Book SummaryChatter, by Ethan Kross

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Chatter

Right now, you’re not only reading these words. You’re also engaging in self-talk: your thoughts taking the form of words, all within your mind. Self-talk is the voice in your mind that says, “Interesting!” when you read something compelling. It’s the encouraging voice that tells you “Nailed it!” after you rock an interview, as well as the inner cynic that grumbles, “You’re a failure” after you bomb a first date. In Chatter, Ethan Kross highlights this last type of voice—negative self-talk, which he believes interferes with your happiness, health, and success. He argues that you can improve your life by quieting negative self-talk.

Chatter is the first book by Kross, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist. He founded a lab at the University of Michigan that studies people’s self-talk. He and his colleagues design experiments to answer the following questions: Why do we engage in...

Chatter Summary Part 1: Background on Self-Talk

What Counts as Self-Talk?

Is self-talk just another word for our thoughts? Not quite: Kross claims that specifically, self-talk is thoughts that take the form of silent words you “hear” in your mind. Here are several examples of self-talk:

• After you say something awkward to your date, you mentally chastise yourself. Your internal voice moans, “Now they probably think I’m a loser.”
• Before you share your idea in a meeting, you imagine what you’ll say.
• After you meet someone, you mentally repeat their name so you don’t forget it.

Self-Talk Also Manifests as an Imagined Dialogue

Throughout his book, Kross’s examples of self-talk mostly take the form of a single voice that enters your mind. In The Voices Within, psychologist Charles Fernyhough claims that some people experience self-talk as multiple voices engaged in a conversation, such as a conversation between themselves and someone they know. Let’s reimagine what the aforementioned examples might be like for...

Chatter Summary Part 2: Positive vs. Negative Self-Talk

Kross contends that our self-talk is extremely important: It influences our happiness, health, and success. In this section, we’ll contrast how positive and negative self-talk impact your life. We’ll begin with positive self-talk.

How Positive Self-Talk Improves Your Life

Role 1: Supporting You With Your Goals

Kross explains that when your self-talk is positive, it’s an internal mentor that improves your life by supporting you with your goals. Your internal mentor does this in three ways:

• It motivates you by offering encouragement.
• It prompts you to assess your progress by reflecting on your accomplishments so far and comparing them to your goals.
• It helps you plan for the future by directing you to engage in behaviors that increase your chances of accomplishing your goals.

Questioning the Idea That All Positive Self-Talk Is Beneficial

Here, Kross focuses on how your internal mentor supports you with your goals. However, he doesn’t explore in depth how this outcome may vary by the individual—or what your self-talk must sound like for you to experience these benefits.

Some research suggests that not everyone...

Chatter Summary Part 3: How to Manage Your Negative Self-Talk

Kross argues that, fortunately, we can prevent our negative self-talk from interfering with our success, happiness, and health. He claims that we can’t get rid of our internal cynic completely, but we can quiet it and therefore reduce its power over us. In this section, we’ll share five of Kross’s research-based strategies for quieting your negative self-talk.

Exploring and Questioning the Idea of Trying to Quiet Your Internal Cynic

Kross doesn’t fully explain why quieting your internal cynic is the best way to manage it, nor does he explain why we can’t silence our internal cynic completely. Let’s further explore these two claims.

Claim 1: Quieting your negative self-talk is the best way to manage it. We can infer that Kross believes quieting your internal cynic is an effective approach because doing so reduces the negative effects that we explored in the previous section. However, quieting your internal cynic isn’t the only way of managing your negative self-talk: Some experts argue that you should spend time processing your negative self-talk, either instead of quieting it or before quieting it.

For instance, rational emotive...

Shortform Exercise: Make a Plan for Managing Your Negative Self-Talk

Kross claims that negative self-talk can harm your happiness, health, and success. Reflect on how you engage in negative self-talk and which of his strategies may help quiet your internal cynic.

List five examples of negative self-talk that you regularly engage in. (For instance, you might think things like “I can’t do this,” “I’m not good enough to achieve my goals,” or “other people don’t like me.”)