Q: “How Do I Stop Negative Self-talk?” | The Happiness Lab | Dr. Laurie Santos

pushkin earlier this year i taught a class at yale on the science of well-being and how we can apply research back strategies to live happier lives what we're continuing our discussion on today are the kinds of right sorts of thoughts that seem to make us happy it was the same course that i had offered for the first time back in 2018 it's the one that got a lot of media attention and led to the creation of this podcast but this time around i added a new happiness talk worry negative thought patterns rumination these are not good they're not effective strategies but what are some effective strategies for controlling our thoughts are there thought patterns we can use that aren't just neutral but actively help us my new lecture was all about strategies we can use to change our inner monologue and fight our inner critic when my students reviewed the class at the end of the semester they said this new lecture was the most useful part of the entire class pretty much all of the strategies my students found so helpful came from one particular book this fantastic book by ethan cross called chatter it's all about useful strategies and ways you can talk to yourself in your head to improve well-being and also improve productivity so when i invited listeners of this podcast to write in with questions about how to be happier i wasn't all that surprised when we got a ton of questions on the same theme how can we shut up that inner voice in our heads so that we can feel happier and i knew exactly who to call to get some answers my name is ethan cross i'm a professor of psychology and management at the university of michigan and the author of the book called chatter the voice in our head why it matters and how to harness it today we'll be diving into ways we can change the way we talk to ourselves so our inner critics can become our inner champions you're listening to the happiness lab listener questions special edition with me dr laurie santos [Music] so ethan the question i wanted to tell you about today was from a listener called buttery brannigan who i learned actually isn't a person named buttery brand again but is the twitter account of a y a author duo beth buttery and patricia brannigan but we're just gonna call them buttery brand again for now buttery brand again asks hey happiness lab help me i want to stop all this negative self-talk and finally learn how to love myself please help the reason i love this question so much is i think buttery could mean two kinds of things by how to stop all this negative self-talk right one is all the negative self-talk in your head right like rumination and worry and all that stuff but then a second thing she could mean is the negative self-talk right like the bad things we say about yourself and one of the reasons i was so excited to talk to you is that you're a guy who has studied both of these so you can help us let's start with this idea of the negative parts of our self-talk right like buttery's not unique here a lot of us have stuff going on in our heads that doesn't feel so great kind of feels pretty sad or fearful or just generally pretty negative right yeah absolutely i mean i hear this question a lot so buttery brannigan am i getting the name right yes that's right bran again you are not alone actually just knowing that hopefully is a teensy bit empowering i think it's really important for us to normalize the experience of negative emotions in general and negative self-talk as well one thing that i know you believe in laurie and have talked about before is that negative emotions in and of themselves aren't a bad thing what we do want to figure out how to do is keep those negative emotions in check because like buttery brand again buttery yeah we'll scroll the buttery yeah butterbread i kind of want to master the buttery bran again duo i love it like i'm guessing they they have experienced many times which motivate this question like those negative emotions can often morph into rumination and worry and that's when they can get really dysfunctional i want to talk about why we have such negative chatter like a lot of times it's just you know going over the same problem again and again and again i think we have this sense that it works right if we could just think about it and think about something that's going on in our lives that we'd feel better but you and others have found that evidence suggests that that's not the case you know a question i get a lot from people i talk to is how can i just stop talking to myself i just don't want any more negative self-talk i don't i just want to be in the moment all the time that's it and i like to remind folks that you know your inner voice which is the basis of all that we're talking about here our ability to silently use language to work through problems this is a fantastic tool in fact people who lose the capacity to activate their inner voice through experiences like strokes they suffer enormously and so the trick is how do you figure out how to wheel this tool more effectively you've also found that when we don't wield it effectively especially when we get stuck in these really awful rumination and worry loops there can be these really bad consequences to this so let's talk about some of the bad consequences to the negative chatter i genuinely think based on what i know of the science that chatter is one of the great challenges that we face as a species because of the negative consequences that it has for us across domains of life first it makes it really hard for us to focus well that's going to make it really hard for you to do a range of things it's going to make it hard for you to read for fun to focus on that report or even to pay attention to that person across the table who is talking to you i am willing to admit and this is a shameful moment in my life but there have been episodes when i'm sitting at the table with my family and i've got young daughter youngish daughters they want nothing more than to tell me about their day i should feel really lucky that they want to talk to me i'm told that will end at some point in the near future and sometimes they tell me stuff and they they talk for like two or three minutes and then when they're done i ask them a question about what what happened to you today and they just told me and they're like dad we just that's an example of chatter consuming our attention the other way that chatter can undermine us is by leading us to choke under the spotlight there's a a great phrase i love that captures this it's paralysis by analysis right so here the idea is that a lot of the things we do in our lives are these complicated behaviors that we've learned to execute automatically so take a gymnast like simone biles who is on her floor routine doing triple flips and handsprings and you know smiling and all sorts of other complicated stuff that is hard for me to wrap my head around simone through practice has learned to do those behaviors automatically without thinking if she starts to experience the negative self-talk if she starts to focus on her behavior am i doing a good job did i do that well what that does is it zooms her in on the individual pieces of that behavior so she starts hyper focusing on whether she's running fast enough as she tries to execute the somersault or smiling enough and once you start zooming in really narrowly on the specific parts of something complex the whole thing unravels and this actually happened to her last summer in the olympics she actually dropped out on the grandest stage which was quite quite remarkable and it's particularly bad because it really deeply affects our physical health in ways that i think we often don't think right like i forget that i'm just worrying about some you know thing about my job or what this person thinks about me but that's having real consequences for my body so here's here's what we have learned first i'll do a tiny bit of myth busting here lots of us have heard that stress kills i like to point out that that is not actually correct just like other kinds of negative responses or experiences stress in small doses really really useful you want to be able to experience a stress response it helps us deal with threat what makes stress toxic though is is what makes some of those other negative emotions we experience toxic which is when it becomes prolonged and extended over time that's when stress starts to exert a wear and tear on your body that has been linked with physical maladies like cardiovascular disease problems of inflammation and even certain forms of cancer one of the key culprits in perpetuating those stress responses is our chatter because what happens is we experience something truly stressful and aversive in our lives like let's say you and i get into a heated altercation that's going to be stressful for both of us right maybe you leave the recording studio and you leave it all behind because you've done this a bunch of times and you know you've dealt with the uncomfortable exchange i'm hopefully not trying to prime us to experience anything here really self-fulfilling prophecy here you also have no idea about what my rumination cycles are like because they have a teeny tiny thing that could possibly go wrong on this podcast weeks later you know i'll be walking down the street be like remember when i said that dumb thing to ethan like well we'll make sure we get to the what i call the the 2 a.m chatter and my 2 a.m chatter strategy yeah the problem wasn't what happened to my cardiovascular system while we were chatting it was the problem is you keep thinking about it and what we've learned is the act of thinking about that stressful experience that keeps our physiological stress response activated that is not a good formula for health and longevity and so all these negative consequences make me at first think that buttery's right we should find a way to stop these things but you choose to say that we shouldn't stop the negative chatter we should in fact harness it which i think is interesting for two reasons one is that we want some negative chatter which is important but the second is that like we can control it and i feel like this for me was one of the deepest insights about the human mind that has really changed my life which is that we are not our thoughts as they are right now we can move them around which is in some ways kind of incredible an insight that not all people ultimately get to i think it's really useful to distinguish between what we have control over and what we don't so if you ask me do we have control over the the thoughts that pop into our heads at different moments in our life i would say i know of no evidence that suggests that we can precisely control that experience the flip side to that is once the thought is activated then we have enormous control we can open up our toolbox at that point in time and we can push that thought around in all sorts of ways to amplify it as we sometimes do when we go down the rabbit hole of chatter to minimize it to transform it to replace it with other thoughts we'll find out just how to climb out of the rabbit hole of negative thoughts when the happiness lab returns in a moment you know it's particularly frustrating about negative self-talk when we're like beating ourselves up is that even people that you would think have absolutely no reason to beat themselves up wind up beating themselves up i just had this amazing conversation with malala you know nobel peace prize winning global women's rights activist who i thought should you know be brushing her shoulders off of feeling like she's done amazing work and could kind of chill out with the negative self-talk but what's amazing is she talks to herself in a guilty way too she thinks oh i'm not doing enough or i should be doing more i'm not doing the right stuff and that was humbling for me because it made me realize even people who have absolutely no reason to be beating themselves up are kind of beating themselves up with their chatter yeah i love that example i think number one it speaks to this idea of normalizing this experience when people tell me they experience chatter one of the first things i tell them is welcome to the human condition congratulations malala is a great example to bring up though because although she may experience a lot of negative self-talk and i didn't know that about her she also appears to be pretty adept at using psychological tools to manage it maybe she's reading some of our our research i don't know but but actually one of my favorite examples that i often present to audiences comes from malala what i'm talking about here is a tool called distanced self-talk and it's really simple it involves trying to coach yourself through a problem think it through using your own name and or the second person pronoun you so right around the time that she won the nobel peace prize she went on the daily show with jon stewart to do an interview and during that interview jon stewart asked her about what she had went through when did you realize the taliban had made you a target in 2012 i was with my father and someone came in and she went on to narrate her internal monologue when she discovered that the taliban were plotting to kill her and if you listen to the words she uses to describe her experience she starts off in the first person and i used to think that the talib would come and he would kill me she is contemplating the most stressful frightening experience any human being could possibly imagine she's all first person filled with emotion and then when she gets to the potential climax if he comes what would you do malala she automatically switches to using her name to coach herself through that situation like she would give advice to someone else malala just take a shoe and hit him one of the things we've learned through lots of research is that we're much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving ourselves advice and so we've evolved the ability to do that for ourselves through these different distancing tools and language is one way of helping us switch perspectives it's just putting us into that mindset of now i'm in advisory mode and that often makes it much easier for people to work through their problems you've also found that this tool doesn't just help us hear the advice but we actually follow it right there's lots of evidence that when you use this sort of linguistic distancing you do better you eat healthier and so tell me some of the benefits that we get out of using this tool well so what the tool does is in stressful situations it transforms the way people think about a stressful experience you can appraise the situation as something that you can't handle like oh my god i'm never going to be able to do this or you can appraise it as something that you can manage like yeah i can do this i've done this before i mean lori when people have come to you and they are facing objectively stressful circumstances how many times have you told them i don't think you can do it like can you can you just top of mind think about a lot of those situations is that what you tend to tell people i would have been kicked out from my residential college head role a long time ago like um i guess this is impossible sorry yeah i mean you're actually the perfect person to ask this question because you're getting pinged quite a bit with questions like this am i making a leap to say that you are often trying to frame what students are facing as a challenge and then realistically marshaling evidence that supports the idea that they can manage it is that a fair appraisal totally but what's amazing is when i do it in my own head to myself that is rarely the direction i go it's really like oh what an opportunity that i'm facing yeah instead it's like oh my god how am i gonna deal with this that's because we get zoomed in so when we experience trust we zoom in so narrowly on the emotional elements of the experience that that often drive our insecurities and fears and worries but when we zoom out and we think about ourselves from that more objective standpoint like we were thinking about someone else we can often find solutions to our problems and ways of making sense of them that are often much better than the alternative which is you know i'm gonna give the talk it's gonna go terrible i'm going to lose my job followed by prison and you know soon after death like that's the real that's the chain right and it's not hard to dispute that illogical irrational chain of events when you're looking at that big picture from a more objective standpoint that is what distancing helps people do and the linguistic shifts i described before that's one way of doing it another easy tool is something that goes by a few different names mental time travel temporal distancing or in my mind ethan's 2 a.m chatter strategy i told you i would refer to that for me every four to six weeks it's it has that regularity i wake up at 2 a.m eyes wide open i don't know why it happens but there's chatter there's a thought that oh my god what am i going to do and prior to knowing about the research that i'm going to tell you about in a second this actually was quite disruptive because it kept me up it didn't feel good it created interpersonal problems because i'd start you know moving around in the bed jostling with my ipad my wife would elbow me why are you moving now i'm awake like you know all very reasonable the next day would be terrible i'm guessing you've experienced this before yes yes this is it's like you're in my bedroom which is a little creepy but you know okay we'll go ahead we will go there but but also like the interpersonal stuff it's not trivial people like their sleep yeah and and so i don't fault my wife so when that happens now i instantly have a go-to response that i implement without thinking because i've created a plan i ask myself use my own name ethan how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning no matter what the chatter is at 2 am and sometimes it can feel absolutely suffocating i always feel better about that experience the next morning when i'm fully awake have access to all my cognitive resources if that doesn't take the edge off sufficiently i'll go further out in time how are you going to feel about this next week or next month or when you're retired what i'm doing is i'm traveling in time in my mind i'm zooming out i'm broadening my perspective through mental time travel and what that does is it makes clear for me that however awful what i'm experiencing in that moment is it will eventually get better because most emotional experiences that we've had in our lives they've they come sometimes they stick around for a while but they eventually do subside like the stuff that i really ruminated about when i had like you know pimples and i was getting rejected in high school and all that good stuff it faded eventually right as have other things come and gone and so by traveling in time in your mind you remind yourself that our chat or experiences as awful as they are they are unstable they will eventually fade they're impermanent and that does something really powerful for someone mired at chatter that gives us hope and that hope is a powerful antidote so far ethan has shared his top techniques for creating distance between ourselves and our negative thoughts but what about the second part of buttery brannigan's question how do i learn to love myself again we'll be back with answers to that when the happiness lab returns in a moment you say that it's so soothing it's like i'm listening to you on the radio i wanted to get to the second half of buttery's question how do i finally love myself and it feels like if i introspect on my own self-talk sometimes it's ruminating about some problem but there's often some like blame when i'm thinking about that problem like i screwed up i suck i'm really bad at this like there's this negative self-focus to a lot of the chatter too and this probably isn't unique to me in buttery i feel like we there's there's lots of evidence that we can be kind of downright mean to ourselves in our chatter right absolutely you know i would say the meanness in very very small doses can probably be instructive in the sense that it is okay to be a little bit critical of ourselves it is okay to experience a little bit of shame or embarrassment or regret now i don't think that's what we're talking about with buttery's example of course she's talking about the more chronic negative internal monologue that can be a real downer and so when it comes to how do you change the tone of your inner monologue some of the same tools that we talked about as being useful for zipping us out of rumination are also helpful there for example to give ourselves advice like we would give advice to your friends and use your name to do it that can be really helpful turns out when you transfer from thinking about experience as a threat oh my god i can't just to yeah this is something that you can deal with that's changing the nature of our internal conversations that we have with ourselves another strategy you've talked about in regards to that is not just coaching yourself through linguistic use as though you are a kind coach and other wise person out there but literally taking the perspective of a different wise person and this tends to be my go-to strategy when i'm beating myself up like a drill sergeant inside my brain it's to say what would a kind friend say to me or you know what would beyonce do beyonce wouldn't be beating herself up and so talk a little bit about this strategy of literally simulating a wise other person and why it's so powerful so this this deals with activating like an alter ego of sorts and it's another way of switching perspectives getting some space and the trick with this strategy is you want to activate the right alter ego so if i'm really struggling with a problem i don't want to who would be a really bad person to activate i got to be careful here many people might be listening no it's true you know because because the person we sometimes activate is some like horrible drill sergeant that's right or the canonical example is a parent it's a parent that is overly critical and hostile and disparaging and you're hearing their voice in your head which is bringing you further down when the goal is to lift us up and boost the esteem that's not who you that's not the voice you want to hear in your head the voice you want to hear is that supportive coach and i remind people that when you say supportive coach it like my most memorable coaches and advisors were not people who only patted my back and told me that it would be okay they did do that but they also gave me really good feedback at times and said no yeah you can do this better and here's how so so they were being in touch with reality but in a very supportive way another thing that we find is very effective is normalizing our experience right i think it is often when we're experiencing chatter and we're stuck also in those just really negative dialogues with ourselves it's very easy for us to feel like we're all alone and no one else is experiencing this kind of negativity and is this hard on themselves what we find is when you get a person to recognize that what they're experiencing is common to many many others that can have really useful properties i think a beautiful thing about this show and the work you do lori and this is not because you're in front of me but i've said this to others is what the happiness lab helps do i think for many people is it normalizes the at some point's dark side of our emotional lives and tells us how we can manage that a little bit better but in having that discussion it makes it clear that we all suffer from this muck at times it's a part of the human condition and reminding ourselves of that alone can be really powerful especially when you do it in really specific situations you and i are having my first ever podcast conversation in my new podcast studio i'm actually in a closet that i've just designed but that means i've just spent the last two weeks moving and it's been filled with a host of negative emotions i've been grouchy i've been feeling like nostalgic and weepy and i keep in my head reminding myself that moving is the third biggest life stressor after a death of a family member divorce everyone feels this way when they move there is not something particularly wrong with you laurie this is just what happens when you move and that's been so essential for me not you know breaking down with you in the middle of spot i'll share another experience like that when i was writing my book no one told me this but writing a book is a potentially chatter you know vulnerable experience i mean you're you're doing a lot of original work and and putting it out there for many many people to consume and evaluate and there is all sorts of chatter that i did not expect and actually just reminding myself that many first-time authors go through this was tremendously alleviating and so i i shared that experience so so that brings us back to this idea that normalizing our experiences can be really powerful which actually and this wasn't planned but it is a great segue to another category of tools and the category i'm talking about is other people so other people can be a remarkable tool for us when it comes to our chatter but they can also be a tremendous tremendous tremendous vulnerability and what's really tragic here is the way that many of us try to activate the tool of other people isn't always optimal so there there's this strong belief in our culture that when you're experiencing chatter what you want to do is share your emotions with others express vent right don't keep it bottled up inside this notion of venting as a tool it goes way back like aristotle talked about it what we have learned about venting is that venting your chatter can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between two people the fact that you can call me up and complain to me about something that happened which is on your mind and i'm there i'm willing to listen and empathically connect and hear you out that's very good for our relationship you will be more likely to call me again knowing that i'm there for you but if all i do on the on the phone call is oh lori that sounds terrible really they said that i can't believe what did you do how do you feel ugh i'm so sorry that's really bad if that's all we do you leave that conversation feeling really good about our relationship but we haven't talked about anything that's actually helping you deal with the chatter the key to getting good chatter support is to find people to talk to who do two things they do take the time to listen and hear you out establishing those friendship relational bonds really helpful but at a certain point in the conversation they help broaden your perspective they help normalize your experience that's the formula for what i call a good chatter advisor and i think we'd all be a lot better off if we thought really carefully about who those people are in our lives who are the three or four people that you can call when you're experiencing chatter who do both of those things for you so this relates to a final question i wanted to get in from a different listener olga habri who wanted to talk a little bit about toxic positivity but not in the way i expected she wanted to talk about toxic positivity in the context of giving chatter advice and she notes when someone else is feeling bad the automatic response is usually something to the effect of it'll be fine or look on the bright side it feels terrible when someone doesn't want to acknowledge how you feel and just wants to paint over your sadness with fake happiness and then she goes on to note that i read somewhere that toxic positivity can actually be selfish that it's your discomfort with someone else's discomfort and you kind of want to say things to get them to stop being so uncomfortable and i feel like this is another spot where we can go wrong where somebody you know comes to us with like please help me with my chatter we say like oh no no it's fine just get over it you know look on the bright side kind of thing and that doesn't really help either we need more parts to it than that right we want to be positive and supportive that is important but we don't want that to gloss over the need to actually provide important feedback and support sometimes people don't want to hear just the positive stuff i think it's really important in these interpersonal contexts to recognize that this is a dance between two people right what i mean by that is is you want to feel out the person in the situation depending on who the person is and what the problem is sometimes it can be obvious like when i'm talking with someone i know really well sometimes i can just read the situation i see my opening and i know when to go well i have an idea let me share it with you but if i'm not sure i will often explicitly ask so sometimes i will ask my wife when she comes to me hey i have a thought can i can i share with you what i'm thinking and subtitles should be like no no this is just it yeah just keep listening i'm not ready i need to keep going at other points in time she's like yeah please tell me what you think so you want to feel that out and recognize that there is an art to doing this well one of the things i love in chatting with you about chatter ethan is that you're not just an expert on this stuff you use it in the trenches all the time and that's what makes me honestly believe that it works so well you know i really genuinely believe in this stuff because i benefit from it i hope you're able to try out some of the tools that ethan shared in this episode i've heard some of these strategies before but i know i'm still finding new ways to blend them together the next time i get caught in a negative thought spiral at 2 am fretting over some problem i'm gonna use the time travel tool to put things in perspective but this time i think i'll pair it up with some distancing coaching and socializing i'll tell myself laurie how big a deal do you think this problem will be by next week or next year probably not that big right let's think about which friend you can call tomorrow to talk things through i hope that'll be what i need to quiet down the chatter enough to get some sleep and dream up the topic for the next episode of the happiness lab with me dr laurie santos big thanks to writer patricia branigan for sending in this week's listener question and special thanks to my expert guest ethan cross if you like the suggestions he gave us today be sure to check out his amazing book chatter the voice in our head why it matters and how to harness it i'll be back next week with the final episode in this listener questions mini season we'll be exploring challenges we all face to life after lockdown the happiness lab is co-written and produced by ryan dilley emily ann vaughn and courtney guarino our original music was composed by zachary silver with additional scoring mixing and mastering by evan viola special thanks to mia labelle heather fame john schnarz carly migliori christina sullivan brant haines maggie taylor eric sandler nicole morano royston preserve jacob weisberg and my agent ben davis the happiness lab is brought to you by pushkin industries and me dr laurie santos to find more pushkin podcasts listen on the iheartradio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts

Channel: Dr. Laurie Santos

Views: 16,524

Keywords: The Happiness Lab Podcast, Happiness Podcast, Yale Happiness Course, Coursera Happiness Class, Psychology Happiness, Science of Wellbeing, Podcast, Pushkin Industries, Listener Questions, Ethan Kross, Chatter, Self-Talk

Id: o2Wp60tvXzQ

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022