Quit Overthinking Things

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. For the past month, I have not been able to stop thinking about a certain challenge going on in my family life. It keeps me up at night, it distracts me from work, it kills my productivity, and it ruins my mode. I go over and over the problem in my head, thinking about what I could have done to prevent it, what I should do now, and how it’s going to play out in the future. It’s awful and exhausting and I don’t know how to stop.

Luckily, our guest today, will have some advice for me and any of you who suffer from the same tendency to overthink. Ethan Kross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and its Ross School of Business, and is the director of its Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. He’s spent years studying people who struggled with issues like the one I have, from a Major League Baseball pitcher whose hips are so bad that he can’t throw a strike, to an Ivy League student on her way to a promising career who still suffers from imposter syndrome. And he’s conducted and reviewed dozens of experiments to see what actually helps them.

How do we calm these inner voices? How do we stop the worrying and ruminating and get back on track? And how can we help other people, friends, family, employees, colleagues, do the same. Kross’s new book is called Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. Ethan, thanks for being on the show.

ETHAN KROSS: Thanks for having me, Alison.

ALISON BEARD: Let’s start with some background. Why do we as humans talk to ourselves?

ETHAN KROSS: Well, when we talk to ourselves, what we’re really talking about is using language silently. And we use language for a number of reasons. I think it’s an amazing tool that we possess. You can almost think of it as a kind of superpower. At the most basic level, we talk to ourselves when we want to keep nuggets of information active in our head. So if I were to give you my phone number and if I asked you to memorize that, many people would repeat that string of numbers in their head. That’s us using language to keep information active. The inner voice is a part of what we call our verbal working memory system. It’s a basic system that we use every day, to navigate this world.

So we use our inner voice to keep information active in our heads. We also use it to do lots of other things like simulate or plan for the future. So before I give a presentation, I will often rehearse the talking points in my head. Using our inner voice in that ways is critical to succeeding in the workplace and in many other endeavors. And perhaps most interestingly, we use this inner voice to make sense of our experiences in the world. We use our inner voice to create stories that tell us who we are. So we use the inner voice for lots of different things. It’s a tool. We also rely on this inner voice when we experience problems and try to make sense of them.

And sometimes we try to use this tool to manage our problems, but it jams us up, we get stuck. And that takes us into what I think of as the dark side of our inner voice, or what I call chatter, which is when we get stuck in negative thought loops.

ALISON BEARD: It sounds like you’re saying there are lots of upsides, but lots of downsides too that feel particularly painful in the moment. Let’s talk a little bit more about those costs. Do they go beyond just sort of feeling this inner turmoil?

ETHAN KROSS: Absolutely. In my book, I talk about three domains that chatter strikes, and I think they are the domains that many of us care most about. Domain number one, thinking and performing at work. When we experience chatter, it can make it really difficult to think and perform. One of the reasons why that happens is we only have a limited ability to focus at any given moment of time. And when our chatter is consuming those attentional resources, there’s nothing left over to focus on the things that we need to often do when we’re working or even playing.

Another negative consequence of chatter has to do with our social life. There’s lots of research which shows that when you’re experiencing chatter, that can create friction in our social relationships. And it can do so through a variety of different pathways. One of which is, we know that when people are experiencing chatter, they’re often highly motivated to talk about what’s bothering them with other people. And on the other side of the equation, when you’re a listener, whether that be your partner or a colleague or supervisor, there’s often a limit to how much listening we can do before problems begin to surface in the relationship. And so that’s domain number two, that chatter can impact our social relationships.

The final domain is our physical health. When stress becomes toxic, is when it becomes chronic. When we experience a negative event, and then we continue to think about it over and over again, that keeps the stress response chronically active over time in ways that predict things like cardiovascular disease, problems of inflammation, and even certain forms of cancer. And that’s precisely what chatter does. We experience these events in our world, we get the bad news, we get the bad feedback, but we don’t just process that information and then move on. Instead, we continue to think about it over and over and over again, maintaining our stress reaction.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And how common is it for people to really struggle with negative chatter on a regular basis? Are some people more susceptible to it than others?

ETHAN KROSS: Yes, there’s huge variability. One point I think that is important to emphasize is that if you experienced chatter, congratulations, you’re a human. The frequency with which we experience it and the intensity can certainly vary, as do most kinds of experiences. There are some people who experience it very infrequently, and not in strong doses. And at the other end of the spectrum, full-blown episodes of chatter that are enormously intense and that don’t go away. That’s been linked with certain kinds of psychiatric disorders like various kinds of depression, anxiety. But that’s at the other extreme. In terms of the run-of-the-mill blips of chatter, I think many of us are experiencing it a lot of the time.

ALISON BEARD: So how has the current moment that we’re living in – this Covid-19 pandemic – impacted chatter?

ETHAN KROSS: I think we’ve been living through the chatter event of the century, over the course of the past year. Not only because of the pandemic, but also because of the political and economic and social uncertainty and distress that we’ve been experiencing in this nation.

One of the things we know is that experiencing uncertainty and a lack of control, these are elements that propelled chatter. We as a species, humans, we love being certain about things and knowing that we can control outcomes. When you take those qualities away from us, we don’t like it, and it can make it very easy for us to get stuck in chatter.

We’re seeing evidence for that now. Rates of anxiety and depression, which aren’t synonymous with chatter, but we know chatter factors prominently into those experiences. They’re currently three times what they were prior to the pandemic. So a lot of people have a lot of time alone with their thoughts, and I think a lot of people are struggling, but I do want to emphasize that we’re talking about, let’s say, ballpark around 30% of the population is experiencing clinical levels of anxiety and depression over the past year. That’s a big number. And it’s a disconcerting number.

But I do think it’s important to think about the other side of that number, which is the 70% that is not displaying that same reaction, the 70% of people who are managing this adversity reasonably well. I think there’s something we can learn from those individuals about what the tools are that we can use to manage our chatter, so it doesn’t get the best of us.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, that’s a perfect transition. I want to talk about some tools that I and other people like making practice on my own. I assume that my normal strategies of aimlessly scrolling Twitter, watching TV, drinking some wine are definitely not what you recommend.

You’ve just summarized the unhealthy strategies, Alison. Here’s the upshot. The good news is we’ve got a lot of room for improvement here, Alison. So that’s great. So one tool that I use a lot, personally is something called distance self-talk. It involves giving myself advice like I would give to my best friend or partner or child, and I actually use language to help me do that. I use my own name and the second person pronoun, you. “All right, Ethan, how are you going to deal with the situation?”

One of the things we know is that we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking your advice. And distance self-talk leverages the structure of language to help us relate to ourselves like we were relating to another person. sAnd so the idea here is that when we’re using those parts of speech to work through our own problems, it automatically switches our perspective. It puts us in this different mode of relating to ourselves. Now we’re talking to someone else, we’re giving someone else advice. And there’s lots of research which shows that that can be really helpful.

ALISON BEARD: One of my favorite examples from the book was when you had LeBron James deciding to go to Miami and saying, “The LeBron James needs to go where LeBron James is going to be happy.”

ETHAN KROSS: Yeah. Well, what’s fascinating about distance self-talk is you can see traces of this happening throughout history. Julius Caesar wrote an entire book in the third person, Henry Adams, you see LeBron James doing it, Jennifer Lawrence, and lots and lots of others. What’s fascinating to me about that, is that it seems that a lot of people stumble on this tool. That is, they start using it, particularly when they’re under stress without really knowing why they’re using it and sometimes not even realizing that they’re doing it. And what the science shows, though, is that well, this tool can actually be really helpful. And so what I think that does for folks is it allows us to be a lot more deliberate about how we might use this tool in our daily life. So when I’m experiencing chatter, I will very, very quickly start trying to coach myself through the situation using my name, “All right, Ethan, how are you going to handle this?” And it very quickly breaks me out that tunnel vision that characterizes chatter. There is of course, a really important caveat I always feel compelled to provide to listeners, which is, you don’t want to use this tool out loud in front of other people.

ALISON BEARD: What are some other distancing techniques?

ETHAN KROSS: Another tool that I often rely on, another distancing tool is something called temporal distancing or mental time travel. And it’s particularly useful for dealing with acute stressors, stressors that you’re really in the midst of, but that do have some finish line associated with them. When I’m struggling with COVID anxiety and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, my kids still aren’t back at school. I’m still doing 17 Zoom meetings a day. This is awful.” Really easy to get caught up in all of that. I will jump into the mental time travel machine, think first about how am I going to feel six months from now, when I’m vaccinated and my loved ones are vaccinated, I’m traveling again, and I’m hanging out on the beach with my kids and wife and having fun.

When I engage in that mental exercise, when I distanced myself through time in that way, it broadens my perspective. It makes me realize that as awful as what I’m going through is, it’s temporary, it will eventually fade. And that gives me hope. And we know that hope can be a really powerful tool for helping people manage chatter.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Okay, let’s move outside ourselves. You talked about using the environment to calm chatter, how does that work?

ETHAN KROSS: There are lots of different ways we can interact with our physical spaces that can help us manage the thought stream through our head. One of my favorite examples actually comes from the tennis player, Rafael Nadal, who a couple years ago was interviewed about his game. And he was asked, “What’s the hardest thing you struggle to do on the tennis court?” And his answer, on the one hand, made sense to me, but on the other hand, as a sports enthusiast, I found surprising.

What he says, the hardest thing he struggles to do on a tennis court, it’s not keeping up with his opponent. It’s not making sure he can return their backhand or serve. The hardest thing he struggles to do is battle the voices inside his head. And what he’s talking about there is his chatter, it’s his mind game. And how does he manage this? He engages in these elaborate rituals. So if you watch Nadal play, and I’d encourage folks to YouTube this and see for themselves, you’ll see that before every serve, he engages in a very rigid sequence of behaviors, the exact same way every time. He’ll like pick his shorts out of his butt. He’ll take his fingers through his hair, behind his ear a few times. He’ll bounce a ball and do a number of other wacky things that people often poke fun about.

He does this because imposing order on his surroundings like managing himself in that situation, that provides him with a sense of order that he finds really valuable. When we’re experiencing chatter, we often feel like we don’t have control. Our thoughts are controlling us, our thoughts are out of order. And so what Nadal does is he establishes order around him.

If you look at the literature, what you see is that a lot of people do this reflexively, when they’re experiencing stress. They clean and they organize, and this actually helps. There’s research which shows that this helps turn the volume down on their chatter. Rituals, which we define as rigid sequences of structured behaviors, organizing, tidying up, these are ways… one way of interacting with your physical space, that can be helpful. You don’t want to of course, take this to an extreme. Taken to an extreme, rituals can be counterproductive. But that’s true of I would argue, any tool we talk about. Any tool has to be used in moderation. But that’s just one environmental tool.

Another thing you can do is interact with green spaces. Go for a walk in nature, watch even a movie of a beautiful, natural setting. Research shows that that can help us in two ways. The first thing it can do is it can provide us with a sense of rejuvenation. The other thing that exposure to green spaces can do is it can trigger within us a sense of awe. Awe is an emotion we experience when we’re in the presence of something vast that we have trouble explaining. And nature gives us a lot of awe triggers.

And one of the things we know about awe, is when you’re contemplating something vast and indescribable, your own problems feel a whole lot smaller by comparison. So experiencing awe leads to what we call shrinking of the self. And that can be really useful as well when we’re managing chatter.

ALISON BEARD: What are some tools that involve of other people? I know that you say that talking can be a double-edged sword. So how do you do it well?

ETHAN KROSS: Talking is really interesting, because one of the messages I think, culture gives us at least, Western culture is. When you’re experiencing chatter, what you want to do is find someone to venture emotions to, just find someone to unload. And there’s been lots of research on what the consequences of this emotional unloading are for people or you might think of it as… Call it venting. What we know is that when you find someone to vent with, that leads those two people to feel really close and connected and strengthens our friendship bonds. It feels good to know that there’s someone out there who cares enough about you that they’re willing to take the time to listen.

But if all that happens during the conversation is a rehashing of what happened to you and what you felt, that doesn’t do anything to broaden your perspective. It doesn’t do anything to help you reframe how you’re thinking about this problem. And so as a result, you leave the conversation feeling really good about your relationship with that other person, but you’re still anxious or irritated or sad, because the problem persists.

And so there’s research which shows that that venting actually predicts increases in anxiety and depression over time. The best kinds of conversations about chatter do two things. The first thing they do is they do allow you to express your emotions. To a degree, it is important to share with others what we’re going through. So I don’t want to imply that expressing emotions is across the board bad. It’s not. At a certain point in the conversation, what you want to have happen is you want to be talking to someone who can help you broaden your perspective.

Alison, you and I are now buddies. Let’s say you’re experiencing some chatter, you call me up. I’m going to ask you about what’s going on. You tell me about what you’re feeling, what happened, what’s going on. And at a certain point in the conversation, what I would start doing is nudge you to start thinking more broadly about it. “How have you dealt with these kinds of experiences in the past?” Or, “I’ve gone through something similar. Here’s how I’ve dealt with it.” Or, “Here’s what I would tell you my best friend about how I think you should manage a situation.” What I’m trying to do there is trying to break you out of that tunnel vision.

ALISON BEARD: Can I push back on that a little bit, though because a lot of advice on being a good friend and a good spouse is to listen without trying to problem-solve. So is that wrong?

ETHAN KROSS: Well, I think it’s much more complicated than that. The first thing to keep in mind are the… What I just described, that little dance of venting and then helping problem-solve, that pertains to situations in which someone comes to you with a problem that they’re looking for support over. Like they want advice about how to get through their chatter, they’re struggling. And so that’s a specific kind of situation.

Number two, there is an art to how these conversations take place in the sense that, in the immediate aftermath of a negative experience, people aren’t ready to immediately shift into receiving advice. Their social and emotional needs are more active, their venting needs, so to speak. And people vary a great deal on how much time they need before they’re ready to transition into getting advice about what’s bothering them. And so you want to be sensitive to that variability. For some people, depending what the stressor is and how big it is, I may need more time to just express before I’m ready to transition into this other mode. And so one thing you can do is ask the person that you’re speaking to, “Hey, do you want to keep talking or can I offer some advice?” But I think it is a mistake to suggest that across the board our only job as partners and colleagues and supporters is to listen without giving advice.

ALISON BEARD: Speaking of giving advice, if I am a manager, a leader of a team, even a colleague, how can I figure out when someone is struggling with chatter and help them calm it?

ETHAN KROSS: So again, the process that we just talked about, that can often be helpful, where you talk with someone in a way that allows them to express their emotions, but also provide them with some big picture support. That pertains to situations in which someone explicitly is coming to you for help. They want help getting through their chatter. They’re going to be lots of situations when you see a colleague or a friend or a loved one struggling, but they haven’t come to you and asked you for support. And in those instances, there’s danger in volunteering support, like giving unsolicited advice.

There’s a large literature which shows that if someone doesn’t ask you for help, and you volunteer to provide it, that can actually backfire. It can backfire because it can threaten a person’s sense of self-efficacy, the idea that they are capable of managing the situation on their own.

So what do you do in those situations? And I think they generalize in the workplace, they generalize across generations. One thing you can do is try to help invisibly. That is you can provide support, but without shining a spotlight on the fact that you are doing so. And this can take many different forms. And its most basic level, if you see someone struggling, do something to ease the burden. So if I see my wife really struggling with something, there’s her job, there’s a kid issue, there’s the house that other stuff all going on, I can do something like pick up the dry cleaning and make dinner that night. Just take a few things off her plate to make it that much easier for her to get through the day. That can be really helpful.

ALISON BEARD: And a boss can do that too.

ETHAN KROSS: A boss can totally do it. Go pick up coffee for the team when they’re on an engagement, divert some of the work to another person on the team. There are lots and lots of ways that you can try to make it easier for your team to focus on what they really need to focus on.

There are other things you could do as well. If you think about my team, so my lab group, I’ve got postdocs, and graduate students, and they all can experience chatter at times. If I see a postdoc who’s really struggling with their writing, I might make an announcement to the entire group, “Hey, here’s a book that I’m reading that I’m really benefiting from tshat goes over how to write these kinds of papers.” Or if there’s a talk online or at the university, I might make a suggestion to everyone, “Hey, let’s go check this out and talk about it after,” even though I know it really pertains to one person in particular. Those are ways of me getting information to that person in a way that I think will be productive, but without again, shining a spotlight that says, “Hey, you’re really not thriving here and you need this help.” Those are invisible forms of support, and that can be really useful when people don’t explicitly seek out your assistance.

ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you so much, Ethan. I feel like you’ve given me and everyone listening some advice to us personally, but then also to hopefully help other people.

ETHAN KROSS: Thanks for having me. And I very much hope some of these tools can be useful.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Ethan Kross. He’s a psychology professor and author of the book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, we get technical help from Rob Eckhardt, Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.