Coronavirus lockdown brain: How to talk yourself out of negative thoughts
Doing your own head in in lockdown? Learning to quell the chatter in our heads can help us cope better.
Ethan Kross stood in the dark in his living room gripping a child’s baseball bat so hard that his knuckles were white. He stared out of the window into a night where he feared a madman was preparing to attack him, his wife and his baby daughter.
Kross, 41, is a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and this unusual episode of paranoia was triggered by a threatening letter he had received that day about his work. He and colleagues had just published a paper showing that the brain registered physical and emotional pain in similar ways.
It was not clear why the letter writer objected to the study, but the messages and drawings he sent alarmed Kross and over the next couple of days the inner voice in the professor’s head became frenzied.
‘The bogeyman inside your head’
He started looking up bodyguards who specialised in protecting academics.
There was irony in the situation. “Me, a scientist who directs a laboratory that specialises in the study of self-control, an expert on how to tame unrelenting negative thought spirals, staring out the window at three in the morning with a tiny baseball bat in my hands, tortured by the bogeyman inside my head,” he writes in his new book.
Kross is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist who studies introspection. His research focuses on the silent conversations we have with ourselves and he believes that our inner voice is our superpower, allowing us to find solutions to many problems, and the “destructive kryptonite” that hurts us.
Destructive ‘chatter’
The destructive stuff is what he calls “chatter”, the negative thoughts and emotions that can turn our capacity for introspection into a curse.
“Our inner voice can be the source of our ability to problem-solve, innovate and create, but also a source of great despair. It can undermine our performance and decisions, compromise our relationships and our physical health.”
We all know the feeling. “Have you ever had the experience of trying to read a newspaper article while you were experiencing chatter [because] you were worried or ruminating about something?” he asks. “Ever had the experience of reading a page and then realising you don’t know what you’ve just read?” Only all the time, I say, worrying that I may be particularly ill-disciplined when it comes to controlling mind chat. “It’s universal,” Kross says.
Speaking from his home in Ann Arbor, where he is the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, Kross says that he began his exploration of introspection as a young boy growing up in a working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood. His father, who was a voracious reader of eastern philosophy and religion, urged him when he had a problem to “go inside”. Kross has spent the past 20 years in this field.
As Kross was googling for bodyguards that night he stopped and said: “Ethan, what are you doing? This is crazy!” Saying his name in his head made him take a step back. Talking to himself using his own name had subdued the inner voice. He calls this the “distanced self-talk”.
Finding distance
Kross cites examples of people distancing themselves, from Julius Caesar writing his account of the Gallic Wars in the third person, to the Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence becoming emotional in an interview and saying to herself: “OK, get ahold of yourself, Jennifer.”
“What chatter does is it zooms us in very narrowly on the threat, on the problem at hand,” Kross says. “When we’re zoomed in tight, we lose the ability to see that bigger picture.”
Kross has sought to gain perspective on the pandemic. “I engage in mental time travel. I go back and think about the pandemic of 1918 and how that was awful, but we endured it and we thrived after. And then I go into the future and I think about a year from now when I’m having high tea in London. There will come a point relatively soon where I will be able to return to normal. And that gives me hope. Those shifts speak to the elasticity of the mind and our ability to change the view, to go broader and get perspective in ways that can be really helpful when we find ourselves really stuck and mired in chatter.”
Of course, we shouldn’t always be seeking to detach ourselves from situations just to quiet extraneous noise in our heads. “When something’s happening in our environment, we want to be laser-focused on it, to address it. But what we also then want to do is be able to break out, and that’s where things get hairy because we zoom in and we get stuck,” Kross says.
Find the right chat
One would imagine that one of the best ways to clear the chatter is to chat to others. Not necessarily, Kross says. It needs to be the right sort of chat.
Talking can go wrong, Kross says, if the friend you unload to provides empathy, but not practical solutions. You can end up simply reliving a negative experience with that person, a phenomenon called co-rumination.
“There are lots of ways that other people can help us [ …] Sometimes it’s just asking a probing question, to get us to think more deeply.”
We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight that we see others - we’re all victims of what Kross and his colleagues call Solomon’s paradox, named after the Jewish king who was able to give good advice, but was not so great at making sensible decisions in his own life.
Distancing ourselves can help to tackle inner-voice ranting in romantic relationships. In one study Kross looked at couples where one partner was an “immerser” when thinking about problems in the relationship, while the other was a “distancer” who could step outside themselves and look at the relationship. The distancers were able to ease conflict by arguing calmly, which their partner responded positively to.
Kross says that there is nothing inherently bad about sharing on social media, but there are pitfalls. “It provides us with a giant megaphone for broadcasting our inner voice, one that we’ve never had before in the history of our species. Think about the Facebook prompt when you sign in: ‘What’s on your mind?’ ”
Be wary with social media
Overly emotional posts, he explains, tend to alienate and irritate other users. So the empathy you may be looking for online may not be forthcoming. People with depression fuelled by the verbal stream in their heads share more negative content on social media, but find their network less helpful than non-depressed people. A study Kross and colleagues published in 2015 found that the more time people spent passively scrolling through Facebook, the more envy they felt and the more depressed they felt.
Kross recommends old-fashioned diary writing. Working through the narrative of an experience creates distance from it.
Immersion in nature is another way to escape toxic chatter. “There’s a restorative function that it provides when our mind is racing,” Kross says. Even looking at pictures or videos of natural scenes can help, he contends. An experiment in 2016 made participants give a speech at short notice without notes and then watch videos of streets featuring varying levels of greenery. Those who watched the greenest streets recovered from the stress better.
If you find yourself having to give a speech at short notice like that, Kross can help. In an experiment he gave a group of volunteers five minutes to prepare a speech. Half then had to reflect on their anxiety about the speech using the first person and the others were asked to do so using non-first-person pronouns and their own name. Then they were made to give their speeches in front of a panel of judges and a video camera.
The second group, of distanced self-talkers, reported feeling less shame and embarrassment and were focused on the fact that nothing of consequence was at stake.
Talking about yourself like you’re Julius Caesar might be eccentric, but a little distanced self-talk could be worth it if it quells the chatter of the Helvetii, Belgae and Veneti tribes in your head.
The Times
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