On October 14, 1926, the London publisher Methuen & Co. released a slim children’s book by A. A. Milne, a playwright and Punch humorist who would spend the rest of his life mildly annoyed that this was what made him famous. Winnie-the-Pooh was an instant hit. Its American publisher sold 150,000 copies before the end of the year, and the book hasn’t been out of print in the hundred years since.
The book’s most quotable resident is not the bear. It’s a gloomy gray donkey. Eeyore greets his friends like this: “Good morning, Pooh Bear,” says Eeyore gloomily. “If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”
I can relate to Eeyore.
Our minds have a private soundtrack running all the time. I’ve written about the inner voice before that constantly editorializes all my thoughts and actions, mostly unsolicited.
A solitary mind is actually a chorus
says Charles Fernyhough, an author who studies the voices in our heads for a living, in The Voices Within. We are never truly alone because our inner voice is always on, like a 24-hour non-stop radio station. We may dial it down or turn it up, but the voice continues to broadcast.
One of the loudest voices in my head? Guilt. Point me to something that’s gone wrong, and in less than two minutes, I can connect the source of the mishap to something I did (or didn’t do) or could have but didn’t prevent.
The potted plant died because of my black thumb. I got a rejection letter? 100% my fault. I’ve called guilt the diet soda of emotions—a nagging, lurking-under-the-surface emotion that doesn’t quite make the cut as an A-grade feeling.
In the inner voice’s defense, some of this is useful. Guilt lets us know we’ve done something wrong. In that sense, it’s way better than Shame, which will tell us we’re bad people. Psychologist June Tangney has spent decades documenting that gap: across every age group she studied, guilt-prone people tend to apologize, repair, and do better next time, while shame-prone people turn hostile toward others and themselves and change the least.
Despite trying for so long, I know the inner voice can’t be evicted; I’m simply trying to see if I can quieten mine or find better ways to answer.
Psychologist Ethan Kross—whose work came up when I wrote about quieting the inner critic found that people who talk to themselves in the third person, using their own name the way they’d address a friend, regulate their emotions measurably better. Brain-imaging studies show the effect kicks in within the first second, without any extra mental effort. It feels ridiculous and a little conceited. It works anyway.
The second is self-compassion: speaking to ourselves with the same patience, care, and understanding tone we’d employ when talking to a fumbling friend. If a friend messes up, it’s unlikely that we’d pounce on them with “What a moron you are!” But when we are the ones who screw up, all bets are off.
Kristin Neff’s other two components—common humanity (the “It’s okay. It could happen to anyone” sentiment) and mindfulness (feeling and riding our emotions out without suppression, avoidance, or judgment)—are reminders that we’re not the only ones in the soup. And for anyone worried that kindness breeds laziness: in a series of studies, people who met a personal failing with self-compassion went on to study longer and work harder to fix it than the ones who beat themselves up.
The third is to take the whole inner voice broadcast less seriously. Every so often, when I think back to something I said, did, or firmly believed in, I’m hit with an all-too-familiar cringey feeling. Some version of “what on earth was I thinking!”
But the acknowledgment that I was a doofus is clearly a sign of progress, or at least self-awareness. Self-love is wonderful, but self-awareness is even more so. The voice in my head sometimes speaks with tremendous authority, even though its track record so far does not support that confidence.
Nobody in the Hundred Acre Wood ever tries to fix Eeyore. His friends simply keep showing up. For his birthday, Pooh brings him a honey pot (having eaten the honey on the way), and Piglet brings a balloon (burst, also on the way), and Eeyore spends the rest of the day happily putting the burst balloon into the Useful Pot and taking it out again. Despite the gloom, the day still gets better.
I’m learning to work with my own Eeyore and to answer him the way Pooh would. With patience and a little amusement.
We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it. Eeyore, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926