Your inner voice refers to our ability to silently use language to reflect on some feature of our lives.

Chatter's the dark side of your inner voice.

Why did I do that?

I'm such an idiot.

You find yourself berating yourself incessantly.

And when that happens, I think you encounter one of the great problems of humanity, which is...

Leading psychologist and best-selling author, Ethan Cross, has spent years studying the inner critic,

discovering the dark side of mental chatter and why learning to control it is the key to real peace of mind.

I know the data surrounding the consequences of chatter.

And when you look at what it does to us, it sinks us in three areas of life

that I think most of us care a lot about.

How do we know when it's gone from inner voice to chatter?

Your question is a really important and deep one, Ken's. I want to stay with it a second longer.

So, Ethan, as somebody who's been in the psychology world for a long time and obviously now two

really, really successful books, the first thing I wanted to know from you is what does

science tell us about the mind

and its relation to the inner voice? So in other words, where does the inner voice come from?

Is it emotion first? Chicken egg, talk to us a little bit. I think that context would be helpful

to where we're going. Well, I love that question because, you know, we often talk about the inner voice.

I've got a voice in my head.

I can't tell you.

It's actually something very interesting, Ken, when I started researching chatter,

...