Q: "How Do I Stop Negative Self-talk?"

a new happiness time worry negative thought pattern's rumination. These are not good, they're not effective strategies, but we are some effective strategies for controlling our thoughts. Are their thought patterns we can use that aren't just neutral but actively help us. My new lecture was all about strategies we can use to change our inner monologue and fight our inner critic. When my students reviewed the class at the end of the semester, they said this new lecture was

the most useful part of the entire class. Pretty Much all of the strategies my students found so helpful came from one particular book, The Fantastic Book by Ethan Cross called Chatter. It's all about useful strategies and ways you can talk to yourself in your head to improve well

being and also improve productivity. So when I invited listeners of this podcast to write in with questions about how to be happier, I wasn't all that surprised when we got a ton of questions on the same theme, how can we shut up that inner voice in our heads so that we can feel happier? And I knew exactly who to call to get some answers. My name's Ethan Cross.

I'm a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan and the author of the book called Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It. Today, we'll be diving into ways we can change the way we talk to ourselves so our

inner critics can become our inner champions. You're listening to the Happiness Lab Listener Questions Special Edition with me Doctor Laurie Santos, So Ethan, the question I wanted to tell you about today was from a listener called Buttery bran Again, who I learned actually isn't a person named Buttery bran Again, but is the Twitter account of a YA author duo Beth Buttery and Patricia Brand again. But we're just going to call them Buttery Brand again for now. Buttery Bran

again asks, Hey, Happiness Lab, help me. I want to stop all this negative self talk and finally learn how to love myself. Please help. The reason I loved this question so much is I think Buttery could mean two kinds of things by how to stop all this negative self talk. Right. One is all the negative self talk in your head, right like rumination and worry and all that stuff. But then a second thing she could mean is the negative self talk, right like the bad things

we say about yourself. And one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is that you're a guy who has studied both of these, so you can help us. Let's start with this idea of the negative parts of our self talk, right like, Buttery is not unique here. A lot of us have stuff going on in our heads that doesn't feel so great, kind of feels pretty sad or fearful or just generally pretty negative. Right, Yeah, absolutely, I mean I hear this question a lot, so Buttery branagan,

am I getting the name right? Brand? Again, you are not alone. Actually, just knowing that, hopefully is a teency bit empowering. I think it's really important for us to normalize the experience of negative emotions in general, and negative self talk as well. One thing that I know you believe in Lori and have talked about before is that negative emotions in and of themselves aren't a bad thing. What we do want to figure out how to do is keep those negative emotions in check, because like buttery

brand again, Buttery Yeah, we'll squalid buttery yeah, butterbrand. I kind of want to master the buttery brand again, Duo, I love it, Like I'm guessing they they have experienced many times which motivated this question, Like those negative emotions can often morph into rumination and worry, and that's when they can get really dysfunctional. I want to talk about why we have such negative chatter, Like a lot of times it's just you know, going over the same problem

again and again and again. I think we have the sense that it works, right if we could just think about it and think about something that's going on in our lives, that we'd feel better. But you and others have found it evidence suggests that that's not the case no. A question I get a lot from people I talk to is how can I just stop talking to myself? I just don't want any more negative self talk. I don't. I just want to be in the moment all the time.

That's it. And I like to remind folks that you know your inner voice, which is the basis of all that we're talking about here, our ability to silently use language to work through problems. This is a fantastic tool. In fact, people who lose the capacity to activate their inner voice through experiences like strokes, they suffer enormously. And so the trick is, how do you figure out how

to wield this tool more effectively. People also found that when we don't wield it effectively, especially when we get stuck in these really awful rumination and worry loops, there can be these really bad consequences to this. So let's talk about some of the bad consequences to the negative chatter. I genuinely think, based on what I know of the science, that chatter is one of the great challenges that we face as a species because of the negative consequences that

it has for us across domains of life. First, it makes it really hard for us to focus. Well, that's going to make it really hard for you to do a range of things. It's going to make it hard for you to read, for fun, to focus on that report, or even to pay attention to that person across the table who is talking to you. I am willing to admit and this is a shameful moment in my life.

But there have been episodes when I'm sitting at the table with my family and I've got young daughter, youngish daughters. They want nothing more than to tell me about their day. I should feel really lucky that they want to talk to me. I'm told that will end at some point

in the near future. And sometimes they tell me stuff and they talk for like two or three minutes, and then when they're done, I asked them a question about what happened, you say, and they just told me and they're like, Dad, we just That's an example of chatter consuming our attention. The other way that chatter can undermine us is by leading us to choke under the spotlight.

There's a great phrase I love that captures this. It's paralysis by analysis, right, and so here the idea is that a lot of the things we do in our lives are these complicated behaviors that we've learned to execute automatically. So take a gymnast like Simone Biles who is on her floor routine doing triple flips and handsprings and smiling and all sorts of other complicate stuff that is hard for me to wrap my head around. Simone, through practice,

has learned to do those behaviors automatically without thinking. If she starts to experience the negative self talk, if she starts to focus on her behavior, him, am I doing a good job? Did I do that? Well? What that does is that zooms her in on the individual pieces of that behavior. So she starts hyper focusing on whether she's running fast enough as she tries to execute the summersault,

or smiling enough. And once you start zooming in really narrowly on the specific parts of something complex, the whole thing unravels. And this actually happened to her last summer in the Olympics. She actually dropped out on the grand estage, which is quite quite remarkable, and it's particularly bad because it really deeply affects our physical health in ways that I think we often don't think right, Like I forget that I'm just worrying about some thing about my job

or what this person thinks about me. But that's something real consequences from my body. So here's what we have learned. First, I'll do a tiny bit of mythbusting here. Lots of us have heard that stress kills. I like to point out that that is not actually correct. Just like other kinds of negative responses or experiences, stress and small doses really really useful. You want to be able to experience

a stress response. It helps us deal with threat. What makes stress toxic, though, is what makes some of the other negative emotions we experienced toxic, which is when it becomes prolonged and extended over time. That's when stress starts to exert a wear and tear on your body that has been linked with physical maladies like cardiovascure disease, problems

of inflammation, and even certain forms of cancer. One of the key culprits in perpetuating those stress responses is our chatter, because what happens is we experience something truly stressful and aversive in our lives. Like let's say you and I get into a heated altercation. That's going to be stressful for both of us. Right, maybe you leave the recording studio and you leave it all behind because you've done this a bunch of times, and you know you've dealt

with the uncomfortable exchange. I'm hopefully not trying to prime us to experience anything here greatly self fulfilling prophecy. Here. You also have no idea about what my rumination cycles are like, because a teeny tiny thing that could possibly go wrong on this podcast. Weeks later, you know, I'll be walking down the street be like, remember I said that dumb thing to Ethan like, aren't. Well, we'll make sure we get to what I call the two am

chatter and my two am chatter strategy. Yeah. The problem wasn't what happened to my cardiovascular system while we were chatting. It was. The problem is you keep thinking about it. And what we've learned is the act of thinking about that stressful experience that keeps our physiological stress response activated. That is not a good formula for health and launchevity. And so all these negative consequences make me at first think that Buttery's right, we should find a way to

stop these things. But you choose to say that we shouldn't stop the negative chatter we should in fact harness it, which I think is interesting for two reasons. One is that we want some negative chatter, which is important, but the second is that like we can control it. And I feel like this for me was one of the deepest insights about the human mind that has really changed my life, which is that we are not our thoughts

as they are right now. We can move them around, which is in some ways kind of incredible and an insight that not all people ultimately get to. I think it's really useful to distinguish between what we have control over and what we don't. So if you ask me, do we have control over the thoughts that pop into our heads at different moments in our life, I would say I know of no evidence that suggests that we

can precisely control that experience. The flip side to that is, once the thought is activated, then we have enormous control. We can open up our toolbox at that point in time, and we can push that thought around in all sorts of ways to amplify it, as we sometimes do when we go down the rabbit hole of chatter, to minimize it, to transform it, to replace it with other thoughts. We'll find out just how to climb out of the rabbit hole of negative thoughts when the happiness lab returns in

a moment. You know, it's particularly frustrating about negative self talk when we're like beating ourselves up. Is that even people that you would think have absolutely no reason to beat themselves up wind up beating themselves up. I just had this amazing conversation with Malala, you know, Nobel Peace Prize winning global women's race activist, who I thought should be brushing her shoulders off of feeling like she's done amazing work and could kind of chill out with the

negative self talk. But what's amazing is she talks to herself in a guilty way too. She thinks, oh, I'm not doing enough, or I should be doing more, I'm not doing the right stuff. And that was humbling for me because it made me realize even people who have absolutely no reason to be beating themselves up are kind of beating themselves up with their chatter. Yeah. I love that example. I think number one, it speaks to this

idea of normalizing this experience. When people tell me they experienced chatter, one of the first things I tell them is, welcome to the human condition. Congratulations. Malala is a great example to bring up, though, because although she may experienced a lot of negative self talking and I didn't know that about her, she also appears to be pready adept at using psychological tools to manage it. Maybe she's reading

some of our research. I don't know, but but actually, one of my favorite examples that I'll often present to audiences comes from Alala. What I'm talking about here as a tool called distanced self talk, and it's really simple. It involves trying to coach yourself through a problem, think it through using your own name and or the second

person pronoun you. So. Right around the time that she won the Nobel Peace Prize, she went on The Daily Show with John Stewart to do an interview, and during that interview, John Stewart asked her about what she had went through. When did you realize the Taliban had made you a target? In twenty twelve, I was with my father and someone came in And she went on to narrate her internal monologue when she discovered that the Taliban

were plotting to kill her. And if you listen to the word she uses to describe her experience, she starts off in the first person, and I used to think that the tale would come and he would kill me. She is contemplating the most stressful, frightening experience any human being could possibly imagine. She's all first person, filled with emotion, and then when she gets to the potential climax if

he comes, what would you do, Malala? She automatically switches to using her name to coach herself through that situation, like she would give advice to someone else, Malana, just take a shoe and hit him. One of the things we've learned through lots of research is that we're much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving ourselves advice, and so we've evolved the ability to do that for ourselves through these different distancing tools, and

language is one way of helping us switch perspectives. It's just putting us into that mindset of now I'm an advisory mode, and that often makes it much easier for people to work through their problems. You've also found that this tool doesn't just help us hear the advice, but we actually follow it right. There's lots of evidence of it. When you use this sort of linguistic distancing, you do better, you eat healthier, and so as tell me some of

the benefits that we get out of using this tool. Well, so what the tool does is in stressful situations, it transforms the way people think about a stressful experience. You can appraise the situation as as something that you can't handle, like oh my god, I'm never going to be able to do this, or you can appraise it as something that you can manage, like, yeah, I can do this.

I've done this before. I mean, Laurie, when people have come to you and they are facing objectively stressful circumstances, how many times have you told them I don't think you can do it? Like, can you just top of mind think about a lot of those situations? Is that what you tend to tell people. I would have been kicked out from my residential college had rule a long

time ago. I like, oh, I guess this is impossible. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, you're actually the perfect person to ask this question, because you're getting ping quite a bit with questions like this. Am I making a leap to say that you are often trying to frame what students are facing as a challenge and then realistically marshaling evidence that supports the idea that they can manage it is at a fair appraisal totally.

But what's amazing is when I do it in my own head to myself, that is rarely the direction I go. It's really like, Oh, what an opportunity that I'm facing. Yeah, Instead it's like, oh my god, how am I going to deal with this? That's because we get zoomed in. So when we experience trust, we zoom in so narrowly on the emotional elements of the experience that often drive

our insecurities and fears and worries. But when we zoom out and we think about ourselves from that more objective standpoint, like we were thinking about someone else, we can often find solutions to our problems and ways of making sense of them that are often much better than the alternative, which is, you know, I'm going to give the talk, it's going to go terrible, I'm going to lose my job,

followed by prison and soon after death. Like that's the that's the chain, right, and it's not hard to dispute that illogical, irrational chain of events when you're looking at that big picture from a more objective standpoint. That is what distancing helps people do and the linguistic shifts I describe before. That's one way of doing it. Another easy tool is something that goes by a few different names mental time travel, temporal distancing, or in my mind, Ethan's

two am chatter strategy. I told you I would refer to that for me every four to six weeks. It has that regularity. I will wake up at two am, eyes wide open. I don't know why it happens, but there's chatter, there's a thought that, oh my god, what am I going to do? And prior to knowing about the research that I'm going to tell you about in a second. This actually was quite disruptive because it kept

me up. It didn't feel good. It created to personal problems because I'd start, you know, moving around in the bed, jostling with my iPad. My wife would elbow me, why are you moving now? I'm awake, like, you know, all very reasonable. The next day would be terrible. I'm guessing you've experienced this before. Yes, yes, this is like you're in my bedroom, which is a little creepy, but you know, okay, well,

all right, we will go that. But also, like the interpersonal stuff, it's a trivial people like their sleep, and so I don't fault my wife. So when that happens now, I instantly have a go to response that I implement without thinking, because I've created a plan. I ask myself, use my own name, Ethan, how are you going to

feel about this tomorrow morning? No matter what the chatter is at two am, and sometimes it can feel absolutely suffocating, I always feel better about that experience the next morning, when I'm fully awake, have access to all my cognitive resources. If that doesn't take the edge off sufficiently, I'll go further out in time. How are you going to feel about this next week or next month or when you're retired. I'm doing is I'm traveling in time in my mind.

I'm zooming out. I'm broadening my perspective through mental time travel. And what that does is it makes clear for me that, however awful what I'm experiencing in that moment, is it will eventually get better. Because most emotional experiences that we've had in our lives, they come, sometimes they stick around for a while, but they eventually do subside. Like the stuff that I really ruminated about when I had like you pimples and I was getting rejected in high school

and all that good stuff. It faded eventually, right as of other things coming God. And so by traveling in time in your mind, you remind yourself that our chatter experiences, as awful as they are, they are unstable, they will eventually fade. They're impermanent. And that does something really powerful for someone mire to chatter. That gives us hope, and that hope is a powerful antidote. So far, Ethan has shared his top techniques creating distance between ourselves and our

negative thoughts. But what about the second part of Buttery Brannigan's question, how do I learn to love myself again? We'll be back with answers to that. When the Happiness Lab returns in a moment, you say that it's so soothing. It's like I'm listening to you on the radio. I wanted to get to the second half of Buttery's question,

how do I finally love myself? And it feels like if I introspect on my own self talk sometimes it's ruminating about some problem, but there's often some like blame when I'm thinking about that problem, like I screwed up, I suck, I'm really bad at this, Like there's this negative self focus to a lot of the chatter too,

and this probably isn't unique to me and Buttery. I feel like there's lots of evidence that we can be kind of downright mean to ourselves in our chatter, right absolutely, you know, I would say the meanest in very very small doses can probably be instructive in the sense that it is okay to be a little bit critical of ourselves. It is okay to experience a little bit of shame

or embarrassment or regret. Now, I don't think that's what we're talking about with Buttery's example, of course, she's talking about the more chronic, negative internal monologue that can be a real downer. And so when it comes to how do you change the tone of your inner monologue, some of the same tools that we talked about as being useful for zipping us out of rumination are also helpful there.

For example, to give ourselves advice like we would give advice to your friends and use your name to do it, that can be really helpful. Turns out, when you transfer from thinking about experience as a threat, oh my god, I can't manage just to yeah, this is something that you can deal with that's changing the nature of our

internal conversations that we have with ourselves. Another strategy you've talked about in regards to that is not just coaching yourself through linguistic use, as though you were a kind coach another wise person out there, but literally taking the perspective of a different wise person. And this tends to be my go to strategy when I'm beating myself up like a drill sergeant inside my brain, it's to say, what would a kind friend say to me? Or you know,

what would Beyonce do? Beyonce wouldn't beating herself up. And so talk a little bit about this strategy of literally simulating a wise other person and why it's so powerful. So this this deals with activating like an alter ego of sorts, and it's another way of switching perspectives, getting some space. And the trick with this strategy is you want to activate the right alter ego. So if I'm really struggling with a problem, I don't want to who would be a really bad person to activate? I got

to be careful here, many people might be listening. No, it's true, really, you know, because because the person we sometimes activate is some like horrible drill sergeant. Or the canonical example is a parent. It's apparent that is overly credit goal and hostile and disparaging, and you're hearing their voice in your head, which is bringing you further down when the goal is to lift us up and boost the esteem. That's not who That's not the voice you want to hear in your head. The voice you want

to hear is that supportive coach. And I remind people that when you say supportive coach, it like, my most memorable coaches and advisors were not people who only patted my back and told me that it would be okay. They did do that, but they also gave me really good feedback at times and said no, yeah, you can do this better and here's how so. So they were being in touch with reality, but in a very supportive way. Another thing that we find is very effective is normalizing

our experience, right. I think it is often when we're experiencing chatter and we're stuck. Also in those just really negative dialogues with ourselves, it's very easy for us to feel like we're all alone and no one else is experiencing this kind of negative vity, and is this hard on themselves. What we find is when you get a person to recognize that what they're experiencing is common to

many many others, that can have really useful properties. I think a beautiful thing about this show and the work you do, Laurie. And this is not because you're in front of me, but I've said this to others, is what the Happiness Lab helps do. I think for many people's it normalizes at some points dark side of our emotional lives and tells us how we can manage that a little bit better. But in having that discussion, it makes it clear that we all suffer from this muck

at times. It's a part of the human condition, and reminding ourselves of that alone can be really powerful, especially when you do it in really specific situations. You and I are having my first ever podcast conversation in my new podcast studio. I'm actually in a closet that I've just designed, but that means I've just spent the last two weeks moving and it's been filled with a host

of negative emotions. I've been grouchy, I've been feeling like nostalgic and weep, and I keep in my head reminding myself that moving is the third biggest life stressor after death of a family member, divorce. Everyone feels this way when they move. There is not something particularly wrong with you, Laurie, this is just what happens when you move, and that's been so essential for me, not you know, breaking down with you in the middle of podcast, I'll share another

experience like that. When I was writing my book. No one told me this, but writing a book is a potentially chatter vulnerable experience. I mean, you're you're doing a lot of original work and putting it out there for many, many people to consume and evaluate, and there was all sorts of chatter that I did not expect and actually, just reminding myself that many first time authors go through this was tremendously alleviating. And so I shared that experience.

So that brings us back to this idea that normalizing our experiences can be really powerful, which actually, and this wasn't planned, but it is a great segue to another category of tools. And the category that I'm talking about is other people. So other people can be a remarkable tool for us when it comes to our chatter, but they can also be a tremendous, tremendous tremendous vulnerability. And what's really tragic here is the way that many of us try to activate the tool of other people isn't

always optimal. So there is this strong belief in our culture that when you're experiencing chatter, what you want to do is share your emotions with others, express vent. I don't keep it bottled up inside. This notion of venting as a tool. It goes way back, Like Aristotle talked about it. What we have learned about venting is that venting your chatter can be really good for strengthening the

friendship and relational bonds between two people. The fact that you can call me up and complain to me about something that happen which is on your mind, and I'm there, I'm willing to listen and empathically connect and hear you out. That's very good for our relationship. You will be more likely to call me again knowing that I'm there for you. But if all I do on the phone call is oh, Laurie, that sounds terrible. Really, they said that I can't believe

what did you do? How do you feel? I'm so sorry? That's really bad. If that's all we do, you leave that conversation, feeling really good about our relationship, but we haven't talked about anything that's actually helping you deal with the chatter. The key to getting good chatter support is to find people to talk to who do two things. They do take the time to listen and hear you out.

Establishing those friendship relational bonds really helpful. But at a certain point in the conversation, they help broaden your perspective, they help normalize your experience. That's the formula for what I call a good chatter advisor. And I think we'd all be a lot better off if we thought really carefully about who those people are in our lives. Who are the three or four people that you can call when you're experiencing chatter who do both of those things

for you? And so this relates to a final question I wanted to get in from a different listener, Olga Habri, who wanted to talk a little bit about toxic positivity, but not in the way I expected. She wanted to talk about toxic positivity in the context of giving chatter advice, and she notes when someone else is feeling bad, the automatic response is usually something to the effect of it'll

be fine or look on the bright side. It feels terrible when someone doesn't want to acknowledge how you feel and just wants to paint over your sadness with fake happiness. And then she goes on to note that I read somewhere that toxic positivity can actually be selfish, that it's your discomfort with someone else's discomfort and you kind of want to say things to get them to stop being so uncomfortable. And I feel like this is another spot

where we can go wrong. Where somebody comes to us with like, please help me with my chatter, we say like, oh, no, no, no, it's fine, just get over it, you know, look on the bright side kind of thing, and then that doesn't help either. We need more parts to it than that, right, we want to be positive and supportive. That is important, but we don't want that to gloss over the need to actually provide important feedback and support. Sometimes people don't

want to hear just the positive stuff. I think it's really important in these interpersonal contexts to recognize that this is a dance between two people. Right. What I mean by that is you want to feel out the person in the situation, depending on who the person is and what the problem is. Sometimes it can be obvious, like when I'm talking with someone I know really well. Sometimes I can just read the situation. I see my opening and I know when to go. Well, I have an idea,

let me share it with you. But if I'm not sure, I will often explicitly ask. So sometimes I will ask my wife when she comes to me, Hey, I have a thought. Can I can I share with you what I'm thinking? And sometimes you'd be like, no, just listening, I'm not ready. I need to keep going. At other points in time, she's like, yeah, please tell me what you think. So you want to feel that out and recognize that there is an art to doing this well.

One of the things I love in chatting with you about chatter, Ethan, is that you're not just an expert on this stuff. You use it in the trenches all the time. Absolutely makes me honestly believe that it works so well. You know, I really genuinely believe in this stuff because I benefit from it. I hope you're able to try out some of the tools that Ethan shared in this episode. I've heard some of these strategies before, but I know I'm still finding new ways to blend

them together. The next time I get caught in a negative thought spiral at two am fretting over some problem, I'm going to use the time travel tool to put things in perspective. But this time I think I'll pair it up with some distancing, coaching and socializing. I'll tell myself, Laurie, how big a deal do you think this problem will be by next week or next year? Probably not that big, right, Let's think about which friend you can call tomorrow to

talk things through. I hope that'll be what I need to quiet down the chatter enough to get some sleep and dream up the topic for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. Big thanks to writer Patricia Brannagan for sending in this week's listener question, and special thanks to my expert guest Ethan Cross. If you like the suggestions he gave us today, be sure to check out his amazing book Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.

I'll be back next week with the final episode in this Listener Questions mini season, we'll be exploring challenges we all face to life after lockdown. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,

with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Starr, Carlie Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts,