Dr. Don Wood explains that persistent internal 'chatter' or self-talk—exemplified by his wife Bridget—stems from the mind overusing old information and unresolved trauma to predict and protect against future events. He argues this produces information overload and recommends addressing and 'updating' past traumatic experiences to quiet the mind.
Chapters
Do you feel overwhelmed by the thoughts in your head? Here's what you need to do. It's just constant talk going on in your head. Self talk. My wife Bridget had that. She referred to it as chatter. The chatter just kept running all the time. The chatter that they've got going on in their heads are coming from things that have never happened and may never happen. They've got a meeting coming up or they've got a job evaluation coming up. They can't stop thinking about it and it's useless because it's not going to make any difference. But their mind is really trying to protect them, trying to say, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? What if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong? And that's what my wife Bridget was doing. She was always worried about things, that the chances of them happening were pretty much nil. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't look at it. It's an overload of information and the mind trying to protect her. She couldn't understand why I could just be calm and not thinking. She would say, well, that's impossible. You have to be thinking about that. Didn't make sense to her. But it is possible to quiet your mind. So people who have a lot of that chatter going on to a degree, your mind's always trying to scan the environment and look for things. But that's not what the issue is coming from. It's coming from a lot of old information that your mind has experienced. Now trying to use that old information against future or current information and is trying to process way too much data. And it feels like your mind just doesn't stop. It's just way too much overload. You need to rest. The best way to stop the chatter is to resolve the trauma. So if you can get back to the old information that your mind is continually using to protect you, you've got to update, reboot refresh and adjust all that old information. Once you do that, it doesn't use that as a resource for the current or future information. That trauma, those experiences don't exist anymore, but your mind keeps looking at them in real time, trying to change them. It's not possible to change what happened, but your mind is using that old information against anything future coming up or anything presently happening. But it's also trying to fix the old information, which is not possible to do.
