Rumination is chatter about the past worries chatter about the future, but fundamentally if you find yourself in a thought loop trying to work through some kind of problem, but not making any progress that's an indicator that you're experiencing it. Why is it that we have an invoice at all can you explain why it is that we can hear our own thoughts and I had. Yes, it's a great question. So I like to think of the inner voice as a kind of Swiss army knife of the mind that tool lets us do lots of different things.
Things that I want you to tell me how essential you think some of these things that it allows us to do are. So first of all, when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives and we silently talked ourselves for a variety of different reasons. One thing that happens to me quite a bit is I go to the grocery store and I'm charged by my wife and daughters with picking up various items. Inevitably, I get to that grocery store.
I start walking down the aisle. Usually it's a second or third aisle and I forget what I'm supposed to get. And when it happens, I start talking to myself. I start thinking, what am I supposed to get?
And then I list off the items, bananas, chocolate, cheese. What I'm doing there is I'm using my inner voice to keep a nugget of information active in my head. Our inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system. This is a system of the human mind that is specialized for allowing us to rehearse information in a loop.
Nowadays, people don't really memorize phone numbers anymore, but we used to do that. Did you ever do that when you're younger? Yeah, I mean, there's maybe two or three phone numbers that I can remember, my home phone number and my dad's phone number. But by the time that my mum got a mobile phone, I had a phone.
So I've never needed to recall hers back and remember my dad. I can remember my business partners as well. And the reason I can remember that is because of the number of times that I heard the answer machine for him while he was at university and he was still asleep over from the night before. So those are the only three numbers that I can remember.
Yes. Back in the day, there were many more that we wouldn't memorize. But if you were to repeat a phone number in your head or you meet someone at a party and you want to not forget their name, you repeat that over and over, that's using your inner voice. So most people rely on their inner voice for that reason every single day.
We're using it in that capacity. We also use our inner voice to do other things like simulating and planning stuff. Before people go on interviews, they often rehearse what they're going to say in response to different questions they imagine. Before I give a presentation, I'll go over the talking points in my head.
I'll usually go for a walk around the neighborhood or the hotel I'm staying in and I'll go from the beginning to the end. I'll go over the whole rigmarole. I'll imagine what a really obnoxious attendee. What question are they going to ask me?
I'll then imagine what I'm going to say to them. It's usually not very nice things that I say back. I'm much nicer in person than I am in my head. We'll get to that maybe later.
But so we use our inner voice to plan, right, to simulate. We use it to control ourselves. When I'm exercising, if I'm in a class with an instructor or working out one-on-one, I'm smiling to that instructor. But in my head, when they're having me do painful things, I am saying all sorts of not-so-sweet things towards that.
I'm counting down. Come on, man. Seven more reps. Seven, six, five.
That's me using my inner voice to coach myself along. We can also use our inner voice to critique ourselves. And then finally, and I think this is one of the most special functions of the inner voice. We use it to make sense of our lives.
Should happens. And when that occurs, we try to make sense of that adversity. And we use words to create stories that help us understand what we're going through. And those stories we tell ourselves really, they give shape to our sense of who we are.
So your inner voice helps mold your identity. So those are four things that our inner voice does. I think we're unique in our capacity to use an inner voice in that way. And I think there's a decided advantage that we possess that capacity.
It seems surprising to me. All of that sounds great. All of those things sound fantastic advantages. And yet when you talk about inner voice or when people discuss it, for the most part, they see it as an adversary.
They don't see it as a compadre. That's right. Well, one of my favorite findings in psychology can be summed up by the following phrase. It's actually a title of a well-known paper.
Bad is stronger than good. And what that means is the bad stuff tends to stick out a lot more than the good stuff. And there's an evolutionary story about why that is the case. We need to be more tuned to potential threats and losses than games from a survival point of view.
And I think the same is true for our inner voice. I think we often take different granted. I think we're not, we don't always stop and savor all of the benefits it provides when it's doing the things it has evolved to do. But when that inner voice runs off track, when it morphs into the kind of negative self-talk or self-dialogue, the inner critic perks up.
Or one of my favorite descriptions I read about this in my book is Dan Harris who describes as inner voice as an asshole. When the inner asshole starts yammering away, it really grabs our attention in ways that are uncomfortable, makes it hard for us to think and perform, undermines our relationships and health. And that really motivates us to focus on that nasty inner voice and often to try to do something about it. That's interesting.
Something I never thought of before. The negativity bias that we have where we focus on threats more than we do potential advantages. I never thought about that being a selection mechanism for the things that go through our own head. Oh yeah, totally.
That's really cool. Yeah, the negative stuff is sticking out there. And you know, this is a foundational finding. One of the first Nobel Prize is ever awarded for a kind of psychological research was given to a luminary named Danny Kahneman.
And it was for this idea of loss aversion that were more sensitive to potential losses in our lives than gains. The same basic finding generalizes to our inner world. Much more sensitive to the bad stuff happening between our years than the good stuff. It sticks around longer.
How is it that we don't have control over our own inner voice? My arm doesn't choose to move on its own. It's not doing things against my will. It's not continuing to do the same stuff over and over again, even if I want it to stop.
Why don't we have control over what the voice inside of our head says? Well, I think we can and do. But you need to know how to engage that inner voice. So let's talk about, let's break down the concept of control and what is under our control and what isn't.
I think this is often a good place to start. So if you ask me, do we have control over the thoughts that pop into our head while we're awake, while we're asleep? The answer to that question is no, I don't think we do. And if we're responsible for all the thoughts that popped into our head, I think a lot of us would be imprisoned and in big trouble.
I don't know why when I'm walking down the street, a dark thought pops into my head at times. I wish I did, but we don't. So we can't necessarily control the thoughts that pop into our head. But what we do have a lot of control over is how we engage with those thoughts, how we work with them, how we manipulate them, how we control them once they're activated.
And that's really the territory that I and any other scientists like to play in. So once a thought is activated, how do you change its trajectory? So if you find yourself beginning to go down the rabbit hole of worry, rumination, or catastrophization, how do you steer that internal dialogue into a different direction? And the good news here is that there are lots and lots of things that scientists have discovered that are useful for helping people do that.
Ways of shifting your thinking, stepping back, thinking about your circumstances from a more objective perspective, we call these distancing tools. Lots of different ways you can get distance from your problems to think more rationally about your circumstances. There are people tools, there are ways of engaging with other people that can help you work through problems and ways that shift your internal dialogues. And there are also environmental tools, ways of engaging with our physical spaces that can be really helpful too.
Going a little bit further back up the river of thought, I know that when we're talking about chatter itself, when it's manifested and when we become aware of it, we can then direct it to control. But if you've got any idea about where thoughts come from in the absolute first place, they're pure origin. Wow, that's a great question. They can certainly be triggered from external events that activate different kinds of associations from the past.
Or sometimes external events really demand our attention. And thoughts are often functional in the sense that they are helping us make sense of the world. And so if you're walking down the street and you see someone suspicious 15 feet ahead of you, you're going to have a certain set of thoughts activated that are designed to help you deal with that circumstance. In that particular instance, you'll also experience an emotional response in all likelihood that is functional, a negative response, threat detected and you're going to be alerted for dealing with it.
We can also though activate thoughts through thinking. And this is one of the ways in which chatter really syncs us. Lots of people think, for example, that stress kills, right? And this is like a meme out there, avoid stress.
That's not actually true. As I like to point out, you wouldn't want to live life without being able to experience a stress response. The fact that you have a system, a coordinated system in your body that quickly prepares you to respond to threats in your environment to either approach or avoid them, super useful system to have. What makes stress truly toxic from a health point of view is when your stress response goes up and then remains chronically activated over time.
It's that chronic activation stress that exerts a wear and tear in your body that leads to things like cardiovascular disease and inflammation and all sorts of bogeyman like physical disorders. And what accounts for that elevated chronic stress response is chatter. It is thinking because we are capable of re-simulating the things that are worrying us or bothering us. And when we do, that activates related thoughts and a biological reaction as well.
So our thoughts can come from lots of different places, including places that we're not certain of. And I think it's important to share that with folks too, that the human mind is one of the most mysterious physical structures that is out there. And we are trying to improve our understanding. I think we've made a lot of progress in shedding light on how the human mind works, but there is a lot, a lot that we still don't know.
Well, Sam Harris says, if it wasn't for the fact that we are conscious, we would have no idea that consciousness exists out there in the universe. Aside from the fact that we're able to experience it firsthand, there is absolutely no evidence that shows that it's something that's occurring. And it's interesting what you talk about the fact that you end up with kind of like a thought cascade. So a thought can trigger a thought through an association, even if you don't know that those two things are associated.
And then from there, our ability to ruminate perpetuates that. We are the architects of our own sort of cyclical thinking over and over and over again. When it comes to verbalizing thought, one of the things that I realized was that given the fact that our inner voice uses words, does that mean that different languages can engender different thought patterns? I think German is one of those languages where they have tons and tons of words for things that we don't, perhaps, in the West like Chardon Freud and things like that.
That kind of enables a different type of thought almost. Yeah, well, you know, there's lots of interesting connections between language and our experience of emotions. And it is absolutely true that certain cultures have words to describe emotional responses that we don't have in the United States, which raises questions about the universality of certain kinds of emotional experiences and the degree to which emotions reflect these innate, natural kinds of phenomena as opposed to more constructed experiences that our culture helps us make sense of. So in terms of the inner voice and language and foreign languages are different languages, some of the most relevant work here that I really love, which has never made it into my book that it got what's the expression on the chopping room floor, but it's really cool science.
It involves asking the question, how does talking to yourself about an emotional experience in a foreign language change the way you talk to yourself? How does it change your emotional experience? And what that research shows is that when we think about our emotional circumstances in a second language, we're able to think about them in a more objective way, because our primary languages are the languages in which we first learn about emotion, experience emotion. The second language that we learn are a bit more clinical and abstract.
Do you speak more than one language? No, I'm in Guatemala and I've pulled every essence of Spanish that I can out of the half GC I did nearly 20 years ago in school, and it's been terrible. It's been tough. Well, anyone who's listening, I would encourage them to try this exercise.
Try cursing first in your primary language, and then try engaging in the same curse words in your second language. Curse words don't have nearly the same sting. They're kind of funny sometimes to even utter them in a second language as compared to the first, because they don't have the same associations. If you want to get back to this idea of associations, emotional memories are encoded in our primary language.
So your primary language is really the terrain of very rich emotion, and you can actually leverage this phenomenon to your betterment. If you're trying to work through a problem or some chatter, try to think it through in your second language, and research suggests that you might be a little bit less emotional, more rational in how you do so. Yeah, it's interesting, the effortfulness of having to think about what it is that you mean in a language that isn't your first language is probably going to provide some distancing, which I know we'll probably get on to. Another thing that I considered is that as you learn new or more words in your primary language, you're recreating the capacity of your inner monologue, right?
You're actually enabling different ways for you to understand things, and I suppose that you could then roll that forward to concepts. You learn a new concept, like availability bias or a hand-on's razor, or you learn about some sort of psychological traits that you may have or something like that. And it makes me think about what constitutes us, what constitutes me as a person. If I can learn a new word and then use it, and prior to not having that word, I was still me.
And having had this word, I'm still me, but I consider the thoughts that are in my head to somehow be a part of me or a representation of me or something like that. What does it mean to add new words in? What does it mean that I can kind of augment myself with new language? All of that together seems like a bit messy situation.
Well, it's a beautiful mess, I would say, at least in the way I think about it, because the mind is very flexible, and our ability to make sense of our experiences in the world. I mean, look, we can create stories to make sense of almost anything. One of my classic studies in psychology, and I've ever heard of the cognitive dissonance, discovery with the UFOs and things like that. It's a great story.
So Leon Fesinger and his students, Stanley Shacker, two major players in social psychology, basically they wanted to understand what happens in the world. If people believe in something really, really strongly and are then presented with evidence that there's no getting around it, the evidence clearly says you are wrong in this belief. And then the question was a simple one. When you're presented with evidence that contradicts your beliefs, what do you do?
Do you update your beliefs? Or do you come up with some creative rationalization to allow yourself to maintain these beliefs? And their prediction was a controversial one at the time, which is they said actually, when you're presented with undeniable evidence that you're wrong, that's going to be such a threat to your sense of who you are, that you're going to figure out what's wrong with your own beliefs. And so, you're going to figure out a way of bending your mind to make sense of this new circumstance.
And I think that's one response I have to your question about the messiness of the mind. One thing that keeps that messiness in check is that we are motivated to be consistent in how we think about ourselves and the world around us. And so, yeah, we can learn new concepts and ways of thinking about things, but usually we're not going to take those ideas and do a total 180 in terms of how we think about who we are and present ourselves to the world. We are going to maintain some consistency.
Anyway, to get back to the detour of that study I was talking about. So, how does Shactor and Festerger test this idea about whether we take in the new evidence, update our ideas or not? They infiltrate a cult. These are like professors and graduates.
They infiltrate a cult in Minnesota that believes in an alien race that has been visiting the planet for a while to see what's going on. And this alien race has determined that there's going to be this doomsday event on this particular day. And when this happens, if everyone in the cult comes to a certain place, they'll be saved, go on the spaceships and go to the planet. I think it was Clarion, which is a little funny because there is a chain of hotels here in the United States that is called the Clarion Hotel.
It's hard for me to take it seriously. Anyway, they've infiltrated the cult and they're there on the day when the aliens are supposed to come. And guess what happened, Chris? No aliens.
No aliens. I should say, by the way, I'm open to the idea of their being. Aliens that run a successful chain of hotels in America. Yes, exactly, exactly.
Just not the ones that take this shape. So they don't come. And what do the cult numbers do? Well, it turns out they just make excuses for this.
And well, it didn't happen to say what's going to happen three months from now. They're rewriting this internal narrative that has been guiding them for all of this time, even them to invest money in preparations for the migration and so forth and so on. So this observation was really the way we stumbled on this idea of cognitive dissonance, this idea that we really don't like to admit we're wrong and really update ideas even when we're presented with information that contradicts them. Isn't the part of the explanation for how consciousness works or how identity works, the fact that we commit ourselves to those positions is because, uncessorally, it would have made a lot of sense for us to try and be someone that looks reliable, consistent, like they have control over their sort of conscious processes and what they're going to do.
If we were fully verbalizing all of the things that go through our heads, or if it was that we weren't actually as committed to the personality that we have, it would be chaos because the person that was a farmer yesterday is woken up and doesn't want to be a farmer today. He wants to be something else. He wants to be a hunter. No, no, no, no, you're supposed to be that person.
And I remember reading about how it was supposedly adaptive for people to stick to their guns in that sort of way because it makes the behavior more predictable, which actually can cause a tribe to be a cohesive together in a more efficient way because there's not constantly tons of flux. People change from one type of person to another. Yeah, I mean, that's a very popular evolutionary theory and it's one that makes a lot of sense. Evolutionary theories are always hard to completely.
Everything's just so, right? Yeah, it's hard, right, because you can't go back in time necessarily and do this, but it's a theory that does have some support behind it and it makes good sense. What we do know is that human beings, we are highly motivated to have a sense of order and control. We like certainty.
We like to know that the world is predictable because when the world is predictable, it's easier for us to navigate. And that generalizes to our social relationships as well, right? We want to know that people are dependable and so forth and so on. And so I think that does make sense.
And look, the things happening in our mind, when we're pinballing back and forth, that isn't always a very controlled atmosphere inside. And it's interesting, the age of transparency, I think people often, you can push it to an extreme side. I don't know everything you're thinking. In fact, some social media applications actually ask you to share what is on your mind.
That's the prompt or was the last time I checked on Facebook or whatever it's called. I'm not telling people what I'm thinking all the time. There's a little bit of filtering that I'm going to do before I share it with someone else. And I think that filtering is, serves a really useful function.
Can you imagine if we were to go into some minority report world in the future where we were actually able to read people's thoughts? First off, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people who see themselves as the most virtuous would find themselves pretty close to the bottom of the pile. And also, you're right, it's strange the fact that we have this odd cascade of thoughts which can be triggered by thoughts and perpetuated by thoughts means that we end up in, oh, what was that film? There was a film that came out where everyone's in a monologue was verbalised outside of their heads.
Jim Carrey film, was that the one? No, no, this one came out the last year or the other before it's a dystopian one with Violet. There was one on the inner voice. Yeah, I think so.
It's about dystopian future worlds where technology's crashed a little bit. Within the last two years, these things come out and they have, what do they call it? I think they might call it the voice or the whisper or something like that. And you can hear what everybody says outside of their heads.
Oh, really? What happens? Well, it's a nightmare, obviously, because no one can hide things. And the chief, then one of the sort of totalitarian guys that looks after one of the big tribes, he doesn't have a voice.
He's been able to control it. And then as this kid who is the protagonist, and he really struggles, he's trying to talk to girls and he's always saying how cute she looks and stuff like that. And then over time, the journey is him sounding like my childhood. Yeah, maybe.
Did you watch it? It's right. What's the name of your phone? I'll send it to you afterward.
People are screaming it into their headphones at the moment. How does age and gender influence chatter? Are there correlations there? So we know that chatter tends to be higher among women than men.
There are two caveats I always like to provide after describing that statistic. Number one, there are many things that men, many problems of the mind or problems of women that men score higher on than women. So it all averages out if you look at the full terrain. But second, many of the tools that exist for managing chatter work equally well for men and for women.
With age, you know, you could begin to see signs of so that the earliest study I was able to find that had some trace of inner voiceness occurring among kids was around 18 months of age. That's probably not the earliest that it occurs, but methodologically, it's hard to do this kind of research when you get much younger. But we see chatter, the harmful version of the inner voice beginning to occur pretty, pretty early on. You know, young school age kids start to experience worry and rumination.
And it oscillates, it changes over the lifespan. It's also important to know that just because, you know, it's easy to bucket people into, hey, you're a warrior, you're a chatter and you're not. In fact, there are domains of chatter. Some people are really good about not experiencing chatter at all when it comes to relationships when it comes to their work life, chatter, chatter, and vice versa.
So there is a profile that characterizes people. What are your chatter triggers? Let me ask you. God, dude, anything.
I really do struggle to not think. I've done a lot of mindfulness, you know, five years or something, over a thousand sessions of meditation. And it's definitely made me be more aware and more intentional. So my ability to step into see, hear, or feel whatever it is that there isn't in the mind.
And then to let it go is it feels like a superpower. It genuinely feels like a superpower, especially compared to the person I was half a decade ago. But I find it very difficult to not notice things. So as I'm walking through a hotel, I'll notice that a woman has got one sock higher than the other.
And I'll have to think about why she got one sock. Another thing to do is to do with feet. I went to a party a couple of months ago in Austin and people came into this house. It's very nice.
The party was and they were told to take the shoes off at the door. And about 50% of people took their shoes off and about 50% of people took their shoes and their socks off. And I was obsessed. The rest of the party, almost all I could think about was like what bound together the sock people and what bound together the bare feet people.
And what was it about? Why was I one of the non sock people? You're just a lay psychologist. You just got to come to our PhD program here.
Fantastic. I knew that was the key. And then we can do some foot analysis. We can find out what the inner monologue of people that don't wear socks when they go to a party is.
So talking about that, obviously we can have different sorts of projections inside of our mind. We can project visual images. We can also have a here sensation so that verbalizing and verbalizing. And then we can have a feel.
So sort of emotions, I guess, they're a little bit more ephemeral and probably somewhere between the two. Is it possible to quiet in the mind or is it only possible to change what it's saying? Well, I think once you, I think they're, they're often related. So when you're struggling with either imagery that is aversive and promoting chatter or a nasty internal dialogue.
Changing the trajectory of that dialogue or imagery is often linked with quieting the mind. And once you once you address the negativity, it becomes easier than to just move into into a kind of autopilot mode. Now, I do think it's really interesting. I'd love your take on this as someone who has experience with meditation, mindfulness, which I do as well.
And I genuinely, I was about to say generally Friday afternoon, you know, that time of the day, I genuinely value mindfulness meditation. I've been doing it on enough since I was five years old, believe it or not. But I do think that it is one tool among many that we can use to manage our minds. And further, I think oftentimes the way that some of the philosophical ideas that really have given rise to mindfulness, some of those, the way those ideas are promoted, actually distort the original intent.
And what I mean by that is this, we often hear that the goal should be a quiet mind. The goal should be to be in the now, to be in the moment, to not being to dip into the future or pass. And actually, I think that that is not a realistic goal, nor one that we should all strive for to be in the moment at all times. And what I mean by that is the human mind is a time traveler.
We evolve the capacity to travel and time in our mind. And this is a kind of superpower. I think you use that term, but me being able to think back to the last conversation I had, what went right, what went wrong, right? That's a source of self improvement.
Me being able to think about the vacation I recently went on with my family and savor that when I'm not having a great day. That's a huge source of resilience. Me being able to think about the next six months and what I want to accomplish and the difficulties I may have on the horizon, how I'm going to deal with that. That's essential to my ability to be productive and successful.
So traveling and time in our mind, when I go for a walk in the park, letting my mind go to these different places, I think this is part of the reason to be that I've had any success in this world. And that's the capacity that plays an outside role in predicting that kind of success. Sometimes, of course, the mental time travel machine breaks down and we get stuck in the past or the future, which is essentially chatter. One approach there is to refocus momentarily on the present.
But that's only one thing you might want to do in that instance. I think we don't always want to be in the present. So I'm curious what you have to say. What's your take on do you think we should always be striving to be in the moment?
It's a difficult question because obviously it's not super adaptive for that to be the case. It wouldn't do for us to only ever be in the moment because we would never learn from things that we did in the past. But we would be able to anticipate challenges that we're going to come in in the future. It's interesting because the sort of bro science mindfulness solution to everything is to just come back to the present moment.
And yet I'm going to guess that if you dig into the psychological research, that's not necessarily always the best solution. Well, I think the, you know, I'm not fan of there not being any one size fits all solutions. I think we've evolved the capacity to utilize probably close to three dozen different tools, at least, and counting right now for managing our chatter for a reason. Different people, different situations require different kinds of tools.
And so I think we get in trouble potentially by giving people what I think is an unattainable goal. It's not possible to always be in the moment. I mean, have you come across anyone who's always in the moment? No, I've come across people that say that they're always in the moment, but I don't believe that they are.
Yeah, I think, you know, just knowing about how the mind works, it's we evolved to not be in the moment and we've evolved for a reason. So, so it's it's setting people up to have an unattainable goal that is also not something that is functional. So I'd rather, I'd love to shift the conversation to get us talking about being in the moment as one kind of two things. Because one kind of tool we use to manage our chatter, but hey, there's a whole big tool box out there of other skills that we can also activate.
Is it true that some people don't have an in a monologue? No, I thought so. I thought that was bullshit. I get this question a lot and because every few months someone usually writes on the internet that they don't have an in our voice.
So this is where I think it's really important to be clear about what we mean when we use the phrase in our voice and when I use that phrase I'm talking about silently using language. And as I mentioned earlier, there are many, many contexts in which we call upon that tool ranging from reminding ourselves of what's on our grocery list and memorizing a phone number to having a full blown back and forth dialogue with ourselves. Are there some people who may only only resort to that inner voice to keep in mind what they have to buy in the grocery store and don't ever talk to themselves? Sure.
I think we lean on these different functions for two different degrees, but in terms of do we have it? Do we all have an inner voice? Yes. That working memory system that I mentioned before, that is a basic feature of the human mind.
All well functioning human minds have it. There must be people that you've come across in your research who've had some sort of brain trauma or sort of genetic disformity that's caused them to not have it though. Yes. Those are no longer well functioning minds and they're fascinating.
There's just one story I'm particularly fond of, a woman who suffered a stroke that was localized in the left hemisphere of her brain. A vein popped right around the parts of her brain or parts of her brain that were involved in speech production. She temporarily lost the ability not only to talk to other people, but also to use words to talk to herself. What's fascinating about her story is this is a woman who was very well accomplished.
She was a Harvard neuroanatomist. She would often before the stroke complain about all the chatter she was experiencing. She described it as tremendously debilitating. She wished she could just get rid of her voice while the wish unfortunately came true.
But what's astounding to me about her story is she ended up describing her experience in a book. When asked how did she feel after she can no longer talk to other people herself, she described it as euphoric. She described herself as going to La La Land. You've just had someone who hasn't had a massive stroke, can't communicate anymore to other people herself and she's blissfully happy.
Why? Because although words escaped her so did all of the chatter and she found that incredibly liberating. No more obnoxious roommate in her head, chirping away all the time, leading her to self-guess herself and focus on the people who wore socks versus didn't at the party. She found that really liberating.
Now she goes on to say that it actually was an impairment because although it was really nice to not have the chatter for a while, she couldn't do basic things like keep information active in her head or make sense of what was happening to her in the world. So her experience is always a great reminder to me of how the goal shouldn't be to silence the inner voice. It should be to figure out how to manage it more effectively. I like that.
Are you familiar with Ian McGill-Chris' work, Master of InDesign, sorry and the matter with things? No, tell me more. The thing that came up for me there was to do with the strokes and he mentioned how he's a philosopher and a neuroscientist. He looked at strokes at the left hemisphere and strokes at the right hemisphere.
He said that for a long time, doctors had thought that strokes affecting the right hemisphere were preferable because you still retain speech, language, all that stuff, communication, super easy. But what you don't retain is empathy or the ability to understand why other people aren't happy with the things that you're doing or motivation and intention and stuff like that. And it seems now that given the choice, if you were to pick the two, it seems significantly easier to retrain language and to retrain forms of communication with a left hemisphere stroke than it is for the people who are around the person that's had the stroke to overcome the pretty difficult to deal with total lack of empathy, total lack of emotion. You lose more of who you are as a person and that into personal skills.
When you can't speak, you are in a better position than when you can't feel feelings anymore. I thought that was a really interesting way to look at things. Speech is less central to our personhood than the emotions that drive that speech. Well, it's a fascinating question and it sounds like having to choose between the lesser of two evils.
If I have my choice, I'll choose neither. But empathy, for example, and the ability to relate to others, some have described that as a social glue that binds our species together. And when it goes away, you don't always need a stroke in the right hemisphere to get a lack of empathy. There are some people who, for reasons where children are trying to figure out, don't have it.
We call them sociopaths and things don't always work out very well for them. Should people speak to themselves in the third person if they want to motivate themselves? Absolutely. Provided they don't do it while walking down the streets of London without air pods in their ears.
So one thing that we know from lots of research is that people are much better at giving advice to others than they are giving advice to themselves when they're struggling with something really. Emotional. I find it striking that whenever I give a presentation on this work and I ask people, hey, have you ever been in this situation where a friend or a loved one comes to you with a problem they're ruminating about? They don't know what to do.
They present that situation to you and it's relatively easy for you to coach them through the situation. It's just never happened. Every single hand in the audience goes up. There's actually a name for this phenomenon called Solomon's Paradox named after the Bible's King Solomon, who as you probably know was world renowned for being a sage, for being a wise leader.
But if you dig into his personal history, it turns out he made a rash of terrible decisions that ultimately led to his demise as a leader. He got caught up in not only love triangles, but love octagons and a huge hot mess. So there's this finding, right? We can coach other people better than we can coach ourselves.
What we've learned over the years is that what we call distance self-talk, trying to coach yourself through a problem using your name or the second person pronoun. So come on Ethan, you can do this. That's a tool that plays off this mechanism. Because if you think about when do we use names or words like you, we use names and second person pronouns when we think about and refer to other people.
So the links in the mind between using a word like you and thinking about someone else is super strong. So when you use that word to refer to yourself, it's essentially turning on the brain machinery for thinking about others. And that alters our perspective. It puts us in a position to start giving ourselves much, much wiser advice.
So this is actually the first thing that I personally do. If I detect some chatter, come on Ethan. How are you going to manage a situation? What are you going to do?
And it often does make a difference. And there's a lot of science back that up. Have you ever done it? Yeah, I have.
I mean, one of John Peterson's rules is treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping. And I wrote a newsletter about it probably two years ago now that said exactly what you went through. How many times has someone come to you with a problem and you've given them this really sort of wonderful blend of sympathy, with firmness, with support. It's gorgeous blend and you sort of really sort of get them on their way.
And a lot of the time, that's a situation that you yourself could do with that same advice for. That's exactly right. And you'll kick yourself in the dick as you push yourself out the door. Your equivalent is so much more ugly.
That's right. I mean, we say things to ourselves that we would never dare say to a friend, let alone a worse enemy. And this is where Distant Self Talk, I think, really helps. It greases the wheels for providing that kind of friend-oriented advice, giving that to ourselves.
It's leveraging the structure of language to put us in a position where we start doing that relatively effortlessly and automatically. So we don't have to stop and think, hey, what would I tell Matthew in this situation? Ethan, here's what you're going to do. It just flips a switch.
And we've actually done neuroscience studies on this. And one study, we find that the emotional regulatory benefits of this tool kicks in in about a second, actually. This is really, really quick. And just try doing it yourself.
I, Chris, this is a real feeling that many people have. This tool has been around for quite a while. I think it often gets ridiculed because we see it pop up in television sitcoms where people are being made fun of or talking themselves out loud about themselves. But Julia Caesar, Henry Adams.
Didn't Julia Caesar write a whole book? Yeah. You wrote a whole book in the third person. A book about a difficult military exploit.
Henry Adams wrote his autobiography in the third person. Malawi Yousafse, the youngest person ever when the Nobel's Peace Prize, when John Stewart, a host of a television show here in the States, or previously was, when he had her on the show to talk to her about, what was going through her head when she discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her. She tells us wonderful, I mean, terrible, but also the way she tells it is wonderful story about discovering the news that the Taliban were coming to get her. And then the moment where she simulates what's going to happen when they get to the front door, she switches into coaching herself using her own name.
Well, I used to say to myself, what would you do, Malawi, if they come and get you with an eye would reply, just take a shoe and hit him. So she's contemplating this tremendously stressful circumstance. And she switches into using her name to coach herself through it. And there's something, some people stumble on this tool.
And I think the value associated with knowing about the science surrounding is now you and anyone who's listening can just be more deliberate in how they incorporated it into their lives. Matt Fraser, world's CrossFit champion won the CrossFit Games five times, most dominant athlete ever in its history. I saw an interview with him and he said that he always refers to himself in the third person. And, you know, a lot of the time when we're doing stuff that we require sort of acute motivation for, I have three more reps to go.
I have two more reps to go. I have one more rep to go. Or you're running. It's a Memorial Day Murph is a workout that often gets done.
And people will need that because it's a one mile run followed by hell of body weight exercises and then another one mile run. So as you're going through this run with the way it did best and you'll just get to the next lamppost. For him it would be right, Matt, just get to the next lamppost. Just get to the next lamppost.
It is bizarre that we have this. It's not a negativity bias, although it is negative language. It's like a callousness bias or a lack of empathy bias that we have toward ourselves. We got any idea why that is?
Why do we say things to ourselves that we would never say to someone else? You know, it's a great question. Well, we don't have to stand on ceremony with ourselves. There are lots of norms.
I mean, this is one hypothesis idea. Bro signs it, Nathan. Come on. Yeah.
Okay. You know, there are social norms that dictate how we speak to other people. And those norms are are taught to us at a very, very young age, right? So we don't act in ugly ways.
We don't necessarily even always speak the absolute truth about how we feel about someone else all the time. Sometimes we kind of dress it up to ease the the the the blower, the burden that what we're going to say is going to have on someone. We don't have those norms for talking about ourselves. I mean, there's an interesting question here.
Can you change the norms associated with how you talk to yourself? Now, that's a really interesting question that I would love to see some research address. Like, can you teach people to be kinder and more constructive to themselves chronically over time, not just to be corrective about it when you find yourself being nasty to remember to switch into this more compassionate mode, but can you actually train that? It's like self personal resocialization.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really, I mean, I haven't really thought about it. I think it's a really fascinating question.
Now, there is, of course, something to be said about being honest with ourselves as well. So, you know, when you describe, for example, what you wrote in your newsletter about that blend of compassionate, but also honest and stern feedback, that's not typically the way that people often describe certain types of self compassion. Self compassion is often described as more genuinely accepting of yourself as a human being. And it's great, great data associated with it.
But I do think there is a case for the tough coach, so to speak, right? The drill sergeant that's going to also, when necessary, be straight with you about something that isn't working out. And there's a question of how to balance that. Isn't it the case that anything that you are exposed to a lot, you become desensitized to, right?
Like when everything's racist, nothing's racist, but when everything that you do sucks, nothing that you do sucks, you need to balance that. You know, if we have this super negative mindset and you're never happy with any of the outcomes or the outputs that you've done, it's very, very difficult for you to then, where do you go from there? Well, it doesn't always happen. The habituation, I think, is what you were saying.
You just kind of get, you know, if you see one's, if you see a snake a hundred times, it's not like the first time. Sometimes where we get stuck is we don't actually habituate. We remain sensitive to the negative stuff. And that's in part, I think, where people get in trouble, right?
It's because we are so adept at finding new ways to freak ourselves out. It's really good at it, right? Like you'd think, Chris, how many times have you worried or ruminated about something in your life and learned that outcome didn't happen? Oh, it's 99% of the time.
Yet you've continued to do it. And that speaks... Under continues to trigger me. And it continues to trigger me.
Exactly. That speaks to the flexibility of the mind and our ability to just keep on making ourselves resilient against learning. Yes. Impressively resilient against learning.
And that's where the ability to take that step back and look at what we're going through from a different point of view can be really, really helpful, right? Because we just go down these scripts of churning stuff over and over and over again, not productive. But when you step back and look at the bigger picture, think about it like, you know, you tell someone else or, you know, write a story or talk to someone who can help you put in perspective. Those are different ways of attacking a problem that can change a trajectory.
That's a third person language distancing. Is there anything else to add on to that to augment with that? Is there anything we haven't said so that people can use that strategy? Yeah, there are lots.
Let me give you a rapid fire. So there's no one distancing strategy that exists. Turns out there are many, many different ways of stepping back, looking at the bigger picture and thinking about ourselves from a less immersed, more detached point of view. Another common distancing strategy that has a lot of science behind it.
I use it myself is called temporal distancing, distancing through time. So this is a tool I use every time I wake up in the middle of the night with some chatter. It happens every four to six weeks. It's like, I'm wide awake.
Oh, my God. How is that going to happen? What am I going to do? You know, three seconds later on visualizing myself, either in jail or the hospital.
It's not good. Temporal distancing. Think about how you're going to feel about whatever you're struggling with the next day or the next week or six months for now. What we all know from just living life is that lots of emotional experiences, they come, but they eventually go, they subside.
We're in the midst of experiencing chatter. We lose sight of that. So reminding yourself of the fact that, hey, I'm going to feel better about this in the morning. I'm going to be able to manage this in the morning.
That does something really powerful for a chatter-prone mind. It highlights the instability of what we're going through. It's saying, hey, there is hope. And that takes the edge off in a way that can be quite, quite helpful.
So, a simple thing to do. I mean, this is another thing that excites me so much about a lot of the tools I talk about. A lot of complex science went into their identification and validation, but they're easy to implement. And the reason that I like that is the easier things are to do, the more likely people are going to be to do them.
So, I have made a plan in my head. If I wake up at 2am, then I'm going to use Temporal Distancing. I've rehearsed that plan. And now it's on autopilot.
I do it instantly and I don't freak out as a result. So, that's another distance and strategy. Another one that plays on the visual modality is if you're seeing a scene over and over in your head, adopt a fly and wall perspective. See yourself in the event like you're looking at someone else and try to make sense of why that person you're looking.
Why are they acting the way they are? That's another distancing tool. Journaling, that can also help that also activates distance. Talking to other people can be really helpful if you choose the right people to talk to.
Someone who's adept at not only connecting with you empathically using, hopefully not the stroke victims you were referring to before, but then also people who don't just get you to rahash what you're going through, but people who then help you broaden your perspective. A lot of us think that the way to get good support, to get good support and give it, is to just to vent our emotions. What we know about venting is venting. Venting can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people.
It's good to know that Chris, we're connected now and you're here for me. But if all I do is vent to you about something, I leave that conversation. I feel good about our relationship. But I'm just as upset as I was when I started talking.
How do you define venting? Just unloading, rehearsing what happened to you and what you felt without trying to shift towards some cognitive change, some way of making sense of the experience. What's the step to go from then? Someone asks you something about venting, what do they do?
Let's say you're in the role of being my chatter advisor or my coach. What you want to do is you want to learn about what I'm going through. Let's back up a second. People have two needs that they're trying to fulfill when they go to someone else for support.
They have social emotional needs. They want to feel validated and connected with someone else. But they also have cognitive needs. They need to make sense of this problem they're dealing with in a way that lets them move on with their lives.
And ideally the person you're talking to helps address both of those needs. How do they do that? First thing you do is you genuinely and pathetically learn about what happened to the other person. So Chris, tell me what happened with that last podcast.
Really? It sounds terrible. How did you feel? You know, learn a little bit about it.
And then when you sense that the time is right, then you want to start shifting the conversation to move towards solutions and alternative ways of thinking. So, well, you've dealt with that kind of guess before, Chris. How have you dealt with it in the past? What have you done?
Or I've been in that situation. Here's what I've done. Or, well, you know what? Big picture.
This is one guess. So lots of different ways you can broaden the person's perspective. Now, there is an art to doing this well. And what I mean by that is, depending on the person you're talking to and what they're dealing with, some people will need to spend more time sharing their emotions before they're ready to transition into having their perspective being broad.
So you want to feel that out. So if my wife comes to me with some chatter she wants to talk about, I'll stop, I'll listen. And then I'll ask her, hey, I totally get it. I have a thought.
Can I share it? Sometimes she'll say, no, keep listening. Other time. I'm so please tell me.
So that's the art of being a good check-out or advisor. I like the fact that you have asked the question, what kind of what do you want from me at this stage? Like, are you done feeling validated by me hearing what you have to say? Or do you want a solution?
I had a psychotherapist on a show last year, Adam Lane Smith. And he was talking about the fact that many women deal with their problems in two completely languages that women, he said on average, appear to want to feel like they have been heard, like they've been validated, like their emotions are understood. And what men are trying to do from the second that this begins is what's the problem? How can I fix it?
Like, men are interested in things, women are interested in people. And the reverse happens as well. He mentioned about how male and female depression gets treated too, that female depression is treated by making them feel safe like they're loved. And he's like, men don't necessarily want that.
They want to feel like they have a purpose and the ability to achieve it. Well, you know, I would say that there is some variability. So there is some research which shows that so both of these needs, these social and cognitive are, these are, these are needs that both men and women possess. But, but there is, you know, so actually some of this research, this was groundbreaking research done by a Dutch psychologist.
No, a Belgium psychologist. I'm in big trouble now. We'll scrap that. A Belgian psychologist named Bernard Rime.
And he actually tackled this question of, is it the case that women just want the emotional stuff and men the cognitive and in fact he found there was much more similarity than differences. So I think there's certainly those archetypes that exist. But I can tell you, I've got, I've got, you know, buddies calling me all the time. And they often want to vent a little bit.
And I have to remind them, all right, venting, you're ready for the cognitive stuff or you want to keep, and so I think there's a lot of variability there. I think you're wrong. But so other people can be a remarkable tool, but I think a lot of us get it wrong. This is myself included before I knew about this work.
I think a lot of us think the way to help is to just do one or the other, just listen or just advise. In fact, it's a blend. But you asked me about other distancing tools. Let me tell you about one more.
It comes from the environment. I think it's super cool. It involves experiencing the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable. And you can get this awe experience from lots of places.
Like some people get it from exercising outside or going for a walk in a park. Some people get it from imagining they're witnessing their kids doing some amazing thing. I get it from, well, I get it from many places. But the last big one for me was watching the spaceship land on Mars, like just contemplating back to aliens, right?
Like, my God, we figured out how to travel between planets. That's amazing. And so what happens to your chatter when you experience awe is something equally remarkable. All leads to something called the shrinking of the self.
We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, so does our chatter. So to make that concrete, you know, I could have, I wrote an email earlier today that might have been interpreted the wrong way. And I could be lost in that thought loop about, oh my God, what if they thought about this email?
Or I could be thinking about the fact that there are people who figured out how to land a space, an SUV-sized vehicle on another planet and then have a live stream back to us. Like, come on, man, put your problems in perspective. And I did a little distance. I'll talk there just to slip it in as well.
Very nice. I like that. Is there any science behind positive affirmations? There's a lot of science behind positive affirmations.
And it turns out that it is complicated. We want to say bullshit? No, no, no, no. No, no, no.
No, self affirmations can be, can be useful in certain contexts, but they're not a panacea. And so they're not going to be, you know, I think in general, one theme of my book of my work is there are no magic pills. And I don't think that's something to be upset about. I think it is doing us as a species, a disservice to think that these complex minds that we possess can all be just turned on or off, if you will, with respect to chatter by doing one thing or another.
It's a lot more complicated than that. And I think, you know, self affirmations can help along with other tools. What situation is positive affirmations useful for? That's a good question.
If it's a temporary kind of stressor that you're experiencing, something that is not going to be a current source of distress somewhere where you need a little bit of ego inflation, that would be a good instance to try that out. Rose Namanunes, who was the UFC strawweight female's champion up until Saturday when she had the most boring fight in the history of the UFC. She walks out to the octagon saying, I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best, you say that over and over. Sadly, that absolutely didn't come through in her performance on Saturday.
But I was interested by, would it be better if she was saying Rose is the best? That would have been an interesting question. Well, I mean, I will say, before I do any big, big, high stakes presentation, you've got this, man. You've got this, it's third person, it's me channeling my high school wrestling coach and what he would say to me before a big match.
So there's a ton of different strategies that you've got. We've gone through some of the distancing ones. What are, in your opinion, the highest impact strategies that people can do that we haven't gone through so far? We haven't gone through rituals.
Those are really useful ones. Many people report engaging in rituals which are these rigid sequences of behaviors that are infused with meaning when they're stressed out or in high performance context. And there's research done that they can be very beneficial. They provide people with a sense of order and control, which is often lacking when we're experiencing chatter.
They're often not potentially demanding. They draw our attention away from our chatter. So try a ritual. It can be something your culture gives you or something you make up yourself.
You just don't want to become too behold into the ritual where a ritual can get out of hand as... Well, it's a superposition, doesn't it? Well, yeah, you know, and a little bit of superstitions. Okay, also a little bit.
But when it becomes something that you can't, that interferes with your ability to like live a quote unquote relatively normal life in the sense that if you don't do this, you need to stop and go back to do it because then it's becoming more problematic. So rituals are another good one. Creating order around you operates by a similar principle. I tend not to be very organized in my home.
You wouldn't know it from the background. But typically if I turn my computer to the side, you would see mountains of papers and books. But when I have chatter, this place is just in tip-top, perfect shape. Say in principle here, when you're experiencing chatter, you feel like things are out of control.
They're not ordered in your mind. Your thoughts are racing, pinballing back and forth. You can compensate for the lack of order you feel in your mind by creating order around you. And so that's another tool.
Is that compensatory control? Is that what that is? Yes, that's compensatory control. It's one way that rituals as well as organizing can help people.
Nature, exposure to green spaces, lots of compelling data showing that that can have restorative effects. So we know chatter consumes our attention. Try reading a book when you're worried about something good luck, right? You read the words, but you don't remember anything you've read.
It's because the chatter is consuming your attention. Turns out, nature, green spaces are like an energizer battery for your attention. They help restore it. And the way this works is, when you go for a walk in a green space, you're surrounded by, well, I should say, a safe green space, not a place where either people or animals are going to come and get you.
But if you go for a walk in a nice park or a tree-lined street, you're surrounded by really interesting, pleasant-looking things that gently draw your attention. The trees and the shrubs. You're not really carefully studying the geometrical structure of the leaves. One second mate.
Can you come back in about one hour, please? One hour? One hour? One hour?
One hour? One hour? One hour? One hour?
One hour? One hour? One hour? One hour?
See that is repurposing you through the headphones into Guatemala. What were you saying? We're in nature. Nature can help restore our attention.
And the way it works is, when you're in nature, you're surrounded by interesting things that gently draw your attention away. And so funny. For the people that are just listening, the lady that's come to try and clean my hotel room has decided that not only did I want her in one hour to come back and do the room, but I also wanted one agua. So she just delivered me a bottle of water right to the desk.
Hey, you asked where, man. I didn't mean to. Yeah, that's tough. Okay, yeah.
Nature. Here's something I learned about actually the other day. I read that looking at the sky through a tree through tree branches, there's some restorative effect for our brain because of the crisscrossing pattern of the brain. So there's some fascinating work.
Is that no bros? I haven't pulled out of my house. Is that legit? No, there's actually work that looks like that.
So some of this work actually has really tried to drill down into the ingredients that explain how nature helps us and looking at does it have to do with the irregular? There are a few straight lines in nature. So there are curved edges and the ragged, you know, jagged edges and all that kind of gently draws our attention towards it in ways that can be helpful. So no, very good find.