How to Grow Inner Peace: Stop Believing Everything You Think

Inner Peace sounds great. We tend to be pretty aware of outer peace, which we know because most people are easily disturbed by noises, smells, or moving visuals in our environments.

What's incredible is that most of us have a neurotic person chattering non-stop in our heads. Worse, we listen to all of its advice, without even wondering about its track record.

If this was an external person, who was always getting us riled up, whispering to us in the middle of the night about everything worrisome, and so often shouting to us about anything but the task at hand, we would never accept their calls.

Since it's always been this way though, it seems normal to us.

Lately, I've been acutely aware of the voice in my head —the one so many of us have; it's been there as long as I can remember.

When I was in my teens it felt more like 2 voices: my analytical and emotional selves.

I experienced dialogues between different parts of my mind.

There's an analogy that our minds are like a chariot pulled by elephants. While the driver has a say, and while a skilled driver will better steer the chariot, the driver is going wherever the elephants decide.

I feel confident saying that one voice was the driver and one was the elephants. The elephants mostly got their way, unless some huge pressure convinced them they needed the driver's guidance.

Fast-forward 20 years and at some point, those voices unified into a singular ongoing monologue.

In the absence of a "second" voice to debate with, the one voice is content to narrate my entire experience.

On occasion, it likes to argue with itself. Sometimes is simulates future arguments with others, most of which never occur. Sometimes it repeats itself and spins in loops. Mostly, it narrates whatever is happening.

It especially likes to point out when I've finally managed to achieve .5 seconds of inner silence, for example, while meditating. Thanks bro, thanks was helpful 🙄.

I would never put up with someone who yammered incessantly in my ear. I know this because I knew people who did this and I couldn't stand being around them.

But this voice, it's me, right? So it's ok for it never to shut up…?

…That still doesn't sound right.

How Many Voices Should We Have?

In my lifetime, I've gone from experiencing 2 voices to 1.

This leads me to ask: what is the right number of voices?

Is it many, one, or zero?

Before answering, let me ask another question: is the difference actually important for those of us reading or writing this article?

From experience, I'll say no, at least yet for most of us.

Why?

Let's say the right number is zero. Great!
Now you just need to stop the voice in your head. Well go on, stop it. ...I'll wait here.

Did it work? Did you tell the voice to stop it?

What did you use to tell it to stop... the same voice? A different one?
Did that help?

Even in the unlikely case that it did, you're probably still narrating this article to yourself as you read it. It's enough to send one spinning in circles for the better part of a lifetime. Which is what so many of us end up doing.

Let me admit that I can't claim to know the exact answer to the 'number of voices' question but the piles of philosophy, psychology, mindfulness, and growth-related research I've done suggests that progress happens as followed:

1. More important than the actual number of voices is to stop taking our inner voice(s) so seriously. Don't believe everything you think.
2. The ideal number is probably zero, which it seems we get to as we detach from feeling like these voices are ourselves.

Our Internal Frien-nemy

In an interview lead by Tiago Forte, Leadership coach Joe Hudson pointed out that as our relationship with ourselves and the world around us matures, several things happen:

• The critical voice in our head becomes much quieter
• We stop worrying about where we are on our journeys and start enjoying now
• We let go of self-judgements and opinions, both positive and negative

So what does that mean for the voice(s) in our heads?

• Seemingly, while it's pretending to be our friend, it's not a particularly good influence. This voice is a key part of our mechanism for processing and judging the world.
• This essentially makes it our process for attempting to control the world around us. When we 'know' what something is, we feel we can predict what it will do.
• It's also our flag for danger. It's our neurotic parent and quickly becomes our critical parent as well. it brings future doom into the present moment by worrying about where 'it' is all heading.

If our mind were a business, this voice would be in charge of the departments of:

• Judging others and ourselves
• Controlling others and ourselves
• Worrying about the future

Think of a person you know who does a lot of these 3 things. Do you love spending time with them? When I'm caught up in those states, I don't even enjoy spending time with myself. This leads me to look for ways to escape.

Tv, overwork, alcohol, and blaming others are just a few of the ways I try to escape myself. What are yours?

Protection That Stunts Our Growth

Just like helicopter parenting, the extreme outcome of this constant neurotic reflex is to protect us from the necessary road bumps that help us become contributing and well-adjusted people.

We can start to see that our inner voice is essentially taking us out of the present moment. It's responsible for a lot of what causes depression and anxiety:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
― Lao Tzu

This gem of wisdom is over 2000 years, and if you start paying attention, you'll notice how very true it is.

To achieve peace, we need to be able to handle our views of the past and our projections of the future without our minds constantly living there.

The Need for Control

Alan Watts points out that all of the universe is one 'thing' but for the sake of control, we split it up into as many smaller and more mentally consumable 'things' as we can.

This helps us know how each thing will behave, but it also causes us to miss so much of the beautiful complexity of what is really happening.

• We consider a bee and a flower to be separate organisms but without one, the other won't exist. Are they truly separate organisms?
• If a person affects and is affected by their environment, are they truly separate?
• You are over 70% water. When you drink a glass of water, are you then that water?
• When you sweat or otherwise release that water, are you no longer that water?
• When is the exact moment that you are no longer your sweat?
• Or are you only the parts around the water?
• What about the oxygen in your blood?
• What about the space between your molecules?
• How can you separate you from your parts?

Taleb will tell you (ok, Taleb will beat you over the head with the idea that) some of our most dangerous naivety comes from trying to oversimplify complex systems so we can make 'predications'. This is because every so often, something completely unprecedented comes along (see Covid-19).

We break things down into small pieces and believe we can use those pieces to predict the future. In a simple system this works, because our model of the system isn't very far from reality.

In complex systems… well you've heard about the butterfly effect: Our best guesses become woefully inaccurate, but our mind-voices still tell us that we know what is happening. It needs us to feel like we're in control. We need to feel like we're in control.

I'm sure you've caught on by now to the fact that the voice is a defence mechanism. I strongly suspect it to be a manifestation of our egos: the part of our brain that operates on the assumption that "I already know the answer…".

What it doesn't say very loudly is the second half: "…because if I don't know the answer, then I'm not in control, and hat would make me uncomfortably vulnerable.

Even when it's telling us positives things, our inner voice is still taking us away from the moment.

• The time spent thinking: "I love this song" is time spent not actually enjoying the song.
• Consider my ironic example where the voice likes to narrate the fact that I've "achieved" a fleetingly brief state of internal silence. Well, there that went. Time to restart.
• This is the same as when you are exercising or playing a sport and your mind tells you that you're in the zone... Well, you were until that happened.

Degrees of Truth

Another concept Joe Hudson pointed out that the things that we 'do' in our intellectual mind are not really 'it'. That is, when we're focused there, we're not experiencing the essence of life.

One of the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching is:

"Tao (The Way) that can be spoken of is not the Constant Tao’"

Or: the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao.

To my understanding it means that the truths we try to explain in words are only abstracted and incomplete versions of the truth, they are not the real truths.

This article may contain tons of truth but in the form of words. You will need to observe them in yourself and in others in order for you to fill in the blanks. This article is only a finger pointing in the direction of that truth.

I may see a tree and tell you about it, but the tree you are imagining is not the actual tree, it's only your mental model of a tree.

Even the tree that I am remembering is just an abstraction of the actual tree I saw earlier. My memory is a compressed version; It doesn't remember every crack, every leaf, every bug. I've compressed the near-infinite details of the actual tree into something I can hold in my mind.

To add another layer: since I'm still processing most things through my incessant narrator, I'm mostly focused on the details I can already relate to.

Somewhere between looking at the tree and storing it in my brain, my narrator started chopping it up into bark, branches, leaf types and all sort of other taxonomies.

The tree is well classified in my mind and now I feel like I'm in control of it. I can reconstruct it in my mind whenever I want to. I can also extrapolate it into the future.

• It grows X amount each year
• It flowers around Y time each year

Predictability, control. Inner peace, right? Sort of.

Except that fucking voice is still yammering on about everything I look at or think about.

The kicker is that in most cases, I will completely forget that the tree that I've analyzed and stored in my brain isn't the real tree, and as it starts to behave differently than I'd modelled, that voice is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

…And It won't hesitate for a second to do so.

Now, it's not only got an inaccurate tree model to explain away but also the cognitive discomfort that I may not have as much control over the world around me as I'd hoped.

I don't know everything! I'm so vulnerable! This is scary and frustrating, but don't worry, that voice knows exactly who to blame.

Wait, blame? For what?

Well, it seems to need someone to blame for my deeply rooted sense of lack of control and thus vulnerability —the source of my mental and emotional discomforts.

The Comfort of Blaming Others

Paradoxically, blaming someone for something would make me feel empowered again, even as it puts the power to fix the situation in someone else's hands; being a victim still seems easier than accepting an uncertain reality. Now that I've shifted to vulnerable / blame mode my brain is primed and rearing to find a culprit, it's not even picky about the area:

• Why is my coworker so unaccountable?! Now I have to do all this extra work you can't trust anyone!
• Why did my wife leave the dishes out? Can't I ever enjoy a clean kitchen?
• Why did my painters do such a shitty job on the trim in this one corner? What did I pay them for?
• Why does hasn't Google fixed this 5-year-old bug? Can't they deliver a quality product?

These aren't even relevant to the situation at hand, but they are "great" ways to burn off my spike in nervous energy.

If I take those thoughts too seriously I'm going to start a lot of fights. That unskillful approach won't leave anyone as a winner. It'll certainly ruin my hour (or day, or week…).

This brings me to the next thoughts Joe shared in his interview:

• Blame for anyone or anything is not useful
• Feeling like we haven't made progress is detrimental

You'll notice that these two are also inner-voice functions. I hope by now we're all starting to see our sub-vocal "friend" in a new light.

Intellectual Bandwidth

To add to the case against our inner voices:

Not only is our Intellectual intelligence much lower bandwidth than our emotional intelligence, but it's an abstraction of an abstraction of an abs... you get it.

Our inner voices take us out of our emotional, instinctual process and bring us back into the intellectual one. The slow one that needs to process ideas via language.

Language is linear. It's one word at a time. It also comes with inherent cultural biases which I'll cover in a future post.

Think about the difference between a typical video game and a text-based adventure. It's night and day.

That voice will spin loops in our mind and start hijacking our emotional senses, pumping them full of frustration and making it harder for our emotional intelligence to activate and help us grow past the obstacle at hand.

This is why you can know something in your gut years before your intellectual mind can (or is willing to) process it. Often we'll spin intellectual circles just to avoid feeling something undesirable.

Emotional intelligence works in imagery; images can be worth thousands of words. Emotional and instinctual processing is inherently faster, but it's also scarier. Our inner voice helps to solve the scary but slowing it down and cutting it up into bite-sized pieces.

If we can keep ourselves focused on feeling things rather than thinking things, we can quickly clear the emotional barriers rather than thinking ourselves into neurotic circles.

Like the classic example of trying to clear muddy water by shaking it, all this thinking just makes things murkier.

Instead, if we just breathe, feel what we are feeling, and stay in our physical bodies rather than in our heads, we can avoid the endless traps in which so many emotionally unhealthy people are clearly stuck.

How Can We Tame Our Inner Voices?

To summarize the key points up to now:

• Our inner voices take us from the present into the past and future where depression and anxiety live.
• They also slow down our learning as we're mostly observing the world through the keyhole of 'what I already know'
• The combination of these two prevents us from growing our awareness and keeps us in our lesser states, where we are less effective and less happy.
• Our inner voices 'protect' us from growth which often requires some short term pain.

Living by what our mind-voices tell is kind of like drinking to become more sociable.

It's a short term fix with long term harm, and the ongoing possibility of erupting into regrettable behaviour —there's no real win here.

So with all that, what can we do? The only antidote I've found, and it's increasingly effective as I practice it, is to remember:

There is No Future

This might sound crazy but there isn't. The future is a mental construct.

Right now, it's now. Since then a second or two have passed and it's still now. Next year, it still will be now, but a year later.

I hear you: "What kind of Yoda crap is this?"

Let me expand:

While your brain may drift thoughts of the future or past, the only moment you can act in is right now. A never-ending eternal sliver of an instant.

When you think about future negatives, your experience of worrying in advance is almost always worse than your actual experience of that negative in the moment. Sometimes it turns out not to be negative at all:

• For one, the time you have to suffer by worrying in advance is much longer than the moments you're worrying about will last.
• Next, the actual 'awfulness' of the negative experience we fear is usually less than the suffering we imagine in advance.

As Mark Twain apparently never actually wrote:

"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

So often, we worsen our suffering by pre-suffering, and also by over-imagining how bad the bad thing will be. Our inner voice is the driver here.

When I hear my alarm in the morning and think about my first step: getting into the shower, I often feel a huge resistance.

Why? Showering in the morning is enjoyable.

That shower though is the lead-in to all the things I have to do today: work, problem solve, fix things in the home, convince X person of Y thing...

...it's all a lot to bear and I'd rather stay in bed.

But, if I stay in the moment, there is no 'rest of the day' right now, there is only this exact moment where I get to pop into an enjoyable shower. What's objectionable about that?

By living in this exact moment, I can alleviate the entire burden of my future responsibilities.

Anyways, they are in my calendar and task manager so I won't forget them. Clearly letting them weigh on me isn't helping right now.

It turns out, there is nothing to worry about.

Now if you've made it this far, you probably have an idea where we're heading...

My Favorite Meditation: There is Only Ever This Exact Moment

Meditation can take many forms, and I've struggled mightily to build a habit with any of them. We all know the benefits and we all know how little that can help us actually do it.

Allan Watts also said that one can't meditate for outcome or benefit or else it's not meditation, meditation can only ever be for its own sake.

Well fuck you, Allan, how does that help? (Disclaimer: I love Allan Watts). Now why would I ever do this thing that's been proven to have tons of benefits!?

Seriously, that lost me for about 3 years.

How is sitting there doing nothing going to be enjoyable? It's not. It sucks. It's by definition the least fun thing I could do that isn't physically painful.

Since it's taken me about 3 years to figure that out, I hope this helps you as well:

• When I meditate now, I don't listen to guides.
• I put on some pleasant music and I sit down. ("Hey Google, play meditation music")

I feel motivated to meditate because:

• I notice how the burden of my future tasks have all combined into the weight of the world, resting squarely on my emotional and mental state.
• I notice how my internal narrator is yammering non-stop
• I 've also become aware of the tension in my chest and abdomen

So I sit down, listening to pleasant music, in a well-lit room, and remind myself:

There is only this moment. In this moment, everything is ok.

In this exact moment:

• There are no work problems
• There are no fights with my wife
• There are no condo repairs
• There is no need to fix or solve anything
• This moment is perfect if I allow it to be.

...And in this perfect moment, sometimes, I achieve a fleeting blissful moment of inner silence.

...And if I continue to calmly achieve these moments, soon I'll be able to expand them out into minutes, hours, days, or longer.

Imagine: hours or days of presence and inner silence. Engaging fully with those around us because we are not in our heads but rather, connected with the moment.

It sure beats anxiety, constant internal chatter, and the endless stream of pleasure-seeking activities we so often compulsively pursue.

It certainly beats stressing and arguing with those close to us over what amounts to our need for control.

Think about it as a break from the pressure in your life.

My final notes from Tiago's interview with Joe Hudson, which I'll leave you with are:

• There is a lot of fear before every breakthrough. Consider it to be a great sign.
• Joy is our natural state, we just need to let go of things to get there

If we can become present and aware, and stop ourselves from constantly shaking the proverbial muddy water, then our reward is calmness, clarity, and ultimately, inner peace.

Don't you deserve it?

Ask yourself that question, and listen honestly for the answer. You may find your first barrier is that the voice your head says no.

Don't believe everything you think.