You Are Not the Voice in Your Head:
Training the Default Mode Network and Freeing Yourself from Inner Noise
Your brain has a screensaver.
When you’re not focused — walking, driving, lying in bed — it kicks in and starts narrating. Sometimes without your permission. Often, it acts like it hates you.
This is the Default Mode Network — a system that operates across multiple regions in the brain and functions like a voice, a commentary, a narrator with a vendetta.
What Is the Default Mode Network?
There are a whole range of systems involved, but two of the most important are:
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) — the part of the brain that thinks about you. It mediates what you consider to be your conscious self, helps construct the ego, and narrates your place in the world. In Yoga Psychology, this is known as the ahamkara, or “I-maker”.
The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) — located near the back of the brain, where the two hemispheres meet. It brings together emotion and memory, integrating them with your present experience.
This is why you can remember a troubling event, feel your own role in it, and re-experience it in your body as though it were happening all over again.
You think about that embarrassing moment, the argument, the loss — without knowing why — and you relive it.
It happens when you’re trying to fall asleep, in the shower, or drifting in your own little world while driving. It’s responsible for daydreaming, ruminating, fantasising.
When overactive, it can quietly take over your life.
The Problem with the Inner Narrator
The DMN helps us organise experience and gives us a sense of self — it's essential for healthy emotional development, especially in children. (Daydreamers should never be punished.)
But it can also become a trap.
A storyteller that runs wild if left untrained.
Unregulated, it fuels:
Rumination
Fantasy-clinging
Depression
Obsession with the past
Free-floating anxiety with no visible cause
This is why you sometimes feel fear when there’s nothing in front of you — because your DMN is replaying a scene from your internal world.
The Dog and the Pain: A Metaphor for Rumination
There was a man who, walking along one day, was bitten by a dog.
The dog latched onto his hand and wouldn’t let go. In pain and shock, the man didn’t know what to do. Eventually, he walked home, dragging the dog behind him.
He greeted his wife and children, sat down to dinner, and smiled through gritted teeth. His family could see something was wrong, but he kept trying to hide the dog and pretend it wasn’t there.
The next morning, the pain was still there — and so was the dog.
He went to work, greeted his colleagues, and carried on. Several people asked about the pain, but he shrugged it off. “Nothing to be done,” he said. And the dog clung on.
Eventually, his boss sat him down and told him he needed to face the pain and pull his hand away. He tried — again and again. But every time he yanked, the dog’s teeth tore deeper, and the pain was unbearable.
This went on for a long time.
The dog became invisible. The pain became normal. Everyone ignored it because the man seemed fine.
But the pain was getting worse.
One day, he met a wise person who told him something different.
“Dog’s teeth point backward. If you try to pull away, they’ll tear your flesh. You’re not meant to yank your hand out — you’re meant to go inward.”
So the man did.
He pushed his hand further into the dog’s mouth. Slowly, carefully. It didn’t hurt. He kept going until he touched the back of the dog’s throat. The dog gagged, let go, and ran off.
Going Inward: How We Free Ourselves
Most of us are trying to pull away from the pain — with constant noise, overstimulation, talking, scrolling, drinking, working. But the more we pull, the more it tears.
Like the man with the dog, we have to go inward.
We do that through inner or spiritual practice:
Yoga
Martial arts
Meditation
Creative rituals
Flow states
These practices temporarily quiet the Default Mode Network — not by fighting it, but by shifting our attention into the body and the breath.
The goal isn’t to destroy the DMN.
The goal is to separate the voice from the self.
To know, truly, that you are not the voice.
You are the thinker, not the thoughts.
The pond, not the fish.
A Practice to Begin
Here’s a simple way to start:
Sit quietly. Breathe slowly.
No need to manipulate your breath — just take gentle control.
Try to think no thoughts.
Thoughts will appear — that’s fine. Just notice them and let them pass.
Label them: “DMN.” Then return to stillness.
Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield describes this as being like a cat at a mouse hole. Every time a thought-mouse pokes its head out, you gently bop it back. No judgement. No force. Just awareness.
You Are Not the Voice
You are not the voice.
You are the one who listens.
That’s where freedom begins.