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The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it. My colleagues and I refer to this bias as “Solomon’s Paradox,” though King Solomon is by no means the only sage who could lend his name to the phenomenon. …

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, has written that one of his most informative experiences involved learning how to avoid an “inside view” and adopt an “outside view.” As he frames it, an inside view limits your thinking to your circumstances. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, this often leads to inaccurate predictions about potential obstacles. The outside view, on the other hand, include a broader sample of possibilities and thus more accuracy. You’re able to better foresee obstacles and prepare accordingly.


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Several studies back up scientifically what Tracey experienced personally, revealing that the ability to strategically time travel in one’s mind can be a tool for creating positive personal narratives that reroute negative inner dialogues. … You can also benefit by mentally time travelling into the future, a tool called temporal distancing. Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, cam be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.


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Yet this is why talking about emotions so often backfires, in spite of its enormous potential to help. When our minds are bathed in chatter, we display a strong bias toward satisfying our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. In other words, when we’re upset, we tend to overfocus on receiving empathy rather than finding practical solutions.

This dilemma is compounded by a commensurate problem on the helper side of the equation: the people we seek out for help respond in kind, prioritizing our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. They see our pain and first and foremost strive to provide us with love and validation. this is natural, a gesture of caring and sometimes even useful in the short term. But even if we do signal that we want more cognitive assistance, research demonstrates that our interlocutors tend to miss these cues. …

Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions.


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Because our beliefs pertain to so many different kinds of emotions, physiological responses, and experiences, there is no single neural pathway that creates the placebo effect. For instance, while believing that you’ll feel less pain is linked with lower levels of activation in pain circuitry in the brain and spinal cord, thinking that you’re drinking an expensive wine can increase activation in the brain’s pleasure circuitry. Believing you’re consuming a fatty (versus healthy) milk shake even leads to lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin. In effect, once you believe something, your neural machinery brings it to fruition by increasing or decreasing the activation levels of other parts of the brain or body related to the processes you are forming beliefs about.


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Managing our inner voice has the potential not only to help us become more clearheaded but to strengthen the relationships we share with our friends and loved ones, help us offer better support to people we care about, build more organizations and companies where people are insulated against burnout, design smarter environments that leverage nature and order, and rethink digital platforms to promote connection and empathy. In short, changing the conversations we have with ourselves has the potential to change our lives. …

I also remind my daughters and myself that while creating a calming distance between our thoughts and our experiences can be useful when chatter strikes, when it comes to joy, doing the opposite - immersing ourselves in life’s most cherished moments - helps us savor them.


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The Tools

Tools You Can Implement On Your Own

  1. Use distanced self-talk. When you’re trying to work though a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person “you” to refer to yourself.
  2. Imagine advising a friend.
  3. Broaden your perspective. Think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.
  4. Reframe your experience as a challenge. Reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle.
  5. Reinterpret your body’s chatter response. Remind yourself that your bodily response to stress is an adaptive evolutionary reaction that improves performance under high-stress conditions. In other words, tell yourself that your sudden rapid breathing, pounding heartbeat, and sweaty palms are there not to sabotage you but to help you respond to a challenge.
  6. Normalize your experience.
  7. Engage in mental time travel.
  8. Change the view. Visualize the event in your mind from the perspective of a fly on the wall peering down on the scene.
  9. Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days.
  10. Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party.
  11. Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition.
  12. Perform a ritual.

Tools That Involve Other People

Tools for Providing Chatter Support

  1. Address people’s emotional and cognitive needs.
  2. Provide invisible support. In such situations providing support invisibly, without people being aware you’re helping them, is useful. There are many ways to do this. One approach involves covertly providing practical support, like cleaning up the house without being asked. Another involves helping broaden people’s perspectives indirectly by, for example, talking in general terms about others who have dealt with similar experiences (for example, “It’s amazing how stressful everyone finds parenthood”) or by soliciting advice from someone else but without signaling that the questions are meant to help the person in need. For example, if my colleague was struggling to connect with their graduate student and we found ourselves at a function with other advisers, I might casually ask a group whether they’ve experienced trouble connecting with their students and, if so, how they manages the situation.
  3. Tell your kids to pretend they’re a superhero.
  4. Touch affectionately (but respectfully).
  5. Be someone else’s placebo.

_Tools for Receiving Chatter Support

  1. Build a board of advisers.
  2. Seek out physical contact.
  3. Look at a photo of a loved one.
  4. Perform a ritual with others.
  5. Minimize passive social media usage.
  6. Use social media to gain support.

Tools That Involve the Environment

  1. Create order in your environment.
  2. Increase your exposure to green spaces.
  3. Seek out awe-inspiring experiences.