The Source & Power of Stupid Voice: The Most Irritating Voice in Our Heads

We should be thankful for the thankless task it serves.

I’ve had a Eureka moment.

You know, that among the inner voices we all have, there is one that is more irritating than the rest. It’s even more annoying than the pragmatic voice of negativity. It’s stupid, and it’s irritating.

We all have a stupid voice.

It’s the one that mentally verbalizes things we have memorized, things that do not require our conscious thought. For example, it might mentally verbalize to us how to pour milk. It will tell us, first you get a glass, then you put the glass on the counter. Next, you take the milk from the refrigerator. And it continues until we’ve finished the task.

No matter how irritating we find this voice it refuses to be silent. Here’s my Eureka moment regarding where this voice comes from, its source, and why it exists at all.

Our brains absorb incoming information all day long.

Every day our brains are bombarded by thoughts and images, too many for us to assimilate. We all have more information coming in that we cannot process consciously, so our brains take up the task of sorting through that information, operating mostly subconsciously.

It decides, without our constant input, what is important and what is not. Obviously, needing to be talked through the steps of pouring a glass of milk is completely unnecessary, so why does it do this to us?

I believe that, just like going to the bathroom to relieve ourselves physically, our brains have to “take a dump” on occasion, clearing out all the unnecessary temporary and junk files it has stored up.

Our brains defecate this unnecessary and superfluous information through one of our inner voices, the one I have nicknamed “the stupid voice.”

It’s the voice that tells us to turn the key to start our cars or to open a door.

It’s the voice that tells us to push the elevator button repeatedly. It’s the voice that tells us to turn the page when we’ve finished reading the current page in a book. It’s the voice that asks us where the ticket counter is the moment we’ve entered the airport.

This is our stupid voice. We all have one. It’s one of the many voices each of us has inside our heads. Frankly, I’d rather put up with the self-confidence-killing, depressing voice of negativity than this stupid voice. At least it is pragmatic. At least it serves a purpose in helping us to continue surviving.

The stupid voice makes itself impossible to ignore.

It is often the loudest voice, the voice that most insistently demands our attention of all the voices in our head. It won’t go away.

Since it will be with us all our lives, it’s necessary that learn to live with it and place it in its proper context. Just think of this voice like our brains going to the mental toilet evacuating all the unnecessary information it has accumulated throughout the day.

Yes, it’s loud. Yes, it stands out from among the other voices. But physically, the bathroom is also a unique room in our homes too. We all do things in the bathroom that we would never do in any other room of our homes.

So, the stupid voice, much like the bathrooms in our homes, does facilitate our survival in its own way. Without it defecating out our stupidest and most unnecessary thoughts, those thoughts would be left accumulating inside our heads, taking up space best reserved for our more brilliant thoughts.

Without it, each of us, day by day, would be getting just a little bit stupider.