Do something small before reading any further.
Take just one task you've been delaying. A talk you're always putting off. A project you're constantly circling around. The email that you open four times and then close four times.
Wait for just a moment now.
The sentence will come. It's usually brief. You'll look like an idiot. It will be clear what you're about. You never complete anything. It comes fast and it comes confident, like it has already gone through the last page.
There are two things to notice about the sentence. First, you didn't ask for it. Secondly, some part of you believed it despite the fact that no one, including yourself, knows the ending of this story yet.
This post is about the voice. It isn't going to teach you how to silence it. People have tried that for a very long time, and as we saw in The Replay, the mind does not obey an order to stop thinking about something. The following is more quiet and I believe, more valuable. There are other voices present in the same room. A single word, a small one at that, is capable of influencing its volume.
Almost everyone hears it
Begin with a question. When an idea comes into the mind without any prior intention, whose idea is it?
We usually say immediately: Mine. It has emerged out of my head; therefore, it must have some knowledge of me. If I am told that I will fail, there must be some aspect of me which knew this beforehand.
Adam Radomsky et al., a group of psychologists, set out to study the actual behavior of ordinary minds. To achieve this goal, they conducted interviews with 777 university students at 15 different locations in 13 countries across 6 different continents on intrusive thoughts. These were not patients from clinics. These were ordinary students in their everyday life.
93.6 percent of them reported having had at least one such thought within the previous three months. And the kind that was reported most frequently was doubt, the familiar whisper that you got something wrong.
Spend some time pondering this figure. More than nine people in ten, in six continents, exist within sentences they never agreed to. This is the voice that tells you that there is something wrong with you, but it really does tell you little of your faults. More likely, it just says that your mind is behaving like minds do.
This subtly alters the question. Since almost everyone hears the voice, hearing the voice is a poor indicator of who you are. The real test is what we do after hearing it.
A conversation with only one speaker
Plato's description of thought, almost 2,400 years old, remains relevant to date. In his dialogue "Theaetetus," Socrates admits that he understands little of what he is going to describe. Then he offers this: the soul, when it thinks, is simply talking, "asking questions of herself and answering them."
Question and answer. Two parties involved. A dialogue.
Notice what Socrates does not say. He does not say the soul listens. He says it asks and answers. In the image that he gives, a well functioning mind is one that asks questions and gets an answer back, and the idea that remains is the one that holds up to scrutiny.
Now return to the sentence that appeared at the beginning of this post. Did it sound like a dialogue? Or was it a verdict that was declared by one person without allowing anyone to say anything back to it?
This can be one of the ways to define an inner critic. It is half of a dialogue that has lost the other half. There is a talking voice, and everything else in you stays silent and nods, like people go quiet in a room when an assured individual walks in. However, confidence and correctness are two different things. The loudest voice in the meeting is not always the one who read the report.
So the task may be gentler than silencing anyone. It may be as simple as calling back the one who responds.
Wise about everyone except yourself
Here comes the second test. Get the sentence from the voice, and think of your best friend saying it to you about himself. "I'm going to embarrass myself tomorrow. I always do."
What will you tell him?
Most likely, you would not agree with him. You will ask what makes him so sure about that. You will mention the last time when he was so worried and everything turned out fine. You could tell him how fear and lack of preparation are two different things. The words would flow freely and naturally. The words would be gentle. They would also be truer than the words that the voice spoke.
This gap has been studied by psychologists. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross studied it using the term Solomon's paradox, which refers to the biblical king known for his ability to make wise decisions about other people's problems, but very little about his own. In three experiments with 693 participants, the researchers found that people tended to reason more wisely when dealing with someone else's relationship problem than with their own. In the first case, they were faster to realize the limits of their knowledge, to take into account the possible perspectives, and to accept the idea of changing circumstances.
After that, the subjects were instructed to step back and view their own problem from an outsider's perspective. The difference vanished. It vanished in the same manner for the ages of 20 to 40 years and for the ages of 60 to 80 years. Age did not provide wisdom about oneself. Distance did.
Which is actually quite hopeful. The wise voice is already yours. You use it each time a friend calls in the middle of the night. You just forget to give it to yourself.
The smallest word in the sentence
Distance seems like something that requires work. Years of training, maybe, or a silent mountain somewhere. The studies indicate something more minute. It indicates a single word, the word that you use for yourself.
A 2014 paper by Ethan Kross and his colleagues reported seven studies with 585 participants in total. The studies asked what happens when people reflect on their feelings using their own name or "you" instead of "I." Two of these studies included situations in which almost anyone will get anxious, namely making a good first impression and giving a speech.
The people who had been reflecting upon their thoughts through their names or "you" pronouns exhibited better performance, according to the objective judges, in both situations. They had lower levels of distress. Following the speech, they spent less time thinking about it. In further studies, the small change resulted in people viewing future stressors as challenges instead of threats. None of those effects were dependent on the level of social anxiety of the subjects.
Why would the use of such a tiny word be of such importance? The explanation provided by the researchers is quite clear. When you refer to yourself by your name, you start viewing yourself in some way like how you view other people. And as we have seen in the paradox of Solomon, most of us keep our best judgment for other people. Your name serves as a small bridge. The wise friend can cross it and come to your side of the table.
So try this approach. Start with the sentence from above, the one which came when you started thinking about the thing that you have been postponing. Repeat it again, slowly, but substitute the word "I" with your name and address yourself with "you."
For me, "I'm going to mess this up" turns into "Erdem, you're going to mess this up."
What happened?
For many individuals, it now seems that the sentence is just an opinion being said to someone. And when someone is addressed, the possibility of a response arises. Erdem, how do you know this? Erdem, what would your response be to a friend saying this?
Lighter than willpower
This is where beauty lies for me. It could be assumed that responding to the voice would take willpower; that it involves gritting your teeth and arguing your way out of it. In 2017, Jason Moser, Ethan Kross and their team examined what goes on inside our brains.
In one experiment, people looked at distressing pictures and thought about their emotions using either "I" or their names, with their brain activity being measured during the process. When using their own name, an indicator of emotional response decreased already during the first second. An indicator of mental effort did not increase. The second study used brain scans while people recalled painful memories, and it told a similar story. Using their name went with lower activity in a brain region that usually becomes busy when we think about ourselves, and effort stayed where it was.
The researchers' carefully considered conclusion is that this kind of self-talk may be a relatively effortless form of self-control. An effortless technique in the field of self-improvement is something that is very rare. Most advice requires you to try even harder. This advice is about changing one word.
What the voice is for, and what this cannot do
It doesn't mean that this voice turns out to be your adversary. If you listen carefully, you will frequently find that the voice speaks an older language of caring. It wants to save you from embarrassment, rejection, and loss. It learned its part a long time ago from those who brought you up, your teachers, and the bad days that you experienced. This voice is like an anxious relative at a wedding ceremony who is sure it will rain. It means well but doesn't have a very good track record.
Honesty involves acknowledging the constraints as well. These are laboratory experiments using volunteers. These were conducted to measure what occurred at the very time of a speech, a series of pictures, a single discussion with oneself, and not throughout the decades of an individual's life span. Your name will not make something difficult easy, nor will it make the voice disappear. What it does seem to do is something smaller and maybe something bigger in real life: it changes a verdict into a conversation.
One more limit matters. If the voice speaks of harming yourself, or if a heavy, hopeless feeling stays with you for weeks, this is not something to solve with a change of pronoun. Please talk to a doctor or a licensed therapist. In the United States, you can call or text 988 at any hour.
Tomorrow, once
And here is one thing you can try, just once, tomorrow.
Once the voice comes, and it will come, don't heed it and don't try to scream it away. Answer the voice once by name. Mine goes like this: Erdem, what do you really know? Erdem, what would you say to your friend?
Observe what happens in the room. The voice might still be present. However, it is not the only one talking anymore.
Socrates declared that an unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps the same holds true for an unexamined sentence. This voice of yours, saying you will fail, has been around for years, and it has seldom been questioned. Maybe it is time to give it an answer.