Great Minds: Matt Heath speaks to neuroscientist Ethan Kross about our inner voice

Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.

We all have an inner voice yabbering away in our heads. A 1990 study found it runs at roughly 4000 words per minute. Sometimes it's a real a-hole. It evolved so we could evaluate our past and prepare for the future, but often it goes on and on and doesn't solve anything. It can motivate and coach us but also stress us out. Unchecked, a loop of negative self-talk can sap the neurons needed for our executive functions. When that happens, we struggle.

Ethan Kross is a neuroscientist, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. He believes our brains have the tools we need to turn down negative thought spirals. As someone with an inner voice that never shuts up, I found his book Chatter extremely helpful. The only time he had available for a chat was midnight NZ time. As a result, I was utterly shagged when I zoomed him in his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was bright-eyed, enthusiastic and surprisingly handsome. There can't be many neuroscientists who look like a cross between Jeremy Renner and Chris Pine.

Professor Kross, what is our inner voice?

Scientists like myself use the term when talking about the internal use of language to reflect on our lives. The ability is a remarkable asset. It motivates us; it reflects on our moments of joy. It can push us along when we're working on difficult tasks; it helps us prepare for things in advance. It helps us keep track of our goals. It creates narratives that help us understand who we are. This ability to use your voice and introspection is critical to wellbeing. You don't want to stop your inner voice or introspection. Instead, you want to figure out how to harness it more effectively.

In your book, you refer to the unhelpful inner voice as chatter. What is chatter?

It's getting lost in a negative thought spiral. If it's about the future, we call that worry. If it's about the past, we call it rumination. We possess this remarkable tool we can use to solve problems, but often that tool gets stuck. This is what we call chatter. We keep working through an issue. Why did this happen to me? What am I going to do? But we don't make any progress. It undermines people's ability to think and perform. It undermines their relationships with other people. The stress it causes can damage both physical and mental health.

Neuroscientist Ethan Kross says our brains have the tools to quell negative thought patterns. Photo / Supplied

My inner voice is always saying terrible things. Where does that shocking stuff come from?

Haha, I would hate if there was a live feed into my mind that people could monitor. We can't prevent experiencing inappropriate or dark thoughts. I don't know why this happens, and I've been researching it for 20 years. What we can manage, though, is how we engage with those thoughts and how we deal with them once they're activated. Whether we articulate them out loud, dispute the thought, accept it, transform it, or try to suppress it. There's a whole playground we can work with a thought once it's activated; we've got a lot of agency.

How come our inner voice isn't a friend?

Haha, Dan Harris put it this way: "The voice in my head is an asshole." I think we feel that way when we don't activate the introspective process in an optimal way. We have evolved this capacity to think in flexible ways about our lives, but the mind didn't come with a user manual. If you activate certain tools of the mind in the wrong way, then you can get into trouble. When we experience a problem, what we often do is zoom in on it narrowly. If you focus in too much, you lose sight of the bigger picture that often holds the solution. We can get stressed and further from an answer. If your inner voice turns negative, it uses up a lot of brain power that you could use to solve the original problem.

You describe tools to deal with chatter in your book. What's a simple thing people can do?

You can give yourself advice as a friend might. Using your own name can be useful for shifting your perspective. We know from lots of research that we find it easier to give good advice to others than to ourselves. It can help to say something like: "Ethan, calm down; this is not the end of the world." Another tool I find really useful in the heat of the moment is to remind myself how I'm going to feel about this thing tomorrow or next week, or next year. There's a lot of science behind this. We call it temporal distancing. When you are zoomed in and spinning your wheels, it feels like this issue you're experiencing is all-consuming. What we lose sight of is the fact we've experienced these emotional ups and downs throughout our lives. And guess what? They tend to normalise over time. Simply remind yourself that you're probably going to feel better about this tomorrow and, if not tomorrow, next week or next month. You can also mix those two tools. When you wake up in the middle of the night ruminating on something, try asking: "Ethan, how are you going to feel about this in the morning?" The quickest way to turn down chatter is to get some distance.

• It was breakfast time for the good-looking professor, and I had to go to sleep, so we said goodbye. Four hours later, I woke up freaking out. I couldn't stop thinking everyone I care about will die one day. Luckily, I had just been talking to an expert on negative thought spirals, so I said to myself: "Matt, stop freaking out; you always wake up thinking about this and then in the morning, you're fine. Go back to sleep Matty. You'll be OK when you wake up. I love you mate." Surprisingly it worked.

• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross.