According to Dr. Ethan Kross, we can control our negative inner voice by using a few simple practices. These are my favorite take-home points from his appearance on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

Recently, Dr. Ethan Kross appeared on the Huberman Lab podcast to help listeners learn to control their inner voices. Kross is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of Chatter: The Voice In Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It and Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You.

I’m a long-time fan of the Huberman Lab, but was particularly excited to listen to the episode titled Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience. Negative thought loops are a frequent topic with my coaching clients and something that can hinder motivation and goal attainment.

The episode offers an informative interview with Kross, the leading expert on stopping our negative inner voice. I highly recommend this episode to anyone suffering with intrusive, negative thoughts. However, if you don’t have 3 hours to spare, I’ve got the cheat sheet below.

Take-Home Points: How To Control Your Negative Inner Voice

Our inner voice serves an important purpose:

  • It helps us keep things in our working memory so we can remember them later.
  • It allows us to mentally prepare or rehearse, like for a presentation or talk.

Chatter is the dark side of this, or the negative inner voice:

  • It occurs when we get caught in a loop, repeating the same negative thoughts without making any progress with the real problem.
  • Chatter consumes our attentional resources, so we can’t focus or solve problems.

There are simple techniques for controlling the negative inner voice, or chatter:

Distract Yourself:

  • Do something that requires your attention in a healthy way (i.e. play a game, read a book, exercise).
  • Why this works: We really can’t focus on more than one or two things at a time, so healthy forms of entertainment or distraction break the negative thought loop, even if it’s just temporary.

Play is more than just healthy distraction. Learn more here!

Create Distance:

  • Speak to yourself in the third person (i.e. “Melissa, you have a big decision to make, and either way, you’ll be ok.”).
  • Why this works:
    • This gives us more distance from our thoughts than when we speak to ourselves in the first person.
    • We are better at giving advice to others than to ourselves, and speaking in the third person mimics this.

For more help getting distance from your thoughts/emotions, try this!

Use “Mental Time Travel” (a.k.a. temporal distancing):

  • Travel into the future by asking yourself, “How will I feel about this tomorrow morning/next week/in a year?”
  • Travel into the past by asking yourself, “When have I tackled a similar problem?” or “When have I gotten through something that felt this big?” or even, “Who do I know who has been through this?”
  • Use daydreaming to get out of the present thought loop.
    • Daydream about something you want to do in the future that’s enjoyable (i.e. Your dream vacation).
    • Savor a wonderful past experience by reliving it in great detail.
  • Why this works:
    • It’s a great way to address that negative inner voice that occurs at 2:00 AM, because it gives you something positive to focus on.
    • It gives you a better perspective since middle of the night thoughts are always blown out of proportion.

Learn how to use savoring to build resilience here!

Get Outside:

  • Find a safe, natural setting to spend time in.
  • Pay attention to the cues in your environment that create a sense of awe.
  • Why this works:
    • In nature there are cues, like birds chirping or flowers blooming that temporarily take your attention away from your negative inner voice.
    • Awe makes you appreciate the impressive universe.
    • This creates a “shrinking of the self” that puts your problems in perspective.

Check out this article for more ways to experience awe.

Reassure Yourself:

  • Remind yourself that having occasional dark thoughts is normal. It’s just the way the brain works.
    • We ALL have negative thoughts, some of which are really dark.
    • It’s when we get hung up on them, question them, or convince ourselves they must mean something that we can get stuck or feel anxious.
  • Reassure yourself by saying, “That’s just a thought. That’s how my brain works. Everyone has dark thoughts. I don’t have to believe them. They don’t have to mean anything. This is just part of being human.”
  • Why this works:
    • This is a way to practice self-compassion (by linking your struggles to the human condition.)
    • This is a way to be mindful of fleeting thoughts, rather than getting carried away in them.

For a more detailed discussion of self-compassion, read this!

Take-Home Points: How To Increase Your Resilience

When we are resilient, we feel more emotionally stable, rather than hijacked by our emotions. In other words, resilient people experience less dramatic or shorter fluctuations in negative emotions.

All emotions are functional in the right context:

  • They force us to reflect on what is happening.
  • They help us to make sense out of our experience and find meaning.
  • When they are uncomfortable, they help motivate us to make changes.
  • When we express them (verbally or nonverbally), it serves as an important signal to our social support system.

According to Kross, there are simple techniques for managing our negative emotions and building our resilience:

Connect With Your Senses:

  • Look at photos that remind you of a happy experience or photos of nature.
  • Listen to music that is congruent with how you want to feel.
  • Smell something (i.e. a homemade cookie, essential oils, your baby’s skin, fresh air) that you find pleasant.
  • Savor the taste of something delicious.
  • Touch something soft (i.e. a blanket, your pet).
  • Why this works: When you engage one or more of your five senses in a positive way, it shifts your emotions quickly.

Try this 5-Senses technique!

Use Comforting Touch:

  • Hug a loved one.
  • Get a massage.
  • Give yourself a hug. (Yes, compassionate self-touch does actually work!)
  • Why this works:
    • We are social creatures that desire physical human contact.
    • When we are touched in a compassionate way, it releases chemicals that improve our mood.

I know it feels touchy-feely to some, but seriously, read this for more information on compassionate self-touch for stress relief!

Write It Down:

  • Expressive writing is a specific technique, done for 15-20 minutes daily for several consecutive days, focusing on a deeply emotional topic you are struggling with. (This is known as Pennebaker Expressive Writing.)
  • Why this works:
    • Writing out our thoughts and emotions can bring emotional clarity.
    • It forces us to structure our thoughts in complete sentences, which is very different from how we think through emotions.

For more on writing to change your habits, read this!

Each of these practices are evidence-based ways to build resilience and tamp down our negative inner voices. You don’t have to do all of them. The key is to start small by choosing one thing to do differently.

Small Changes, Big Transformation

These are small changes we can make to prioritize our health and build resilience. Wellness doesn’t have to feel so overwhelming. Give this practice a try this week and let me know how it goes!

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