Hello everyone, welcome to The Hacked Gym podcast
I’m your host, Matt. Thank you for joining in for another episode
Today we are going to talk about “Chatter”
What is “chatter”? In this episode we are going to center the discussion around the concepts & teachings found in the book “Chatter” by Ethan Kross from the University of Michigan.
A few quotes I’d like to share to get our thought processes moving here at the start of the episode.
“a destructive thought process exists within all of us, and we are plagued to varying degrees by an internal dialogue that is harmful, restrictive, and at its ultimate extreme, self-destructive” Lisa Firestone
“It’s not hard to feel afraid & insecure. I still fight an inner-critic voice, definitely, I hear it a lot” Alanis Morrissette
"What I battle hardest to do in a tennis match. Is to quiet the voices in my head" Raphael Nadal
We experience Chatter when our inner voice goes rouge. When our internal monologues get stuck in a downward spiral.
Why is chatter a bad thing?
The World health organization tried to put a number on the cost that negative thinking has on our world. Just looking at it from a productivity perspective they put the cost at over a trillion dollars in Lost productivity at work because of the impacts of negative thinking, and the resulting anxiety and depression.
Chatter impacts Us in three key areas one is our employment it does reduce our productivity it does damage our interpersonal relationships at work and our ability to simply function at our highest possible levels. Next it undermines our personal connections outside of work. our friends and family, how we relate to and interact with them can most definitely be harmed through negative chatter. Last chatter hurts our physical health. That negative chatter in our minds prolongs our bodies stress responses. Cortisol levels remain elevated, heart rate remains high, blood flow is restricted it's like a prolonged level fight or flight response. Sustaining that long-term, experiencing that frequently is most assuredly damaging to our health. If you wear a fitness tracker like an Apple watch a Garmin watch something of that nature that has the ability to measure your heart rate at minimum, just try to be mindful of conducting a very simple experiment the next time the circumstances present themselves. At some point in the near future, you will likely catch yourself engaging in negative chatter, you might also at that moment, be in a physical state where you would appear relaxed. You might be seated at your desk at work, you may be lying in bed, you might be on the couch watching tv. you would not have been recently up and running around and therefore it would be expected that your heart rate would be at a typical resting level. But activate your heart rate monitor and you will in all likelihood see that your heart rate is elevated in those moments of chatter. a simple stress response, but that elevated heart rate is likely to remain at that level for as long as you continue to ruminate over those negative thoughts which could be for hours or even days. I have a slightly fancier Fitness watch that measures stress levels by looking at not only heart rate but a few other additional parameters, and I have found that if I open that up during a moment of negative chatter and see a high stress level indicated it also provides me with something new to focus on and I shift my attention to the readout on my fitness tracker and then I mindfully work to reduce that stress level over the next few minutes. My problems don't go away whatever I was thinking negatively about is not suddenly solved but shifting gears just based on what a fitness tracker is telling you, even if you were just simply working on getting your heart rate back down to a standard resting level, can be enough to help us see the bigger picture and recognize that things aren't as bad as we were telling ourselves and we can begin to get a better handle on the chatter.
Stress doesn't kill, chronic stress kills. Stresses here and there are actually positive. We have evolved and adapted to handle those moments that pop up here and there during the course of our week. The physical and chemical responses that occur within the body actually do bring us benefit but it is the sustained exposure to stress that our bodies are not equipped to handle and process and those are the types of stress situations that contribute to heart disease, hypertension, weight gain, weakened immune systems and many other ailments.
So back to those quotes that I started this episode out with that make it sound like our inner voice is a negative thing that these professional athletes, musicians and psychologists are having to constantly fight against and battle and work to silence. Isn’t our inner voice supposed to help us? To guide us? why is it so often that our inner voice is viewed as a enemy or an obstacle to our success? Because of the chatter we so easily fall into. The negative chatter loops & cycles that so easily plague us and hold us back from our full potentials.
-BREAK- Going In Deep Podcast Ollie, Ben, Liam
It's quite interesting when you think about introspection from an evolutionary perspective. Introspection appears to be very unique to human beings. There is some evidence that dogs and primates even dolphins have been shown to experience some levels of introspection but very moderate and only when extreme circumstances are imposed upon them. An example is research done on dogs showing that when they are caged with no possible way of escape and subjected to unavoidable pain they become visibly depressed and that depressive reaction would indicate some level of introspection.
So, if humans really are the only species out there capable of true deep introspection what evolutionary benefit would that have brought to us, when it has the potential and common reaction of making us anxious and depressed therefore limiting our ability to function on a daily basis? Think of the caveman who goes out hunting and day after day for a week and continues to miss all of the saber tooth cats and mammoths he throws his spear at. So, he engages in introspection and becomes depressed and frustrated at his lack of hunting success. He begins to doubt his place in the tribe and question his self-worth and attractiveness to a potential mate. This self-doubt of course leads him to continue to have unsuccessful hunts because of his flawed mental processing. He basically experiences a choking episode the next time he goes out tries to throw the spear because then he's thinking oh no what if I miss is my aim right am I holding my spear properly is my elbow in the proper position all those things that we understand happen in a choking moment due to the introspection, the self-doubt and the improper thinking. How is that an evolutionary advantage? How is introspection and the resulting negative self-talk and doubt a benefit? How does that give us an evolutionary leg up? Why would our advanced brains have developed such a seemingly negative trait? If that caveman continues to be unsuccessful at his hunts he's likely to be kicked out of the tribe if he's kicked out of the tribe his chances of survival solo diminish significantly.
So how do we explain this? Let's start with recognizing the evolution is not a perfect system. Why do we have an appendix? The human spine is truly a disaster from a design perspective makes no sense how that became the way it is through evolution and the human knee, my goodness that really should be a ball and socket joint but evolution just missed that benefit completely. Then there's the animal kingdom. Giraffes give birth while standing up, so every newborn baby drops five feet to the ground for its welcome to the world. How about pandas? Sure they're cute but they're not aggressive enough to defend themselves effectively in the wild. Their mostly bamboo diet is nearly devoid of nutrition and wreaks havoc on their digestive system making them prone to many health problems. And bees, if they sting you they die. what kind of defense mechanism results in suicide when used?
Is our inner voice an evolutionary flaw? Probably not of course. We turn inward to find comfort, resolution, to make sense of a situation, but what ends up happening often is that we dwell on the circumstances, we ruminate, we obsess and it becomes a negative experience instead of a cathartic or positive experience. This is what Ethan cross has termed as chatter. Chatter is the negative cycle of self-talk of self-reflection of introspection. That's what we're working on here today is how to control and eliminate the chatter.
As Ethan cross presents the concept of Chatter, he’s talking about introspection. I think most of us understand what introspection is all about but there are many degrees of introspection that we can engage in and often the most effective levels are avoided because we really just don't want to know the truth. Intense, deep introspection will often reveal that we're to blame, we're at fault, we caused the problem, we are the anomaly in the equation. That could be hard, that could be painful, that could be depressing. But moving past it once we've identified it can also be cathartic, healing and the right thing to do in most cases.
Introspection will often lead to our greatest creative moments, our most effective problem solving sessions, so it is immeasurably valuable.
Again it is true that introspection can yield anxiety, depression and potentially could even push someone to a level of depression so severe that suicide is contemplated. There is a risk with introspection that must be acknowledged. So how do we use introspection to our advantage and benefit and avoid those possible pitfalls of the associated anxiety and depression? What does science have to offer us that will guide us through that process of introspection safely and effectively? We’ll get to all that in a moment. Let’s talk for a few more minutes about our inner voices.
What is our inner voice really? I'm going to give you five numbers and I want you to do your best to remember those five numbers so get ready here they come six eight one nine three. One more time 6 8 1 9 3. All right so you got those numbers in your mind? Excellent, now let's talk about the process you just went through. You most likely repeated those numbers in your mind several times maybe you ran through that number sequence a couple dozen times rapidly trying to get them to lock into your memory. You were speaking those numbers, to yourself, internally, within your mind. That's your inner voice that's what we're talking about. That process of information storage that we engage in utilizing our inner voice is only one small part of what our inner voice is used for however.
We also use that inner voice for planning and carrying out possible scenarios. we run through mock drafts of circumstances that we may find ourselves in. We use it to conduct if then type scenarios. if this happens I could react that way. if that other thing falls through then I could do this in response. we go through that type of thought process utilizing our inner voice.
We also use our inner voice for self-control. When I walk across our family room late at night, in the dark and step on a Lego that my grandson left out, my inner voice, hopefully, kicks in and tells me to remain calm and quiet and not emit a stream of very loud profanities that would wake up the whole house. My inner voice often fails me in those moments.
Probably most importantly our inner voices help us make sense of the world around us. We experience things on a pretty regular basis that challenge us and confuse us and cause us to really question our world. Deaths or other acute moments of loss, health issues, natural disasters, sudden job losses, rejections of all sorts. These difficult, painful moments often cause us to turn inward to try to make sense of the situation. We will often find that we are monologuing with ourselves, asking what just happened? why did this happen? how do I react to this? In those moments our inner voice helps us create stories that explain the reality to us, that help us to cope and adjust to the new circumstances we find ourselves in. Many of us have probably done a lot of this coming through the whole covid situation and dealing with lockdowns and illnesses, job changes and maybe even deaths of friends and family.
At this point in the episode I do want to try to explain a difference here that is important to comprehend, a difference between chatter and negative self-talk. Negative self-talk can be good for us, let me give you some examples. I might say to myself Matt you're an idiot why did you say something so stupid. That's negative self-talk but it can be what I need to hear to prevent me from making the same mistake again in the future. I might introspect when things aren't turning out the way I want and say dude you're just being a lazy SOB right now you need to get your butt in gear and take action. Negative self-talk but it gets me motivated to change my behavior and therefore it is productive it may be negative self-talk but that's the key differentiator is it productive does it yield desirable results. I really like the way cross describes it he calls it a problem that we have in society with this culture of toxic positivity. This idea you see thrown out all over the place that everything should be positive and we should just eliminate all shame and we should eliminate all negative self perception and we should just accept everything as it is as being positive that is utterly ridiculous and insane. We do need negative self-talk sometimes. We need to face reality we need to admit the truth to ourselves we need to acknowledge where we are failing and change. That usually is not going to happen without some negative self-talk. So now with that understanding of negative self-talk chatter is unproductive. Chatter doesn't yield positive results. Chatter is depressing demoralizing and it is a downhill slide that only takes us to darker and darker places. Hopefully that separation gives a little more clarity to everything else we will continue to talk about and when I use the term chatter.
-Break- Support on Bonfire
So, what to do about chatter?
A series of tools are available to help us wrangle that inner voice when it gets out of control when we find ourselves stuck in a negative thought loop that's what we're going to begin discussing here is how do we change that thought direction get things back under control and use our inner voice for those positive mechanisms those coping mechanisms that we need it for.
One tool at our disposal is called distant self talk. We are often pretty good at giving valuable advice to other people but we tend to be terrible at taking our own advice. It is a common tendency of human beings. We don't listen to our inner voice. Our inner voice says don't go there, don't eat that don't say that, but we don't listen. So engaging actively in distant self-talk can really help us out. This is when we use the pronoun you in our thought process we intentionally begin to refer to ourselves using the pronoun you, and also, our own name. This shifts our perspective to feel and sound the way that we speak to a friend. When we give our friends advice we say I think you should do this l, I think you should try this. So if we speak to ourselves the same way and say I think you should try this solution, that perspective shift is beneficial. By incorporating you, we do tend to be more likely to listen and follow that self-advisement. Saying to myself "Matt, don't say those words out loud on this zoom meeting, you'll get yourself in trouble" is going to be more effective than just saying "don't say that" in my mind. That is definitely a lesson I have got to learn, use "you" more often during my introspection. I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Begin to train yourself to incorporate you and your name more often as you are sorting through your problems, as you are going through your inner thoughts, and when you find yourself caught in the chatter and things are going in a negative direction in your brain that is the moment you really need to shift that perspective and start incorporating you and your name and that distance that is created will help you to gain control and to stop the negative cycle that you are trapped in. As you give advice to a friend you are not going to intentionally steer them into a negative thought loop and if they begin to spiral into a negative thought loop you're going to strive to pull them out of it. as you speak to yourself with you or your name that is where your brain shifts gears toward toward that moment of advising a friend and that perspective shift helps you to develop a desire internally to pull out of that negative thought cycle.
Another distancing tool that is useful is viewing from a distance. This is somewhat similar to the project premortems that we talked about in the prior episode. When we get caught in chatter it draws our attention to a very focused, finite point. That ultra myopic view can really lead us into a stressful chatter loop. Consciously stopping for a moment and asking ourselves what is this going to look like in 6 months what is this going to look like in a year. Stepping back and taking that distant view will very often help us to shut down that chatter and we will see a bigger picture it will change our perspective and we will realize this is a temporary issue that we are facing right now when at first we couldn't see an end in sight.
Another tool to help us Break Free of the chatter is to talk with someone else but I don't mean to vent to someone else. Sure venting can be cathartic but venting in and of itself doesn't solve the problem. Venting doesn't usually resolve the stress that caused us to spiral into a negative thought cycle and experience chatter in the first place. It's great if you have a friend or family member who will allow you to vent, that's fantastic, but we're looking for Solutions here, we want genuine problem solving to occur and to eliminate the chatter. So what you need is someone who will listen and allow you to vent to a degree, but who will then, at an appropriate point in the conversation begin to guide you toward a solution. Someone who will be able to help you see the bigger picture, help you to find solutions that you had not thought about yet or help you to reframe the situation from a different perspective. By doing so they can pull you out of the chatter, they can help to quiet your mind and help you eliminate that negative thought process. Hopefully you have someone in your world who can do that for you, who could be that sounding board and guide. Maybe it is the person who usually just listens to you vent but you can begin the conversation by asking them to offer input advice and guidance this time, instead of just listening to you rant.
These people who you turn to, cross calls them chatter advisors. Be careful who you select, because we all know those people who will actually drive us to keep the chatter brewing. They'll feed into our negative thought processes with their own negative views. We may love them dearly but they are not going to be effective chatter advisors. Go for those who have empathy and will listen to you and will validate your feelings on the subject, but who will also be honest and firm enough with you to set you straight and push you in the right direction.
Another highly effective tool for managing chatter is ritual. Rituals are behaviors infused with meaning. We see them manifested as superstitions often. We've talked about this in prior podcast but athletes love to engage in these rituals. Maybe it's the way they walk out onto the field, maybe it's a celebratory dance maybe it's something they do in the locker room before heading out to the court. Rituals can help calm and eliminate the chatter. Cross points to the example of Rafael Nadal. He engages in some of the most intense rituals I have ever seen in the World of sport. He often gets in trouble for his rituals because they take too much time. If you've ever watched a match with Nadal you know what I'm talking about, if you haven't you need to go to YouTube and check this out. He enters the tennis court the same way every single time. The way he walks out, the way he approaches his bench, the way he places his bag and his water bottle, the way he prepares to serve, even the way he wipes sweat off his face, everything is intentional and executed with the highest level of precision. The way he sits on the bench the way he retrieves his water bottle the way he places his water bottle back on the ground, every move is ritualistic. Some of you maybe already thinking it sounds rather autistic for someone to behave that way. You're totally right. Through research and studies we do understand that a high percentage of those on the autism spectrum experience a higher level of chatter than a typical person. Therefore they are more likely to engage in rituals as their preferred coping mechanism. I'm not saying Nadal is on the autism spectrum, I'm just pointing out a similarity in coping mechanisms. I'm not on the autism spectrum either but I certainly use rituals as a coping mechanism under a lot of circumstances and I'm sure many of you do as well. What these rituals really do for us is they give us a sense of control, so even though in our mind the chatter might be intimidating, overwhelming and frightening and negative, by engaging in the ritual we are able to begin to tell ourselves, persuade and convince ourselves that we will be okay, we can take control, we can change the course of events and it helps us to see some hope in the future, even though that chatter might be driving us to see things very negatively at the moment. The ritual can also be proactive where we anticipate that the chatter will become overwhelming because of pressure or fear that we are about to experience, so we engage in the ritual prior to the chatter beginning, to again give us that sense of control and help us to squash that chatter when it begins. Nadal engages in those rituals long before he makes his first serve, before he enters the court, before the cameras are on him and before he is standing in front of the spectators. It would appear to be a proactive maneuver to manage the chatter that he expects to begin when the match starts. Chatter causes us to feel that we are not in control of our thoughts but our thoughts are in control of us, so I do certainly recommend rituals to help you regain control, if you don't engage in them already, it would be advisable that you create some rituals to utilize the next time you head into a stressful situation.
What about totally silencing our inner voice? How do we do that? Surprisingly, not everyone experiences chatter, positive or negative. Some replicated studies show that around 12% of the population actually report that they don't talk to themselves, they don't experience inner monologues and these episodes of introspection and self-reflection. Maybe it's an evolutionary advantage maybe not, but it is not unheard of for a person to be very confused when someone else references "talking to themselves".
Of course, really, we don't want to silence that inner voice. We just employ tools to control the chatter, but our inner voice, we desperately need it. Those who don't experience an inner voice are commonly sociopaths and psychopaths. That doesn't mean they're dangerous people, actually psychopathy and sociopathy can still exist in good people, so don't misunderstand what I'm saying here, but the reality is those who suffer from sociopathy and psychopathy struggle, their lives are not easy, and keeping their behavior in check with societal norms is phenomenally difficult due in large part to the lack of that inner voice. I will point out here there is still some debate as to whether these people who claim not to have an inner voice truly do not or if they're just really skilled at ignoring it, to the point that they think it doesn't exist within them. But regardless they still move through life without using the benefits that introspection can bring, thus the struggles they face.
Has chatter increased in our society as a result of the covid pandemic? Maybe so, it's hard to measure, there certainly have been other serious problems in the past that humans have had to deal with such as the intense economic downturns, international wars, other global plagues, the macarena. But, we did pull through all of those as a species, regardless of the societal levels of chatter. Maybe learning how to deal with chatter is more needed in our world today, maybe not. The reality is that it's never going away, so understanding the tools that are at our disposal to help us individually as well as assist us to guide friends and family through managing their chatter, is the objective of this episode.
So what does this all have to do with our health and fitness? I'm sure you've already thought of a multitude of applications. You've likely experienced chatter when it comes to thinking about your nutrition and diet, your workout plan, your coach, your training partner, your grocery budget, your gym membership, or hundreds of other possible thoughts related to your health and nutrition that could be consumed by chatter. I've personally really been struggling with a lot of chatter connected to my rehab process and my diet and nutrition. I can't work out as intensely as I normally would therefore I've had to modify my diet and nutrition to try to compensate and I haven't been successful in figuring out exactly what I need to do. Historically I've always been really good at modifying my nutrition plan to meet my needs and everything has turned out the way I wanted but the last few weeks post-surgery things just aren't coming together the way I would hope and I have caught myself many times stuck in a negative chatter cycle. To manage it, I’ve turned to the coping mechanisms we have already discussed, and Ethan Kross lays out over 2 dozen more techniques we can employ to manager our chatter in his book. I highly recommend giving the book a read.
Maybe your chatter is about other things, past abuses, failed relationships, hurtful comments, things that continue to create distracting and limiting chatter in your mind that you struggle to move past and let go of, and that chatter is holding you back from accomplishing your health and fitness desires. Sometimes our chatter is so intense and so effective at stopping our progress that we need professional help, you need to go see a trained skilled therapist. Please go get that professional help if you need it. How do you know if you need it? When you genuinely, honestly try other coping mechanisms and they don't work that's your best clue. Exactly how do we apply the management of chatter to achieving our health & fitness objectives? Answering this question this week is rather simple and brief. Chatter can kill our workout quality, prevent us from training at all even. Chatter can keep us out of the gym for days & weeks on end. Chatter can convince us that we are not good enough, that we don’t belong, that we should quit and stop trying. Chatter has gotten the better of us all at some point and driven us to quit when we should not have. So, apply the coping mechanisms we’ve discussed today and shut off the chatter in your mind. Move forward and find success. Smash your fitness goals by managing your inner voice. Practice is required and you will fail now and then, just don’t quit, be consistent and more times than not, you will succeed in calming the chatter and achieving your objectives.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for joining me. I wish you all a productive week, now, go crush your workout
Is chatter a strictly negative thing?
According to the author?
1) Other people:
Nadal quote "what I battle hardest to do in a tennis match...is to quiet the voices in my head"
Take a macro view and see the bigger picture to calm down your mind. COVID example. It's easy as we think about the future and how covid is going to play into that it's very simple to become overwhelmed fearful especially as we look at it on a very small level of personal level just in our own world but if we zoom out and we look at the fact that we've had pandemics before the best example would be the 1918 flu pandemic that swept across the world that came through at a time where we had very little available in medical treatment we did not have vaccines available for that wave of flu we did not have adequate support systems and infrastructure to handle all of the ill. And yet we rebounded as a people across the globe and reach the point that we found ourselves at about a hundred years later in 2019 just before the next pandemic hit. I think if we look back at the world and our own individual lives in 2019, we would say things were pretty good society was pretty stable and we forget the devastating impact that the 1918 flu pandemic had across the globe and the millions upon millions who were killed because of it. So that macro view can help us understand that we will be okay as a society as a world as people we will be okay we will pull through this we will rebound we will adapt we will create better treatments and medications and vaccines and better systems for detection and testing we will continue to improve and that brings a sense of calm that can bring a sense of peace now individually they're still our issues those don't go away but that macro view when we're looking at all sorts of problems and stressors can often yield a more calming perspective a more realistic view of what the future holds.