Why your most important relationship is with your inner voice
Discover the profound significance of your inner voice. It's not just a whisper in your mind, but a powerful guide that shapes your thoughts, decisions, and ultimately, your life. Let's delve into why this relationship is so crucial.
Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing
Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist.
- Kross runs the Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career to studying the silent conversations people have with themselves
- Our thoughts, he says, don’t save us from ourselves. They give rise to something insidious: the kind of negative cycles that turn the singular capacity of human beings for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing, with potentially grave consequences both for our mental and physical health (introspection of the wrong sort can even contribute to faster ageing).
- There is a robust body of research to show that when we experience distress – something MRI scans suggest has a physical component as well as an emotional one – engaging in introspection can do “significantly” more harm than good
Kross believes that superstitions, rituals, and lucky charms can be useful
Placebos have been found to work on chatter, just as they do in the case of some physical illnesses
- In one study, a saline nasal spray acted as a kind of painkiller for the inner voice
- Children should be taught the science behind all of these ideas
- Kross finished his book long before the outbreak of the pandemic, let alone the storming of the Capitol
- His most cited paper to date looked at the harmful implications of social media
- We need to learn to navigate the environment we live in with more care
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