Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience

The inner voice is a powerful tool that can be both beneficial and harmful. It can be used to manage emotions, but it can also lead to chatter, which is the repetitive looping of negative thoughts. To combat chatter, Dr. Kross recommends distancing techniques, such as using second-person pronouns to create a more objective perspective, and temporal distancing, which involves asking yourself how you will feel about a problem in the future.

Inner voice

• 00:06:22 The inner voice is the ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives and it's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things, including keeping verbal information active for short periods of time, simulating and planning, and regulating emotions.

Chatter

• 00:06:24 Chatter is a dark side of the inner voice that involves looping over the same problem in our heads without making any progress. It can consume our attentional resources, interfere with our ability to focus and solve problems, and can even lead to depression, anxiety, and trauma.

Sensory shifters

• 00:11:11 Sensory experiences like music or visual images can be powerful tools for shifting our emotions. They can help us to feel more motivated, less anxious, or more relaxed. However, it's important to be aware that we may not always want to shift our emotional state, and that trying to force a shift can sometimes backfire.

Invisible support

• 00:21:14 Invisible support involves providing support to someone who needs it without making it obvious that you are doing so. This can be a more effective way of helping someone than trying to intervene directly, as it allows them to feel like they are capable of managing their own circumstances.

Expressive writing

• 00:28:03 Expressive writing is an effortful but effective tool for working through problematic experiences. It involves sitting down and writing about a difficult experience for 15-20 minutes a day for 1-3 days. This practice can help people to reduce anxiety, cope with trauma, and gain a better understanding of their own thoughts and emotions.

Self-control & motivation

• 00:33:53 Self-control and motivation are both essential for effective emotion regulation. We need to be motivated to manage our emotions, and we need to possess the tools that allow us to achieve our emotional goals.

Unconscious problem solving

• 00:48:46 Our brains are constantly working to solve problems, even when we are not consciously aware of it. Sometimes, solutions to problems will suddenly bubble up into our awareness when we are engaged in an activity that is not related to the problem at hand. This is because our unconscious mind is processing information and generating solutions that we are not aware of.

Emotional contagion

• 02:00:01 Emotional contagion is a phenomenon in which emotions spread quickly from one person to another. We are more likely to catch emotions from others when we are unsure of how we should be feeling in a particular situation. This is because we often look to others for cues on how to respond.

Attentional spotlight

• 02:44:00 Our brains have a sophisticated attention deployment system that allows us to focus on specific things, ignore others, and shift our attention back and forth between different things. However, it's difficult to maintain our attention on something when we are experiencing strong emotions.

Flexibility

• 02:52:20 Flexibility in how we deploy our attention is key to effective emotion regulation. Sometimes, we need to focus on a problem in order to solve it, but other times, we need to distract ourselves or shift our perspective. The key is to be able to adapt our approach based on the situation at hand.