I see chatter as one of the most common problems we humans experience as a species. We spend between a third and a half of each day, when we are awake, not living the present moment. What are you doing when you’re not living in the moment? You’re self-talking. Your inner voice is your ability to use language without sounds or gestures in order to reflect on your life. Chatter is the dark side of your inner voice. If you turn your attention to the inside, in order to make sense of your problems, you won’t solve your problems. You’ll ruminate; you’ll worry; you’ll catastrophise. What ends up happening is that you get on a downward spiral. You take the most splendid tool your species has now, the inner voice, and you turn it not into a blessing but into a curse.

And what about this question of whether there’s an evolutionary function to all of this? For my part, I see language as a tool for organizing our progress through the world, and so the fact that we not only use language to organize our interactions with other people, but we also start using language to organize our interactions with ourselves, gives us a survival advantage. This is a spectacular problem-solving device. At the most basic end of this spectrum are things such as the inner voice being part of what we call our ‘Verbal Working Memory System’. It’s just a fundamental facet of the mind and of the human mind, it’s an aspect of working memory that helps us keep verbal information alive in our heads. The inner voice also allows us to plan and also to simulate. So I might plan, before I go in and give a presentation, I’ll go over in my head what am I gonna say? What are my talking points that I’m gonna go through? I’ll hear what questions you’re gonna ask me, and then I’ll hear myself respond, and that’s also what happens when we have an inner voice The inner voice is also how we control ourselves. Think about the last time any of us wanted to go and reach for a treat at night, and then we hear: ‘Don’t do it, you’re going to regret this in the morning.’ I see that as the inner voice. And then I think about how the inner voice also allows us to ‘storify’ our lives. We tend to turn our attention inward for the purpose of coming up with some narrative that allows us to make sense of our experiences in a way that gives us shape and identity.

So sometimes this internal voice can be this tremendous engine of healing, but then sometimes it can really drag you under. One of the problems is that chatter makes it really hard for you to focus. It occupies your attention. Chatter can also cause you to be more irritable and, as a result, create friction in your relationships, because you are just endlessly talking about your problems and you are not listening to other people. In a similar vein, chatter can also heighten something that researchers call ‘displaced aggression’. Finally, we know that chatter can have really devastating, bad, physical health impacts. You probably heard that stress kills. And that’s not really true. The stressresponse is actually a really, really adaptive response. What makes stress toxic is when, over time, those stress response-induced body responses stay up chronically. And this is exactly what chatter does. We have a stressor in our lives; it then passes; but in our mind, we are keeping that thing alive, because we are keeping that problem front-and-center of our attention, we are thinking about it over and over again. And that keeps those stress responses really primed and this has been associated with things such as cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, and even cancer. I think it would be an understatement to suggest that chatter is really negative.

The good news is that there is something that you can use, like a science-based toolkit, to begin to regain your act. There are things you can do on your own, there are ways of utilizing relationships with other people, there are ways of utilizing relationships with physical environments; and so on, and one of the best examples of that is rituals. So one of the things that we like to do is feel in control. Look, when you’re in this chatter state, you feel like your mind is controlling you, and some of the things that we have learned through science is we can start to compensate for that feeling like we’re out of control by creating order around us — and a ritual is one way of doing just that. The ritual is an ordered sequence of behaviors that you execute in some rigid He does rituals. Between points, he goes over to his bench. The first thing he does, he take a drink out of one of those exactly where he picked it up from on another diagonal towards the court. It is a ritual he employs to control his chatter.

There are no universal tools that ‘work for anyone and everyone in every situation’ to help you manage your chatter, if that’s what you are struggling with. Rather, the real challenge is what are the combinations of tools that ‘work’ for you? Are you disabled because you have chatter? Of course not. You are human because you have chatter, so welcome to the human condition.