Chatter (book)
✒️ Note-Making
🔗Connect
🔼Topic:: introspection
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- Self talk creates inner narratives - It's through how we talk to ourselves, how we think about the events of our lives that we build our inner reality, how we see the world and how it connects to our identity and our values
- Convert harmful self talk to beneficial - Self talk becomes harmful when it is a form of "chatter", when we become our own worse critic, when we fill our mind with noise, stress and anxiety that we are unable to function. To turn this into a positive self talk, we can:
- Distance ourselves - To talk to ourselves as a supporting friend, address yourself by your name. This will give enough distance from the situation so we would be able to think more clearly
- Gain perspective - Immerse yourself in situations that would connect you to something bigger than yourself, gaining distance and perspective, like walking in nature
- Fake it till you make it - Use placebos and rituals to get yourself "unstuck", to escape from the negative cycle you are in and start acting like the person you want to be, and with time you will become one.
🗒️Relate
⛓ by following this method, what will happen? What is the goal of this book?
🔍Critique
✅ relevant research, metaphors or examples that helps to convey the argument our inner voice is our source of strength but also weakness. It fuels our motivation, goals, and creativity. But sometimes it can lead to stress and anxiety. To reduce those cases, we need to use cognitive distancing, rituals and constructive conversations to give us perspective and order.
❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...
🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...
🗨️Review
💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... He advices using placebos and rituals to calm our inner chatter. While it does seem that he is very aware that we should not mystify those rituals, it is still very dangerous to use them, especially with kids, since it might be part of their culture without knowing the true implications of placebos.
🖼️Outline
📒 Notes
Intro:
We all talk to ourselves, using introspection as a tool to find answers to the challenges we meet in life. However, sometimes we find an inner critic instead of support, and get stuck on an endless cycle of negative thought. Self Criticism
The answer, is not to avoid inner chatter, but rather to do it wisely.
- In the most basic sense, introspection simply means actively paying attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings. (Location 176)
- when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good. (Location 183)
- Chatter consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. (Location 191)
- We introspect hoping to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead. (Location 194)
- The key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively. (Location 261)
Why We Talk to Ourselves
chatter in the technical term is our barrier to connect between Working Memory (recent events) and the conscious self. However, in essence our inner voice is our tool to "self narrate" our lives. We are creatures of Narratives, of great ideas and identities. This inner voice is what allows us to connect/determine the effects of recent events on our identify, how we perceive them, and how do they connect to our goal, to our creativity, and ability to make sense of our lives and control it. They are the glasses by which we see our lives. Subjective Reality. That's why what we're thinking at any given moment is more predictive of our happiness than what we're actually doing. Happiness is an internal state The inner voice is sometimes similar to dreams, both meant to be a tool to simulate situations in life in a safe environment.
- The inner voice was always there with something to say, reminding us of the inescapable need we all have to use our minds to make sense of our experiences and the role that language plays in helping us do so. (Location 343)
- our inner voice makes its home in us as children by going from the outside in, until we later speak from the inside out and affect those around us. (Location 403)
- dreams are often functional and highly attuned to our practical needs. You can think of them as a slightly zany flight simulator. They aid us in preparing for the future by simulating events that are still to come, pointing our attention to potentially real scenarios and even threats to be wary of. (Location 431)
- we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character. Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity. (Location 437)
- Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about. (Location 495)
When Talking to Ourselves Backfires
Chatter can hurt us in several ways:
- Disrupt our physical actions - chatter draws attention away from our automatic processes, which turns them from automatic to separated high maintenance actions, which leads most likely to errors, like thinking about how to play the piano can only hurt vs just "let the fingers do their thing". Flow
- Isolate us - whether by chattering about our positive image, or overwhelming others with our complaints, we just push people away. It intensifies our emotions so much that we are no longer able to see clearly the other side, empathize with them, so we ignore their viewpoint. Relationships
Chatter can also lead to actual physical damage. Emotional and physical sensations are linked, meaning an emotional pain like being dumped is felt the same as actual pain in our body. Which means that the negative cycle of chatter can actually hurt us. Also, it can effect the way our genes interact which the world, meaning manipulate the effects of the environment on which genes are activates, to increases negative effects of stress, for example. Genetic Switches
- This is exactly what our inner voice’s tendency to immerse us in a problem does. It overfocuses our attention on the parts of a behavior that only functions as the sum of its parts. The result: paralysis by analysis. (Location 583)
- we jam our executive functions up by attending to a “dual task”—the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. (Location 607)
- We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough. (Location 641)
- The words streaming through our heads can unravel us, but they can also drive us toward meaningful accomplishments…if we know how to control them. (Location 807)
Zooming Out
The best way to stop chatter from spiraling out of control is by zooming out, self talk
However , Cognitive Distancing can lessen the positive sensations of the moment, since we are less immersed in the situation
- chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on something, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective. (Location 877)
- distraction constitutes a short-term fix—a Band-Aid that obscures the wound without healing it. (Location 911)
- Distancing could put out chatter brush fires before they grew into longer-lasting conflagrations. (Location 956)
- Wisdom involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the “big picture” in several senses: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people’s viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives. (Location 1001)
- what temporal distancing promotes is one of the facets of wisdom: the understanding that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are going to change. Recognizing that feature of life when it comes to negative experiences can be tremendously alleviating. (Location 1083)
When I Become You
The main disadvantage of cognitive distancing is that it requires focus and effort, which is exactly what we don't have due to our inner chatter that uses up all of our mental power. However, there is a simple and easy tool that mimics cognitive distancing without costing much. Address yourself by your name. Instead of "why did I do it", ask "what did John did it". It will force your mind to look at yourself as a third person, thus creating distance.
- using your own name, while also employing the second and third person, created emotional distance because it makes you feel as if you were talking to another person when you’re talking to yourself. (Location 1206)
- distanced self-talk leads people to consider stressful situations in more challenge-oriented terms, allowing them to provide encouraging, “you can do it” advice to themselves, rather than catastrophizing the situation. (Location 1298)
The Power and Peril of Other People
Even talking to others might not be the best solution for our chatter. In each situation of stress, we have two types of needs from others:
- Emotional needs - Empathy, the desire that others will share our pain and worldview. Active Listening
- Cognitive needs - the desire to resolve the situation, find a more helpful viewpoint
When we focus more on our emotional needs rather than our cognitive ones, instead of distancing by listening to an outsiders opinion, we get an amplifier for our chatter, a sort of a Conformation Bias.
the answer, therefore, is to combine "somehow" the emotional connection of a warm human, with the guidance of a wise teacher. Mentor note however that it could backfire when the person you are talking to doesn't want your help, and didn't invite you to do so.
- sharing our emotions with others makes us feel closer to and more supported by the people we open up to. But the ways most of us commonly talk and listen to each other do little to reduce our chatter. Quite frequently, they exacerbate it. (Location 1452)
- when we’re upset, we tend to overfocus on receiving empathy rather than finding practical solutions. (Location 1497)
- rumination amounts to tossing fresh logs onto the fire of an already flaming inner voice. The rehashing of the narrative revives the unpleasantness and keeps us brooding. While we feel more connected and supported by those who engage us this way, it doesn’t help us generate a plan or creatively reframe the problem at hand. (Location 1512)
- Active Listening → Empathy → Rapport → Influence → Behavioral Change. In essence, it’s a road map for satisfying people’s social-emotional needs that nudges them toward a solution drawing on their cognitive abilities. (Location 1556)
- when we are aware that others are helping us but we haven’t invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some way—a feeling that our inner voice may latch on to. (Location 1613)
Outside In
Nature walk, like watching trees or walking in a park has a positive effect on our mental and physical well-being. It does that by drawing our attention away from ourselves, connecting us to something bigger, external, creating a sense of fascination. Since this doesn't require us to focus, we are not trying to remember every detail about the tree, but rather be immersed in the sensation, it is an activity that is easy to do. We don't have to be physically close to nature for it to work, using photos and videos generate the same effect.
- Trees and grass seemed to act like mental vitamins that fueled their ability to manage the stressors they faced. (Location 1714)
- nature provides humans with a tool for caring for our inner voice from the outside in, and the longer we’re exposed to nature, the more our health improves. It offers us a playbook for structuring our environments to reduce chatter. (Location 1795)
- feeling out of control often causes our chatter to spike and propels us to try to regain it. Which is where turning to our physical environments becomes relevant. (Location 1914)
Mind Magic
we have ways of tricking our mind to feel or be better. one way is placebos Placebo effect, merely by believing something would work, it does . Not only in physical sensations, like reduced pain, but also calmness and order in our mind, reducing chatter.
the second way is Rituals, acts or habits that are mentally connected between the external and inner world. Like organizing your house would being order to your mind.
- the back door of placebos is tricky to access. For one to work, we have to be deceived into believing that we’re consuming a substance or engaging in a behavior that has actual healing properties. (Location 2121)
- Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves. They simultaneously serve to broaden our perspective and enhance our sense of connection with other people and forces. (Location 2211)
- The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of the inner voice. (Location 2213)
Conclusion
- This inability to ever fully escape our minds is a main driver of our ingenuity: the things we build, the stories we tell, and the futures we dream. (Location 2286)
- The challenge isn’t to avoid negative states altogether. It’s to not let them consume you. (Location 2302)
- changing the conversations we have with ourselves has the potential to change our lives. (Location 2354)
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