The Wellness Scoop - Controlling the inner critic

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

We talk to psychologist Ethan Kross – a world expert on controlling the conscious mind – on how we can harness the ongoing chatter in our heads, the ongoing internal conversation, to silence streams of self-doubt from our inner critic. From how ruminating on negative thoughts impacts on our relationships, work, physical health and stress levels; to why venting our emotions isn’t the answer and the tools we need to stop ruminating on negativity and catastrophising. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me Ella Mills. I sadly do not have my co-host Matthew Mills with me today for the second time that's so far this season but it's been a genuine miracle getting his time for all the episodes we have so far. He's literally the busiest person I've ever met in my life so it's been a genuine miracle getting his time for all the episodes we have so far. He's literally the busiest person I've ever met in my life. So it's been a complete joy. He's up at our factory today because we're doing production for our newest, newest product, which we mentioned the other day, which are our chocolate bars, which are these amazing, creamy, vegan chocolate bars with cashews through them,

which is what makes them so extra creamy. And then they're loaded up with salted cashews through them which is what makes them so extra creamy and then they're loaded up with salted cashews hazelnuts almonds they're so delicious they're going to be available in Waitrose and on our web shop from the 22nd of Feb so very very soon and from our web shop we can ship all around the UK and as well to Ireland to Germany France Austria and the Netherlands as well so that's just www.deliciousiella.com if you want to be the first people to try the Deliciousiella chocolate bars. And thank you so much again for your questions this week. Any questions, podcast at deliciousiella.com.

The first question I had actually quite a few of on the back of our episode with Dr. Alan Desmond about the power of a plant-based diet to revolutionize your health. He was such an exceptionally brilliant guest. I absolutely loved speaking to him and it seems like what he said really resonated with a lot of you as well. He just, I thought was particularly eloquent, great getting his point across. But the question was how do I involve my family and friends with eating plant-based meals? And that's something that has been really important to me. I love food as something that we share and something that brings people together. And I think that's such an important thing and dietary preferences should never get in the way of that. When I first changed my diet all the way back in 2011, 2012, my friends and family thought I was quite strange. It's

unbelievable how much the world's changed in the last 10 years when veganism, plant-based eating, this kind of approach for more natural whole foods, plant-based diet was seen as quite weird, quite niche, quite unheard of. And my friends and family kind of looked at me with quite a lot of raised eyebrows when I said this is what I was doing and when I was starting Delicious Ciela. And I found what I would do is I would never preach at them. I would never say this is vegan or really try and make a big deal of it. I would just try and cook for them and just try and show them these sorts of foods can be absolutely delicious. So make a delicious curry and saute red onion and garlic and cumin seeds and mustard seeds. And then simmer that with coconut milk, a splash of maple, add in curry and like roasted vegetables, which

I'd coat with curry powder and cinnamon, wilted spinach, do coconut rice and apple crumble with cinnamon, all those sorts of things just so delicious and just not make any kind of mention of the fact that it was plant-based. And then with other people, I would do plant-based main and I would do something else on the side again, just to make it feel much more accessible. And for me, that really, really worked. I never ever did like a plain salad or anything. It was all about really celebrating hearty ingredients. Things like our mushroom walnut ragu has been really popular again again because it's quite hearty and meaty. That with some delicious spaghetti. Yeah, complete winner I've found so far. Another question was whether either of us have a morning routine.

I think quite a few people may be struggling with a bit of motivation at the moment, which I absolutely relate to. We have really found for us having two tinies means obviously our day starts really early and when it starts it starts with a bang and then it keeps going until the second they're asleep and so we try and get up about an hour or so before them whenever we can whenever they don't wake up that extra hour early and my favorite thing go downstairs take probiotics and then make us coffee and we make really frothy coffee I like almond milk Matt likes coconut milk and we have that in bed and just catch up listen to radio 4 and see what's happening in the news and then we both try and work out Matt likes something hardcore hip cardio

strength I like yoga just having that 45 minutes or so to yourself first thing it changes everything for me throughout the day gives such a great. And I'm sure as any parent can relate, having that little bit of time for yourself is really, really, really invaluable as well. And on that, loads of lovely questions of people asking how May's getting on and what's it like kind of going back to work with her? We getting ready to wean her? How are we going to wean her? I'm a bit nervous about weaning I have to say introducing food to Sky wasn't the kind of resounding success I expected I thought she'd love food because we loved food and that's kind of the essence of our family life our family business what we do she hated food for the first six months of her life she literally never ate a single bite of

baby food or puree and she didn't really eat much until she was about one when she could start to do it herself and knowing her and her independence and fiery spirit that makes a lot of sense now so yeah I've got a lot to learn I think on how to approach it um with May and and make it work for her but yeah we'll be weaning her on a plant-based diet and I'm really looking forward to that it's been absolutely lovely going back to work. I've really enjoyed being able to get really stuck into what we're doing at the moment. I really did miss it whilst I took a few months off with May. It was a real privilege to have a few months just to focus on her, which I didn't have with Sky, but to tell us kind of our heart and soul. So being back feels

incredible, but I'm sure it's something lots of people can relate to, whether they've taken time off work for maternity or switching jobs, starting a new career, starting a new course or something. I think when you go back into something or start something really new, you can definitely have that sense of insecurity, you know, that questioning in your head, am I doing this right? What does everyone else think of what I'm saying or what I'm doing? Did it work better without me? And that inner critic, I think is something I've definitely really noticed in myself the last kind of six weeks or so. And I think it's something that can be prevalent for so many of us, which is why I really wanted to focus on it for today's conversation on the podcast. So today I'm

talking to psychologist Ethan Cross, who is a world expert on controlling the conscious mind. And we're going to be talking about how we can harness that ongoing chatter in our heads, the kind of internal conversation that keeps going, where we can have these kind of unrelenting negative thought spirals. You know, this is my fault. I'm really bad at this. Do people like me? Do I look silly? Do I sound silly? Or when we start rehashing past events or kind of really worrying about what might happen in the future and how we can look at all of that and start to kind of silence those streams of self-doubt that come from our inner critics so it's a topic that feels very close to home and something that i'm really looking forward to talking about so really really pleased

to welcome ethan to the podcast today um i have to tell you i laughed quite a lot when i saw the book was called chatter because matt my husband says that I chatter all day long. He says he's never heard anyone talk quite so much. I have a kind of incessant need to chatter. But on a kind of more serious note, I really related to everything you were saying in the book. And I definitely have that kind of inner critic that very much can come out through the voice in my head. And you refer to this voice in our head as chatter. And I wondered if we could just kind of start with understanding a little bit more about what you mean by the voice in our head and what chatter is and how you define that and the role

that it plays for us. Sure. Well, thanks for having me. I think of the voice in our head as it's a tool. And what we're talking about is really using language internally, silently, to make sense of our worlds, our lives. And that can be a really amazing, helpful tool. It can do everything from help us rehearse nuggets of information that we need to keep active in our heads at any given moment in time. Like if I were to ask you to rehearse a phone number, try to memorize it, verbalize it, the voice in your head is really useful for helping you do that. But it's also really helpful for doing things like controlling ourselves, like when we give ourselves instructions. So if you're working on a difficult puzzle,

I've got two little girls, I'm constantly building toys for them. And I'm thinking about a presentation I have to give, I might verbalize what I'm going to say. I might anticipate what an audience member is going to ask and how I would respond to that. The voice is really helpful there. The voice is also really helpful for narrating the story of our lives. So there's a lot of research which suggests that we're constantly creating stories that help us explain who we are, where we fit in our families and in this world. And the voice can be really helpful for doing that too. So those are all the positives. There is a negative side to this voice, which I call chatter. And what that captures is really when this incredible tool starts running awry and we lose control of it. And it often happens when we're experiencing intense negative emotions,

because when that happens, many of us turn inward to introspect on what has happened to try to make sense of our problems and work through them. When we do that, though, rather than coming up with clear solutions, a lot of people report getting stuck. They ruminate, they catastrophize, they worry, they get caught in the negative cycle of thinking and feeling that is what I call chatter. And the visual analog of chatter is you can imagine like a hamster running on an exercise wheel. They're running, running, running. They've got nowhere to go. They're not making progress. And that can be a really debilitating mental state.

Yeah, I think that's something we can all relate to, especially, you know, you kind of get into bed at night and you start, as you say, that hamster wheel starts. So if you worry about one thing and then you project that into the future. And you said you start kind of catastrophizing about this, or you start worrying about what you said earlier, and could this have happened and that happened? And what happens when this chatter is kind of overwhelmingly negative? Well, it's not good. It feels quite bad. You know, a lot of some people ask, well, how do I know when I'm experiencing chatter? And my response is, you usually know it if you're in the midst of it. I mean, is that true of your experience, Stella? Oh my gosh, absolutely. I think it's so funny. And it's a question I have

later because you talk about there are two tendencies that shape this voice as psychological immersion and psychological distance. And it seems like there's two kind of real camps for people. And I definitely would put myself in the camp probably where it's able to spiral quicker than other people. Right, right. Yeah. So I mean, you know it when you're you experience it often. And it can exert a negative effect on many different domains in our life. And I would argue in most of the domains that we care deeply about. So one thing that chatter can do is it can negatively influence our decision-making and performance at work, at school, on the ball field. One way it does so is by consuming our attention. So as many listeners no doubt will relate, we have a

limited amount of attention that we can use at any given time to focus. And what ends up happening when you're experiencing chatter is chatter consumes that attention. So it's soaking up all of the mental juice that you have to focus on something. And when that happens, you end up in an experience where you read four pages in a book or in a report while you're experiencing chatter. You know, you've read the four pages, but by the time you get to the end, you don't remember anything that you've read because you were thinking about something else. Has that ever happened to you? Yeah, absolutely. I was just nodding along. I think it's a really good point. You're worrying about something and as a result, you're not really absorbing what's right in front of you.

And so, you know, imagine that happening when you're trying to study or prepare for an important presentation or when you're having to shoot a goal kick that can determine who wins the game. That can be really destructive. And indeed, there's lots of research showing that chatter can undermine performance across all those different domains. So that's how it can impact decision making and performance. It can also have negative social implications for your relationships. And there are lots of ways that it can do so, but I'll single out just one, which is when we experience the kinds of strong negative emotions that characterize chatter, there's a lot of research showing that we are

highly motivated to share our feelings with others, to go to others and talk to them about the chatter streaming through our heads. And we'll probably talk later on today about how other people can be helpful. They can be quite helpful for helping us manage our chatter. They can be harmful too. But one thing that often happens is when chatter is striking, you go to talk to someone about the problem. Then you talk about it some more. You keep experiencing chatter. So you keep talking about the problem over and over and over again. And what can are to have social friction in their relationships. So that's one way it can knock out our relationships. The final area that chatter has implications for, really big implications, is for our physical health.

So if we think about negativity and probably the key negative experience that many people are familiar with, having a stress reaction. You've probably heard that stress kills, but stress in and of itself is not a bad thing. The capacity to experience a stress reaction is actually a really, really useful response, right? What it does is we detect some threat around us. And now we have this wonderful, wonderfully elegant set of responses in our bodies that prepare us to deal with that threat. We approach it, we avoid it, we do something to get out of the way. That's not harmful from a health perspective. The way stress gets harmful, the way it gets under the skin to impact things like cardiovascular disease, certain forms of cancer, inflammation, is when your stress response goes up, and then it remains

elevated over time, right? That exerts a chronic wear and tear on your body that can be extremely damaging. And chatter is one of the culprits that keep that stress reaction alive. Because what happens is you experience something negative, but then through the power of your mind, you keep on reliving that experience over and over and over and over again. So you're thinking about the awful, cringeworthy moment you had at work when you're laying in bed trying to go to sleep. You're replaying what happened, how you felt, oh my God, what if, what if, or you're imagining the possible future negative. What if I bomb the next podcast interview and no one likes it? You're

keeping that stressor active in your mind and that can have a really negative effect on your body. So in short, there are many different ways that chatter can undermine us. But the good news is that there are also lots of tools that we have evolved to possess that can help us manage it. So I don't want to leave on a terrible note there. That sounded really awful. I feel bad.

Not at all, as you said, because there's lots of ways out of it. And I think there's only a solution to something when you understand what what the problem is in the first place but I thought it was there's a lot of very interesting points and I'd like to pick up on but one of the things I think so interesting and it really struck me as I was reading this is that so much of what you're saying it's obviously backed up by all this absolutely fantastic research but it goes against what I guess is kind of what feels like common

sense or what we're brought up being told time and time again, like a problem shared is a problem halved because we should go around telling people our feelings and what we're worried about and what you're saying. And I was absolutely blown away by the studies that you shared about people that had witnessed 9-11 and been part of those absolutely horrific college shootings. And the research showing there that people who shared the most about their feelings as a result of this kind of chronic distress that they had, actually had the highest levels of distress and the worst physical health afterwards. And so I just wondered what your take was on the fact that what your research is showing actually goes against so

much of what we're kind of brought up to believe in that sense of sharing. Yeah, so other people, we're talking about sharing emotions with other people sharing chatter. And other people can be an amazingly helpful tool for helping us manage chatter, but they can also be a vulnerability as well. And so there's a chapter in chatter where I try to break this down and explain how that works. When we go to other people for help with our chatter, there are typically two needs we have. So one thing, we have these emotional needs where we want to find someone who we can share, we can express our emotions with. It's nice to know that there's someone else in this world who cares enough about us, that they're willing to sit and listen to what

we're feeling and what happened to us. And we find someone like that to share our emotions with, that leads us to feel more connected to that person. It also leads us to feel validated. And those are good things. But, and I will emphasize, I think this is an important, but simply expressing your emotions or venting to someone else that may make us feel more connected to the person we're talking to, but it doesn't give us the information we need to help solve our problems, to help work through our problems. And other people are often in an ideal position to help us work through our problems because they're not experiencing those issues. So they can be more objective and give us what I call perspective broadening advice.

We often have tunnel vision when we're experiencing chatter, right? We have trouble adopting different perspectives on our experience and other people are in a perfect position to help us think differently about it. So, you know, Ella, if you came to me with a problem, like, I'd listen to you empathically and hear what you're, you're telling me, but I might ask, so, you know, that sounds awful, but you've experienced things like that before, right? How have you managed it before? And you seem to have gotten through it. So I think you might do that again now. Or I might say, you know, that is terrible. But you know, there's something very similar happened to me. And here's what I did. And so there are lots and those are just two examples.

But there are lots of things that people we talk to can do to help broaden us to help us actually problem solve and work through. And you need both of those elements to have a really productive conversation about chatter. That message isn't always conveyed in popular culture. Instead, what we simply hear is venture emotions, get it out. And the science doesn't support that being productive, right? Because venting, it can make us feel more connected. But think about what you're doing when you're venting. If I ask you, Ella, to just tell me, tell me more about what what that person said to you. Really? They said that? I can't

believe it. What did you how did you feel when that happened? So if I just keep on cuing you to replay what happened and what you felt, I'm basically like throwing logs on the fire. I'm just getting you to relive the pain around that negative event. And just reliving it doesn't do anything to solve it. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob

at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n.com. Yeah. So both as the person with the problem and as the listener, there's a lot more that we can do to support that is what I'm taking from that. Yeah. So, so one of the things I tried to do in chatter was talk about the mechanics that explain what is chatter? Why does it happen? And when it happens, what are the tools that people can use to manage it? And so when we talk about other people, I try to explain the mechanics of, well, here's how you can look for more effective chatter support, right? And so for me, for example, I'm extremely deliberate when I'm experiencing chatter. And, you know, yes, it's true. I run a laboratory and I wrote a book on this topic and we study it, but I'm human. I experienced chatter

at times too. When I do, I'm extremely deliberate about who I approach for chatter support, right? There are some very well-intentioned people in my life, people who I love dearly and who I know love me very much. I do not go to them for chatter support because I know they're not going to help broaden my perspective. So instead, I have got, you know, the equivalent of a board of advisors, I've got these three people and I can always count on them to support me and give me the perspective, broadening advice I need. And there are a couple other people who I approach for personal issues. And so thinking carefully about who you can talk to now that you know what you need from them, I think can be really empowering. On the flip side, I think there are lessons about how you can be a better chatter advisor to others, how you can support them more effectively. There was one other point I just want to circle back on about, you know, the science not necessarily backing up what we talk about a lot in popular culture. And one of the other bits there, which I thought was very interesting, again, that you talked about in the book as well, is this idea of living in the present, which obviously taps into a very kind of prevalent conversation in the modern world of mindfulness. And as you said, that this message actually kind

of goes against biology and that our brains do actually really struggle to kind of sit in the here and now. And I think that's something we can probably all relate to. Well, you know, there's no question, right, that for the past 10 or 15 years, there's been a widespread movement behind mindfulness and a message to be in the moment that that should be the goal. I do think there's fantastic work and science behind showing the benefits of mindfulness unequivocally, you know, meditating and recalibrating your attention when you're feeling distressed can be very effective. But the message is often, I think, taken to an extreme. If your goal is to always be in the now, always be in the moment, I do think that that message hits a brick wall in a certain sense when you try to implement it in your life, because human beings, you and me and everyone who's listening, we did not evolve to always be in

the moment. Instead, we have this incredible, incredible capacity. We can travel in time in our minds. We can project ourselves into the future and plan for the future and fantasize about things. Like right now I've been stuck in, in my house in Ann Arbor for close to a year. I'm fantasizing regularly about the vacation I'm going to take once this pandemic ends. And that brings me joy. It's fun, right? And being able to think about the future, I think is often helps me be successful, right? I can imagine what's going to be asked of me on the next engagement I have. And I start preparing, being able to go back in time can also be really useful, right? I can think about the experiences I've had with my

kids or growing up and that experience nostalgia and savor them. I can also think about screw ups I've had in the past, which may not be fun to think about, but which I can learn from and provide me with reminders about how I'm not perfect. And there are always things I'm trying to do better. And here's how I can grow from these experiences. So that that flexibility to go back or forward in time. That is a unique feature of the human mind. It's one that I think distinguishes us from animal species in a significant way. That is not something that I would want to do away with. So what I talk about in chatter is not that we want to figure out how not to go backwards or forwards in our minds. Instead, I think the challenge is to figure out

how to master that art of mental time travel without getting stuck. The problem is that oftentimes when people go into the future, they worry. When they go into the past, they ruminate. And so we want to just figure out how they can traverse those mental spaces more effectively rather than getting rid of that capacity altogether. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that obviously comes up a lot in the sense of chatter is worry and rumination, as you just said. And there's obviously a kind of very prevalent mental health concern across the world, across the Western world at the moment, and increased rates of anxiety. And obviously the last year has not necessarily been easy for that. And it's obviously been a time

where I think that catastrophizing in our own brains probably has kind of spiraled to some extent. And I just wondered if at all you saw a link between this increase in anxiety and depression, low mood, mental health concern in general, and this part of the brain and our ability to sort of spiral into self-doubt and negativity? Well, I think they are very closely related. So there is a negative verbal component to anxiety and depression. And you could think of those as extreme manifestations of chatter. So lots of us right now, due to the pandemic and the wonderful set of circumstances that we are living through, right? I think in your country, as well as the US, we've been facing not just the pandemic, but economic turmoil, political instability,

different social groups clashing with one another, there is a lot of chatter provoking things happening right now. There's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of lack of control that we don't have. And I know that you talk about recipes and things of that sort. If you want a chatter recipe, like there you go, those are two key ingredients. So certainly in recent memory, at the societal level, chatter is extremely prominent right now. If you had asked me when I first started working on this book four years ago to give you a formula for the chatter event of the century, what we're living through right now is exactly what I would have told you. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think it's hard to get away from. So I guess it's quite reassuring knowing, first of all, that this is, it's very normal. And it's very normal to have that kind

of rumination and to sit with that negative thought pattern. But how do you start to change it? How, which is obviously the positive side of what you're talking about, that there is absolutely a way to turn your critic around and be something that actually starts to benefit you. Yeah. And you know, what I've spent most of my career focusing on is exactly this, right? So when chatter strikes, how can we help people manage it more effectively? Before I get into the tools, and the good news is that, you know, science has unearthed many. I think I talk about 20 something in chatter. I won't go into all of them. I'll give you a couple of examples. But there are lots of tools that we can use. So that's

good to know. And I just want to go back and emphasize one point you made, Ella, because I think it is so important for listeners to know, which is, if you're experiencing heightened levels of chatter right now, that is normal. There's a great saying in academia. It comes from a study that was published several decades ago. I'm going to butcher it a little bit, but I think you'll get the message. The saying goes, abnormal situations call for abnormal responses. And so the idea is that if you're experiencing a very unique situation that is negative emotion provoking, it makes sense that you would be responding with more negative emotions. So I think that statement really just applies to what we're all experiencing right now. In terms of the tools that exist,

I like to break them down into three buckets or categories. There are things you could do on your own, ways of shifting the way you're thinking about the situation or your problems that can be useful. Then there are ways of interacting with other people. And we've talked a little bit about those, but specific ways of talking to other people and not just talking, actually connecting with them. Affectionate touch, for example, between close others can be really useful. So there's certain ways of leveraging our relationships with other people that can be useful for helping us combat chatter. And then the third category of chatter tools consists of ways that we can

navigate the physical spaces around us, our physical environments that can be useful too. One of the most interesting forays that I had while researching the book was discovering that our environment, the world around us has chatter tools. And if you know where to find them, they can be really useful. I think a lot of people, and this was myself included prior to doing some of this work, simply weren't aware of what those environmental tools are. So I talked a little bit about those. So why don't I give you an example of a few tools? Would that be helpful? Yeah, that would be absolutely brilliant.

Okay. Let's start with something you can do on your own. So when we experience chatter, we often zoom in really narrowly on the problem, tunnel vision. We think just about what it is that's bothering us, and we lack the capacity to adopt a broader perspective or point of view, a broader perspective that might invite us to contextualize the experience and realize, as awful as this is, there are other ways of managing it, other explanations, so forth and so on. So a lot of the tools that are helpful for breaking people out of chatter consist of asking them to do the opposite of zooming in. Instead, we ask them to zoom out, to think about their experience with a little bit more what we call psychological distance or mental space. And one way you can do that is through a linguistic tool that we call distant

self-talk. So you silently coach yourself through the problem, try to make sense of it using your own name and other non-first person pronouns, words like you or he or she, they. So for example, if I'm really chattery about an upcoming speech I have to give, all right, Ethan, let's break this down. What do you need to do? Here's what you got to do. What we find is that that tool can be really useful for helping people manage their chatter. It leads them, it silences that inner critic and instead promotes a more coach-like messaging. And the reason we think it is so useful is we know that it is so much easier to advise other people on their problems than it is to take our own advice. Many people have the experience of a friend or a loved one coming to them with a problem. They're ruminating,

they're anxious, they don't know what to do, and they present the problem to you. The situation is not happening to you, and you can easily coach them through it. Has this ever happened to you, Ella? Yeah, absolutely. It's always so much easier to give objective advice to someone else, isn't it? Yeah. And so that's a phenomenon. We actually call that Solomon's paradox named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famous for giving out great advice, but not following his own advice. He had countless concubines and making sure that relations were good amongst them led in part to his kingdom's demise and losing the throne. But what language essentially does is it helps us think about ourselves like we were another person. And that gives us some objectivity, mental space that can

be really helpful for navigating stressful times that's one thing you can do distance self-talk another distancing tool that can be useful something called temporal distancing or i like to call it mental time travel so if you're dealing with an acute stressor think about how you're going to feel once the stressor ends right so rather than focusing on how awful our current circumstances are, and to be clear, they are not pleasant, right? What I do is I think I go forward in time and I think, all right, how am I going to feel 18 months from now when the country is vaccinated and I'm back to walking to work each day and seeing my colleagues and traveling. What that does, what engaging in that mental time travel exercise does, it makes it crystal clear to me that what

we're experiencing right now is temporary. It's bad, but it will eventually end. And when I think about the experience in that way, that gives me hope. And hope is really powerful for helping silence those doubts and worries. I also sometimes go back in time to the past and I try to contextualize what we're going through and think, we actually went through something like this before, a little over 100 years ago, the pandemic of 1918. And that was awful, arguably even worse than what we're going through right now because our technology and medicine wasn't as good. But guess what? We managed to get through that experience. We endured and we're here and we'll make it through this again. So that's another, it's a slight perspective shift that can help when you're experiencing chatter. So those are two examples of things

you can do on your own. There are lots of other tools. I talk about the science behind them in the book. We've already talked a little bit about other people. So maybe let's just turn to our environment and how ways of harnessing the environment. Does that sound good? Yeah, absolutely. It's a topic I found so interesting. We did a whole podcast actually on it. It must have been about 18 months ago, specifically about nature, but about all this amazing stats and research around how much nature can support your brain and emotional regulation. And I don't think it's something that people kind of completely realize actually is grounded in facts? Oh, yeah. So there's a lot of science behind the restorative effects that green space exposure, i.e. walking in nature. Scientists definitely have a unique ability to use complicated language to describe simple things. I always laugh at the green space exposure. I never say to my kids, come on, girls, let's go get some green space exposure. I say, come on, let's go for a walk in the park. So there's a lot of data showing that

when we're stressed, going for a walk in a green space, in a park, on a tree-lined street can help us. One of the ways it does so is by serving as a type of attention replenisher. So when we're experiencing chatter, as we talked about before, we're thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. We're using up those limited attentional reserves that we have. And there's work showing that when we are in a safe, natural setting, we naturally let our guard down. And that can have a restorative effect, replenishing those limited attentional reserves, gearing us up to focus better and feel better when we're done. So that's one thing people can do. Another thing you can do is seek out experiences that provide you with an experience

of awe, the emotion of awe. And you can also get that from nature that you can get it from other things too. For me, I often experience awe when I look at a skyscraper and I try to imagine how is it possible that we human beings figured out to build things like this? Or I look at airplanes, like I fly all the time. Every time I get on the airplane, I still look and think, how did we figure out at one point, we were, we were hanging out in loincloths, you know, like working really hard to make a fire. That was, that was the engineering challenge of our lives and fast forward, and now we figured out how to safely blast ourselves off into the sky and then land. I mean, to me, those are just awe-inspiring achievements.

And so the experience of awe is an emotion we have when we're in the presence of something really big, really vast that we have trouble explaining. And what science shows is that when we have that experience, what it does is it leads to something called a shrinking of the self. We ourselves and our concerns feel a lot less important when we're in the presence of something that's so monumentally great, right? So if I'm looking up at the sky and I'm contemplating all the stars in the universe, the concerns I have about the little tiff I had with my colleague feel a whole lot smaller than matters of the universe. And so that can also be really useful for helping people. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that sense of perspective is incredible. I have to say, we live in central London and it's definitely the thing that I'm finding myself really missing at the moment is that sense of space and that sense

of nature, because I think it always has that amazing ability to make you feel small in the best possible way. But Ethan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I wondered if you could just leave us with one final thought, if there was one thing you wanted everyone to know about chatter, what it was and what it could do for you, if you could tell us what that would be. So chatter is an incredibly common experience that we have. The good news is that tools exist, lots of different tools. There are no magic pills. There's no single tool that I can advise listeners to use and tell them that this tool is going to make it so they never experience chatter again. Instead, I think what is fascinating to me is that we've developed, we've evolved to possess a whole boatload of tools.

And different tools work for different people in different situations. And I think the challenge for both scientists and for listeners is to figure out what are the combinations of tools that work best for you in the different chatter provoking situations you find yourselves in. And I'm hopeful that the book Chatter will help readers do that. On a personal note, I took a lot from the book and everything you had to say. It's very easy to get lost in that spiral. And I think it's brilliant just to have the reminder, as you said, of all these tools that are there, they're available. They're so easy to do. They're something you can do for free at any moment. And it's incredibly beneficial just to, again, even have the reminder that that's the case. So thank you so much for your time today. I'll put all the details of the book in the show notes below. Thank you everyone so much for tuning in and listening

to us today. We will be back again next Tuesday. And please do share the episode with anyone else you think it will benefit. As always, have a lovely day. Thanks so much. Bye. Thank you. ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.