Something You Should Know - Why You Love The Music You Love & The Horrible Things You Tell Yourself

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

When you have to take a test and you don’t know the answer, the conventional advice is to go with your first answer. A lot of people believe that – but is it true? This episode begins with some interesting evidence that may help you the next time you take a test.  https://www.spring.org.uk/2012/02/multiple-choice-tests-why-sticking-with-your-first-answer-is-probably-wrong.php Music is such an important part of life for so many of us. Most of us have a favorite song or band or type of music. Listening to music can make you happy or sad or transport you back in time. Why does music affect us the way it does? Joining me to discuss that is Susan Rogers who was the chief engineer on Prince’s Purple Rain album as well as other hit records. In fact, she is one of the most successful female record producer of all time. She is now a professor of neuroscience and author of the book This is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You (https://amzn.to/3ROjCGg) You often don’t notice it, but you are constantly saying things to yourself – often about yourself. And often the things you say aren’t very nice. Seldom are we telling ourselves how wonderful we are. Instead, we are often self-critical. Why is that? Why do we tend to think so negatively about ourselves and the world around us? Here to explain is psychotherapist Katie Krimer, author of the book, Sh*t I Say to Myself: 40 Ways to Ditch the Negative Self-Talk That’s Dragging You Down (https://amzn.to/3S7miOD) Do you know the law when you come up on a school bus picking up or dropping off students? It turns out the area right around a stopped school bus can be very dangerous. In fact, driving around kids walking to and from school is always risky. Listen as I explain when you need to know and do when you are driving around school children. https://www.nhtsa.gov/road-safety/school-bus-safety PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! To match with a licensed therapist today, go to https://Talkspace.com. Use promo code SYSK to get $100 off of your first month! Helix Sleep is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders AND two free pillows for our listeners at https://helixsleep.com/sysk.  Redeem your rewards for cash in any amount, at any time, with Discover Card! Learn more at https://Discover.com/RedeemRewards Go to Amazon and search for Conair Turbo Extreme to get your 2-in-1 steam and iron steamer today! Along with alarms, fire extinguishers are essential. Make sure to place fire extinguishers on every level of your home and in common spaces like the kitchen and know how to use them. For more information on fire safety products, safety tips and educational activities you can do at home with your family visit https://firstalert.com/firepreventionmonth   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, when you take a test and you aren't sure of the answer, should you go with your gut? Then, why you love the music you love. And what do you think about when you hear it? The single most common answer was when people listen to the music they love, they picture autobiographical memories. To our surprise, the second most common response was the story

and the lyrics. Also what you must know if you're driving near a school bus. And negative self-talk. The horrible things you tell yourself about yourself. And it's doing you no good. Let's take the word should. I should go to the gym today. I should eat healthier. Should, if you use it frequently, you will often talk about all the things that you need to do

while guilting yourself that you're not doing them. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick?

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use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know i bet you've heard this advice that when you're taking a multiple choice test and you're not sure of an answer, you should stick with your first answer. College students believe it. About 75% of college students agree that changing your first choice will lower your overall score. Instructors believe it, too. In one study, 55% of them believed it would lower students' scores, while only 16% believe it would improve them. And yet all of this is wrong. One survey of 33 different studies conducted over 70 years

found that on average, people who change their answers do better than those who don't. Study after study shows that when you change your answers in a multiple-choice test, you are more likely to be changing it from wrong to right. So sticking with your first answer is usually the wrong strategy. And that is something you should know. Music is an important part of people's lives. From the time we're infants and throughout our lives, we listen to music, we seek out music, we have our favorite music, and you probably have some music you don't like.

When we hear music, it has an effect on us. So what is it that music does for us? Why does it affect us and how? Here to discuss that is Susan Rogers. Susan was the chief engineer on Prince's Purple Rain album and other successful records. In fact, she is one of the most successful female record producers of all time. She's now a professor of cognitive neuroscience, and she's author of a book called This Is What It Sounds Like,

What the Music You Love Says About You. Hi, Susan. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on your show. Many people who write about music write about the musicians or the songwriters, but what's interesting is that your focus is the listener. Why people who listen to music listen to music? You know, my whole life I've loved records like a lot of kids, nothing special about that.

But I never had the urge to play or write or sing, perform. I always loved being a listener. Eventually I became a record maker. I worked as an audio tech and as a recording engineer and as a mixer and as a record producer. I had a lot of success in the late 90s, and I entered college to earn a PhD in music perception and cognition. So for over 40 years, I've been thinking about what music is, what happens when that transfer function takes place. We listen to something, we go into our own heads, we become somebody else. We're then taking the thoughts that came out of others' heads and making it feel in ourselves

intensely personal and intensely private. I love thinking about and talking about how that happens. I've always wondered why people like the music they like. Why do I like some music and you don't and vice versa? What causes that? What makes our taste? Exactly. I love this saying from the biologist Darcy Thompson. He said, everything is the way it is because it got that way. So our taste in music got that way. When we were young, we heard music in a variety of contexts and in a variety of emotional states. If you just so happen to have heard music while you felt good or while you were thoroughly enjoying something, that music is going to get encoded in your nervous system along with those good feelings.

So exposure to music when we're young, the odds of hearing this record and not that record, plus the context in which we heard it, whether it was rewarding to us or punishing to us, helps to establish our taste in music. Now, the interesting thing is, to quote another biologist, Peter Medivore, he said, the human mind treats a new idea the way the human body treats a new protein. It rejects it. So initially we reject things that are new, but if we just so happen to get enough exposure to something and to realize, actually, no, this is pretty good. The music you like is shaping your auditory cortex, actually shaping it so that as the years roll by, you get better and faster at recognizing the music you love.

I just like to call it the music of you. So the music of you is an ongoing process. Happens most rapidly when we're young in adolescence. But as we get older, we each have a unique listener profile where the records we listen to match with their younger years. That even though, like, I listen to music now, and I'm exposed to newer music, but it is the music of my younger years that I consider more my music, the music of me, than newer music that I hear today. I like to say that popular music is by, for, and about young people.

That's always been true in popular music is by, for, and about young people. That's always been true in popular music because it's so tied up with mating and social rituals. But when we get older, we've often bonded to a type of music or a piece of music that comforted us when we were young. So what happens when you come home from school, you're a teenager, you've got a terrible day. You come home and you're so upset and you go into your room and you put that record on and you listen to that record. And that singer is essentially saying to you, here's what you should think. Here's what you should say. Here's what you should do tomorrow. Here's the attitude to show that guy or show that girl how you're feeling. And what happens when someone takes

care of us? We bond to them. We bond to them. So you can't help but have a soft spot in your heart for that music of your youth that not only represented you, it took care of you. Now, as we get older, the pressures of life mean that we don't have to go putting records on in order to help us solve our problems or tell us who we are. We know who we are. So that's why we tend to say, you know what? This music has always functioned for me. I like it just fine. I don't need to go adventuring and looking for other styles. But some of us, those of us who work in music or maybe are musicians, are constantly on the lookout for new landscapes, new musical sounds or artists who will give us that feeling again. When I listen to music of my youth, I'm not just listening to the music.

I'm transported back in time. I remember being somewhere with someone at a time. It isn't just, the music is triggering a lot of memories as well as just being the music. Yes, autobiographical memories are what many people report as being the primary reason for listening to the music that they love. They want to be transported back in time, and they want to remember the events or the people or the circumstances that were happening in their lives when this music was popular. My co-author, Ogi Ogas, and I did some research in the writing of this book, and we asked people

what we thought was a really interesting question. What do you see in your mind's eye when you listen to music? Now, Ogie and I came up with this question because we asked each other first, what do you see in your mind's eye? And I always had assumed that everyone saw the same thing that I've been seeing since I was a little kid, which is, I see the musicians performing. I have always visualized the players. Ogi is completely the opposite. He said, I don't see any people at all. I see abstract shapes and colors. So we both looked at each other and we kind of went, oh, that's weird. So I went looking for research that showed what do most people see in their mind's eye. And it turned out there's really a

paucity of research on that question. So we conducted our own experiment. It turned out over three different surveys, the single most common answer was when people listen to the music they love, they picture autobiographical memories. To our surprise, the second most common response was the story and the lyrics. Surprisingly, many, many people make up a story based on the lyrics. And my visualization, seeing the performers, that's right down there around 10% of music listeners and abstract shapes and colors. Well, that's even a smaller percentage. Some people prefer to see natural scenes like the beach or the mountains or the ocean. And some people prefer to imagine themselves performing. I do that some of the time, but I can never hang on to that visualization

because I'm not a performer. So we seek out music for different rewards. So let's talk about lyrics, because to some people, lyrics don't matter at all. Other let's talk about lyrics, because to some people, lyrics don't matter at all. Other people are very into lyrics. In some songs, lyrics are very moving. In other songs, they're very light and airy and don't mean much. So talk about lyrics. That is so interesting to me. So you're right. Some people really don't listen to the lyrics and other people value the lyrics so highly that if the lyric writing doesn't meet a certain standard for them, they have no interest in this record. of the brain that are specialized for processing melody. For most of us, that's on the right side of our brains. Lyrics, processed where speech is processed on the left side. Rhythm, up at the top near our motor cortex. Timbre is processed in another region of the brain. So it's truly possible to devote most of your listening attention to just the lyrics or just the melody or just the rhythm and ignore the other aspect

of a record. If one aspect of a record is satisfying you greatly, it's easier to ignore the other aspects. So for example, if I'm listening to James Brown, the song Hot Pants, and he's singing, Hot Pants gives you confidence. Well, those lyrics don't mean anything to me. I don't care about those lyrics. It's not the reason why I'm listening to this record. I'm listening for that rhythm. Many, many listeners, though, place a very high value on lyrics and, as I said earlier, won't listen to a record if it doesn't match their notion of what good is. There's another phenomenon that happens. I was told this by a young male journalist. We were having a conversation on the records we love, just a casual conversation,

and we were both talking about how we loved Solange's new album, came out in 2016. And he said, I love that record. And then he said, I've never listened to it when I'm out with my guy friends though. And I said, why not? And he said, you just don't to it when I'm out with my guy friends, though. And I said, why not? And he said, you just don't do it. Men don't listen to records by women when they're out with other guys. And it was funny, and it was a little bit sad, because certainly women would listen to records by men when they're out with other women. But what he was trying to convey is that when I'm with my friends, I have a self-identity.

And I don't want that identity to publicly include a woman's thoughts or feelings. It is what it is. This is how some people relate to lyrics on a record and why lyrics on a record can be intimately bound up with their own self-knowledge or self-awareness. I'm speaking with Susan Rogers. She was a chief engineer on Prince's Purple Rain album, amongst other successful records, and she's now a professor of cognitive neuroscience and author of the book, This Is What It Sounds Like, What the Music You Love Says About You. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk-turned-traveling

medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests,

but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Susan, I had an experience not that long ago where I actually went back or I heard a song that I've known since I was young, and I never paid attention to the lyrics. And I actually listened to the lyrics, and I had no idea that that's what the song was about, but it was a, I can't remember what it was, but it was a huge hit. I've no, I could sing it to you, but I never stopped to think about what the words mean. I love when that happens. It's

like finding an extra present under the Christmas tree. So you enjoyed this record maybe for its, its melodies or its sound design or just the kind of visualizations you had. You were getting all the enjoyment you needed. And then you wandered over to what Prince would call Lyric Street. You wandered over to this other street and you said, well, let me just check out what's going on on this street. And sure enough, you discovered something that made you think, I'm now hearing this record in a whole new way. That's a really beautiful thing when that happens. As record makers, we're learning to always scan the musical landscape and we're looking for those treats.

We're looking for those truffles where listeners might get a reward from the aspects of the record that we thought were good and were worthy. But even record makers can find themselves ignoring certain aspects of a record because we're just so heavily attracted to other aspects of it. Talk about the connection between music and movement. They certainly are intertwined. I mean, people have been dancing and dance to music all the time, but music moves people or makes them move. And what's going on there? Human beings have evolved to have these really thick bidirectional tracks,

neural tracks that run back and forth between their auditory processing regions and their motor cortex how they move the late neuroscientist jack pank set he said a sentence that i just absolutely love he said sound is a special form of touch so it turns out when we're listening to music especially if it's got a nice steady tempo at a beats per minute of between 100 and 120 beats per minute, which is like a nice brisk walk. If it's got that steady tempo at that pace that feels good to our bodies, our auditory cortex and our motor cortex are communicating with one another. When we amplify that connection, what happens is that our entire nervous system begins to oscillate at a certain frequency range that feels really good.

I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking that that's special or into thinking that there's only one frequency at which our nervous system oscillates. It oscillates at a lot of different frequencies throughout the day and night. But there's something called the beta band, which is between 15 and 30 hertz. It's kind of the feel-good band. So music, especially music with a good strong rhythm, can amplify oscillations in the beta band. What that means is first thing in the morning when you wake up and you're all sleepy and you kind of need to get your body going, you can put music on and it'll take you from that quiet, slow alpha state up to that beta state and get you moving physically, mentally too. And likewise, if you've had a very stressful day and you need to calm down from

physical or mental exertion, you can put music on and it'll bring you down from that high frequency gamma state into that beta energy band. So rhythm is really effective. It may be the fastest of the musical elements to get us to feel something. Melody needs a little bit of time to progress. Lyrics need more time to tell us the story. But rhythm is pretty instantaneous. Well, what's interesting, though, about music is that people often dislike certain kinds of music, particularly the newest music that's out there that, you know, with other forms of art, I mean, you know, I'll watch dancers or I'll look at art on

a wall and I don't have a real negative, if I don't like it, I don't like it. But it's not that I dislike it, I just don't like it. But with music, people actually dislike music. That is such an interesting phenomenon. The disliking, the instant and almost visceral disliking of certain forms of music. So it turns out that in our brains, there's a little neural structure called the precuneus. And our brains are pretty symmetrical. So what happens on the right side is also has a similar structure on the left. But anyway, the right precuneus is kind of a gatekeeper for our musical taste. So some studies showed, fMRI studies showed, that when people were lying in the scanner

and they were played music that they had already categorized as being music they liked, music they disliked, or music that was their favorite song. And they were played music in these three categories. The precuneus increased its connections to something called the default network when it heard music that it liked. The default network is a network of interconnected brain structures that become active when we're in our own heads, when we're daydreaming, when we're fantasizing, when we're mind-wandering. So there's the precuneus, and you're lying in the scanner, and here comes a song, and you like this song, and the precuneus says, oh, now that's what I'm talking about, and it increases its connection to the default network. Same thing when you hear your favorite song, which you brought into the laboratory just

for this purpose. But as soon as the precuneus hears a song it dislikes, it gets this response of, do not want, not for me. And it decreases its connections to the default network. It's almost as if this little structure is saying, this is not the music of me, and I don't want this integrated into my psyche, into my self-identity, not for me. I said earlier that as we appreciate and learn to like music over our lifetimes, it's shaping our auditory processing path, so we get better and faster at recognizing what we like.

But the reverse is also happening. You get really good and really fast at deciding, hate this, not for me, not my music. That can be overcome if someone walks you through the music that they love, that might be in a style you don't care for, And they point out, here's what's great about it. Here's why this just kills me. Here's why this is genius. That top-down knowledge-based processing can kind of tap the precuneus and say, hey, be open-minded. Have a listen to this. Don't just automatically reject it. And maybe there's something good about it. Our tastes can change. I wonder how many people learn to like music or hear music and say that, you know, I'm thinking of, say, the Beatles. Back when the Beatles were hot, every kid liked the Beatles, whether they liked them or not. In other words, they might not necessarily have liked them, except everybody else liked them. So they kind of jumped on the bandwagon and, yeah, oh, yeah, I love the Beatles.

But that really may not be their kind of music. I experienced that. There's a social contagion that happens. And there's also a capacity that we have to evaluate something purely on a cerebral level. You can listen to it and say, yeah, that's pretty good. But that doesn't mean it's going to pluck your heartstrings the way the music of you will. For example, when I was a little kid, I think I was seven years old when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. And I remember in the living room staring at the TV and thinking to myself, I don't know. I don't quite get it. It's okay.

And all the kids at school and all the neighbor kids are crazy about the Beatles, but I don't know. I'm not hearing it. I didn't say anything to anybody. I didn't want the social embarrassment. And then maybe a year or a few months later, the Rolling Stones were on Ed Sullivan playing Time is on My Side. And I remember thinking, like little kids do, this is what I'm talking about. This is what I love. So that instantaneous attraction is very similar to romantic love. So you see someone and your heart just suddenly starts to beat faster and you think, oh, he or she is perfect. Look at this exquisite creature. Other people in the room don't necessarily think that this person is exquisite.

But to you, this person just happens to match your notion of what it is you'd like to have in a romantic partner. Music works the same way. The music that we love is not perfect any more than the person we love is perfect, but they're perfect for us. It's a perfect fit. I know Prince used to refer to it as the street you live on. That's a useful metaphor. I also think of it just in terms of sweet spots on these different dimensions of music listening. When something pings your sweet spot, like blues-based music does for me, you're in, you're there, you're in love. Well, it's great to listen to you talk about music because you not only have studied it, you've kind of lived it, you've been part of the music business, and you have a really

interesting perspective on this. I've been speaking with Susan Rogers. She was the chief engineer for Prince's Purple Rain album and some other successful records as well. She's one of the most successful female record producers of all time, and she's now a professor of cognitive neuroscience. She's author of a book called This Is What It Sounds Like, What the Music You Love Says About You. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Susan. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mike. This was fun. I appreciate it. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

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All day long, you talk to yourself. Silently most of the time, I imagine. But you are telling yourself things constantly. And much of what you tell yourself is about yourself. And a lot of it isn't very kind. According to Katie Krimer, a psychotherapist and author of the book Stuff I Say to Myself, 40 Ways to Ditch the Negative Self-Talk That's Dragging You Down. It actually isn't stuff I say to myself. It's the other S word, but we don't swear on this podcast, so you'll have to use your imagination. Anyway, Katie is here to talk about negative self-talk and how we can keep

it in check and why it's so important to do so. Hi, Katie. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. So it seems that when people monitor and really pay attention to their self-talk, and I've done this, it seems that it's seldom, oh, I'm so great. I'm so awesome. Oh, that was great. I mean, sometimes it is. Sometimes you give yourself a pat on the back. But much of the time, it's, why did I do that?

Why did I say that? I'm so clumsy. It tends to be really negative. Totally. Even some of our more subtle words that we use, they have such an impact on our brain and on our self-esteem and our being. So imagine if the words that we're saying to ourselves are things like, I'm not good enough. I can't do this. I should be doing this more often. I'm a terrible partner. I'm going to get fired.

And imagine if those were the words that, you know, we spoke to the people that we loved the most. I don't think they'd want to be around us very much. So why is it then that we tend to be so negative? Where does that come from? We naturally, as humans, we have something called a negativity bias. So we kind of filter out a lot of the things that would be quite nice to think about. Like right now, I'm looking outside my window and there's a beautiful tree and we've got some grape vines that I didn't plant, but I'm eating grapes off of and the light is hitting everything so beautifully. And it would be nice if that was our reflex, but our reflex stems from those ancient systems. And so when we look around

in the world and we move around in the world, our lens is actually quite prone to negativity. Well, since we all tend to have this negative self-talk, does being very deliberate about positive self-talk, does that help neutralize the negative self-talk? So I often don't even call what I do or what I teach positive self-talk. When I meet folks, they tend to be so entrenched in a lot of the statements that in the language that's really familiar to them that when you bring up the idea of positive self-talk, they kind of don't want to hear it. You know, a lot of folks have an aversion to positive psychology, right? Or, you know, maybe you've heard these days about, you know, toxic positivity in the sense that we're not taking a negative sentence and necessarily always turning it positive. What we are doing is we're trying to change our language into more adaptive, helpful formats. And that does mean that it's always positive.

Give me an example. Give me an example of some negative self-talk and how you would adapt it. Sure. Let's take the word should. It's a pretty innocuous word in our language, or at least it seems that way. We all use it. I should go to the gym today. I should eat healthier. The problem with should, there's a couple of problems. One issue with should is that I call it a judgy word. It implies that there's some way to be that's a better way than the current present moment. And while theoretically that may be true,

should is judgy enough that if you use it frequently, you will often talk about all the things that you need to do while guilting yourself that you're not doing them. And that energy that that word tends to carry, that guilting energy, is what we're trying to shift with our new self-talk or our more adaptive self-talk or even positive self-talk. I'll give you an example. So let's take, I should go to the gym. Most of us get into a headspace where we skip a couple of days and we're sitting on our couch and we're talking to our partner or friend and we're saying, man, I should go to the gym tomorrow. I didn't go yesterday and I didn't go today. I really should go. That is, turns out, it's not motivating

enough to our brain. Turns out it doesn't really help to build very good habits. And if you already have a tendency toward bringing yourself down, if you have struggles with self-esteem, if you have struggles with implementing good habits, should is going to kind of subvert all of those attempts as well. So while a positive self-talk could look like something like, I'm going to go to the gym, yes, which might not feel authentic to a lot of people, I ask folks to actually tell me what is it that they are trying to say when they say I should go to the gym. And what they usually come up with is, well, I would like to go. I want to go to the gym.

So at first I have them start by saying I want to go to the gym. And want compared with should is a lot less judgy. It's a lot less guilt inducing. It is a more positive way of looking at a situation. I want to instead of I should. And already you can see a slight shift. I watch people's faces change as soon as they change just that one word. So are there some common things that people tell themselves?

Are there some like top 10 negative self-talk things? Sure. I can't change. People tend to think that everything that comes into their mind is automatically true. That's kind of a flaw in the human system, if you will. So a lot of statements really come from whatever those thoughts, the content of those thoughts. I just know the worst will happen. I'll definitely fail. I'm going to fail. Why should I try? I can't. So the word can't is used so often that I really, I ask folks in my sessions pretty much to eliminate can't and to eliminate should and find ways to work around those.

Because there's actually, there are things we can't do. I can't grow a tree out of my head. But sometimes we say we can't and it limits our self-efficacy or our belief that we can succeed at something. Any language around guilting yourself, any language that implies some kind of attachment to an identity. So when we say things like, oh, I'm so lazy, It's just who I am. Right? So just acknowledging that in that moment, using self-talk that basically implies that there's not a lot of wiggle room. And then, you know, self-talk that really falls into two categories, the past and the future. So if only I could change what happened, or I hate the uncertainty that lies

ahead. I need to be perfect. Life is unfair. And then lots of black and white terminology, like I always do this, or I never do that. Which again, if you try to bring in some of the evidence as we do in cognitive behavioral therapy specifically, you'll find that we can poke a lot of holes in the things that people say. And so when people say these things, my sense is when I have looked at my own negative self-talk, that I'm not particularly aware that I'm saying them. I don't go, oh yeah, I just talked to myself. I mean, these things are kind of happening in the background, it seems. That's right. Yeah. So you can break it down into a couple of levels, I think. There are things that we say aloud about ourselves, either to ourselves or to other people, right? So for example, let's say I'm talking to my partner

and I say, oh my gosh, I have such bad stage fright. I'm going to do this podcast and I'm really freaked out. I hope that Mike doesn't think I'm a fraud, which was a quick passing thought that I had. In that case, I'm making these claims about myself out loud. Then we have our thought stream. In general, most of us are not really aware of what our thought stream is doing. You said a while ago that one of the techniques, one of the things you can use to help you keep track of what you're saying to yourself is mindfulness. So explain that.

Mindfulness is a skill that every human being has. It's nothing magical, although it can have some pretty cool magical consequences if you practice it. And all it is is paying attention to the present moment on purpose and without judgment. So it takes a little while for people to kind of understand the concept, right, of observing your mind or observing the content in your mind. But the easiest way is to just ask yourself, what was I just thinking? So when I wasn't speaking, what was I thinking about? And a lot of us don't pay attention. We're really just kind of going through motions or we're focused on different things. We're focused on things we're stuck on in the past, or we've

got our to-do lists that we're going over in the future. So it does take a lot of practice to learn how to focus your attention on what goes on in the mind. And so once you're aware of those negative thoughts that you're having, once you're able to tell yourself, what was I just thinking, and become aware of the negative things you were thinking, how do you then stop those thoughts? If I may, I'd love to just read just a quick quote that I love. It's by Eckhart Tolle. How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying it? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore, and then letting go of it.

It's a really simple process, but it's made difficult by many things. Humans tend to repeat what is familiar to them. We cling to language that upholds our core beliefs about ourselves, which are often really flawed. We learn about those core beliefs from our environment, social, parental, familial. And so for a lot of people, they have very, very ingrained negative self-talk. Now, getting them to notice is, as you said, just the first step. It's just one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of work that goes into getting someone motivated enough to want to change that self-talk. That's a huge part of it. For a lot of people, for most humans, we learned some kind of negative self-talk because at some point it was indeed adaptive or protective. If we grew up in an environment where we were hearing our parents fighting a lot, for example, we might learn things to say to ourselves in those moments that comfort us.

Sometimes we may learn how to say things that harm us because of the things that were taught by the people who are supposed to care about us. And it's, unfortunately, it's just something that gets passed on through generations and generations. And so if you really think about it, as simple as it is, as Eckhart talks about dropping a piece of hot coal, we don't have that same immediate gratification from dropping, let's say, a negative self-talk statement. It takes time to build those new connections in the brain. It takes time for people to have enough adaptive self-talk and have let go of enough of their negative self-talk for them to start to see some of those really awesome positive changes in their self-worth, their self-image, their self-esteem, their relationships. What is the goal here? Is the hope that you stop it all,

that you stop 10% of it, that you replace it? What are you trying to get to if it all went well? Yeah. I would say we can't possibly pay attention to every single thought that comes our way. So some of them are going to be negative. Some of them are going to give us faulty information. So what we're really looking to do is to first build a person's ability to recognize how frequently and how often and how intensely they may be utilizing this kind of language. I would say that that's the first goal. Oftentimes, once someone really, it really sets in for them, wow, every other sentence or every other word that I think or say is something against myself or something against the world in which I live in. That has to hit somebody first is what I've recognized in the work that I do. Once that happens and they realize that it leads to suffering in their life, the next goal I would say is to learn how to say something else. So you could still have that

negative thought. Like I said today before I came on, I do have stage fright. It's been a thing my whole life. I have to regulate my nervous system. I have to tell myself it's going to be all right. And it's not as though, let's say 10 years of working on myself and the way that my mind works and the way that I relate to the content of my mind, it's not like it made all of that go away. So I tell folks, don't set up the expectation that we're here to stop negative thinking. Oftentimes, if you tell yourself to stop something, what resists persists. So we're not going to have the goal of stopping. We're going to have the goal of having language that functions in a better, less harmful,

more adaptive way. So whether or not that becomes the reflex, which is amazing, I would say that if there were some kind of ultimate goal, it would be that in the typical time when your mind's reflex or your verbal reflex is to say something crummy about yourself, that your new response becomes some kind of more adaptive, effective, psychologically healthy language. I would say that that's probably our goal. So with your example of you were nervous about doing this podcast and you would then tell yourself it's

going to be all right. Well, how does that help? How does that override all the negative self-talk that came before it? One example of self-talk that many of us use, negative self-talk, is what I call prophesizing or future telling. So earlier on, as I told you, I was thinking about what this chat would be like and my heart rate was going up. So I was noticing that and I was noticing my fun self-talk surrounding my imposter syndrome. And when I started talking more adaptively by saying, hey, Mike talks to tons of people every day. He's probably not a monster. He's probably not going to judge or shame you.

And then the last thing I tried to remind myself was, hey, you've been doing this for almost 10 years and you got a couple of books. You probably know something about something. So once I did that, it really first and foremost helped get my nervous system to a place where my voice wasn't shaking. So it helps kind of stabilize my arousal, physiologically speaking. And then it also helps keep my mind a little bit clearer so that while I'm answering questions, I'm not also still thinking about how much I'm flubbing the interview. So it really helps clear out cognitive space and calm the physiological activity in my body.

What are the benefits of doing this? What can you hope to get from listening to your negative self-talk and trying to counter it the way you've described? What could I hope to achieve from listening to your negative self-talk and trying to counter it the way you've described, what could I hope to achieve from doing this? What will having better self-talk do for you? What could it change? Even if you don't know, even if you're totally new to this, just use your imagination. What if you stopped telling yourself that you couldn't do something and you started to say, I'm willing to try, for example, right? So it still leaves room for failure.

So we can't quite call it entirely positive, but it is a way to support yourself while you're out on this planet doing all kinds of hard human things instead of a way to devalue yourself immediately. Well, the good part about this, I think, is that anyone who's listened to this conversation for the last 20 minutes will be, at least for a while, be a little more aware of what it is they say to themselves as they go through their day, and they may be very surprised what they notice. Katie Crimer has been my guest. She's a... Katie Crimer has been my guest. She is a psychotherapist in New York,

and the name of her book is Stuff I Say to Myself, 40 Ways to Ditch the Negative Self-Talk That's Dragging You Down. And as I said before, it's not actually stuff I say to myself. It's the other S word. And there is a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Katie. Thanks so much. Have you ever gotten stuck behind a school bus? Well, it's kind of too bad. Here are some back to school rules of the road to remember. You can never pass a school bus that is stopped to load and unload children.

It is illegal in all 50 states. If you're traveling in the same direction as a stopped school bus, you still must stop as well. When waiting with your own child, teach them to wait until the stop arm is fully extended and the bus door opens before moving towards the bus. The area 10 feet around a school bus is at the highest risk for a child being hit. Most states have distance requirements and they might be further away than you think. Also remember that a lot of kids who are walking to school aren't paying close attention to the cars around them, and many of them have AirPods in their ears and can't hear your car.

So you have to be extra careful. And that is something you should know. I would love it if you would help spread the word about this podcast and tell someone you know to give it a listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you.

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