The way you talk to yourself shapes your well-being — here's how to harness it. #TEDTalks

We experience what I call the dark side of our inner voice. Chatter. If you look at what chatter does to us, it sinks us in three domains of life that I would argue everyone here cares a great deal about. One thing that chatter does, it makes it really hard for us to think and perform. Chatter also creates friction in our relationships with other people because when we experience chatter, we're often highly motivated to share its glory with those around us. Then there's our health. So chatter helps explain how stress gets under our skin to impact our physical health because what it does is it prolongs our stress response and that creates a wear and tear in our body that is physically damaging. We don't want to get rid of that tool. What we want to figure out is how to harness it. We human beings are much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice. Using your own name and you shifts your perspective. It gets you to relate to yourself like you were giving advice to someone else. And that makes it much easier for us to wisely work through our problems. Another tool you can use to manage your chatter is other people. The best kinds of conversations with other people do two things. One, the person you're talking to does let you express your emotions. It is important for them to empathize with you and validate what you're going through. But then once you've had an opportunity to share your feelings, they ideally start working with you to broaden your perspective. They're in an ideal position to help you do that because the problem isn't happening to