This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When was the last time you stayed awake at night, unable to sleep, replaying something in your head that happened that day? Oh, how can I say something so stupid? Why did I do that? I'm always so lazy. I really should have worked out. I cannot believe you forgot to fill out that permission form, you forgot about parent's or your conferences, what the hell. My back hurts, my body is just falling apart.
Why does this inner voice seem to love to torment us? Wouldn't life be better if we could just make it stop? When that negative inner voice takes hold, that is all we can hear because it is consuming our attention. Today, we try to understand the purpose of that nagging voice inside your head, how it works and what you can do to make it work for you, this week on Hidden Brain. You might be an expert, you might be a novice, you could be a veteran or just starting out in your career.
You've almost certainly heard that voice inside your head questioning if you know enough, questioning if you are enough. At the University of Michigan, psychologists Ethan Cross studies that voice, what it does, why it exists and how we can learn to be friends it. Ethan Cross, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks for having me, Shankar, it's an absolute delight to be here.
Ethan, I want to start by talking about a couple of incidents in your own life where you had to confront what you call the chatter of your own inner voice. When you started college at the University of Pennsylvania, you came in as a very strong student with stellar grades from high school. Can you tell me how you fared academically in your first few months at Penn? I think the best word that I could use to describe my experience is it was a disaster academically my first semester.
I had graduated as a valedictorian from high school and thought I knew how to study and turned out I did not know how to study very well for college classes and ended up getting a sea of bad grades. I also felt like I didn't exactly fit in at Penn, I had come from a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn and I was surrounded now by students from more privileged backgrounds that I had come from and they talked different, they dressed different.
So all of those thoughts about whether I fit in, whether I belong, that became a distraction and that that weighed on me that there was a mental burden that exerted which was unpleasant and or something I had to figure out how to address.
I want to fast forward a couple of decades to another moment in your life when the when the voice inside your head was deafening you become a successful academic you were married you had a growing family and wonder you are playing with your young daughter getting her ready for her nap. Can you pick me a detailed picture of what you were doing and what happened next season?
This is a painful experience even when I reflect back on it now when my youngest daughter was less than one at the time or right around that age we would have this ritual of sorts that we would engage in where before her nap I'd read to her play a little bit change her diaper and then I would like launch her off of the changing table you know swirl her up and down like a spaceship in the sky and then flip her on her back and you know very quickly
kind of put her down in the crib and she would love it you know always smiles and and she always expected it so something we did every single time and this one episode I started going through the procedure she she knew exactly what was coming she was loving it and the only problem is when I when I went to land her so to speak in the crib she started screaming
I say screaming I mean I'm talking about your shattering screams were coming out of out of her mouth and she started grabbing reaching for her arm and so I immediately called my wife told her what happened she then started to come home from work and I'm then just I'm sitting on the rocking chair with my daughter screaming looking at me and I'm thinking oh my god what did I do I started wrote you know simulating in my mind the worst case scenarios
have I have I permanently injured her or we can be she can a need surgery oh my god what what a surgery like when a kid is this young so I started catastrophizing as though that were insufficient for working me up then I went in a different direction with the catastrophization I started thinking
what is the doctor going to think when I bring my daughter in are they going to think I might have deliberately hurt her and that made me feel terrible when you couple that with the pain I felt when just looking at my child who was screaming in pain was a terribly chatter provoking episode in my life and not a particularly pleasant episode to relive
Ethan would later discover his daughter had dislocated her elbow but in that moment the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened allowed his chatter to spin out of control oh absolutely I mean we know that uncertainty
can fuel chatter because we don't know what's going to happen and you know our mind is incredibly adept at simulating all sorts of possibilities and in that moment my mind was it was firing on all cylinders and that's certainly contributed to that negative state I was experiencing
and I feel that this is as close to a universal experience as there is I think almost everyone experiences this one of the more dramatic examples of this phenomenon that took place in public involves a baseball picture Rick and Keel and for listeners who don't know much about baseball can you tell me a bit about Rick and Keel and describe step by step what happened on October 3rd 2000 sure so Rick and Keel was a new picture in the major leagues
and when he arrived on the St. Louis Cardinals he was touted as the next greatest thing not just that year but he had the potential to be according to the pundits one of the greatest pictures of all time and throughout his first year in the league that's exactly how he performed
and Keel 11 and 7 on the year in 30 starts 194 strikeouts breaking the record by a rookie he was lights out an ace pitcher his team ended up getting to the playoffs and during one of the playoff games he took the mound and a few batters into the game he did something that was very uncommon for him and a wild pitch the ball hit the dirt at the batter's feet and shot past the catcher the runner on first ambled over to second base this was not the sort of thing fans expected from Rick and Keel
it was uncommon for him because he had such incredible control over where he placed the ball and after he throws his wild pitch he pauses and he says to himself I just threw a wild pitch he shrugged it off and then he winds up to throw another pitch and this one's even more wild than the one that came before it another wild pitch over the head of Fernandez and back to the backstop and now he's starting to wonder what is going on he winds up for another pitch
and this one is even more wild than the last it sails over the catcher and the umpire and on and on he goes through this inning it's incredibly painful to watch his implosion on the mound and another wild one and Maddox will score it's ball four to Galaraga he finally gets mad at the ball a pitcher who previously was able to hit targets with pinpoint precision and he's just walking batters across the bases and ultimately has to be taken out of the game
never regains his form when describing what he underwent on the field that day and during subsequent outings in which he tried to regain his control he talks about this monster that was born inside him and the monster is a name that he gives to his chatter I wake up in the middle of the night you know having the nightmare that I couldn't throw a strike I'm soaked in sweat and it's like this thing won't even leave me alone during my sleep
every time he would wind up to throw a pitch he would start thinking about is he squeezing the ball too tight or is it too loose?
is he distributing his weight appropriately and ultimately this monster his chatter ended up sinking his career you say that the voice that he heard that day this voice that he called the monster was louder than the 52,000 fans who were in the stands watching I mean that's an extraordinary statement Ethan I think it's also a statement that that rings true for many people there's some wonderful research which shows that often what predicts how we feel at any given moment in time is not
is not what we're actually doing but it's the thoughts streaming through our head so you can be on a carnival ride with your kids that should be enormously fun but you're worried about how the last conversation went with a guest where things were a little choppy and you're not having fun
this speaks to I think exactly what and keel experience in that moment and what so many of us experience at times which is when that chatter starts brewing when when that negative inner voice takes hold that is all we can hear because it is consuming our attention
that negative inner voice is often lying in weight ready to chime in it refuses to let mistakes go and reminds us of them at the worst possible moment when we come back the many different drivers of this chatter and the psychological techniques we can use to master the voices inside our heads
you're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta psychologist Ethan Cross studies the phenomenon of self talk and chatter the voices we all hear incessantly inside our heads
we've seen how chatter can take the form of a merciless tormentor once baseball star Rick and keel made one mistake his inability to set that mistake aside produce the next mistake and the next and the next when Ethan accidentally heard his young daughter he found it really hard to forgive himself
the harsh and unforgiving judge is a common role that is played by our inner voice but the more Ethan studied the phenomenon of chatter the more he realized it comes in many guises Ethan some years ago you made an appearance on television that set off a firestorm of chatter inside your head
this was a different kind of chatter start by telling me about the TV appearance and what happened afterwards this was early in my career and my colleagues and I published a study that we were really excited about it dealt with the idea that when we're rejected by someone else in a romantic relationship people may actually be referring to physical sensations in their body when they experience social pain
and this was a study we were really excited about we didn't particularly expect it to get a lot of attention but many people came calling and one minute I'm lecturing in introductory social psychology about the psychology of love and the next minute I'm in a studio across campus doing an interview for the CBS evening news so when we're alone we experience physical pain and that's a cue to say it's time to get things back on track
and that's what lequid fast forward about a week after this interview aired I walk into work and I notice a letter that's hand-addressed to me and I proceeded to open the envelope and that's where I saw a really chilling disturbing note had been written to me all sorts of racial slurs threats ugly drawings of me I immediately broke out into a sweat and the first thing I remember the first thing I did was I showed it to my assistant just to get a second set of eyes on this
to make sure I wasn't jumping to an extreme and I looked at her face and I remember her face went white and you know she the first thing she said to me is you need to tell someone about this a couple of hours later after talking to folks in the department and at the university I ended up at the police station show them the letter ask them what to do so their advice to me was to keep an eye out for people who looks suspicious for the next few days
and make sure to drive home a different way from work each day so that no one no one follows you which was kind of comical because at the time I lived like just a few blocks from campus so you know there weren't exactly many many different ways I could go home and this activated some chatter some really significant chatter for the next few days I you know I couldn't sleep I was pacing my house I had my baseball bat resting on my shoulder
you know I was in protector mode I was constantly thinking to myself what have I done why did I do this interview my first daughter had just been born you know I've put her at risk I put my wife at risk it was it was really a scary moment in life and it was an all consuming one and when your chatter is consuming your attention for a long period of time that makes it really hard for you to do other things in your life that matter like your work like advising your students
writing papers or even being a good partner and parent to your partner and kids right because they're trying to talk to me and I'm thinking about this potential threat so that was the letter in the chatter as I refer to that episode
the chatter inside Ethan's mind brought him back to the letter over and over again he was trying to decipher clues about the person who sent it he was trying to understand their intentions it was actually from a nearby town which also magnified the significance of the perceived threat but there you know there was no reason why this person was making the accusations that they were making there was no reason why they drew the pictures of me that they did and why they said the things they did
but that didn't make it in that moment any less threatening and that's what chatter does to us because it zooms us in on the things we're concerned about whether it be whether we belong whether we're making grades whether we've been rejected or whether someone's coming to kill us
right you're zoomed in so narrowly on the problem at hand you lose the ability to see that bigger picture so another form of chatter that's related to this idea of the fearful prognosticator it is the problem of rumination and I think many of us are affected by this you know we're bothered by something small and then we pull and pull and pull on that ball of thread until you know very small mole hills become very big mountains a great example of this comes from the TV show
Seinfeld the character Elaine is on a crowded subway train happily thinking about an upcoming wedding she's about to attend I really look forward to this I love weddings maybe I'll meet somebody maybe not oh man we're stopping oh this is great this is what I need just what I need
okay take it easy I'm sure it's nothing probably rats on the track they're stopping for rats god it's so crowded how could there be so many people if I missed the wedding I got the ring what they do you can't get married without a ring
oh I can't breathe I feel faint okay take it easy it'll start moving soon think about people in concentration camps what they went through the hostages what would you do if you were a hostage think about that this is nothing no it's not nothing it's something it's a nightmare what's that on my leg
so obviously even this is comedy but but I love how the writers here start with the smallest of inconveniences and then 20 seconds later Elaine's comparing herself being stuck on a train to being in a concentration camp yeah the the mind's ability to make mountains out of mollholes and to catastrophize is truly remarkable you know there's this this one study that I really love it was this study done by the British anthropologist Andrew Irving
he basically went up to New Yorkers on city streets several years ago and gave them a microphone and just asked them to verbalize the stream of thoughts that were flowing through their mind at any given moment in time and what you see in those externalized inner monologues is something very similar to what you hear Elaine going through in that clip one thing that I think is so interesting is there's a non-linearity to our inner voice we we pinball back and forth all over the place in that clip
Elaine's not just thinking about the wedding but that you know she's going to the concentration camp and then she's going back to the subway conditions we're moving back and forth very rapidly and the other feature of these externalized inner monologues that was so no worthy is
they often dealt with negative content not always but that was the majority of the kinds of thoughts that were streaming through people's heads and I just find it remarkable at how fast I we are in our ability to go from one negative thing to another and down those rabbit holes
so another hallmark of rumination is that I think we feel as if we're making progress on some problem like we're thinking about something and we think okay if we think about this problem we can now make progress and solve the problem and then as you say moments later we're pinballing off 17 different things and then we don't realize it but we are walking in circles we're like the people who are lost in a forest who are walking in circles
can you talk about that that one of the hallmarks of rumination is it has sort of the circularity to it that we come back to the same stops over and over again but we don't realize we're going in circles you know chatter is a term I used to refer to getting stuck in a negative thought loop
this perceiverative circularity rumination tends to be about dwelling on the past worry is more about what's happening in the future or the present but the common theme across both of those different states is this negative circularity this perceiverative negative cognition
and it is thought to be what psychologists call a transdiagnostic risk factor for many different forms of mental illness ranging from various forms of depression and anxiety to other kinds of negative states for example people who are overly aggressive and easily set off
the common theme across many of those conditions is that people are herping on some misdeed or grievance or concern over and over and over again so we've seen how the inner voice can take the form of the you know the harsh judge or the second guesser sometime ago we featured Kevin Cochley on Hidden Brain and he studies the imposter phenomenon the phenomenon of self doubt and in some ways that's also connected to the story of chatter
the ways in which people who are actually very good at doing some things can sometimes start to second guess the moment second guess themselves you tell the story of Mr. Rogers on TV he came across a serenely self confident but behind the scenes it was another picture altogether
yeah there's this wonderful chatter artifact of sorts that the New York Times published several years ago Fred Rogers had gone on a kind of sabbatical for a while from his show and when he came back he was filled with self doubt about whether he'd be able to
perform at the same level that he did prior to taking his break and in this letter that he writes to himself he very very candidly expresses that vulnerability he writes am I kidding myself that I'm able to write a script again I wonder why don't I trust myself after all these years it is just as bad as ever I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damn trying to create oh well the hour come of and now is when I've got to do it get to it Fred get to it
so this is really remarkable to me first of all I mean we're talking about Mr. Rogers you know Mr. Rogers helped teach me how to manage my emotions growing up as he did countless other kids and probably adults too and yet here we see him admitting to struggling with his own
self doubt at times which I think is such an important message to convey to folks because it really says to people hey if you've ever experienced chatter if you've ever ever experienced self doubt welcome to the human condition we all do at times
there is one final form of negative chatter worth discussing sometimes the voice inside our head takes the form not of an angry judge or a fearful warrior but a disappointed parent or teacher some time ago hidden brain listener Jose Velasquez shared the story with us
I betrayed the trust of one of my closest family members and left them with a financial disaster that they had to resolve entirely on their own and it took them the better half of five years to fix it and there doesn't pass a single day where I don't think about it and hate myself for it
and even though the person I betrayed has forgiven me has said so explicitly I don't see how ever forgive myself it just haunts me every single day so even I'm struck by the line where he says I don't see how I can ever forgive myself I'm wondering if you can talk for a moment about the chatter that comes in the role of shame chatter refers to getting stuck in those negative thought loops the content of that negativity can vary in some cases it could be filled with anxiety provoking thoughts
but in other cases as you're referring to here it could be filled with shame provoking thoughts as well both feel awful but in very different ways but in my experiences talking to people and doing research on this topic what has become crystal clear is just how normative this experience of chatter is for people our inner voices can take many forms they can cause us enormous anguish they can cause friction in our relationships impair our performance destabilize us
it's enough to make anyone wish for a little peace and quiet that's exactly what happened to the neuroscientist Jill Bulti Taylor in 1996 she suffered a stroke that silenced the voice of her inner tormentor she described what that change was like in a TED Talk my brain chatter went totally silent just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button total silence and at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind and I affectionately refer to this space as Lala Land
but it was beautiful there imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage oh I felt euphoria when we come back Jill Bulti Taylor discovers something that nagging bothersome voice she was so happy to lose she starts to miss it you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta
this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta psychologist Ethan Cross is the author of the book Chatter he has studied the different roles of the voices we hear inside our heads the harsh judge the fearful prognosticator the repetitive ruminator one of the puzzles that arises from this area of research is this if our inner voice is consistently a source of anxiety or a driver of depression why do we have an inner voice at all?
shouldn't natural selection have found a way over thousands of years to remove something that causes so much harm? Ethan you've called introspection the great puzzle of the human mind what is paradoxical about it? well what's paradoxical about it is that on the one hand the ability to introspect is a remarkable tool that is a source of innovation it's a tool that lets us solve problems if you think about verbal introspection specifically what many people describe as the inner voice
what that refers to specifically is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives and that lets us do many many different things number one your inner voice lets you keep information active in your head for very short periods of time
it's part of what we call our verbal working memory system so if you go to the grocery store and like me five minutes after you get there you forget what you were supposed to buy and you pause and you think to yourself well I was I was supposed to get cheese, yogurt, oranges
that's you're using your inner voice you're using it to retain information but we also use that inner voice to do other things like simulate and plan before giving a new presentation I will go for a walk around my neighborhood and I'll go through what I'm going to say often word for word in my mind
we also use our inner voice to control ourselves this morning I was exercising it was a hard workout I was literally coaching myself along come on you got this seven more reps then you get a break and then I count to down seven six five so we can use that inner voice to be a coach and then finally we use our inner voice to tell stories to create narratives that help us understand our experiences in this wacky world and those narratives that we create they give shape to our sense of who we are
I think of the inner voice and more broadly in respect as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us do many many different things I'm thinking about one other feature that the inner voice gives us Ethan when we do something that's wrong you know we often castigate ourselves
we are mad at ourselves we second guess ourselves we experience shame we experience remorse and obviously it's not fun to go through those things but of course if we imagine a world where we didn't go through them where we did something wrong where we didn't reflect back on what happened
we might be entirely prone to make the same mistakes over and over again experiencing negativity and negative emotions isn't something that we want to shy away from many scientists myself included believe that negative emotions are functional when experienced in the right dosage
we evolve the capacity to experience shame regret anger sadness you fill in your favorite negative emotion for a reason they prepare us for dealing with that situation that we're managing and they often serve as cues to say hey you need to focus here so you don't repeat this mistake again
so we don't want to rid ourselves of negativity what we do want to figure out is how to prevent those small spikes of negative emotions from morphing into chatter so earlier in the episode we explored the story of the neuroscientist
Jill Bulti Taylor she suffered a stroke that left her unable to engage in introspection and at first she welcomed the absence of her bothersome in her voice but Ethan finished the story for us did the relief that Jill Bulti Taylor felt at losing her inner voice was that long lasting
what ended up happening was the euphoria that she initially felt when all of her chatter went away that morphed into a state of dysfunction as time went on because although she stopped worrying and ruminating she also stopped being able to do basic things like keep information active in our head
the inner voice is part of your working memory system she lost that ability to organize her thinking to make sense of what was happening in her world and the lesson that she learned from going through this stroke was that the goal for her was no longer to identify ways of silencing her
inner voice of getting rid of it instead the goal became to learn how to manage that inner voice more effectively so I want to take you back to a story that you told me at the start of this episode and I want to have you tell me how you in some ways managed to control the chatter
that was unfolding inside your head this was after you went on TV and you received a threatening letter you were terrified you started pacing about your house at night with a baseball bat patrolling your house at one point in the end you sat down at your computer and began to search for ways
that you could protect yourself what were you hoping to find with your google search and what happened subsequently look anyone who's experienced chatter knows that the rabbit hole when you're really in it can take you down it quite deep and I was very deep down the rabbit hole
and at the very worst of it I sat down at my laptop and I had the thought why don't I search for a bodyguard that specializes in protecting academics and I didn't actually hit enter on the search I did type it but then I thought to myself first well what if someone sees you type this they'll think you've lost it and then I actually said to myself what are you doing?
get your act together and I started talking to myself like I was talking to someone else and it instantly snapped me out of that very narrow view of my situation that was filled with thoughts about threat and oh my god what if this happens and it was more it was a broader view that I adopted
well look I'm not the first person to experience this situation the police told me that other folks get letters on occasion they usually blow over this will too it's not doing any good to not sleep so why don't you go upstairs and stop this stuff and that's exactly what I did
and interestingly enough if you think back to that letter by Fred Rogers that I read before he did something very similar he used his own name it was almost as though in both of our circumstances we were thrust into this other advisory mode it was like we were giving advice to a good friend
and we then went on to do research on this tool we call it distance self talk and what it involves doing is trying to coach yourself through your chatter using your own name or the second person pronoun you and it turns out this is a useful tool for helping people
gain distance from what they're going through in ways that can be quite useful so I want you to talk a little bit about that research because in some ways beyond the fact that talking to yourself as if you were outside yourself helped you
you actually have data to show that in fact this technique is effective you publish a study where you asked volunteers to think about personal events that they were worried about and then ask them to think about those events either in the first person or using a different pronoun
tell me how you ran that study and how it unfolded well what we did in that study is we had people first tell us about experiences from their past that people might ruminate about and another study adult with future worries and concerns
and then during the study we would have people reflect on those experiences we'd have them think about them and then try to really work through their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding those events half of the time we had them try to work through their feelings
as we normally do in the first person so why did I feel this way what was going on in the other half of the time that we'd have them use their own name and the second person pronoun you so Ethan why did you feel this way what was going on and what we found was across both studies
people consistently felt less upset when they use what we call distance self-talk when we when they use their name and the second person pronoun you to try to work through and make sense of what they were going through what this helps us do is it it helps us step back and think about
our circumstances more similar to how we would think about something that's happening to another person and when we do that we have the enhanced ability to be more objective and deliberate when we think about our problems so besides using our names or second person pronouns
when talking to ourselves it turns out there are also other ways of creating psychological distance from our problems and you found many of these techniques to be beneficial one of these techniques involves visualization changing the way we see things in our minds I can you tell me about the work that you and your colleagues have done to test the idea of adopting what's called a fly on the wall perspective on our own problems?
Yeah so when when we think about negative experiences or when we anticipate future ones as well we often have mental imagery surrounding it and research has shown that we can think about different experiences in our lives from different perspectives so you can conjure up a mental snapshot of a past event and actually replay it happening in your own mind from a first person perspective or you can also think about that same experience but from a third person perspective like a fly on the wall
appearing down on the scene research has shown that when people adopt a third person or a fly on the wall perspective that tends to be linked with lower levels of emotionality and that's true for both positive and negative experiences in one set of studies we found that when participants were
provoked when an experimenter in the lab acted in a very rude and insulting way to them if we ask people to reflect on the provocation from a distance they were much less likely to be aggressive towards that experimenter when given the opportunity than people who were directed to just reflect on
the experience as they normally would in the first person and so more broadly what I think this speaks to is the fact that look it's very easy for us to become consumed with negativity and when we're consumed with that negativity we often say things and do things that we would never dream of doing
if the emotional amplitude was just a little bit lower and that's what we see happening with many of these different kinds of distancing techniques it turns down the temperature just a little bit it doesn't I should and I think this is an important point to convey when people
distance in our studies we don't take a negative experience and turn it into a joyfully blissfully positive event when I coached myself you know Ethan what are you doing bodyguards for academics it was still a negative situation I was dealing with but the intensity of it was diminished to a point
where I could think about it more objectively and deliberately and that can be really useful and often the difference between being mired in chatter on the one hand and working through a negative activity and working through a negative experience adaptively on the other
so we've seen how creating a little distance using language can be effective and creating a little distance using you know spatial imagination can be effective it turns out there's a third way we can also achieve some distance from our own problems can you talk about the idea of temporal distance Ethan?
yeah I love this distancing tactic it's one that uh... uslemadik and one of her colleagues discovered a few years ago what it involves doing is remarkably simple and effective so take your latest worry rather than think about how awful the circumstances right now
think about how you're going to feel some time down the road in the future what that does what engaging in that form of what we often call mental time travel does for us is it makes it clear that whatever we're dealing with as awful as it is it will eventually pass
and that gives us hope that can be a very powerful antidote to a negative mind that is overwhelmed with chatter Ethan another researcher has also found it helps to give new labels to our emotions when a negative voice inside you warns of all the bad things that could happen
and you feel yourself getting anxious relabel that anxiety another tool that can help people involves changing the way we interpret what we're going through shifting from thinking about our circumstances as a threat to thinking about it as a challenge and the way this works is as follows
when people are experiencing stress they often ask themselves and this often happens subconsciously two kinds of questions what's required of me in this situation and what resources do I possess to manage it if you answer those questions if if you know
okay there's a lot that's being asked of me and no way I can deal with this that elicits a threat appraisal which predicts all sorts of bad stuff poor performance poor subjective feelings poor health and so that's another switch another lever you can pull
to shift how your function in a particular situation go from threat to challenge we've looked at several techniques that individuals can practice but it's striking of course that you know long before you had psychological signs come up with solutions to the problem of chatter
societies have been grappling with ways to help people deal with stressors and out of control anxiety you cited a remarkable study looking at a technique practiced by Israeli women living in war zones what did the women do to bring their anxieties in that chatter under control
well they activated an ancient chatter fighting tool which was they prayed ritualistically and praying for them was associated with reductions in anxiety you look at cultures around the world think about the death of of a loved one right lots of different religions
prescribed very very different kinds of rituals for engaging with with that kind of chatter provoking event and research shows that engaging in a ritual can actually be helpful for modulating our chatter one thing to to keep in mind is when we're experiencing chatter
we often feel like we don't have control over the thoughts and feelings that are streaming through our head and one of the reasons we think rituals are helpful is because a ritual is under your control it's a rigid sequence of behaviors that you perform the same way every time
that's something that you have agency over and that's a way of compensating for the lack of control we often feel when we're struggling with chatter another way that they can aid us is they're often intentionally demanding which is to say rich people are always in the same position
they're often intentionally demanding which is to say rituals are often complicated and to execute them we have to focus on the individual parts of performing those rituals and that can take our attention away momentarily from the chatter we're experiencing and give us a bit of distraction
and so that's another pathway through which rituals can help and of course we see these rituals not just in the context of religion we see this in sports all the time you tell the story of the australian swimmer Stephanie Rice before every race she swings her arms eight times
presses her goggles four times touches her cap four times it does sound religious but clearly it's just about sports performance yeah so there's research which has shown that you can give people arbitrary rituals to engage in you know clap their hands three times spin around in their seat twice and then tap their head and engaging in those kinds of non-religious rituals can be beneficial as well probably the most famous athlete who's known for doing rituals is Raphael Nadal several years ago
a journalist asked Nadal what's the hardest thing you struggle with on the tennis court and his answer surprised a lot of people because he didn't say the hardest thing I do is you know making sure I keep my serve in check or return my opponents back in and said
he says the hardest thing I struggle with is to battle the voice inside my head the hardest thing he struggles with is his chatter on the court and if you watch Nadal play you will see his solution for managing that chatter he engages in elaborate rituals from the time he enters the court
to before every single serve he has specific rituals that he engages in when he's and when he's been asked why do you do these wacky rituals yeah again Raphael Nadal finds a way he says these rituals are a way of ordering my mind providing the order I seek in a match
I understand that you have some rituals of your own to combat your inner chatter before giving a big speech I do I will pound a fist into my hand two or three times I will give myself a little mini very brief distant self talk pop talk you know come on man you've got this
and if it's a really really high stakes event I've been known to do a few push-ups right before showtime as well we started this conversation by having you tell me about your experience as a young undergrad at Penn um who was dealing with
setbacks when you first got a college one of the people you reached out to for help time was your dad and it turns out that your dad played a really formative role not just in helping you while you were at Penn but in some ways helping you think about the whole idea of introspection more generally
I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your dad and the connection between his insights and the work that you've been doing these last several decades one of the interesting ahas I had was that although I had been searching chatter and how to manage it for about 20 years
I've been thinking about it for close to 40 the reason for that is I had an unconventional dad my dad was someone who on the one hand you know love watching the the New York Yankees and driving aggressively on the streets of Brooklyn and you know chain smoking you know
Brooklyn bushy mustache kind of guy but when he wasn't doing all those things he was he was reading Eastern philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita meditating and when he wasn't doing those things he was talking to me as a three year old about what he was learning about he wasn't a college
grad or you know this wasn't he wasn't a professor by the way it's just a hobby that he had he was fascinated by the mind and our ability to manage it and the message that he conveyed to me from the time I was a little kid was whenever something is going wrong
turn your attention inward and try to work through the situation the way he said that to me was you know he'd give me this corny phrase go inside find the kernel of truth you would say that was a message that he just conveyed to me over and over and the time I was a little kid and it was a tool
that I as a result relied on throughout my childhood and that lesson so I get into an argument or I ask a girl out they'd say no I'd go inside to introspect try to work through figure out why this happened come up with a solution and move on and then I got to pen
I experienced some of my own chatter and then I ended up taking a psychology class and I learned in that class that lots of people do exactly what my dad had told me to do when they struggle with something and they benefit as a result this ability to introspect was a remarkable tool
but in some cases that tool failed lots of people as well and discovering that puzzle why is it that we have this tool sometimes it helps other times it hurts us that became a passion of mine that I've been trying to solve ever since Ethan Cross is a psychologist at the University of Michigan
he's the author of the book Chatter the voice in our head why it matters and how to harness it Ethan thank you for talking to me today on Hidden Brain thanks so much for having me Shankar was a pleasure if you have follow up questions for Ethan Cross that you'd be willing to share with
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