Do You Talk to Yourself? Here’s How to Harness Your Inner Voice | Ethan Kross | TED

0:04 So today, what I want to do is talk

0:06 to you about the most important conversations you have each day:

0:09 the conversations you have with yourselves.

0:11 My name is Ethan Kross.

0:13 I’m the director of the Emotion and Self

0:15 Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and for the past 25 years,

0:18 I've been studying how people can manage their emotions.

0:21 And one of the things that I've learned during that time— (Object drops) See?

0:25 I'm managing my emotions right now.

0:27 (Laughter) One of the things that I've learned

0:31 during that time is that a key to managing

0:34 one's emotions effectively involves understanding how to harness

0:37 this mysterious force called the voices inside our head.

0:42 Now I realize some of you may be asking yourself right now,

0:45 “What is a purported serious scientist doing talking

0:48 about a squishy topic like the voices inside

0:52 our head?" But I want to point out the elephant in the room— that, you know,

0:56 if you've just asked yourself that question, you are talking to yourself.

1:01 And that's totally OK,

1:03 because the vast majority of us have a voice inside our head.

1:07 Here's a scientific fact that I absolutely love.

1:10 We spend between one half and one-third

1:12 of our waking hours not focused on the present.

1:15 Between one half and one-third of the time, our minds, they are drifting away.

1:19 We are thinking about other things.

1:21 Some of you are doing that right now.

1:23 Please stop.

1:24 (Laughter) Once we find ourselves drifting away,

1:29 one of the things that we're doing is

1:31 talking to ourselves and listening to what we say.

1:35 Now when scientists like myself use the term “inner voice,” what we're talking

1:39 about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives.

1:42 And it turns out this is one of your superpowers,

1:45 because your inner voice lets you keep information

1:47 active in your head for short periods of time,

1:50 like when you go to the grocery store.

1:52 And if you're like me, 15 seconds into the expedition,

1:56 you forget what you’re supposed to buy, and you repeat that list in your head.

2:00 "Apples, cheese.

2:01 Pepto Bismol." TMI.

2:06 We also use our inner voice to simulate and plan,

2:09 like when we silently rehearse what we're going

2:11 to say before an important presentation or an interview.

2:15 And of course, we use our inner voice to control and motivate ourselves,

2:20 as I did just before I came on stage.

2:23 It's right around the corner, over there.

2:25 I silently said to myself, "Come on, man, you've got this.

2:29 Deep breath.

2:30 45 minutes, and you are done.” (Laughter) And of course,

2:34 all of you just said to yourself, "This guy thinks he's talking for 45 minutes.

2:38 He's nuts." (Laughter) Finally, perhaps most magically,

2:43 we use our inner voice to make sense of this messy world that we often live in.

2:50 When we experience challenges, we turn our attention inward,

2:53 and we try to work through them.

2:55 And our inner voice helps us create those stories that shape our sense of self,

3:00 stories that really craft our identity.

3:02 So your inner voice, this is a remarkable tool.

3:06 The problem is it is a tool that often jams up on us when we need it most.

3:12 We don't come up with clear solutions to our problems.

3:16 We get stuck in negative thought loops, instead.

3:18 We worry.

3:19 We ruminate.

3:20 We experience what I call the dark side of our inner voice: chatter.

3:25 How do you know if you're experiencing chatter?

3:27 If you ever find yourself trying to work

3:29 through a problem but not making any progress,

3:32 or if you find yourself berating yourself incessantly— "I'm an idiot,

3:37 such an idiot." Those are two telltale signs.

3:41 Now if this description of chatter resonates with any

3:43 of you here— I'm sure it does not.

3:46 But if it does, my response to you

3:49 is welcome to the human condition, my friends.

3:52 Chatter is a feature of it.

3:55 We all have the capacity to experience it at times.

3:59 It also happens to be one of the big problems we face as a species.

4:04 And I say this because, if you look at what chatter does to us,

4:08 it sinks us in three domains of life that I

4:10 would argue everyone here cares a great deal about.

4:14 One thing that chatter does,

4:15 it makes it really hard for us to think and perform.

4:18 If you've ever had the experience of sitting down to read a few pages in a book,

4:22 and under oath, you would swear to a judge

4:25 that you have read the words on the screen or page,

4:28 but you get to the end of the section, the chapter,

4:31 and you don't remember a damn thing that you've read,

4:33 you've experienced one way that chatter undermines us.

4:36 It consumes our attention, leaving very little left over to do the things

4:41 that we often want and need to do.

4:43 Chatter also creates friction in our relationships with other people,

4:46 because when we experience chatter,

4:49 we're often highly motivated to share its glory with those around us.

4:53 What I mean by that is we often want to talk about our chatter,

4:57 so we find someone to talk to, and then,

4:59 we keep on talking, over and over again.

5:03 This can have a really sad consequence

5:07 of pushing away people who genuinely care about us,

5:10 because there's only so much that they can

5:12 endure before we start to bring them down.

5:15 Then there's our health.

5:17 So chatter helps explain how stress gets

5:20 under our skin to impact our physical health,

5:22 because what it does is it prolongs our stress response.

5:26 And that creates a wear and tear in our body that is physically damaging,

5:31 predicts things like problems of cardiovascular disease,

5:34 inflammation, even certain forms of cancer.

5:37 Now when people hear about these findings,

5:39 the question they often ask me is: “How can I silence this inner voice?

5:42 Just shut it up." And I don’t think this is the best question to be asking.

5:48 Because your inner voice is a remarkable tool.

5:52 We don't want to get rid of that tool.

5:54 What we want to figure out is how to harness it.

5:56 And this is where the really, really good news comes into play.

6:00 This is precisely the question that scientists like myself

6:03 have been trying to answer for a few decades now,

6:06 and we have learned a lot about

6:08 the science-based tools that exist to do precisely this.

6:11 Now there are many tools out there.

6:13 I'm not going to tell you about each one,

6:15 because then we would go for 45 minutes.

6:17 But I do want to share with you three of my favorites.

6:20 And we're going to start with language.

6:22 Right before Malala Yousafzai became the youngest

6:25 person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize,

6:27 for advocating for the rights of young girls to receive an education,

6:31 She was invited onto "The Daily Show"

6:33 with Jon Stewart to talk about her experience.

6:36 At one point during the interview,

6:38 she begins to explain what went through her head when

6:42 she first discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her.

6:47 I want to present to you a quote right here,

6:49 of how she starts to talk about this experience.

6:52 “I used to think that the Talib would come and he

6:55 would just kill me...” Nothing particularly out of the ordinary here.

6:59 She's talking to herself in the first person,

7:01 the way we typically think about our lives.

7:04 But the moment she gets to this part of the experience, "The Taliban,

7:08 they're on my doorstep," "they're coming to get

7:11 me." It's what is arguably the climax,

7:13 the most stressful, chatter-provoking event you can imagine.

7:16 Once she gets to that part, she does something kind of strange.

7:21 I'm going to show you another quote, and I want you to look at what she says.

7:24 "I asked myself, 'What would you do, Malala?' Then I would reply to myself,

7:28 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said,

7:32 'If you hit a Talib with your shoe,

7:34 then there would be no difference between you

7:36 and the Talib.’” So she starts off in the first person, but then she switches.

7:40 She's coaching herself.

7:41 She's giving herself advice like she would someone else,

7:45 using her name and the word "you." In this instance,

7:49 what Malala is doing, she's using a tool that we have studied.

7:52 It is called "distanced self-talk," and it

7:55 is useful because we human beings are much,

7:58 much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice.

8:04 So if you've ever felt like a giant hypocrite,

8:06 once again, welcome to the human condition.

8:08 There's even a name for this phenomenon.

8:11 It's called Solomon's paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon,

8:15 who was famous for being able to give great advice to other people,

8:19 but when it came to his own affairs, he stumbled mightily.

8:22 Using your own name and "you" shifts your perspective.

8:25 It gets you to relate to yourself like you were giving advice to someone else,

8:29 and that makes it much, much easier for us to wisely work through our problems.

8:34 Another tool you can use to manage your chatter is other people.

8:38 But you have to be really careful about who you go to for chatter support.

8:43 Many people think that the best way to help

8:46 someone else is to let them vent their emotions,

8:50 but venting doesn't help us work through our chatter.

8:53 I want to repeat that again, because it's a really important take-home.

8:56 Venting doesn't help us work through our chatter.

8:59 Venting is really useful for strengthening

9:02 the friendship and relational bonds between people.

9:05 It is good to know that someone's there,

9:07 they're willing to take the time to listen and empathize with you.

9:11 But if all you do is vent about a problem, you leave that conversation,

9:15 you feel great about the person you just spoke to, but the chatter

9:18 is still churning because you haven't done anything to actually address it.

9:22 The best kinds of conversations with other people do two things.

9:26 One, the person you're talking to does let you express your emotions.

9:30 It is important for them to empathize

9:32 with you and validate what you're going through.

9:34 But then, once you've had an opportunity to share your feelings,

9:38 they ideally start working with you to broaden your perspective.

9:42 They're in an ideal position to help you

9:44 do that, because the problem isn't happening to them.

9:47 So think really carefully about who your chatter advisors are.

9:50 They should be people who both listen and advise.

9:54 That brings me to my third and final tool that I want to share with you.

9:57 It's my favorite.

9:59 It's experiencing awe.

10:02 About 10 years ago, scientists at Berkeley tracked a group of military

10:06 veterans and first responders as they paddled down Utah's majestic Green River.

10:11 They measured participants' levels of PTSD and stress,

10:15 mental states that are infused with chatter,

10:18 both before and after the rafting trip.

10:21 Not surprisingly, they found that most of the participants,

10:24 their stress and PTSD levels declined

10:26 from the beginning to the end of the experiment.

10:29 But what was surprising was the factor

10:32 that predicted those declines in PTSD and stress.

10:36 It was participants' experience of awe.

10:39 Awe is an emotion we experience when we

10:41 are in the presence of something vast and indescribable.

10:44 Lots of people get it from an amazing sunset.

10:47 I'm a science geek, so I get it

10:50 when I contemplate outer space and interplanetary travel.

10:53 We have an SUV on Mars right now,

10:56 sending us footage back of that terrain— that is awe-inspiring to me.

11:00 When we experience this emotion of awe,

11:02 it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self.

11:05 We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable,

11:10 and when we feel smaller, so does our chatter.

11:14 I want to wrap things up by sharing

11:16 with you a set of observations about our, at times,

11:19 messy emotional lives that I find myself thinking about quite a bit.

11:25 And every time I do, it fills me with both dread, and I find it inspiring.

11:31 Between 8,000-10,000 years ago,

11:33 our ancestors invented the first surgical technique.

11:37 Its name was trepanation,

11:38 and what it involved doing was drilling holes in people's skulls.

11:43 One of the reasons why this technique was believed

11:45 to be used was to help people manage their emotions— big,

11:50 dysregulated emotional responses.

11:52 Let the evil spirits out.

11:54 Fast-forward to 1949.

11:56 A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel

11:59 Prize for another emotion regulation intervention.

12:03 This one's name?

12:05 The frontal lobotomy.

12:07 We have come a long way, thankfully,

12:10 from carving holes in people's heads and sticking ice picks

12:15 in our frontal cortices to provide people with emotional relief.

12:18 Our toolbox of science-based skills is vastly improved.

12:24 What we need to do a better job doing is using

12:27 these tools in our lives and sharing them with other people.

12:30 We spend enormous amounts of resources teaching ourselves

12:34 how to communicate more effectively with other people.

12:38 What we need to do is devote an equivalent amount

12:41 of resources to teaching ourselves how

12:43 to communicate more effectively with ourselves.

12:47 Thank you.

12:48 (Cheers and applause)