Episode Transcript
Intro
Hi everyone, welcome to how to live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I am your host Sharad Lal.This is episode 23.
Topic
- Negative mental chatter weighs us down.
- I’m not good enough
- I should have saved more when I was younger
- I need to be more patient with my kid
- And so on
- Often negative thoughts keep going in circles without resolution
- This adds to stress, anxiety and other mental health problems.
- We’ve all heard of mindfulness and meditation that helps calm the mind - but that’s not for many of us.
- We have busy lives with multiple activities
- Adding another activity on top of these - even if it’s for removing stress - actually ends up adding more stress.
- So how do we manage all these thoughts in our mind seamlessly - with our everyday life
- In today’s episode we meet Gita who’s struggling with constant mental chatter
- Through her story we look at
- A good framework to understand our thoughts
- And 5 simple mental health tools to manage chatter.
- These are simple tools that don’t involve meditation or mindfulness.
- Any of us can use these and find some peace in our lives.
Before getting into the episode
- Thank you to you listening for your generous support
- Please do consider leaving us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening to this.
- Thank you in advance
- For today’s episode we’ve referred to Ethan Cross’s book - Chatter for some mental health tools we reference later.
Meet Gita
- Back to the episode
- Meet Gita
- Gita was born in India.
- When she moved to Singapore 15 years back for higher education - little did she know that this place will become her home
- Today she’s married. Has a 5 yr old boy and balances a career in an exciting startup with motherhood.
- On most mornings - 7am you’ll find Gita running along the river.
- This was a recent habit - developed during COVID -
- It gives her the energy to be present to her boys’ needs and excel in her career.
- Of late however - things have been stressful.
- She’s had to go back to office almost full time.
- Business travel around South East Asia is back.
- She finds herself on the edge.
- Last night after a hard day at work - she came home to her son who was intent on troubling her.
- He threw his food on the ground, took her phone away, threw it in the toilet and kept trying to provoke her.
- Gita had had a bad day. Her patience was low. She lost it. She got so angry that she screamed at her son like never before. She almost hit him.
- This was not the first time. She’s been shouting at him a fair bit of late.
- At night after putting her son to sleep - Gita felt shameful and sad.
- The innocent eyes of her son - shocked at how his mom treated him - kept haunting Gita.
- She couldn’t sleep all night
- Realised she’s been running at full throttle the past few months
- Hasnt been sleeping well. Stopped her morning runs
- And is overwhelmed
- Her mind is constantly on overdrive
- Thinking, planning, stressing,
- Pickups, dropoffs, co-ordinating travel with husbands travel, difficult boss, challenging timelines,
- Anger, Guilt, unease and many other emotions.
- She can’t drop anything. Everything is important.
- What should she do?
Stoicism and Top 10
- This is a good time to reconnect with the Stoicism concept of taking control of our lives.
- Stoics believed we need to be in control at all times
- One might think - how can I take control of my life?
- I cant even control all the demands on me
- I have to look after my son - and I really want to
- I have to work - we need the money
- I need to do the travel, late nights - that’s part of my work
- And offcourse there’s more - friends, family etc - which I have to and want to
- I don’t want to drop anything - everything matters to me.
- The Stoics lived in the real world.
- They understood that we have many demands on us to live and thrive in this world
- While we cannot control these externals
- But we always have control over the internals
- We can control our minds
- We can control the stress we go through
- The stories we make up
- The negative thoughts
- The rumination
- The mental chatter
- The multiple demands in life are often achievable
- but it's this negative chatter that drains our energy and debilitates us.
- For more on Stoicism please refer to episode 6.
- So the key is allow ourselves to live to our full capacity is
- to manage the accompanying chatter.
- Reduce it.
- How do we manage mental chatter?
- The starting point is to understand the chatter.
- What are all these thoughts about?
- Often they seem to be innumerable
- Order the print cartridge, buy our son’s halloween costume, prepare the deck for the CEO visit and hundred other things
- But in reality - only a handful of thoughts occupy most of our mind space
- Typically our top 10 thoughts occupy 90% of our brain space
- And these thoughts are mainly negative and repetitive
- It’s the same few thoughts we keep ruminating about
- Going in circles without moving forward
- So this mental chatter that stresses us out - debilitates us - is caused by a few half baked thoughts that we keep playing in our minds repeatedly.
- A great tool to identity these thoughts is called the Top 10
- As the name suggests - it’s identifying these top 10 thoughts that are sapping us.
- Listing down our top 10 makes the problem of mental chatter finite and manageable
Geeta’s Top 10
- After the night of no sleep Gita took the next day off.
- She dropped her soon to school and went to this new cafe at Botanic Gardens -
- Sitting outside overlooking vast expanse of tropical greenery, she ordered herself a big breakfast and a smoothie - made herself comfortable and started reflecting on her top 10
- There was so much in her mind
- Words kept flowing
- She just let them out - and wrote whatever came up. No filters.
- It soon became lunch time.
- She kept going.
- She picked her son up later in the afternoon already feeling a lot lighter
- But she wasn’t finished - there were still many unresolved thoughts in her mind.
- Over the next two weeks she continued reflecting on her top 10
- Wrote down a little bit everyday
- Finally she had accurately captured her top 10
- This exercise not only helped her understand her thoughts but also helped in uncovering insights about herself, patterns and was a an outlet to so many repressed emotions
- The first thought she uncovered was the pursuit of perfection.
- This wasn’t something that only troubled her for the last 6 months
- Instead - Its been with her as far as she can remember
- She wanted to be the perfect friend, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect employee and when she slipped even a bit her critical negative inner voice would taunt her.
- What kind of a mom are you - cant even drop your son to school in time. Even if it was just 2 mins late.
- Or you’re so inconsiderate. You forgot a friend’s birthday. Even if it wasn’t a close friend or she was swamped with work and other pressure.
- Most of her mental chatter around juggling, planning, multi-tasking, guilt,- was towards the ideal of perfection.
- Nothing could go even slightly wrong.
- This put too much pressure and stress on her.
- This wasn’t something that only troubled her for the last 6 months
- In this context, Gita connected with a story from her childhood
- Back in India, when she was 9 years old - her father was hospitalised for a year.
- During that period, her mother single handedly took care of the 3 siblings, the house, the finances and also supported her ailing father.
- Later on during her college years she realised what a superhero her mother was
- Putting her grief aside, she smartly and responsibly handled all the affairs of the house and did so with a kind, gentle energy.
- All the kids got so much love during the time that they didn’t even think of it as a stressful phase.
- That was the day Gita got inspired to be like her mother - immensely capable but also loving. A go-getter /hustler but also present and grounded.
- While this was powerful inspiration - it put huge self inflicted pressure on Gita and has been the major source of her stress and mental chatter ever since.
- The other thoughts were the usual suspects - boss, husband, parents, money, job security etc.
- Listing these thoughts helped her understand the cause of stress better and even come up with some practical action steps
- She realised what angered her about her husband was not him unwilling to share the workload at home, or the late night drinking, but his lack of empathy. She really needed the empathy as she struggled to juggle everything.
- On the work front, Gita discovered a way to have a constructive conversation with her boss about his work style and how it was adversely affecting her and the team.
- Outside the usual thoughts, the one thought that really stumped her was the level of obsession with a random friend’s insta account
- She followed a school friend who posted everyday- sometimes twice.
- Even though they hadn’t spoken for 20 years, were never really close, nor was this person an influencer or celeb
- Her posts triggered Gita
- Her posts that attempted to show the perfect husband, kids, work, holidays - even though it was a poor attempt - got a reaction out of Gita.
- Gita had always known she would think about this girl - how fake and irritating she was. But Gita was unaware how much distress this caused her. Negative emotions like anger, irritation and more.
- Gita was totally shocked that this random girl occupied so much of her mind space - was one of her top 10 thoughts.
Precursor to tools
- With the Top 10 exercise Gita built awareness, uncovered insights, and even resolved some nagging issues.
- However as life moves forwards - more challenges, complexities are bound to occur
- Problems are not going to go away
- Gita had a tool to be aware of the mental chatter. Now she needed some tools to manage this chatter - calm it down.
- She didn’t like meditation, mindfulness and this new age stuff
- That wasn’t for her.
- Nor did she want to add another activity on top of her busy schedule
- She was looking for some simple practical tools that seamlessly fit into her life and bring her some peace
Mental Chatter from a neuroscience standpoint
- Let’s look at what happens to our brain with all the noise and stimuli around us.
- At any given moment, we are bombarded with lot of information
- Attention is what allows us to filter out things that don’t matter
- There are 2 type of attention - involuntary attention and voluntary attention
- Involuntary attention is subconscious. It’s like when we turn to a loud voice.
- And Voluntary attention is concentrating and consciously putting our attention on a task.
- This is how we live - thinking, planning, executing etc. All this requires our voluntary attention.
- However when there is a negative voice in our mind - it hogs our attention - steals neurons from other tasks and makes us focus narrowly on the source of distress.
- With very few neurons left to do the tasks at hand, our capacity to get anything done reduces, our attention blurs and
- As a result we are stressed and unable to get much done
- If we carry on like this for a period of time - we get depressed and burnt out
- With this simplistic neuroscience as context, lets look at 5 tools to manage the mental chatter
- 1. Eliminate attention sources that trigger us
- In Gita’s case it was a friend on social media she barely knew
- But she paid attention to her everyday, felt distressed and had chatter inside that hogged a large part of her brain space
- By unfollowing her - she eliminated that problematic source of attention. This was easy to do as she had no dependency with this person.
- For us - we could do an attention audit and see what sources of attention trigger us.
- Out of these what are not important in our life - have minimal impact.
- Maybe its people or situations that don’t matter
- We can simply eliminate them.
- If they aren’t important - they shouldn’t be causing us distress and hogging our mind space.
- For things/people that are important in our life, but trigger us the following four tools can be useful.
Tool two: Spending time in Nature & Open Spaces
- The second tool is spending time in nature and open spaces
- We all know how being in nature feels good and replenishes our soul
- But beyond the fresh air, nature does wonders to our brain from an attention standpoint.
- In an experiment conducted on patients recovering from surgery - half were put in rooms facing trees whereas the other half faced a brick wall.
- The ones facing trees recovered quickly and were emotionally resilient as compared to the others - even though they were just looking at nature and not within nature.
- This is because nature draws our involuntary attention and not the voluntary attention.
- Nature has subtle properties, soft fascinations. This does not need concentrated focussed attention of our senses.
- Therefore there isnt too much load on the brain and attention does not get hogged up.
- Over time, it helps rewire the synapses to less negative thinking.
- This was the reason Gita was able to do deep thinking in botanic gardens.
- She is now thinking of getting back to running.
- Maybe a short run everyday on fort canning park and not through the city.
- This will get the endorphins flowing and also gives her brain a break from voluntary attention.
.
Tool 3: Self Talk in Third Person
- The third tool is ridiculously simple but very effective
- It’s as simple as referring to oneself in the Third person when we speak to ourselves.
- So instead of I binged on chips, felt bloated, and then got angry with myself
- Its Sharad binged on chips, felt bloated and then angry with himself.
- Give this a try on your own
- You will notice that the same words when said in third person don’t sound nasty or critical.
- This is backed by data.
- Research shows that we are far more critical to ourselves vs anyone else even a stranger.
- Just think about this - we are more forgiving of a completely unknown person and not ourselves.
- In the previous example - someone bingeing on chips, and getting angry with themselves is a fairly common occurrence. No big deal.
- But if I binge on chips and feel angry - I feel negative emotions.
- So just this act of referring to ourself in third person creates tremendous self compassion and reduces the negative chatter.
- This technique falls under the umbrella of distancing techniques.
- Distancing techniques are those where we put some distance between ourselves and the thoughts.
- We don’t identify with our thoughts. Instead we observe them.
- This is the premise of mindfulness
- So we are getting the benefit of mindfulness without being a mindful practitioner
- Another distancing techniques is looking at our situation from a vantage point like a fly on the wall,
Tool four: Normalising
- The fourth tool is normalising
- When we are in the middle of our problems - our egocentric self constructs a picture of the world that’s restricted to just us and our problems.
- In this narrow zoomed-in world, every small little thing seems big.
- Upsets us.
- If we can zoom out and see others around us. Really notice them
- We will realize that everyone has problems.
- That’s part of life.
- It’s normal. We haven’t been singled out.
- Even if we feel isolated dealing with our problems, many people are isolated dealing with their problems.
- This both makes us feel connected and also view our situation as normal.
- We just go about doing our stuff without too many negative thoughts.
- Another technique of normalising is time travel.
- Think of our future self - 5 years from now - How important will our future self view these problems
- This was a useful exercise for Gita.
- Her future self would not really bother much if 5 years back she missed putting her son to bed a few times due to travel or was a little abrupt with a co-worker or forgot to return a friend’s call.
- These small stress points in her pursuit for perfection would not really matter in the long run.
Tool five: Talking to the right people
- The fifth tool is talking to the right people
- Talking to others is known to help get troublesome thoughts out of our heads
- But have you noticed that sometimes when we talk to others about our problems we come back feeling worse?
- If that’s you - you are not alone.
- A survey of 9/11 victims found that those who shared their feelings and thoughts with others didnt feel better.
- On average they felt worse than the people who didn’t talk to anyone..
- Why does this happen?
- Its because of the concept of co-rumination
- Often people we talk to build on our negativity - by dumping their own experiences, making us feel foolish or providing unsolicited advice.
- This makes the bad state even worse
- To avoid co-rumination, we need to find the right people who both
- Empathise with us meeting us where we are
- And help problem-solve to move us forward.
- Here are few ways we can get the right help
- Have a diverse pool of people not one go to person - this way individual biases get evened out
- Go to different people for different topics.
- Someone for relationships, someone for work etc
- Talk to sensible people outside one’s social circle - people who aren’t present in our life.
- We can talk freely and it’s easier for the person to give objective feedback
- And lastly use the help of experts - therapists and coaches.
Back to Gita
- It’s been a while since the journey started
- She still uses the various tools to manage her stress.
- Surprisingly she’s even opened up to mindfulness to deepen her resolve and also goes to a therapist. She never thought she would
- Interestingly working with the therapist she revisited the image of her mother’s perfection and looked deeper
- In that small town she grew up in - they were part of a very closely knit community of 10-12 families.
- When her dad was hospitalized - This community - which was like a large family - took care of everything in the background
- Dad’s business, hospital/house admin, money, food shopping etc.
- With the confidence of their support,her mother could focus on the kids and her dad.
- And she wasn’t always calm and collected.
- Often she’d needlessly shout at her eldest sister, at the help, even at her brother. Gita being the youngest got shielded - but her mother wasn’t the picture of calmness she imagined.
- Instead her mother displayed an inner resilience creating a safe space for the family during this adversity. They all felt safe.
- That’s how Gita has reframed the inspiration in her mind - she will build resilience and be the pillar of safety for her family no matter what adversity life throws at them.
Action Steps
- If any of this resonated, here are a few action steps you could consider
- Listing your Top Ten
- You can find a peaceful place with 1-2 hours to spare and do this exercise
- This need not be as extensive as Gita but even by reflecting for an hour - you’d be able to arrive at the top thoughts causing mental chatter
- If the exercise is useful, you can consider doing this every 6 months.
- You could also consider incorporating any of the mental health tools we discussed
- An Attention scan to eliminate unimportant sources of attention that bother you
- A daily or weekly walk in nature
- Referring to yourself in third person when you’re being self critical
- Zooming out - looking at the big picture - and normalising your situation
- And considering the people you’d want to talk your difficult thoughts with.
- Listing your Top Ten
End
- That’s all for today’s episode
- I hope you enjoyed it
- Consider listening to episode 3 and 4 on managing everyday stress if you’d like to go deeper into this.
- The next episode will drop two weeks from now on September 13.
- I hope you join me for that.
- The next episode
- Wish all of you a wonderful day ahead.
- Bye bye
Intro
Hi everyone, welcome to how to live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I am your host Sharad Lal.This is episode 23.
Topic
- Negative mental chatter weighs us down.
- I’m not good enough
- I should have saved more when I was younger
- I need to be more patient with my kid
- And so on
- Often negative thoughts keep going in circles without resolution
- This adds to stress, anxiety and other mental health problems.
- We’ve all heard of mindfulness and meditation that helps calm the mind - but that’s not for many of us.
- We have busy lives with multiple activities
- Adding another activity on top of these - even if it’s for removing stress - actually ends up adding more stress.
- So how do we manage all these thoughts in our mind seamlessly - with our everyday life
- In today’s episode we meet Gita who’s struggling with constant mental chatter
- Through her story we look at
- A good framework to understand our thoughts
- And 5 simple mental health tools to manage chatter.
- These are simple tools that don’t involve meditation or mindfulness.
- Any of us can use these and find some peace in our lives.
Before getting into the episode
- Thank you to you listening for your generous support
- Please do consider leaving us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening to this.
- Thank you in advance
- For today’s episode we’ve referred to Ethan Cross’s book - Chatter for some mental health tools we reference later.
Meet Gita
- Back to the episode
- Meet Gita
- Gita was born in India.
- When she moved to Singapore 15 years back for higher education - little did she know that this place will become her home
- Today she’s married. Has a 5 yr old boy and balances a career in an exciting startup with motherhood.
- On most mornings - 7am you’ll find Gita running along the river.
- This was a recent habit - developed during COVID -
- It gives her the energy to be present to her boys’ needs and excel in her career.
- Of late however - things have been stressful.
- She’s had to go back to office almost full time.
- Business travel around South East Asia is back.
- She finds herself on the edge.
- Last night after a hard day at work - she came home to her son who was intent on troubling her.
- He threw his food on the ground, took her phone away, threw it in the toilet and kept trying to provoke her.
- Gita had had a bad day. Her patience was low. She lost it. She got so angry that she screamed at her son like never before. She almost hit him.
- This was not the first time. She’s been shouting at him a fair bit of late.
- At night after putting her son to sleep - Gita felt shameful and sad.
- The innocent eyes of her son - shocked at how his mom treated him - kept haunting Gita.
- She couldn’t sleep all night
- Realised she’s been running at full throttle the past few months
- Hasnt been sleeping well. Stopped her morning runs
- And is overwhelmed
- Her mind is constantly on overdrive
- Thinking, planning, stressing,
- Pickups, dropoffs, co-ordinating travel with husbands travel, difficult boss, challenging timelines,
- Anger, Guilt, unease and many other emotions.
- She can’t drop anything. Everything is important.
- What should she do?
Stoicism and Top 10
- This is a good time to reconnect with the Stoicism concept of taking control of our lives.
- Stoics believed we need to be in control at all times
- One might think - how can I take control of my life?
- I cant even control all the demands on me
- I have to look after my son - and I really want to
- I have to work - we need the money
- I need to do the travel, late nights - that’s part of my work
- And offcourse there’s more - friends, family etc - which I have to and want to
- I don’t want to drop anything - everything matters to me.
- The Stoics lived in the real world.
- They understood that we have many demands on us to live and thrive in this world
- While we cannot control these externals
- But we always have control over the internals
- We can control our minds
- We can control the stress we go through
- The stories we make up
- The negative thoughts
- The rumination
- The mental chatter
- The multiple demands in life are often achievable
- but it's this negative chatter that drains our energy and debilitates us.
- For more on Stoicism please refer to episode 6.
- So the key is allow ourselves to live to our full capacity is
- to manage the accompanying chatter.
- Reduce it.
- How do we manage mental chatter?
- The starting point is to understand the chatter.
- What are all these thoughts about?
- Often they seem to be innumerable
- Order the print cartridge, buy our son’s halloween costume, prepare the deck for the CEO visit and hundred other things
- But in reality - only a handful of thoughts occupy most of our mind space
- Typically our top 10 thoughts occupy 90% of our brain space
- And these thoughts are mainly negative and repetitive
- It’s the same few thoughts we keep ruminating about
- Going in circles without moving forward
- So this mental chatter that stresses us out - debilitates us - is caused by a few half baked thoughts that we keep playing in our minds repeatedly.
- A great tool to identity these thoughts is called the Top 10
- As the name suggests - it’s identifying these top 10 thoughts that are sapping us.
- Listing down our top 10 makes the problem of mental chatter finite and manageable
Geeta’s Top 10
- After the night of no sleep Gita took the next day off.
- She dropped her soon to school and went to this new cafe at Botanic Gardens -
- Sitting outside overlooking vast expanse of tropical greenery, she ordered herself a big breakfast and a smoothie - made herself comfortable and started reflecting on her top 10
- There was so much in her mind
- Words kept flowing
- She just let them out - and wrote whatever came up. No filters.
- It soon became lunch time.
- She kept going.
- She picked her son up later in the afternoon already feeling a lot lighter
- But she wasn’t finished - there were still many unresolved thoughts in her mind.
- Over the next two weeks she continued reflecting on her top 10
- Wrote down a little bit everyday
- Finally she had accurately captured her top 10
- This exercise not only helped her understand her thoughts but also helped in uncovering insights about herself, patterns and was a an outlet to so many repressed emotions
- The first thought she uncovered was the pursuit of perfection.
- This wasn’t something that only troubled her for the last 6 months
- Instead - Its been with her as far as she can remember
- She wanted to be the perfect friend, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect employee and when she slipped even a bit her critical negative inner voice would taunt her.
- What kind of a mom are you - cant even drop your son to school in time. Even if it was just 2 mins late.
- Or you’re so inconsiderate. You forgot a friend’s birthday. Even if it wasn’t a close friend or she was swamped with work and other pressure.
- Most of her mental chatter around juggling, planning, multi-tasking, guilt,- was towards the ideal of perfection.
- Nothing could go even slightly wrong.
- This put too much pressure and stress on her.
- This wasn’t something that only troubled her for the last 6 months
- In this context, Gita connected with a story from her childhood
- Back in India, when she was 9 years old - her father was hospitalised for a year.
- During that period, her mother single handedly took care of the 3 siblings, the house, the finances and also supported her ailing father.
- Later on during her college years she realised what a superhero her mother was
- Putting her grief aside, she smartly and responsibly handled all the affairs of the house and did so with a kind, gentle energy.
- All the kids got so much love during the time that they didn’t even think of it as a stressful phase.
- That was the day Gita got inspired to be like her mother - immensely capable but also loving. A go-getter /hustler but also present and grounded.
- While this was powerful inspiration - it put huge self inflicted pressure on Gita and has been the major source of her stress and mental chatter ever since.
- The other thoughts were the usual suspects - boss, husband, parents, money, job security etc.
- Listing these thoughts helped her understand the cause of stress better and even come up with some practical action steps
- She realised what angered her about her husband was not him unwilling to share the workload at home, or the late night drinking, but his lack of empathy. She really needed the empathy as she struggled to juggle everything.
- On the work front, Gita discovered a way to have a constructive conversation with her boss about his work style and how it was adversely affecting her and the team.
- Outside the usual thoughts, the one thought that really stumped her was the level of obsession with a random friend’s insta account
- She followed a school friend who posted everyday- sometimes twice.
- Even though they hadn’t spoken for 20 years, were never really close, nor was this person an influencer or celeb
- Her posts triggered Gita
- Her posts that attempted to show the perfect husband, kids, work, holidays - even though it was a poor attempt - got a reaction out of Gita.
- Gita had always known she would think about this girl - how fake and irritating she was. But Gita was unaware how much distress this caused her. Negative emotions like anger, irritation and more.
- Gita was totally shocked that this random girl occupied so much of her mind space - was one of her top 10 thoughts.
Precursor to tools
- With the Top 10 exercise Gita built awareness, uncovered insights, and even resolved some nagging issues.
- However as life moves forwards - more challenges, complexities are bound to occur
- Problems are not going to go away
- Gita had a tool to be aware of the mental chatter. Now she needed some tools to manage this chatter - calm it down.
- She didn’t like meditation, mindfulness and this new age stuff
- That wasn’t for her.
- Nor did she want to add another activity on top of her busy schedule
- She was looking for some simple practical tools that seamlessly fit into her life and bring her some peace
Mental Chatter from a neuroscience standpoint
- Let’s look at what happens to our brain with all the noise and stimuli around us.
- At any given moment, we are bombarded with lot of information
- Attention is what allows us to filter out things that don’t matter
- There are 2 type of attention - involuntary attention and voluntary attention
- Involuntary attention is subconscious. It’s like when we turn to a loud voice.
- And Voluntary attention is concentrating and consciously putting our attention on a task.
- This is how we live - thinking, planning, executing etc. All this requires our voluntary attention.
- However when there is a negative voice in our mind - it hogs our attention - steals neurons from other tasks and makes us focus narrowly on the source of distress.
- With very few neurons left to do the tasks at hand, our capacity to get anything done reduces, our attention blurs and
- As a result we are stressed and unable to get much done
- If we carry on like this for a period of time - we get depressed and burnt out
- With this simplistic neuroscience as context, lets look at 5 tools to manage the mental chatter
- 1. Eliminate attention sources that trigger us
- In Gita’s case it was a friend on social media she barely knew
- But she paid attention to her everyday, felt distressed and had chatter inside that hogged a large part of her brain space
- By unfollowing her - she eliminated that problematic source of attention. This was easy to do as she had no dependency with this person.
- For us - we could do an attention audit and see what sources of attention trigger us.
- Out of these what are not important in our life - have minimal impact.
- Maybe its people or situations that don’t matter
- We can simply eliminate them.
- If they aren’t important - they shouldn’t be causing us distress and hogging our mind space.
- For things/people that are important in our life, but trigger us the following four tools can be useful.
Tool two: Spending time in Nature & Open Spaces
- The second tool is spending time in nature and open spaces
- We all know how being in nature feels good and replenishes our soul
- But beyond the fresh air, nature does wonders to our brain from an attention standpoint.
- In an experiment conducted on patients recovering from surgery - half were put in rooms facing trees whereas the other half faced a brick wall.
- The ones facing trees recovered quickly and were emotionally resilient as compared to the others - even though they were just looking at nature and not within nature.
- This is because nature draws our involuntary attention and not the voluntary attention.
- Nature has subtle properties, soft fascinations. This does not need concentrated focussed attention of our senses.
- Therefore there isnt too much load on the brain and attention does not get hogged up.
- Over time, it helps rewire the synapses to less negative thinking.
- This was the reason Gita was able to do deep thinking in botanic gardens.
- She is now thinking of getting back to running.
- Maybe a short run everyday on fort canning park and not through the city.
- This will get the endorphins flowing and also gives her brain a break from voluntary attention.
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Tool 3: Self Talk in Third Person
- The third tool is ridiculously simple but very effective
- It’s as simple as referring to oneself in the Third person when we speak to ourselves.
- So instead of I binged on chips, felt bloated, and then got angry with myself
- Its Sharad binged on chips, felt bloated and then angry with himself.
- Give this a try on your own
- You will notice that the same words when said in third person don’t sound nasty or critical.
- This is backed by data.
- Research shows that we are far more critical to ourselves vs anyone else even a stranger.
- Just think about this - we are more forgiving of a completely unknown person and not ourselves.
- In the previous example - someone bingeing on chips, and getting angry with themselves is a fairly common occurrence. No big deal.
- But if I binge on chips and feel angry - I feel negative emotions.
- So just this act of referring to ourself in third person creates tremendous self compassion and reduces the negative chatter.
- This technique falls under the umbrella of distancing techniques.
- Distancing techniques are those where we put some distance between ourselves and the thoughts.
- We don’t identify with our thoughts. Instead we observe them.
- This is the premise of mindfulness
- So we are getting the benefit of mindfulness without being a mindful practitioner
- Another distancing techniques is looking at our situation from a vantage point like a fly on the wall,
Tool four: Normalising
- The fourth tool is normalising
- When we are in the middle of our problems - our egocentric self constructs a picture of the world that’s restricted to just us and our problems.
- In this narrow zoomed-in world, every small little thing seems big.
- Upsets us.
- If we can zoom out and see others around us. Really notice them
- We will realize that everyone has problems.
- That’s part of life.
- It’s normal. We haven’t been singled out.
- Even if we feel isolated dealing with our problems, many people are isolated dealing with their problems.
- This both makes us feel connected and also view our situation as normal.
- We just go about doing our stuff without too many negative thoughts.
- Another technique of normalising is time travel.
- Think of our future self - 5 years from now - How important will our future self view these problems
- This was a useful exercise for Gita.
- Her future self would not really bother much if 5 years back she missed putting her son to bed a few times due to travel or was a little abrupt with a co-worker or forgot to return a friend’s call.
- These small stress points in her pursuit for perfection would not really matter in the long run.
Tool five: Talking to the right people
- The fifth tool is talking to the right people
- Talking to others is known to help get troublesome thoughts out of our heads
- But have you noticed that sometimes when we talk to others about our problems we come back feeling worse?
- If that’s you - you are not alone.
- A survey of 9/11 victims found that those who shared their feelings and thoughts with others didnt feel better.
- On average they felt worse than the people who didn’t talk to anyone..
- Why does this happen?
- Its because of the concept of co-rumination
- Often people we talk to build on our negativity - by dumping their own experiences, making us feel foolish or providing unsolicited advice.
- This makes the bad state even worse
- To avoid co-rumination, we need to find the right people who both
- Empathise with us meeting us where we are
- And help problem-solve to move us forward.
- Here are few ways we can get the right help
- Have a diverse pool of people not one go to person - this way individual biases get evened out
- Go to different people for different topics.
- Someone for relationships, someone for work etc
- Talk to sensible people outside one’s social circle - people who aren’t present in our life.
- We can talk freely and it’s easier for the person to give objective feedback
- And lastly use the help of experts - therapists and coaches.
Back to Gita
- It’s been a while since the journey started
- She still uses the various tools to manage her stress.
- Surprisingly she’s even opened up to mindfulness to deepen her resolve and also goes to a therapist. She never thought she would
- Interestingly working with the therapist she revisited the image of her mother’s perfection and looked deeper
- In that small town she grew up in - they were part of a very closely knit community of 10-12 families.
- When her dad was hospitalized - This community - which was like a large family - took care of everything in the background
- Dad’s business, hospital/house admin, money, food shopping etc.
- With the confidence of their support,her mother could focus on the kids and her dad.
- And she wasn’t always calm and collected.
- Often she’d needlessly shout at her eldest sister, at the help, even at her brother. Gita being the youngest got shielded - but her mother wasn’t the picture of calmness she imagined.
- Instead her mother displayed an inner resilience creating a safe space for the family during this adversity. They all felt safe.
- That’s how Gita has reframed the inspiration in her mind - she will build resilience and be the pillar of safety for her family no matter what adversity life throws at them.
Action Steps
- If any of this resonated, here are a few action steps you could consider
- Listing your Top Ten
- You can find a peaceful place with 1-2 hours to spare and do this exercise
- This need not be as extensive as Gita but even by reflecting for an hour - you’d be able to arrive at the top thoughts causing mental chatter
- If the exercise is useful, you can consider doing this every 6 months.
- You could also consider incorporating any of the mental health tools we discussed
- An Attention scan to eliminate unimportant sources of attention that bother you
- A daily or weekly walk in nature
- Referring to yourself in third person when you’re being self critical
- Zooming out - looking at the big picture - and normalising your situation
- And considering the people you’d want to talk your difficult thoughts with.
- Listing your Top Ten
End
- That’s all for today’s episode
- I hope you enjoyed it
- Consider listening to episode 3 and 4 on managing everyday stress if you’d like to go deeper into this.
- The next episode will drop two weeks from now on September 13.
- I hope you join me for that.
- The next episode
- Wish all of you a wonderful day ahead.
- Bye bye