Pushkin Hey, Slight Changers.
So it's only January, but if you're like me, you're already feeling pretty overwhelmed by twenty twenty five insert melting face emoji. Three weeks in and my Slight Change team and I have found ourselves ruminating, feeling despondent, and being needlessly self critical. And so we decided to look back at the archives and create a special compilation episode for you. We're sharing our favorite scientific tools for improving our relationship
with ourselves and our mental health. Today, we're going to hear from three psychologists we've had on the show, Ethan cross And on the Science of introspection, Madubey Aquinola, who specializes in stress research, and Kristin Nef, a pioneer in the science of self compassion. We'll start with Ethan, who talks about our inner voice, that internal monologue that often serves us so well, but sometimes turns negative and starts the spiral out of control. Ethan calls this chatter and
he shares some valuable tips for reining it in. But first he explains why having an inner voice at all is actually an incredible feature of our minds.
I like to think about this inner voice as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us achieve a number of important things. So, at the most basic end of the spectrum, your inner voice lets you just keep information active in your heads. This may not be the most glamorous feature of it, but my, oh my, is it an important one. So if you go to the grocery store, for example, and you're like me, you know, my wife tells me what we need, and
thirty seconds later, I forget what those things are. I'm walking down the grocery all that I'm thinking to myself what do I have to order? And I go over the list in my head cheez granola fruit. I'm using words silently to repeat those items. It's part of our working memory system, basic system of the human mind that is fundamental to our ability to navigate the world.
Yeah, and I love another one you mentioned in your book, which is that our inability to escape our minds is also a driver of human ingenuity. It's like the fact that we can't escape our minds is giving us this fertile soil for creative ideas to come into existence. Right, I mean those the thoughts you have in the shower and you're taking a walk and you don't even notice it, but your mind is drifting off and then all of a sudden you come up with the new idea.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think this is the source of human innovation, which is why I think we actually want to give our elves latitude to let our introspective
capacities run wild. So you know, it's interesting. There's some research which suggests that we spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not focused on the present, and sometimes those data are used to suggest that there's a huge problem, right because we should always be in the present, but this ability to travel in time in our minds, so to turn our attention in where to think about our past and anticipate the future. This lets us do a number of remarkable things.
When does our inner voice become harmful and transform into what you call chatter?
So it becomes harmful when we experience something in our life that cuse us to try to use this tool that we have to make sense of our feelings, but the tool gets jammed up, so something bad happens. We turn our attention in word to try to make sense of the problem, but we get stuck in a negative thought loop. That's what I call chatter. You keep on trying to think and work through the problem, but you don't make any progress. And there are lots of different
terms that scientists have used to describe this state. If it's chatter about the past, we tend to call that ruminating. If it's about the future or present, we call that worrying. Sometimes we call it perseverating. But the common idea here is you're trying to make sense of a problem with language, but you're not making any forward progress. It's kind of like the visual is one of a hamster on an exercise wheel.
We fall prey to this illusion when we're actively repeating those loops in our mind, that we are actually making progress because just merely indulging in that topic, right, like staying in that space. I think it fools our brains into thinking, ah, I am in fact advancing because look at how much airtime this topic is getting in my mind.
And then only maybe.
Hours later, do you realize, oh crap, I'm in exactly the same position that I was in at the beginning.
Well, and think about how much experience you have succeeding in the usage of this tool. Like most of the time, this tool, this ability to use language to think analytically about a problem, it serves you really really will. I mean, this is undoubtedly why you have been able to achieve the things that you have accomplished in your life. And the same is true for so many other people. So you've got this tool that often works really really well. It should work here it's not working. I'm not a
I don't give up. I'm going to keep going.
Yeah. Can you say more about how that inner monologue can lead us astray in these moments or what the negative consequences can be?
Yeah, happy to So, first, chatter consumes our attention to the point where we have very little left over to focus on other things. And so the example I like to give people is to think about a time when you're worried about something, you're ruminating, and you sit down, you try to read a couple of pages in a book or a magazine, and you read the pages. You are sure, like under oath, you would swear that the information has passed your gaze, but you don't remember anything
that you have read. It is an incredibly common experience, and the idea is very very simple. We only have so much attention. If all of it is being consumed by your chatter, that means not much is left over to do your job. Not a good thing. We also know that chatter can undo our habits. And the way this works is like what is a habit? A habit is a complex set of behaviors that are strung together
through repeated practice. So when I get up on stage to give a presentation, I've given hundreds and hundreds of talks. I've learned to do things without thinking, like to move my hands in particular ways, and vary my vocal tone, and smile and look at different people in the audience. If I start to worry about what I'm doing, oh my god, am I giving a good presentation? What happens is I zoom in on all the individual behaviors. Am I smiling enough?
Yeah?
Am I using the stage appropriately? And once you start doing that, the whole script explodes, the behavior explodes. You don't do well. And we saw this happen on the grandest stage in the Olympics, when Simone Biles dropped out because of what she called the twisties. The twisties are another name for chatter. Sometimes they're called the yips and and if you think about Simone's situation, I think it really highlights just how toxic this can be. Here you
have someone who is on the peak. You know, she's at the peak of her career, on the grandest stage.
Yeah, and she appropriate best in human history as well.
Best in human history, and she has to drop out appropriately because it was dangerous. And so that's what chatter can do to us when it comes to our individual performance. If we shift to the second domain, we know that chatter undermines our relationships. It can create friction, and there are a couple of ways that works too. One thing that that chatter can do is it can push other people who care about us away. And here are the ideas. You've got a problem and you're motivated to share it
with other people for a variety of reasons. You want to get support. But what happens is you talk to the other person about the problem, and then you keep talking about it over and over and over again. And for most of us, there's only so much we can listen to before we ourselves start to get brought down. And so that's one of the ways that that chatter can alienate us from others lead us to feel socially rejected and alone. These are not not healthy states.
Okay, so we need some hope, Ethan. You got to help us out here, all right. I'd love to do a deep dive in some of the strategies we can use for better managing our chatter.
Yeah.
So I'll tell you about two of my favorites, which also happen to be two tools that I use myself if I experienced shadow. They're my first lines of defense.
I love it.
The first one is maybe counterintuitive to folks. What it involves doing is trying to coach yourself through a problem using your own name or the second person pronound you. So, if I'm really upset about something and spinning, all right, Ethan, here's what you're going to do. Here's how you're going to manage the situation. I'm basically talking to myself like I would speak to another person, right, the second person
pronound you. This is a part of speech that we almost exclusively use when we think about and refer to other people. That shifts your perspective. It puts you into this different mode of thinking about your problems. It's like you're giving advice to your best fri and when you're in that mode of advice giving, you come up with much better solutions to your problems. So that's a really simple thing that people can do to switch their perspectives.
And that's the first thing that I'll do. Another distancing tool that is really easy and works for many situations is something that we call temporal distancing, or thinking about how you're going to feel about something that's causing you chatter right now? How are you going to feel about this a week from now, or a month from now or a year from now. Right, You could stretch out
the time window as much as you want. What engaging in that little mental time travel exercise does for us is it often makes clear that whatever we're dealing with, as awful as it is, it will eventually fade, because most of the trials and tribulations we experience do eventually fade with time, and that gives us hope, which is really useful for managing chatter. This is actually what I do when I wake up on occasion two am and am grippe, Oh my god, why did I send that email?
And what are they going to think?
Did they read?
So I will just remind myself Ethan, You're going to feel better about this in six hours.
I'm hearing you say that, and I'm thinking to myself that, in my most anxious moments, if you had asked me, how are you going to feel about this in six months, or five years, or ten years, I would have said, I'm going to feel exactly the same damn way, Ethan.
And so what's occurring to me in this moment is that potentially another healthful thought experiment is to think about past experiences where we felt a certain way and we're absolutely convinced that that was going to be a immutable state of the world, but looking back, we now know we no longer feel that same way about it today.
I'm just remembering how there was this thing that I was worrying about in my early twenties, and I was imposing a lot of negativity of my brother, who was on the receiving end of all this anxiety to your earlier point, and I remember him saying, I promise you, this is not going to be a topic you're worried about in ten years. And I was absolutely resolute in my convictions that it was going to be something that I continue to worry about and you know, older brother, wiser than me.
He's right.
I no longer am worried about this issue, and I keep that in my mind often as a personal anecdote of how I engaged in bad cognitive forecasting. I was wrong about myself and my own ability to be able to move on from certain challenges or anxieties. And I think it's helpful, potentially helpful for listeners to identify. You know, there's the Spanish flu, which is like the global thing, but you know, we all have some element of narcissism in us that leads us to want to know that actually.
Narcissm is the wrong word here.
I think we can feel sometimes like society might be able to deal with this, but I maya won't be able to because I'm not as cognitively strong as other people.
And so I think it can be helpful to just find even one instance, one case study from your own life where you did actually exit a state of mental chatter successfully and think differently about it so that you can hold on to because it helps me in present day moments where I'm like, no, I'm still gonna be worried about this thing now in ten years, and I'm like eh, you're wrong about this, at least once.
You've actually touched on something that is. I think another message of hope for listeners, which is there's a lot of research which shows that as we get older, we actually get happier barring negative health conditions. And one of the explanations for why that happens is we're learning how to regulate ourselves better. And part of how that works is we're learning from our experiences. And I think this is exactly what you've described. When you're younger, you don't
have the same quantity of experiences. You don't know that you're not going to be worried about this ten years later because you may not have been around for that long. And so I think we accrue that wisdom with age. And what's exciting about some of these tools is they have the potential to give us that insight without having to wait to be forty sixty, seventy years old, right, So we can have the insight that, oh, wait, it will get better with time without having to wait the
whole stretch of time for that to happen. So it's a really valuable exercise for folks to think about.
That was psychologist Ethan Cross. I'll be talking to Ethan again about his latest book, which is all about how to better manage our emotions. Make sure to follow a slight change of plans on your favorite podcast app so you can catch that episode when it comes out next month. After the break, we'll hear from Madupey Aquinola on how we can work with our stress rather than against it.
Madupay Aquinola is a psychologist who's an expert on something that most of us try to limit as much as possible, stress, but a different perspective. She wants us to make stress our friend because our body's stress response is actually a kind of superpower on a physiological level. Can you tell us what happens to us when we experience stress?
So when we experience stress, our sympathetic nervous system gets activated. It's that part of our body that tells us do you need to fight or do you need to flee this situation? And when that happens, we get adrenaline, we get dopamine, we get cortisol, all of the resources we need physiologically to move to act to do what we
need to do. This process is a very adaptive one, so that when you're done with the stressor ideally your body wants to go back to its resting state where you know, those hormones decrease, that adrenaline decreased, you get back to resting and relaxing and all that. That is a normal physiological response to an acute dresser.
Yeah, I love your sharing that because stress obviously gets a really bad rep but it's not just this random bad thing that our bodies experience. It exists in part because it is highly adaptive and there are many situations in which an active stress response helps us do what needs to be done. So, in other words, you mentioned cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline. How do those translate into increased performance increased acuity? Just help me build that bridge.
So essentially, your body is being taxed and your heart rate is increasing because again you're getting ready. That cortisol is giving you the energy that you need to be attentive, to be focused to approach the situation. And when you have increased cortisol, you are attentive to threats, often in a good way. You're like waiting for what's happening. You're able to remember things in a different way, and so we need to remember when our bodies are acting. It's
telling us you've got this, now, let's use this. But one of the problems is when we can be overactivated and too attentive to threat and those levels of the dopamine, the cordis the adrenaline all that are staying elevated kind of chronically, and that is what leads to disease and all of these problems that we want to avoid physiologically. So that's kind of the stress cycle.
Okay, So now you've given us the lay of the land on the basics of stress. Yes, one fascinating thing your research focuses on is that how we think about our own stress, our mindset, and our attitude towards stress can actually change its impact on us. Yes, can you first walk us through the two types of mindsets that we can have towards stress.
So the two types of mindsets are a mindset that stress is enhancing, it can help us in terms of our performance, our growth, our learning. The second piece is that stress is debilitating, harms us in terms of our health and vitality and our performance and our growth in our learning. And it's often your mindset about stress that can influence the extent to which it can have harmful or helpful effects. So when we have more of a stress is enhancing mindset that leads to better outcomes.
I love this research.
I'm wondering if you can give me a couple of examples of how introducing this mindset shift was actually able to help performance in different contexts.
So in one study, we had people just watch a video showing the many ways in which stress can be enhancing. You can imagine things like that stressful moment in a soccer game and somebody makes the goal. We can each think of times when we have risen to the occasion. When we show people these videos and then have them engage in a creative task, we find that they're more creative. We find that they are more attentive to positive things
in the environment versus negative things in the vironment. On the flip side, tell people or show them videos of when stress can be debilitating and see the opposite, they're less creative and also generally more negative mood, more attentive to threats. So that's some of the research we've done.
Yeah, and one of the most fascinating insights is that our underlying physiology can change when we adopt a stress is enhancing mindset. So it's not just that I think more positive thoughts. It actually can affect our physiological response to stress at this underlying level.
I think that that's absolutely right, that when you have an enhancing mindset, it can affect your body's response to stress. There has been research showing that the walls of your blood vessels, rather than constricting, they're more likely to dilate with a stress is enhancing mindset and the importance of the mind body connection is something I think we often forget. And you know, our dominant model and narrative is that we should deny, reduce and avoid stress, and that is
not always the case. Every single person I know can tell of the time where their stress helps them. So instead, in this research we talk a lot about how can you acknowledge your stress, welcome your stress, and use it in a way that will be beneficial because it is designed to help you. Now, it's important to say, I'm not saying run towards stress, like you shouldn't like find more stressors. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying
it's not always a bad thing. It's actually designed to help you.
Yeah, you talk about dating your stress, Yes, you know slight change listeners. We're simply asking for a first date. Okay, you can decide if you want to do a second or a third, but just go on that first date.
That's right.
Get to know your stress a little better and brace it and.
Be kind to it. Open the door for it, you know, let it in, welcome it, see how it feels. That's what we need to do a lot more of.
Are there situations where applying a stress is enhancing mind set doesn't make sense because I can see a situation where if we apply this mindset too liberally, we might end up tolerating certain stressful situations that we really should try and avoid. So, for example, a highly toxic relationship at work or in your personal life, that's a situation where you're kind of you really think, okay, we need
to change the situation. I need to get out of this situation, versus using a mindset shift in order to better adapt to it.
So do you have thoughts on that?
Yeah? I do think that our minds are so complicated and we will trick ourselves into believing a stressful situation is a good one when it's not. So that's when the idea, Remember I talked about demands resources. One resource is external support, your friends helping you and seeing when something is harmful versus helpful for you.
Yeah, I think it's helpful to clarify that this is a mindset that's almost best to adopt when you're in situations where you can't avoid the stress, so you can't control whether that situation exists or not, and so adopting a more positive mindset might be one of the few resources at hand.
That's absolutely right. And the challenge with the dominant narrative about reducing or avoiding stress is that there are times where we cannot do that. You can't, it's not possible. So that's why it's important to understand how the stress that you're experiencing or how your body's response can be helpful.
How do we learn to cultivate this mindset?
So a piece of this goes back to that, how do I think of my stress differently? When my heart is beating, I'm normally thinking to myself, this is bad. But if you can remind yourself that my heart beating is telling me, like I'm excited about something, there's something here that I care about. This is something that I want to do. Well in this is something that I can do well in. Then that reframes that heartbeat not as a bad thing, but as your body preparing to act.
There have been so many times in my life, whether when I was, you know, a child playing the violin, or whether it's going into an interviews for a slight change of plans, I get a little spooked if I'm not nervous, because that means maybe I don't care as much as I used to, and so I've actually I see stress as being a very affirming signal because it shows me that I really care about the outcome, and it justifies the unpleasantness of some of those feelings.
And that's a beautiful way of approaching it. That we are typically stressed because there is an underlying reason why we care about the situation. And if we can continue to ask ourselves why why why, then that puts a whole different lens around why you're stressed and changes your approach.
Our next and final guest is psychologist Kristin Nef. Kristen's an expert in self compassion, which she defines as treating yourself with the same warmth, kindness, and care that you would show to a friend. I'd never been totally bought into the idea of self compassion, but Kristin helped me see the resent in a new light. Okay, so you know, Kristin, I will confess that when I first encountered this work years ago, I was a little skeptical. And to be clear,
it's not because I don't need more self compassion. I've always been an intensely self critical person. It's more that I just have had specific concerns, and I'm wondering if right now we can engage in a quick mythbusting session in case there are listeners out there who share some of the same skepticism I used to have. I want to bring them on this journey with me towards really
embracing the research and really understanding the value. So one concern that I've had is that it seems like promoting self compassion can cause people to let themselves off the hook for their bad behaviors. And you know, I look around and I see a lot of people who are not taking accountability for their actions. Right, it seems like they could benefit from a bit more internal criticism and so and of course, for myself, right, I've benefited from
self criticism a lot. And so don't we need people to be more self critical so that they can be better to others?
Yeah, So self compassion, this kind of unconditional acceptance and kindness is toward our worthless people. As human beings. We need to accept ourselves, but we can't accept all our behavior, especially if it's harming self or others, because if your behaviors cause harm to yourself or others is not compassionate. So what we do with self compassion is we accept ourselves as flawed human beings who've made a mistake and that sense of safety. First of all, we don't blame
others as much. Often, if we slam ourselves with shame for admitting we've done something wrong, our little brains are going to try as hard as they can to avoid taking responsibility and to blame someone else that they can. And by the way, research shows that self compassion lessons shame, which is a sense of I am bad, but not necessarily guilt, which is I did something bad.
Yeah, and reading your scholarship, I found this distinction very helpful because you talk about the difference between guilt and shame, and you say, look, being critical of our behaviors is healthy.
It is good.
It provides learning opportunities, It allows us to be better people, allows us to reflect on who we are and what we want from ourselves moving forward. But criticism aimed at ourselves, at our being as a whole, is not healthy because, as you said, and I've definitely fallen into this camp in the past, you don't want to internalize I made a mistake, as I am a mistake, right, I am bad.
Exactly when you do that, it actually shuts down your ability to learn from your mistakes because you're so consumed by the thoughts of inadequacy or shame. Our sense of self kind of gets totally absorbed by the shame. It's like we disappear. There's no one home to be able to try to correct the behavior. You need the safety of self acceptance to be able to criticize your behavior and learn from it.
So another myth that I love you to bust is that self compassion is demotivating. And this one's personal. So my husband, Jimmy, he loves playing competitive squash. Okay, he's obsessed with squash, he's obsessed with getting better, and he's so self motivated, But he really berates himself when he has a poor performance, and as someone who really loves him,
I hate seeing him in this self vurration mode. Like it's pretty painful after a tournament or after some competition for him to be like, oh God, why did I do that? Or you know, I messed up or I didn't play my best. But what I tell him to stop the self criticism to curve it a bit. His counter argument is that he doesn't want to lose that part of himself because it means he might have less
motivation to work hard during his next practice session. And so, yeah, give me a good argument with my husband.
Yeah, well, I'll give you the argument. Then I'll give you the data. Because this one is also very very clear, is it self Compassion is a more effective motivator than self criticism. So self criticism does kind of work. Clearly, it works gets people through med school. It probably motivates your husband. But the motivation comes from fear I have to do better or else I'll slam myself, and that's motivating.
No one wants to feel like they're a bad person or a loser, So that does provide some motivational power, but it also has some maladaptive side effects, which is first of all, performance anxiety. Right, So we want some anxiety to feel like, Okay, it's important that I work. But performance anxiety, which is kind of fear of if I mess up, I'm going to be a loser or I'm going to shame myself that actually stands in the way of our ability to do our best. It also
undermines our self confidence. But this is really key, It undermines our ability to learn. It's very similar to what we were just talking about. If you shame yourself for losing, I'm a loser, I'm a bad person. You aren't going to be as able to say, Okay, just because I lost doesn't mean I'm a loser. What can I do better next time? And so self compassion is very strongly linked to a learning goal orientation as opposed to what's called performance goals, which is my success or failure defiance
my work as a person. There's a new study that isn't even published yet. It just got accepted a few days ago. Hot Off the Presses, who I Love Hot Off the Presses? Slight Change listeners, listen up. So you know I work at University of Texas at Austin, and I had a dissertation student at the time. He was an ex basketball player who for her dissertation decided to
formalize a self compassion training for NC DOUBLEA athletes. So we did a study with several high end NCUBLEA sports teams, all different sports, and we taught them self compassion over about four weeks. We actually didn't call it self compassion because we knew that was standing in the way. We called it inner resilience training, and we taught them how to be warm and supportive and kind to themselves when they were having trouble in their training routine or if
they lost in their sport. And what we found is not only did it help players' mental health, it improved their performance, both self rated and coach rated performance, because again, when it's okay to make a mistake or to lose, you're more able to learn from the loss or the mistake and improve it next time.
So yes, I love all this research, Kristen.
Another concern that I'd had when it came to engaging with the self compassion work or trying out these interventions is that it just kind of felt self centered or selfish or narcissistic.
I don't know.
I was like, what am I doing here? Sitting here trying to love myself? Like I just yeah, convince me that this is not just the most extreme form of narcissism.
Yes, well, absolutely. The reason it's not selfish or narcissistic is because it's not like we only have five units of compassion and if we give three to ourselves, we only have two left over for other people. It actually doesn't work this way. Then the research is very clear, the more self compassion we give ourselves, in other words, the more we fill our own cup, the more compassion we have available to give to others. Right, So, there's a couple of studies that show this one is burnout.
You know, this burnout such a problem. We know, whether you're a special needs parent or you're a healthcare worker, if you're more self compassionate, you're less likely to burn out or experience fatigue giving compassion to others. And then the other evidence we have that self compassion isn't selfish is that in relationships, our partners say that we're more giving, we're less selfish, we're less controlling in the relationship if
we have self compassion. And again, it's really about resourcing yourself. When you can resource yourself, you actually have more to give to others and you aren't so self focused because it's like, oh, Okay, maybe I made a mistake or maybe this is a little difficult, and you give yourself what you need to get through that, and that actually gives you the emotional energy you need to care for us others. Shame and self criticism is an incredibly self
focused state. You know, who are you thinking about when you're beating yourself up? Not other people?
A good point to Chee. I think this is such a critical point that you're making about us not having finite compassion resources, because I think we do think of it as a trade off instinctively. Oh, if I'm really compassionate towards myself, then I have fewer resources to give to others. Or if I'm really compassionate towards others, I don't have the resources to give that same compassion to myself. Yes, And what you're telling me is that we shouldn't see
it as a limited resource. We actually can tap into a lot and it can be a virtuous cycle where the more we invest compassion ourselves, the more the more we have to give to others.
Is that right?
Absolutely, it's additive. It's not a zero sum game.
Yes, yeah, Hey, thanks so much for listening. You can find links to the full versions of the episodes featuring Ethan, Madupe and Kristen in the show notes. If you enjoyed the special compilation episode, let us know. We're always eager to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. We'll be back in your feed with a new episode on February tenth.
See you then.
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producers Britney Cronin and Megan Lubin, and our sound engineer Erica Wong. Scara wrote our delightful theme song and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.