July 19, 2021 • 52 mins
Dr. Ethan Kross joins LeAnn to discuss the healing potential of harnessing those voices inside your head.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Holy Human with Leanne Rhymes is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, beautiful people, Welcome, Welcome to today's Holy
Human Podcast. I am so excited for you to meet
today's guest. Dr Ethan Cross is an award winning psychologist
(00:23):
and one of the world's leading experts on controlling the
conscious mind. He's also the author of a book that
I have found both fascinating, truly truly fascinating and very useful,
Chatter The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and
How to harness it. Today. Dr Cross is here to
explain the incredible hidden power of our inner voice and
(00:44):
show us how we can harness it to live healthier,
more satisfying, and more productive lives, all on this episode
of Holy Human. Yeah yeah, all right, Dr Ethan Cross,
(01:16):
thank you so much for joining us here on the
Holy Human Podcast. So it's a delight to be here
chatting with you about this. So yeah chatting. I love that.
I'm no fun intended. I have literally recommended your book
and I'm yet to finish it because it is a
thick book, but I'm I'm so obsessed. I read like
a hundred pages this morning because I I find that
(01:37):
this is a topic that is very close to my heart.
I feel like it's something that I have. I'm very
aware of chatter in my mind and how it can
take on different forms and and control all of our lives.
And so that's what we're diving into today with you,
is everything chatter and inner voice. And I would love
(01:59):
to just start at what when you talk about inner voice,
what is that? Exactly? What do you mean by that?
So I think of the inner voice um as this
amazing tool that we all have. It's our ability to
silently use language to do lots of different things. So
it's like a Swiss army knife of the mind. So
if I asked you to repeat a phone number in
(02:21):
your head, you use the language to do that, right,
So it helps us remember things. But we can also
use our inner voice to to plan and or simulate things.
So I do it when when I'm when i have
to give a big presentation, I'll often rehearse what I'm
going to say in my head, and then I'll hear
what people in the audience are going to say, and
(02:41):
I'll often think of what the nasty audience member is
going to say, and then I'll say something back. And
usually I'll say something back in my head that I
wouldn't say in daily life, but right, so, so that's
like a powerful tool. We also use our inner voice
to make sense of our experiences. Like things happen all
the time to us, and we're trying to weave those
(03:02):
experiences together to give us a sense of who we are,
and our inner voice helps us do that too. I
would imagine that in your line of work, you're you're
also constantly engaging this inner voice when you're hearing sounds
and a lot of progressions. I mean, maybe I'm wrong,
but does it does it factor into your everyday experience
(03:22):
as well? Oh? Yeah, absolutely, Well gosh, I could go
so many ways with this. I feel like my under
voice turns on like the moment I get up, and
it can it can go kind of down one way
or the other, whether it be a negative path or
somewhat of a positive path. It just depends on on
the day. And when I'm performing, I definitely engage it,
(03:44):
you know. I feel like sometimes that's what the performance
piece for me is actually the one place where I
can lose it, where I can go beyond it, which
is to me what feels so for someone who has
constant chatter in their mind. It's actually really blissful to perform.
I mean, obviously I'm still using it because there's I mean,
(04:06):
I'm engaging when I'm singing words and in that way,
but when I get lost in my art, there is
a there's a place beyond the chatter for me. That is,
like I said, blissful. And at the same time, I
can actually have full on conversations in my head on
stage about like what I'm gonna eat for breakfast tomorrow
(04:26):
and who I'm piste off at. And so it's it's
interesting how that I can have I can be doing
something and still have this whole other experience and internal
dialogue going on. Yeah, I mean that reminds you of
like when when I'm at the dinner table and like
my daughters are telling me about their day, and if
my mind somewhere else, they finished talking and I don't
(04:50):
necessarily hear what they've said, you know that it has
happened where they like telling me about a whole experience.
And then when they're done, I'm like, oh, so what
happened today? And I just told you that that And
so that's an example of how you know, really are
thoughts and which are often verbal in nature. Um, you know,
they they determine where we are, like what we're feeling,
(05:12):
what we're attending to even and so they can like
cloud out our experiences. But but you know, back to
the inner voice. So so it can do a lot
of things for us that I think are really really useful,
but it can also get us into trouble. And and
chatter is what I the term I used to describe
what happens when our inner voice gets us into trouble.
(05:32):
So so we've got this amazing ability, uniquely human our
ability to use words to silently talk to ourselves, solve problems, create, innovate.
But then when we experience problems in our life, we
we we we we go inside, we try to figure
out why we're feeling this way we are, and then
we get stuck. We start spinning, we get worried, anxiety, rumination,
(05:58):
we catastrophize, think of the worst scenarios, and we get
stuck in those negative thought loops that I think many
of us have probably experience from time to time that
may make life not so much fun. You know that
that make it difficult to be in that blissful state
you were describing earlier that can interfere with our health
and our relationships and so so chatter is is what
(06:20):
captures those the negative side of the inner voice. And
and you know, my my approach to this is if
the inner voice is really helpful in some cases, which
I think it is. I don't think we want to
stop talking to ourselves. I don't think we want to
silence our inner voice. We want to figure out how
to use it more effectively. And so I spent a
(06:40):
lot of time in my lab trying to figure out
how to do that, and I talk about that in
the book. Yeah, so does everyone have an inner voice?
I've actually read that people some people don't experience an
inner dialogue? And how does one develop that inner voice?
And do people that don't have an inner voice actually
have a call more world? Wow, they're okay, lot lots
(07:02):
of good questions here, So let me check how much
time do you? Yes? I know I can talk to
you about this all day long. No, I'm game. This
is this is what I live and breathe, So it's
all good. So do some people not have an inner voice?
So I think about the inner voice as like the
Swiss army knife, of the mind. It does lots of
different things. And I think if you have the ability
(07:23):
to speak out loud, then you've got the capacity for
an inner voice. So most people can use land with
properly functioning brains can use language to rehearse information. So
if I give you like like that the challenge I
gave you before, just here's here are four numbers, repeat
them in your head. That is a basic feature of
(07:44):
the human mind that we can use language to do that,
and I think everyone has that. Now, when you go
to other other functions that the inner voice provides, like
having an ongoing conversation with ourselves, there, I think there's
a lot more variability. Some people report never doing that,
and you know, there may be a minority of people
(08:04):
like that who don't have that inner running commentary. Other
people do it a fair amount, others a lot more.
In my experiences, the majority of people that I've spoken
to have certainly had experiences with with chatter, and so
I think it is a pretty common common experience that
that people have. Do you find that certain types of
(08:25):
people are more prone to negative or and or positive
self talk, Well, so there there are differences. Um, we
do know that women are more likely to get stuck
in chatter than men, but the tools that exist for
managing chatter work equally well for men and women. Now
(08:45):
this is not to say, by the way, that women
just have it worse than men. Across the word. Men
do plenty of things in psychological terms worse than women,
engage in certain kinds of other harmful behaviors, so so
it all balances out. But we do know that there
is that gender difference in terms of the experience of chatter,
but the tools work equally well, and I think that's
(09:07):
really good news. Yeah, absolutely this you say that. One
of my favorite things that you say is the inner
conversation is is the most important conversation we have all day.
Can you dive into a little bit of why that is. Yeah,
we're spending a lot of time I think most of
us lost in thought. You know. We we often hear
about the importance of living in the moment and being
(09:27):
in the moment. And I am all for being in
the moment at the appropriate time, but our brains evolved
to not be in the moment. We spend between a
half and a third of our waking hours flowing into
the past and transporting ourselves into the future, and we
spend a lot of that time talking to ourselves about
(09:48):
past experience. Is trying to figure out, well, why did
I screw this up? Or or savoring like a past
event my daughter, my younger starter, had a birthday, you know,
two weeks ago. I'm thinking about that experience, replaying conversations
we had, or I'm imagining what I'm going to say,
you know, during this podcast or something else. So we're
spending a whole lot of time in our heads and
(10:11):
a lot of that time talking to ourselves. And so
I think what we say is really quite important. Um.
We know those conversations can impact like how we feel,
our relationships, our ability to focus and perform at work.
So I think they really are truly important set of
conversations we have. Yeah, when we get stuck in that
(10:31):
rumination or that that negative place, what effects does it
have on our bodies? Like physically do you do? You
really want to know? Yeah? I would I say this
because you know, this is disconcerting stuff. And um, and
so let me preface it by saying, I'll talk a
(10:51):
little bit about the negatives. But there's a there's a
light at the end of the tunnel. So you know,
we often hear that stress kills, stress is bad for you.
In fact, that's not correct. Stress, like the ability to
experience stress is really adaptive. When there's something threatening in
front of us, having this system to react super fast
(11:13):
is useful when stress gets harmful in a in a
physical sense, is when we have a stress response, it
goes up, it's activated, and then it remains chronically elevated
over time. That's when the stress begins to eat away
at our body in ways that predict things like cardiovascular disease,
in certain forms of cancer and information. Now, this inner
(11:35):
voice that we have is really really good at maintaining
our stress responses because what happens is something happens in
the world. Someone tells me I'm a bad professor, or
they don't like an experiment, whatever, and it happens. But
then what do we do. We replay it again and
again and again and again in our heads. And when
(11:57):
we do, we're essentially conjuring up and reactivating that threat response,
that that stress response, and we're keeping it active over time.
So that's one of the ways that stress can get
under the skin to really impact our health in in
really powerful ways that, um I think we want to
try to avoid. Yeah. Absolutely, Um. Well, and you know,
(12:19):
you talk about something we hear a lot about is
going inward and turning inward. And I found it so
interesting how you talk about how introspection can actually backfire
on some people. Yeah, well, you know, and I found
this interesting too because it was actually the way I
got interested in this whole line of work. Wasn't wasn't
really I think the typical path that most people get
(12:40):
into psychology and neuroscience. Um so if I inter started
with my dad when I was a little kid, and
every time something bad would happen to me, not that
I got into huge amounts of trouble, but you know
I didn't get a cookie extra cookie for dessert, or
I got into find my mom. You know, he'd tell
me to like go inside, to introspect and try to
figure out a solution to move on with my life.
(13:02):
And that advice really served me well throughout my childhood
an adolescence. And then I got to college and I
took a psychology class, and I realized that a lot
of people do exactly what my dad told me to
do when they get upset, but it doesn't make them
feel better, they end up feeling worse. Instead, they get
stuck ruminating over and over and over about things are
(13:23):
worrying excessively. And so for me, the big question became, Okay, well,
why does that happen? Why is this really useful ability
to tap inside ourselves and try to use our mind
to come up with a solution. Why does it often
fail us? And we've learned a little bit about about
the answer to that question over the years. Um. We
(13:44):
we've learned that when when people are really upset and
they introspect, they tend to over focus on the problem.
They zoom in so narrowly that the only thing they
can think about is what happened to them and how
they felt, and that makes it really challenging for them
to think about the bigger picture, other ways of maybe
making sense of the experience that might lead them to
(14:05):
feel better. And so one of the piece of advice
we give people is to try to zoom out when
you're feeling chat when you're experiencing chatter. And there are
lots of ways you can do that. Yeah, you know,
you talk a lot about our environment and how it
affects this chatter in our mind, and I feel like,
you know, something I've been experiencing. I think a lot
of people are experiencing as we sit at home, as
(14:27):
our lives have changed. You know, I've been I've been
on the road my whole life, basically since I was thirteen,
and all of a sudden, now being at home in
one place, which is something that's never happened to me.
I've found that, you know this, the chatter can get
really loud, and I think a lot of people probably
are experiencing that in this moment. And can you talk
(14:49):
about how that those shifts in our environment can can
affect the way that we we talk to ourselves, because
I know that that shift in my environment has definitely
been challenging. Yeah, well, you know you're not alone. Um,
We've seen a threefold increase in clinical levels of anxiety
and depression in the population over the past year, which
(15:10):
is quite significant. We have a lot of time that
we're now spending alone with ourselves and our thoughts, and
we're living through a really stressful time. Like arguably, I mean,
I think this is like the chatter event of the
century if you think about it, Like, but once in
a century pandemic really scary, economic instability, politics were a
(15:31):
mess up until recently. People are fighting with each other,
Like there's a lot of uncertainty in the world and
a lack of control, and we know that those are
two ingredients that fuel chatter when we don't have control
over things. And so the first thing I would say is,
if you're feeling chatter, you're not alone. I think a
(15:52):
lot of people are are feeling chatter, and that makes
total sense. And so then the question as well, well,
what can you do about it to manage it effect like,
and you know, there are lots of different kinds of
tools that people can use. It look like you wanted
to give an no first. I think it's interesting. I
feel like I've had to really become aware of the
fact that it's even happening sometimes, Like I feel like
(16:14):
we can get so you talk about you know, with
listening are thinking about something and not hearing your daughters.
I almost feel like that can happen in my own head,
Like it just continues to have this conversation. I have
a friend of mine and I were talking about our
inner voice, and she's like, if it's not if it's
not talking, and it finds song lyrics and it just
keeps going on that and all of this that happens
to me a lot. All of a sudden, I'm like, wait,
(16:35):
I've been ruminating on song lyrics now, the same song forever,
and it's it's almost like the awareness of it has
to to occur because sometimes we totally just completely unaware
of that it just continues to talk. Well, I think
you just described like that's like part one of the
battle against it is simply like being aware of what
(16:58):
chatter is and how works. Because I think if you're
not even aware of it happening, and you're not going
to do anything to try to fix it. So I
study self control and I break it down for people's
self control's got two pieces motivation and ability. So you've
got to want to do something, and then you've got
to have the tools to actually do it. So if
(17:21):
you're if you don't know, if you don't realize your
experience and chatter, you're not gonna be motivated to reduce it.
You're just going to get lost in it. Hopefully, listeners
right now and people who read the book, like step
one is they just recognize that, Yeah, when I'm getting
stuck in the thought loop and it's coloring everything I do.
That's chatter, and that's a cue to maybe try to
(17:42):
minimize it so I can live a happier and healthier,
healthier life. And up next we're going to learn exactly
how to do that. But first we are going to
take a super quick break. Welcome back everyone. We are
(18:05):
here with Dr Cross talking about how to minimize negative
mental chatter. And it's not something we teach, you know.
This is the amazing thing we're doing research now where
we've developed curricula on the mind and emotions and have
a manage it that we're teaching to high school kids.
It's shocking to me, Like, you know, I spent so
much time in high school learning about the digestive system. Man,
(18:27):
I never have the need for knowledge about the digestive
Like I've used it once in recent history, like to
explain to my daughters how it's possible to be upside
down and swallow food, like that is it. But like
the mind, this thing that that we cared between our ears,
like we use this all the time. People who understand
our works are in a good position. Yeah, and it
(18:47):
can have effect on the digestive system. But it absolutely
has an effect on the digestives and that's right, so
very good. Yeah, we really need to start up here
the to understand anything. And the fact that kids are
even learning this in high school now, I think it
is incredible because you know, it really can change the
course of of their life. Yeah. Well, you know when
(19:08):
my oldest daughter, when you know, she's eleven, which I'm
learning is an interesting age. I have an only only child,
so I didn't know about daughters, and eleven is an interesting,
interesting time to be one. I'll just say that. And
when she gets upset about something, like when I tell her, actually,
you don't have to feel that way. You can you
can actually choose to feel differently. And and here's here's
(19:31):
like a way of thinking differently that might make you
feel better. Like that's eye opening for I think kids, right,
because if you don't, if no one teaches you that,
then you don't know any better. And so you're then
just victim to how you automatically respond. And we know that,
like our thoughts aren't our destiny, we have the ability
to control them in ways that can be really useful.
(19:53):
So that's part of the reason why we're trying to
work with kids and and why I wrote that book. Yeah, absolutely, Well,
I mean, you know, I've struggled with anxiety and depression,
and depression for me has has really kind of hit
hard um the beginning of this year. And you know,
when you get caught and that you say you can
choose your thoughts, But when you get caught in that rumination,
(20:13):
and it can be when I get depressed, it's like
the lens in which I view the world changes and
that therefore the thoughts change, and I can literally make
up a completely different story about the exact same life
that I that I have, that I love, and all
of a sudden, like that whole story changes. So when
you're caught in that rumination, what's the when you, like
(20:36):
you said, you say you can choose your thoughts. But
to someone in that rumination space, choosing your thoughts seems
like the last thing that you're able to do. What
where's the first place to go when you're in that space?
So first all I want to point out I love
the way you just describe that experience because it invoked
the voice, right you're the stories that you're telling yourself
(20:59):
when you're when you're depressed or sad, are are shaping
how you feel right and and so that goes back
to like these how important these conversations that we have
with ourselves are because they can really influence how we
view the world. So what can people do? First of all,
I break it down into there being like three categories
(21:20):
of tools that science has revealed that people can use
for managing their InterVoice. Things that people can do on
their own to change the way where they're thinking about
the situation, small ships that can have benefits, ways of
interacting with other people that can be really useful, and
then ways of interacting with our environments. And so there
are like twenty something tools that fit into those different buckets.
(21:43):
Let me tell you what I do when I find
myself slipping into chatter, because if I go through all
twenty tools, probably you might fall asleep and so listeners. Um,
so take COVID as an example. Not a fun not
a fun time to be in. So one thing I'll
do is is we know that when people are experiencing chatter,
(22:04):
they zoom in really now in the problem, that's all
there is. And so what we try to do is
get people to zoom out to broaden their perspective. One
way you could do it is by doing something called
temporal distancing or mental time travel. So I'll think about, all, right,
how am I going to feel nine months from now
(22:25):
when everyone I know is vaccinated and I'm traveling again
and going to restaurants That seems pretty awesome? Right, When
I travel in time in the future like that, what
that does is it makes it clear that as awful
as what I'm experiencing is right now, and it really
is awful, it's temporary. It will eventually fade. And that
(22:46):
gives me hope. And we know that hope is a
really powerful antidote to chatter, right, It can really help
bring people out when you're when you're sad and anxiously
feel hopeless, So it's giving you the exact opposite. I'll
also go back in time. I'll think about the pandemic
from eighteen and how that was even worse than this, Right,
(23:06):
people didn't have uber eats and zoom and all of
the things that we can do right now that make this,
I think much more tolerable. And they got through it
back then, right, They came and roaring back in the
nineteen twenties and life was awesome, And so that that
broadens mic perceptives. That's one thing I'll do. Another thing
I'll do is I'll try to give myself advice like
(23:29):
I would give to another person. One of the things
we've learned is there's a quirk of human nature. We
are so much better at advising other people on their
problems than we are taking that advice ourselves. It's bizarre.
And what we have learned is that it's possible for
us to coach ourselves through our problems like we're talking
(23:49):
to someone else. And as wacky as it sounds, one
way to do it is to use language, to use
your name to walk yourself people. All right, ethan, how
are you going to deal with this problem? That sounds
a little a little strange, But what we know is
that when people do that silently, what that linguistic shift
does is it gets you to think about yourself like
(24:10):
you're another person. Like most of the time we use
names and when we're talking to other people. So here
you're giving distance between you and yourself. And that can
be really helpful too for helping you think objectively and
not get stuck in a rumination wortex. Have you ever
have you ever done that? Yeah? Well, so I've been
been implementing some of these pieces of your book, especially
(24:32):
during tennis. So I started playing tennis a couple of
years ago, and I really have been using the self talk,
the distant self talk piece, you know, like coaching myself,
you know, Lee, and You've got this like just you know,
I've been calming myself down, um while playing tennis, because
I have a tendency to just like at a certain point,
if I even if I'm winning the match, like all
(24:52):
of a sudden, I'll start playing harder or trying harder.
And it's like I've been trying to like kind of
talk myself back from that. And so today today I
just played tennis that long ago, and well, there's a
piece in your book about belief, which is really which
we can get into in a second. I'll just tell
my story. But the belief being such a huge component
(25:12):
in in the way that we can work with our chatter,
and really a belief being kind of this magical tool,
is what you call it. And so with belief, I
had was watching the Australian Open the other day and
there were these two girls playing and I looked at
my husband, I'm like, I could play them, and he's like, no,
you couldn't, and I'm like, yes, I could. I could
play them. So I went on on the court today
(25:34):
and I looked at my coach and I told him
the story. I'm like, I could play them, and he
very kindly and facetiously was like, oh yeah, sure, you're goold.
And I literally took that belief and I truly believe
that if I worked hard enough, I could play them.
And with that belief and my distance self talk today,
I have never played better tennis. And he looked at
(25:56):
me at the end and he went, what the hell
got into you? Like? I walked away from that realizing,
like I mean, belief is so powerful. It is incredibly powerful.
And for me, I have been you know, like I said,
I've been sitting at home. Another way that they have
kind of flipped this on myself is also sitting at home,
not being on the road. And the first place that
(26:18):
my mind goes, and this is another story telling your
book about the picture that forgot how to pitch. The
first place my mind has gone, not being in practice
of singing every other weekend or whatever it may be,
is oh ship, well, I forget how to sing. That
path can take me down to a really dark place
where I'll go to sing and all of a sudden
have all this apprehension around something that I've never thought about,
(26:41):
like I don't think about singing just comes out. And
so that's been so interesting to have the time to
sit and be like, wait, when do I know what
I'm doing? Still? And when I read that part in
your book about the picture forgetting to pitch, it actually
gave me some context of what was going on in
my own mind, and it allowed me to go, oh,
(27:01):
I can shift that, I can change the way that
I'm thinking about this. And to be able to see
the way that my belief changed my tennis. It was
like having the yin and the yang of experiences of
belief shaping the way that I talked to myself and
the outcome of things. Yeah, well that's that's that's a
great example. Too bad I'm not still writing the book.
(27:23):
I would have used that one of the anecdotes. And
the belief is, you know, just remarkably powerful. And I think,
you know, there's so much science behind showing like when
the placebo work. So if you give people a sugar
pill and you say take this pill, it's gonna make
you feel better. It's going to help relieve your anxiety
(27:45):
and depression. And sure enough, if you actually believe the
physician who gives you that medication, research shows that for
mild and moderate forms of depression and anxiety, it actually
has that effect, which to me speaks to the power
of belief to impact how we feel. Right, And so,
you know, how does that work? Why can't we just
(28:07):
often believe ourselves into something? Right? Well, there's always like
some nagging self doubt, right, and in our critical nous
that I think gets in the way. But when you've
got a trusted physician or coach who says, Leanne, this
is going to make you feel better, I am certain
of it, right, they're basically taking away those downs and
(28:27):
just letting your belief carry the day. And so I
think a lot of really great coaches do this for
their players, right, their masters at channeling this belief. But
what we've learned is that there are ways we can
we can do that for ourselves, and I think that
provides us with a useful tool. Yeah, So, do you
have to be a hundred percent and on a belief
(28:47):
for it to work? Because I find there is the
inner believer. And there's also like the one that doesn't
like there is the one who is a skeptic in
me too. And so for the magic to work, do
you have to be all in? You have to be
all in for the belief one to to usually work.
That's that's typically how that one goes. So you may
have some trouble with that. But but here's the good news.
(29:09):
The good news is that the belief that's like one
of twenty different tools that exist. So here's another tool
tennis related that you don't have to believe in it
for its work and as rituals, so so like athletes
um and performing artists as well. Actually you do you
have any rituals before you perform that you engage them,
(29:31):
you know what I Actually I probably do, but they're
not like elaborate or concrete in any way. But I'm
sure there's some kind of well, I would have to
say probably one of the things that I've when I'm
on the road that I do before my guitar player
will come in and we'll just kind of like play
over music just it doesn't have to be songs we're
going to perform, but just to like get us in
that headspace. I think that's probably the one. You just
(29:54):
did it. You said we didn't, we didn't rehearse that.
That was just organic. Yeah, got you in the headspace, right.
So here's what's super fascinating about rituals. Rituals by the way,
you know, I think we often think of rituals as
synonymous with like obsessive compulsive disorder in certain worms of anxiety.
That is an extreme usage of rituals. But we have
(30:18):
been using rituals to help with our chatter for a
really long time. Like cultures around the world give us
rituals for handling the ultimate chatter provoking events like death. Right,
no matter what your religion is, you probably have a
grieving ritual that you engage in. When babies are born,
(30:39):
there are birthing, this is a tumultuous time. Our cultures
give us rituals to engage in. And what we see
is that, like a lot of athletes and people who
perform under stress, they organically create their own rituals. So
Raphael Adualts bring it back to the tennis. He's got
a great story that I just I just love. Um.
(30:59):
He is interviewed and someone asked him like what's the
hardest thing you do on the tennis court? And and
you know, this guy is playing against the best athletes
in the world, like athletes who are trained from the
moment they're born to beat him, basically, and competing against
his athletes, that's not the hardest thing he does, he says.
The hardest thing he does is battle of voices inside
(31:21):
his head, the nagging inner voice, the chatter that can
get in the way of him and performing well. And
how does he do it. He engages in a ritual,
a very rigid, structured sequence of behavior. So he always
walks onto the court the same way, and then he
you know, takes his jacket off in a very particular way,
and he lines his water bottles up diagonally against the cord.
(31:43):
And before ever we serve, he runs his fingers through
his hair and he picks his shorts out of his butt.
I mean, weird, wacky stuff, right, but he does it
every time. And what it does for him is it
provides him with a sense of order and control and
one word, experienced and chatter. We often feel like we
don't have control of what's happening, right, like our mind
(32:04):
is taking over, like ah, like I can't control what
I'm what I'm thinking and feeling. And what we've learned
is you can compensate for that feeling of a lack
of control by creating order around you, and rituals are
one way that people do that. And the science shows
that you don't actually have to even believe that they're
going to help you. If you engage in the rigid
(32:26):
sequence of behaviors, they still have benefit. And so the
beliefs aren't working for you. You know, you can do
a ritual interesting, so you don't actually have to believe
that they're working. Oh that's fascinating. Yeah, Now if you
do believe, right, it's only benefit. But there's research which
shows you don't have to believe and you still bet
(32:47):
you can still benefit from them. That's interesting. Um. The
environment pieces is always is fascinating, and it's for me.
I know that while I've been sitting at home, a
lot of lists have been happening. I know you talk
about a lot of that lot about the like people
can tidy up their environment, which helps a lot, especially
as we're all sitting at home, like you know. Um,
(33:08):
for me, it's been about lists and and being able
to execute the things on my list. Like, that's a
way I know that from my own mind that I
feel like I have a bit of control over a
time when I have I feel like I also I
feel like I have zero control. You're you're you're creating order,
and we know that when when anxiety is heightened, people
(33:30):
naturally try to re establish order in ways like that
by by creating lists in order. I tell a story
in the book about how when when I was a
little chatter prone one writing the book, like when a
paragraph wouldn't come out right, or I had a deadline approaching,
I would do something really strange for me, strange because
I'm not a particularly like orderly. I'm pretty free, you know,
(33:51):
like books are all over the place, and to my
wife's dismay, like a shirt might be in one corner another.
But when I was struggling, like my office never looked
so good, and I go to the kitchen and like
carefully clean all the pots and put them away really nicely.
And that was my way. And I think doing what
you're doing with lists, right, I'm trying to compensate for
(34:14):
this feeling of despair that I'm experiencing by leaning on
my environment and I think that's fascinating that they were
like tools that exist in the world around us for
managing the chatter inside our head. Like, again, we don't
learn that growing up, you know, we kind of just
stumble on these things through the course of living. But
(34:35):
I think science can help guide us now and say, Okay,
here's what we've learned about how to harness your environment
to your betterment. Well, that's what I love about your
book is that there's scientific proof. I mean some of
these ticks and things that we're not aware that we're
actually sometimes already doing these things. And you know, that's
where the science is so fascinating to me because for
(34:57):
me reading it, it's made me aware of the things
already do and given me context around why why it works.
And I think like you were saying that in the placebo,
it's like here, take this placebo. It will help you
feel better. It's and knowing how the placebo works and
why it's gonna help you feel better, It's like knowing
the why has really been beneficial for me at least
(35:20):
on you know, continuing to to do these things that
I kind of naturally already do and doing them even
with more purpose. Yeah, and I think I think that's
exactly it. It's knowing what the tools are and how
they work allows us to be a lot more deliberate
about how we use them in our lives. So so
if I experience a moment of chatter, I have a
(35:41):
go to like chatter cocktail that I take as not
alcohol based right to deal with it. Definitely don't do
chat alcohol not conferred competition, that's not in your book.
It's not in the book. Not a good thing. But
you know, I'll do the mental time travel, I'll do
the distance self talk. I'll do something we haven't actually
talk about yet. I'll talk to people about my chatter.
(36:03):
But like, I'll be really careful about who I choose
to talk to because other people can be incredibly helpful
when it comes to our chatter, but they can also
get us into a lot of trouble. And that's not
a message you hear often conveyed. You know, we often hear, oh,
if you're feeling bad, just get it out, vent your emotions,
(36:23):
find someone to unload. And we know that that that's
not actually helpful for helping people deal with chatter. So
what is beneficial then for for each other? Find someone
who's there to like really listen to you and show empathy,
someone who you can have a conversation with, but at
a certain point they hear you, but they don't just
(36:45):
keep asking you to rehash what you felt. Oh my god,
he said that, and how did you feel? What are
you going to do? Like not just getting you to
keep venting, because what if you're just venting? That makes
you and I feel really close and connect did like
our friendship grows, but it doesn't do anything to help
you solve the problem. So what you really want to
(37:06):
find as a person who can let you bend a
little but then nudge you to think about the bigger picture,
trying to help you reframe the experience. So so you know,
if you're really down about let's say your your last
performance didn't go so well, you know maybe I'm like, well,
but yeah, you've done hundreds of thousands of these performances before, right,
Like you've had bad ones before, you've gotten over it
(37:28):
and you've gone onto great things. So think about that,
or or let me tell you about the last time
I floved a presentation, and you know, like here's what
I did. And so these are ways of just trying
to break you out of that doom and despair that
characterizes chatter. And other people can be helpful. But um,
(37:50):
but if they don't do that, they can make the
chatter worse. So I'm super super careful about who I
go lose throughout. And sometimes it's not the people who
are the closest with it's other people. M hm, Well
it's my husband so great at that of giving that
type of advice, And sometimes I just want to slap
him because I'm like, that's not what I wanted to
hear at this moment in time. All right, at this
(38:13):
moment in time, we are going to pause for a
quick break. But don't worry, we'll be right back. Welcome back, loves.
We were talking about the best people to bounce your
inner chatter off of. But that's a very important um caveat.
And I talk a little bit about this. There's an
art to being a good chatter advisor and so um
(38:35):
And you know, as a scientist, I'm not used to
talk to me about art in what I view, right,
but but there's an art here in this in the
following sense, Different people need different amounts of time to
just unload their emotions. Like, so maybe I take two
minutes of subscribing it to my wife before I'm ready
for her to help me, but maybe for someone else
(38:57):
it's twenty minutes, right, or fifteen minutes. I think the
art of being good chatter advisors being able to read
the person you're interacting with so that you can know
when they've really felt heard like and are ready to
go broader. And and it's going to be different for
every every individual. That's interesting. Yeah, that is very important.
(39:17):
Did these voices change, I mean throughout our lives and
like what influences that you know, like where, when, at
what times can they can they change and shift? Yeah?
So they can shift? And um, I like to think
about it as the voices in our head are are
tuned by our surroundings, and so early on in life,
(39:40):
our parents and caretakers are playing you know, they're in
our heads quite a bit. As we grow older, the
other other people in our lives and our relationships, like
our colleagues are, our partners, are loved ones like their
voices are shaping our own voices. So we are very
sensitive to our surroundings. And that makes sense, right, because
(40:05):
we want to be tuned to the world around us
so that we can navigate it optimally. So the kinds
of things that are causing you concern or giving you
joy at different moments in time are likely going to
be shifting depending on where you are in your life,
right and so you know the things that give me
joy right now professionally, like I don't know, twenty five
(40:27):
years ago I would have made fun of Like in fact,
I remember, like in college, saying to myself, if I
ever end up doing them for a living, like you know,
someone shake me, and here I am doing it. So
so how we think about our lives and use language
and do so is very sensitive to who we surround
ourselves with. Yeah, I mean, what are some of the
(40:48):
unconscious ways that our environment is shaping the way that
we think? Well, So, so this goes to a tool
that I think could be really useful, which is which
is nature? So nature, there's actually just an article yesterday
in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was that
basically said is two hours of time in nature the
New ten Thousand Steps, and and I talked a lot
(41:12):
about nature in the book. What we've learned is like nature,
our physical surroundings provide us with the tool for rejuvenating
ourselves after we're depleted from chatter. So when we're experiencing
chatter like that's taking up all of our attention. And
that's in part why it impairs us when it comes
to work, because we can't think about anything else. It's
(41:34):
what we've learned is that exposure to green spaces. So
if you go for a walk, I can see your
window right now looks much nicer than mine because I'm
facing like a foot of snow, but yours looks a
lot more pleasant outside. Yes, not here. More, what nature
does for us is it captures our attention in a
(41:57):
very soft way. So it's like our our attention just
drifts to the leaves and the trees and and the
bushes and the squirrels, and and that it occupies our attention,
but we're not working really hard to make sense of
our surroundings. And that allows our attention, our ability focus
to restore, and that can be really, really helpful. So
(42:19):
that's one way that our environment can, outside of our awareness,
really help us well. And I found it, sorry not
to interrupt you, I found it interesting that you said
not only being in nature, but actually photos and sounds
and so a lot of people, you know, have been
stuck at home and they don't have access to nature.
I mean, I'm fortunate have a backyard, you know, I
(42:40):
can go out in it, like so many people can
be stuck in small places. And that's what I've found
so fascinating about the research of nature. It's just even
looking at photos or hearing sounds of nature can be
just as impactful. Yeah, absolutely right. You know, I will
say that I think the more immersive it is, the better.
So the more time you spent and the more all
(43:01):
consuming it is, the more likely it is to have
the biggest effect. But you can absolutely benefit from it
by looking at pictures or videos. In fact, when I
became involved in some of this research, the first thing
I did is in my office at work, I took
down like the picture of whatever that was there, and
I put like a photo of a tree that my
sister I had taken for me because like, you know,
(43:24):
practice what I preach it. I got like an orchid
in the corner now because I know I know what
the science says. So that's one way the environment up.
But the other really cool thing, and I mean I
suspect people actually get this from like going to your concerts,
and I'd be curious about whether you experienced this too.
On the other side, we've learned that experiencing awe, the
(43:47):
emotion of awe, can also help us manage chatter and
so really quick. The way that works is as an
emotional we experience when we're in the presence of something
vast that we have trouble explained. And so a lot
of people get it from nature. So when I think
about like the number of planets in the universe, I
can't it's hard for me to contemplate that it's awe inspiring.
(44:10):
But other people get it from attending an amazing concert
where everyone's singing together and there's a sense of transcendence,
like you're all in it and the sounds are amazing.
And this is hard to understand how that actually works.
And what we know is that when people experience that emotion,
(44:30):
it makes us as individuals and our concerns feel a
whole lot smaller. Our self shrinks, And when it comes
to chatter, like shrinking your chatter is that's not a
bad thing, right, Like our concerns feel a lot smaller
in their presence of something bad. So to me, that's
a really just neat beautiful finding and so do you
(44:52):
ever experience that when you're I think that's what I
was saying earlier about getting past the chatter, is that
the the awe of knowing. I always say that I'm
being sung instead of being the one singing. And when
I experienced that kind of effortless, free flowing energy and
(45:14):
knowing I'm connected to something else, Um, that is inspiring
on stage and you know you're saying, so many people
singing you know the same song. Like to watch the
energy of a massive crowd like coming right back at you. Yeah,
that's absolutely inspiring. I think about it. You know, I
live for those moments. I think when we experience then,
(45:35):
we all really do like it takes you out of
your own inner chaos for a moment and and places
you somewhere that's um for what I feel is kind
of probably our truest The truest place for us is
out beyond us. Well, here's what's really cool about the
awe research, I think, which is not everyone gets to
(45:57):
sing in front of how many tens of thousands of
people to experience that, and a lot of us don't
get to go to that many concerts right, like you know,
once every couple of years maybe, um. But what we've
learned is like you can find I think your own
awe triggers, Like you don't have to wait for those experiences,
(46:18):
so you can like seek out like, okay, are there
are there things in the park that give you a
sense of also and I go, like to the arboretum
by my house and like think about the fact that
a tree has been here for three years, like that's
all inspiring. Or if I look at an amazing piece
of art, like that fills me with awe. So there
are ways of Again, now that we know how these
(46:38):
things work, you can try to be really deliberate to
build these chatter fighting tools and experiences into your life.
And that's the challenge I think that we all face,
which is, once we are aware of the different tools
that exist, how do we bring them in and fold
them in profitably to help us live better lives. I
want to ask a bit of a selfish question right now,
(47:00):
because I mean, I don't think it's probably selfish. I
think a lot of people are experiencing this in the
morning when I like when I wake up, like I said,
that's my first thing that I'm aware of the chatter
that instantly starts. Is there anything to set us on
the right path in the morning when it comes to
our own chatter? Well, I think I think what you
(47:20):
could try to do is like try to create like
a chatter habit. You know, so if you know that
as soon as you wake up, boom, like there's that
voice and I don't want to hear it. Um, you know,
think about, like what are the tools that really work
for you. So maybe it's a ritual that you engage
in right away that like that morning to start your
(47:42):
day and you know, followed by a walk and wherever
to you know, try to give you a double hit, Like, so,
find the tools at work and then make habits, make
specific plans to activate those tools right away before you
let the chatter to take hold. A lot most of
the tools I talked about in the book are are
pretty simple to implement, Like these aren't tall orders. Um,
(48:06):
they're not meant to replace, like clinical interventions if the
chatter gets too extreme, Like I'm a huge proponent of
science based interventions and therapy and things like that. For
most of us, we experienced like chatter is a part
of life and so just trying to think about how
you can bring those tools in and and make those
plans can hopefully help prevent it from getting more intense,
(48:30):
might require you to get more more intensive intervention. Yeah,
you know, we're living in a really interesting, chatter provoking time,
and I think that your book is is really fascinating
and and so helpful. Like I said, I've I've been
implementing the things that that you write about, and I
am living proof that it actually does work, and which
(48:51):
makes me excited because there's a lot of you know,
there's a lot of books and a lot of information
out there, and you know, like so much that people
can that people claim to be helpful. And I just
found that the tools that, like you said that you
that are fairly simple and easy to implement, and the
tools that you have provided have definitely already been impactful
(49:14):
in my life with just the first like a few
days of really implementing them. And that makes the four
years of drudgery that went into that all worth it.
I mean really, um, I mean, you know, the reason
I wrote that book was to take what we know
and translated for others, like you know, not so just
signed just talking about the stuff so that people can
(49:36):
benefit from it. So the fact that it's having that
effect really warms my heart and is the best news
I've gotten. While so very good, Thank you well. I
always like to end my episodes with music because obviously
music is such a big part of my life, and
I find it fascinating to hear what music people love
and what's on their playlist and what's inspiring them. So
(49:58):
I call this the Holy Five. I've so do you
are you? Are you a music fan? And do you
do you have five songs that are that moview that
you'd like to share? I do, but I think you
might have to change it from calling the Holy five.
I don't know that you'll these will be holyse blongs.
No no, no, no, like whole holy as in like
(50:20):
you know your whole five? I see, okay, good not
with an age, not with the age the w okay.
So no judgment. I love music, but I've been made
fun of throughout my life for my case, so here goes.
Don't stop leaving journey. Oh that's that's a solid one. Um,
(50:46):
it's gonna get worse. Just prepare with or without you
YouTube that's still solid. Uh. Jesse's Girl, Rick Springfield, Jessee's good. Yeah,
that's a good one. Um, blinding Lights the weekend and
(51:12):
more contemporary one. Oh yeah, very cool. I'm maybe and
bon Jovie living on a prayer Steve you that's those
are all great. I got made made fun of big
(51:32):
time in college for those choices, so oh well, now
you're cool. Thank you to stand for approval. Yes, absolutely,
Thank you so much for joining us today. Um. I
really think people will benefit from from everything we discussed
and especially your book, So thank you so much. Thanks
for having me. It's ten of fun alright everyone. That
(51:54):
wraps up this episode and kicks off our second season
of Holy Human. I am so thrilled that we are
on our second season. Thank you so much for all
of you for coming along on this journey with me.
I truly truly appreciate you joining me on this ride,
and I also love hearing from you. So please leave
me your feedback wherever you're listening, and don't hesitate to
(52:15):
share this podcast with anyone in your life that you
feel could benefit from hearing it. I send you my
love until next time. On the next episode of Holy Human,
We're going to tackle something that is truly transformative, heart
centered guidance with the beautiful Daniel apport. Until then, loves,
have a beautiful day, a beautiful week, and I love you.
(52:39):
Holy Human with Me Leanne Rhymes is a production of
I Heart Radio. You'll find Holy Human with Leanne Rhymes
on the I Heart app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
get the podcast that matter most to you.
Holy Human with Leanne Rhymes is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, beautiful people, Welcome, Welcome to today's Holy
Human Podcast. I am so excited for you to meet
today's guest. Dr Ethan Cross is an award winning psychologist
(00:23):
and one of the world's leading experts on controlling the
conscious mind. He's also the author of a book that
I have found both fascinating, truly truly fascinating and very useful,
Chatter The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and
How to harness it. Today. Dr Cross is here to
explain the incredible hidden power of our inner voice and
(00:44):
show us how we can harness it to live healthier,
more satisfying, and more productive lives, all on this episode
of Holy Human. Yeah yeah, all right, Dr Ethan Cross,
(01:16):
thank you so much for joining us here on the
Holy Human Podcast. So it's a delight to be here
chatting with you about this. So yeah chatting. I love that.
I'm no fun intended. I have literally recommended your book
and I'm yet to finish it because it is a
thick book, but I'm I'm so obsessed. I read like
a hundred pages this morning because I I find that
(01:37):
this is a topic that is very close to my heart.
I feel like it's something that I have. I'm very
aware of chatter in my mind and how it can
take on different forms and and control all of our lives.
And so that's what we're diving into today with you,
is everything chatter and inner voice. And I would love
(01:59):
to just start at what when you talk about inner voice,
what is that? Exactly? What do you mean by that?
So I think of the inner voice um as this
amazing tool that we all have. It's our ability to
silently use language to do lots of different things. So
it's like a Swiss army knife of the mind. So
if I asked you to repeat a phone number in
(02:21):
your head, you use the language to do that, right,
So it helps us remember things. But we can also
use our inner voice to to plan and or simulate things.
So I do it when when I'm when i have
to give a big presentation, I'll often rehearse what I'm
going to say in my head, and then I'll hear
what people in the audience are going to say, and
(02:41):
I'll often think of what the nasty audience member is
going to say, and then I'll say something back. And
usually I'll say something back in my head that I
wouldn't say in daily life, but right, so, so that's
like a powerful tool. We also use our inner voice
to make sense of our experiences. Like things happen all
the time to us, and we're trying to weave those
(03:02):
experiences together to give us a sense of who we are,
and our inner voice helps us do that too. I
would imagine that in your line of work, you're you're
also constantly engaging this inner voice when you're hearing sounds
and a lot of progressions. I mean, maybe I'm wrong,
but does it does it factor into your everyday experience
(03:22):
as well? Oh? Yeah, absolutely, Well gosh, I could go
so many ways with this. I feel like my under
voice turns on like the moment I get up, and
it can it can go kind of down one way
or the other, whether it be a negative path or
somewhat of a positive path. It just depends on on
the day. And when I'm performing, I definitely engage it,
(03:44):
you know. I feel like sometimes that's what the performance
piece for me is actually the one place where I
can lose it, where I can go beyond it, which
is to me what feels so for someone who has
constant chatter in their mind. It's actually really blissful to perform.
I mean, obviously I'm still using it because there's I mean,
(04:06):
I'm engaging when I'm singing words and in that way,
but when I get lost in my art, there is
a there's a place beyond the chatter for me. That is,
like I said, blissful. And at the same time, I
can actually have full on conversations in my head on
stage about like what I'm gonna eat for breakfast tomorrow
(04:26):
and who I'm piste off at. And so it's it's
interesting how that I can have I can be doing
something and still have this whole other experience and internal
dialogue going on. Yeah, I mean that reminds you of
like when when I'm at the dinner table and like
my daughters are telling me about their day, and if
my mind somewhere else, they finished talking and I don't
(04:50):
necessarily hear what they've said, you know that it has
happened where they like telling me about a whole experience.
And then when they're done, I'm like, oh, so what
happened today? And I just told you that that And
so that's an example of how you know, really are
thoughts and which are often verbal in nature. Um, you know,
they they determine where we are, like what we're feeling,
(05:12):
what we're attending to even and so they can like
cloud out our experiences. But but you know, back to
the inner voice. So so it can do a lot
of things for us that I think are really really useful,
but it can also get us into trouble. And and
chatter is what I the term I used to describe
what happens when our inner voice gets us into trouble.
(05:32):
So so we've got this amazing ability, uniquely human our
ability to use words to silently talk to ourselves, solve problems, create, innovate.
But then when we experience problems in our life, we
we we we we go inside, we try to figure
out why we're feeling this way we are, and then
we get stuck. We start spinning, we get worried, anxiety, rumination,
(05:58):
we catastrophize, think of the worst scenarios, and we get
stuck in those negative thought loops that I think many
of us have probably experience from time to time that
may make life not so much fun. You know that
that make it difficult to be in that blissful state
you were describing earlier that can interfere with our health
and our relationships and so so chatter is is what
(06:20):
captures those the negative side of the inner voice. And
and you know, my my approach to this is if
the inner voice is really helpful in some cases, which
I think it is. I don't think we want to
stop talking to ourselves. I don't think we want to
silence our inner voice. We want to figure out how
to use it more effectively. And so I spent a
(06:40):
lot of time in my lab trying to figure out
how to do that, and I talk about that in
the book. Yeah, so does everyone have an inner voice?
I've actually read that people some people don't experience an
inner dialogue? And how does one develop that inner voice?
And do people that don't have an inner voice actually
have a call more world? Wow, they're okay, lot lots
(07:02):
of good questions here, So let me check how much
time do you? Yes? I know I can talk to
you about this all day long. No, I'm game. This
is this is what I live and breathe, So it's
all good. So do some people not have an inner voice?
So I think about the inner voice as like the
Swiss army knife, of the mind. It does lots of
different things. And I think if you have the ability
(07:23):
to speak out loud, then you've got the capacity for
an inner voice. So most people can use land with
properly functioning brains can use language to rehearse information. So
if I give you like like that the challenge I
gave you before, just here's here are four numbers, repeat
them in your head. That is a basic feature of
(07:44):
the human mind that we can use language to do that,
and I think everyone has that. Now, when you go
to other other functions that the inner voice provides, like
having an ongoing conversation with ourselves, there, I think there's
a lot more variability. Some people report never doing that,
and you know, there may be a minority of people
(08:04):
like that who don't have that inner running commentary. Other
people do it a fair amount, others a lot more.
In my experiences, the majority of people that I've spoken
to have certainly had experiences with with chatter, and so
I think it is a pretty common common experience that
that people have. Do you find that certain types of
(08:25):
people are more prone to negative or and or positive
self talk, Well, so there there are differences. Um, we
do know that women are more likely to get stuck
in chatter than men, but the tools that exist for
managing chatter work equally well for men and women. Now
(08:45):
this is not to say, by the way, that women
just have it worse than men. Across the word. Men
do plenty of things in psychological terms worse than women,
engage in certain kinds of other harmful behaviors, so so
it all balances out. But we do know that there
is that gender difference in terms of the experience of chatter,
but the tools work equally well, and I think that's
(09:07):
really good news. Yeah, absolutely this you say that. One
of my favorite things that you say is the inner
conversation is is the most important conversation we have all day.
Can you dive into a little bit of why that is. Yeah,
we're spending a lot of time I think most of
us lost in thought. You know. We we often hear
about the importance of living in the moment and being
(09:27):
in the moment. And I am all for being in
the moment at the appropriate time, but our brains evolved
to not be in the moment. We spend between a
half and a third of our waking hours flowing into
the past and transporting ourselves into the future, and we
spend a lot of that time talking to ourselves about
(09:48):
past experience. Is trying to figure out, well, why did
I screw this up? Or or savoring like a past
event my daughter, my younger starter, had a birthday, you know,
two weeks ago. I'm thinking about that experience, replaying conversations
we had, or I'm imagining what I'm going to say,
you know, during this podcast or something else. So we're
spending a whole lot of time in our heads and
(10:11):
a lot of that time talking to ourselves. And so
I think what we say is really quite important. Um.
We know those conversations can impact like how we feel,
our relationships, our ability to focus and perform at work.
So I think they really are truly important set of
conversations we have. Yeah, when we get stuck in that
(10:31):
rumination or that that negative place, what effects does it
have on our bodies? Like physically do you do? You
really want to know? Yeah? I would I say this
because you know, this is disconcerting stuff. And um, and
so let me preface it by saying, I'll talk a
(10:51):
little bit about the negatives. But there's a there's a
light at the end of the tunnel. So you know,
we often hear that stress kills, stress is bad for you.
In fact, that's not correct. Stress, like the ability to
experience stress is really adaptive. When there's something threatening in
front of us, having this system to react super fast
(11:13):
is useful when stress gets harmful in a in a
physical sense, is when we have a stress response, it
goes up, it's activated, and then it remains chronically elevated
over time. That's when the stress begins to eat away
at our body in ways that predict things like cardiovascular disease,
in certain forms of cancer and information. Now, this inner
(11:35):
voice that we have is really really good at maintaining
our stress responses because what happens is something happens in
the world. Someone tells me I'm a bad professor, or
they don't like an experiment, whatever, and it happens. But
then what do we do. We replay it again and
again and again and again in our heads. And when
(11:57):
we do, we're essentially conjuring up and reactivating that threat response,
that that stress response, and we're keeping it active over time.
So that's one of the ways that stress can get
under the skin to really impact our health in in
really powerful ways that, um I think we want to
try to avoid. Yeah. Absolutely, Um. Well, and you know,
(12:19):
you talk about something we hear a lot about is
going inward and turning inward. And I found it so
interesting how you talk about how introspection can actually backfire
on some people. Yeah, well, you know, and I found
this interesting too because it was actually the way I
got interested in this whole line of work. Wasn't wasn't
really I think the typical path that most people get
(12:40):
into psychology and neuroscience. Um so if I inter started
with my dad when I was a little kid, and
every time something bad would happen to me, not that
I got into huge amounts of trouble, but you know
I didn't get a cookie extra cookie for dessert, or
I got into find my mom. You know, he'd tell
me to like go inside, to introspect and try to
figure out a solution to move on with my life.
(13:02):
And that advice really served me well throughout my childhood
an adolescence. And then I got to college and I
took a psychology class, and I realized that a lot
of people do exactly what my dad told me to
do when they get upset, but it doesn't make them
feel better, they end up feeling worse. Instead, they get
stuck ruminating over and over and over about things are
(13:23):
worrying excessively. And so for me, the big question became, Okay, well,
why does that happen? Why is this really useful ability
to tap inside ourselves and try to use our mind
to come up with a solution. Why does it often
fail us? And we've learned a little bit about about
the answer to that question over the years. Um. We
(13:44):
we've learned that when when people are really upset and
they introspect, they tend to over focus on the problem.
They zoom in so narrowly that the only thing they
can think about is what happened to them and how
they felt, and that makes it really challenging for them
to think about the bigger picture, other ways of maybe
making sense of the experience that might lead them to
(14:05):
feel better. And so one of the piece of advice
we give people is to try to zoom out when
you're feeling chat when you're experiencing chatter. And there are
lots of ways you can do that. Yeah, you know,
you talk a lot about our environment and how it
affects this chatter in our mind, and I feel like,
you know, something I've been experiencing. I think a lot
of people are experiencing as we sit at home, as
(14:27):
our lives have changed. You know, I've been I've been
on the road my whole life, basically since I was thirteen,
and all of a sudden, now being at home in
one place, which is something that's never happened to me.
I've found that, you know this, the chatter can get
really loud, and I think a lot of people probably
are experiencing that in this moment. And can you talk
(14:49):
about how that those shifts in our environment can can
affect the way that we we talk to ourselves, because
I know that that shift in my environment has definitely
been challenging. Yeah, well, you know you're not alone. Um,
We've seen a threefold increase in clinical levels of anxiety
and depression in the population over the past year, which
(15:10):
is quite significant. We have a lot of time that
we're now spending alone with ourselves and our thoughts, and
we're living through a really stressful time. Like arguably, I mean,
I think this is like the chatter event of the
century if you think about it, Like, but once in
a century pandemic really scary, economic instability, politics were a
(15:31):
mess up until recently. People are fighting with each other,
Like there's a lot of uncertainty in the world and
a lack of control, and we know that those are
two ingredients that fuel chatter when we don't have control
over things. And so the first thing I would say is,
if you're feeling chatter, you're not alone. I think a
(15:52):
lot of people are are feeling chatter, and that makes
total sense. And so then the question as well, well,
what can you do about it to manage it effect like,
and you know, there are lots of different kinds of
tools that people can use. It look like you wanted
to give an no first. I think it's interesting. I
feel like I've had to really become aware of the
fact that it's even happening sometimes, Like I feel like
(16:14):
we can get so you talk about you know, with
listening are thinking about something and not hearing your daughters.
I almost feel like that can happen in my own head,
Like it just continues to have this conversation. I have
a friend of mine and I were talking about our
inner voice, and she's like, if it's not if it's
not talking, and it finds song lyrics and it just
keeps going on that and all of this that happens
to me a lot. All of a sudden, I'm like, wait,
(16:35):
I've been ruminating on song lyrics now, the same song forever,
and it's it's almost like the awareness of it has
to to occur because sometimes we totally just completely unaware
of that it just continues to talk. Well, I think
you just described like that's like part one of the
battle against it is simply like being aware of what
(16:58):
chatter is and how works. Because I think if you're
not even aware of it happening, and you're not going
to do anything to try to fix it. So I
study self control and I break it down for people's
self control's got two pieces motivation and ability. So you've
got to want to do something, and then you've got
to have the tools to actually do it. So if
(17:21):
you're if you don't know, if you don't realize your
experience and chatter, you're not gonna be motivated to reduce it.
You're just going to get lost in it. Hopefully, listeners
right now and people who read the book, like step
one is they just recognize that, Yeah, when I'm getting
stuck in the thought loop and it's coloring everything I do.
That's chatter, and that's a cue to maybe try to
(17:42):
minimize it so I can live a happier and healthier,
healthier life. And up next we're going to learn exactly
how to do that. But first we are going to
take a super quick break. Welcome back everyone. We are
(18:05):
here with Dr Cross talking about how to minimize negative
mental chatter. And it's not something we teach, you know.
This is the amazing thing we're doing research now where
we've developed curricula on the mind and emotions and have
a manage it that we're teaching to high school kids.
It's shocking to me, Like, you know, I spent so
much time in high school learning about the digestive system. Man,
(18:27):
I never have the need for knowledge about the digestive
Like I've used it once in recent history, like to
explain to my daughters how it's possible to be upside
down and swallow food, like that is it. But like
the mind, this thing that that we cared between our ears,
like we use this all the time. People who understand
our works are in a good position. Yeah, and it
(18:47):
can have effect on the digestive system. But it absolutely
has an effect on the digestives and that's right, so
very good. Yeah, we really need to start up here
the to understand anything. And the fact that kids are
even learning this in high school now, I think it
is incredible because you know, it really can change the
course of of their life. Yeah. Well, you know when
(19:08):
my oldest daughter, when you know, she's eleven, which I'm
learning is an interesting age. I have an only only child,
so I didn't know about daughters, and eleven is an interesting,
interesting time to be one. I'll just say that. And
when she gets upset about something, like when I tell her, actually,
you don't have to feel that way. You can you
can actually choose to feel differently. And and here's here's
(19:31):
like a way of thinking differently that might make you
feel better. Like that's eye opening for I think kids, right,
because if you don't, if no one teaches you that,
then you don't know any better. And so you're then
just victim to how you automatically respond. And we know that,
like our thoughts aren't our destiny, we have the ability
to control them in ways that can be really useful.
(19:53):
So that's part of the reason why we're trying to
work with kids and and why I wrote that book. Yeah, absolutely, Well,
I mean, you know, I've struggled with anxiety and depression,
and depression for me has has really kind of hit
hard um the beginning of this year. And you know,
when you get caught and that you say you can
choose your thoughts, But when you get caught in that rumination,
(20:13):
and it can be when I get depressed, it's like
the lens in which I view the world changes and
that therefore the thoughts change, and I can literally make
up a completely different story about the exact same life
that I that I have, that I love, and all
of a sudden, like that whole story changes. So when
you're caught in that rumination, what's the when you, like
(20:36):
you said, you say you can choose your thoughts. But
to someone in that rumination space, choosing your thoughts seems
like the last thing that you're able to do. What
where's the first place to go when you're in that space?
So first all I want to point out I love
the way you just describe that experience because it invoked
the voice, right you're the stories that you're telling yourself
(20:59):
when you're when you're depressed or sad, are are shaping
how you feel right and and so that goes back
to like these how important these conversations that we have
with ourselves are because they can really influence how we
view the world. So what can people do? First of all,
I break it down into there being like three categories
(21:20):
of tools that science has revealed that people can use
for managing their InterVoice. Things that people can do on
their own to change the way where they're thinking about
the situation, small ships that can have benefits, ways of
interacting with other people that can be really useful, and
then ways of interacting with our environments. And so there
are like twenty something tools that fit into those different buckets.
(21:43):
Let me tell you what I do when I find
myself slipping into chatter, because if I go through all
twenty tools, probably you might fall asleep and so listeners. Um,
so take COVID as an example. Not a fun not
a fun time to be in. So one thing I'll
do is is we know that when people are experiencing chatter,
(22:04):
they zoom in really now in the problem, that's all
there is. And so what we try to do is
get people to zoom out to broaden their perspective. One
way you could do it is by doing something called
temporal distancing or mental time travel. So I'll think about, all, right,
how am I going to feel nine months from now
(22:25):
when everyone I know is vaccinated and I'm traveling again
and going to restaurants That seems pretty awesome? Right, When
I travel in time in the future like that, what
that does is it makes it clear that as awful
as what I'm experiencing is right now, and it really
is awful, it's temporary. It will eventually fade. And that
(22:46):
gives me hope. And we know that hope is a
really powerful antidote to chatter, right, It can really help
bring people out when you're when you're sad and anxiously
feel hopeless, So it's giving you the exact opposite. I'll
also go back in time. I'll think about the pandemic
from eighteen and how that was even worse than this, Right,
(23:06):
people didn't have uber eats and zoom and all of
the things that we can do right now that make this,
I think much more tolerable. And they got through it
back then, right, They came and roaring back in the
nineteen twenties and life was awesome, And so that that
broadens mic perceptives. That's one thing I'll do. Another thing
I'll do is I'll try to give myself advice like
(23:29):
I would give to another person. One of the things
we've learned is there's a quirk of human nature. We
are so much better at advising other people on their
problems than we are taking that advice ourselves. It's bizarre.
And what we have learned is that it's possible for
us to coach ourselves through our problems like we're talking
(23:49):
to someone else. And as wacky as it sounds, one
way to do it is to use language, to use
your name to walk yourself people. All right, ethan, how
are you going to deal with this problem? That sounds
a little a little strange, But what we know is
that when people do that silently, what that linguistic shift
does is it gets you to think about yourself like
(24:10):
you're another person. Like most of the time we use
names and when we're talking to other people. So here
you're giving distance between you and yourself. And that can
be really helpful too for helping you think objectively and
not get stuck in a rumination wortex. Have you ever
have you ever done that? Yeah? Well, so I've been
been implementing some of these pieces of your book, especially
(24:32):
during tennis. So I started playing tennis a couple of
years ago, and I really have been using the self talk,
the distant self talk piece, you know, like coaching myself,
you know, Lee, and You've got this like just you know,
I've been calming myself down, um while playing tennis, because
I have a tendency to just like at a certain point,
if I even if I'm winning the match, like all
(24:52):
of a sudden, I'll start playing harder or trying harder.
And it's like I've been trying to like kind of
talk myself back from that. And so today today I
just played tennis that long ago, and well, there's a
piece in your book about belief, which is really which
we can get into in a second. I'll just tell
my story. But the belief being such a huge component
(25:12):
in in the way that we can work with our chatter,
and really a belief being kind of this magical tool,
is what you call it. And so with belief, I
had was watching the Australian Open the other day and
there were these two girls playing and I looked at
my husband, I'm like, I could play them, and he's like, no,
you couldn't, and I'm like, yes, I could. I could
play them. So I went on on the court today
(25:34):
and I looked at my coach and I told him
the story. I'm like, I could play them, and he
very kindly and facetiously was like, oh yeah, sure, you're goold.
And I literally took that belief and I truly believe
that if I worked hard enough, I could play them.
And with that belief and my distance self talk today,
I have never played better tennis. And he looked at
(25:56):
me at the end and he went, what the hell
got into you? Like? I walked away from that realizing,
like I mean, belief is so powerful. It is incredibly powerful.
And for me, I have been you know, like I said,
I've been sitting at home. Another way that they have
kind of flipped this on myself is also sitting at home,
not being on the road. And the first place that
(26:18):
my mind goes, and this is another story telling your
book about the picture that forgot how to pitch. The
first place my mind has gone, not being in practice
of singing every other weekend or whatever it may be,
is oh ship, well, I forget how to sing. That
path can take me down to a really dark place
where I'll go to sing and all of a sudden
have all this apprehension around something that I've never thought about,
(26:41):
like I don't think about singing just comes out. And
so that's been so interesting to have the time to
sit and be like, wait, when do I know what
I'm doing? Still? And when I read that part in
your book about the picture forgetting to pitch, it actually
gave me some context of what was going on in
my own mind, and it allowed me to go, oh,
(27:01):
I can shift that, I can change the way that
I'm thinking about this. And to be able to see
the way that my belief changed my tennis. It was
like having the yin and the yang of experiences of
belief shaping the way that I talked to myself and
the outcome of things. Yeah, well that's that's that's a
great example. Too bad I'm not still writing the book.
(27:23):
I would have used that one of the anecdotes. And
the belief is, you know, just remarkably powerful. And I think,
you know, there's so much science behind showing like when
the placebo work. So if you give people a sugar
pill and you say take this pill, it's gonna make
you feel better. It's going to help relieve your anxiety
(27:45):
and depression. And sure enough, if you actually believe the
physician who gives you that medication, research shows that for
mild and moderate forms of depression and anxiety, it actually
has that effect, which to me speaks to the power
of belief to impact how we feel. Right, And so,
you know, how does that work? Why can't we just
(28:07):
often believe ourselves into something? Right? Well, there's always like
some nagging self doubt, right, and in our critical nous
that I think gets in the way. But when you've
got a trusted physician or coach who says, Leanne, this
is going to make you feel better, I am certain
of it, right, they're basically taking away those downs and
(28:27):
just letting your belief carry the day. And so I
think a lot of really great coaches do this for
their players, right, their masters at channeling this belief. But
what we've learned is that there are ways we can
we can do that for ourselves, and I think that
provides us with a useful tool. Yeah, So, do you
have to be a hundred percent and on a belief
(28:47):
for it to work? Because I find there is the
inner believer. And there's also like the one that doesn't
like there is the one who is a skeptic in
me too. And so for the magic to work, do
you have to be all in? You have to be
all in for the belief one to to usually work.
That's that's typically how that one goes. So you may
have some trouble with that. But but here's the good news.
(29:09):
The good news is that the belief that's like one
of twenty different tools that exist. So here's another tool
tennis related that you don't have to believe in it
for its work and as rituals, so so like athletes
um and performing artists as well. Actually you do you
have any rituals before you perform that you engage them,
(29:31):
you know what I Actually I probably do, but they're
not like elaborate or concrete in any way. But I'm
sure there's some kind of well, I would have to
say probably one of the things that I've when I'm
on the road that I do before my guitar player
will come in and we'll just kind of like play
over music just it doesn't have to be songs we're
going to perform, but just to like get us in
that headspace. I think that's probably the one. You just
(29:54):
did it. You said we didn't, we didn't rehearse that.
That was just organic. Yeah, got you in the headspace, right.
So here's what's super fascinating about rituals. Rituals by the way,
you know, I think we often think of rituals as
synonymous with like obsessive compulsive disorder in certain worms of anxiety.
That is an extreme usage of rituals. But we have
(30:18):
been using rituals to help with our chatter for a
really long time. Like cultures around the world give us
rituals for handling the ultimate chatter provoking events like death. Right,
no matter what your religion is, you probably have a
grieving ritual that you engage in. When babies are born,
(30:39):
there are birthing, this is a tumultuous time. Our cultures
give us rituals to engage in. And what we see
is that, like a lot of athletes and people who
perform under stress, they organically create their own rituals. So
Raphael Adualts bring it back to the tennis. He's got
a great story that I just I just love. Um.
(30:59):
He is interviewed and someone asked him like what's the
hardest thing you do on the tennis court? And and
you know, this guy is playing against the best athletes
in the world, like athletes who are trained from the
moment they're born to beat him, basically, and competing against
his athletes, that's not the hardest thing he does, he says.
The hardest thing he does is battle of voices inside
(31:21):
his head, the nagging inner voice, the chatter that can
get in the way of him and performing well. And
how does he do it. He engages in a ritual,
a very rigid, structured sequence of behavior. So he always
walks onto the court the same way, and then he
you know, takes his jacket off in a very particular way,
and he lines his water bottles up diagonally against the cord.
(31:43):
And before ever we serve, he runs his fingers through
his hair and he picks his shorts out of his butt.
I mean, weird, wacky stuff, right, but he does it
every time. And what it does for him is it
provides him with a sense of order and control and
one word, experienced and chatter. We often feel like we
don't have control of what's happening, right, like our mind
(32:04):
is taking over, like ah, like I can't control what
I'm what I'm thinking and feeling. And what we've learned
is you can compensate for that feeling of a lack
of control by creating order around you, and rituals are
one way that people do that. And the science shows
that you don't actually have to even believe that they're
going to help you. If you engage in the rigid
(32:26):
sequence of behaviors, they still have benefit. And so the
beliefs aren't working for you. You know, you can do
a ritual interesting, so you don't actually have to believe
that they're working. Oh that's fascinating. Yeah, Now if you
do believe, right, it's only benefit. But there's research which
shows you don't have to believe and you still bet
(32:47):
you can still benefit from them. That's interesting. Um. The
environment pieces is always is fascinating, and it's for me.
I know that while I've been sitting at home, a
lot of lists have been happening. I know you talk
about a lot of that lot about the like people
can tidy up their environment, which helps a lot, especially
as we're all sitting at home, like you know. Um,
(33:08):
for me, it's been about lists and and being able
to execute the things on my list. Like, that's a
way I know that from my own mind that I
feel like I have a bit of control over a
time when I have I feel like I also I
feel like I have zero control. You're you're you're creating order,
and we know that when when anxiety is heightened, people
(33:30):
naturally try to re establish order in ways like that
by by creating lists in order. I tell a story
in the book about how when when I was a
little chatter prone one writing the book, like when a
paragraph wouldn't come out right, or I had a deadline approaching,
I would do something really strange for me, strange because
I'm not a particularly like orderly. I'm pretty free, you know,
(33:51):
like books are all over the place, and to my
wife's dismay, like a shirt might be in one corner another.
But when I was struggling, like my office never looked
so good, and I go to the kitchen and like
carefully clean all the pots and put them away really nicely.
And that was my way. And I think doing what
you're doing with lists, right, I'm trying to compensate for
(34:14):
this feeling of despair that I'm experiencing by leaning on
my environment and I think that's fascinating that they were
like tools that exist in the world around us for
managing the chatter inside our head. Like, again, we don't
learn that growing up, you know, we kind of just
stumble on these things through the course of living. But
(34:35):
I think science can help guide us now and say, Okay,
here's what we've learned about how to harness your environment
to your betterment. Well, that's what I love about your
book is that there's scientific proof. I mean some of
these ticks and things that we're not aware that we're
actually sometimes already doing these things. And you know, that's
where the science is so fascinating to me because for
(34:57):
me reading it, it's made me aware of the things
already do and given me context around why why it works.
And I think like you were saying that in the placebo,
it's like here, take this placebo. It will help you
feel better. It's and knowing how the placebo works and
why it's gonna help you feel better, It's like knowing
the why has really been beneficial for me at least
(35:20):
on you know, continuing to to do these things that
I kind of naturally already do and doing them even
with more purpose. Yeah, and I think I think that's
exactly it. It's knowing what the tools are and how
they work allows us to be a lot more deliberate
about how we use them in our lives. So so
if I experience a moment of chatter, I have a
(35:41):
go to like chatter cocktail that I take as not
alcohol based right to deal with it. Definitely don't do
chat alcohol not conferred competition, that's not in your book.
It's not in the book. Not a good thing. But
you know, I'll do the mental time travel, I'll do
the distance self talk. I'll do something we haven't actually
talk about yet. I'll talk to people about my chatter.
(36:03):
But like, I'll be really careful about who I choose
to talk to because other people can be incredibly helpful
when it comes to our chatter, but they can also
get us into a lot of trouble. And that's not
a message you hear often conveyed. You know, we often hear, oh,
if you're feeling bad, just get it out, vent your emotions,
(36:23):
find someone to unload. And we know that that that's
not actually helpful for helping people deal with chatter. So
what is beneficial then for for each other? Find someone
who's there to like really listen to you and show empathy,
someone who you can have a conversation with, but at
a certain point they hear you, but they don't just
(36:45):
keep asking you to rehash what you felt. Oh my god,
he said that, and how did you feel? What are
you going to do? Like not just getting you to
keep venting, because what if you're just venting? That makes
you and I feel really close and connect did like
our friendship grows, but it doesn't do anything to help
you solve the problem. So what you really want to
(37:06):
find as a person who can let you bend a
little but then nudge you to think about the bigger picture,
trying to help you reframe the experience. So so you know,
if you're really down about let's say your your last
performance didn't go so well, you know maybe I'm like, well,
but yeah, you've done hundreds of thousands of these performances before, right,
Like you've had bad ones before, you've gotten over it
(37:28):
and you've gone onto great things. So think about that,
or or let me tell you about the last time
I floved a presentation, and you know, like here's what
I did. And so these are ways of just trying
to break you out of that doom and despair that
characterizes chatter. And other people can be helpful. But um,
(37:50):
but if they don't do that, they can make the
chatter worse. So I'm super super careful about who I
go lose throughout. And sometimes it's not the people who
are the closest with it's other people. M hm, Well
it's my husband so great at that of giving that
type of advice, And sometimes I just want to slap
him because I'm like, that's not what I wanted to
hear at this moment in time. All right, at this
(38:13):
moment in time, we are going to pause for a
quick break. But don't worry, we'll be right back. Welcome back, loves.
We were talking about the best people to bounce your
inner chatter off of. But that's a very important um caveat.
And I talk a little bit about this. There's an
art to being a good chatter advisor and so um
(38:35):
And you know, as a scientist, I'm not used to
talk to me about art in what I view, right,
but but there's an art here in this in the
following sense, Different people need different amounts of time to
just unload their emotions. Like, so maybe I take two
minutes of subscribing it to my wife before I'm ready
for her to help me, but maybe for someone else
(38:57):
it's twenty minutes, right, or fifteen minutes. I think the
art of being good chatter advisors being able to read
the person you're interacting with so that you can know
when they've really felt heard like and are ready to
go broader. And and it's going to be different for
every every individual. That's interesting. Yeah, that is very important.
(39:17):
Did these voices change, I mean throughout our lives and
like what influences that you know, like where, when, at
what times can they can they change and shift? Yeah?
So they can shift? And um, I like to think
about it as the voices in our head are are
tuned by our surroundings, and so early on in life,
(39:40):
our parents and caretakers are playing you know, they're in
our heads quite a bit. As we grow older, the
other other people in our lives and our relationships, like
our colleagues are, our partners, are loved ones like their
voices are shaping our own voices. So we are very
sensitive to our surroundings. And that makes sense, right, because
(40:05):
we want to be tuned to the world around us
so that we can navigate it optimally. So the kinds
of things that are causing you concern or giving you
joy at different moments in time are likely going to
be shifting depending on where you are in your life,
right and so you know the things that give me
joy right now professionally, like I don't know, twenty five
(40:27):
years ago I would have made fun of Like in fact,
I remember, like in college, saying to myself, if I
ever end up doing them for a living, like you know,
someone shake me, and here I am doing it. So
so how we think about our lives and use language
and do so is very sensitive to who we surround
ourselves with. Yeah, I mean, what are some of the
(40:48):
unconscious ways that our environment is shaping the way that
we think? Well, So, so this goes to a tool
that I think could be really useful, which is which
is nature? So nature, there's actually just an article yesterday
in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was that
basically said is two hours of time in nature the
New ten Thousand Steps, and and I talked a lot
(41:12):
about nature in the book. What we've learned is like nature,
our physical surroundings provide us with the tool for rejuvenating
ourselves after we're depleted from chatter. So when we're experiencing
chatter like that's taking up all of our attention. And
that's in part why it impairs us when it comes
to work, because we can't think about anything else. It's
(41:34):
what we've learned is that exposure to green spaces. So
if you go for a walk, I can see your
window right now looks much nicer than mine because I'm
facing like a foot of snow, but yours looks a
lot more pleasant outside. Yes, not here. More, what nature
does for us is it captures our attention in a
(41:57):
very soft way. So it's like our our attention just
drifts to the leaves and the trees and and the
bushes and the squirrels, and and that it occupies our attention,
but we're not working really hard to make sense of
our surroundings. And that allows our attention, our ability focus
to restore, and that can be really, really helpful. So
(42:19):
that's one way that our environment can, outside of our awareness,
really help us well. And I found it, sorry not
to interrupt you, I found it interesting that you said
not only being in nature, but actually photos and sounds
and so a lot of people, you know, have been
stuck at home and they don't have access to nature.
I mean, I'm fortunate have a backyard, you know, I
(42:40):
can go out in it, like so many people can
be stuck in small places. And that's what I've found
so fascinating about the research of nature. It's just even
looking at photos or hearing sounds of nature can be
just as impactful. Yeah, absolutely right. You know, I will
say that I think the more immersive it is, the better.
So the more time you spent and the more all
(43:01):
consuming it is, the more likely it is to have
the biggest effect. But you can absolutely benefit from it
by looking at pictures or videos. In fact, when I
became involved in some of this research, the first thing
I did is in my office at work, I took
down like the picture of whatever that was there, and
I put like a photo of a tree that my
sister I had taken for me because like, you know,
(43:24):
practice what I preach it. I got like an orchid
in the corner now because I know I know what
the science says. So that's one way the environment up.
But the other really cool thing, and I mean I
suspect people actually get this from like going to your concerts,
and I'd be curious about whether you experienced this too.
On the other side, we've learned that experiencing awe, the
(43:47):
emotion of awe, can also help us manage chatter and
so really quick. The way that works is as an
emotional we experience when we're in the presence of something
vast that we have trouble explained. And so a lot
of people get it from nature. So when I think
about like the number of planets in the universe, I
can't it's hard for me to contemplate that it's awe inspiring.
(44:10):
But other people get it from attending an amazing concert
where everyone's singing together and there's a sense of transcendence,
like you're all in it and the sounds are amazing.
And this is hard to understand how that actually works.
And what we know is that when people experience that emotion,
(44:30):
it makes us as individuals and our concerns feel a
whole lot smaller. Our self shrinks, And when it comes
to chatter, like shrinking your chatter is that's not a
bad thing, right, Like our concerns feel a lot smaller
in their presence of something bad. So to me, that's
a really just neat beautiful finding and so do you
(44:52):
ever experience that when you're I think that's what I
was saying earlier about getting past the chatter, is that
the the awe of knowing. I always say that I'm
being sung instead of being the one singing. And when
I experienced that kind of effortless, free flowing energy and
(45:14):
knowing I'm connected to something else, Um, that is inspiring
on stage and you know you're saying, so many people
singing you know the same song. Like to watch the
energy of a massive crowd like coming right back at you. Yeah,
that's absolutely inspiring. I think about it. You know, I
live for those moments. I think when we experience then,
(45:35):
we all really do like it takes you out of
your own inner chaos for a moment and and places
you somewhere that's um for what I feel is kind
of probably our truest The truest place for us is
out beyond us. Well, here's what's really cool about the
awe research, I think, which is not everyone gets to
(45:57):
sing in front of how many tens of thousands of
people to experience that, and a lot of us don't
get to go to that many concerts right, like you know,
once every couple of years maybe, um. But what we've
learned is like you can find I think your own
awe triggers, Like you don't have to wait for those experiences,
(46:18):
so you can like seek out like, okay, are there
are there things in the park that give you a
sense of also and I go, like to the arboretum
by my house and like think about the fact that
a tree has been here for three years, like that's
all inspiring. Or if I look at an amazing piece
of art, like that fills me with awe. So there
are ways of Again, now that we know how these
(46:38):
things work, you can try to be really deliberate to
build these chatter fighting tools and experiences into your life.
And that's the challenge I think that we all face,
which is, once we are aware of the different tools
that exist, how do we bring them in and fold
them in profitably to help us live better lives. I
want to ask a bit of a selfish question right now,
(47:00):
because I mean, I don't think it's probably selfish. I
think a lot of people are experiencing this in the
morning when I like when I wake up, like I said,
that's my first thing that I'm aware of the chatter
that instantly starts. Is there anything to set us on
the right path in the morning when it comes to
our own chatter? Well, I think I think what you
(47:20):
could try to do is like try to create like
a chatter habit. You know, so if you know that
as soon as you wake up, boom, like there's that
voice and I don't want to hear it. Um, you know,
think about, like what are the tools that really work
for you. So maybe it's a ritual that you engage
in right away that like that morning to start your
(47:42):
day and you know, followed by a walk and wherever
to you know, try to give you a double hit, Like, so,
find the tools at work and then make habits, make
specific plans to activate those tools right away before you
let the chatter to take hold. A lot most of
the tools I talked about in the book are are
pretty simple to implement, Like these aren't tall orders. Um,
(48:06):
they're not meant to replace, like clinical interventions if the
chatter gets too extreme, Like I'm a huge proponent of
science based interventions and therapy and things like that. For
most of us, we experienced like chatter is a part
of life and so just trying to think about how
you can bring those tools in and and make those
plans can hopefully help prevent it from getting more intense,
(48:30):
might require you to get more more intensive intervention. Yeah,
you know, we're living in a really interesting, chatter provoking time,
and I think that your book is is really fascinating
and and so helpful. Like I said, I've I've been
implementing the things that that you write about, and I
am living proof that it actually does work, and which
(48:51):
makes me excited because there's a lot of you know,
there's a lot of books and a lot of information
out there, and you know, like so much that people
can that people claim to be helpful. And I just
found that the tools that, like you said that you
that are fairly simple and easy to implement, and the
tools that you have provided have definitely already been impactful
(49:14):
in my life with just the first like a few
days of really implementing them. And that makes the four
years of drudgery that went into that all worth it.
I mean really, um, I mean, you know, the reason
I wrote that book was to take what we know
and translated for others, like you know, not so just
signed just talking about the stuff so that people can
(49:36):
benefit from it. So the fact that it's having that
effect really warms my heart and is the best news
I've gotten. While so very good, Thank you well. I
always like to end my episodes with music because obviously
music is such a big part of my life, and
I find it fascinating to hear what music people love
and what's on their playlist and what's inspiring them. So
(49:58):
I call this the Holy Five. I've so do you
are you? Are you a music fan? And do you
do you have five songs that are that moview that
you'd like to share? I do, but I think you
might have to change it from calling the Holy five.
I don't know that you'll these will be holyse blongs.
No no, no, no, like whole holy as in like
(50:20):
you know your whole five? I see, okay, good not
with an age, not with the age the w okay.
So no judgment. I love music, but I've been made
fun of throughout my life for my case, so here goes.
Don't stop leaving journey. Oh that's that's a solid one. Um,
(50:46):
it's gonna get worse. Just prepare with or without you
YouTube that's still solid. Uh. Jesse's Girl, Rick Springfield, Jessee's good. Yeah,
that's a good one. Um, blinding Lights the weekend and
(51:12):
more contemporary one. Oh yeah, very cool. I'm maybe and
bon Jovie living on a prayer Steve you that's those
are all great. I got made made fun of big
(51:32):
time in college for those choices, so oh well, now
you're cool. Thank you to stand for approval. Yes, absolutely,
Thank you so much for joining us today. Um. I
really think people will benefit from from everything we discussed
and especially your book, So thank you so much. Thanks
for having me. It's ten of fun alright everyone. That
(51:54):
wraps up this episode and kicks off our second season
of Holy Human. I am so thrilled that we are
on our second season. Thank you so much for all
of you for coming along on this journey with me.
I truly truly appreciate you joining me on this ride,
and I also love hearing from you. So please leave
me your feedback wherever you're listening, and don't hesitate to
(52:15):
share this podcast with anyone in your life that you
feel could benefit from hearing it. I send you my
love until next time. On the next episode of Holy Human,
We're going to tackle something that is truly transformative, heart
centered guidance with the beautiful Daniel apport. Until then, loves,
have a beautiful day, a beautiful week, and I love you.
(52:39):
Holy Human with Me Leanne Rhymes is a production of
I Heart Radio. You'll find Holy Human with Leanne Rhymes
on the I Heart app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
get the podcast that matter most to you.
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