How to Train Your Inner Critic, With Psychologist Ethan Cross
Have you ever fallen into a spiral of worry while thinking about what is bothering you? Have you ever reproduced this awkward conversation or fight with your partner over and over again?
If you’ve ever struggled with any of these things, you’ll appreciate that this week we’re learning to better control that voice in our head with the help of psychologist Ethan Cross. Listen to this week’s update release to find out why speaking out to a trusted friend isn’t always the most rewarding way to solve problems, and how we can use language and other distancing tools to better understand our problems.
Ethan is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business and one of the world’s leading experts on mind control. His book is called Chatter: The Voice in Our Heads, Why It Matters, and How to Use It .
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Ethan Cross:
About what chatter is and why it’s a problem:
I think the first thing to be clear is that chatter is not just negative self-talk. When I talk to people about this topic, many people say, “Well, how can I stop being negative about myself?” The ability to be critical at certain points is really helpful. For example, if I fail an interview or presentation, it’s good for me to be able to say, “Oops! You ruined everything. Here’s what went wrong. ” What is chatter is when we get stuck in a loop. So I screwed up, “My God, what should I do? What if this happens? “And then this and the next thing you know, you’re fired or have cancer, right?” So you’re stuck on that hamster wheel. We take something negative, you are very narrowly approaching only the negative of it.
On how temporary distancing can help reduce chatter:
[Right] before we logged in, I had two children who systematically took apart their mother’s closet in an attempt to find something green to wear on St. Patrick’s Day, and screamed all over the place. “I’m hosting a podcast!” Well, do you know what to do? I might have thought, “Well, in four months I’ll get the vaccine. I have to go back to work and, you know, not have all this hustle and bustle at home … ”What this means, transferring me to the future is distancing. It makes me wake up to the big picture. What I am going through now is terrible. But you know what? This is temporary. It will end. This gives me hope. And hope is a balm for chatter.
On how talking to ourselves in the third person can help us cope with our reflections:
We learned that language can be a distancing tool. We usually use names when we think about how to relate to other people and what we have learned to do – it’s like a linguistic trick or a psychological trick in jujitsu – when we use our own name to think about ourselves, it changes our point of view. It makes us treat ourselves like we are talking to someone else, and it gives us distance, and that can be productive too.
For more helpful advice on how to suppress this disturbing, self-deprecating inner voice, we highly recommend listening to the entire episode.
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