How We Talk to Ourselves Has the Power to Raise or Ruin Us
You must harness the voice in your head if you want to succeed.
Before I quit drinking, I criticized myself endlessly. As a result, the first years of sobriety were primarily about developing a nurturing inner voice.
Ethan Kross talks in-depth about the importance of this in his new book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It.
He writes about “the inescapable tension of the inner voice as both a helpful superpower and destructive kryptonite that hurts us.” The research is clear, he says: the way we talk to ourselves has the power to raise or ruin us.
So if you’re struggling with a toxic inner narrative, you need to tackle it or it. Here’s what I learned about managing mine in the process of learning to live sober.
1. Observe the mean narrator
This is an easy but uncomfortable part of the process. Listen to what the voice inside is telling you. Mine criticized me for what I said and what I didn’t say. It told me that the decision I had made was wrong, so I changed my mind, and then it said the same thing. If your voice is as bad as mine was, then it shouldn’t take you long to realize that it is never happy.
