We were all there. We got stuck in the two-minute conversation three days ago. We go back and forth in our minds over and over. I shouldn't be angry with my father. He was always very patient while raising me. We get stuck. The voice in our head turns from an ally to a nasty nag and over and over the same things uselessly. Ethan Kross, an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, wants to teach us how we can control the voices in our minds. Remember, this is not the voice caused by mental illness, it's the voice we all have that happily (or nagging) our lives as we go about our days.
The goal is not to stop talking to ourselves. That wouldn't be nice.
In his new book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It, Kross guides his readers through a series of strategies for controlling mental chatter. One of the key strategies is “independent self-talk,” that is, using language to create a mental distance from ourselves. The best cure for getting stuck on a problem is to develop a new perspective on it. One way to gain this new perspective is to talk to oneself as if they were someone else. "You can never be sure what he's thinking, Liz, maybe he appreciated you." I spoke with Kross via Zoom. How can we recognize this chatter in our minds, what's going on in our brains during the cycle, and of course that nagging in our head,
What is mental chatter?
When we encounter problems, we often turn our attention to ourselves to make sense of them. But we often get stuck. We ruminate, we worry, and we catastrophe. A chatty mind refers to the negative thought cycles that characterize this experience of being stuck. A chatty mind; It includes rumination (thinking about the past) and worrying (thinking about the future).
How can we tell the difference between a normal stream of consciousness and a mind-babble spiral?
Typically, you find yourself rehearsing the same things over and over instead of finding a clearer, more objective solution to a problem. And you find that these negative thoughts really start to prevent you from doing other things. I think people are often aware of it when they encounter chatter.
The human mind cannot always stay in the moment.
What are the effects of mental chatter?
This can make it difficult for us to think well and perform well. And one of the main reasons for this is that we are too talented to stay focused at any given moment in time. If all your focus is on the chatter in your mind, good luck with getting things done.
Besides behavioral problems, this can also have social consequences. Often times our relationships take a turn for the worse when babbling preoccupies our minds. And this can take various forms. We go to other people and constantly talk about our problems. This drives people away from us. Or we take our anger out on others because of our heightened negative emotions. We attack them and direct our negative emotions towards them. What mind babble does is go through a stressful experience and prolong it. Stress is not bad in itself. What makes it bad is that it stretches over time and drags on. That's exactly what babbling does.
So how can we quiet the chatter in our minds?
Various strategies work for various people in different situations. And the main thing is to be able to create a combination of strategies in the real sense. I do many different things when I encounter the chatter in my mind. I have independent conversations with myself. I practice temporary distances. I find experts to talk to so they can help me gain different perspectives. These people don't have to be people I'm close to, but they should be people who agree to help me when I'm in between when I'm in trouble. I also go for nature walks or tidy my office when I'm bored.
In your chattering book, you talk about how you stopped a particularly bad spiral by calling yourself by your name. This is fascinating to me.
We know it's much easier to give advice to people than to take it ourselves. And what we learned is; language is a tool for coaching ourselves through our problems, as if we were talking to someone else. It includes our use of your name and other non-first person pronouns such as “you” or “he”. We call this “independent self-talk”. This is a tool that many people encounter all the time without knowing how it works. Lab studies show that this tool gives us a mental space.
What do you think this is?
The idea is that when you use a name to refer to yourself, it's literally like an automatic perspective switch button. It changes our perspective because you are so used to using these parts of speech when addressing others.
Does it matter how we address ourselves? Name, surname, nickname?
We haven't systematically investigated whether phrases like "Well, Ethan you can do this" or "Okay, E-man" make a difference. We think the reason nouns and pronouns are so useful are because they are just speech tools we use when we think of and refer to others. We know that with children, they can benefit by having them imagine they are a superhero. We call this the Batman effect. If a child is struggling with any problem, say, "Okay Matt. What would Batman do in this situation? Imagine you are Batman and find solutions to guide your problem." we say.
When you're rejected by someone else, you don't know what to do. We think it's helpful to talk about your personal experience using your equivalent version of yourself and not in the first person. What we have found through research is that it is a linguistic device that helps people make sense of their negative experiences. It takes the experience away from you. We're not the only ones experiencing this, it's the whole world. Anyone who experiences something like this reacts this way. This gives you some distance and helps you normalize your experience.
In your babbling book, you talk about the fact that nature has a positive effect on our inner voice.
Yes. The thinking behind why nature can be so helpful is its ability to recharge our attention. And the way to do that is to focus our attention on things that are interesting to us but don't take much to make sense of. Virtual nature still has a positive effect. But the more intense and immersive a real experience is, the bigger the payoff. Another mechanism that explains how nature can be beneficial is by doing things that encourage feelings of peace. The feeling that you have something enormous that you cannot explain. This gives you a sense of perspective and makes your worries feel smaller.
What is the cause of the chatter in our minds?
When we experience negative emotions and try to analyze our emotions, we often take a narrower view of what we are experiencing, ignoring ways of thinking that might make us feel better about the event. This; It causes us to get stuck in a negative cycle of thinking and feeling, in which we reshape what we feel and feel, causing us to feel stuck. This psychological experience corresponds to increased activity in brain networks that create self-reference in the brain and support emotional processing. Why this happens can be explained by saying that it is an adaptive response (using self-reflection to solve a problem) that occurs in a particular situation.
What does the babbling spiral in the brain look like?
We observe higher activation in brain regions that become active when we think about ourselves and not other people. These self-referential processing networks, which are more active among clinically anxious and depressed people, are also active in people with mental chatter.
So what are self-referential (self-referential) transaction networks?
It is a network formed by a group of regions along the cortical midline—the dorsal cingulate and posterior cingulate—that lights up in brain scans when you let the person think about whatever they want to think about themselves. Thoughts naturally shift to one's own experiences. That is, thinking of oneself. This is what is activated during mental chatter.
What did you do to support these thoughts?
In the brain; we did some work in the areas of self-talk, self-referential processing, and emotional processing. We came across something interesting in brain imaging studies; We observed less activation in both processing networks, but not an additional increase in cognitive control networks, which often come into play when trying to control ourselves. The idea behind this is that it's hard to rein in our emotions. These linguistic changes seem easy enough for people to use. The changes they bring to people's perspectives are more effortless.
Nowadays, there is an orientation about “awareness” within popular culture. What do you think about this?
I think awareness is a wonderful thing. And it contains a lot of incredible data. My only reservation on this subject is that if awareness is a tool, it is the only one to be chosen among many other tools. I think the challenge is figuring out how the different tools can work together. The message behind mindfulness sometimes goes too far in the sense that you must always stay in the moment. The human mind cannot always stay in the moment. It didn't evolve for that. And by traveling through time, thinking about the past and the future, we can benefit greatly. So I think the challenge is to figure out how we can help people more effectively without getting stuck in time traveling in their minds, rather than saying turn off the time machine completely when you're upset.
Can mind babble be productive?
The inner voice is often incredible. It's a superpower. It helps us do many different things. I see mind chatter as an inefficient form of our inner voice. So once you get into the chatter (in the thought loop), we can no longer talk about productivity. We are talking about the opposite. But that doesn't mean our goal should be to silence our inner voice or stop talking to ourselves. I don't think such a situation would be right. The challenge is figuring out how to talk to yourself and using the right language to weigh your problems without babbling.
