Staying On Course: Transforming Your Mental Chatter

Over the last sessions we have talked about:

• Discovering What’s Important
• Charting Your North Star
• Mapping Your Route
• Identifying Your Obstacles
• Staying on Course
  • Changing Unproductive Habitual Tendencies
  • Transforming Your Mental Chatter

That chatter consists of thoughts that are images and sound bites, not reality. Scientists estimate that we have 50,000-80,000 thoughts per day.  That is 2,000-3,000 thoughts per hour. Most of the thoughts we are below the line.  We have talked about thinking of your mind as a circle with a line through it.  Anything above the lne we are aware of. Anything below the line is unconscious. Are you aware of the 2,000-3,000 thoughts you had in the last hour?

A lot of our thoughts are unconscious. We don’t even know they are going on. But everytime we have a thought, we are strengthening the neuropathway of that thought. So if you have a negative thought going on below the level of consciousness, it is getting stronger and stronger every time you think of it. About 90% of our thought are repeats. Many of those thoughts are rehashing the past, that shoulda/woulda/coulda. Thinking that if we just keep thinking about it in different ways we will change the ending. But we can’t change the ending of the past. A lot of our thoughts are stirring up anxiety about the future. All we know about the future we can’t predict it. Overplanning will not give us control over the future. Another type of thought that occurs is , “What is this person going to think of me?”

When we look closely at our chatter, you find that many of your thoughts are figments of our imagination. Some chatter replays of the monologues of your parents, or other influential people in your lives.  Other chatter comes from your inner critic who is so worried that you will fail that it is constantly trying to fix us. 

I call my inner critic Billy after a boy who was mean to me in 8^th grade. I have found that attributing the chatter to Billy makes it less credible and thus it has less power over me. I don’t have to listen to Billy and I don’t have to believe what he says. I got the idea of naming my critic frofm Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher.  She calls hers Lucy from Charlie Brown. It is a way to put a little more light heartedness in it so you take it a little less seriously.

Calming your inner critic is really what transforming your mental chatter is all about.  It is really a hard thing to do.  If you try to resist the thoughts, push them away or push them below the line guess what happens? They are still there below the line and they are still happening thousands of times a day. You are still strengthening that neuropathway. You want to make your chatter less credible, give it less power over you. Sometimes that chatter was helpful in the past, but it is not helpful any more. Our mental chatter may have been helpful in the past, so our brain says keep doing it. But as with habits, the reward value may have changed. Now that mental chatter hurts us instead of helping us.

“What’s important to remember about the stories other people have about us—like our family—is that we didn’t write them! These are stories someone else told us, and they’re much more about the person telling the story than they are about us.” Lori Gottlieb

You have a story you have been telling yourself. Maybe it is your house isn’t clean enough. It is possible that story is telling more about the person who said that than it is telling about you. They may be OCD and their house has to be perfect. It is not really talking about you. Your house may be cleaner than 90% of all houses in the world. Yet you still beat yourself us because someone else told you a story and you started believing it.

Most of the time, our inner voices function well.  However, when we are stressed or emotional from facing high stakes, our inner voice can turn to chatter.  The chatter may be rehashing the past, worrying about the future, or making up stories about what others are thinking. When someone doesn’t say hello to us, we often make up a story that she doesn’t like me or she is mad at me. Instead of listening to what their story is.Sometimes we jump from one negative story to the next. She is mad at me, that means the so and so is mad at me that means I am never going to have any friends because everyone is mad at me. And then we jump to another mistake we made. I am not smart enough, I did this wrong.

If we allow ourselves to become lost in negative chatter, we can become distressed. Our prefrontal cortex, the decision making part of our brain, stops working and our amygdala, the emotional part of our brain, pushes us onto the hamster wheel of reactivity. The wheel spins round and round and we can’t get off no matter how hard we try. And each time we spin, we strengthen the neural pathway of that negative chatter. That is the bad news about neural plasticity. 

So we want to be aware as soon as possible when the negative thoughts pop us. That is why we meditate. You may have thought you were meditating to stop the thoughts. But that doesn’t happen. We meditate to train our brain to be aware when a thought it popping up. Some people can be mindful throughout the day. I have been meditating for over a decade, and I still need formal meditation practice so that I can be more mindful throughout the day.

Reflection

Think of a time when your mind was flitting from one story to the next. What were some of those stories? How did you feel in your body as your mind was racing from one thought to the next?

You may have found that when chatter takes over, you torment yourself. You may have thought about how you screwed up, said the wrong thing, or mistreated someone; so you end up feeling bad about yourself. Then you think about it again. And again. And this negative thought tends to activate another negative thought, which triggers another, and so on. You are so busy running from one negative thought to the next that you lose sight of the big picture.

You could step back and say, “Oh, she didn’t say hello to me. She may be in a totally different world. I wonder what is going on with her.” Instead of  saying, “She doesn’t like me.” We could step back and see that maybe the world doesn’t revolve around me. Maybe I need to take a step back and see what is going on with them. We just talked about the stories people told you might say more about them than they do about you. Maybe the fact that she didn’t say hello to you is because something is going on with her. Can you could get curious about that instead of making up a story that has no basis in reality? If not, instead of moving past, you are stuck on the hamster wheel of reactivity. You may even feel paralyzed. All your energy is going into negative story after negative story.

“It is as if your brain is stuck in the wrong gear and the judgments are quietly whirring just below your perceptual threshold, gnawing away at you and draining precious mental resources. In this state of mind, it can be difficult to think clearly or make decisions. It can feel like your brain is frozen and you’ve lost the antifreeze.” Mark Coleman

We tolerate this constant chatter in our minds telling us how horrible we are, we eat too much, we are fat and lazy, and we will never be able to meditate. I didn’t do my gratitude journal, I am a terrible person. We let that mental chatter go on and on until we somehow come to believe that these ruminations, judgments, and worries are an accurate representation of how our lives and the world ‘really are.’ What the mental chatter really is is just thought bubbles. You can pop those bubbles. We do this by teasing out the fact from the fiction in our stories.

All this negative chatter hogs our neural capacity. Our attention narrows to the thoughts that cause us the most distress. We use our brain to listen to our inner critic instead of solving the problem or doing what we want to be doing at that moment. Try reading a really good book when you are ruminating about being mistreated.  Your mind can’t stay on the story. Each time you think you have read a page, have no idea what you read. Not a clue. Because the negative thoughts are hoggin our neural capacity. Until we can quiet those negative  thoughts down, we are not going to be able to remember what we read. We won’t be able to see what is actually going on in the present moment. Our chatter divides and blurs our attention. So we need to turn the volume down on our chatter so we can see things as they are and be in the present moment.

We practice mindfulness so we are aware of the chatter and can make a conscious decision whether we want to continue to pay attention to the thoughts or refocus our attention. We can choose to pay attention to the thoughts that tell us we are not good enough and do not deserve happiness, or we can change to more empowering thoughts. We don’t have to believe the old narrative that we thought was our identity.

“Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. It helps us “storify” life. The words of the mind sculpt the past, and thus set up a narrative for us to follow into the future. By flitting back and forth between different memories, our internal monologues weave a neural narrative of recollections. It sews the past into the seams of our brain’s construction of our identity.” Ethan Kross

The thoughts I had that I was supposed to get all A’s constructed the identity that I was a no-it-all and do-it-all. It had a big impact on how I lived my life.  The narrative that you have is really very important.

Reflection

How has your mental chatter set up a narrative for you to follow into the future?

Our mindfulness practice helps us to work with our thoughts in two very important ways.

1. First, become aware of the constant torrent of thoughts cascading through our mind. “What is going on right now? What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? What am I sensing?” Pay close attention to whether you are adding a story onto the facts of the situation. The story you add on is usually what hurts us. Typically, we add the thought “there something is wrong me” or “there is something wrong with you”  Medditation really helps you become more aware of the stories.

• Second, we learn to extricate ourselves from the stories we are constantly creating. We can’t resist the stories and say just don’t think about it. I did that for 50 years. Just brush it under the carpet and it won’t bother you. But the thought remains below the line and the story keeps playing over and over, getting strongere and stronger and I don’t even know it. One of the ways I extracated myself from my stories was naming my inner critic Billy. Then I could tell myself, that is just Billy talking again. By extricating myself, Billy has become much quieter than he ever was before. I have really turned his volume down. I did it partly by naming him which took some power away from him. But partly by followingsome ways to control chatter from Ethan Kross.

• Distanced self-talk – use your name and the second-person you to refer to yourself. Referring to yourself in second-person makes you less likely to ruminate and generate negative emotions and more likely to improve performance under stress and think more skillfully.
• Imagine advising a friend – talk to yourself as you would to a friend going through the same experience.
• Broaden your perspective – think about how this experience compares to other adverse experiences you have navigated and how it fits into the broader scheme of your life.
• Reframe your experience as a challenge – instead of thinking of the experience as a threat that you can’t manage, turn it into a challenge you are up for.
• Normalize your experience – Know that you are not alone; think of all the others in the world who are facing or have faced this experience.
• Engage in mental time travel – think about how you will feel in a month, a year, or even ten years out.
• Journal – write your deepest throughs and feelings for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three days.
• Create order in your environment – chatter makes us feel we are losing control. Boost your sense of control by cleaning, organizing, making lists, or arranging objects.

Our minds are extraordinary; they allow us to survive and thrive. We can choose what we want to do with the thoughts that pop into our heads.  We can let the negative ones derail us, or we can choose to savor the positive ones. We can look at obstacles as threats or as opportunities. We can be supportive of ourselves, or we can be our own worst critic. Most of us have been creating unhelpful neural pathways, so it will take practice to strengthen the good ones while letting the unhelpful ones atrophy. By doing so we we stay on course towards our North Star.