If you haven’t watched Inside Out, go and watch it: it’s deep! One simple but profound truth that it points out is that we all have voices, or even whole personalities, inside our heads. And quite often they take over the steering wheel.
This realization is profound because our conventional understanding is that we, as “normal” and rational people, make all our decisions based on logical rules and clear principles. For example, this was the predominant view in classical economics, until the theory of Bounded Rationality turned everything on its head. But the view of humans as purely rational agents is simply not true – most of the time we listen to the voices in our head.
In Inside Out, the five voices are Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. But in reality the voices are more numerous and nuanced. For instance, there can be the Defender – always looking out for your safety. Or the Skeptic – always questioning everything we’re told. We often take on these voices from our parents, friends, TV, and culture.
I have a strong voice that I inherited from my father, I call the Evaluator – it always measures and compares everything, calculating whether one choice, outcome or experience is/was better than another. The Evaluator meticulously evaluates each decision I make, no matter how small (“Was having sushi tonight really optimal, given that I’m having lunch with a friend at a sushi place tomorrow?”). But it also constantly evaluate me: Am I a successful entrepreneur? Do I have enough interesting things to say in my blog? Am I good enough? This evaluation happens frequently and habitually, and rarely by my choosing. Sure, I appreciate the Evaluator sometimes – it does help me weigh the decisions and learn from experience. But in reality it’s far less useful than it thinks it is, and often causes a great amount of self-doubt, second-guessing and disappointment.
From Psychology Today:
Psychologists believe these voices are residues of childhood experiences—automatic patterns of neural firing stored in our brains and dissociated from the memory of the events they are trying to protect us from […] Yet, in many cases, we’re so used to living by these unwritten internal rules that we don’t even notice or question them. […] If left unchecked, the committees in our heads will take charge of our lives and keep us stuck in mental and behavioral prisons of our own making. Like typical abusers, they scare us into believing that the outside world is dangerous, and that we need to obey their rules for living in order to survive and avoid pain.
So it’s helpful to practice becoming aware of the voices and creating space from them. Which doesn’t mean denying them, suppressing them or making them wrong. Instead, we just listen to what they have to say and tell them: “Thank you. I heard you. I appreciate your input.” And then we just let the voices be, as we pause, and allow a deeper wisdom to emerge through us. Because the Truth is always more bigger than any one voice can tell us.