Your inner voice can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Mental chatter can help you rehearse and refine a presentation, even help you write a novel when the characters take on a life and a voice of their own inside your mind.

But persistent chatter can also cloud your thinking. Especially those dark thoughts on dark nights when you worry, ruminate and catastrophize. Endless fatalistic chatter stuck on a negative loop.

How can you stop such negative chatter in your head? One surefire way is to blow your brains out. (Kidding, kidding. Please don’t blow your brains out.)

A less dramatic and more effective solution is to be aware of how chatter can turn toxic and fuel anxiety.

What makes anxiety and stress toxic is when a stress response is triggered and then remains chronically activated over time.

That’s exactly what anxious chatter does. You experience something stressful in your life and then you keep replaying it in your head over and over and over. And every time you replay it, you maintain that stress reaction.

That’s how stress predicates major health problems like inflammation, cardiovascular disease, even certain forms of cancer. Stress is a killer.

Chatter zooms in on your problems. You start thinking very narrowly about the experiences driving those negative reactions.

Stepping back and thinking about what’s happening from a broader perspective can be lifesaving. Move from a narrow perspective (with limited options) to a broader perspective (with potentially unlimited options) and stress dissipates.

Talk to yourself in the second-person

To get some distance, adopt a more objective perspective.

Use language to alter your perspective. Use your own name and the second-person pronoun ‘you’ to coach yourself through the problem.

Talking to yourself in the second-person shifts your perspective and alters the way you relate to difficult emotional situations.

Giving yourself advice as if you were another person takes you out of yourself. Out of your swirling thoughts.

Time travel into the future

When you’re experiencing negative chatter, it’s all-consuming.

Take a deep breath. Think about how you’ll feel about this problem the next day, next week, next month, next year. This broadens your perspective using time rather than language.

When imagining how you’re going to feel about something you’re grappling with down the road, you realize that as awful as what you’re going through now feels, it’s usually temporary.

Most of your negative experiences eventually fade with time, and thinking about how you’re going to feel in the future melts away anxiety and quietens the chatter.

Create a ritual

A ritual diverts your attention away from the chatter.

It shifts your attention so rather than focusing on the chatter, you focus on the ritual. Sometimes a split second is all your need.

A ritual can be as simple as pressing the tips of your thumb and forefinger together. Or as elaborate as placing two drink bottles down by your feet, in front of your court-side chair, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court.

You don’t have to be a world-class professional tennis player to appreciate the power of a ritual in taking attention away from your chatter.

A ritual gives you a greater sense of agency. Rather than being at the whims of ceaseless chatter, a ritual proves you’re in charge.

You’re in control.

Reference

“Controlling the chatter in your head” ABC (2022)