The Science of Our Inner Voice

it just kept all of those negative feelings alive. That's what I call chatter. You keep on trying to think and work through the problem, but you don't make any progress. Ethan Us is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and he wrote the book Chatter, The Voice in Our Heads, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.

Ethan's an expert on the science of introspection, and his research focuses on those moments when our inner voice turns negative, and he gives us strategies for how to tame it when it does. One of the things we know about chatter is it zooms us in on our problems. We get stuck thinking in a very narrow way about only this issue right, we're not thinking about the bigger picture.

Are alternative ways of making sense of that circumstance, And what we've learned over the years is that being able to step back, just take a little step back in your mind, get some psychological distance from your problems, can be really useful for broadening our perspective and helping us

work through the situation more objectively. On today's episode, how to Control our Inner Voice to help us live happier, healthier lives, I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. We're all familiar with our inner voice. It's that running monologue in our heads that sometimes serves us well and at other times, was the case with Ethan's daughter, totally drives us nuts, and when it does, it can really

affect our well being. The good news science shows we can change the way we engage with our inner voice, and Ethan is here to help. But before we dive into all that, I asked Ethan to give us an overview of the positive aspects of this uniquely human ability. 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 groceryil. Then I'm thinking to myself what do I have to order? And I go over the list in my head Cheese, 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. So you're in a voice lets you do that, but then it lets you do lots of other arguably, I don't know, sexier things like like tell stories. Right, So we experienced adversity in our lives. Oh my god, my paper was rejected, My my, My kid didn't do well on the soccer field.

I didn't have a great conversation with a colleague yesterday. When that happens, we turn our attention inward to make sense of what happen to us, and we use our inner voice to create those stories. That's a really important capacity. Yeah. 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 a 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

ourselves 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 and where to think about our past

and anticipate the future. This lets us do a number of remarkable things. Yeah, so let's dig in right to this live in the present more mantra. Right, that is very much in the zeitgeist. I want to hear what your reaction is to this, because it strikes me that we are we are forgetting the benefits of allowing our minds to wander. And my personal view is that we are failing to appreciate how remarkable it is that we

even have this ability in the first place. So just a personal anecdote is I remember my good friend from college, Dane. He got onto the Mindfulness Meditation Present mind Inness train and he got really enamored with this particular spiritual grew.

I remember Dane telling me, oh, yeah, Maya like you gotta stay more in the present, And he sends me a video of this grew and the Grew's going on and on about the importance of staying in the present, and then at one point he calls out a member of the audience and he kind of gives like him a stern lecture and he's like, what have you found yourself thinking about and the guy's like, well, actually, I was kind of imagining that I was going to go to lunch after this, and I was kind of imagining

what I was going to order at the restaurant and what it was going to taste like. And you know, he gets the audience member gets scolded by the grew for having these thoughts, and I'm thinking to myself, first of all, this Grew's very boring to me. So it's wonderful that this audience member had an escape route from

the lecture that was happening. But two, it's amazing that we have this faculty that allows us at times to escape our present environment and think about other things, to daydream, to think about the future, to anticipate things like that is a rich part of the human experience that I

don't want to be lost on people. And so I think, I think reframing our relationship with our inner monologue chatter it can be in the long term a productive way of actually solving some of the challenges that accompany the inner voice. Yeah, I totally agree. You know, I use the title Harness our Inner Voice for the title for the book. The subtitle I didn't I didn't say silence,

and that was a very strategic decision. A lot of people that I speak to when we're talking about, you know, the inner voice, run a muck, which is essentially chatter when you're getting stuck in those thought loops that you can't escape, and they are, for lack of a better term, driving you nuts. Right. They're so oppressive and stifling and really not fun. So many people ask me, Okay, what can I do to get rid of it? I just

want to shut it up. I don't. I don't want to have an inner voice, and I there's a story telling the book. It's one of my favorite stories. It's of a woman named Jill Bolt Taylor who was a Harvard neuroanatomist working at the very top of her game, and like so many of us, she experienced chatter from time to time, and she thought this same thing to herself. She would ask, how can I silence this in her voice?

And she got an answer to that question one morning when she was exercising on a chreadmill, because she suffered a stroke that temporarily wiped out her ability to use language not only to communicate with other people, but also with herselves and Initially, she described this experiences wait for it, strangely, you fork, Now, that's remarkable to me. Right, She's just had a massive stroke. It's targeted language centers in her brain.

She cannot speak to other people or to herself. And what's the emotion relief because all the chatter is gone,

all that chatter that was weighing her down. But as the days and weeks went on, she began to describe this this experience as quite debilitating because although the chatter is gone, so were all of the good things that her inner voice allowed her to do, like plan for the future and control ourselves and create stories and keep things in mind and so and improves as a person, by the way, like the negative chatter is productive, it's

very helpful. It's data to ourselves about how we can become better people, all right, and take feedback in and work at things that touches on another I think are important reframe for listeners, which is we often strive to lead lives free of negative emotions, but in fact, all

emotions are useful when experienced in small doses. When I experienced a small ping of anxiety before a big presentation, that's really really a useful response, because what it does is it says, hey, you know, start preparing and don't just walk in there and think you could wing it. There have been a few occasions where I haven't experienced any emotion before presentation. Those presentations actually didn't turn out as well as the ones that I was a little

bit on edge four. And the same is true for all the negative emotions we experience. What makes them useful is that they are painful. They do draw our attention in you just don't want to bathe in them endlessly. That's when they become counterproductive. Yeah, So with that in mind, let's get into the kind of the darker sides of

this ability. As we've discussed, so much of our lived experience is the thoughts that are happening in our heads, and so it's important for us to learn how to better manage those thoughts, right, to better manage that monologue. And this is especially true because another thing you point out in your book is that our inner voice is more predictive of our happiness than what we're actually doing. And man, is this going to be salient for so many people who are listening, Like I'm on the luxury

vacation I'm on the beach. I'm supposed to be having the time of my life, and yet I'm anxious about something that's happening back home, and my mind is not even present and fully sabotages what's otherwise supposed to be a great experience. 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 accuse 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 where 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 were 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 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. But I've been seduced by that this feeling of oh, you know, I'm gonna be real resolved if I just kind of keep it marinating in there. And then without really sophisticated strategies like from cognitive behavioral

therapy and whatnot, you know, oftentimes it's not that productive. 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 should work here it's not working. I'm a I don't give up. I'm going to keep going. And so that's when you really need this ability to step back, if you will, and just recognize weight this approach isn't working. Let me shift perspective or do any number of other things to help reconcile the situation. So you know, it's something that

we all fall victim too at times. 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 too. So when the inner voice morphs into chatter, it sinks us in three domains of life that I think are three domains that we care a lot about and really make life worth living. And that's why I think it's such a huge problem. 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 past 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 work 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 appropriate? And once you start doing that the whole script explodes,

the behavior explodes, and you don't do 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 are called the yips. 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, and she appropriate the 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. That 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 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, is 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 healthy states. Boy, I'm getting I'm getting depressed just talking about this maya But let me quickly just mention the final domain, which is our physical health, that I think is really important to highlight. Many people think that experience stress like stress kills. This is a very popular idea. It turns out that is

not exactly correct. What we know is that the ability to experience a stress response is an amazingly useful biological reaction to a confronting threat. It is really useful to know that if we see a threat in our world, we have a system that is designed to get us to approach or avoid it in a split second. What make stress toxic is when the stress response goes up and remains chronically elevated over time, over days, over weeks.

That's what chatter does. Because we experience a threat in our world, and then we keep replaying it in our minds, sometimes even making it worse, and that keeps the whole stress machinery going in ways that lead stress to predict things like cardiovascular disease and certain forms of cancer and other unpleasant physical states to talk about. So thinking, performing relationships, health chatter wraps its tentacles around all of those domains, and it's why I think it's one of the big

problems we face. I promise hope is on the way. Don't worry. When we return, Ethan will give us some science based strategies to help us harness our inner voice. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. Okay, so we need some hope, Ethan. You've 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, just to give give everyone a framework for thinking about these tools and

also being hopeful for managing their chatter. I want to be super clear, there are lots and lots of tools that exist for managing our chatter, and so like when I think about the potential that is out there, there is a lot of it. So where do you find these tools you can You could think of them as

falling into three different domains or buckets. Things you could do on your own, relationship tools ways of talking or interacting with other people that can be helpful, and then what I call environmental or physical tools out there in the world. If we start with the first category, things you could do on your own, one of the things we know about chatter is it zooms us in on

our problems. We get stuck thinking in a very narrow way about only this issue, right, We're not thinking about the bigger picture, all alternative ways of making sense of that circumstance. And what we've learned over the years is that being able to step back, just take a little step back in your mind, get some psychological distance from your problems, can be really useful for broadening our perspective

and helping us work through the situation more objectively. One of the findings that my colleagues and I found several years ago that I always come back to is this we are much much better at giving advice to other people than we are following our own advice. I find this really remarkable. You know a friend or a loved one who is struggling with the same problem that you might have experienced at some point when they come to them. Sorry, sorry,

sorry interrupted. I just want to clarify because I think, is it about we're better at giving advice to other people than following our own, or we're better at giving advice to others than we are at giving advice to ourselves. Well, I would say giving advice to others, we're better doing that than following our own advice. Okay, because it also seems like we sometimes give ourselves bad advice as well

when it's the first person thing, because emotions cloud our judgments. Well, you know that, I would say it's probably both actually, so we give better, we give ourselves often poorer advice, and we have trouble following the more effective pieces when we when we think about them. And it's a pretty

pretty pervasive phenomenon. And what we've learned is that there are lots of different psychological tools people can use to shift their perspective and get them to think about their problems like they were weighing in on someone else's problems. And when you do that, you often find less chatter, more objective thinking. What we might even call wiser reasoning about about issues that we're facing. I'll tell you about two of my favorites, which also happen to be two

tools that I use myself if I experience 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 pronoun you. So, if I'm really upset about something and spinning alread 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 pronoun on 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 friend, and when you're in that 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 your factives. 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 You could stretch out the time window as much as you want. What engaging in that 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 experienced 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 at two am and gripp it, 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 helpful 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. Well you got me before, I could do mental time travel the Martnie mcflyway in the past

completely agree. Right. So that's the second piece of it, which is so if you think about COVID as a great example of this, right, So COVID things are on the whole, I think, getting better, but you know, we don't know when the end is going to happen, So going into the future is somewhat murky. So what we can also do, exactly as you're describing, is we can p into the past. And this is what I do. This is how I use mental time travel for dealing

with COVID. I'll think about the Spanish flu pandemic of nineteen I think it was nineteen eighteen, that was really bad and we got through it. Sometimes though, that doesn't even take the edge off. So then I'll go back further in time. I'll think about the bubonic plague that decimated Europe right like, that was much much worse than this, went on for a really long but we got through it. We are still standing. So that shows you the flexibility

through which you can use mental time travel to help yourself. Yeah, I'm just remembering how there was a 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 i'm 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 narcisism 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 onto because it helps me in 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, ah, 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, you know, just wait the whole stretch of time for that to happen. So it's a really valuable exercise for folks to think about. I love this concept of what you call the universal you.

This is related to the idea of referring to ourselves in the third person, but it's slightly different in terms of how it's implemented. So can you just share more about the universal you? Yeah? I love this research. What we noticed is that sometimes when people are trying to make sense of really difficult, chatter provoking situations in their life, they do something that is very odd linguistically if you

actually stop and think about it. They talk about their own experiences using the word you, but not to refer to another person, but to refer to the world in general. So let me give you a concrete example. Cheryl Sandbergs, as many listeners know, tragically lost her husband while they were on vacation several years ago, and she went in mourning.

And when she came out of mourning several weeks later after the loss, she wrote a really emotional post on her Facebook page on which she described what she was going through, and she said something to the effect of, when you lose someone you love, you just don't know what to do. Your heart jumps out from your skin. The idea she was talking about her own deeply personal experience using a word you that is the verbal equivalent

of talking about the world in general. She's essentially saying, when anyone loses their husband, anyone would be devastated, right. And what that does for us is it gives us a little bit of distance from our problems, right because it's saying it's not just me, this is anyone who's dealing with it. And what we've learned through lots of science is that this can be an effective tool for

helping people make meaning out of negative experiences. It helps them normalize what they're going through, get some space from their experience. And it also does something that I just find so cool. It draws other people into our world. Because if I'm saying, anyone and everyone would experience, guess what, you, the person I'm speaking to, you are part of anyone and everyone. So it enhances the resonance that people have, people who are listening with our ideas, and as really

a useful tool in all of those ways. Oh I love that. Yeah, I love how inclusive the language is. You're participating with the person who's in distress, let's say, because you can empathize with them, and you're also like, hey, I probably have a few lessons I can learn from this, because it might just be a matter of time before a similar situation hits my life or strikes me totally.

So I think that leads to your next kind of pillar right of strategies, and that is around relationships and how we can engage with others when we're in the middle of the angst of mental chatter. Yeah, so other people are an incredible potential tool that we have at our disposal for helping us manage our chatter. But they

can also be a huge liability. And this is why I really like talking about the science that governs how all this works, because what we know about chatter is that with a few exceptions, you know, if you're experiencing chatter about shame or certain forms of trauma, you're not going to be that motivated usually to talk about with

other people. But for all the other kinds of chatter that we experience, chatter about anger and anxiety and depression, we're often highly motivated to talk to other people about it. But many people think that the route to get in good support from other people is to just find someone to vent our emotions, to just let it out express onload.

And there's been a lot of research on venting over the years, and what we know is that, on the one hand, venting can be useful for strengthening the friendship bonds between two individuals. It feels good to know that there's someone out there who is willing to take the time to listen to us and spend time learning about our lives. But if all you do is vent about a problem, it just keeps the fire burning inside because you're just rehearsing all of the things that are driving

you nuts. The key to getting good support for our chatter involves doing two things. Finding a person who will take the time to hear you out, to learn about your situation, to empathize, but at a certain point in the conversation they start trying to help you broaden your perspective.

Right to do what we just talked about. We're capable of doing it on our own broadening our perspective, but other people are often in a prime position to help us see that bigger picture because the problems not happening to them. That's the formula for getting good chatter support. Someone who listens, connects, but then helps broaden. Now, there is one critically important caveat to this whole equation, which

is there is an art to doing this well. And the reason I say there's an art to doing this well is depending on the person in the situation, it's not always clear when to transition from just listening to to start providing advice and So sometimes sometimes my wife will come to me with a problem and you know, she'll start unloading and I'm there, I'm receptive, I'm empathic, And then a certain point this sounds off. I totally get it. I can I have a piece of advice?

Can I offer you? And sometimes she'll just you know, pause and say, no, I'm not done, just listen, and then she keeps going and going, and it's okay. At other times she'll be like, yes, please tell me, tell me what to do. That's why I'm talking. So you want to be gentle as you as you feel that out.

That is the art involved in all of this. Yeah. No, I relish this part of your book because I think we are living in a time where everyone is being encouraged to vocalize all of the things that are happening

in their minds. Right, it's like, oh, that's that's the definition of vulnerability, you know, that's the but pointing out that it can be counterproductive, and pointing out that when you come to someone and you're you're venting to them, and you know, you presume in the situation the person cares about you, they will be more focused on satisfying your emotional needs first, and your cognitive needs second. Right, the practical solutions side of things that will actually lead

to long term growth and mental progress. You know, you and I are familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy and some of the techniques, but I want to give some color to what it means to go from emotional We all know what emotional mode feels like. That is very intuitive. What does cognitive mode feel like. Cognitive mode is broadening your perspective. Let's put this in context. Let's think about

the bigger picture. Cognitive mode is sharing information that can be useful for helping the person deal with the problem at hand, like instrumental information. So, hey, I was in this situation, exactly this situation, and here's how I dealt with it. Cognitive mode is pointing out sometimes the blind spots that may exist that are governing people's emotion reactions. But it is important you want to strike the balance. Right if you just so, what are the hazards? What

if we just skipped emotion mode altogether? That often comes across as patronizing and uncaring, and so you want to strike that appropriate, that appropriate balance. So what I love about this science is there's like a double whammy benefit it provides people. On the one hand, knowing about how this works, it allows people to be much more deliberate about who they call when they're struggling with chatter. So there are many people who I'm really really close to,

I'm related to. Some of them, I don't call them about my chatter. There's no ill intention on their part, but they're just not skilled at helping me shift from emotion to cognitive mode. There are a couple of people I know who are good at this. And you know what I've experienced happening in my own life with this little board that I've put together is people know when they're on that board, and they actually value it, like

they feel privileged. Not because it's like, oh, you can put you on the way, it's actually what it's communicating is that I really value you as a friend and life advisor. That's who I rely on, and it's really effective. So that's one benefit. The other benefit is when someone comes to me with their chatter, I've got a playbook. I know what to do to help effectively coach them through that situation. And so so it's useful on both

sides of the equation. Yeah, what's striking me in this moment is that we can do a service to the people that we choose to vent two by giving by almost engaging in a pre commitment of sorts, which is at the outside of the conversation, say, I'm really upset about this situation, and I'm going to tell you all about it, but I want you to know I really do want some reframing strategies so I can think differently

about the situation. And this serves two benefits, right. One, it's signaling to the person that you're engaging with, maybe who you're training to enter that board of advisors, to know that is appropriate at some point to make that pivot.

And before you get two into the heat of the moment, as you're replaying the negative episode, you're mentally committing to the fact that you do want to leave the conversation with some degree of enlightenment about your situation in terms of you know, bigger picture, broad contexts, maybe things that you misinterpreted totally. All right, So let's move into the environment and these these seemingly subtle aspects of our environment

that can actually have a profound impact on the mental chatter. Sure, so one of the things we've learned over the years is that nature, or are exposing ourselves to green spaces can provide us with a tool to manage our chatter. And I love this work and it's actually it's changed the way I live my life. And this does not

mean I've, like, you know, become one with nature. And for those who can't see them, Ethan's actually taking this interview from the jungle, but it's excellent audio quality, that's right. So the way this research has changed my life is I actually go to work a different way each day. I take a slightly longer walk to work, which is a walk down a tree line path rather than a

walk down the streets of ann Arbor. And the reason I do this is what we know about nature is this nature provides an opportunity to restore that precious attention we have that our chat or depletes. And the way this works is when you're going for a walk in a natural setting, there are all these interesting things around us that we become fascinated by, so our attention gently

drifts on those surroundings. And when it's gently drifts and is captured by our surroundings, that allows our attentional resources to restore, and they often can be really useful for managing our chatter. So that's one way it helps. The other thing that nature does is something that I find just beautiful, which is nature gives us the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe. And awe is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast

and indescribable, like a beautiful sunset, or you know. I go for the walk in the arboretum right by my house and I see these trees that have been here for literally hundreds of years, and I think, how do I even contemplate, like I'm just struggling to get through my forty you know, pandemic and back aches, and hundreds of years these trees have survived. That feels me with awe.

When you are contemplating something vast and indescribable, you feel smaller by comparison, and when you feel smaller, so do your worries and ruminations. So as this powerful experience, it really is in some ways, it's like the ultimate perspective broadener, the way of putting ourselves and we're a spec in

this much broader, beautiful universe that is out there. There's so many different ways that you can get a healthy amount of distance from your problems, and drawing on that set of skills I think can be helpful for allowing people to skillfully manage your chatter. Hey, thanks for listening. On next week's episode, we'll hear from Scott Manky. When Scott was a contestant on the game show Jeopardy, he was surprised when the audience responded not just to his performance,

but to who he was as a person. One of the first comments that I remember seeing was this person saying, I really like Scott's demeanor on the show. I didn't expect that reaction. It seemed to be like they liked who I was, and they thought I'd seemed like a nice person and a good, good hang or whatever. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produce

by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Emily Rosteck, our producer and fact checker, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Tolliday, our sound engineer, and Neil la Belle, our executive producer. Louise Scara wrote our 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, including the colmer, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Faint and Carly Niggliori, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. I could have a person come to me and say, hey, I experienced chatter here. What should I do? Tell me exactly which tools to use and to what degree I

should be using them. I cannot give that prescription. You know, the six tools that I use to manage my chatter may be very different from the seventeen that you use, or or the four. Okay, I see how you feel. Even my chatter can run laps around your chatter, okay, And I'm proud of that