JunkSound

We all know what junk food does. It’s cheap and easy and tastes good in the moment, but slowly corrosive over time. What it gives the taste buds, it takes from the body.

It has a counterpart we rarely talk about: JunkSound. Same characteristics as junk food, but JunkSound shows up in the toxics words we say, hear, and tell ourselves. 

Spoken out loud, JunkSound is: gossip, putting people down, posting nastiness behind a screen, disrespect, interrupting, complaining, sharp criticism, self-serving ideas, boastfulness. They are the mind’s version of empty calories, giving a short-lived emotional spike but delivering a lingering detrimental impact in their wake.

The internal version is often more destructive still. The harsh self-judgment, the shame and guilt, the hyper-critical inner monologue, the beatdowns we’d never deliver aloud to anyone, not even our enemies.

Junk food is an obvious villain. JunkSound is the more vicious saboteur, because it operates out in the open and we’ve mostly stopped noticing it.

The damage shows up in measurable ways, and the research proves it.

Georgetown business professor Christine Porath has spent more than two decades studying negative workplace interactions.

In one experiment, she had participants observe a single rude exchange before tackling a set of cognitive tasks. The bystanders—not the targets of the rudeness, just the people who happened to be in the room—performed 25% worse on cognitive tasks and generated 45% fewer ideas than a control group.

That rude exchange was JunkSound playing in the room. The bystanders absorbed it the way you absorb music piped through a grocery store, ambient and unchosen. Even that involuntary dose cost them a quarter of their cognitive performance.

How to conquer JunkSound:

1. Be aware of it.

See it for what it is, then change the conversation or remove yourself altogether. It’s giving you the same hit as six Big Macs a day.

2. Change the channel.

Think of sound waves on a radio. We each have access to other channels. Instead of wallowing in JunkSound Greatest Hits, tune the dial to a more productive alternative. Reprogram the junk by swapping in kindness, compassion, service, generosity, warmth, support. Luckily the “health food” version doesn’t mean choking down raw kale. HealthSound can be every bit as delicious, with vastly more nutritional value.

3. Practice.

Like anything else, more reps lead to more proficiency. Pretty soon you’ll be on a JunkSound-free diet, avoiding the soul’s equivalent to a cardiac arrest.