How to cope with the chatter in your mind

“When we experience negative emotions and try to analyze our feelings, we often zoom in narrowly on the experience to the exclusion of other ways of thinking about the event that could lead us to feel better,” Liz Greene wrote in an article for Nautilus. “This leads us to get stuck in a negative cycle of thinking and feeling where we rehash what we felt and are feeling in ways that lead us to feel stuck.”

She interviewed Ethan Kross, an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, who “wants to teach us how to control the voices in our heads. Not the voices of mental illness, mind you, just the little voice we all have, cheerily (or naggingly) narrating our lives as we go about our days.”

Greene asked him, “In Chatter you say that nature, even virtual nature, can have a really positive effect on our inner voice.” Kross responded, “Yes. The idea behind why nature can be so useful is it gives our attention the ability to recharge. And the way it does so is by subtly drawing our attention to things that are interesting to us, but don’t necessarily take a whole lot of bandwidth for us to make sense of.”

Even so-called “virtual nature” counts. “Virtual nature can still have a positive effect, but there does appear to be a dose-response relationship. So the more intense and immersive an actual experience is, the larger the gain,” Kross said. “Another mechanism that explains how nature can be useful is by promoting feelings of awe. The sense that you’re in the presence of something vast that you can’t explain. That gives you a sense of perspective, makes your concerns feel smaller.”

Learn more about this fascinating development in self-control over our inner voice by reading Liz Greene’s complete article in Nautilus.

Source: How to Quiet Your Mind Chatter: To break the tape loop in your head, talk to yourself as another person.