Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Use This Powerful Tool to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Ethan Kross #343

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 173 of the podcast with the award-winning psychologist, Dr. Ethan Cross. Now, we often turn to our inner voice for guidance, ideas, and wisdom, but sometimes this voice can lead us down a rabbit hole of negative self-talk. It's our inner voice that makes us unique as humans. And in this clip, Ethan explains why instead of silencing the chatter, we can learn how to harness it. The inner voice is a tool. It's a tool of the mind.

Starting point is 00:01:58 And when we use it the right way, it can bring us much happiness. It can help us be successful and productive, but when used the wrong way and the manifestation of that is chatter, it can be enormously destructive for our health, for our relationships, for our ability to perform. When we're consumed with chatter, it's not only depleting, it can also have a really negative side effect, which is we can't focus on anything else that matters in our life, like our work or our families. So we're consumed, we're depleting our attention when we're stuck in these states. People get tired. People often feel really tired when they're stressed and worried about things. You know, Ethan, as a doctor, I'm really interested as to how the voice inside our heads can affect our physical health. So

Starting point is 00:02:47 can chatter make us ill? Well, and I think the answer to that question is yes. So how does stress actually make us physically ill? One of the leading theories is the idea that as human beings, we are designed to experience stress, right? Experiencing stress is a really useful adaptive response to a threat in our environment. It's a good system to have. I wouldn't want my worst enemy to not be able to experience stress because they wouldn't survive well in the world. Experiencing a stress response isn't harmful per se. What makes it harmful is when our stress response is triggered and then remains chronically elevated over time. That exerts a wear and tear on the body that we are not designed for. And what helps keep our stress responses

Starting point is 00:03:40 active over time? It's me getting an email last night that I wasn't so happy about and replaying that email in my head, hearing the words spoken over and over and over again, and replaying that email today and tomorrow, thinking how I'm going to respond. This may or may not be a hypothetical event, by the way, but our minds are capable of maintaining our stress responses and when you get people who are ruminating or worrying for long stretches of time that's what the mind is doing it's keeping us in that stress state and that that has been shown to predict a host of physical maladies that range from cardiovascular disease to problems of inflammation to various forms of cancer. And so the link to our physical health is there. It's strong. And I think it's one of the

Starting point is 00:04:33 three big reasons to really be concerned about chatter. Chatter is an aversive state. It feels awful. We don't like this experience of being consumed by our thoughts, our inner noise. What I think we often lack is the ability, knowing exactly what tools we could then use in a very precise way to manage that. You give all these sort of practical solutions. Talk me through some of those ideas. Yes. When a person's struggling with anxious thoughts or depressive cognition, many of those people want to feel better. They want to think differently about the situation. They just don't, they can't do it. And the idea is like stepping back a little can help them follow through with their goal to actually think different, to actually feel better.

Starting point is 00:05:22 So when we experience chatter, we often zoom in on our problems so narrowly. We have tunnel vision. We're focusing on that issue that's bugging us to the exclusion of really everything else that's going on in our lives. And so one of the things we've learned is that what can be really helpful in that situation is to broaden our perspective, helpful in that situation is to broaden our perspective, to step back or zoom out, if you will, to focus on the bigger picture, which often brings alternative ways of making sense of what we're experiencing that can be quite useful. So giving yourself advice like you would someone else and actually using language to help you do that, we call that distanced self-talk. It's a kind of distancing tool. And this ability to get some distance or space from our experience can often be quite

Starting point is 00:06:09 helpful. We call it a distancing tool because if you think about the context in which you use names and second person pronouns, words like you, most of the time we use those parts of speech, we use them when we think about and refer to other people. So the idea here is that when you're using your own name and the word you to refer to yourself, it's a kind of automatic perspective switch. It's getting you, it's leveraging the power of language to help you relate to yourself like you were relating to another person. And interestingly enough, we see people falling back on this tool during times of stress throughout history. Everyone from Julius Caesar to Henry Adams to the actress Jennifer Lawrence to my favorite, you know, LeBron James. During times of stress, people seem to do this odd thing. They start

Starting point is 00:07:06 talking to themselves using their own name. All right, LeBron, here's what you got to do. Jennifer, get your act together. This is just an interview. And what we find with laboratory studies experiments is that when you ask the people who are in the midst of chatter to try to coach themselves through a problem using their own name, it really helps them do that. Rather than thinking about the situation they're facing as a threat, something that they can't handle, when they're talking to themselves like they're advising someone else, they end up giving themselves pep talks. They start reframing the experience as a challenge, something they can manage.

Starting point is 00:07:47 Ethan, you've given a hundred talks before. Why are you so worried about this one? You've never had someone ask you a question that has led you to cry on stage. It's going to be fine and so forth and so on. So it's this small shift that really breaks you out of this threat mode. I can't do it. Oh my God, what's in front of me? And really gives you this sense of self-efficacy that you can manage this situation.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Chatter is described by being totally immersed in that negative state, right? In a very tunnel vision-like way, which makes it very difficult to think objectively about the situation. We're just consumed. We're all emotion. So when that happens, you want to get some space, step back in order to then approach the problem

Starting point is 00:08:31 from a more objective standpoint, which can be helpful. Distant self-talk is one thing you can do, lots of others. I love tools like that because certainly in health and wellness, my mission is to try and make it as accessible as possible to as many different people. And that's a tool that we can all use. Now, let's move on now to what we can do with other people. How can we, when we are experiencing negative chatter that, you know, we just can't stop, you know, we often want to share that we just can't stop. We often want to share that with a friend or our network as a way of giving us support. And there's a couple of phases to that, which I don't think we consciously think about. We think that, oh, I'm not feeling this so good. Let me call up my buddy

Starting point is 00:09:18 and talk about it with them. But you're sort of demonstrating how that's not always enough. about it with them. But you're sort of demonstrating how that's not always enough. How we talk to other people about our chatter, I think is a really interesting topic because we know from lots of research that when people experience strong negative emotions, they're intensely motivated to share them with other people, to talk about them. There are very few exceptions to this rule. We tend not to talk about them. There are very few exceptions to this rule. We tend not to talk about things that we experience shame about or trauma, but all other kinds of negative experiences,

Starting point is 00:09:53 when they're triggered, we often want to share them. And our culture and our characters, they often give us a message which says, hey, when something bad is happening, vent it, get it out. It's not good to hold it in. And I think that's the temptation that a lot of us have too. We want to find someone to just unload. What the research in this area suggests is it's not as simple as just venting our feelings. And in fact, venting our feelings often backfires and makes us feel

Starting point is 00:10:25 worse. So here's how this works. Let's say I'm really struggling with a problem. And I find, you know, I call you, we're buddies now. And I tell you about the rejection I just had from my 11 year old daughter. It's a frequent experience for me. And, and I'm ruminating about it. And I start telling you about what happened and what I felt and And you, oh, man, that sounds awful. Tell me what you did. That was so nice of what you tried to do. And she said that that's terrible. And so you keep on kind of getting more out of me and you feel really close and connected. So when you empathically connect with me, that validates my experience. It makes me know that there's someone else in this world who's willing to listen. That feels good in the moment.

Starting point is 00:11:15 It strengthens our friendship bonds. But if that's all we do, just talk about what happened and what I felt, it doesn't do anything to help me work through the problem, it doesn't do anything to help me work through the problem. It doesn't do anything to help me reframe the way I'm thinking about this experience that will ultimately lead me to feel better. So the best kinds of conversations when someone approaches you for help with their chatter are conversations that actually do two things. First, you do learn about the other person's

Starting point is 00:11:45 experience. You need to find out what they went through, what they're feeling. And it's important for them to be able to share that with you to a certain degree. But then at a certain point in the conversation, when the person who's talking about what happened to them is ready for it, you want to start trying to nudge them to go broader. Hey, so that sounds awful, but you've gotten in lots of little tiffs with your son before. How have you dealt with them in the past and how have they resolved? Or that happens to me all the time. Here's what I do in that situation. break you out of that tunnel vision where you're just harping on the negativity over and over and over again. So I'm trying to connect with you, but then also help you go broader. And it's doing both of those things that we find in research is useful for not only getting people to connect well, but also helping them work through their experiences in ways that nip their chatter in the bud. Yeah. There's sort of a couple of

Starting point is 00:12:46 things there really. So from one perspective, it's like, okay, I'm struggling with my chatter. I can phone up one of my buddies and talk to them and we then connect. Okay, that's stage one. That's great. I feel there's a supportive tribe around me. I'm not alone in the world. You know, for social animals like humans, that's a really rewarding feeling to have that we're not alone, that there's people around us to help us and keep us safe. But sometimes we're missing that second part, which is the solution. How can we help that person think about this differently? And you said, oh, you know, this has happened to you lots of times before. How did you deal with it then? That's just one strategy, isn't it? Because you can ask them a question, you can maybe provide

Starting point is 00:13:30 a solution, although you've got to be very careful when you provide a solution. We've all got these different stages, right? Different people may require different stages of that connection first. But then also when you do get to that sort of solution phase one of the options was what you just did in your example but another option was you can help silently there are going to be lots of situations in people's lives when they see someone who's struggling but that person has not asked for help explicitly they're they're suffering alone. And for whatever reason, they haven't approached you. That's a situation where this other kind of support, which I call invisible support, becomes really relevant. One of the things we've learned is that when we volunteer support for

Starting point is 00:14:21 other people when it's not asked for, it can often backfire spectacularly. This happens to me with my kids all the time. I teach for a living. I do math and science. And I see, let's say, my oldest daughter, Maya, struggling with her homework. Hey, sweetie, let me show you how to do this. Not that way. You do it this way. And it's like Mount Edna erupts. Did I ask you for help? You think I can't do it? So what's happened there is I've threatened the other person, in this case, my daughter, her sense of self-efficacy, this idea that, hey, I can manage this thing on my own. That's a really powerful set of cognitions. The sense of self-efficacy, we know it predicts lots of things, performance, well-being in life,

Starting point is 00:15:16 feeling that we have control over this situation and we can do it. When we inject ourselves into the equation, we can often threaten that. So in those situations, what can often be really useful is helping without the other person knowing you're helping. So when my wife is really, she's a dietician, when she's overwhelmed with work and clients, I'll figure out a way of taking care of dinner and getting the dry cleaning, right? That eases the burden. If that falls on her plate, that's one thing less she has to worry about. That's easing her stress load. Or there are other ways you can help

Starting point is 00:15:50 invisibly too. Let's say there's a student in my lab who's really struggling with their writing. And so maybe there's a workshop on campus, a guest speaker is coming to talk about a topic. I'll write an announcement to the lab. Hey, this sounds like a great talk for all of us. Why don't we go together? Right? So that's a way of getting information to that student who's struggling, but without me shining a spotlight and say, hey, you need to attend this because your writing stinks. So there are lots of ways that we can try to help outside of awareness invisibly. And I think that's a powerful awareness to have when it comes to our relationships. And again, the big picture here is we're talking about really breaking down how to get good support from others. And on the other

Starting point is 00:16:40 end of the spectrum, how to provide good support. We're breaking down it into bite-sized steps so as to allow people to be much, much more deliberate about how they go about seeking and providing support in their lives. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Use This Powerful Tool to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Ethan Kross #343

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