Summary: Chatter. The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. Ethan Kross

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Smart Reading. Summary: Chatter. The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. Ethan Kross

How Our Mind Works

Where Is the Source of Our Inner Voice

Solomon’s Paradox

20 Ways to Calm Your Inner Interlocutor

Tricks You Can Practice Mentally

Tricks That Involve Others

The Power of Suggestion

Top 10 Take-aways

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One third to one half of our waking hours we spend living everywhere but in the present. Every now and again our brain uploads memories and puzzles us with imagined scenarios, attacks us with worries, and forces us to imagine the future, both near and far. And all this mind activity is accompanied by endless thinking. The voice in our head gives us advice, warns, threatens, bothers us, and we begin thinking about past arguments or those that have yet to occur. All this is really tiring, even exhausting. So much so that you want to force our inner interlocutor to shut up completely, if not stay quiet at least for a while. But these thoughts come to mind anyway, sometimes in droves. We spend a huge part of our life… in our own mind!

You, of course, won’t be able to stop all this chatter. And the good news is you don’t have to. Our mind’s ability to wander about, peeking both into the past and future, is a huge evolutional advantage that allows people to teach and learn, to tell stories, plan, dream, and avoid danger. Fortunately, nature has also provided us ways of making our flow of thoughts much more efficient and balanced.

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With age we notice that our inner narrator is too chatty. Subconsciously we understand that these thoughts don’t always have much to do with reality, but we still are unable to resist an internal argument with that inner voice.

"I’m no good enough", "I’m afraid I won’t succeed", "What did she mean by that?" – such chatter is the preferred phrasing of our mental interlocutor.

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