How to Stop Your Inner Voice From Spiraling (A Slight Change of Plans)

Summary

Podcast Summary:
Proxy with Yowei Shaw
Episode: How to Stop Your Inner Voice From Spiraling (A Slight Change of Plans)
Date: July 21, 2026
Host: Maya Shankar (original "A Slight Change of Plans" episode)
Guest: Dr. Ethan Kross, Professor of Psychology and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

---

Episode Overview

This episode brings together cognitive scientist and host Maya Shankar and psychologist Dr. Ethan Kross to explore a near-universal emotional struggle: When our inner voice spirals into negative, repetitive thought patterns—what Dr. Kross calls “chatter.” The conversation blends science, real-life examples, and practical techniques for interrupting mental spirals so that our inner voice becomes a tool for insight rather than a source of misery.

---

What Is “Chatter”? (05:16)

• Definition: Dr. Kross describes chatter as “when we turn inward to work through a problem, but instead of making progress, we get stuck in a repetitive thought loop that keeps the negative feelings alive.” (05:16)
• Examples: Dr. Kross recounts his daughter getting stuck ruminating about a school incident, and Maya shares feeling mentally distant from a vacation due to anxious thoughts.
• Key Insight: The inner voice—our ability to reflect and narrate—can be a double-edged sword. Used well, it helps us plan, remember, and innovate. Used poorly, it narrows our focus to worries and magnifies distress.

---

The Positives of the Inner Voice (07:42–14:18)

• Working Memory: The inner voice keeps information active in our minds, helping us remember and plan ("Cheese, granola, fruit... I'm using words silently to repeat those items. It's part of our working memory system..." – Ethan Kross, 07:42)
• Storytelling and Meaning-Making: It's how we “create stories” and derive meaning from adversity.
• Innovation: Wandering minds aren’t inherently bad. Our daydreams and mental time travel are “the source of human innovation.” (09:37)
• Not About Silence: Dr. Kross deliberately titled his book “Harness” (not “Silence”) your inner voice. Shutting it off completely, as illustrated by Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke story, is debilitating: “Although the chatter was gone, so were all the good things her inner voice allowed her to do.” (12:14)
• Emotions as Data: Even negative chatter can provide useful feedback about improvement or preparation: “All emotions are useful when experienced in small doses... you just don't want to bathe in them endlessly.” (14:29)

---

When Inner Voice Becomes Harmful "Chatter" (16:17–23:38)

• Chatter Onset: Chatter begins when we get stuck in a thought loop about the past (rumination), present, or future (worry): “You keep on trying to think and work through the problem, but you don’t make any progress. It’s like a hamster wheel.” (16:17)
• The Illusion of Progress: Repeatedly thinking about a problem can feel productive, but often leaves us unchanged: “[It] fools our brains into thinking, ‘Ah, I am in fact advancing, because look at how much airtime this topic is getting in my mind.’” (17:15)
• Consequences: Chatter undermines:
  • Attention & Performance: Consumes mental resources, disrupts habits (Simone Biles’ “twisties” as a public example – 21:14)
  • Relationships: “Chatter can alienate us from others, lead us to feel socially rejected and alone.” (22:09)
  • Physical Health: Chronic chatter keeps stress systems active, which is linked to cardiovascular problems and more. “What makes stress toxic is when the stress response goes up and remains chronically elevated over time… that's what chatter does.” (22:49)

---

Strategies for Interrupting Chatter (25:06)

Framework—Three Buckets:

1. Tools you can use on your own
2. Relationship tools—using others
3. Environmental/physical tools

1. Tools You Can Use on Your Own

Psychological Distance & Self-Coaching (28:02)

• Distanced Self-Talk: Coach yourself using your own name or “you.”

  • “All right, Ethan, here's what you're going to do.” (28:02)
  • This subtle shift helps you address yourself as you would a friend, generating better advice and less emotional heat.

• Temporal Distancing (Mental Time Travel)

  • Ask: “How will I feel about this in a week, month, or year?” or reflect on past situations you once thought were insurmountable (29:58).
  • Maya’s personal example: “I remember him saying, ‘I promise you, this is not gonna be a topic you’re worried about in 10 years.’… He’s right.” (31:31)

• Universal “You”

  • Instead of “I,” say “you” to make your experience feel more universal, reducing shame or isolation.
  • Example: Sheryl Sandberg using “you” in describing grief (34:19).
  • “She was talking about her own deeply personal experience using a word, ‘you’, that is the verbal equivalent of talking about the world in general.” (34:19)

2. Relationship Tools (36:59)

• Venting vs. Reframing

  • Simply venting feels good and strengthens bonds, but doesn't solve the underlying chatter (36:59).
  • Effective support means balancing emotional empathy with gently encouraging cognitive reframing—perspective broadening.
    • “Finding a person who will take the time to hear you out, to empathize. But at a certain point... they start trying to help you broaden your perspective.” (38:38)

• The “Board of Advisors” Principle

  • Not everyone is good at shifting you from emotion to cognition—be deliberate about who you seek out.
  • “There are many people who I'm really, really close to... I don't call them about my chatter... But there are a couple who are good at this.” (41:00)

• Explicit Asking Helps

  • Maya: “We can do a service to the people that we choose to vent to by... at the outset of the conversation, say... I really do want some reframing strategies.” (43:00)

3. Environmental and Physical Tools (44:05)

• Nature and Green Spaces
  • Exposure to nature replenishes depleted attention and induces awe, which shrinks our worries by expanding our sense of scale.
    • “Our attention gently drifts on those surroundings... nature gives us the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe... when you feel smaller, so do your worries and ruminations.” (44:05–45:40)
  • Ethan chooses a tree-lined path to walk to work because “that allows our attentional resources to restore and they often can be really useful for managing our chatter.” (44:30)

---

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “I like to think about this inner voice as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind.”
  — Ethan Kross (07:42)
• “All emotions are useful when experienced in small doses… You just don't want to bathe in them endlessly.”
  — Ethan Kross (14:29)
• “Chatter wraps its tentacles around all of those domains. And it's why I think it's one of the big problems we face.”
  — Ethan Kross (23:27)
• “We are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are following our own advice.”
  — Ethan Kross (26:45)
• “This is a part of speech that we almost exclusively use when we think about and refer to other people. That shifts your perspective. It puts you into this different mode of thinking about your problems.”
  — Ethan Kross on using second-person self-talk (28:30)
• “When anyone loses their husband, anyone would be devastated. Right? And what that does for us is it gives us a little bit of distance from our problems.”
  — Ethan Kross (35:00)
• “Venting can be useful for strengthening the friendship bonds... but if all you do is vent, it just keeps the fire burning inside.”
  — Ethan Kross (37:15)
• "When you are contemplating something vast and indescribable, you feel smaller by comparison. And when you feel smaller, so do your worries and ruminations."
  — Ethan Kross on awe in nature (45:08)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• [05:16] Defining “Chatter” & Real-Life Example
• [07:42–14:18] Positive Roles of the Inner Voice
• [16:17–23:38] When the Inner Voice Turns Harmful
• [25:06–29:58] Solo Strategies: Self-Talk & Mental Time Travel
• [31:31] Personal Growth: Learning From Our Own Experience
• [34:19] Universal “You” for Distance
• [36:59–43:00] Relationships: How to Get (and Give) Good Support
• [44:05–45:40] Environmental Tools: Nature & Awe
• [48:24] Final Reflections: No One-Size-Fits-All Solution

---

Key Takeaways

• Your inner voice isn’t the enemy—it’s a vital tool that sometimes spirals out of control.
• Chatter is natural but makes us miserable when unmanaged, impacting thinking, relationships, habits, and health.
• Distancing techniques (third-person self-talk, mental time travel, universal language) help broaden perspective.
• Venting is only half the equation; for real relief, seek people who also help you reframe and contextualize your worries.
• Nature and awe are powerful ways to reset mental spirals.
• No universal solution: Everyone's “chatter toolkit” will be unique—experiment to find what works for you.

---

For further exploration: Find more on Ethan Kross’ book [Chatter], and more episodes from "A Slight Change of Plans" wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[Ethan Cross]

If you're looking for some of the sharpest takes on film and television, I hope you'll tune in to Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[Podcast Announcer]

Over here at Critics at Large, we

[Maya Shankar]

like talking about what we loved, but crucially, what we hated about what we're watching.

[Podcast Announcer]

But even more, we like making sense of what's happening in the culture right

[Maya Shankar]

now and how we got here.

[Ethan Cross]

Join us as we make our way from Eddington to Moby Dick, from Ted Lasso to the rise in Therapy Speak from the Pit to Luigi Mangioni, it's

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Critics at Large from the New Yorker. Wherever you get your podcasts, this show is supported by Blueland. We hear a lot about microplastics in oceans and food, but they can also come from products we use every day at home, like cleaning products. If you're trying to be more mindful about microplastics, check out Blueland. Blueland makes dish soap, laundry detergent and other household products that are 100% plastic free. Their formulas are also made without dyes, parabens, or harsh chemicals. Instead of repeatedly buying plastic bottles, you just use tablets, making it an easy way to cut down on waste at home. Blueland is a certified B Corp and Leaping Bunny Cruelty Free certified. Their formulas are EPA Safer Choice certified and many products have also earned Cradle to Cradle's Gold Material Health Certificate. Make the switch today. Get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.comprx that's blueland.comprx all new

[Ethan Cross]

drinks are now at McDonald's with refreshers like the Strawberry Watermelon Refresher and the Mango Pineapple Refresher with Popping Boba to crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire six? All new drinks are here now at McDonald's.

[Podcast Announcer]

Refreshers contain caffeine hello proxy people. Thank you for being patient while the team works on new cases for the fall. And an especially big thank you to our paid members for giving us the time, money and space to do that. A reminder that you should come hang out with us on Zoom tomorrow. We're having another proxy processing session on Wednesday, July 22nd at 6pm Eastern Time. We'll process the spring season, share any editorial and financial secrets, answer your questions and play a dumb game. These Zoom hangs have been really fun. It can get lonely in my recording booth feeling like I'm podcasting into the void, so it's really cool for me to interact with actual humans on the other end I'll send the Zoom link in an email Wednesday morning. And for everyone who isn't a paid member yet but wants to join us, you still can just go to proxyhq.org okay, today we have an episode about a not so niche emotional conundrum getting stuck in negative mental chatter. When I tell people I don't have a loud inner voice, people usually go, that sounds nice, like I'm peacefully present in the moment, free from an inner critic committing violence 24 7. But nope, that would be too convenient. Unfortunately, I get the worst of both worlds. I don't get the benefit of a running monologue that's constantly turning experience into coherent narrative. And I still get that negative noise. It happened yesterday. I was hanging out with friends and feeling a bit shy and awkward after weeks of cranking away alone on this podcast and and then the voice started up and I started to tunnel into myself and disengage from the actual conversation. Am I not talking enough? Am I chewing too loudly? Am I failing to be fun and interesting after weeks of not doing anything fun and interesting? Psychologist Ethan Cross has a name for this kind of chatter. It's when we turn inward to work through a problem and but instead of making progress, we get stuck in a repetitive thought loop that keeps the negative feelings alive. Ethan is a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of the Voice in Our why It Matters and How to Harness it. And he's the guest on today's episode from our friends at A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of big changes. On the show, cognitive scientist Maya Shankar brings warmth, curiosity, and scientific insight to conversations about how people navigate life's unexpected turns. And in this episode, Maya and Ethan talk about one tool we can harness to help us navigate those turns. Our inner voice. And Ethan shares some practical science based ways to stop our chatter from trapping us inside our problems. You can find more episodes of A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts. Here's Maya Shankar.

[Ethan Cross]

Just last night we were at the dinner table and one of my two daughters was telling me about a problem that she experienced with another person at school. It was really bugging her the way this other student behaved towards her and she kept on going over the problem, repeating it 17,000 different ways and she wasn't making any progress towards actually finding a way to think about this thing that would make her feel better and instead it just kept all of those negative feelings alive. That's what I call chatter. You keep on Trying to think and work through the problem, but you don't make any progress.

[Maya Shankar]

Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and he wrote the book the Voice in Our why It Matters and How to Harness It. Ethan's an expert on the science of introspection, and his research focuses on those moments when our inner voice turns negative. And he gives us strategies for how to tame it when it does.

[Ethan Cross]

One of the things we know about chatter is it zooms us in on our problems. We get stuck thinking in a very narrow way about only this issue, right? We're not thinking about the bigger picture or alternative ways of making sense of that circumstance. And what we've learned over the years is that being able to step back, just take a little step back in your mind, get some psychological distance from your problems, can be really useful for broadening our perspective and helping us work through the situation more objectively.

[Maya Shankar]

On today's episode, how to control our inner voice to help us live happier, healthier lives. I'm Maya Shankar, and this is a slight change of plans. A show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. We're all familiar with our inner voice. It's that running monologue in our heads that sort of sometimes serves us well and at other times, like was the case with Ethan's daughter, totally drives us nuts. And when it does, it can really affect our well being. The good news science shows we can change the way we engage with our inner voice. And Ethan is here to help. But before we dive into all that, I asked Ethan to give us an overview of the positive aspects of this uniquely human ability.

[Ethan Cross]

I like to think about this inner voice as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us achieve a number of important things. So at the most basic end of the spectrum, your inner voice lets you just keep information active in your head. This may not be the most glamorous feature of it, but my, oh my, is it an important one. So if you go to the grocery store, for example, and you're like me, you know, my wife tells me what we need, and 30 seconds later, I forget what those things things are. I'm walking down the grocery aisle, Then I'm thinking to myself, what do I have to order? And I go over the list in my head. Cheese, granola fruit. I'm using words silently to repeat those items. It's part of our working memory system, basic system of the human mind that is fundamental to our ability to navigate the world. So your inner Voice lets you do that, but then it lets you do lots of other, arguably, I don't know, sexier things like tell stories. Right. So we experience adversity in our lives. Oh, my God. My paper was rejected. My kid didn't do well on the soccer field. I didn't have a great conversation with a colleague yesterday. When that happens, we turn our attention inward to make sense of what happened to us, and we use our inner voice to create those stories. That's a really important capacity.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. And I love another one you mentioned in your book, which is that our inability to escape our minds is also a driver of human ingenuity. It's like the fact that we can't escape our minds is giving us this fertile soil for creative ideas to come into existence. Right. I mean, those. The thoughts you have in the shower and you're taking a walk and you don't even notice it, but your mind is drifting off and then all of a sudden you come up with a new idea.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think this is the source of human innovation, which is why I think we actually want to give ourselves latitude to let our introspective capacities run wild. So it's interesting, there's some research which suggests that we spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not focused on the present. And sometimes those data are used to suggest that there's a huge problem. Right. Because we should always be in the present. But this ability to travel in time in our minds, so to turn our attention inward and think about our past and anticipate the future, this lets us do a number of remarkable things.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. So let's dig in. Right. To this, this live in the present more mantra. Right. That is very much in the zeitgeist. I want to hear what your reaction is to this because it strikes me that we are. We are forgetting the benefits of allowing our minds to wander. And my personal view is that we are failing to appreciate how remarkable it is that we even have this ability in the first place. So just a personal anecdote is I remember my good friend from college, Dane, he got onto the mindfulness meditation present mindedness train, and he got really enamored with this particular spiritual guru. I remember Dane telling me, oh, yeah, Maya, like, you gotta stay more in the present. And he sends me a video of this guru. And the guru's going on and on about the importance of staying in the present. And then at one point he calls out a member of the audience and he kind of gives, like him a stern lecture. And he's like, what have you found yourself thinking about? And the guy's like, well, actually, I was kind of imagining that I was gonna go to lunch after this, and I was kind of imagining what I was gonna order at the restaurant and what it was gonna taste like. And, you know, he gets. The audience member gets scolded by the guru for having these thoughts. And I'm thinking to myself, first of all, this guru is very boring to me. So it's wonderful that this audience member had an escape route from the lecture that was happening. But two, it's amazing that we have this faculty that allows us at times to escape our present environment and think about other things, to daydream, to think about the future, to anticipate things like that is a rich part of the human experience that I don't want to be lost on people. And so I think reframing our relationship with our inner monologue chatter, it can be, in the long term, a productive way of actually solving some of the challenges that accompany the inner voice.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, I totally agree. You know, I used the title Harness Our Inner Voice for the title for the book, the subtitle. I didn't say silence. And that was a very strategic decision. A lot of people that I speak to when we're talking about the inner voice run amok, which is essentially chatter. When you're getting stuck in those thought loops that you can't escape, and they are, for lack of a better term, driving you nuts. They're so oppressive and stifling and really not fun. So many people ask me, okay, what can I do to get rid of it? I just want to shut it up. I don't want to have an inner voice. And there's a story I tell in the book. It's one of my favorite stories. It's of a woman named Jill Bull Taylor, who was a Harvard neuroanatomist working at the very top of her game. And like so many of us, she experienced chatter from time to time. And she thought this same thing to herself. She would ask, how can I silence this inner voice? And she got an answer to that question one morning when she was exercising on a treadmill. But because she suffered a stroke that temporarily wiped out her ability to use language not only to communicate with other people, but also with herselves. And initially, she described this experience as, wait for it. Strangely euphoric. Now, that's remarkable to me, right? She's just had a massive stroke. It's targeted language centers in her brain. She cannot speak to other people. Or to herself. And what's the emotion? Relief. Because all the chatter is gone. All that chatter that was weighing her down. But as the days and weeks went on, she began to describe this experience as quite debilitating, because although the chatter was gone, so were all of the good things that her inner voice allowed her to do, like plan for the future and control herself and create stories and keep things in mind and so.

[Maya Shankar]

And improve as a person. By the way, like, the negative chatter is productive. It's very helpful. Helpful. It's data to ourselves about how we can become better people. Right. And take feedback in and work at

[Ethan Cross]

things that touches on another, I think, important reframe for listeners, which is we often strive to lead lives free of negative emotions. But in fact, all emotions are useful when experienced in small doses. When I experience a small ping of anxiety before a big presentation, that's really, really a useful response because what it does is it says, hey, start preparing, and don't just walk in there and think you could wing it. There have been a few occasions where I haven't experienced any emotion before a presentation. Those presentations actually didn't turn out as well as the ones that I was a little bit on edge for. And the same is true for all of the negative emotions we experience. What makes them useful is what makes. Is that they are painful. They do draw our attention in. You just don't want to bathe in them endlessly. That's when they become counterproductive.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. So with that in mind, let's get into the kind of the darker sides of this ability. As we've discussed, so much of our lived experience is the thoughts that are happening in our heads. And so it's important for us to learn how to better manage those thoughts. Right. To better manage that monologue. And this is especially true because another thing you point out in your book is that our inner voice is more predictive of our happiness than what we're actually doing. And, man, is this gonna be salient for so many people who are listening. Like, I'm on the luxury vacation, I'm on the beach. I'm supposed to be having the time of my life, and yet I'm anxious about something that's happening back home. And my mind is not even present and fully sabotages what's otherwise supposed to be a great experience. When does our inner voice become harmful and transform into what you call chatter?

[Ethan Cross]

So it becomes harmful when we experience something in our life that cues us to try to use this tool that we have to make sense of our Feelings, but the tool gets jammed up, so something bad happens. We turn our attention inward to try to make sense of the problem, but we get stuck in a negative thought loop. That's what I call chatter. You keep on trying to think and work through the problem, but you don't make any progress. And there are lots of different terms that scientists have used to describe this state. If it's chatter about the past, we tend to call that ruminating. If it's about the future or present, we call that worrying. Sometimes we call it perseverating. But the common idea here is you're trying to make sense of a problem with language, but you're not making any forward progress. It's kind of like the visual is one of a hamster on an exercise wheel.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Hmm.

[Maya Shankar]

We fall prey to this illusion when we're actively repeating those loops in our mind, that we are actually making progress because just merely indulging in that topic. Right. Like staying in that space, I think it fools our brains into thinking, ah, I am in fact advancing, because look at how much airtime this topic is getting in my mind. And then only maybe hours later do you realize, oh, crap, I'm in exactly the same position that I was in at the beginning. But I've been seduced by that. This feeling of, oh, you know, I'm going to be able to resolve it if I just kind of keep it marinating in there and then without really sophisticated strategies like from cognitive behavioral therapy and whatnot. You know, oftentimes it's not that productive.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, and think about how much experience you have succeeding in the usage of this tool. Like, most of the time, this tool, this ability to use language to think analytically about a problem, it serves you really, really well. I mean, this is undoubtedly why you have been able to achieve the things that you have accomplished in your life. And the same is true for so many other people. So you've got this tool that often works really well.

[Maya Shankar]

Really well.

[Ethan Cross]

It should work here. It's not working. I don't give up. I'm gonna keep going. And so that's when you really need this ability to step back, if you will, and just recognize, wait, this approach isn't working. Let me shift perspective or do any number of other things to help reconcile the situation. So it's something that we all fall victim to at times.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. Can you say more about how that inner monologue can lead us astray in these moments or what the negative consequences can be?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, happy to. So when the inner voice morphs into chatter, it sinks us in three domains of life that I think are three domains that we care a lot about and really make life worth living. And that's why I think it's such a huge problem. First, chatter consumes our attention to the point where we have very little left over to focus on other things. And so the example I like to give people is to think about a time when you're worried about something, you're ruminating, and you sit down and try to read a couple of pages in a book or a magazine, and you read the pages, you are sure, like, under oath, you would swear that the information has passed your gaze, but. But you don't remember anything that you have read. It is an incredibly common experience. And the idea is very, very simple. We only have so much attention if all of it is being consumed by your chatter. That means not much is left over to do your job. Not a good thing. We also know that chatter can undo our habits. And the way this works is like, what is a habit? A habit is a complex set of behaviors that are strung together through repeated practice. So when I get up on stage to give a presentation, I've given hundreds and hundreds of talks. I've learned to do things without thinking, like to move my hands in particular ways and vary my vocal tone and smile and look at different people in the audience. If I start to worry about what I'm doing, oh, my God, am I giving a good presentation? What happens is I zoom in on all the individual behaviors. Am I smiling enough? Am I using the stage appropriately? And once you start doing that, the whole script explodes, the behavior explodes, and you don't do well. And we saw this happen on the grandest stage in the Olympics when Simone Biles dropped out because of what she called the twisties. The twisties are another name for chatter. Sometimes they're called the yips. And if you think about Simone's situation, I think it really highlights just how toxic this can be. Here you have someone who is on the peak. You know, she's at the peak of her career on the grandest stage, and

[Maya Shankar]

she appropriately like the best in human history as well.

[Ethan Cross]

Best in human history. And she has to drop out, appropriately, because it was dangerous. And so that's what chatter can do to us when it comes to our individual performance. If we shift to the second domain, we know that chatter undermines our relationships. It can create friction. And there are a couple of ways that works too. One thing that chatter can do is it can push other people who care about us away. And Here the idea is you've got a problem and you're motivated to share it with other people for a variety of reasons. You want to get support, but what happens is you talk to the other person about the problem and then you keep talking about it over and over and over and over again. And for most of us, there's only so much we can listen to before we ourselves start to get brought down. And so that's one of the ways that chatter can alienate us from others, lead us to feel socially rejected and alone. These are not healthy states. Boy, I'm getting depressed just talking about this, Maya. But let me quickly just mention the final domain, which is our physical health that I think is really important to highlight. Many people think that experience stress, like stress kills. This is a very popular idea. It turns out that is not exactly correct. What we know is that the ability to experience a stress response is an amazingly useful biological reaction to confronting threat. It is really useful to know that if we see a threat in our world, we have a system that is designed to get us to approach or avoid it in a split second. What makes stress toxic is when the stress response goes up and remains chronically elevated over time, over days, over weeks. That's what chatter does because we experience a threat in our world and then we keep replaying it in our mind, sometimes even making it worse. And that keeps the whole stress machinery going in ways that lead stress to predict things like cardiovascular disease and certain forms of cancer and other unpleasant physical states to talk about. So thinking, performing, relationships, health, chatter wraps its tentacles around all of those domains. And it's why I think it's one of the big problems we face.

[Maya Shankar]

I promise, hope is on the way. Don't worry. When we return, Ethan will give us some science based strategies to help us harness our inner voice. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans.

[Podcast Announcer]

Try Hard, the podcast about embracing cringe is back. This season, host Alex Sujong Laughlin is diving into try hard moments. The big decisions, pivots and leaps of faith that come to define our lives. Like the OG lifestyle influencer who left her YouTube career behind. An author who chose to write the book he wanted to write instead of the one his editors wanted. And a fancy pants business consultant who stepped off the career treadmill to do something radically different. Each of these episodes digs into the powerful stories we tell about ourselves. And what every guest has in common is that they ask themselves the same question. What if I told a different story? Listen to Try Hard from defector Media and Radiotopia, wherever you get your podcasts or you can watch this season, they're publishing video episodes, too. Check out Defector Media's YouTube channel. And yeah, to be cringe is to be free.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay, so we need some hope. Ethan, you gotta help us out here. All right. I'd love to do a deep dive in some of the strategies we can use for better managing our chatter.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So just to give everyone a framework for thinking about these tools and also being hopeful for managing their chatter, I want to be super clear. There are lots and lots of tools that exist for managing our chatter. And so when I think about the potential that is out there, there is a lot of it. So where do you find these tools? You could think of them as falling into three different domains or buckets. Things you could do on your own. Relationship tools, ways of talking or interacting with other people that can be helpful. And then what I call environmental or physical tools out there in the world. If we start with the first category, things you could do on your own, one of the things we know about chatter is it zooms us in on our problems. We get stuck thinking in a very narrow way about only this issue. Right. We're not thinking about the bigger picture or alternative ways of making sense of that circumstance. And what we've learned over the years is that being able to step back, just take a little step back in your mind, get some psychological distance from your problems, can be really useful for broadening our perspective and helping us work through the situation more objectively. One of the findings that my colleagues and I found several years ago that I always come back to is this. We are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are following our own advice. I find this really remarkable. A friend or a loved one who is struggling with the same problem that you might have experienced at some point when they come to the point.

[Maya Shankar]

Sorry to interrupt you. I just want to clarify because I think, is it about, we're better at giving advice to other people than following our own, or we're better at giving advice to others than we are at giving advice to ourselves?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, I would say giving advice to others, we're better at doing that than following our own advice.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. Because it also seems like we sometimes give ourselves bad advice as well when it's the first person thing, because emotions cloud our judgments and all that.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, you know, I would say it's probably both, actually.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Okay.

[Ethan Cross]

So we give better. We give ourselves often poorer advice, and we have trouble following the more effective pieces when we Think about them. And it's a pretty pervasive phenomenon. And what we've learned is that there are lots of different psychological tools people can use to shift their perspective and get them to think about their problems like they were weighing in on someone else's problems. And when you do that, you often find less chatter, more objective thinking, what we might even call wiser reasoning about issues that we're facing. I'll tell you about two of my favorites, which are also happen to be two tools that I use myself. If I experience shatter, they're my first lines of defense.

[Maya Shankar]

I love it.

[Ethan Cross]

The first one is maybe counterintuitive to folks. What it involves doing is trying to coach yourself through a problem using your own name or the second person pronoun, you. So if I'm really upset about something and spinning. All right, Ethan, here's what you're going to do. Here's how you're going to manage the situation. I'm basically talking to myself like I would speak to another person.

[Maya Shankar]

Right?

[Ethan Cross]

The second person pronoun you. This is a part of speech that we almost exclusively use when we think about and refer to other people. That shifts your perspective. It puts you into this different mode of thinking about your problems. It's like you're giving advice to your best friend. And when you're in that. In that mode of advice, giving you come up with much better solutions to your problems. So that's a really simple thing that people can do to switch their perspectives. And that's the first thing that I'll do. Another distancing tool that is really easy and works for many situations is something that we call temporal distancing, or thinking about how you're going to feel about something that's causing you chatter right now. How are you going to feel about this a week from now or a month from now, or a year from now? Right. You could stretch out the time window as much as you want. What engaging in that little mental time travel exercise does for us is it often makes clear that whatever we're dealing with, as awful as it is, it will eventually fade. Because most of the trials and tribulations we experience do eventually fade with time. And that gives us hope, which is really useful for managing chatter. This is actually what I do when I wake up on occasion at 2am and am gripped. Oh my God, why did I send that email? And what are they gonna think? Did they? So I will just remind myself, ethan, you're gonna feel better about this in six hours.

[Maya Shankar]

I'm hearing you say that, and I'm thinking to myself that in my most anxious moments, if you had asked me, how are you gonna feel about this in six months or five years or 10 years, I would have said, I'm gonna feel exactly the Ethan. And so what's occurring to me in this moment is that potentially another helpful thought experiment is to think about past experiences where we felt a certain way and were absolutely convinced that that was gonna be an immutable state of the world. But looking back, we now know we no longer feel that same way about it today.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, you got me before I could do mental time travel, the Marty McFly way in the past. Completely agree. Right. So that's the second piece of it, which is. So if you think about COVID as a great ex. Example of this. Right. So Covid, things are, on the whole, I think, getting better, but we don't know when the end is going to happen. So going into the future is somewhat murky. So what we can also do exactly as you're describing is we can go into the past. And this is what I do. This is how I use mental time travel for dealing with COVID I'll think about the Spanish flu pandemic of 19. I think it was 1918. That was really bad, and we got through it. Sometimes, though, that doesn't even take the edge off. So then I'll go back further in time. I'll think about the bubonic plague that decimated Europe. Right. Like, that was much, much worse than this went on for a really long period. But we got through it. We are still standing. So that shows you the flexibility through which you can use mental time travel to help yourself.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, I'm just remembering how there was this thing that I was worrying about in my early 20s, and I was imposing a lot of negativity on my brother, who was on the receiving end of all this anxiety, to your earlier point. And I remember him saying, I promise you, this is not gonna be a topic you're worried about in 10 years. And I was absolutely resolute in my convictions that it was going to be something that I continue to worry about. And, you know, older brother wiser than me. He's right. I no longer am worried about this issue. And I keep that in my mind often as a personal anecdote of how I engaged in bad cognitive forecasting. I was wrong about myself and my own ability to be able to move on from certain challenges or anxieties. And I think it's helpful, potentially helpful for listeners to identify, you know, there's the Spanish flu, which is like the global thing. But, you know, we all have some element of narcissism in us that leads us to want to know that. Or actually narcissism is the wrong word here. I think we, we can feel sometimes like society might be able to deal with this, but I, Maya, won't be able to because I'm not as cognitively strong as other people. And so I think it can be helpful to just find even one instance, one case study from your own life where you did actually exit a state of mental chatter successfully and think differently about it so that you can hold onto. Because it helps me in present day moments where I'm like, no, I'm still gonna be worried about this thing now in 10 years. And I'm like, eh, you were wrong about this at least once.

[Ethan Cross]

You've actually touched on something that is, I think, another message of hope for listeners, which is there's a lot of research which shows that as we get older, we actually get happier, barring negative health conditions. And one of the explanations for why that happens is we're learning how to regulate ourselves better. And part of how that works is we're learning from our experiences. And I think this is exactly what you've described. When you're younger, you don't have the same quantity of experiences. You don't know that you're not going to be worried about this 10 years later because you may not have been around for that long. And so I think we accrue that wisdom with age. And what's exciting about some of these tools is they have the potential to give us that insight without having to wait to be 40, 60, 70 years old so we can have the insight that, oh wait, it will get better with time without having to just wait the whole stretch of time for that to happen. So really valuable exercise for folks to think about.

[Maya Shankar]

I love this concept of what you call the universal you. This is related to the idea of referring to ourselves in the third person, but it's slightly different in terms of how it's implemented. So can you just share more about the universal you?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, I love this research. What we noticed is that sometimes when people are trying to make sense of really difficult, chatter provoking situations in their life, they do something that is very odd linguistically if you actually stop and think about it. They talk about their own experiences using the word you, but not to refer to another person, but to refer to the world in general. So let me give you a concrete example, Sheryl Sandberg, as Many listeners know Tragically lost her husband while they were on vacation several years ago, and she went in mourning. And when she came out of mourning several weeks later after the loss, she wrote a really emotional post on her Facebook page in which she described what she was going through. And she said something to the effect of, when you lose someone you love, you just don't know what to do. Your heart jumps out from your skin. The idea was she was talking about her own deeply personal experience using a word, you. That is the verbal equivalent of talking about the world in general. She's essentially saying, when anyone loses their husband, anyone would be devastated. Right. And what that does for us is it gives us a little bit of distance from our problems. Right. Because it's saying, it's not just me. This is anyone who's dealing with it. And what we've learned through lots of science is that this can be an effective tool for helping people. People make meaning out of negative experiences. It helps them normalize what they're going through, get some space from their experience. And it also does something that I just find so cool. It draws other people into our world. Because if I'm saying anyone and everyone would experience, guess what? You, the person I'm speaking to, you are part of anyone and everyone. So it enhances the resonance that people have, people who are listening with our ideas, and is really a useful tool in all of those ways.

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, I love that. Yeah. I love how inclusive the language is. You're participating with the person who's in distress, let's say, because you can empathize with them. And you're also like, hey, I probably have a few lessons I can learn from this, because it might just be a matter of time before a similar situation hits my life or strikes me totally. So I think that leads to your next kind of pillar of strategies, and that is around relationships and how we can engage with others when we're in the middle of the angst of mental chatter.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So other people are an incredible potential tool that we have at our disposal for helping us manage our chatter, but they can also be a huge liability. And this is why I really like talking about the science that governs how all this works. Because what we know about chatter is that with a few exceptions, you know, if you're experiencing chatter about shame or certain forms of trauma, you're not going to be that motivated, usually, to talk about it with other people. But for all the other kinds of chatter that we experience, chatter about anger and anxiety and depression, we're often highly Motivated to talk to other people about it. But many people think that the route to getting good support from other people is to just find someone to vent our emotions, to just let it out, express, unload. And there's been a lot of research on venting over the years. And what we know is that on the one hand, venting can be useful for strengthening the friendship bonds between two individuals. It feels good to know that there's someone out there who is willing to take the time to listen to us and spend time learning about our lives. But if all you do is vent about a problem, it just keeps the fire burning inside because you're just rehearsing all of the things that are driving you nuts. The key to getting good support for a chatter involves doing two things. Finding a person who will take the time to hear you out, to learn about your situation, to empathize. But at a certain point in the conversation, and they start trying to help you broaden your perspective. Right? To do what we just talked about. We're capable of doing it on our own, broadening our perspective. But other people are often in a prime position to help us see that bigger picture because the problem's not happening to them. That's the formula for getting good chatter support. Someone who listens, connects, but then helps broaden. Now, there is one critically important caveat to this whole equation, which is there is an art to doing this well. And the reason I say there's an art to doing this well is depending on the person and the situation, it's not always clear when to transition from just listening to start providing advice. And so sometimes, sometimes my wife will come to me with a problem, and, you know, she'll start unloading, and I'm there. I'm receptive, I'm empathic. And then at a certain point, this sounds off. I totally get it. I have a piece of advice. Can I offer you? And sometimes she'll just pause and say, no, I'm not done. Just listen. And then she keeps going and going, and it's okay. At other times, she'll be like, yes, please tell me. Tell me what to do. That's why I'm talking. So you want to be gentle as you feel that out. That is the art involved in all of this.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. No, I relished this part of your book because I think we are living in a time where everyone is being encouraged to vocalize all of the things that are happening in their minds. Right? It's like, oh, that's the definition of vulnerability. That's the but, but pointing out that it can be counterproductive. And pointing out that when you come to someone and you're venting to them and you presume in this situation the person cares about you, they will be more focused on satisfying your emotional needs first and your cognitive needs second. Right? The practical solutions side of things that will actually lead to long term growth and mental progress. You and I are familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy and some of the techniques, but I want to give some color to what it means to go from emotional. We all know what emotional mode feels like. That is very intuitive. What does cognitive mode feel like?

[Ethan Cross]

Cognitive mode is broadening your perspective. Let's put this in context. Let's think about the bigger picture. Cognitive mode is sharing information that can be useful for helping the person deal with the problem at hand, like instrumental information. So, hey, I was in this situation, exactly this situation. And here's how I dealt with it. Cognitive mode is pointing out sometimes the blind spots that may exist that are governing people's emotional reactions. But it is important that you want to strike the balance, right? If you just. So what are the hazards? What if we just skipped emotion mode altogether? That often comes across as patronizing and uncaring. And so you want to strike that appropriate, that appropriate balance. So what I love about this science is there's like a double whammy benefit. It provides people, on the one hand, knowing about how this works, it allows people to be much more deliberate about who they call when they're struggling with chatter. So there are many people who I'm really, really close to. I'm related to some of them. I don't call them about my chatter. There's no ill intention on their part, but they're just not skilled at helping me shift from emotion to cognitive mode. There are a couple of people I know who are good at this. And you know, what I've experienced happening in my own life with this little board that I've put together is people know when they're on that board and they actually value it. Like they feel privileged. Not because it's like, oh, Ethan put you on the board. It's actually what it's communicating is that. But I really value you as a friend and life advisor. That's who I rely on. And it's really effective. So that's one benefit. The other benefit is when someone comes to me with their chatter, I've got a playbook. I know what to do to help effectively coach them through that situation. And so it's useful on both sides of the Equation.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. What's striking me in this moment is that we can do a service to the people that we choose to vent to by giving, by almost engaging in a pre commitment of sorts, which is at the outset of the conversation, say, I'm really upset about this situation and I'm going to tell you all about it, but I want you to know I really do want some reframing strategies so I can think differently about the situation. And this serves two benefits, right. One, it's signaling to the person that you're engaging with, maybe who you're training to enter that board of advisors to know that it is appropriate at some point to make that pivot. And before you get too into the heat of the moment, as you're replaying the negative episode, you're mentally committing to the fact that you do want to leave the conversation with some degree of enlightenment about your situation in terms of bigger picture, broad context, maybe things that you misinterpreted totally. All right, so let's move into the environment and these seemingly subtle aspects of our environment that can actually have a profound impact on the mental chatter.

[Ethan Cross]

Sure. So one of the things we've learned over the years is that nature or exposing ourselves to green spaces can provide us with a tool to manage our chatter. And I love this work. And it's actually, it's changed the way I live my life. And this does not mean I've like, you know, become one with nature for

[Maya Shankar]

those who can't see him. Ethan's actually taking this interview from the jungle, but it's excellent audio quality.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. So the way this research has changed my life is I actually go to work a different way each day. I take a slightly longer walk to work, which is a walk down a tree lined path rather than a walk down the streets of Ann Arbor. And the reason I do this is what we know about nature is this nature provides an opportunity to restore that precious attention we have that our chatter depletes. And, and the way this works is when you're going for a walk in a natural setting, there are all these interesting things around us that we become fascinated by. So our attention gently drifts on those surroundings. And when it gently drifts and is captured by our surroundings, that allows our attentional resources to restore and they often can be really useful for managing our chatter. So that's one way it helps. The other thing that nature does is something that, that I find just beautiful, which is nature gives us the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe. And awe is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, like a beautiful sunset. Or I go for the walk in the arboretum right by my house, and I see these trees that have been here for literally hundreds of years, and I think, how do I even contemplate? I'm just struggling to get through my 40s, you know, pandemic and backaches and hundreds of years these trees have survived. That fills me with awe. When you are contemplating something vast and indescribable, you feel smaller by comparison. And when you feel smaller, so do your worries and ruminations. So awe is this powerful experience that really is. In some ways, it's like the ultimate perspective broadener, the way of putting ourselves in. We're a speck in this much broader, beautiful universe that is out there. There's so many different ways that you can get a healthy amount of distance from your problems. And drawing on that set of skills, I think can be helpful for allowing people to skillfully manage their channel.

[Maya Shankar]

Hey, thanks for listening. On next week's episode, we'll hear from Scott Menke. When Scott was a contestant on the game show Jeopardy, he was surprised when the audience responded not just to his performance, but to who he was as a person.

[Ethan Cross]

One of the first comments that I remember seeing was this person saying, I really like Scott's demeanor on the show. I didn't expect that reaction. It seemed to be like they liked who I was and they thought I seemed like a nice person and a good, good hang or whatever.

[Maya Shankar]

A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Emily Rostek, our producer, and fashion fact checker Jen Guerra, our senior editor, Ben Tolliday, our sound Engineer, and Mia LaBelle, our executive producer. Luis Guerra wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, including Nicole Marano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Fane, and Carly Migliori. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lynn. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at drmayashankar.

[Ethan Cross]

I could have a person come to me and say, hey, I experience chatter here. What should I do? Tell me exactly which tools to use and to what degree I should be using them.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

What?

[Ethan Cross]

I cannot give that prescription. The six tools that I use to manage my chatter may be very different from the 17 that you use or the three or four.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay, I see how you feel. Even my chatter can run laps around your chatter. Okay. And I'm proud of that.

[Ethan Cross]

Radiotopia from prx.

[Podcast Announcer]

All right. I want to tell you about a podcast I think you will like. It's called what it's like to Be from author Dan Heath. In every episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession, a long haul trucker, a brain surgeon, a professional Santa Claus. And he asks what it's like to do what they do. What it's like to be a funeral director, to do the hair and makeup for a dead person. Is a Secret Service agent supposed to pretend like they're not there when they're around the president? What is the scariest thing an airline pilot can hear in the cockpit? If you're curious about what other people do in their jobs, check it out. What it's like to be wherever you get your podcasts.