Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

A Winning psychologist reveals the hidden power of our inner voice and demonstrates how we may use it to live a more fulfilling, productive, and healthy life.

If you admit to a stranger that you have conversations with yourself, you can be dismissed as unusual. However, the reality is that everyone of us has a voice within of us. Often, when we speak to ourselves, we encounter our inner critic instead of our inner coach. Our inner coach may encourage us while we're confronting a challenging assignment by saying, "Focus—you can do this." However, we also often let our inner critic completely depress us: I'm going to fail. Everyone will make fun of me. For what purpose?

Prominent psychologist Ethan Kross examines our inner dialogue in his book "CHATTER." Kross demonstrates how these interactions impact our lives, jobs, and relationships by fusing cutting-edge behavioural and brain research from his own lab with real-world case studies, such as a pitcher who loses his ability to pitch or a Harvard freshman juggling her double life as a spy. He cautions against giving in to confusing and negative self-talk, or "chatter," since it may ruin our health, lower our emotions, sour our relationships with others, and make us crumble under duress.

The good news is that we already have the means to influence our inner voice to speak out for us. These resources are often concealed in plain sight—they may be found in the language we use to describe ourselves, the gadgets we use, the journals we store in our closets, the interactions we have with our loved ones, and the environments we foster at work and in our classrooms.

With its well-reasoned arguments, meticulous research, and captivating tales, "CHATTER" offers us the ability to transform the most significant daily dialogue we have: the one we have with ourselves.

RUNNING TIME: 5 hours, 45 minutes.

© 2021 Random House Audio/Ethan Kross (P)