Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why the Voice Inside Your Head Can Sound Like a Jerk

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Today’s episode is about the science of self-talk—and how our relationship to our own inner monologue can become toxic. Psychologist Ethan Kross joins the show to explain his work on emotion regulation, his book 'Chatter' on the science of negative self-talk, why the ability to have an inner monologue can be a kind of superpower, and how to harness it. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_.Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ethan Kross Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today's episode is about our inner monologue. If I asked you, who's the person that you talk to most in the world? You might say your best friend, your spouse, parent, sister, colleague. But for most of us, the answer is us.

We are the person we talk to most. And that's because most people are blessed and cursed with the ability to think in words. We replay past conversations. We imagine future dialogues. We pump ourselves up. We repeat shopping list to commit them to memory on our way to CVS. Shampoo, conditioner, soap, toothbrush. Shampoo, conditioner, soap, toothbrush.

But that voice in our head isn't always very nice to us. It isn't always very useful. Sometimes it's just a jerk. Sometimes when we wake up in the morning, the silent monologue inside our heads is a little bit like the title character in the Netflix comedy BoJack Horseman. Breakfast. I don't deserve breakfast.

Shut up. Don't feel sorry for yourself. What does that do? Get breakfast, you stupid, fat ass. These are cookies. This is not breakfast. You are eating cookies. Stop it.

There is a word for this sort of looping self-talk, where you can't get the anxious thought out of your head, and it just burrows in there, like an earworm of negativity, playing on repeat. The psychologist Ethan Cross calls this chatter. Today's guest is Ethan Cross. In today's episode, we talk about his book, Chatter.

the science of our inner monologue, why so many people suffer from negative looping self-talk and how to make friends with the voice inside your head. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ethan Cross, welcome to the podcast. Derek Thompson. So great to see you. Thanks for having me on. So to start, why don't you say a bit about what it is that you study at the University of Michigan? So in a nutshell, I studied the nuts and bolts that explain how people can manage their emotions when they want to manage their emotions.

And what I mean by nuts and bolts is I try to understand the mechanics that underlie our ability or, in many cases, inability to manage our emotional lives. And so sometimes it takes us to studying the brain. We focus on people's behavior a lot. And we also do big intervention studies to see whether the instance. we gleam from the science that we do can actually be translated to help people manage their emotions effectively in their daily lives. So one part of my daily life that is a sometimes annoyance and sometimes extraordinary help is the fact that I talk to myself constantly. I have a very loud inner monologue. My sub vocal self-talk sometimes sounds very, very vocal. I had never read about

this concept, though, in any formality. And so it was so awesome to get your book chatter to help break it down. Let's start with a definition. What is self-talk? What is chatter? Well, before I give you the definition, I just want to normalize your experience for you and to let you know that if you have a very active inner voice, you know, you're not alone. Many people do. So let's start with this concept of the inner voice, which is where I like to start things. So when scientists use the term inner voice, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use words to reflect on different features of our daily experience. If I were to present you with a number, like a phone number, and I'd ask you, hey, just repeat this in your head. So 209, 0501. You do that silently.

That's you using your inner voice. If you go to the grocery store, you walk down the aisle and you think to yourself, hey, what am I supposed to buy? and you go down the list. Eggs, cheese, milk, that's your inner voice. Your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system. Basic system of the human mind that lets us keep verbal information active for short periods of time. And we rely on that system every day throughout the day to live our lives. So that's one thing your inner voice helps you do.

Another thing it helps you do is simulate and plan. So before I give a big presentation, I will go over what I'm going to say. usually word for word in my head when I'm going for a walk around the hotel right I'm rehearsing that's me using my inner voice I don't just and I don't just simulate what I'm going to say I then imagine what is someone else going to say to me and then I respond in my head I go through that whole interaction using my inner voice so we use our inner voice to simulate and plan we also use our inner voice to motivate ourselves so this morning I'm exercising doing a really high intensity interval training, whatever it's called, hit class. I'm miserable. I'm in pain. And the instructor's

telling me to do more painful things. And I start talking myself, you come on, you son of a, you got this. And I'm being pretty firm, but I'm motivating myself, an athlete's report doing this all the time. And then finally, and I wonder if this is where your self-talk really perks up, and knowing you a little bit outside of this podcast. I suspect it does, but I might be wrong. So you tell me. For those of you who are listening, Derek's face now is becoming very serious as he waits for me to offer him my appraisal of the situation. So we use our inner voice to storify our lives. Like things happen in our lives that we're trying to make sense of we are meaning making machines. Why did this happen? Why didn't I get this gig? Why did this person

say this to me? What should I do? And we use our inner voice to create narrative. narratives that help us make sense of life. So those are just a couple of the key functions your inner voice allows you to do. It all falls into the domain of talking to ourselves, but in lots of different ways for lots of different reasons. Your book has so many interesting little details about self-talk. One of them is that according to one study, we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking 4,000 words per minute out loud, which put in perspective means that or put in perspective, the contemporary American president state of the union speeches typically run around 6,000 words and last over an hour. So it's extraordinary the degree to which we can

talk to ourselves in a way that is really, really concentrated and fast. I want to focus on this concept of negative self-talk, because that's one of the key parts of your book. Before we get into the mechanics of negative self-talk and why it's such a common part of the human experience. Why don't we just make this personal very quickly? Give me an example of negative self-talk or chatter from your own life. Happy to. This is payback for putting you on a spot before about your own self-talk. So negative self-talk or, well, actually, let me distinguish between negative self-talk and chatter because I think there's a really, it's a subtle, but important distinction.

Negative self-talk is when there's just negative content that you are saying, you're saying, oh, I screwed up or I made a mistake. That would be negative self-talk. The difference between negative self-talk and what I call chatter is chatter involves getting stuck on a negative thought loop. So it's not just, oh, I screwed up. And then I learned from my experience move on. It's, oh, I screwed up.

Shit, what am I going to do? I can't believe I screwed up. Why did I do it? And you start looping over and over again. And so the idea is when problems happen, what we often do is we try to make sense of them using our inner voice, this capacity to talk to ourselves. But we don't come up with clear solutions and we start spinning instead in ways that are enormously dysfunctional. That's what chatter is all about getting stuck in those negative thought loops. And I think it's an incredibly common experience. I'll give you an example of my own as you asked me to do. So several years ago when my youngest daughter was a newborn, we'd have this ritual that we engaged in every day before she'd take her nap. I'd change her diaper. And then I would kind of like take her. She's very little. And I kind of like, you know, swoop her in the air, like she's an airplane going for a spaceship, going up and down, back and forth. And then we're going in for like, oh, you know, it's going to be a really rocky landing. And I then push her down rapidly into the crib, but then stop soft, very soft landing in the crib. And she absolutely

love this experience. If you were to have watched it, it'd be like a positive mood induction for anyone. She's oogling and giggling and I'm having fun. And then we participate in this ritual one time. And as I take her in for that smooth. landing at the very end, it's not just smiles and giggles. Instead, it's, it screams. And what is going on here? And she's holding her elbow really tightly. And what ended up happening was she, she grabbed onto my shirt as I, as I pushed her into, you know, put her down into the crib gently with all the best intentions, mind you. And when she, when she held onto my shirt, um, her elizabeth. elbow was dislodged essentially from the socket nurse's elbow. It's pretty common experience in

newborns. And I felt totally helpless. I felt such terrible, emotional and even some physical pain myself looking at, hey, here's this being that I care so much about. And I've just hurt you unnecessarily. How did this happen? What did I do? I start looping. Right? First, it's about her, then it goes up a level of abstraction. What is my wife going to say? Should I call her? She's doing this. Do I interrupt? Oh, boy. Then it goes up another level. Wait a second. We have to take her to the doctor. And what is the doctor going to say? They're going to think that I abused her and that maybe this was a form of, you know, and so my mind starts spinning as I attempt to work through the situation and how to deal with it. And I'm playing all the worst case scenarios.

I'm catastrophizing, and I'm a wreck as a result. That's what chatter is. That was a pretty severe case for me when it happened. But if you look at the science, what you learn is that we all, well, I don't want to say we all, most of us experience these chatter blips throughout our lives, and they can vary in intensity. And when they occur, they can be enormously disruptive without trying to be hyperbolic. I think they are one of the big problems we face as a species.

And I say that based on the science. So that's what chatter is. That was my one example of an experience I had. We could probably spend the whole time talking about more if you like. I think everyone has that example, especially of something that you deeply regret that happened very subtly. When you make a small mistake, when you can imagine a parallel reality in which that tiny mistake had not been made,

how can you not loop and loop and loop and essentially think through a bunch of, if only something slightly different had happened, I wouldn't be in this terrible position. I want to bring the topic to sports. This is a Bringer podcast network. This is a sports podcast network. And I feel like this issue, the mental gymnastics that athletes go through is this perennial topic that I'm really interested in. And in particular, I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of professional baseball players,

getting the yips, which basically means to people who don't follow baseball, that after a certain period of their life, some baseball players literally cannot throw the ball properly anymore. The second baseman Chuck Knoblock had this situation, and famously Rick Ankeel, a star prospect for the St. Louis Cardinals, also faced the yips. Just very briefly, tell us Rick Ankeel's story and what this tells us about the effects of chatter. I'm happy to share that story with you, but I have a question first. Was the Chuck Knoblock reference, a dig because you know I'm a Yankees fan? Dude, I'm a Yankees fan.

I suffered through it. I suffered my own negative self-talk, just having to watch Chuck Knoblock have to throw the ball into the stands over and over and over. The emotional pain. And for those of you who don't know Chuck Knoblock or maybe you're not like super baseball fans, Chuck Knoblock was an all-star second basement who actually couldn't throw the ball five feet accurately. It was really remarkable. So let me tell you about another remarkable case of the Yips, and then I'll link it back to chatter. And that's a great way of actually talking about why this can be so disruptive.

So Rick Ann Keel was what was generally considered to be a phenom when he came into Major League Baseball. He was touted as having the potential to be one of the greatest pitchers of all time, played for the St. Louis Cardinals. and throughout his first season in the league, he performed like a phenom. He helped get his team to the playoffs. And then during his, I believe it was his first appearance in the playoffs, something really strange happened. He winds up and he throws a wild pitch. Andrew Jones in the dirt back to the screen.

And over the second base goes Greg Maddox on the wild pitch. It's a special. Now, most pitchers throw a wild pitch every now and again, but not. Ann Keel, he was like Greg Maddox in his, his precision, right? Like he had thrown the ball tens of thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands of times. He could get it into the mid with his eyes closed, but he throws this wild pitch. And so he, when that happens, he stops and he goes, huh, I just threw a wild pitch. And gets the ball, shrugs it off,

winds up, throws it again, and he throws another wild pitch. Another wild pitch over the head of Hernandez and back to the backstop. And another and another and another. And when I'm talking wild, like, you can actually go watch this on YouTube. It is painful to watch us. I mean, you see the ball sailing into the backdrop. I mean, it is, it is, he's missing the plate by a wide margin. Wild pitch.

And then Chipper Jones up. Wild pitch, Galaraga up with runners at second and third. a save of a would-be wild pitch, and then on a walk to Goneraga wild pitch, and now another wild pitch. We'll go into the Wildness Hall of Fame, I think. And Keel eventually gets pulled out of the game. He comes back again for his more wild pitches. The next season, they give him another go.

He's got to drink alcohol before the game to calm his nerves. He's so nervous all of a sudden. He still can't find the play. plate, he eventually leaves majorly baseball and never actually pitches again professionally. He does reinvent himself as an outfielder later on his career, but pitching for him, someone who was on track to be the best ever at what he does was undone. Why did this happen? Because of his self-talk.

So he's on the mound, and what he starts to do is he starts focusing on all of the individual pieces of his windup. Now, let me back up a second. So when you're pitching or performing any complicated sports behavior, you are doing something very complex without thinking, because we've developed these habits. We link together lots of different movements into one seamless whole. So if you're pitching, you grip the ball a certain way, you step back, you lift your leg, you move your shoulders and so forth. Like it's a super complicated windup. And what you teach kids to do in Little League is to perform that action without thinking in the same way that you don't really think when you walk down the street anywhere, right? You don't really think about,

hey, how far should I lift my leg up when I'm running on the treadmill? You just do it. What Chatter does, which is what I would argue and Keel experienced on the mound that day, is that is it zooms us in on the thing we're worried about. So if I'm worried about my pitch, tunnel vision, that's all I could think about is, am I holding the ball tight enough? Am I getting enough momentum as I move back and forth? And what we've learned from laboratory research

is once you start zooming in on all of the individual components of a complex behavior, the whole thing unravels. There's something so interesting about this and subtly strange, which is that chatter is both near universal and somewhat self-destructive. If you imagined many people's inner voice

to be an outer person, that person would be an asshole. The individual would not want to hang out with the person who has set up residence inside of their brains. And it makes me wonder, if chatter is often so negative and often so destructive

to our performance, or our focus, why do we have it? What neurological purpose does it serve? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, the insight into the asshole inside us is, I think, a powerful one. And it turns out some of the tools that can help people manage chatter involve simply recognizing that feature of our experience. So why does this happen? I think of the inner voice as an unwieldy tool. It is a tool of the mind that when we wheeled, it with precision, it can be really, really helpful. But we don't get a user's manual for how to activate this tool. I have yet to encounter an adult who had a formal class in elementary school

or middle school on how to manage your inner voice. Right. And so we have this capacity that actually works for us, I would argue, the majority of the time, right? The majority of the time that we're using words in our life to simulate and plan and make meaning, I think it's often helping us the times that it doesn't help us stand out because we know people have the sensitivity to negative information. Negative stuff looms much larger than everything else. But in some cases, especially when there's a lot of emotion, what that can do is it can make it difficult for us to activate this tool well. One of the explanations for why, that happens if you want to dig a layer deeper is when we're experiencing intense negative emotion

of the sort that characterizes chatter, that often consumes many of the prefrontal resources we have. So prefrontal cortex evolutionarily more recent parts of the brain that help us think flexibly and underlie our ability to change the way we think about things, like rethink things. Many of those networks are depleted by our chatter. So it's as though the resources that we have to manage our inner voice are themselves being consumed by the bad stuff, which makes it really important to understand. Like, hey, so what are the back doors that allow us to regain control of the situation? And studying those back doors is what I've spent most of my career doing. And the good news is that, despite how frequent and common chatter is, there are a lot of things people can do.

So I think there's a lot of hope out there. I want to go one level deeper on this concept of the blinding effects of negativity or the fact that negativity, for whatever reason, dose for dose, seems to consume our attention more than mild positivity. So I am what you might call a failed meditator. I have attempted meditation many times in my life. I really want to be a habitual meditator, but as a habit, it just does not stick. That said, one of the takeaways that I've gotten from my many failed misadventures in meditation

is that I like to try to watch my mind, especially when I'm feeling something negative, angry or jealous or frustrated, disappointed. I try to concentrate on that feeling of anger or jealousy, et cetera, and ask, what is happening here? How has this emotional color tone taken over my entire attention,

sometimes even feel the vision. Like I can't even focus on the physical world when I'm feeling really upset. And you had this passage in your book that absolutely leapt out at me. It goes, quote, negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. Verbal rumination concentrates our attention

narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us. End quote. I don't know if you want to take this in an evolutionary way or a neurological way, but why does negativity do this, do this to us? Why is it so hard to focus on the physical world when we're thinking negative thoughts? Well, the reason why is because the negative stuff is, if you take an evolutionary point of view, the negative stuff in our lives is so much more dangerous to our survival and our ability

to pass on our genes than everything else. we're talking about negative, we're talking about actually living or dying in a threat, right? So we need to like hit the pause button and mobilize the like, you know, not just the Navy SEALs, but like the Army, the Fifth Regiment, the Air Force, like everything, all hands on deck to deal with this stuff. And so that's a pretty crude response that we've evolved. But it gets the job done because it certainly focuses on. us in where our focus needs to be. What we have also evolved the ability to do, though, is to hit that timeout button. You can activate it via meditation or like 30 other things. Let's get back to

that meditation or other stuff in a little bit. But there are lots of other things that we've evolved like backdoors, escape hatches that we do possess, that we've learned about. of. The problem is that we don't teach people about these backdoors. Like some, you know, some, I talk about like 30 or so tools in my book where science-based things people can do. My guess is that some people have anecdotally kind of learned those experiences just through trial and error in their lives. Maybe their parents taught them about a few. But then there are a lot of others that just aren't on the radar. And so, so like, you know, the reason I wrote this book actually was to take what I think is really useful information

and put it out there for people so that they can figure out what to do when the all-consuming vortex of negativity, we all have our different ways of describing it when it strikes. And we're going to get to the advice aspect of your book in a second. I just want to hit one more point on describing self-talk and chatter.

I like to think that our ability to be in dialogue with ourselves, to think about the past, to think about the future, to imagine alternative timelines, it is a kind of superpower. I mean, it may be one of the great intellectual superpowers that our species has over other species,

that we have this capacity to have other voices within us that we can learn from. So what can we say positively about self-talks ability to improve our judgment and even our creativity. Our ability to silently use language helps us do lots of things.

It can be a source of innovation and creativity. You're talking about what I think of as mental time travel. My ability to go back in time in my mind and work through why I screwed this thing up or succeeded in this regard, that is an essential capacity that allows me to learn and grow. it's a tool that allows me to learn from my mistakes to savor the victories in ways that elevate my mood and motivate me moving forward. That's going back in time and using self-talk to work through some issues. I can also go forward in time in my head and try to anticipate problems or fantasize about pleasant things happening in the future. That ability to be flexible

and where we focus our attention and to recruit language to help us work through different scenarios, I would not want to live life without that tool. It would really, I think, get me in trouble. Actually, I tell a story in the book about a neurologist, not a neuroscientist who actually provide some really unique evidence of what I just said, how disruptive life might be without inner voice, she ended up having a stroke that temporarily impaired her linguistic centers in the brain made it impossible for her to talk to other people as well as impossible for her to talk to herself. So she couldn't repeat a number in her head using words. She couldn't try to use words to sort

through her life and make sense of her experiences. And she described this experience as tremendously disruptive. So we don't want to get rid of the inner voice. This is what people ask me all the time. Hey, cross. Actually, they're not that. They usually say, hey, Professor Cross or Ethan, it'd be fine if they say cross. But the question they normally pose to me is, shut this thing up.

How do I get rid of it? And what I usually respond with is we don't want to get rid of our inner voice. What we want to do is figure out how do you harness it, to free it up, to do all the wonderful things it's capable of doing without all the bad stuff, without the yips, without the problems that it can have for your relationships and for your physical health.

This concept of mental time travel and the mental time machine, I don't want to be dramatic, but I do think it's like one of the most important ideas in the world. Like there is so much in meditation and self-help about living in the present, right? Be here now, be here now. And I do think it's like kind of bullshit.

Like as a species, we are not built to be here now. We are built with the mind that is designed to travel and we are better off as individuals and as a species, I think, for it. Like when you're in the time machine, the mental time machine, the key is, I think, are you driving or are you being driven? Like when we're, I'll speak personally, when I am lost in regret in thinking, oh, if only I just did that, or lost in future anxiety, thinking, about some event that I really, really want to happen and I'm just not paying attention to my

surroundings. Or maybe I'm lost in that sideways time corridor of like being jealous about somebody else or wishing I had what someone else has. I am truly lost. I am truly lost when I'm being driven by that time machine out of my present. But when I can come back from that, when I can come back from regret to the present, when I can come back from anxiety of the present, and I can learn from regret and learn from anxiety, those examples of mental time travel, I think are really important to my ability to learn and get better judgment and become more creative. And it's about whether or not I have the capacity to realize that I'm mentally time traveling and then get back in that driver's seat and come back to the present, like Marty

McFly. Like get back in and come back home. And that seems to me to be such an important element of self-talk. How do we wrangle it enough that we get the best of it and then come back to our here and now when it serves us. Does that concept of driving the time machine sit well with you? Absolutely. I completely agree the way I've described it is you want to be able to travel fluently through time into the past or the future. The problem is that for a lot of us, we get in that time machine in our minds and then we go to the past or the future and then it breaks down, not unlike Marty McFleigh. We get stuck and that's not good. We don't want to get stuck in the future or past. So the question is not how to rid yourself of the time machine

so you're always in the moment. This would not be a good thing. There are species that are always in the moment. They tend to have like multiple legs, creepy crawlies, like cockroaches, things like that. I mean, truly, those are animals that are driven by stimulus response right here and the now. one of the things that makes us so incredibly unique is human beings our ability to not be in the moment all the time we don't want to shut that capacity down uh i i don't think it's actually possible to shut it down unless you have some kind of neural impairment to be honest i think it's actually an unattainable goal um so what we want to do is is just figure out how do you travel in your mind more effectively using your inner voice and that's what that's what the science

that my book is all about. I want to say one thing, you touched on this cultural maxim of living in the moment right now that's very popular. And, you know, I think it is important to clarify that in cases where you find yourself getting lost in the past or future, refocusing on the moment can be useful. I think that there is data to support that. The problem is we've gone from recognizing the fact that, hey, there are some instances in which focusing on the moment can be useful to think, we go from that to, hey, we always have to be in the moment. And if we're not in the moment, that's us not achieving our full potential. And that is fundamentally wrong. It does not cohere with how the brain works, how the mind works, and is an important distinction,

I think we need to recognize. I have this kind of bastardized and definitely not. expert idea that maybe you can just give me some feedback on it because it's something that I've taken out of my reading of yours and other neuroscience books and books about meditation, which is this idea of three layers of thought. So at the bottom layer of thinking or the bottom layer of attention, you have sort of pure sensory experience, that is what flow, you know, Mihai's Sheks and Miha's concept of flow really feels like. So when I'm playing a board game, when I'm playing a sport, when I'm having an awesome dinner conversation with someone with great wine and food,

there's no rumination, there's no anxiety. I'm fully plunged entirely into the moment. That's that sort of first layer of attention. And it tends to feel really good. Let's be honest. The second layer is where chatter lives. It's getting lost in thought, getting lost in anxiety or regret or jealousy, or looping ideas about, oh, if I had only done this,

that second layer of thought you really want to stay out of. But a lot of meditation and mindfulness research seems to be about building a third tier of attention, which is a tier that looks down into level two, right? Your ability to say, aha, that is regret. I identify you as jealousy. I am identifying you as rumination. And you can see all of these negative effects

and the ability to see them is its own strategy for eliminating them. You're like a cop shining a light on the suspect, and the suspect runs away. Sometimes just identifying the negative thought can help to move it away. So you have my totally made-up theory of like three layers of attention. How does that, how does your understanding of chatter and self-talk and thought fit or not fit with my sort of three-layer theory? Well, I like the name, the three-layer theory. It is catchy. I actually think you do a nice job providing a heuristic for how to think about these different mental states that we often find ourselves in. You know, when you talk about like there's the sensory experience, the harmful chatter, and then the layer three, the way I would translate that is the middle layer is thinking. in a destructive way.

And then going up a level is what we call metacognition. It's thinking about thinking. And thinking about thinking, if you know how to do it, can be really, really useful. Essentially what we're talking about here is getting some psychological distance from your own experience, which is another thing that, you know, as far as I know, human beings are unique in the degree to which we are capable of doing this. I can step outside myself and actually reflect, hey, what is, you know, Ethan feeling this way. Why is he doing that? Let me try to give Ethan some advice. Now that may sound

totally wacky, kooky, like the kind of stuff that we make fun of on television shows. But in fact, there's a lot of research which shows that this ability to go to what you're calling level three, number one, can be really helpful. Number two, there are a variety of ways that you can get to that level. Their variety of level three tactics, if you will. This is now beginning to sound like an NSA show that might appear at 9pm

on channel on 5th or something. Level 3 tactics? Yeah. Level 3 tactics. Mind level 3 tactics. Stranger Things theme, like coming soon to a season near you. So let's talk about these level 3 tactics, if you will,

metacognition or what I call distancing, getting some space from from your experience. Let me break down for you why this is useful. And then what are a few different tools that exist to help you do that so that if anyone is interested in maybe trying this stuff at home, they have some concrete things they could do. We talked earlier about when you experience chatter, you zoom in, the negativity permeates your entire being, right? What if this, what if that, why, the grad, all this bad stuff. When that happens, what you want to do, is kind of look at that bigger picture.

Take a step back, if you will, and see that bigger space. Like, recognize, you know, Derek, maybe you didn't talk so nicely to Ethan on the podcast, but you don't need to leave sleep. He's not going to hold a grudge. You know, like big picture, what is that one conversation going to mean in my entire life? Like, is that the only, right? So when we look at that bigger picture, we often find that there are solutions to our problems and stepping outside of ourselves, getting some object to.

can help us do that. You've done a nice job setting up the problem of the voice in our head and why it's often a jerk. This is a good place to switch to talking about solutions. What do the level three tactics look like? How do we climb far enough above our thoughts to see them with clarity and remove ourselves from that looping negativity? You talked earlier about meditation. That's one tool that people can use to try to get this objectivity.

One of the things that meditation teaches people to do. is be able to recognize that the thoughts floating through their head are not intrinsically who they are. They're just these mental events. So you start repeating a mantra over and over and focusing on your breath. And what most people learn really quickly is how amazingly difficult that is. Your mind wanders somewhere else. Eventually you have the recognition, oh, there are all these thoughts passing by, but I don't really need to cling to those thoughts. So that's what I would call pretty effortful intervention. It's effortful because it takes 15 or 20 minutes a day, once or twice a day to do that. There are other distancing tools we can use.

We can think to ourselves. We can do something called distant self-talk. So this is a linguistic tool that involves using your name to try to give yourself advice, like you would give advice to someone else. You said before, it's remarkable that I have an asshole living inside my head. quite a bit. What's interesting is, like, when your friends come to you with their problems, like, how often do you activate that inner asshole when talking to them?

I would guess never. Like, you're a supportive friend. You're trying to help them. So when we use our names to try to work through our problems, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage a situation? Names and second person pronouns like you, those are parts of speech that we usually use when we're referring to other people, right? someone else. And so the link in your head between using a name and thinking about another person

is super tight. So this is like a psychological jiu-jitsu move. So when you start using your own name to think about your problems to try to work through them, it essentially thrusts you into this advice giving mode. It's like, all right, here's what I would say to a best friend. And that makes it a lot easier to work through our problems objectively. So that's another kind of distancing tool. one last one and I'll throw it back to you that maybe brings us full circle is something that I call mental time travel it's a specific kind of mental time travel and what it involves doing is when you're down that rabbit hole of negativity think to yourself how are you going to feel about this problem tomorrow if that doesn't take the edge off think to yourself how am i going to feel about this next week

next month, 10 years from now. And if 10 years doesn't work, ask yourself, how are you going to feel about this when you're dead? That is the ultimate time travel. And what that does is that those are other ways of broadening our perspective, right? Life is filled with ups and downs, but guess what? Almost everything that's negative, even the really big stuff eventually comes down. And you traveling in time in your mind in this way, we call this temporal distancing, this

makes it clear that what you're going through as awful as it is, it will eventually fade. And that gives us hope that can be really useful when it comes to chatter. Tell me about the research that you've done or the research that you've read around venting. Because to a certain extent, I think there's probably a conventional wisdom that when you have a problem, it's good to just talk about it. And to talk about it even in a very unstructured way, to bitch about it, to vent about it. does venting work? Yeah, it certainly feels good to vent in some ways, right? Like when bad things are happening.

You know, if there's one chapter in the book that I feel really strongly about getting the message of that chapter out to people in the world, it is the chapter on other people and the role they play in either helping or hurting us unintentionally when it comes to our chatter. As you've described, Derek, there is a very strong, popular belief that when when bad things happen what you want to do is not keep it bottled up inside you want to find someone to just get those emotions out to just get it out don't keep it in vent your feelings this is uh I call this an ancient idea it goes all the way back to Aristotle was popularized by Freud and People magazine has run with it

ever since so it's it's really out there right there's been a lot of research on this and here's what we have learned venting venting leads people to feel closer and more connected to the people they're talking to. So it feels good to know that I can call you and share what's going through my head right now in a very vulnerable way. The fact that you're willing to take the time to listen, to empathize, to validate my experience as a human being, that's really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between us. Here's the problem if all I do is vent in a conversation with someone else. So all I do is just, Derek, you wouldn't believe what happened at this faculty meeting earlier today.

This person said this. It really pissed me off. And that's, you know, and then just keep going, looping over and over on that. If all we do is talk about the bad stuff, I leave the conversation feeling really close and connected to you. I feel great about our friendship. But I leave that conversation just as upset, if not more upset than when I started. because all I've done is I've kept that negative information active in our head. One way to think about this metaphorically is the way the mind works in terms of emotion is

kind of like the game of dominoes. You activate one negative thought and that pings another negative thought and a related negative thought and you think about all the different experiences with that person who pissed you off and how much you hate them and you're miserable when you're done. So that is the hazard to pure venting, which raises the question. All right. So should we not vent? What should we do instead?

You don't want to not vent. What you want to do is find people to talk to who let you do two things. Number one, you do want to take some time to share what's going through your mind and your heart. It's good to share your feelings. But at a certain point in the conversation, the person that you're talking with, ideally helps broaden your perspective. Someone else who's not going through what you are going through is an ideal position to help you work through that experience because they've got the objectivity.

They have the psychological distance. They are already at Derek Thompson's level three of NSA, you know, tactic level awareness, right? Like, they're there. They can be that objective guide. And so, so, you know, if we were to role play how this. might work. Let's say I'm the, I'm the friend, you come to me, you're, you're, you've got tons of chatter. First, I'd ask you some questions. Hey, tell me what happened. Oh my God, that sounds awful. Yeah, I'd feel the same way too. I'd learn about what you're going through. And then in a certain

point in the conversation, um, I might, I might just, hey, can I, can I offer you? I have a thought. Can I share it with you? Um, you might say, no, I want to keep talking for a little bit. And if so, I would keep listening. I'd try again. But in other instances, you might say, yeah, please, what do you think, Ethan? And then I'd start, I'd start kind of riffing, right? Like, I might share with you how I've dealt with a similar situation or ask you, how do you think you could have dealt with this more effectively?

Or give other prompts to you to help broaden your perspective. That is the key to getting good chatter support. It involves talking to people who allow you to do two things. share your emotions and work through them. You don't want to find people who just focus on one or the other of those two processes. It's interesting because the metaphor that occurs to me right now is that negative chatter is a little bit like a whirlpool, almost like a jacuzzi. And you can get stuck in it.

You can feel sucked into it and you can't get out. And acts of distancing, anything that puts your mind or attention outside of that jacuzzi is good. If you talk to yourself in a third person, Derek, you need to shape up. You need to stop thinking about this and move on and just like focus on the trees, take a walk. That's me getting out of the jacuzzi. Me having a conversation with Ethan and you working through, here's ways that you can fix this problem. Here's ways that other people have fixed this problem. That's getting out of the jacuzzi too.

But if I just want to vent, if I just want a bitch about the problem, that's me inviting you into the jacuzzi. Right. I'm not actually getting out at all. My attention is actually being sucked into the whirlpool. I want to talk about one other way. No, no, I think it's a very powerful metaphor. I think it's a very powerful metaphor. I'm in the jacuzzi.

Here we go. We didn't know we go there. It feels good to have company in the jacuzzi, even though it may be, you know, shriveling up your skin or whatever, have the negative physical effects off and take the metaphor too far. I should say, I don't even like jacuzis. The metaphor might have occurred to me because I already, already have a negative association with Jacucese.

Right. Go right ahead. Well, it certainly is evocative visually. But yeah, I think it's great. Inviting them in so you could share in my misery, misery loves company. I think that is true. There's science behind that. But the goal isn't just to have,

I would argue that for most people, we don't want to just have company in misery. We want to have company and then get out of the misery. And that's where step two comes into play. This, you know, there's a lot of, like, decades of research go into what I just described to you before. And this is not my own research. It's the research of other folks across the world.

I say decades to convey that, like, there's a lot of complexity to how all this works that scientists have figured out. But what I love about it is that the take-home, practical take-home points here are really, really clear. They're like two things you need to be alert to. And if you have these two features of what it looks like to talk to someone productively, like share emotions and then also work through them, it makes it much easier to find the right guides in life. So I like it for that reason. You had one more prescription that I thought was so interesting, which is that you said that

clutching a lucky charm or embracing a superstition, simply believing that an object or a superstition might help relieve our chatter, often has precisely that. effect. Tell me why you think that works. So, so I find this fascinating. I think the title of this chapter was mind magic and I think about it as magical. Not to be clear in a, well, you know, we don't know how strong the data is, but really magical and a more just, wow, human condition is really a mind blower. So here's what we've learned from decades and of research. Placebo effects are real.

If I get you to believe something, especially if I get you to believe something having to do with your psychological functioning, how angry, depressed, anxious you are, whether you have stomach issues, things like that, if I can get you to believe that there's going to be some change, that belief can activate a cascade of processes in the brain that bring those outcomes to fruition. So if we want to get really technical here, I'm joking, but like if we, you know, take the scalp off, look into the brain, it's all connected, right? Sometimes the connections from one network to another take longer to get to. But the networks that support our beliefs and how we think about the world, they connect to parts of the brain that play a role

in our physiological makeup, our sense of proprioception, how we interpret the signals that our body gives us. And so your beliefs can really channel your experience in powerful ways. And lots of research has shown that if you give people a sugar pill and you tell them, hey, this is going to make you feel better. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. Take two of these every day for the next 20 days and your depression will subside. You'll be less anxious. Many studies have shown that that is exactly what happens. And so if we go from those laboratory studies on sugar pills to the more real-world manifestation of those studies, that's clutching a lucky charm. And so, you know, my daughter, if she has a lucky, a lucky, you know, a teaching that she likes

to take with her to school before a test, I totally embrace it. If you think that's going to help you do better, you know, clutch away because it's not going to hurt. and it may well have the effect that you think it is. Final thought. I am a secular reform Jew. I was brought up in the Jewish faith. I have lots of respect for religions, but I don't practice much.

I see an interesting connection between two things you've just said. One, that belief itself can reduce negative chatter. And two, that distancing can reduce negative chatter. And it makes me think, like, to a certain extent, isn't belief in God the ultimate, act of distancing? Like, religion tells us that there's a universal third person that we can look to when times are terrible. God loves me. There is a higher being with care for me. And when we put our faith in a higher being, what we're kind of doing is placing our locus of attention outside

of ourselves. There might be something inherently satisfying and calming, I guess, about, like, the removal of oneself from the whirlpool of chatter in that way. Yeah. So we're actually doing research on this right now, looking at the degree to which believing in religion and engaging in certain religious acts serves a distancing function, serves to help broaden your perspective. The prediction is that, you know, Derek, you should just come come work in the lab. Like, we'll get to the PhD, like on an expedited timeline, right? Six years? Seven for you. Yeah, that's, I think, you know, religion is a powerful boon to our well-being.

And we know that from lots of research. What we don't yet quite understand are the mechanisms that explain how it helps us. I think distancing is one explanation for how that works. Absolutely fascinating. Ethan Cross, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

And fantastic book. Shatter was really, it's always wonderful to read a book that shines such a clear light on a part of the human experience that you have thought about without thinking about. So I really appreciate it.

Thanks, man. Well, thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, give us a five-star rating, leave a review. And don't forget to check out our TikTok at Plain English underscore. That's at Plain English underscore on TikTok.