Day 5: Running Commentary
Week 1 Awareness
In Day 3 we discussed giving yourself a pep talk in the third person, to help you become more objective in your self-talk. The trap to avoid is creating the noise of a persistent running commentary in your head. A running commentary is not good. The problem lies in the fact that your self-talk is a lot faster than your verbal speech. Your self-talk can clock itself up to extraordinary rates. Running too fast, it gets fragmented. You can lose track. When it goes too fast, just like a commentator in a horse race, you end up only catching snippets although you still get all of the emotions that come with it.
Think about that for a second. Your internal dialogue can run at speeds your conscious mind can’t keep up with. You’re bombarding yourself with thoughts faster than you can process them. No wonder you feel overwhelmed. No wonder you can’t think straight. You’re trying to listen to ten conversations at once, all of them happening in your own head.
The Problem with Mental Noise
Often the running commentary of our self-talk is just noise. It’s a continuous background chatter in our heads. It goes on under the radar. Even if we’re unaware of what it’s saying most of the time, it brings with it a tone, a feeling, and it’s a huge part of our self-esteem at any one time.
Some people describe it as being like having a radio on that you can’t turn off. Sometimes you can make out the words, sometimes it’s just noise, but it’s always there. Always commenting. Always judging. Always processing. Never shutting up.
Here’s what that does to you. That constant background noise drains your mental energy. It’s like trying to concentrate on reading a book whilst someone’s playing loud music in the next room. You can do it, but it takes more effort. Everything takes more effort when you’ve got that internal commentary running at full volume.
Slowing Down to Gain Control
Slowing down your self-talk is essential if you want some coherence and if you want to improve your thinking in general. Generally you need to learn to use it as a friend rather than let it bully you with negativity.
Slowing down your self-talk, rationalising it, bringing in some rules, running some tests on it can really help you to gain confidence and start to lead a much more positive life.
If your life is a running commentary, you need to give yourself a bit of peace and quiet. To a degree it doesn’t matter what you’re saying to yourself. If you’re saying too much and it’s too fast, it’s going to be difficult to switch off and get some clarity with all of that chatter going on.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Bad Commentary
Get into the wrong self-talk habits and speaking to yourself in the wrong way will cause you to live in a world of self-criticism and negativity, creating internal stress and a focus on all of the negative things around you. Then over time it will become more difficult to refute all of this negative criticism. You start to live a self-fulfilling prophecy of a life moving towards the negatives and what you don’t want, steered this way by your poor internal chatter.
Consider this example. Someone wakes up and before they’ve even had breakfast, their mind starts commenting. You’re late. You look terrible. You forgot to respond to that email. Your boss thinks you’re useless. Your partner’s probably going to leave. You’re getting fat. You need to exercise. But you’re too tired. See, you’re useless. And on and on and on. No wonder people feel exhausted before the day has even started. They’re fighting a battle with themselves before they’ve done anything.
When the Outside World Becomes the Inside Voice: Naomi Osaka
In 2021, Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open and later Wimbledon, citing her mental health. She had been ranked number one in the world. She was, by any external measure, at the peak of her career. What she described, though, was a running commentary that had become impossible to manage.
For years, media criticism, social media, post-match press conferences, and public scrutiny had been feeding directly into her internal dialogue. The external commentary became internal commentary. The volume kept rising. What started as noise from outside had become noise she couldn’t locate or separate from her own thoughts. She told the world she had been dealing with depression since 2018, and that the press conferences felt like they were exposing her to her own self-doubt at the exact moment she was most vulnerable.
This is the running commentary problem at scale. When you can’t slow the internal voice down, when you can’t separate what’s yours from what you’ve absorbed from other people, the commentary doesn’t just drain you. It starts to define you. Osaka didn’t have a performance problem. She had a volume problem. The same one many people experience every single day. The content is different. The mechanism is identical.
The skill Osaka was missing in those years, and has since spoken about developing, was the ability to turn the volume down. Not to silence all external input. Not to pretend criticism doesn’t exist. But to stop letting the external noise automatically become the internal voice. That’s what slowing your running commentary down actually achieves. You get to choose what you let in. And you get to decide how loud it runs.
Breaking the Cycle
Slowing down your self-talk is about getting a grip. If you want to improve your self-talk, you need to listen to what it’s actually saying. For now, slow the commentary down. Listen to some of the comments and what you’re really saying to yourself. Only then can you learn how to change it.
Think of it like this. If someone’s talking to you at a hundred miles an hour, you can’t really process what they’re saying. You catch bits and pieces, but you miss the meaning. The same thing happens with your internal dialogue. Speed it up too much and you’re just feeling the emotional impact without actually understanding what’s being said.
Practical Techniques to Quiet the Noise
Here’s a simple technique. When you notice the commentary speeding up, literally say to yourself stop. Out loud if you can, in your head if you’re in public. Just stop. It sounds too simple to work, but it does. It interrupts the pattern and creates a break in the flow.
Then, deliberately slow down one thought. Just one. Pick something you’re telling yourself and slow it right down. Say it at speaking pace, not thinking pace.
Another technique is to write it down. The act of writing forces you to slow down because you can’t write as fast as you can think. Get some of that mental chatter out of your head and onto paper. You’ll be surprised how much less overwhelming it looks when it’s written down. What felt like an avalanche of thoughts often turns out to be three or four actual concerns that you can actually address.
The Volume Control
Your internal dialogue has a volume control. This exercise comes from NLP rather than from the trial literature, and it’s one a lot of people find useful: not literally, but you can learn to turn it down. Meditation helps with this. Mindfulness practices help with this. But even just consciously deciding to think about something more quietly can work.
Try it right now. Think a thought loudly in your head. Really loud. Now think the same thought more quietly. Notice the difference? The content is the same, but the impact changes. A quieter internal voice is less demanding, less urgent, less exhausting.
This isn’t about suppressing your thoughts or pretending everything’s fine when it’s not. This is about giving yourself the mental space to actually think clearly instead of being deafened by your own internal noise.
Why This Matters
You can’t improve something you can’t hear properly. If your self-talk is running so fast you’re only catching fragments, you can’t analyse it. You can’t challenge it. You can’t change it. You’re just being buffeted by emotional responses to thoughts you’re not even fully processing.
Slowing it down gives you back control. It lets you actually hear what you’re telling yourself. And once you can hear it clearly, you can start to question whether it’s true, whether it’s helpful, whether it’s even yours or just something you picked up from someone else years ago.
The running commentary doesn’t have to run your life. You can learn to turn down the volume, slow down the pace, and actually listen to what you’re telling yourself. Because some of what you’re telling yourself is useful. Some of it’s protective. Some of it’s wise. But you’ll never know which is which if you can’t slow down enough to tell the difference.
If the commentary in your head has become severe, or you’re experiencing clinical depression, serious anxiety, or a mental health crisis, please speak to a doctor. This course can complement professional support but it doesn’t replace it.
References
- Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. Crown.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(4), 569-582.
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.