Chatter - The Key to a Productive Conversation

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Many people think that the key to having a productive, useful conversation about your chatter is to find someone to vent your emotions. Research shows that when you vent to someone, se that that often strengthens the friendship bonds between people. The best kinds of conversations do two things: You spend a little time expressing your emotions, getting it out, letting the other person learn about what you've gone through. They start helping you try to reframe your experience. So in oftentimes, talking can go terribly wrong, but it also has the potential to go really right.

Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. He is an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business and also the Director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. In addition to countless television appearances, Ethan’s research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many others.

In this episode, Ethan and Eric talk about his book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It.

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Ethan Kross and I Discuss How to Harness the Chatter in Our Head and…

His book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It
How we have both emotional and cognitive needs when dealing with the “chatter” in our heads
Common triggers for internal chatter are uncertainty and lack of control
The three main categories of tools to work with chatter
Learning to zoom out and broaden our perspective
Distance self-talk is talking to yourself like you’d talk to another person
Temporal distancing (mental time travel)
Expressive writing about negative experiences
Using your imagination to replay a past experience to gain objectivity
Harnessing our internal chatter rather than silencing it
How to think about thinking and what we can and cannot control
Being aware of how easy some of these tools are to implement
Creating if/then plans increases the likelihood you’ll remember to use the tools
Environmental tools and the benefits of getting outside in nature
How cleaning and organizing our physical space impacts our mental state

Ethan Kross Links:

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If you enjoyed this conversation with Ethan Kross, you might also enjoy these other episodes:

Overthinking and Internal Soundtracks with Jon Acuff

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