Do you ever find yourself on a spiral of fear thinking about things that are bothering you? Have you ever repeated or fought this awkward interaction with your partner over and over again?
If you’ve ever struggled with any of these things, you’ll appreciate this week we’re learning how to better control that voice in our heads with the help of psychologist Ethan Kross. Listen to this week’s upgrade episode to learn why reaching out to a trusted friend isn’t always the most helpful, and how language and other distancing tools can help us get a better perspective on our problems.
Ethan is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business and one of the world’s foremost experts on mind control. His book is called Chatter: The voice in our head, why it matters and how to use it.
Listen to the upgrade above or find us in all the common places that podcasts are made available, including Apple Podcasts, Google play, Spotify, I was listening to the radioand NPR One.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Highlights from this week’s episode
From the Ethan Kross interview:
What chatter is about and why it’s a problem:
I think the first thing to clarify is that chatter isn’t just negative self-talk. When I speak to people about this topic, a lot of people say, “Well, how do I stop being negative with myself?” The ability to be critical at certain moments is really useful. If I decline an interview or a presentation, it is good for me to be able to say, “Oops! You screwed this up. The following went wrong. “What chatter is when we get stuck in a loop. So I screwed up, “Oh my god, what am I supposed to do? What if that happens? “And then that and the next thing you know, you’re fired or have cancer, right? So you’re stuck on that hamster wheel. We’re taking something negative, you just zoom in on the negativity of it.
How temporal distancing can help ease chatter:
[R]Right before we signed up, I had two kids who systematically disassembled their mother’s closet to find something green for St. Patrick’s Day and were screaming everywhere. “I’m on a podcast!” Do you know what can i do? I might think, “I’ll be vaccinated in four months. I should be back at work and not have all this commotion at home … ”What it means to transport myself into the future is to distance yourself. It makes me realize [the] big picture. What I’m going through right now is terrible. But guess what? It’s temporary. It will end. That gives me hope. And hope is a balm for chatter.
How speaking to ourselves in third person can help us manage our rumination:
What we learned is that language can be a distancing tool. We usually use names when we’re thinking about relating to other people and what we’ve learned – it’s like a linguistic hack or a jujitsu psychological movement – when we’re using our own name to think about ourselves, something our perspective changes. It makes us relate to ourselves like we’re talking to someone else and that gives us distance and that can be productive too.
For more great tips on how to suppress that worrying, self-critical inner voice, we highly recommend listening to the entire episode.
Do you have any feedback or ideas for future episodes? Would you like to be featured on the show? Leave us a voicemail at 347-687-8109 or send a voice note to upgrade@lifehacker.com.
Episode log
