Make Emotion Your Ally
I recently watched psychologist Ethan Kross speak at TED about the voice inside your head. His talk, "Do You Talk to Yourself? Here's How to Harness Your Inner Voice," reveals what most high-performers miss: that voice is not the problem. How you're using it is.
Your inner voice is a powerful tool for self-reflection, planning, and self-control.
When it turns against you, it becomes chatter. Negative thought loops that consume cognitive capacity, prolong stress response, and damage physical health.
video synopsisYour inner voice allows you to silently use language to reflect on your life. It keeps information active in working memory. It lets you simulate and plan. It creates the stories that shape your identity.
But this tool jams when you need it most. Instead of clarity, you spiral. Instead of solutions, you berate yourself. This is chatter.
Chatter undermines you in three domains:
Cognitive capacity. Chatter consumes attention, leaving little left for tasks requiring focus. You read a page and remember nothing. You sit in meetings mentally replaying earlier conflicts.
Relationships. You talk about the problem repeatedly without progress. This pushes away people who care about you because empathy has limits when nothing changes.
Physical health. Chatter prolongs stress response. That wear creates cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and certain cancers.
Most people ask Kross: "How do I silence this voice?" Wrong question. The goal is learning to harness it.
Don't have time to watch it? Here's what you need to know:
Your inner voice shapes identity. It helps you plan, reflect, control yourself, and make sense of experience.
Chatter is negative thought loops without solutions. Signs: replaying problems without progress, self-criticism that doesn't lead to change.
Chatter damages performance, relationships, and health. It consumes attention, exhausts support networks, and keeps cortisol elevated.
Three regulation tools. Distanced self-talk using your name and "you," chatter advisors who both listen and advise, experiencing awe to shrink the self and quiet noise.
Venting strengthens bonds but doesn't resolve chatter. You need empathy plus perspective, not just validation.
What Amplifies Chatter in High-Performers
Perfectionism as operating system. Your inner voice enforces impossible standards. Every mistake gets replayed with commentary. Every success gets minimized as "should have been better."
Cognitive overload treated as normal. Your mind never rests. Even downtime becomes planning time. The voice that says "use this moment productively" runs constantly.
Isolation that comes with seniority. The higher you rise, the fewer people you trust with struggles. Your inner voice becomes your only sounding board. Without external perspective, it loops without interruption.
Unprocessed emotion from override patterns. When you push through feelings instead of metabolizing them, they resurface as chatter. Your inner voice tries to process what your body wasn't allowed to feel in real time.
The pattern: your inner voice became the tool you use to abandon yourself.
How Chatter Shows Up
Decision paralysis that consumes hours. You replay scenarios endlessly without landing on a choice. The cognitive load leaves you too depleted to act.
Over-rehearsal that undermines performance. You practice the presentation so many times that by delivery, you've already exhausted your capacity. The preparation becomes the performance drain.
Relationship patterns where support turns to friction. You bring the same problem to your partner repeatedly. They move from supportive to frustrated. You feel unseen, but the loop is the barrier.
Physical symptoms your doctor can't diagnose. Tension headaches, digestive disruption, fragmented sleep. Nothing shows up on tests because the problem is prolonged activation, not pathology.
Three Tools to Regulate Through Your Inner Voice
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Humans are better at advising others than themselves. This is Solomon's paradox: King Solomon gave brilliant advice to others but failed in his own affairs.
When Malala Yousafzai discovered the Taliban were plotting to kill her, she coached herself using her name: "What would you do, Malala?" Using your name activates different neural pathways than first-person self-talk. You access the compassion you extend to others.
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Effective support has two phases: First, the person lets you express emotion and validates it. Your nervous system needs to feel seen. Second, they shift toward perspective. They help you see angles you can't access while stuck in the loop.
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Awe makes you feel smaller when encountering something vast. When you feel smaller, your problems shrink proportionally. It bypasses your thinking brain and speaks to your nervous system directly. The brain region generating the loop goes offline temporarily.
