Are You the Center of the Universe?
Do you ever feel like the whole world revolves around you? That everything that’s happening—no matter where it’s happening, or when it happened, or who is involved or affected by it—is actually happening to you?
If you ever do feel that way, you might not be willing to admit it. You might think it’s narcissistic, self-involved, or cold: lacking in compassion or empathy.
But to your inner narrator, you are the center of the universe and everything is happening to you. After all, the functions your inner narrator serves are all related to your survival—not to the survival of Helen or Frank over there.
Our minds constantly struggle to extract meaning from the data rivering through our senses. —Jonathan Gottschall
Your inner narrator interprets and edits—sometimes heavily—all your experiences and weaves what it considers relevant into an ongoing story that makes sense to and for you. All stories, whether they’re fiction or non-fiction, have a point of view. You are the protagonist in your story, so the point of view is yours. Your inner narrator is not operating in a vacuum. Your mental model is the frame of reference it uses to make sense of events and experiences.
Maintaining the Status Quo
You may not be aware of the powerful effect your self-talk has on you. The constant chatter in your head is your brain’s attempt to keep you from veering off course. If you’re satisfied with the course you’re on, that’s great. If you’re trying to change something, however, listening unquestioningly to the ongoing narrative is counterproductive. It’s like being blasted with so much propaganda you eventually come to believe it.
If your self-talk (and, as a result, your inner narrative) has a tendency to accentuate the negative, you can help yourself avoid getting sucked into the story by practicing self-distancing. That means putting some space between you and the story your narrator is spinning. You can do that by avoiding talking to yourself in first-person (using “I”). Talking to yourself in second- or third-person—addressing yourself by name—has been proven to expand perspective, thereby creating distance as well as diminishing the voice of the inner critic.
Hearing Voices
Not everyone readily recognizes the voice of their inner narrator. The words narration or narrator have particular associations that can get in the way. Your narrator probably sounds less like Morgan Freeman narrating The Shawshank Redemption and more like a sports announcer’s play-by-play.
Unlike the narration in a movie or a written story, your inner narrator doesn’t speak formally and doesn’t necessarily use complete sentences. It doesn’t have to because, according to Charles Fernyhough, author of The Voices Within, you know what you mean.
Your inner speech is also much faster than your verbal speech. Research reveals it can be up to 10 times faster!
Your inner speech or narration may take the form of a monologue, but it may also be a conversation between you and someone else or between one part of you and another part of you.
Self-Talk Radio Is Always on the Air
Some of your inner narration occurs unconsciously, but most of it is available to you if you make an effort to tune in to it.
Your inner narrator is unreliable. Everyone’s inner narrator is unreliable. But it is very committed to it’s agenda and very good at lulling you into going along with it. So unless you pay attention to it and persuade it to take on your agenda, it will continue to spin stories that take you along for a ride.