This is HiddenBrain, I'm ShankarVedanta.
When was the last time you stayed awake atnight, unable tosleep, replaying something in your head that happened thatday?
Did you notice how your thoughts coil back onthemselves, how you went in circles as the night woreon?
All ofus, even those who have been spared the pain ofinsomnia, have heard thatvoice.
Have you messed up a presentation at work or flubbed the test at school or been rejected inlove?
You've heard thosenagging, doubtingthoughts, borrowing themselves deeper and deeper into the recesses of yourbrain.
How can I say something sostupid?
Why do Iknow? I was amess.
I'm always solazy. I really should have workedout.
I cannot believe you forgot to fill out that permissionform.
You forgot about parent-teacherconferences, what thetetherts.
My backhurts. My body is just fallingapart.
Why does this inner voice seem to love to tormentus?
Wouldn't life be better if we could just make itstop?
When that negative inner voice takeshold, that is all we can hear because it is consuming ourattention.
Today, we try to understand the purpose of that nagging voice inside yourhead.
How it works and what you can do to make it work foryou, thisweek, on HiddenBrain.
You might be anexpert, you might be anovice, you could be a veteran or just starting out in yourcareer.
You've almost certainly heard that voice inside yourhead, questioning if you knowenough, questioning if you areenough.
At the University ofMichigan, psychologists Ethan Cross studies thatvoice, what itdoes, why it exists and how we can learn to befriends.
EthanCross, welcome to HiddenBrain.
Thanks for havingme, SeanCards, absolute delight to behere.
Ethan, I want to start by talking about a couple of incidents in your ownlife, where you had to confront what you call the chatter of your own innervoice.
When you started college at the University ofPennsylvania, you came in as a very strong student with stellar grades from highschool.
Can you tell me how you fared academically in your first few months atPenn?
I think the best word that I could use to describe myexperiences, it was a disaster academically my firstsemester.
I camein, I had graduated as valedictorian from my high school and thought I knew how to study and it turned out I did not know how to study very well for college classes and ended up getting a sea of badgrades.
I also felt like I didn't exactly fit in atPenn.
I had come from a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn and I was surrounded now by students from more privileged backgrounds that I had come from and they talkeddifferent, they dresseddifferent.
All of those thoughts about whether I fitin, whether Ibelong, that became adistraction.
That weighed onme. There was a mental burden that exerted which was unpleasant and was something I had to figure out how toaddress.
I want to fast forward a couple of decades to another moment in your life when the voice inside your head wasdeafening.
You'd become a successfulacademic, you weremarried, you had a growing family and wonder you were playing with your young daughter getting her ready for hernap.
Can you paint me a detailed picture of what you were doing and what happened nextseason?
This is a painful experience even when I reflect back on itnow.
My youngest daughter was less than one at the time or right around thatage.
We would have this ritual of sorts that we would engage in where before her nap I'd read toher, I'd play a littlebit, change her diaper and then I would like launch her off of the changingtable, swirl her up and down like a spaceship in the sky and then flip her on her back and very quickly kind of put her down in the crib and she would loveit.
She always smiles and she always expected it so something we did every singletime.
This one episode I started going through theprocedure, she knew exactly what wascoming, she was loving it and the only problem is when I went to land her so to speak in the crib she started screaming and when I say screaming I'm talking about ear shattering screams were coming out of her mouth and she started grabbing reaching for herarm.
So I immediately called my wife told her whathappened, she then started to come home from work and I'm sitting on the rocking chair with my daughterscreaming, looking at me and I'm thinking oh my god what did Ido?
I started simulating in my mind the worst casescenarios.
Have I permanently injured her or are we going tobe, is she going to needsurgery?
Oh my god what a surgery like when a kid is thisyoung.
So I started catastrophizing as though that were insufficient for working me up then I went in a different direction with thecatastrophization.
I started thinking what is the doctor going to think when I bring my daughterin, are they going to think I might have deliberately hurt her and that made me feel terrible and when you couple that with the pain I felt when just looking at my child who was screaming in pain was a terribly chatter provoking episode in my life and not a particularly pleasant episode torelive.
Ethan would later discover his daughter had dislocated her elbow but in that moment the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened allowed his chatter to spin out ofcontrol.
Oh absolutely I mean we know that uncertainty can fuel chatter because we don't know what's going to happen and you know our mind is incredibly adept at simulating all sorts of possibilities and in that moment my mind was it was firing on all cylinders and that's certainly contributed to that negative state I wasexperiencing.
And I feel that this is as close to a universal experience as thereis.
I think almost everyone experiencesthis.
One of the more dramatic examples of this phenomenon that took place in public involves a baseball pitcher Rick Ankeel and for listeners who don't know much about baseball can you tell me a bit about Rick Ankeel and describe step by step what happened on October3rd,2000.
Sure so Rick Ankeel was a new pitcher in the major leagues and when he arrived on theSt.
Louis Cardinals he was touted as the next greatestthing.
Not just that year but he had the potential to be according to the pundits one of the greatest pitchers of all time and throughout his first year in the league that's exactly how heperformed.
Ankeel 11 and 7 on the year in 30 starts 194 strikeouts breaking the record by arookie.
He was lights out an acepitcher.
His team ended up getting to the playoffs and during one of the playoffs came he took the mound and a few batters into the game he did something that was very uncommon forhim.
One on one out and a wildpitch.
The ball hit the dirt at the batter's feet and shot past thecatcher.
The runner on first ambled over to secondbase.
This was not the sort of thing fans expected from RickAnkeel.
It was uncommon for him because he had such incredible control over where he placed the ball and after he throws his wild pitch he pauses and he says tohimself,huh?
I just threw a wildpitch.
He shrugged it off and then he winds up to throw another pitch and this one's even more wild than the one that came beforeit.
And now he's starting to wonder what is goingon.
He winds up for anotherpitch.
And this one is even more wild than thelast.
It sails over the catcher and the umpire and on and on he goes through this inning it's incredibly painful to watch his implosion on themound.
And another wild one and Maddox willscore.
It's ball four toGalaraga.
He finally gets theball.
A pitcher who previously was able to hit targets with pinpoint precision and he's just walking batters across the bases and ultimately has to be taken out of thegame.
Never regains his form when describing what he underwent on the field that day and during subsequent outings in what he tried to regain hiscontrol.
He talks about this monster that was born inside him and the monster is a name that he gives to hischatter.
I wake up in the middle of thenight, youknow, having the nightmare that I couldn't throw astrike.
I looked in sweat and it's like this thing won't even leave me alone during mysleep.
Every time he would wind up to throw apitch, he would start thinking about is he squeezing the ball too tight or is it tooloose?
Is he distributing his weightappropriately?
And ultimately thismonster, his chatter ended up sinking hiscareer.
You see that the voice that he heard thatday, this voice that he called themonster, was louder than the 52,000 fans who were in the standswatching.
Imean, that's an extraordinarystatement,Ethan.
I think it's also a statement that rings true for manypeople.
There's some wonderful research which shows that often what predicts how we feel at any given moment in time is not what we're actuallydoing, but it's a thought streaming through ourhead.
So you can be on a carnival ride with your kids that should be enormouslyfun.
But you're worried about how the last conversation went with a guest where things were a little choppy and you're not havingfun.
This speaks to I think exactly what and keel experience in that moment and what so many of us experience attimes, which is when that chatter startsbrewing, when that negative inner voice takeshold, that is all we can hear because it is consuming ourattention.
That negative inner voice is often lying inwait, ready to chimein.
It refuses to let mistakes go and reminds us of them at the worst possiblemoment.
When we comeback, the many different drivers of this chatter and the psychological techniques we can use to master the voices inside ourheads.
You're listening to HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. This is HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. Psychologist Ethan Cross studies the phenomenon of self-talk andchatter.
The voices we all hear incessantly inside ourheads.
We've seen how chatter can take the form of a mercilesstormentor.
Once baseball star Rick and keel made onemistake, his inability to set that mistake aside produced the next mistake and the next and thenext.
When Ethan accidentally heard his youngdaughter, he found it really hard to forgivehimself.
The harsh and unforgiving judge is a common role that is played by our innervoice.
But the more Ethan studied the phenomenon ofchatter, the more he realized it comes in manyguises.
Ethan some yearsago, you made an appearance on television that set off a firestorm of chatter inside yourhead.
Now this was a different kind ofchatter.
Start by telling me about the TV appearance and what happenedafterwards.
This was early in my career and my colleagues and I published a study that we were really excitedabout.
It dealt with the idea that when we're rejected by someone else in a romanticrelationship, people may actually be referring to physical sensations in their body when they experience socialpain.
And this was a study we were really excitedabout.
We didn't particularly expect it to get a lot ofattention.
But many people came calling and one minute I'm lecturing in introductory social psychology about the psychology of love and the next minute I'm in a studio across campus doing an interview for the CBS eveningnews.
So when we'realone, we experience physical pain and that's a cue to say it's time to get things back ontrack.
And that's what LeQuiteis.
Last forward about a week after this interviewaired, I walk into work and I notice a letter that's hand addressed tome.
And I proceeded to open the envelope and that's where I saw a reallychilling, disturbing note had been written tome.
All sorts of racialslurs,threats, ugly drawings ofme.
I immediately broke out into asweat.
And the first thing Iremember, the first thing I did was I showed it to my assistant just to get a second set of eyes on this to make sure I wasn't jumping to anextreme.
And I looked at her face and I remember her face went white and the first thing she said to me is you need to tell someone aboutthis.
A couple of hours later after talking to folks in the department and at the university I ended up at the policestation, showed them theletter, asked them what todo.
So their advice to me was to keep an eye out for people who look suspicious for the next few days and make sure to drive home a different way from work eachday.
So that no one followsyou.
Which was kind of comical because at the time I lived like just a few blocks fromcampus.
So youknow, there were exactlymany, many different ways I could gohome.
And this activated somechatter, some really significantchatter.
After the next fewdays, I couldn'tsleep.
I was pacing myhouse. I had my baseball bat resting on myshoulder.
I was in protectormode.
I was constantly thinking tomyself, what have Idone?
Why did I do thisinterview?
My first daughter had just beenborn.
I've put her atrisk. I put my wife atrisk.
It was really a scary moment in life and it was an all-consumingone.
And when your chatter is consuming your attention for a long period oftime, that makes it really hard for you to do other things in your life that matter like yourwork, like advising yourstudents, writingpapers, or even being a good partner and parent to your partner andkids,right?
Because they're trying to talk to me and I'm thinking about this potentialthreat.
So that was the letter in the chatter as I refer to thatepisode.
The chatter inside Ethan's mind brought him back to the letter over and overagain.
He was trying to decipher clues about the person who sentit.
He was trying to understand theirintentions.
It was actually from a nearby town which also magnified the significance of the perceivedthreat.
But there was no reason why this person was making the accusations that they weremaking.
There was no reason why they drew the pictures of me that they did and why they said the things theydid.
But that didn't make it in that moment any lessthreatening.
And that's what chatter does to us because it zooms us in on the things we're concernedabout.
Whether webelong, whether we're makinggrades, whether we've beenrejected, or whether someone's coming to killus,right?
You're zoomed in so narrowly on the problem athand, you lose the ability to see that biggerpicture.
So another form of chatter that's related to this idea of the fearful prognosticator is the problem of rumination and I think many of us are affected bythis.
We're bothered by something small and then we pull and pull on that ball of thread until very small molehills become very bigmountains.
A great example of this comes from the TV showSeinfeld.
The character Elaine is on a crowded subway train happily thinking about an upcoming wedding she's about toattend.
I'm really looking forward tothis.
I loveweddings. Maybe I'll meetsomebody.
Maybenot. Ohman, we'restopping.
Oh, this isgreat. This is what Ineed.
Just what Ineed.Okay, take iteasy.
I'm sure it'snothing. Probably rats on thetrack.
They're stopping forrats.
God, it's socrowded. How could there be so manypeople?
What if I missed thewedding?
I got thering. What do youdo?
You can't get married without aring.
I can'tbreathe. I feelfaint.
Okay, take iteasy. It'll start movingsoon.
Think about people in concentration camps what they wentthrough.
And thehostages. What would you do if you were ahostage?
Think aboutthat. This isnothing.
No, it's notnothing. It'ssomething.
It's anightmare. Helpme.
What's that on myleg? Soobviously, even this iscomedy, but I love how the writers here start with the smallest ofinconveniences.
And then 20 secondslater, Elaine's comparing herself being stuck on a train to being in a concentrationcamp.
Yeah, the mind's ability to make mountains out of mollholes and to catastrophize is trulyremarkable.
Youknow, there's this one study that I reallylove.
It was a study done by the British anthropologist AndrewIrving.
He basically went up to New Yorkers on city streets several years ago and gave them a microphone and just asked them to verbalize the stream of thoughts that were flowing through their mind at any given moment intime.
And what you see in those externalized inner monologues is something very similar to what you hear Elaine going through in thatclip.
One thing that I think is so interesting is there's a non-linearity to our innervoice.
We pinball back and forth all over theplace.
In thatclip, Elaine's not just thinking about thewedding, but she's going to the concentration camp and then she's going back to the subwayconditions.
We're moving back and forth veryrapidly.
And the other feature of these externalized inner monologues that was so no worthy is they often dealt with negativecontent, notalways, but that was the majority of the kinds of thoughts that were streaming through people'sheads.
And I just find it remarkable at how fast I will we are in our ability to go from one negative thing to another and down those rabbitholes.
So another hallmark of rumination is that I think we feel as if we're making progress on someproblem.
Like we're thinking about something and wethink,okay, if we think about thisproblem, we can now make progress and solve theproblem.
And then as yousay, momentslater, we're pinballing off 17 different things and then we don't realizeit, but we are walking incircles.
We're like the people who are lost in a forest who are walking incircles.
Can you talk aboutthat?
That one of the hallmarks of rumination is it has sort of the circularity to it that we come back to the same stops over and overagain, but we don't realize we're going incircles.
Youknow, chatter is a term I use to refer to getting stuck in a negative thoughtloop.
This perseverativecircularity, rumination tends to be about dwelling on thepast.
Worry is more about what's happening in the future or thepresent.
But the common theme across both of those different states is this negativecircularity, this perseverative negativecognition.
And it is thought to be what psychologists call a transdiagnostic risk factor for many different forms of mentalillness, ranging from various forms of depression and anxiety to other kinds of negativestates.
Forexample, people who are overly aggressive and easily setoff.
The common theme across many of those conditions is that people are herping on some misdeed or grievance or concern over and over and overagain.
So we've seen how the inner voice can take the form of the harsh judge or the secondguesser.
Sometime ago we featured Kevin Cochley on Hidden Brain and he studies the imposterphenomenon, the phenomenon ofself-doubt.
And in some ways that's also connected to the story ofchatter, the ways in which people who are actually very good at doing some things can sometimes start to second guessthemselves.
You tell the story ofMr.
Rogers on TV he came across as serenelyself-confident, but behind the scenes it was another picturealtogether?
Yeah, there's this wonderful chatter artifact of sorts that the New York Times published several yearsago.
Fred Rogers had gone on a kind of sabbatical for a while from hisshow.
And when he cameback, he was filled with self-doubt about whether he'd be able to perform at the same level that he did prior to taking hisbreak.
And in this letter that he writes tohimself, hevery, very candidly expresses thatvulnerability.
Hewrites, am I kidding myself that I'm able to write a scriptagain?
I wonder why don't I trustmyself?
After all theseyears, it is just as bad asever.
I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damn trying tocreate.
Ohwell, the hour comeof, and now is when I've got to doit.
Get to itFred, get toit.
So this is really remarkable tome, first ofall.
Imean, we're talking aboutMr.
Rogers.Mr. Rogers helped teach me how to manage my emotions growing up as he did countless other kids and probably adultstoo.
And yet here we see him admitting to struggling with his own self-doubt attimes.
Which I think is such an important message to convey to folks because it really says topeople,hey, if you've ever experiencedchatter, if you've ever experiencedself-doubt, welcome to the human condition we all do attimes.
There is one final form of negative chatter worthdiscussing.
Sometimes, the voice inside our heads takes the form not of an angry judge or a fearfulwarrior, but a disappointed parent orteacher.
Some timeago, Hidden Brain listener Jose Velazquez shared this story withus.
I betrayed the trust of one of my closest family members and left them with a financial disaster that they had to resolve entirely on theirown.
And it took them a better half of five years to fixit.
And there doesn't pass a single day where I don't think about it and hate myself forit.
And even though the person I betrayed has forgivenme, has said soexplicitly, I don't see how I forgivemyself.
It just haunts me every singleday.
So even I'm struck by the line where hesays, I don't see how I can ever forgivemyself.
I'm wondering if you can talk for a moment about the chatter that comes in the role ofshame.
Chatter refers to getting stuck in those negative thoughtloops.
The content of that negativity can vary in somecases.
It could be filled with anxiety provokingthoughts, but in othercases, as you're referring tohere, it could be filled with shame provoking thoughts aswell.
Both feelawful, but in very differentways.
But in myexperiences, talking to people and doing research on thistopic, what has become crystal clear is just how normative this experience of chatter is forpeople.
Our inner voices can take manyforms.
They can cause us enormousanguish.
They can cause friction in ourrelationships, impair ourperformance, destabilizeus.
It's enough to make anyone wish for a little peace andquiet.
That's exactly what happened to theneuroscientist, Jill BultiTaylor.
In1996, she suffered a stroke that silenced the voice of her innertormentor.
She described what that change was like in a TEDTalk.
My brain chatter went totallysilent.
Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mutebutton, totalsilence.
And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silentmind.
And I affectionately refer to this space as La LaLand.
But it was beautifulthere.
Imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotionalbaggage.
Oh, I felt you forya. When we comeback, Jill Bulti Taylor discoverssomething.
Nagging bothersome voice she was so happy tolose, she starts to missit.
You're listening to HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. This is HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. Psychologist Ethan Cross is the author of thebook,Chatter.
He has studied the different roles of the voices we hear inside ourheads, the harshjudge, the fearfulprognosticator, the repetitiveruminator.
One of the puzzles that arises from this area of research isthis.
If our inner voice is consistently a source of anxiety or a driver ofdepression, why do we have an inner voice atall?
Shouldn't natural selection have found a way over thousands of years to remove something that causes so muchharm?
Ethan, you've called introspection the great puzzle of the humanmind.
What is paradoxical aboutit?
Well, what's paradoxical about it is that on the onehand, the ability to introspect is a remarkable tool that is a source ofinnovation.
It's a tool that lets us solveproblems.
If you think about verbal introspectionspecifically, what many people describe as the innervoice, but that refers to specifically as our ability to silently use language to reflect on ourlives.
That lets us domany, many differentthings.
Numberone, your inner voice lets you keep information active in your head for very short periods oftime.
It's part of what we call our verbal working memorysystem.
If you go to the grocerystore, and likeme, five minutes after you getthere, you forget what you were supposed to buy and you pause and you think toyourself,well, I was I was supposed to getcheese,yogurt,oranges.
That's you using your innervoice.
You're using it to retaininformation.
We also use that inner voice to do other things like simulate andplan.
Before giving a newpresentation, I will go for a walk around my neighborhood and I'll go through what I'm going tosay, often word for word in mymind.
We also use our inner voice to controlourselves.
This morning I wasexercising.
It was a hardworkout. I was literally coaching myselfalong.
Comeon, you gotthis, seven morereps, then you get abreak.
Then I count itdown,seven,six,five.
We can use that inner voice to be acoach.
Thenfinally, we use our inner voice to tellstories, to create narratives that help us understand our experiences in this wackyworld.
Use narratives that wecreate, they give shape to our sense of who weare.
I think of the inner voice and more broadly inrespect, as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us domany, many differentthings.
I'm thinking about one other feature that the inner voice givesus,Ethan, when we do something that'swrong, we often castigateourselves, we amattedourselves, we second-guessourselves, we experienceshame, we experienceremorse.
Obviously, it's not fun to go through thosethings, but ofcourse, if we imagine a world where we didn't go throughthem, where we did somethingwrong, where we didn't reflect back on whathappened, we might be entirely prone to make the same mistakes over and overagain.
Experiencing negativity and negative emotions isn't something that we want to shy awayfrom.
Manyscientists, myselfincluded, believe that negative emotions are functional when experienced in the rightdosage.
We evolve the capacity to experienceshame,regret,anger,sadness, you fill in your favorite negative emotion for areason.
They prepare us for dealing with that situation that we'remanaging, and they often serve as cues tosay,hey, you need to focus here so you don't repeat this mistakeagain.
We don't want to rid ourselves ofnegativity.
What we do want to figure out is how to prevent those small spikes of negative emotions from morphing intochatter.
So earlier in theepisode, we explored the story of theneuroscientist, Jill BolteTaylor.
She suffered a stroke that left her unable to engage inintrospection.
Atfirst, she welcomed the absence of her bothersome in hervoice, but Ethan finished the story forus, did the relief that Jill Bolte Taylor felt at losing her inner voice was that longlasting?
What ended up happening was the euphoria that she initially felt when all of her chatter wentaway.
That morphed into a state of dysfunction as time wenton, because although she stopped worrying andruminating, she also stopped being able to do basic things like keep information active in ourhead.
The inner voice is part of your working memorysystem.
She lost that ability to organize herthinking, to make sense of what was happening in herworld.
And the lesson that she learned from going through this stroke was that the goal for her was no longer to identify ways of silencing her innervoice, of getting rid ofit.
Instead, the goal became to learn how to manage that inner voice moreeffectively.
So I want to take you back to a story that you told me at the start of thisepisode.
And I want to have you tell me how you in some ways managed to control the chatter that was unfolding inside yourhead.
This was after you went on TV and you received a threateningletter, you wereterrified, you started pacing about your house at night with a baseball bat patrolling yourhouse.
At onepoint, you sat down at your computer and began to search for ways that you could protectyourself.
What were you hoping to find with your Google search and what happenedsubsequently?
Look, anyone who's experienced chatter knows that the rabbithole, when you're really in it can take you down it quite deep and I was very deep down the rabbithole.
At the very worst ofit, I sat down at my laptop and I had thethought, why don't I search for a bodyguard that specializes in protectingacademics?
And I didn't actually hit enter on thesearch.
I did typeit, but then I thought tomyself,first, what if someone sees you typethis, they'll think you've lostit?
And then I actually said tomyself, what are youdoing?
Let your acttogether. And I started talking to myself like I was talking to someone else and it instantly snapped me out of that very narrow view of my situation that was filled with thoughts about threat and oh mygod, what if thishappens?
And it wasmore, it was a broader view that Iadopted.
Well,look, I'm not the first person to experience thissituation.
The police told me that other folks get letters onoccasion.
They usually blowover.
Thiswill,too, it's not doing any good to notsleep.
So why don't you go upstairs and stop thisstuff?
And that's exactly what Idid.
And interestinglyenough, if you think back to that letter by Fred Rogers that I readbefore, he did something verysimilar.
He used his ownname. It was almost as though in both of ourcircumstances, we were thrust into this other advisorymode.
It was like we were giving advice to a goodfriend.
And we then went on to do research on thistool.
We call it DistancedSelf-Talk.
And what it involves doing is trying to coach yourself through yourchatter, using your own name or the second person pronounyou.
And it turns out this is a useful tool for helping people gain distance from what they're going through in ways that can be quiteuseful.
So I want you to talk a little bit about that research because in some ways beyond the fact that talking toyourself, as if you were outside yourself helpedyou, you actually have data to showthat, infact, this technique iseffective.
You publish a study where you asked volunteers to think about personal events that they were worriedabout, and then ask them to think about those events either in the first person or using a differentpronoun.
Tell me how you ran that study and how itunfolded.
Well, what we did in that study is we had people first tell us about experiences from their past that people might ruminate about and in anotherstudy, it dealt with future worries andconcerns.
And then during thestudy, we would have people reflect on thoseexperiences.
We'd have them think about them and then try to really work through their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding thoseevents.
Half of the time we had them try to work through their feelings as we normally do in the firstperson.
So why did I feel thisway?
What was goingon? In the other half of the time that we'd have them use their own name and the second person pronounyou.
SoEthan, why did you feel thisway?
What was goingon? And what we found was across bothstudies, people consistently felt less upset when they use what we call distance self-talk when they use their name and the second person pronoun you to try to work through and make sense of what they were goingthrough.
What this helps us do is it helps us step back and think about our circumstances more similar to how we would think about something that's happening to anotherperson.
And when we dothat, we have the enhanced ability to be more objective and deliberate when we think about ourproblems.
So besides using our names or second person pronouns when talking toourselves, it turns out there are also other ways of creating psychological distance from ourproblems.
And you found many of these techniques to bebeneficial.
One of these techniques involves visualization changing the way we see things in our mindseye.
Can you tell me about the work that you and your colleagues have done to test the idea of adopting what's called a fly on the wall perspective on our ownproblems?
Yeah, so when we think about negative experiences or when we anticipate future ones aswell, we often have mental imagery surroundingit.
And research has shown that we can think about different experiences in our lives from differentperspectives.
So you can conjure up a mental snapshot of a past event and actually replay it happening in your own mind from a first personperspective.
Or you can also think about that sameexperience, but from a third personperspective, like a fly on the wall peering down on thescene.
Research has shown that when people adopt a third person or a fly on the wallperspective, that tends to be linked with lower levels ofemotionality.
And that's true for both positive and negativeexperiences.
And one set of studies we found that when participants wereprovoked, when an experimenter in the lab acted in a very rude and insulting way tothem, if we asked people to reflect on the provocation from adistance, they were much less likely to be aggressive towards that experimenter when given the opportunity than people who were directed to just reflect on the experience as they normally would in the firstperson.
And so morebroadly, what I think this speaks to is the factthat,look, it's very easy for us to become consumed withnegativity.
And when we're consumed with thatnegativity, we often say things and do things that we would never dream of doing if the emotional amplitude was just a little bitlower.
And that's what we see happening with many of these different kinds of distancingtechniques.
It turns down the temperature just a littlebit.
Itdoesn't, I think this is an important point toconvey.
When people distance in ourstudies, we don't take a negative experience and turn it into a joyfully blissfully positiveevent.
When I coachedmyself,Ethan, what are you doing bodyguards foracademics?
It was still a negative situation I was dealingwith.
But the intensity of it was diminished to a point where I could think about it more objectively anddeliberately.
And that can be reallyuseful.
And often the difference between being mired in chatter on the one hand and working through a negative experience adaptively on theother.
So we've seen how creating a little distance using language can be effective and creating a little distance using spatial imagination can beeffective.
It turns out there's a third way we can also achieve some distance from our ownproblems.
Can you talk about the idea of temporaldistance,Ethan?
Yeah, I love this distancingtactic.
It's one that Aslam Ayduk and one of her colleagues discovered a few yearsago.
What it involves doing is remarkably simple andeffective.
So take your latest worry rather than think about how awful the circumstances rightnow, think about how you're going to feel sometime down the road in thefuture.
What thatdoes, what engaging in that form of what we often call mental time travel does forus, is it makes it clear that whatever we're dealing with as awful as itis, it will eventuallypass.
And that gives us hope that can be a very powerful antidote to a negative mind that is overwhelmed withchatter.
Ethan, another researcher has also found it helps to give new labels to ouremotions.
When a negative voice inside you warns of all the bad things that could happen and you feel yourself gettinganxious, relabel thatanxiety.
Another tool that can help people involves changing the way we interpret what we're goingthrough, shifting from thinking about our circumstances as a threat to thinking about it as achallenge.
And the way this works is asfollows.
When people are experiencingstress, they often askthemselves, and this often happenssubconsciously, two kinds ofquestions.
What's required of me in this situation and what resources do I possess to manageit?
If you answer thosequestions, if youknow,okay, there's a lot that's being asked of me and no way I can deal withthis, that elicits a threat appraisal which predicts all sorts of badstuff, poorperformance, poor subjectivefeelings, poorhealth.
And so that's anotherswitch.
Another lever you can pull to shift how your function in a particularsituation, go from threat tochallenge.
We've looked at several techniques that individuals canpractice, but it'sstriking, ofcourse, that long before you had psychological science come up with solutions to the problem ofchatter, societies have been grappling with ways to help people deal with stressors and out of controlanxiety.
You've cited a remarkable study looking at a technique practiced by Israeli women living in warzones.
What did the women do to bring their anxieties and that chatter undercontrol?
Well they activated an ancient chatter fighting tool whichwas, they prayed ritualistically and praying for them was associated with reductions inanxiety.
Look at cultures around theworld, think about the death of a lovedone.
Lots of different religions prescribe very different kinds of rituals for engaging with that kind of chatter provokingevent.
And research shows that engaging in a ritual can actually be helpful for modulating ourchatter.
One thing to keep in mind is when we're experiencingchatter, we often feel like we don't have control over the thoughts and feelings that are streaming through ourhead.
And one of the reasons we think rituals are helpful is because a ritual is under yourcontrol.
It's a rigid sequence of behaviors that you perform the same way everytime.
That's something that you have agency over and that's a way of compensating for the lack of control we often feel when we're struggling withchatter.
Another way that they can aid us is they're often intentionallydemanding, which is to say rituals are often complicated and to execute them we have to focus on the individual parts of performing those rituals and that can take our attention away momentarily from the chatter we're experiencing and give us a bit ofdistraction.
So that's another pathway through which rituals canhelp.
And of course we see these rituals not just in the context ofreligion, we see this in sports all thetime.
You tell the story of the Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice before every race she swings her arms eighttimes, presses her goggles fourtimes, touches her cap fourtimes.
I mean it does sound religious but clearly it's just about sportsperformance.
Yeah, so there's research which has shown that you can give people arbitrary rituals to engagein, youknow, clap their hands threetimes, spin around in their seat twice and then tap their head and engaging in those kinds of non-religious rituals can be beneficial aswell.
Probably the most famous athlete who's known for doing rituals is RafaelNadal.
Several years ago a journalist asked Nadal what's the hardest thing you struggle with on the tenniscourt?
And his answer surprised a lot of people because he didn't say the hardest thing I do is you know making sure I keep my serve in check or return my opponents backhand and said he says the hardest thing I struggle with is to battle the voice inside myhead.
The hardest thing he struggles with is his chatter on thecourt.
And if you watch Nadal play you will see his solution for managing thatchatter.
He engages in elaborate rituals from the time he enters the court to before every single serve he has specific rituals that he engages in when he's been asked why do you do these wackyrituals?
He says these rituals are a way of ordering mymind, providing the order I seek in amatch.
I understand that you have some rituals of your own to combat your inner chatter before giving a bigspeech.
Ido. I will pound a fist into my hand two or threetimes.
I will give myself a little mini very brief distance selftalk,Papdoc.
Come on man you've gotthis.
And if it's areally, really high stakes event I've been known to do a few push ups right before show time aswell.
We started this conversation by having you tell me about your experience as a young undergrad at Penn who was dealing with setbacks when you first got acollege.
One of the people you reached out to for help at that time was your dad and it turns out that your dad played a really formative role not just in helping you while you were at Penn but in some ways helping you think about the whole idea of introspection moregenerally.
I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your dad and the connection between his insights and the work that you've been doing these last severaldecades.
One of the interesting ahas I had was that although I had been researching chatter and how to manage it for about 20 years I've been thinking about it for close to40.
The reason for that is I had an unconventionaldad.
My dad was someone who on the one hand you know love watching the New York Yankees and driving aggressively on the streets of Brooklyn and you know chain smoking you know Brooklyn Bushy mustache kind of guy but when he wasn't doing all those things he was he was reading Eastern philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita and meditating and when he wasn't doing those things he was talking to me as a three year old about what he was learningabout.
He wasn't a college grad or you know this wasn't he wasn't a professor by the way it's just a hobby that he had he was fascinated by the mind and our ability to manage it and the message that he conveyed to me from the time I was a little kid was whenever something is going wrong turn your attention and word and try to work through thesituation.
The way he said that to me was you know he'd give me this corny phrase go inside find the kernel of truth you would say that was a message that he just conveyed to me over and over from the time I was a little kid and it was a tool that I as a result relied on throughout my child and adolescent so I get into an argument or I ask a girl out they'd say no I'd go inside to introspect try to work through figure out why this happened come up with a solution and move on and then I got to pen I experienced some of my own chatter and then I ended up taking a psychology class and I learned in that class that lots of people do exactly what my dad had told me to do when they struggle with something and they benefit as a result this ability to introspect was a remarkable tool but in some cases that too fell lots of people as well and discovering that puzzle why is it that we have this tool sometimes it helps other times it hurts us that became a passion of mine that I've been trying to solve eversince.
Ethan Cross is a psychologist at the University of Michigan he's the author of the book Chatter the voice in our head why it matters and how to harnessit.
Ethan thank you for talking to me today on HiddenBrain.
Thanks so much for having me Shankar it was apleasure.
If you have follow up questions for Ethan Cross that you'd be willing to share with members of the Hidden Brain audience please record a voice memo and email it to us at ideas athiddenbrain.org.
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