning was over. And yet the humiliation didn’t end there, though his brief career as a major-league pitcher effectively did.
At the start of the following season, Ankiel pitched a few more games during which he had to drink alcohol to stay his nerves before taking the field, but even the liquor couldn’t help calm his mind. His pitching didn’t improve. He was sent to the minors, where he spent a dispiriting three years before deciding to retire from baseball in 2005 at the tragically premature age of twenty-five.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he told his coach.
Rick Ankiel would never pitch professionally again.
Rick Ankiel isn’t the first elite athlete to lose his superpower—to suddenly have the skill he was best at stop being a skill altogether. Time and again, people who have spent years mastering a talent watch it break down like a decrepit old Chevy when chatter hijacks their inner voice. This phenomenon isn’t restricted to athletes. It can happen to anyone who has become skilled at a learned task—from teachers who memorize their lesson plans, to start-up founders with rehearsed spiels they pitch to investors, to surgeons who perform complex operations that took them years to master. The explanation for why these skills fail ultimately relates to how the conversations we have with ourselves influence our attention.
At any given moment, we are bombarded with information—countless sights and sounds, and the thoughts and feelings that these stimuli spark. Attention is what allows us to filter out the things that don’t matter so that we can focus on the things that do. And although much of our attention is involuntary, like when we automatically turn toward a loud noise, one of the features that make humans so unique is our ability to consciously concentrate on the tasks that require our attention.
When we find ourselves overwhelmed by emotion, as Ankiel did on that fall day in 2000, one of the things our inner voice does is harness our attention, narrowing it in on the obstacles we encounter to the exclusion of practically everything else. This serves us well most of the time, but not when it comes to exercising our attention to wrangle an automatic, learned skill, as pitching was for Ankiel. To understand why this is, it’s useful to look at what goes right when athletes’ automatized behaviors lift them into the most impressive heights of performance.
On August 11, 2019, the American gymnast Simone Biles made sports history when she became the first woman to ever land a triple-double flip at an official competition during her floor routine at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships. As one commentator wrote, “It’s a move that requires incredible, almost superhuman strength, coordination, and training.” To execute it by deliberately thinking about each movement would be impossible, because everything happens in the air, where the laws of physics play out in an instant—gravity versus a body.
The seemingly impossible move Biles pulled off required her to spin her body around two axes at the same time and do two backflips while also spinning three times, hence the name triple double. We can think of her perfect execution of the move as the culmination of all the automatized movements her brain had mastered over the years: running, jumping, handsprings, backflips, twists, and landing. To achieve her triple double, she linked into one breathtaking feat a set of movements that took years to learn but that eventually stopped needing her brain’s conscious control. Biles’s inner voice didn’t direct her every action, though it likely rejoiced as the crowd went wild.
Like all athletes, Biles built her triple double out of a series of individual behaviors that she linked together through practice. Eventually, the separate elements in the chain of movements merged into one seamless action. Her automatic bodily mechanics, spurred by her brain’s ability to link them together (combined with fabulous DNA), propelled Biles into sports history. Until Ankiel’s meltdown, he seemed as if he were on a similar trajectory, with flawless movements and a preternaturally strong arm. So, what happened that day on the mound?
He unlinked.
Ankiel’s verbal stream turned into a spotlight that shined his attention too brightly on the individual physical components of his pitching motion, thereby seeming to inadvertently dismantle it. After throwing the first few wild pitches, he mentally stepped back and focused on the mechanics of his throw: the choreographed movements that involved his hips, legs, and arm. On the surface, that seems wise and intuitive. He was calling on his brain to fix a scripted behavior it had previously successfully carried out literally tens of thousands of times. Which is precisely where things went wrong.
When you’re completing your taxes, it pays to double-check your calculations to make sure you’ve done everything right, even if you’re an experienced accountant. But for well-worn, automatic behaviors that you’re trying to execute under pressure, like pitching, this very same tendency leads us to break down the complicated scripts that we’ve learned to execute without thinking. This is exactly what our inner voice’s tendency to immerse us in a problem does. It overfocuses our attention on the parts of a behavior that only functions as the sum of its parts. The result: paralysis by analysis.
Chatter ruined Ankiel’s career as a pitcher, but automatic behaviors aren’t the only kind of skill that can backfire when our inner voice betrays us. After all, one of the things that distinguishes us from every other animal species is our ability not just to execute automatic behaviors but to use our mind to consciously focus our attention.
It is our ability to reason logically, solve problems, multitask, and control ourselves that allows us to manage work, family, and so many other crucial parts of our lives with wisdom, creativity, and intelligence. To do this, we have to be deliberate and attentive and flexible, which we are capable of doing thanks to what we can think of as the CEO of the human brain—our executive functions, which are also vulnerable to the incursions of an unsupportive inner voice.
Our executive functions are the foundation of our ability to steer our thoughts and behavior in the ways we desire. Supported largely by a network of prefrontal brain regions located behind our forehead and temples, their job is to intervene when our instinctual processes aren’t sufficient and we need to consciously guide our behavior. They allow us to keep relevant information active in our mind (working memory is a part of executive functions), filter out extraneous information, block out distractions, play with ideas, point our attention where it needs to go, and exercise self-control—like helping us resist the temptation to open a new browser tab and go down a tangential Wikipedia rabbit hole. In short, without our executive functions we wouldn’t be able to function in the world.
The reason your brain needs this type of neurological leadership is that paying attention, reasoning wisely, thinking creatively, and executing tasks often require you to leave automatic mode and exercise conscious effort. And doing this asks a lot of your executive functions because they have a limited capacity. Like a computer that slows down when it has too many programs open, your executive functions perform worse as the demands placed on them increase.
The classic illustration of this limited capacity, known as the magical number four, has to do with our ability to hold between three and five units of information in the mind at any given time. Take an American phone number. Memorizing the number 200-350-2765 is much easier than memorizing 2003502765. In the first instance, you’ve grouped the numbers, so you’re memorizing three pieces of information; in the latter, you’re trying to memorize an unbroken string of ten pieces of information, placing more demands on the system.
Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. Verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us. In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a “dual task”—the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, that’s how chatter divides and blurs our attention.
All of us are familiar with the distractions of a negative verbal stream. Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources. The problem for most of us, however, is that usually we’re engaged in activities with much higher stakes than retaining information in a book. We’re doing our jobs, pursuing our dreams, interacting with others, and being evaluated.
Chatter in the form of repetitive anxious thought is a marvelous saboteur when it comes to focused tasks. Countless studies reveal its debilitating effects. It leads students to perform worse on tests, produces stage fright and a tendency to catastrophize among artistic performers, and undermines negotiations in business. One study found, for instance, that anxiety led people to make low initial offers, exit discussions early, and earn less money. This is a very nice way of saying they failed at their jobs—because of chatter.
On any given day, the keel of our inner voice can be thrown askew by an infinite number of things. When this happens, we have trouble focusing our minds to address the inevitable daily challenges we face, which often produces still more turbulence in our inner dialogues. Quite naturally, when we’re floundering like this, we look for a way out of our predicament. So, what exactly do we do?
That’s the question a middle-aged, mild-mannered psychologist became intrigued with some thirty years ago. His research would raise profound questions about the costs of chatter that go far beyond our ability to focus our attention. Our inner voice affects our social lives as well.
In the late 1980s, a bespectacled Belgian psychologist named Bernard Rimé decided to examine whether experiencing the kinds of strong negative emotions that characterize chatter lead people to engage in a very social process: talking.
Over the course of several studies, Rimé brought people into his laboratory and asked them whether they talked about negative experiences from their past with others. Then he turned his focus to the present and asked people to record in diaries over the course of several weeks each time they confronted an upsetting situation and whether they discussed it with members of their social networks. He also ran experiments in which he provoked participants in the lab and then watched if they shared their reactions with others nearby.
Again and again, Rimé landed on the same finding: People feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences. But that wasn’t all. The more intense the emotion was, the more they wanted to talk about it. Additionally, they returned to talking about what had occurred more often, doing so repeatedly over the course of hours, days, weeks, and months, and sometimes even for the remainder of their lives.
Rimé’s finding proved true regardless of people’s age or education level. It was characteristic of men as well as women. It even carried across geography and cultures. From Asia to the Americas to Europe, he kept finding the same thing: Strong emotions acted like a jet propellant, blasting people off to share their experiences. It seemed to be a law of human nature. The only exceptions to this rule were cases in which people felt shame, which they often wished to conceal, or certain forms of trauma, which they wanted to avoid dwelling on.
Such consistency in a finding was stunning, though it may sound like a confirmation of the obvious. As we all know, people talk a lot about intense emotions. It’s not as if we go around calling friends to say, “Hey, I feel fairly normal today.” It’s the highs and lows that leap from the verbal stream in our minds to the words that leave our mouths.
While this sounds normal and harmless, repeatedly sharing our negative inner voice with others produces one of the great ironies of chatter and social life: We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that talking to others about your problems is harmful per se. But it highlights how chatter can transform an otherwise helpful experience into something negative.
Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves. Relationships thrive on reciprocity. That’s one of the reasons why therapists charge us for their time and friends don’t. When this conversational balance becomes lopsided, social connections fray.
To make matters worse, when this occurs, the people who are overventing and inadvertently alienating those around them are less capable of solving problems. This makes it harder for them to fix the breach in their relationships, begetting a vicious cycle that can end with a toxic outcome: loneliness and isolation.
For a heightened example of how this process of progressive social isolation operates, we can look to that widespread emotional tumult known as middle school. One study tracked more than one thousand middle schoolers for seven months and found that kids who were prone to rumination reported talking with their peers more than their low-rumination counterparts. Yet this did more harm than good. It predicted a host of painful results: being socially excluded and rejected, being the target of gossip and rumors by their peers, and even being threatened with violence.
Unfortunately, in this case, what is true of preteens and teens crosses over to adulthood. Furthermore, it turns out it doesn’t matter much even if you have a legitimate reason for venting; overvoicing your chatter can still push people away. One study that focused on grieving adults found that people who were prone to ruminate reached out for more social support after their loss, which is normal. The uncomfortable twist, though, is that they reported experiencing more social friction and less emotional support in their relationships as a result.
Uncontrolled emotional sharing isn’t the only type of social repellent that chatter enables. People who perseverate on conflicts are also more likely to behave aggressively. One experiment showed that cuing people to ruminate about how they felt after being insulted by an experimenter who undiplomatically criticized an essay they had written led them to be more hostile with the person who insulted them. When given the chance to administer loud blasts of noise to the experimenter, they did so more than people who didn’t ruminate. In other words, the more I stew over what you did to me, the more I keep those negative feelings alive, and the more likely I am to act aggressively against you as a result. Chatter also leads us to displace our aggression against people when they don’t deserve it. Our boss upsets us, for example, and we take it out on our kids.
But none of this research considers our digital lives. In the age of online sharing, Rimé’s work on emotions and our social lives has acquired a new urgency. Facebook and other social media applications like it have provided us with a world-altering platform for sharing our inner voice and listening in on the inner voices of others (or at least what other people want us to think they’re thinking about). Indeed, the first thing people see when they log in to Facebook is the prompt asking them to broadcast their answer to this question: “What’s on your mind?”
And broadcast we do.
In 2020, close to two and a half billion people use Facebook and Twitter—almost a third of the world’s population—and they frequently do so to share their private ruminations. It’s worth highlighting that there’s nothing inherently bad about sharing on social media. In the long historical timeline of our species, it’s simply a new environment that we find ourselves spending a great deal of time in, and environments aren’t good or bad per se. Whether they help or harm us depends on how we interact with them. That said, there are two features of social media that are worrying when you consider the intense drive we have to air our stream of thoughts: empathy and time.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of empathy both individually and collectively. It’s what allows us to forge meaningful connections with others, it’s one of the reasons why we so often find ourselves venting (we seek the empathy of others), and it’s also one of the mechanisms that holds communities together. It’s a capacity we evolved because it helps our species survive.
Research shows that observing other people’s emotional responses—seeing someone wince or hearing a quiver in a voice—can be a potent route to triggering empathy. But online, the subtle physical gestures, micro-expressions, and vocal intonations that elicit empathic responses in daily life are absent. As a result, our brains are deprived of information that serves a critical social function: inhibiting cruelty and antisocial behavior. In other words, less empathy all too frequently leads to trolling and cyberbullying, which have grave consequences. Cyberbullying, for example, has been linked to longer episodes of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, as well as several toxic physical effects like headaches, sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal ills, and changes in how well stress-response systems operate.
The passage of time is likewise essential to helping us manage our emotional lives, especially when it comes to processing upsetting experiences. When we identify someone to talk to off-line, we often have to wait until we see the person or until they’re available to chat. While one waits for that person, something magical happens: Time passes, which allows us to reflect on what we’re feeling and thinking about in ways that often temper our emotions. Indeed, research supports the common idea that “time heals” or the advice to “just give it time.”
Now let’s transplant ourselves to the parallel world of digital life and our ability to access it anytime thanks to our smart devices. Social media allows us to connect with others in the immediate aftermath of a negative emotional response, before time provides us with the opportunity to rethink how we’re feeling or what we’re planning to do. Thanks to twenty-first-century connectivity, during the very peak of our inner flare-ups, right when our inner voice wants to rant from the rooftops, it can.
We post. We tweet. We comment.
With the passage of time and physical elicitors of empathy removed, social media becomes a place amenable to the unseemly sides of the inner voice. This can lead to increased conflict, hostility, and chatter for both individuals and arguably society as a whole. It also means that we overshare more than ever before.
Similar to talking for too long and too frequently to others about your problems, overly emotional posts irritate and alienate others. They violate unspoken norms, and users wish people who overshare online would look for support from friends off-line. Unsurprisingly, people with depression—which is fueled by the verbal stream—share more negative personal content on social media yet actually perceive their network as less helpful than nondepressed people do.
But social media doesn’t just provide us with a platform to (over)share the thoughts and feelings streaming through our head, and the ways it derails our internal dialogues don’t exclusively relate to empathy and time. Social media also allows us to shape what we want other people to believe is happening in our lives, and our choices about what to post can fuel other people’s chatter.
The human need to self-present is powerful. We craft our appearances to influence how people perceive us all the time. This has always been the case, but then along came social media to give us exponentially more control over how we do this. It allows us to skillfully curate the presentations of our lives—the proverbial photoshopped version of life, with the low points and less aesthetically pleasing moments left out. Engaging in this self-presentation exercise can make us feel better, satisfying our own need to appear positively in the eyes of others and buoying our inner voice.
But there’s a catch. Although posting glamour shots of our lives may lead us to feel better, that very same act can cause the users who view our posts to feel worse. That’s because at the same time that we are motivated to present ourselves positively, we are also driven to compare ourselves with others. And social media switches the social-comparison hardware in our brain into overdrive. A study my colleagues and I published in 2015 demonstrated, for example, that the more time people spent passively scrolling through Facebook, peering in on the lives of others, the more envy they experienced and the worse they subsequently felt.
If broadcasting our feelings on social media and participating in its culture of self-curation have so many chatter-inducing effects, it’s reasonable to ask why we continue to share. One answer to that question has to do with the trade-off that often comes from engaging in behaviors that feel good in the moment but have negative consequences over time. Research shows that the same brain circuitry that becomes active when we are attracted to someone or consume desirable substances (everything from cocaine to chocolate) also activates when we share information about ourselves with others. In a particularly compelling illustration, one study by Harvard neuroscientists published in 2012 showed that people would prefer to share information about themselves with others than receive money. The social high, in other words, is like a neuronal high, a delicious hit for our dopamine receptors.
The point of all this is to say that both online and off-line, when we let our chatter drive social behaviors, we frequently crash into a range of negative outcomes. The most damaging one for internal and external conversations is that, quite often, we end up finding less support. This starts a vicious cycle of social isolation, which further wounds us. In fact, if you stop and listen, you’ll notice that many people actually use the language of physical “pain” to describe how they feel when they’re rejected by others.
In languages across the globe, from Inuktitut to German, Hebrew to Hungarian, Cantonese to Bhutanese, people use words related to physical injury to describe emotional pain—“damaged,” “wound,” “injured,” among many others. It turns out the reason they do so is not just that they have a knack for metaphorical expression. One of the most chilling discoveries I’ve had in my career is that chatter doesn’t simply hurt people in an emotional sense; it has physical implications for our body as well, from the way we experience physical pain all the way down to the way our genes operate in our cells.
One by one they arrived in our basement laboratory: the heartbroken of New York City.
It was 2007. My colleagues and I had begun a study to better understand what emotional pain really looked like in the brain. Instead of finding just any volunteers to participate—which would have meant finding a method for making them feel bad in the lab in some effective but somehow still ethical way—we sought out forty volunteers who were already hurting: people who had recently suffered heartbreak, one of the most potent elicitors of emotional torment that we know. We posted ads in the subway and in parks looking for people who had just been rejected from monogamous relationships that had lasted at least six months:
Have you recently had a difficult, unwanted breakup?
Still have feelings for an ex-partner?
Participate in an experiment on how the brain processes emotional and physical pain!
In a city of eight million, volunteers were easy to find.
We did do one slightly provocative thing, though. We had them bring a photo of the person who’d dumped them. Having the photos wasn’t gratuitous. By asking the volunteers to lie in an MRI scanner, look at the object of their unrequited love, and recall how they felt during the precise moment of their breakup, we were hoping to obtain a neural snapshot of chatter. But we also wanted to know something else: whether the way the brain processes an experience of emotional pain was similar to how it processes physical pain. To get at the latter, we also applied heat to their arms that felt like a hot cup of coffee.
Afterward, we compared the MRI results from when they looked at the photo of their lost love with those of the hot-coffee simulation. Incredibly, there was a high degree of overlap in brain regions that play a role in our sensory experience of physical pain. In other words, our results suggested that emotional pain had a physical component as well.
These and a host of findings from other labs that emerged around the same time were beginning to demonstrate how admittedly fuzzy concepts like social pain influence what happens in our bodies, especially when it comes to stress.
It’s a cliché of the twenty-first century to say that stress kills. It’s a modern epidemic that contributes to productivity losses in the United States alone that amount to $500 billion annually. Yet we frequently lose sight of the fact that stress is an adaptive response. It helps our bodies respond quickly and efficiently to potentially threatening situations. But stress stops being adaptive when it becomes chronic—when the fight-or-flight alarm fails to stop signaling. And sure enough, a main culprit in keeping stress active is our negative verbal stream.
Threat includes physical danger, of course, but it also encompasses a range of more common experiences. For example, when we encounter situations that we aren’t sure we can handle: losing a job or starting a new one, having a conflict with a friend or family member, moving to a new city, facing a health challenge, grieving the death of a loved one, getting a divorce, living in an unsafe neighborhood. These are all adverse circumstances capable of triggering a threat response similar to the one we get when we are in immediate physical danger. When the threat trip wire in our brain gets crossed, our bodies quickly mobilize themselves to protect us, much like a country mobilizing its army for a coordinated strike against an enemy invader.
Phase one begins instantly in a cone-shaped region of the brain called the hypothalamus. When your hypothalamus receives signals from other parts of your brain indicating that threat exists, it triggers a chain of chemical reactions that release adrenaline into your bloodstream. The adrenaline causes your heart to beat fast, your blood pressure and energy levels to rise, and your senses to sharpen. Moments later, the stress hormone cortisol is released to keep your jet engines firing and maintain your energy levels. While all of this is happening, chemical messengers are also working to curb the systems in your body that aren’t vital to your ability to respond to an immediate threat, like your digestive and reproductive systems. If you’ve ever noticed your appetite for food or sex disappear when you’re in the midst of a crisis, these chemical messengers are the reason why. All of these changes have a singular goal: to enhance your ability to respond quickly to the stressors you face, regardless of whether you’re actively confronting those stressors in the moment (like seeing a burglar enter your home) or simply conjuring them up in your mind.
Yes, we can create a chronic physiological stress reaction just by thinking. And when our inner voice fuels that stress, it can be devastating to our health.
Countless studies have linked the long-term activation of our stress-response systems with illnesses that span the gamut from cardiovascular disease to sleep disorders to various forms of cancer. This explains how stressful experiences such as feeling chronically isolated and alone can have drastic effects on our health. Indeed, not having a strong social-support network is a risk factor for death as large as smoking more than fifteen cigarettes a day, and a greater risk factor than consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, not exercising, being obese, or living in a highly polluted city.
Chronic negative thoughts can also push into the territory of mental illness, though this isn’t to say chatter is the same thing as clinical depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Repetitive negative thinking isn’t synonymous with these conditions, but it’s a common feature of them. Indeed, scientists consider it a transdiagnostic risk factor for many disorders, meaning that chatter underlies a variety of mental illnesses.
But here is what is most frightening about the ways in which chatter feeds stress. When our panic response is prolonged, the gradual physiological erosion it causes can harm more than our ability to fight sickness and keep our body running smoothly. It can change the way our DNA influences our health.
When I was in college, I learned a simple formula: Genes + Environment = Who We Are. In class after class, my professors told me that when it came to the shaping of human life, the effects of genes and environment didn’t mix. Nurture was in one box, and Nature was in another. This was conventional wisdom for a long time—until suddenly it wasn’t. To many a scientist’s surprise, new research suggests that this equation couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because you have a certain type of gene doesn’t mean it actually affects you. What determines who we are is whether those genes are turned on or off.
One way to think about this is to imagine that your DNA is like a piano buried deep in your cells. The keys on the piano are your genes, which can be played in a variety of ways. Some keys will never be pressed. Others will be struck frequently and in steady combinations. Part of what distinguishes me from you and you from everyone else in the world is how these keys are pressed. That’s gene expression. It’s the genetic recital within your cells that plays a role in forming how your body and mind work.
Our inner voice, it turns out, likes to tickle our genetic ivories. The way we talk to ourselves can influence which keys get played. The UCLA professor of medicine Steve Cole has spent his career studying how nature and nurture collide in our cells. Over the course of numerous studies he and his colleagues discovered that experiencing chatter-fueled chronic threat influences how our genes are expressed.
Cole and others have found that a similar set of inflammation genes are expressed more strongly among people who experience chronic threat, regardless of whether those feelings emerge from feeling lonely or dealing with the stress of poverty or the diagnoses of disease. This happens because our cells interpret the experience of chronic psychological threat as a viscerally hostile situation akin to being physically attacked. When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections. Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.”
Learning about the effects that our negative internal dialogues can have on our minds, relationships, and bodies can be deeply unsettling. As a scientist steeped in this work, I often can’t help but think how this research applies to my own life and the lives of those I love. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t worry each time I see one of my daughters fretting over something.
And yet, if I look around me, I see examples that offer hope. I see students who go from insecure freshmen drowning in self-doubt to confident seniors ready to make contributions to the world. I see people who face tremendous hardships find ways to connect with others and receive support from their social networks. And I see those who have lived with chronic stress attain healthy lives. As a young woman in Poland, my grandmother Dora escaped the Nazis by hiding in the forest a whole terrifying year, and yet she still managed to live seventy more resilient, joyful years in the United States.
What these important counterexamples bring me back to is that great puzzle of the human mind: how our inner voice can be both a liability and an asset. The words streaming through our heads can unravel us, but they can also drive us toward meaningful accomplishments…if we know how to control them. At the same time that our species evolved the inner voice, which can drown us in chatter, we also co-evolved tools to turn it into our greatest strength. Just look at Rick Ankiel, who returned to the major leagues in 2007—not as a pitcher, but as an outfielder who still had to contend with the pressures of playing in front of tens of thousands of fans.
Ankiel would play in the majors for another seven years, known for his rocket arm in the outfield and his explosive swing at the plate. He was the pitcher who’d lost his career, he wrote, “at about the worst possible time, spent nearly five years fighting that with a determination that bordered on obsession, and turned up the hitter who could put a ball in the top deck and the outfielder whose arm was again golden. It was all so marvelous and strange.”
Even stranger and more marvelous, in 2018, four years after retiring, Ankiel took the pitching mound at an exhibition game of former professional players, the first time he’d done so in public in nearly twenty years since his incident against the Braves.
He faced one batter and struck him out.
Now, to begin learning the hidden techniques for harnessing our inner voice, we need look no further than one of the more remarkable students I’ve ever taught. A spy from West Philadelphia.