How To Stop Overthinking with Ethan Kross

thank you so much for being here welcome to another live action for happiness event it's uh fantastic to have so many of you joining us from all around the world and I'm really delighted to welcome uh Ethan cross our very special guests for today's event Ethan uh lovely to have you with us thank you so much for making the time for this lovely to be here Mark thanks for the invitation it's just uh I always Marvel at how Zoom can bring us together uh across across Seas Nations and all so thanks everyone for chiming in thank you and uh the topic of today's event is how to stop overthinking um Ethan is of course an award-winning Professor University of Michigan psychologist and author of a great book chatter which we're going to be exploring together in this conversation today um after Ethan and I have had a sort of brief exploration of this there will be a chance for all of you to ask Ethan questions so please do use the the Q a function and um there will also be a few chances for us to all interact and to get a bit of a sense of how you're feeling out there in the community so I'm really looking forward to this but maybe Ethan we could start with a little bit of background about you not only your professional work but I guess what brought you to this topic of as you call it in the book chatter and this idea that we have a an inner dialogue that's so important well for me um I've been studying this inner dialogue and and when it conspires against us in the form of chatter for um for over 20 years now but my interests go back even further so uh they started around the time I was three or four years old because I was raised in a household with what I would describe as a pretty unconventional dad who every time I um I found myself getting upset about something he would say to me hey go inside tap into that inner voice and figure out a solution to your problem and you know I would roll my eyes when I was a kid he told me to do this but as no doubt many uh parents who are on this call know your messages have a way of penetrating into your children's minds and I listened to my dad growing up and every time I experienced some kind of adversity I would um I would do what he told me I'd introspect I turned my attention or hey why are you feeling this way what's what's going on and I come up with a solution and I was is really good at thinking through problems I never really got stuck in ways that were damaging and then I got to college and I took my first psychology class and about halfway through the semester we came on the topic of introspection and I thought to myself you know I essentially did this in my mind you know I got this down I've been thinking about this stuff with my dad for a long time and what I discovered in that class was many people reflexively do the same thing my dad taught me to do which was go inside try to tap into your inner wisdom to come up with a problem but their attempts to do it didn't always work out they often backfired and and pretty spectacular ways leading to things like worry and rumination and this to me just activated this giant puzzle in my head why is it that we have this tool our mind and our ability to use language to work through problems this is an amazing tool that lets us do remarkable things like build spaceships that blast us off into outer space and develop vaccines in record times and solve all sorts of problems and yet it is off is also the source of of incredible misery and suffering so why is it sometimes helpful and other times not I went to graduate school to figure out how to use the tools of of science to answer that question and that's what I've been doing ever since and I decided to write the book chatter because um we've learned a little bit about how to answer it so that's what got me to where I am right now thank you that's great to have a bit of the story but um I think it's been amazing to see the the response to chatter obviously it really uh chimed in with a lot of people of what's going on for people and of course this event here this evening we've had a fantastic response to it it's clearly a topic that people are well feeling a connection with and I'm just I'm reminded of something you told me when we first connected which was I think you said the most important conversations we have are with ourselves why is it you think this is a topic that we're drawn to and maybe struggle with well um we all have an inner voice and I will uh I will walk you through why I believe that to be true with conviction in in a few moments um I think it's remarkable that we all have this tool that's a really powerful tool and yet we don't receive a user's manual that directs us how to use it and so we're left to just stumble on our own in our lives I mean how many people on this call took a class when they were growing up on what your inner voice is and how it works how many people can actually even Define what an inner what it actually means to have an inner voice how many people here spent their their dinner time conversations with their families talking about the things that they're saying to themselves is it even socially acceptable to admit that we sometimes talk to ourselves sometimes I have to do a little bit of of normalization to say hey if you ever talk to yourself congratulations welcome to The Human Condition because we all do at times so let me break down what the inner voice is because I think this is really just basic knowledge to get us all on the same page when I use the term inner voice when I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives and I think of this capacity this ability to silently use language as one of the a Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us do many many different things and so let me just walk you through a few things that this this tool allows you to do um if I were to ask folks here to what's a what's a what's a popular phrase right now over in your neck of the woods mark popular sports team or I don't know National phrase meaning uh so sorry uh the name of a team or like a yeah okay you know okay I'll I'll do this so I live in Ann Arbor in Michigan yeah and we have a football team associated with our University that we fervently support and the chant that we crop we we we shout every weekend is go Blue so I'd like everyone Right Here Right Now to repeat that phrase in their mind silently three times go Blue say it three times if you were able to do that you have just come in touch with your inner voice your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system this is a basic system of the human mind what it allows you to do keep little nuggets of verbal information active for short periods of time so if you go to a grocery store and like me 60 seconds into shopping you think to yourself I don't know what I'm supposed to get I forgot and you start repeating that list in your head what was I supposed to get milk cheese yogurt that's you using your inner voice that's one thing it allows you to do your inner voice also lets you simulate and plan before I give a presentation I'll go for a walk outside or around the hotel lobby I'll rehearse what I'm going to say in my mind often word for word from the beginning to the end I'll get to the end and visualize lots of clapping and cheering usually is not that strong but in my mind it feels really good and then and then I'll actually simulate what is the most hostile question that I might get I'll hear the question and then I'll respond I'm using my inner voice there to plan for the future we do this before presentations dates interviews when I'm exercising in the morning I'm constantly talking to myself I go to these classes with these torturous trainers coaches who tell me to do all sorts of terribly painful things and when they utter those directives to me the first thing I say is a little bit of release I whisper expletives in my mind you son blah blah blah and then I say come on you could do this six more reps six five four I'm using my inner voice ever coach me along final thing I'll flag final feature of your voice it helps you make sense of your experience in this world when we experience adversity things don't work out like they're supposed to work out or we're not certain what's going to happen many of us reflexively turn our attention Inward and we try to come up with a story to explain what we're going through and the stories that we create about our lives those stories give shape to our understanding of who we are and your inner voice helps you do that so your inner voice is as multi-purpose tool that you would not want to live life without the the the catch here and what has kept me in business and I don't mean you know like selling things but kept me doing researches oftentimes it's remarkable to we possess it breaks down when we need it most so we're suffering we try to figure out work through our problem but we don't come up with a clear solution we start overthinking and get stuck in what I call chatter which are those negative thought Loops that I think are one of the great challenges we face as a species chatter is really dysfunctional it interferes with our relationships our health our ability ability to think and perform and so the real question is when when chatter strikes and this inner voice that we all possess starts backfiring what are the tools that exist to help us right the ship so to speak yeah and you've got some fantastic tools and I'm really excited to come on to some of the Practical things we can do to sort of befriend this inner voice but I think you've made a really important Point Ethan well many but in particular reminding us that this this capability we have can be both um well a liability in a sense that we we are overthinking many of us are here to learn tonight maybe how to stop overthinking but but also that it's an asset that we use all the time in many ways and I wonder if we could maybe stop and connect with the community and see how people are feeling about their inner voices right now what sort of question can we ask to sort of explore this with our with our community here uh can I can I be blunt and ask imposing the question yeah please okay um one of my favorite quotes uh describing an inner voice run amok is by a former co-host of Good Morning America Dan Harris who very pointedly said the voice in my head is an I would love to know how many people on this Zoom call sometimes feel like the voice in their head is an as opposed to an asset okay so asset versus yeah put it in there the uh asset versus uh or liability whatever you want to say so it looks like we're getting I'm looking at the chat here now and I'm seeing yeah more negative more than asset but Mark this is really funny because when we do ex when we do experiments you know one of the tools that sometimes we use is we just we we try to Prime Concepts in people's heads by flashing words over and over that activate those ideas and just watching the ticker here this chat yeah all I see is the hassle so hopefully neither of us starts behaving in that way but actually I think although there is a mix of stuff I'm saying in the chat it's um a very strong bias if that's the right word towards the negative people are really struggling with this inner voice in terms of it could be a critical so is it is it ever good that we're harsh on ourselves in this inner voice is that sometimes helpful or is it always a problem um well first let me just say your observation that sometimes it's worse than good uh there's this finding in in Psychology that I love it's called bad is stronger than good and what it really captures for me is the bad stuff really sticks out it's much more Salient in our minds than the good stuff and I think it's an important to remind ourselves of that your inner voice may help you out 17 times in a row but you are going to remember the one time that it really brought you down and so I think that's just a helpful little um reminder but it is important to draw a distinction between um being tough and firm on yourself as opposed to suffering from chatter sometimes uh being a little harsh with yourself can actually be quite useful when I when I screw something up my ability to recognize ah you know you really you really botched this up like not a good thing you've got to fix this that's that's actually bringing in important information if we take that further our ability to experience negative emotions period is a really good thing you don't want to live life without negativity because each negative emotion serves a function when I experience a little bit of anxiety before an upcoming presentation that helps cue that I need to prepare for that presentation there have been a few occasions where I've experienced no anxiety whatsoever before a big talk those are the talks that haven't gone so well so being harsh on yourself per se isn't something bad what makes that harshness really toxic is when it is continual when you are constantly critiquing yourself over and over and over in ways that are bringing you down that's what chatter is all about getting stuck in those negative thought Loops that can really pose a major handicap to our lives yeah thank you and I get the sense from the comments I'm seeing in the chat that this is something that lots of us um really struggle with so I guess an instinct might be that we want to silence this voice we want to make it go away is that helpful no no let me elaborate um yeah so there's this there's one anecdote I tell the story in my book um that every time I think about it it really it really moves me it's a story of this woman who was a neuroanatomist at Harvard very top of her game overcome with chatter and she used to think to herself what if I can just silence this inner voice which by the way is a question that I get asked quite a bit just make it go away shut it up in the chat if you ever think that put a yes in there um just get rid of this thing so she would ask herself that question quite a bit a lot of yeses okay yeah wait for the story so so she would ask herself this and um she actually got her wish one day uh in a really tragic uh a tragic experience she's exercising on a treadmill before work and she suffers a massive stroke that's localized in the left hemisphere of her brain right around the parts of her brain that are involved in speech production so she temporarily loses her ability to not only speak to other people but she loses the ability to communicate with herself later on when describing how she reacted to that experience initially she describes it as wait for it euphoric she's just suffered this massive stroke she can't communicate with other people herself and she describes herself as going to La La Land that's a that's a quote because God was all the chatter and once the chatter left her so did all of these mental experiences that were bringing her down now as as the the hours and and days and weeks went on she began to describe this experience as truly um truly disruptive because she she couldn't do basic things she couldn't keep information active in her heads to remember what she had to buy at the grocery store she couldn't plan for the future she couldn't weave together those stories and so I love her story because I think it's a powerful reminder that the goal should not be to rid ourselves of it of our inner voice it's a tool what we want to figure out how to do is wheel that tool more productively how can we use science to to help us keep that inner voice in its productive Zone and not spill into chatter territory and the the really good news what makes me super excited to wake up and talk about this stuff every day to do research on it is we've discovered that there are lots of things you can do we are born into this world with many different tools some of these are tools that we can activate on our own they're ways of changing the way we think about our circumstances that can help us nip the chatter in the bud other tools are embedded in our relationships with other people and how we interact with them and then most magically of all in my mind there are tools that are actually hidden in the physical world around us and and they're just waiting to be activated if you know where to look if you know what levers to pull they can help you manage your chatter and so a big reason for writing this book was to really shine a spotlight on what this remarkable set of tools is that we possess well that's exciting let's make sure we spend the rest of our time together exploring them because I'm sure everyone here is Keen to learn so you mentioned the things we can do by ourselves things we can do sort of with others and things we can do sort of in the world around us why don't we take those each and turn then what when we're by ourselves what can we do to sort of befriend this inner voice okay so I'll I'll give you um so disclaimer here I'm just going to give you a couple of examples from each bucket there is no magic pill there's no one thing that everyone here can do to make themselves feel better I get asked that a lot as well uh what's the one thing you could do to to get rid of your chatter um there is no one thing we evolve the ability to to use multiple tools and different sets of tools work for different people and different combinations and so maybe we'll end by talking about what you do with that information but um here are a couple of my favorite ones so the first tool that you can use on your own is something called distanced self-talk what this involves doing is using your own name and the second person pronoun you to coach yourself through a problem when you're struggling with it now you don't want to do this out loud um you don't want to walk down the the Streets of London say hey Ethan how are you feeling about this what do you think sir right you want to do this silently in your mind here's how this tool works one of the things we've learned through research is that we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves right do do as I say not as I do there's a name for this phenomenon it's called Solomon's Paradox it's named after the Bible's King Solomon who many many viewers here will instantly recognize as a super wise man right he's he's known as perhaps one of the wisest mans in history so he could offer wise advice to other people but if you look at his own his own life he struggled terribly he constantly got himself into love octagons with other other women and It ultimately led to his kingdoms to mice what distant self-talk allows us to is it is it leverages the structure of language to shift our perspective when you use your name or the second person pronoun you to to refer to yourself that leads you to think about yourself like you were like you were giving advice to another person and that makes it much easier for us to work through our problems objectively you can see signs of this you can see examples of this happening all over the place um one of my favorite recent ones was jovovic in the in the last Wimbledon if anyone was watching Wimbledon you'll recall that uh jovovic was was down um in the semi-finals I believe and he abruptly went into the locker room and then came out and he was a different player and he you know he basically demolished his opponent after he went away and then he ended up winning Wimbledon journalists asked Joe Vick hey what did you do um when you went in the locker room and he goes I basically said to myself come on champ you can do this you've got this essentially he used distant self-talk to give him self-advice like he would give to someone else that's one tool you can use and it's probably the first tool that I activated my toolbox that's a really fantastic practical example so let's just say when I I know I was shocked when I first met Kristen Neff and she did that exercise of helping me sort of notice how I speak to myself I might mess something up for like I've let someone down and say you're an effing idiom you know to myself and and and so that's very personal it's directed at me what's the sort of way I can distance my just if I'm already being harsh to myself how can I say how can I sort of be that coach to myself on top of that well I would I would if you're finding yourself going down a bad path um what I would say is specifically try to work through the problem use your name so um so have that directive of trying to work through and try to give your what advice would you say to your buddy like would you actually say to your friend you're a idiot you really screwed this up you're terrible um I mean it's it's pretty remarkable that the things we say to ourselves we would never dream of or just uttering out loud let alone saying to another human being so put that frame on and and oftentimes when people report is that switch using their name helps them put them into that advice giving mode that's really good thank you so you're about to go into another example for by yourself or what else can we do um okay so another thing you could do is something called temporal distancing or mental time travel you know we often we often hear that um being in the moment is something that can be useful when we're stuck in chatter uh and that we should strive to live lives in which we're always in the moment uh being the moment can be very very useful but I like to remind people that the human mind evolved to allow us to travel in time right we could think about the future and plan and learn from our past and we don't want to give up that capacity and in fact you could harness that capacity to your betterment and temporal distancing or mental time travel is a tool that lets you do that so I call this my 2 A.M chatter strategy I call it my 2 A.M chatter strategy because every four to six weeks and I'd love to hear if this resonates with folks in the audience every four to six weeks it's not predictable I will wake up at 2 A.M and I will be wide-eyed like and there's chatter that woke me up and the chatter always takes the same form something has happened at work I lose my job I lose my family I go to jail I die it's very predictable it's just terrible catastrophization totally out of touch with reality and it feels really awful right prevents me from sleeping uh what I do when that happens is I I say to myself how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning no matter how bad the chatter is at 2 am I always feel better about it the next day when my mind is fully activated and I have all these resources to deal with it in in some instances where I experience a problem it's not a chatter a 2 A.M problem but during the day if it's not how you're going to feel about it tomorrow I'll think to myself how am I going to feel about this next week or next month or next year what traveling in time in your mind into the future does is it makes it clear that whatever you're going through how awful it is eventually it will fade because all of our emotions that there's a there's a Time course that explains how they work right they they get triggered they go up and then they eventually come down with time and we all of course know this because we've lived lives rich in emotion and we've experienced adversity and we've we've we've we've surmounted it in many cases and so temporal distancing reminds you of that and that does something really powerful for a chatterpro mind it gives it hope and hope is a is a really um it's it's a kind of antidote for chatter so that's traveling in time in the future you could also go into the past you want did you want to jump in just what um there was a lot of response to your example about Syria M uh being awake well the most the most common one was oh it's four am for me but clearly a very common um concept and I was reminded in what you said of partly of that Shakespearean quote um this too shall pass uh but also something that we we've used quite often in our community the idea of asking yourself will this still matter a week from now a month from now yeah yeah it's really it's kind of kind of putting things into perspective a little bit isn't it it's it is absolutely perspective we call it prospective broadening being able to distance which is one category of tools that can be really useful all of us have the solutions usually at our disposal but what chatter does is it zooms Us in very narrowly on the awfulness of what's happening so we lose sight of the bigger picture where these Solutions often reside and distance self-talk that's one way of broadening our perspective right like what would you say to someone else a friend temporal distancing going into the future this too shall pass that's another way of broadening our perspective you could go back in time too when I'm really struggling I'm I'm so oh my God paralyzed with fear what if I screw up this this next presentation I can go back in time and think of the last 200 presentations I've given and I've never screwed it up so bad that I lost my job right that's broadening my perspective writing expressively create you know telling a story about yourself that's another way of zooming out and there are countless others that that I talk about these are really easy to use tools that you want to have in your toolbox for managing each other yeah that's great Ethan thank you and just to say folks we're going to include some follow-up links in the email that you'll all receive tomorrow so there'll be chances for you to find out more about Ethan's work and check in on some of these and some other tools but the other thing you mentioned apart from things we can do ourselves like the the distance self-talk and the time travel is about things we can do with each other and in this community there's a huge amount of I think awareness of the fact that our happiness and our well-being is is about our interrelatedness relationships are important we're part of something bigger than just ourselves um I guess the first thing that comes up when you think about other people on your inner chat is yeah is it helpful and if so when and who do we share in a dialogue tonight any problems with it feels like we've moved into a World perhaps especially post covered we're talking about our inner lives has become more mainstream more acceptable less stigmatizing which I think is generally a really positive shift but say more about that what can we do with others well um first of all I think a little little um little factoid when we experience chatter we are often intensely motivated to share it with other people there's a Belgian psychologist who showed this uh across culturally uh with few exceptions we don't like to talk about chatter involving shame or embarrassment for obvious reasons but all other kinds of chatter you often want to get it out and what the research suggests is that you should think carefully about who you talk to your chatter about because other people can be either a tremendous asset for helping you or a an extreme vulnerability as well that can make it worse now many people think that the the way to to fix your chatter interpersonally is to find someone to just Venture emotions to don't keep it in just get it out this is a pervasive belief that is spread across cultures it goes back to Aristotle Freud popularized it and tabloids ran with it ever since the research suggests though that you should think twice before venting your emotions because what we know about venting is it doesn't actually help you work through your chatter it can actually make it worse so venting to someone else this can be good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between two people Mark you and I have interacted several times now I consider you a friend and a colleague it's good to know that I can call you and you would be willing to take the time to listen to me that's validized validating that you will empathize and connect with me the problem is if all we do when we talk is you you probe me and allow me to speak about what happened to me and how awful I felt I leave that conversation feeling really good about our relationship but I haven't done anything to actually work through the chatter if anything it's even more active because I've just spent all this time talking to you about it so I leave that conversation just as upset if not more upset than when we started the key to working through chatter with other people is to find people who help who essentially do two things with you first they do take the time to listen and learn about what you're going through it is important for you to share for you to feel valid validated and empathize with but at a certain point in the conversation that person you're talking with ideally nudges you to start looking at that bigger picture they're in an ideal position to to help you do that because the experience isn't happening to them so you could ask me all sorts of questions so how have I dealt with similar experiences like that in the past or you might share with me how you have dealt with experiences like this or something you've learned that's the two-step process to to getting and providing good chatter support taking the time to listen and share and then also talking to someone who helps broaden your perspective and so what I encourage people to do is think really carefully about who they go to in their lives for chatter support and do they help you do both of those things I can tell you that there are many people in my life who I love dearly I would sacrifice many things for them DNA determines that if you get the subtext we are related I never talk to them about my chatter because I know they're going to want to help me but the only way they do it is by getting me to just vent and it doesn't help so I'm really careful about who I talk to I've got a carefully curated Board of chatter advisors and they are an invaluable resource that I possess how interesting so let me just say if I've understood it correct Ethan so you're sort of saying that we need people who are able to listen so we hear we feel heard and validated but also that have the ability to sort of shift into helping us find positive ways forward maybe doing some of those things about helping people through the perspective taking and the time travel and so on but it also makes me think that maybe what you're really asking us to do is to be quite deliberate in who we also how we how we seek to support others as well that's right be deliberate think about who you're going to to seek support from and when people come to you I think the beauty about knowing about this science is I've got a Playbook now for how to help other people who come to me it's really simple right there are two two steps listen learn and then try to try to help that person broaden their perspective now there is an art to doing this well and I can tell you as a scientist I usually don't talk about art I like to talk about like do this for 46.5 seconds and then transition here but that's that's just it's not that simple what I mean by there's an art is depending on the person who they are the problem they're struggling with some people need to spend more time just sharing before they're ready to transition into having their perspective be brought in so if I were to use my wife as a as an example here I'm going to whisper a little bit because I she actually just pulled up she's in the background I don't know if she'd want me sharing this with I'm just kidding she'd let me share but I'll whispered nonetheless sometimes my wife will come to me with some chatter and hey can I talk to you about of course and I start listening and listening and and then when I see my opening I'll ask her I'll totally get it I have an idea can I share with you and um sometimes she'll she'll hear me ask her that question and she'll look at me just keep listening I'm not done yet and then I back off and I I listen some more and then I'll try again a little bit later at other times other other instances I'll pose the same question to her and she'll say please yes what do you think give me your advice that's why I'm here so you wanna You Wanna Be Artful in how you approach this um very wise thank you now you mentioned the sort of three different domains the person are and the relational which you've talked about and maybe even most exciting was you talked about how there were things in the world around us that we can do that make a difference uh maybe you could share a few of those ideas as well I'm happy to um so one thing one thing that you can do uh in terms of the world around you is is create order so when we are experiencing chatter we often feel like our thoughts are taking over we're not in control of the situation anymore our mind is taking the reins and that is an unsettling experience for many people because human beings are highly motivated to have certainty and and develop a sense of control and in many ways we are a species of control freaks if you will and one of the things we've learned is you can compensate for the lack of order you feel in your mind by exerting order around you but and and organizing and tidying up is one way to do that so this this helps explain why so many people reflexively clean and organize when they're experiencing chatter and I'm one of these people so in general my office looks pretty clean and organized in the background but I knew I'd be speaking to everyone here if you were to see my office under normal conditions and maybe if I turn the actually you want to see here I'll give you I'm chatter free look at that you see you know it's just it's it it's it's it's it's uh it's pretty pretty disorganized here when I'm not experiencing chatter there are clothes all all over the the bedroom my office is a mess and so forth um but when I when I experienced a chatter I start putting things away neat and tidy then I go into the kitchen I wash the dishes sometimes I'll even masochistically go into my kid's room and put their stuff away and I'm doing that because it gives me a sense of order and control this is also one of the reasons why so many people perform rituals if you ever watch sports and you see athletes doing these bizarre highly involved rituals before stressful moments this is one of the reasons why they're doing it a ritual is an ordered sequence of behaviors when they're in uncertain conditions they have control over the ritual which gives us them the sense of agency that can help them feel better now clearly you could take this to an extreme and that wouldn't be helpful um in the form of not not feeling like you could live your life each day without performing a ritual but that's a that's an extreme case of taking a tool that is helpful under normal conditions um to an extreme so that's one kind of thing you could do organize your environment the other thing you can do is um you can enhance your exposure to Green spaces uh going out for a walk in nature doesn't just help us feel good there's a lot of research which shows that it it actually functions to restore our attention so when you're experiencing chatter that depletes our attention because you're you're spending all of this time focusing on a problem over and over and over again and not making any progress and if you have any doubts about what this is like just just think to yourself about a time when you've sat down to read a few pages in a book while you were worried about something and you've read a chapter but not remembered anything that you've read it's a very common experience that highlights how chatter can consume our attention in ways that are damaging what enhancing your exposure to Green spaces do is when we go for a walk in nature we're surrounded by really like interesting things that capture our attention now like you know bushes and trees and flowers and we look over we take it in now most of us are not very carefully scrutinizing the geometrical structure of the of the of the hedge or or taking into account like with careful Precision the the you know the canopy overhead we're just we're just taking it in and what that allows us to do is restore the attention that has been consumed by our chatter so that's one way that green space exposure can help the other way can help is it can put us in a position to experience the emotion of awe which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and Indescribable something that we just can't wrap our heads around like the fact that there are trees on my street that have been alive for hundreds of years like how is that possible when we are consumed by ah what that does is it leads to something that we call shrinking of the self you feel smaller when you're contemplating something vast and Indescribable when you feel smaller so does your chatter so so the natural world is filled with those awe triggers but so is the human-made world um you know I I I'm filled with how every time I I think about how how we figured out how to like travel in Planes I still I travel all the time on planes but I I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that not too long ago we were struggling to build fires and now we can safely blast off and then land in a couple of hours halfway around the world like how did we figure out how to do that when I'm contemplating that and experiencing that emotion of awe the worries I have about making the deadline that's coming up just feel a little bit smaller and that little bit of of smaller that sense of smallness when it comes to chatter can be a really uh useful useful way of muting it I love these suggestions and actually one thing that's just come up for me which interesting to hear your perspective on but in all three of those examples the sort of getting out into nature they're creating a sense of order and the sense of all it strikes me that things like gardening must be a really wonderful combination of many of those things you can be creating order uh in nature but also just you know caught up in the beauty of like a something that's growing and the Miracle of that is and in some ways that something as simple as just going into the garden getting out to plants a plant can do a lot of those things I mean this is um you should the only the only Hazard with respect to gardening and this comes from someone who spent a lot of time in the garden when he was writing his book is that the bills can go up quite High um to to preserve the order in the guard but but it's absolutely true I mean that's a way of getting um multiple tools activating at the same time and and one of the things we're learning right now is how these different tools combined and one of the things we're seeing in ongoing work is the more healthy tools you use often the better so there seems to be this additive effect where you can benefit from layering multiple tools on I I neither I nor you by the way we should be clear are sponsored by the international Garden Association definitely not my wife would definitely not see me as a gardener I'm to be useless um I'm I'm I want to get to these wonderful questions that people are posting so if you have a question for Ethan please do use the Q a and if you see a question you like please do vote it up and we'll try and use the most popular and requested questions but just two final things before we come there first of all I just want to share a comment that Wendy just made in the chat which I think is a lovely summary of of how I think many of us are feeling with this conversation she just said I'm so glad that chatter is actually normal and I think one of the real valuable things you're doing is just helping us realize that there's stuff that we often get really worried about that's going on is just part of being human and actually this is this is that that in itself is a real insight I think ABS absolutely I mean if there's one hope that I one thing I that you I hope you take away from this conversation is that if you experience chatter at times Welcome to The Human Condition yeah most of us do I I received an email actually a couple of days ago from um from a a very distinguished individual um a well-known academic who who wrote to me and said he's experienced chatter his whole life and he's never been able to really talk about it with someone else because it was always in his head and he never was able to actually put a label on what he was experiencing and just knowing that this is part of how his mind operates how all Minds operate was incredibly relieving to him and so I hope that is is true for everyone else here as well I think it really is um so just before questions I wanted to ask a question which is touching back at something I think you've already hinted at but we obviously in this community care about our own inner well-being but also very much about our loved ones our colleagues our neighbors our family our friends um how can we sort of pass this knowledge you've shared with us on it I mean you made the point at the start that we're not really taught this maybe we should be taught this but how can we be ambassadors for the chatter ideas well um share it share it with others and I can tell you that the reason I decided to write this book was was really towards that end I was I was actually teaching a class of seniors at the University here about a lot of this material like many professors teach about what they do research on and during the final session of the semester the assignment to students was to come with questions for me and one student asked me quite angrily actually why are we learning about this now and I am what do you mean why are you signed up for the course I didn't say that I thought in my head inner voice I thought oh can you elaborate on that and and what she went on to say was why did anyone teach us about these tools earlier on in life when they could have made a difference and my response outwardly was fear not you'll have opportunity to manage your emotions and inner voice in your 20s and Beyond but I didn't have a good answer um so what you can do is is is pass these tools along share this information do it explicitly and you could also do it invisibly one of the things I talk about in the book is how do we help people when they actually don't ask us for help and there's actually a lot of research which shows that volunteering support and advice when you're not asked for it can blow up in your face if anyone's ever had a a meddling parent or in-law offer advice on what to do when you have an Astrid you know what this can feel like um but it turns out there are still ways you can you can help other people and it can be by by helping them invisibly giving them the information without shining a spotlight on and say hey I heard about this interesting stuff and and this is what I learned today rather than hey you need to read this book or you need to do this because it's going to make you feel better so be be Artful in how you communicate I think that's very wise uh generally passing on wisdom to loved ones in a way that might be more more easily received um and let's come to these questions so the most popular question that's been upvoted by lots of you is from Beth who asks how can you catch yourself when in the middle of an overthinking spiral any tools or techniques for noticing it sooner and she says thank you for a great session as well uh well thank you for that wonderful question um so one a couple of responses um one thing that I advise is you want to have a plan for what you do when you do catch yourself people ask me whether I ever experience chatter as someone who studies he said yeah I experience it at times what I'm really good at it what really good at doing is the moment I find myself slipping down the rabbit hole I instantly have a plan a set of tools that I use now the tools that I use they're a little bit different from the ones my wife will use or some of my friends but I know the three things that I'm going to do the moment it register it registers and so develop that plan actually think to yourself if I experience chatter then I'm gonna do a b c d we call that developing an implementation intention it's a really useful way of making sure you use these tools when they matter most in terms of of I of discovering when you're slipping into that rabbit hole simply knowing about what chatter is should help you do that because now you know if you're thinking about a problem and you're and you're finding that a you're not making any progress and B it's really weighing you down cognitively you're having trouble focusing or or or subjectively your mood's plummeting you don't have as much energy that's a cue to try using a tool so it's when the thinking process is not paying dividends I've shared this on this film a couple of times before but just um that's all that I sort of stumble accidentally I told you earlier that I discovered I call myself an effing this and an effing that quite well a lot more than I thought I did so the way I've found a tool to deal with that in that spiral is a little bit of humor so to re Rebrand the the f word uh to remind myself how I want to be in the world friendly useful calm and kind and I try and disrupt this spiral by reminding myself that I am generally friendly useful calm and kind and that that both makes me smart but also just shifts that that chatter spiral into something more constructive um so I like that one revisit that um so Deb has asked um one well maybe the observation one of the most difficult things is to deal with the overthinking that comes while waiting for medical test results which I think is a you know quite common challenge lots of people are facing or happy facing recently any tips or suggestions on how to deal with that particular sort of type of overthinking or over worrying yeah health anxiety can be a a huge source of chatter for a lot of people um there I think um you know recognizing that that you so first of all what what often drives that anxiety is zooming out zooming in on the worst case scenarios oh my God what if it is this and there's of course nothing you can do while you wait for those test results so being able to Simply recognize that there's nothing you can do that in and of itself is often anxiolytic and so what would you tell you know your friend who's worrying well there's nothing you can do and and and knowing is better than not knowing like that that would be what I would recommend thank you that's very wise um Larry has made the point that he says I often self-catastrophize is this the same as overthinking or the can the tips that we've learned here be used to stop sort of proper sizing bad situations I guess it's sort of maybe this is a little bit about um worrying into the future I don't know if that's what Larry means any thoughts um that is uh um you know self-catastrophizing would certainly be a kind of chatter so what chatter gets at is the cycling over and over and over again and there are many forms that that could take it could be a depressive rumination um it oh my God I'm such a and my life is never going to be okay it can be oh my God what if what if what if and by the way another helpful little psychological Jiu Jitsu move for the what-ifs the catastrophization is to replace that with us so what um so instead of thinking yourself what if this happens think to yourself so what if this happens that's a little way of putting you down a different trajectory I actually do this with my daughters whenever they uh find themselves experiencing chatter what if I never fall asleep this is what happens with my my nine-year-old look she'll come in what if I never get well so what if you never fall asleep and that really gives them a pause because it's harder for them to answer that question and um um so but yeah that's a form of chatter and I would try these different tools for that it goes without saying by the way these tools you know chatter is part of everyday life for for most of us and these tools are are really about developing a kind of mental Fitness to master your inner voice so you don't fall yourself going down that rabbit hole too deep if you find your spouse spiraling for longer periods of time in ways that are truly bringing you down let's say oh for more than two weeks and and the Chatters interfering with your daily quality of life that's uh that's an indication that you want to take the the steps to get an even more concentrated form of support in the form of a therapeutic intervention yeah very wise thank you for reminding us of that um my colleague Sarah and thank you Sarah behind the scenes he's helping us here today has just uh drawn to my attention that somebody's asked a question which I haven't actually seen but seems really relevant about what if you're catastrophizing or overthinking about politics or climate change or something that is really properly outside of your direct control but of course is on so many of our minds and and we care really deeply about it you know we really are worried about the state of the world and the country and so on what's what are your thoughts yeah it's interesting how increasingly I get questions about these kinds of issues one of the things um just very simply that we've learned is um uh we actually did a study that looked at this news consumption can really Stoke that fire and I think simply being aware of the fact that reading this information over and over again about these negative things that are happening in the world is like putting logs on a burning fire and it just keeps that flame burning so I think you want to add I think there's a difference between being informed and safety seeking in the sense of continually refreshing that screen to get the latest update on who's going to be your next prime minister or what the climate you know negotiations are are are you know how they're progressing and so be have good social media and news hygiene so to speak then the other thing is I think some of these tools can well be helpful in those contexts uh with the caveat I I don't know if research that specifically looked into these particular contexts but um you know we've been through some very turbulent times here in the United States as I'm sure many of you know politically and um I I've been affected by this as well as many others I could tell you that one of the things that I've done is um it has been a perspective broadener like there have been other times in history where things have been politically um turbulent and we've made it through and we likely will make it through this again um and and so I think pla trying out these different prospective broadeners can in fact be useful there are always different ways of of thinking about dire circumstances and and I'll just say for for those of you who may be questioning well can you really always reframe things one of my favorite examples is is the case of Victor Frankl who was a famous psychiatrist who lived through World War II and had his entire family Stripped Away From Him during the Holocaust and and yet he wrote a wonderful book man search for meaning was a pivotal book in my life my favorite book's ever fantastic yeah and and he and he was able to to reframe his circumstances there in ways that allowed him to move on not to not to pretend to rationalize and pretend that evil wasn't happening but he was able to rethink his circumstances in ways that let him keep going and I think we all possess the capacity to do that that is one of the the virtues of the human mind and so we just need to figure out how to tap into that capacity and that's what a lot of the tools that I talk about help us do thank you for that reminder Frankel said everything can be taken from us but one thing the last of human freedoms the ability to choose how we respond to any set of circumstances or words to that effect which I find constantly uh both challenging and encouraging when I try and practice it we're sadly running out of time I want to bring in this question from Renee which I think is very topical is today's Trend or interest in mindfulness and meditation actually just a way of calming our the chatter in our mind or is it actually a way of sort of temporarily avoiding it well I think I've got some views on that but what do you think I'd love I'd love well you know we need to have a part two Mark to get into that absolutely um so you know my dad I I come full circle here we started with him um I said he was an unusual dad uh he was unusual not only because he talked to me about the inner voice at the time I was three um he he was a huge devotee of meditation Transcendental Meditation I for my fifth birthday rather than getting a a new bicycle I got a mantra so I've been meditating on and off my whole life I'm I'm very familiar with it I think meditation and related contemplative practices are one type of tool that exists and it constitutes a tool that is useful for lots of people but it is not a Panacea and what I like to remind people is that there are lots of other tools that are out there and so if you meditate and it works for you great keep doing it uh if there are but but there are other tools that we possess to the point of does meditation help us not deal with our chatter it so depends on what kind of meditation and practice you're implementing um there can be a lot of value in just accepting the presence of negative thoughts and letting them float away but I think there's also real value that comes from being able to to Grapple with our thoughts and analyze them and make sense of them and that is not something that many types of contemplative Traditions advocate so I think you want to like the best advice I can offer folks on this Zoom call is the advice that I give to my family and it's advice that I follow myself which is familiarize yourself with all the tools that are out there and then figure out what are the tools that work best for you if I'm a carpenter and I show up for a job I want to have all of the potential tools that I I need on that job I'm not showing up with just a hammer I'm having the entire van and I think the same is true when it comes to our mental lives and and the hope is that that this conversation and um and my book is a small way of getting people to that point it really is Ethan thank you so much it's been a really insightful conversation I'm seeing a lot of love for you in the chat and also quite a lot of enthusiasm for your idea of part two so I'd love to revisit that with you because I think there's so much more we could talk about um I as I said we're going to send around an email to everyone tomorrow um with a link to your fantastic book chatter but also I understand that on your website people sign up to your newsletter they can actually get access to a toolkit with some free resources and other things so we'll make sure they get a chance to link through to that um thank you all from all around the world for thousands of you for being here for your fantastic questions I'm sorry we didn't get to all of them for the amazing engagement in the chat and for being so honest and open and kind uh with each other as always but mainly thank you from all of us to you Ethan it's been a wonderful time together is there a final thought you'd like to leave us with um I I wish you all chatter free days ahead familiarize your yourself with the tools and share them with others thank you so much looking forward to part two thanks everyone bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 17,942

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Id: wW7REcWZop4

Length: 56min 56sec (3416 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022