Don’t listen to the voice in your head

Imagine your internal monologue was a real person who just hung out with you all day.

24/7. All the time. Yapping away. Changing their mind every two seconds. Giving you dubious advice. Having inexplicably strong opinions on your hair.

Would you be friends with them? Probably not, right?

So: why do you listen to the voice in your head?

You’re not the voice (try and understand it)

The voice you hear in your head – or images, sounds, whatever – isn’t you. You can tell because you can actively observe it.

You have what American writer Michael Fisher calls an “subject-object” relationship with your internal monologue. Here’s what he says about it in his book The untethered soul:

You are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

He argues that the internal monologue is constantly “trying to find a comfortable place to rest” – flip-flopping between sides of a debate, preparing for the future or interrogating the past, describing whatever it is you see or do.

Think about it in terms of feelings: feelings start in the body but thinking about them helps make them feel less immediate. Easier to control. Easier to make comfortable.

But, really, those thoughts are just a burst water main, spewing thoughts all over the place for you to experience. It’s misdirected energy.

That’s not to say it’s totally useless, of course. It has a point. Take your observations, for example: you’re walking down the street and your internal monologue names everything you see. Cool dog, interesting dress, wow that tree is getting bigger.

Fisher poses a question: “Why do you really need this?” You can take in detail faster than you can narrate it. And you’re aware of the world without needing to verbally describe it all. So: what’s going on?

Here’s what Fisher has to say:

The narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like backseat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in your control. You actually feel like you have some relationship with them. By verbalizing it mentally, you brought that initial direct experience of the world into the realm of your thoughts. There it becomes integrated with your other thoughts, such as those making up your value system and historical experiences.

Basically, you’re creating a mental model of the world that you control. The world moves on without you; you have little to no say over it and neither do your thoughts. That can feel nice, right?

Fisher uses an example to illustrate the dynamic:

When your body experiences cold, there may be nothing you can do to affect the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, “It’s cold!” you can say, “We’re almost home, just a few more minutes.” Now you feel better. In the thought world there’s always something you can do to control the experience.

That’s fine when it’s banal. But it takes on a different tenor when you’re castigating yourself for something.

Suddenly, the thing that helps you feel in control is going in on you for a perceived failing. And, if you believe that voice is capital-Y You, well, aren’t you a failure?

Nope. Of course not. Because the voice isn’t you. It’s a thought flailing around for a sense of control and safety, your need to sleep be damned.

If there is a capital-Y You, Fisher argues that it’s the “awareness of being” or consciousness that sits just behind everything you observe (including your thoughts).

He says:

You live in the seat of consciousness. Just as you effortlessly look outside and see all that you see, you will eventually sit far enough back inside to see all your thoughts and emotions, as well as outer form. All of these objects are in front of you. The thoughts are closer in, the emotions are a little further away, and form is way out there. Behind it all, there you are.

Once you internalise that, your thoughts and feelings and whatnot take on a different edge. You’re not just aware of them; you’re “aware that you’re aware”.

Now, maybe, you can turn those thoughts to good use.

Making use of your thoughts

In his book The voices within, psychologist Charles Fernyhough breaks down the various roles self-talk – your internal monologue – can have:

A distinction will crop up in any discussion of why we talk to ourselves: a separation between myself as speaker and myself as a listener. If we really do talk to ourselves, then the language that ensues must have some of the properties of a conversation between different parts of who we are.

For example, negative self talk can come “a the part of the self that can adopt a critical distance from what is being enacted.” In the process, you’re able to “step out of yourself for a moment” and see what’s happening from a different point of view.

Depending on what you’re doing, that can be helpful. If you’re working away on something, self talk that says “nah, do this instead” or “you’re whiffing on this” can help you realise you’ve made a mistake.

It can even be plainer than that. Instructional self talk, like “gotta add the cumin next” when you’re cooking, can keep you on task. This kind of self talk, according to Fernyhough, has “its power in controlling attention”. He explains:

I often talk to myself at the wheel [of a car] as a way of focussing my attention in one direction or another. Approaching a roundabout, for example, I might say “Look to the right” so that I can give way to traffic from that direction. I’m probably more likely to do that if I’ve just returned from a trip overseas, where I will likely have been driving on the other side of the road. I can’t prove it scientifically, but those few words seem to help me to keep my attentional focus.

So that’s all useful stuff, right?

The problem is clear, though: different flavours of self talk isn’t always going to be useful. Saying “you’ve got this” when you’re about to try something can be more effective than “you’ve got no chance here, Zanoni”. And instructive self talk can just get in your way, slowing down what’s otherwise a cool, smooth action.

Pick your thoughts

The secret, it seems, is understanding what flavours of thoughts are coming up, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

Next time you notice your self talk, make note of its tenor and goal. Is it a coach, a guide, a merciless pessimist, a bouyant optimist? What are they trying to do? What do they want you to see?

That way, you can be more choosey about what you pay attention to. You can say “nope, not for me today” if they’re not helpful and direct your attention elsewhere.

But it doesn’t stop there: you can also decide what person to speak in: the first-person pronouns “I” and “me” versus the second-person “you” or using your name.

Here’s Fernyhough:

When people are instructed to refer to themselves by their own name or through the second-person pronoun, they appear to gain a kind of distance from the self that they would not get if they referred to themselves as “me” or “I”.

He goes onto to discuss an experiment at the University of Michigan. One of the tasks in the study involved participants getting five minutes to prepare to persuade a panel of “experts” they were qualified for a dream job. (The task was designed to create social anxiety: mission accomplished.)

Some of the volunteers were told “to prepare for the task by referring to what ‘I’ should do”. Those that hadn’t been instructed to refer to themselves in the first person performed better, felt better about it and worried less afterwards.

Fernyhough summarised the results:

Avoiding first-person references seemed to give participants a distance from the self that allowed them to regulate their behaviour more effectively, and in particular deal with emotions such as social anxiety.

It goes back to what Fisher was saying about awareness, right? By being “aware that you’re aware”, it becomes easier to step back and make active choices about what you’re attending to. “I’m anxious” can become “huh, there’s some anxiety”.

The thought becomes less You and more Something Over There.

Managing awareness

Because that’s the thing about awareness: it’s all encompassing. Whatever you’re totally in feels like you. And that chattering voice in your head can direct your awareness; it becomes you.

But that’s an illusion. It’s just a series of thoughts, expressed as words, none of which can accurately reflect reality. Like we’ve spoken about before, “language is an inherently flawed way to describe the world. It can never accurate capture things as they are.”¹

So you don’t need to listen to the words in your head.

I mean, would you take advice from someone who changed their opinion on things every minute or so? Would you take recommendations from someone would could be cruel one second and sycophantic the next? That flips around like a plastic bag stuck in a willy-willy?

Nope. You wouldn’t. Because that person would be insufferable.

You don’t need that in your life.

That leaves us with three things we can work on:

1. Noticing thoughts and acknowledging that they’re not you.
2. Putting together a little inventory of the different flavours your internal monologue takes so you can choose between them as required.
3. Consciously deciding between thinking as “I” and thinking as “you” (or your name) as the situation arises.

It’ll take a while. But it’s worth the effort.

So, next time your inner voice arcs up, take a moment to remind yourself it’s not you. Remember that you can pick your friends and you can pick the thoughts you pay attention to. Then choose well.