501: Harness the Voice in Your Head with Ethan Kross
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Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
We speak an estimated 50,000 words to ourselves, in our head, every single day. That’s the same amount of information as you’d find in most paperback books. We have positive, negative, and instructive self talk; but for many of us, the negative takes center stage. It might be anxiety over an uncertain future or ruminations about regrets and pains from the past. Either way, when the voice in your head dominates, it’s very hard to get anything done, much less enjoy the process. My guest on this week’s show is a psychologist whose work is focused on understanding and helping us to harness what he calls, chatter.
Learn
- How to distance yourself from your inner dialogue
- How beauty, awe and experiences can get us out of our head
- The value of ritual
- Why venting with others doesn’t always help
Links
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ethan Kross is a doctor of psychology whose work focuses on controlling the conscious mind. He founded the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory in 2008, and his work has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and numerous other peer-reviewed journals. His book is called, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There are a number of things about the personal growth and development and mind-body wellness |
| 0:07.6 | community that drive me crazy and one of them is this emphasis on the monkey mind and the idea |
| 0:13.9 | that we can tame our monkey mind often through some type of intellectual exercise. As if the |
| 0:20.6 | chatter in our head were simply a lack of willpower, a lack of determination, a lack of, I don't know, |
| 0:27.4 | strategy or discipline and what I've found for myself is that so much of the time my inner |
| 0:33.6 | dialogue is really out of control and that might happen at 12 o'clock on a Wednesday that might |
| 0:39.3 | happen at 3 a.m. in the middle of the night but when that inner dialogue is out of control, |
| 0:45.5 | it's very difficult to get out of that self-talk. It's all different kinds of self-talk, |
| 0:50.5 | there's positive self-talk, don't have a lot of that one, there's instructive self-talk, |
| 0:54.4 | you know, reminder, listen, remembering how to go through different things you might be doing |
| 0:58.3 | in your life like a checklist for, I don't know, locking down your home or whatever it might be |
| 1:02.8 | and then there's the negative self-talk and that's usually focused on future anxiety, worries about |
| 1:07.5 | the economy, worries about health, worries about work or family and then rumination over the past |
| 1:12.9 | and this is one that spins a lot of us out. Maybe you made a decision that still haunts you, |
| 1:18.0 | maybe you missed an opportunity and you worry that it'll never come again. Maybe you missed someone |
| 1:23.7 | in your life that's gone and you can't get them back and you wonder what if and with all of your |
| 1:28.9 | best thinking you can't get out of that mess that that inner dialogue our guests on today's show |
| 1:35.7 | calls chatter and he has some really interesting strategies for breaking free from that chatter, |
| 1:41.0 | understanding your psychology, the adaptive nature of it in different ways to get around it. |
| 1:46.0 | If you're new here, it's the Lucas Rockwood show, I'm a yoga teacher, a teacher trainer, |
| 1:49.6 | I'm a serial entrepreneur, I'm a father, I have three kids, but first and foremost, |
| 1:53.2 | I'm a student, I like to learn things so I go out into the world and find people, medical doctors, |
... |
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