How to Stop Overthinking

I've noticed something about a lot of very smart people. They have rich internal conversations. They can go over something in their head 16 ways to Sunday or replay what happened in a meeting and analyze it from different perspectives. This type of introspection is very valuable. It can help you anticipate mistakes and to learn from missteps. But this inner monologue can also spin out of control. It's the nagging taskmaster that wakes you up at 3 in the morning. The punishing critic who tells you that you're not good enough or smart enough or attractive enough. Today, I want to share with you what happens when this inner dialogue takes over your life and how you can turn it from a foe to a friend. Let me explain. A few years ago, I sat down with a psychologist named Ethan Kross for an episode of my podcast, Hidden Brain. Ethan studies this inner voice that we have in our heads. As I said, this voice can be helpful, but it can also turn against you if it becomes an endless stream of negativity.

When that negative inner voice takes hold, that is all we can hear because it is consuming our attention.

If this sounds familiar to you, well, there's some good news. Ethan has figured out techniques to help you manage the voice inside your head. And to show you what he means, I'd like to take you to October 3rd, 2000. A 21-year-old named Rick Ankeel is standing standing on the mound at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. 52,000 people are in the stands. It's a playoff game. Rick is the best young pitcher in baseball, touted as the next greatest thing. But watch what happens during this next at-bat.

One on, one out, and a wild pitch.

A rare mistake from the Cardinals ace. Rick shrugs it off, but then—

Another wild pitch over the head of Hernandez and back to the backstop.

He throws again, and this one is worse.

Wow, to the screen again. It hits off the backstop.

The best young arm in baseball cannot find the plate anymore. He walks batter after batter until he has to be pulled from the game. What happened that day would come to haunt Rick Ankiel.

I'd wake up in the middle of the night, you know, having the nightmare that I couldn't throw a strike. I'm soaked in sweat, and it's, it's like this This thing won't even leave me alone during my sleep.

Rick had a name for this inner voice that destabilized him. He called it the monster. Ethan has a different word for it.

He talks about this monster that was born inside him. Ultimately, this monster, his chatter, ended up sinking his career.

Chatter. That's the word that Ethan uses for our inner voice when it gets stuck. The same voice that lets you rehearse a hard conversation is the one that runs on a loop at midnight, keeping you awake. Before we can understand how to turn this voice into our friend, it's important to understand why we have this voice in our head in the first place. To answer that, let's look at a most unusual story. In 1996, a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke, and something extraordinary happened.

My brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first, I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. And I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage!

Oh!

I felt euphoria.

No more self-criticism. No more loops at 3 a.m. Sounds amazing, right? Except the silence took everything else with it. She could no longer keep simple information active in her mind. She lost the ability to organize her thinking, to plan, to make sense of the world around her. The voice she was so glad to lose turned out to be doing a lot of useful work.

I think of the inner voice and more broadly introspection as a kind of Swiss Army knife of the human mind that lets us do many, many different things.

A mind with no inner voice is not free. It's lost.

We don't want to rid ourselves of negativity. What we do want to figure out is how to prevent those small spikes of negative emotions from morphing into chatter.

Introspection is a core function of the human mind. But it starts to undermine us when it turns into negative chatter. Consider the case of one of the kindest, calmest men to ever appear on television, Fred Rogers, as in Mr. Rogers, the man who taught generations of children how to manage their feelings. In the late 1970s, Fred Rogers was suffering from writer's block. He sat down to type out a memo to himself, and the doubt poured out of him. Am I kidding myself that I'm able to write a script again? He asked himself. Why don't I trust myself after all these years? Why don't I trust myself? The steadiest man on television asking the same question you ask yourself at 3 in the morning.

If you've ever experienced chatter, if you've ever experienced self-doubt, welcome to the human condition. We all do at times.

So if we cannot delete this voice, and even Mr. Rogers could not out-talk it, What can we actually do? Ethan learned the answer the hard way. Early in his career, after a TV appearance, he received a threatening letter at his office. For days, he couldn't sleep. He paced his house at night with a baseball bat on his shoulder. One night, he sat down at his laptop and started to type out a search: bodyguard who specializes in protecting academics. And then he stopped and he spoke to himself.

What are you doing? Get your act together.

And then the chatter stopped.

I started talking to myself like I was talking to someone else, and it instantly snapped me out of that very narrow view of my situation.

That accident became a research finding. Ethan and other psychologists refer to what he did in that moment as distanced self-talk. It's one of several ways to put space between yourself And the voice.

What it involves doing is trying to coach yourself through your chatter using your own name or the second-person pronoun you.

Ethan led a study in which volunteers worked through their worries using you and their own name instead of I. When they did so, they felt less upset. You would never talk to a friend the way you talk to yourself. The trick is to engage with yourself like you would with a friend. Another technique that can quiet chatter is to change the camera angle. When your mind gets stuck in a loop, don't relive the scene from behind your own eyes. Watch it from across the room, like a fly on the wall. The same problem viewed from a distance gets smaller.

When people adopt a third-person or a fly-on-the-wall perspective, that tends to be linked with lower levels of emotionality.

A third strategy is to travel in time. Whatever is consuming you tonight, Ask how you will feel about it a year from now.

Rather than think about how awful the circumstance is right now, think about how you're going to feel sometime down the road in the future.

The discomfort doesn't vanish. It just shrinks back to its real size. Rituals can also help us to reduce mental chatter. Take the tennis great, Rafa Nadal. Before matches, he would line up his water bottles in a certain way. He would repeat the same routines before each serve. This wasn't superstition. Asked once about the hardest part of tennis, Rafa Nadal didn't talk about his opponent. The biggest challenge, he said, was the voice inside his own head. The rituals were how he responded to it. So let's go back to 3 in the morning. Your inner voice is going in circles, examining and reexamining that thing you said, the thing that you didn't do. The thing that might go wrong. You used to think the goal was to silence that chatter. It's not. That voice is the same one that will plan your day, find your words, and tell you the story of who you are. You don't need it gone. You just need a little distance from it. So the next time it starts to spin, try talking to yourself like the way you would talk to a loved one. Watch the moment from across the room. Ask, whether this problem will still matter in 1 year. You cannot choose to silence your inner voice. You wouldn't want to. Introspection is one of the remarkable gifts of an intelligent mind. But you can learn how to manage it and maybe even make it your friend. Thank you for watching this video. Every week on my audio podcast, I explore ideas and insights about human behavior. We feature research from scholars who have spent decades studying a topic in depth. These are not folks who woke up one day and decided to become influencers. They are scientists, and the ideas they share on my show are backed up by peer-reviewed research. If you would like to learn more about your own mind and trust that what you're hearing is actually true, please check out my weekly podcast. Hidden Brain is available on Apple, Spotify, and hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.