How to Relate to the Voice in Your Head

There’s one instruction that unites the world’s major wisdom traditions. The ancient Oracle of Delphi greeted all comers with the injunction “Know thyself.” Jesus of Nazareth promised his followers that the kingdom of God was within each of them. The Dalai Lama reminds us that “True change is within.” So many revered sages, century after century, millennium upon millennium, urge us to look inside.

But very often when we look inside, what do we find? A laundry list of worries, complaints and repetitive thoughts. Why did I eat that? Will I get that job? I hate washing dishes…

We don’t want to spend more time caught up rumination. What are we supposed to find when we look inside?

Mental Chatter

The first greeter at the door when we look inside is mental chatter (a term popularized by Srikumar Rao), a voice in our heads, but it’s more than an ordinary voice. In a recent book called Chatter, psychologist Ethan Kross reports that our stream of consciousness runs at a rate equivalent to four thousand words per minute. Mental chatter can include visual images and a soundscape as well. It can be an inner movie, even an immersive virtual reality.

This mental simulation mechanism evolved as a powerful survival tool, enabling us to noticing anything that is not as it should be and to imagine anything that may go wrong.

Often, this function goes into overdrive; we affix our scrutinizing attention on other people, or on our own failings, and treat them as threats, even though we no longer live in the wild and our spouse’s careless utterance is not a lion stalking us.

How to Relate to Mental Chatter

Although Kross marshals some interesting research on the topic of chatter, I found his solutions limited. He argues that we should control our thoughts and channel them into more positive directions. The tools he offers can certainly offer some relief, but ultimately, controlling mental chatter is a losing game.

A more deeply transformative approach is to observe the chatter carefully and see it for what it is.

Once we realize that mental chatter is not the narrator of reality, but just a series of thoughts passing through our minds, its power over us wanes. The key is learning to notice it, and this noticing is a skill that we can strengthen with practice.

Over the years, I’ve engaged in this explorative practice with hundreds of students. They are assigned to look inside several times a day and note down their moment-to-moment thoughts. While each person’s chatter is different, they overwhelmingly report that there is much more chatter inside than they ever realized, and most people are surprised to find how many harsh, untrue, and even patently absurd things they say to themselves inside every day.

I’ve asked them to describe what their mental chatter looks like, what images can describe the experience?

One student suggested a hamster wheel, while another saw a henhouse full of squawkers. A third described a cartoon gremlin, half gnome and half wolf, whispering. (For a longer lists of images, see the appendix to this post.)

After careful observation, we can all see that there are many layers and textures in our inner experience. It’s not just one train of thought. The more we look, the more complexity we find.

As thoughts come and go, I sometimes think of them as different kinds of clouds. There are wispy cirrhus clouds, barely conscious judgements that come and go quickly and are easy to miss. There are regular, fluffy cotton-ball clouds, workaday thoughts that are in the front of my consciousness, like the ones telling me what to write in this sentence. There are storm cloud thoughts that completely envelop me for long periods of time in imaginary scenes. And there are steady background thoughts, ideas that I constantly hold in my head about how the world works, about who I am, about the nature of reality. I think of these as low blanket clouds, underlying everything.

Waking Up from Mental Chatter

Another image for mental chatter is that of a copilot. Let’s say you’re the pilot; your job is to navigate, while your copilot is constantly taking measurements and telling you the speed, the altitude, the direction, and warning you of any dangers coming up.

And you’re listening… but then a strange thing happens, and you start listening so intently that you mentally switch into the other seat. You forget that you’re the pilot. You identify with the copilot; you feel like you’re actually sitting in the copilot’s seat. You start looking at all the flashing lights and dials, totally absorbed in a kind of trance.

Your whole reality becomes the world of measurements and warnings. This trance can continue for some time.

And then you suddenly wake up and you’re back in the pilot’s seat. You can look across at your copilot with objectivity, and you’re also free to look out at the real world to steer your course through the sky. What a liberation!

How to Go Beyond Mental Chatter

Every time we notice that mental chatter is merely mental chatter, we experience a mini-awakening. We wake up from thoughts of the past or the future, or from judgments about how things should be. We return to the here and now, and realize, “Oh, that was just a thought I was having.”

Writing the chatter down helps us take even more distance, making the thought into an odd little artifact that actually feels a bit funny. We can think, “Ha, I was actually thinking that thought, just a moment ago. And now that thought is just a scribble on the paper, and here I am, free of it.”

We can disidentify from the mental chatter. We can realize that we are not the chatter; we are the one listening to it. As the sages remind us, “Anything you can observe is not you.”

Here’s a rhyming corollary: “It’s not true, and it’s not you.”

If you think of mental chatter as clouds, remember that you are the sky. If you think of mental chatter as your copilot, remember that while he can inform you, you’re the one in charge.

Observe your mental chatter with lovingkindness and compassion. Remember its function is to protect you, but you don’t have to get caught up in it. Acknowledge it, give it a gentle smile and a nod, and let it go.

The more you let it go, the more you are free to see what else is inside you. Joy, love and peace are not in the chatter.

Keep looking within.

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35 Images of Mental Chatter

In my conversations with students about Mental Chatter, I often ask, “What does your mental chatter look like?” Here’s a list I’ve compiled from their answers:

1. A panel of commentators, like the TV show The View

2. A tiny person in my head

3. A ping pong ball going back and forth

4. Clouds floating by, while I am the sky

5. A gossipy ghost

6. A Rubik’s Cube that I get absorbed in, and then realize it’s a game

7. A movie I get absorbed in, then realize it’s a movie

8. A meerkat nervously scanning the horizon for danger

9. My father, my mother, my sister…

10. Many cars that keep cutting me off in traffic

11. Zombies trying to surround me

12. An untrained dog

13. A leprechaun on the edge of my mind, throwing rocks and dirt at me

14. The model of teeth that the dentist has in the office, chattering

15. A cartoon gremlin, half gnome and half wolf, whispering

16. A mean version of me, talking in a cold voice

17. Little bombs that go off irregularly, like time bombs

18. The Gordian knot that I would like to slice through as Alexander did

19. A tornado

20. A piece of chewing gum, because it repeats itself

21. A train, and I have to outrun it

22. A bunch of very talkative people running around my head

23. A visitor in the house; he’s always there, and he gets bigger and smaller, and I ignore him

24. A henhouse full of squawkers, bgaaak, bgaak!

25. A old-fashioned film projector

26. A child running around a corn maze

27. A mobile phone with all the apps open

28. Waves of the ocean

29. A road with many forks

30. Roger Rabbit when his eyes are big and looking around

31. A dragon guarding the door to the palace, where the palace is my happiness

32. A ball of yarn that I’m trying to untangle in the corner, while missing the party

33. A cauldron of boiling water that sometimes boils over

34. Two trains, one positive and one negative, going in divergent directions

35. The Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, because it munches on all my experiences.

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