Managing Your Inner Chatter with Ethan Kross

An interview with Ethan Kross by Alison Beard

Many of us are overthinkers, unable to stop mulling over or ruminating about certain things. This tendency can keep us up at night, kill our productivity, and ruin our flow. In overthinking things, we spend hours going over what we could have done to prevent something, what we can do now to work through it, and how it’s going to play out in the future. It can be exhausting. But there are certain tools we can apply to calm and manage our inner chatter.

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 a tendency to overthink, from a Major League Baseball pitcher whose yips were so bad that he couldn’t throw a strike, to an Ivy League student on her way to a promising career who still suffered from impostor syndrome. And he’s conducted and reviewed hundreds of experiments to see what actually helps them. In this interview, Ethan discussed how we can calm these inner voices, stop the worrying and ruminating, and get back on track.

Alison Beard: Why do we as humans talk to ourselves?

Ethan Kross: At the most basic level, we talk to ourselves when we want to keep nuggets of information active in our head. And we use our inner voice to do that. 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, if I were to give someone my phone number and asked them to memorize that, many people would repeat that string of numbers in their head.

We also use our inner voice to do lots of other things like simulate or plan for the future. And perhaps most interestingly, we use this inner voice to make sense of our experiences in the world—to create stories that tell us who we are or rely on this inner voice when we experience problems and try to make sense of them.

Sometimes we try to use this tool to manage our problems, but it jams us up, and we get stuck. 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.

While chatter seems to have some upsides, could you elaborate on its negative effects?

In my book, I talk about three important domains where chatter can have a negative effect. The first domain is thinking and performing at work. When we experience chatter, it can make it really difficult to think and perform. One reason why that happens is because 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 what we need to do when we’re working.

The second domain is our social life. Research shows that when you’re experiencing chatter, that can create friction in our social relationships. When people are experiencing chatter, they’re often highly motivated to talk with other people about what’s bothering them. And on the other side of the equation, when you’re a listener, whether that be with 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.

The final domain is our physical health. When we experience a negative event, then we continue to think about it over and over again, that keeps the stress response chronically active in ways that predict cardiovascular disease, inflammation problems, and even certain forms of cancer. And that’s precisely what chatter does. We experience these negative events in our world—bad news, 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.

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?

The frequency with which we experience chatter, and its intensity, can certainly vary. Some people may experience it very infrequently, and not in strong doses. At the other end of the spectrum are those who experience episodes of chatter that are enormously intense and don’t go away. These more extreme cases have been linked with certain kinds of depression and anxiety. But in terms of run-of-the-mill chatter, I think many of us are experiencing it a lot of the time.

What are some tools we can leverage on our own to manage it?

One tool that I use a lot 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. 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 rapidly breaks me out of that tunnel vision that characterizes chatter.

Another distancing tool I use is something called “temporal distancing” or mental time travel. It’s particularly useful for dealing with acute stressors—stressors that you’re in the midst of, but that do have some finish line associated with them. As an example, when I was struggling with Covid anxiety and I was thinking, “Oh, my God, my kids still aren’t back at school. I’m still doing 17 Zoom meetings a day. This is awful,” it was really easy to get caught up in all of that. So, I jumped into the mental time travel machine. I first thought about how I was going to feel six months from now . . . when I’m vaccinated and my loved ones are vaccinated, and I’m traveling again and hanging out on the beach with my kids and wife and having fun. When you engage in that mental exercise and distance yourself through time in that way, it highlights the impermanence of what you’re experiencing. “This too shall pass.”

Are there other ways to broaden your perspective?

When experiencing chatter, many people are strongly motivated to vent their emotions. There’s been lots of research on the consequences of this emotional unloading process. When you find someone to vent with, that leads those two people to feel really close and connected and strengthens your 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 or reframe how you’re thinking about this problem. Consequently, you’ll leave the conversation still feeling anxious about the problem at hand.

The best kinds of conversations about chatter do two things. First, they allow you to express your emotions. To a degree, it is important to share with others what we’re going through. I don’t want to imply that expressing emotions is across the board bad. It’s not. Second, they help you broaden your perspective.

Say someone comes to you and tells you how they’re feeling, what’s happened, and what’s going on. At a certain point in the conversation, you begin to nudge the person to start thinking more broadly about it. You could say, “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.” By asking these questions you’re trying to break the person out of that tunnel vision.

If I am a manager, a leader of a team, or a colleague, how can I figure out when someone is struggling with chatter and help them calm it?

The process that I spoke about above can often be helpful, where you talk with someone in a way that allows them to express their emotions but also provides them with some big picture support. That pertains to situations in which someone explicitly is coming to you for help for getting through their chatter. If you see someone struggling, but they haven’t come to you and asked you for support, there’s danger in volunteering support.

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

One thing you can do in those situations is to try to help invisibly. You can provide support, but without shining a spotlight on the fact that you are doing so. At its most basic level, if you see someone struggling, do something to ease the burden. In my lab, 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 that goes over how to write these kinds of papers.” Or if there’s a talk online or at the university, I might suggest 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 useful when people don’t explicitly seek out your assistance.

Ethan Kross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He has spent years studying how people talk to themselves and the effect that this “chatter” has on our performance. He offers tips and tricks to break out of negative thinking and get back on track, especially at work. He’s the author of the book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. Alison Beard is an executive editor at Harvard Business Review.