How To Improve Your Inner Voice - Ethan Kross

Rumination is chatter about the past, worry is chatter about the future. But fundamentally, if you find yourself in a thought loop trying to work through a ... some kind of problem, but not making any progress, that's an indicator that you're experiencing it. (wind blowing)

Why is it that we have an inner voice at all? Can you explain why it is that we can hear our own thoughts in our heads?

Yes. It's a great question. Um, so I like to think of the inner voice as a kind of Swiss Army knife of the mind, that it's a tool, lets us do lots of different things. Um, things that I ... Well, you ... Why don't you tell me how essential you think some of these things that it allows us to do are? So first of all, when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And, and, and we silently talk to ourselves for a variety of different reasons. One thing that happens to me quite a bit is I go to the grocery store, and I'm charged by my wife and daughters, um, with picking up various items. Inevitably, I get to that grocery store, I start walking down the aisle. Usually it's the second or third aisle, and I forget what I'm supposed to get. And when that happens, I start talking to myself. I start thinking, "What am I supposed to get?" And then I list off the items: bananas, chocolate, cheese. What I'm doing there is I'm using my inner voice to keep a nugget of information active in my head. Our inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system. This is a system of the human mind that is specialized for allowing us to rehearse information in a loop. Um, nowadays, people don't really memorize phone numbers anymore, but, um, we used to do that. Did you ever do that when you were younger?

Yeah, I mean, I can ... There's maybe two or three phone numbers that I can remember, my home phone number and my dad's phone number. But by the time that my mum got a mobile phone, I had a phone, so I've never needed to recall hers, but I can remember my dad ... I can remember my business partner's as well. And the reason I can remember that is because of the number of times that I heard the answer machine for him while he was-

(laughs)

... while we were at university and he was still asleep or hungover from the night before. So those are the only three numbers that I can remember, but yes.

See, back in the day, there were, there were many more that we would memorize. But, but, but if you were to repeat a phone number in your head or you meet someone at a party and you wanna not forget their name, you repeat that over and over, that's using your inner voice. So most people rely on their inner voice for that reason. Every single day, we're using it, um, uh, in that capacity. We also use our inner voice to do other things, like simulating and planning stuff. Before people go on interviews, they often rehearse what they're gonna say in response to different questions they imagine. Before I give a presentation, I'll go over the talking points in my head. I'll usually go for a walk around the neighborhood or the hotel I'm staying in, and I'll go from the beginning to the end. I'll go over the whole rigamarole. I'll imagine what a really obnoxious attendee, what question are they gonna ask me. I'll then imagine what I'm gonna say to them. Um, it's usually not very nice things that I say back. Um, I'm much nicer in person than I am in my head. We'll get to that maybe later. But so we use our inner voice to plan, right, to simulate. We use it to control ourselves. When I'm exercising, if I'm in a class with an instructor or working out one-on-one, I'm smiling to that instructor. But in my head, when they're having me do painful things, I am saying all sorts of not-so-sweet things towards them. "You son of a ..." I'm counting down, "Come on, man, you know, seven more reps, seven, six, five." That's me using my inner voice to coach myself along. We can also use our inner voice to critique ourselves. And then, and then finally, and I think this is one of the most special functions of the inner voice, we use it to make sense of our lives. Shit happens, and when that occurs, we try to make sense of that adversity, and we use words w- ... to, to, to create stories that help us understand what we're going through. And those stories we tell ourselves, really, they give shape to our sense of who we are. So your inner voice helps mold your, your identity. So those are four things that our inner voice does. Um, I think we're unique in our capacity to use an inner voice in that way, and I think it is a decided advantage that we possess, um, that, that capacity.