Program: What influences your inner voice? Controlling 'chatter' part two

Sana Qadar: So we're a weekly podcast, right? And I try to make an interesting show every week. But some shows punch above the rest and they connect with people on a whole other level. I can't always pick which shows those are going to be. Sometimes I can. But one of our most popular episodes of the last two years is one we did on chatter. The chatter that fills your head your inner voice, which normally helps you with thinking and reflecting, gets hijacked by worry and rumination.

Professor Ethan Kross: For the next couple of nights, I was a chatter filled mess. I kept thinking, why did I go on television?

Sana Qadar: As the comments on that episode rolled in, which I should mention is called Controlling the chatter in your head. I knew we'd have to get Professor Ethan Kross back on the show again.

Professor Ethan Kross: Like a fancy, super fancy mic. So we did. Okay, perfect. So we're good to go.

Sana Qadar: Ethan is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. And last time we spoke about strategies for managing chatter, but there was so much left unsaid. So this time we're talking about some of the myths related to chatter and how your parents and your culture influence the nature of your inner voice.

Professor Ethan Kross: Cultures tell you what to care about and how to live your life. So in a certain sense, it's almost programming when your inner voice should act up to tell you, hey, things are not going well or things are going well.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, the voice in your head and the influences that shape it.

Sana Qadar: Thanks for coming back on the show. You were such a hit last time. People really responded to what you had to say. And it made me wonder, do you find that you're like generally a hit at dinner parties and things when you talk about your work? Are people instantly fascinated?

Professor Ethan Kross: It turns out a lot of people are interested in, I would say, things happening inside their head that we all experience but haven't really learned a whole lot about earlier in life. So yeah, like, you know, the voice in our head, emotions, how to manage them. These tend to be popular dinnertime conversations. So that's fun.

Sana Qadar: Yeah. Yeah. OK. I'm wondering if you could start by just giving us a refresher on how the inner voice works and whether we all have it.

Professor Ethan Kross: Sure. So let me first tell you how scientists like myself define the inner voice. When I use that term, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives, some feature of our life, maybe things happening in the world or things that we're imagining. And all people have this capacity. If you have a well-functioning mind, you do have an inner voice. Some people sometimes don't think that's the case because you can use your inner voice to do lots of different things. And some people rely on it to do some things more than others. So the best evidence that we all have an inner voice comes from the work on working memory. Your inner voice is part of your verbal working memory system. All healthy human brains have a working memory system. It's kind of the basic hardware of the human mind. But we can also think in terms of images and also in this more abstract code sense of just a sense of knowing. And so there are different modalities of thought for sure. And there are individual differences. But that, I would argue, is a matter of degree rather than either or.

Sana Qadar: Let's stick with the verbal inner voice, though, because that has some quirks that you might not even realize. For example, when you speak, generally you're doing it in full sentences. That's not necessarily how you're talking in your head.

Professor Ethan Kross: Huge variability there as well. So we can certainly engage in an inner monologue with ourselves. We can like talk to ourselves in poetic verse. Some people sometimes report experiencing an inner dialogue in which there's a back and forth conversation within their own minds. Very often, though, we think verbally in terms of sound bites. Like when I'm thinking about someone that I'm really upset about, there might be a negative like, you know, expletive that comes up in my mind. And there's a whole set of meaning attached with that one word. And that can activate a cascade of subsequent thoughts like that one word. So sometimes we're thinking in a seemingly chaotic manner, just like sound bites here and there. Sometimes it's a lot more fleshed out. And this speaks to the flexibility of how the voice in our head functions.

Sana Qadar: And I think in your book, you also wrote, we talk really fast. Is that right? In our heads?

Professor Ethan Kross: Well, we can talk really fast in our minds. And what's interesting about that is there have been a few studies that have tried to clock the speed and the numbers are all over the place. But think about when you talk out loud. I think we often take for granted how many additional steps are involved in actually vocalizing out loud. Right? You've got the thought in your head, but now you have to start moving your mouth. You've got to take air in and out, right? Lift your diaphragm to utter those words out loud. You have to move your mouth in particular ways so we can think much faster than we can speak. It's also true that if one word or just a few words in our minds, like if we just think really upset, that could be equivalent to a paragraph of talking out loud to convey the meaning of that because really upset. There's lots of other thoughts that are connected with that that we may not have to vocalize, but we may become aware of. So, you know, the mind'spretty efficient.

Sana Qadar: Those are some of the mechanics of the inner voice, but what about its nature? Our inner voice doesn't just appear out of nowhere, fully formed. It's influenced by our parents, by our experiences, and by the cultures we grow up in. But how, exactly? To answer that, let's go back to the beginning. And toddlerhood is when our language skills start to develop. So it makes sense that that might be when our inner voice develops. But is that correct?

Professor Ethan Kross: It's correct as far as we know. It's a challenging question to answer because, you know, it's hard to do some of these studies with kids at very young ages. But when I was researching my book, the earliest sign of the inner voice that I was able to come across in the literature popped up around 18 months of age, which is around, you know, the age that certain kinds of verbal faculties begin to develop.

Sana Qadar: This is my kid back when he was 18 months old. Just to show you what the verbal faculties sound like at that age.

Professor Ethan Kross: That doesn't mean that it might not come online a little bit sooner, but that's at the time that it was as early as it had been documented that I was able to find.

Sana Qadar: Then as kids get older, from about three years and up, they start to talk out loud to themselves and narrate what they're seeing or thinking or doing. Again, this is my kid pointing out all the things he sees on a train ride. And I asked Ethan if this is them narrating their inner voice.

Professor Ethan Kross: It's adorable. And according to some, this really represents the way that children first learn about self-control and start practicing it. So according to one influential theory of how self-control develops, kids listen to their parents say things to them, even though it might seem like they're never listening. They are. And what ends up happening is they hear you say something, and then they go away and then they're playing with themselves. And they start then repeating those phrases out loud. So if I tell my kids, you know, it's not good to be mean and ugly to one another. I don't want you to ever say hurtful things. My youngest daughter might have gone over to the corner and repeated that. Like you shouldn't say mean things. It's not a good thing to do. Don't do this. This is them beginning the process of internalizing their parents' instructions and their parents' voices in their own mind. Now, eventually kids stop. That describes the process through which this kind of like outer voice of someone else internalizes itself in a kid's own mind.

Sana Qadar: That's interesting because one of the things I wanted to ask was if you spend any time on parenting Instagram or TikTok, as I have done, there is a saying that makes the rounds, which is the way you speak to your children is what their inner voice becomes, which it sounds like from what you're saying is accurate. I've always wondered how accurate that was.

Professor Ethan Kross: I would. I would just. There is more than a grain of truth there. So how you speak to your kids, no doubt, influences how they think about everything themselves, the world around them. You know, this gets us into the territory of culture. And, you know, family is a kind of culture. Right. And so when you're talking to your kids, you are conveying your values and beliefs, right, which are shaping their values and beliefs. You are conveying how do you respond to adversity? All of those different lessons that shapes our kids' inner world, including how they talk to themselves. I say shape, though, very deliberately, because what you describe from TikTok and Instagram, you said your voice becomes their voice. That is not true in the sense that kids have agency and there are unlimited examples of kids who operate quite differently from their parents.

Sana Qadar: I want to explore that a bit more, because there's this idea that if your parents were particularly harsh, possibly you're going to be very self-critical later on and your inner voice will be really harsh. Is it that straightforward?

Professor Ethan Kross: Well, it's an influence, but it's not what we would call deterministic. So you can break down a lot of how human beings function in a psychological sense. If you want to look at the influences, there's our environment, which is what we're talking about now, our relationship initially with our parents as we get a little bit older, our environment mushrooms out and then it becomes our friends. And then older it becomes our school, has a culture, organizations, geopolitical, all of those forces are environmental forces that can influence how we think about the world, how we view it, how we think about ourselves. There also are our genetic influences that can predispose us to think about our circumstances in particular ways. So it is by no means the case that your environment determines psychological outcomes of the sort that we are talking about, but it does play an important role.

Sana Qadar: One thing I'm wondering, I'll ask you about culture more broadly in a moment, but what's the weirdest thing about our inner voice to you? From all the research you've done, what really makes you think that's so odd or interesting?

Professor Ethan Kross: Oh, that's a great question. You know, what I find so interesting is actually about our inner voices is really the question that got me interested in psychology in the first place, which is I think of the inner voice as this remarkable tool that we possess. It lets you keep information active in your head. It lets you simulate and plan for the future. It helps you control yourself. It helps you make meaning, find purpose, defines your sense of who you are. So this is an amazing tool, but it is also the source of enormous, enormous suffering. I've talked about problems surrounding our inner voice as one of the big problems we face as a species. And that claim is motivated by research, which shows that when people struggle, they often reach for this tool, often reflexively. Okay, I've been rejected or I'm scared about something or I'm really sad because this thing happened. So let me use my inner voice to try to work through that experience. And then it jams up on us. So we don't get to where we want to be. We don't effortlessly work through our circumstances. Instead, we start spinning. We ruminate. We worry in ways that make it hard for us to think and perform, damage our relationships and damage our health. And so why is it that we have this amazing tool that is so powerful on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's really sometimes quite difficult to harness? Why did we evolve in such a manner that it's sometimes really hard to master this tool? That's a question that I have spent many a night reflecting on and I still continue to marvel at that question.

Sana Qadar: Yeah. And what's the closest to an answer you've landed on for that?

Professor Ethan Kross: Well, the closest I've come is that the circumstances under which our inner voice often backfires on us are these really intense negative circumstances. When things are going well, we can activate our inner voice to help us out. It's when we are infused with negative emotion that sometimes it's really hard to harness that tool to help us turn the volume on our negative emotions down. And I think one of the reasons why that is, is negative emotions when they are experienced in the right proportions are really actually quite good for us.

Sana Qadar: Like they're motivating.

Professor Ethan Kross: Yeah, they're motivating and they're motivating in very specific ways. So anger is an example. We often think of anger as a toxic emotion. We should never experience anger. In fact, when do we experience anger? We experience anger when we feel as though we've been transgressed in some way or a group that we're associated with has been transgressed and there's still an opportunity to rectify the situation. That's the circumstance in which we experience anger. And sometimes that's really useful. So if one of my daughters does something really, really dangerous that I've told her to not do before, anger is an emotion that is motivating me to immediately get into that situation and fix it so that she doesn't do the same thing again. So let's say doesn't put her seatbelt on in the car. So in the right proportions, it can be useful. And I'll give you a couple more examples, actually. Anxiety. What's the usefulness of anxiety?

Sana Qadar: Oh my God, please tell me. Because yeah, that seems very unuseful to me.

Professor Ethan Kross: Seems crazy, right? Can anxiety ever be useful? Yes, it can. So anxiety prepares us to deal with an impending threat, right? It's like a little alarm that goes off that says, hey, pay attention. There's something important coming up. You should deal with it. So I give lots of public talks as part of my job. And even having given hundreds of these things, I often experience a little bit of butterflies in my stomach before going on stage. I remember one time, this was about four or five years ago, I felt zero anxiety. There was no emotion whatsoever. It was one of the flattest presentations I had ever given. And so anxiety can be useful. And if you are listening and you're someone who experiences anxiety at times and doesn't like that feeling, actually just reframing it as a useful signal that your body is giving you, research shows that that can be really, really helpful for allowing people to harness their anxiety. Here's the thing, though, about these negative emotions, and I'll bring it back to your question about why it's sometimes hard for us to manage our inner voice. Anxiety, sadness, envy, you know, all the negative emotions, they can be good for us. What makes them good for us, though, is that they are painful, right? They hurt. So that quickly draws our attention and motivates us to respond really quick because we want to reduce those negative feelings. Imagine if you were capable of always activating your inner voice to get rid of your negative emotions. Most of us would probably elect to never experience any kind of negative emotion because it doesn't feel very good. And that would not be good for human beings. So I think that's why sometimes figuring out how to use your inner voice as a tool can be a little tricky.

Sana Qadar: We explored a lot of the tools for taming your inner voice when it turns to chatter in our first episode with Ethan, and we'll link to that in our show notes. But here are just a couple of quick examples. There's mental time travel.

Professor Ethan Kross: Think about how you're going to feel about this problem the next day, the next week.

Sana Qadar: There's something called distanced self-talk.

Professor Ethan Kross: I'll think to myself, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? What are you going to do? I'm talking to myself in that instance like I would actually talk to another person.

Sana Qadar: And there's a whole lot more. And we go into why these work as well. But one thing we didn't fully explore in that first episode was the myths around chatter and what won't help.

Professor Ethan Kross: Okay, so let's talk about myths about chatter. Number one, you should always strive to be in the present. And if you're not, something is wrong with you. This is a myth because human beings weren't designed or we didn't evolve to always be in the present. There are many animals that are always in the present, and they have lots of many more appendages than we do in antennae. Your ability to, like, you know, I'm thinking cockroaches, your ability to travel in time in your mind is an amazing defining feature of humanity. This is what allows us to build spaceships, right? So like plan for the future and solve problems and learn from the past and savor past experiences and fantasize about good things that might happen. So you don't want to give up this ability to travel in time in your mind. You want to figure out how to do that more effectively. So that's one myth that always being in the moment is where we always want to be. Another myth is that avoidance is toxic. So have you ever heard this idea that you never want to avoid something that's bothering you, always confront it?

Sana Qadar: Yeah, yeah. Because avoidance is like what people with anxiety do, that kind of thing. Yes, I've definitely heard that.

Professor Ethan Kross: So avoidance can be harmful in many circumstances, but there's also research which shows that strategically avoiding problems can, in the right circumstances, actually be helpful. So let's say I have a difficult conversation with a colleague and it's bugging me and taking some time away from that, strategically diverting my attention onto something that's more engaging and positive, and then coming back to the problem after, sometimes can be really helpful because what the avoidance does there is it gives me some time to cool down. And sometimes that cooling down period is all you need to deal with a problem. And so the trick here with what we're talking about here is really attention in these kind of chatter situations is as follows. If you have the temptation to get some space and focus on something else for a while and you do that, and then you come back to the situation and you're feeling fine and you're not overcome with chatter, then great, avoidance has worked. Right. If you turn away from it and then come back and the chatter is still there, then that's the cue that you want to go deeper into the experience, reframe it to try to work through it. But there are cases in which taking some time away can actually be useful.

Sana Qadar: That is so helpful to know. And on the present, being in the present is not where you always want to be. Does that mean, like, that's the message from all the mindfulness stuff we hear all the time, you know, bring your attention to the present. Is that wrong then?

Professor Ethan Kross: I think bringing your attention to the present is one type of tool that can be helpful and has shown to be helpful when dealing with chatter. So when you're overcome with chatter about the future or past, refocusing on how you're feeling, your body is moving in and out as you breathe, that can be helpful in that very moment. But it is one tool of close to 30. And we know, again, that there are no one size fits all solutions. That is relevant to mindfulness as well. Mindfulness benefits lots of people, but there are some people who don't benefit. So the real challenge is to is to figure out the tools that work best for you. That is the best advice I could offer people.

Sana Qadar: Okay, so coming back to culture more broadly, you talked about how parents are in a family is a kind of culture that a kid grows up in and that influences their inner voice. What about the wider culture that we grow up in? How do various cultures sort of influence the way people within those cultures talk to themselves in their head?

Professor Ethan Kross: They influence our inner voice quite powerfully. So what culture does, you can break culture down in its most simple form into doing three things for us. Number one, culture shapes our beliefs and values. So it determines what we care about in this world. It also gives us beliefs about the things that are important about other people, about ourselves. So culture is shaping beliefs and values. Culture is also giving us norms or rules for how to how to navigate the world. So if you violate a norm, like a rule for how to behave like that's probably going to activate your inner voice. And so in this sense, cultures tell you what to care about and how to live your life to abide by those things you care about. So in a certain sense, it's almost programming when your inner voice should act up to tell you, hey, things are not going well or things are going well.

Sana Qadar: In your book, you give an example of how American Western culture values independence and many Asian cultures value social cohesion, and that can influence the way we talk in our own heads. Can you talk about that a little bit as an example?

Professor Ethan Kross: So yeah, take an independent culture like the United States. Independence. This is about about expressing myself and achieving and showing that I've accomplished something. So failure for me to achieve an important goal that I have win this award, publish this paper, write this book, right? Failure to do that may be exactly the circumstance that's going to activate my inner voice, right? My chatter, if you will. Now let's shift to an interdependent culture. Take Japan as an example of that kind of culture. Interdependence is more about fitting in with the broader collective. You don't want to stand out. You want to fit in and make sure the team is doing well, right? So they're actually standing out and accomplishing something and having all the attention drawn to you. When a person from the independent culture might crave, that might be associated with the exact opposite kind of emotional response, which is, oh, dread, right? The spotlight is on me, which is going to activate your chatter. So the mirror image experience across those two cultures is having a very different effect on our inner voice. Does that make sense?

Sana Qadar: Yeah, no, it does. And it makes me wonder, I don't know if this is even possible to say, but whether various cultures have an influence on this. We probably don't have the answer for this, but like how negative overall people tend to be in their self-talk, like a stricter culture might mean you are more fearful or more critical, that kind of thing.

Professor Ethan Kross: Well, we can come close to it. So there has been work which shows how culture influences the kinds of emotions we tend to experience and also the emotional experiences that we value. And I think this is often called ideal affect. Affect is a term that scientists often use to refer to emotional experiences. I think this is a fascinating literature. So people from collectivist or Eastern cultures, they tend to value experiences that are characterized by equanimity. Remaining kind of cool, calm, collected at baseline, that's a state that on the whole, people in Eastern cultures crave more than people in the West who are more motivated to experience high arousal, positive emotions like happiness and enthusiasm. And so if your culture is leading you to value one type of emotional experience more than another, what do you think is going to happen next? You're going to seek out those kinds of experiences more. And then you seek out those experiences more, that's going to shape your experience in this world. So it's a really powerful example of how culture is tuning us to have different kinds of lives.

Sana Qadar: And when your inner voice flips to chatter, so rumination, worry, one of the benefits of culture is that it can also give you tools for coping with that in the form of prayer, meditation, and other rituals.

Professor Ethan Kross: These are other tools that our culture is giving us to help us manage our inner voice when it acts up. So culture plays a profound role in shaping how we think about the world and our place in it.

Sana Qadar: But that relationship also goes the other way. You could say that the inner voice has had a profound role in shaping culture, especially via religion. So I want to end this chat by leaving you with something somewhat philosophical to ponder.

Professor Ethan Kross: You know, thousands of years ago, some people thought that the inner voice was the voice of God. And some people still often think about the voice in their head as a communication they're having with a supernatural force. And that doesn't mean, by the way, that there's anything wrong with those individuals. This is a belief. This is a way of interpreting their inner experience. And so, you know, people have described the inner voice as being the kind of the seed of one's soul, the voice of your soul. And so lots of different ways that people can make sense of this internal experience. But if you look at the Bible, people often talk about hearing the voice, the voice of God or prophets having these kinds of verbal hallucinations. And you wonder, through the lens of science, how might that be interpreted differently?

Sana Qadar: I have often thought about that. What does that mean about the things we believe and where those messages came from? Because, yeah, by current day standards, if someone says they're hearing the voice of God, they might end up at the hospital.

Professor Ethan Kross: And those are some of the most celebrated figures in the history of the world, right, if we think about it, which, you know, isn't to say that they did or didn't, but it just certainly makes you think about the role that this voice in our head has played throughout time.

Sana Qadar: That is Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it. And if you want to take a listen to the first episode Ethan appeared in with us, it's called Controlling the Chatter in Your Head. And you can Google that title, plus All in the Mind, or scroll back in your podcast feed. We'll also link to it in our show notes. Now, a quick note, if you live in Brisbane, I'm going to be there next week for a live show at the World Science Festival. I'll be chatting about animal consciousness with a few different experts, and there are just a few tickets left. So if you're keen to hear about that and you're in Brissy, come along. You can head to the worldsciencefestival.com.au website for more info. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and sound engineer Roy Huberman. This episode was written, edited and presented by me, Sana Qadar. And finally, thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.