Internal Dialogue: Chill the Chatter!
You should talk to yourself, they say. New studies suggest that vocalizing your thoughts is good for you. It focuses the mind and clarifies ideas, boosting intelligence, communication skills, self-awareness and well-being. But almost all of us do it already, just silently, in our heads – and with opposite results!
The reason is that most of the virtually ceaseless chatter in our minds is habitual, repetitive, distracting, often negative and generally detrimental to our emotional/intellectual development. And a great deal of it is depressive, rooted in the past, or anxious, worried about the future, pulling us out of a healthy, centered grounding in the present.
So which is it? Is the idea to indulge the internal dialogue habit or to find ways to cut it out?
It’s neither and both.
How to manage internal dialogue.
Consider this: You are not your thoughts.
You generate them, and you’re deeply affected by the emotions they can produce, but you’re not made of them. They aren’t all you are. (Philosophy, not our milieu here, is the realm of the profound question, What is the ‘I’ that does the thinking?)
But nor, of course, are you some entirely separate entity, divorced and distinct from what you’re thinking at any given time. Thoughts (and how you think of them) are a key component of who and what you are.
So it’s a misconception to believe that meditation or mindfulness, for example, among other practises, are ways to filter out your thoughts. That’s neither possible nor desirable.
Rather, you simply observe them from a detached standpoint. Take note of them. Watch them form and pass, without identifying with them, dwelling on them or judging them.
Merely let them be part of the landscape of everything else that’s happening in your fleeting reality at that moment, along with whatever sensory inputs and other impressions that form your awareness.
Let thoughts be. That’s all you need to do at first.
Liberate yourself from trying to evaluate which thoughts are ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, assessing whether the feelings they give rise to are desirable or not. Just allow them to register on your mental radar along with other data and move on.
This alone can be a transformative exercise. Once you build the skill of seeing your thoughts from a removed vantage point, you cease living in bondage to them, and you certainly put to rest the notion that somehow you’re them and they’re you.
From that perspective perch, you can then examine them much more effectively, determining which serve you now and which are mere habitual holdovers from a past that’s gone.
You can be relatively unaffected, too, by the moods they tend to generate, letting unpleasant emotions pass like clouds after you sit with them to unpack their message and meaning.
This unruffled frame of reference soon carries over into your day-to-day mindset when you aren’t meditating.
And that starts to redefine what you imagine your limits are.
Freed from fear of failure, what would you attempt?
Unburdened by the past, how lightly might you tread?
Released from notions of unworthiness, what would you feel you deserve?
What perceived absolutes are really illusions? What cages that we choose to live in have paper bars?
Returning to the question, then, of whether to validate the inner dialogue that chatters in our minds all day or try to shut it out.
The answer is neither/both because it depends.
Thoughts and feelings need examining, you see, before their usefulness can be determined. If they once worked for you, they might no longer be a match. They might need updating, but they’re still a very real part of your inner world, and they must first at least therefore be recognized. Wishing them away won’t work, and it isn’t helpful if there are nuggets of practical wisdom in there that need retaining.
Look inside and see. Listen and discern.
Weed out conclusions that no longer apply to your new circumstances and understandings. Adopt what is useful and abandon what no longer serves you.
To do this, you must identify and eliminate rote, nattering thoughts that echo and loop back on themselves in a long-ingrained groove. They’re like a TV stuck on a tedious but familiar background channel all the time. And in the case of those learned mental patterns that run on repeat, silence would indeed be better. But you can’t break out of a rut until you see you’re in one.
The goal is to rule your thoughts rather than to allow them to govern you.
So talk to yourself, sure, aloud or inside, but move determinedly away from routine prattle. Everyone hates being yapped at, even by themselves. But who doesn’t enjoy a good conversation that teaches you something useful about yourself and the world you inhabit?
It’ll seem at first like a hard trick, but it’s hardly magic, and tricks become skills pretty quickly.
And then, finally, beyond all that chatter, peace comes to mind, and stillness is yours.
Just think!
