Managing Your Mind's Chatter (part 1)

This episode is all about managing your mind's chatter. From anxious rumination to depressive thoughts, to resisting reality, to self-limiting beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies... we talk about how to manage all of that, and more. 

Explore several helpful models and tools that I've picked up over the years. Some come from different forms of therapy, others come from great minds and spiritual thinkers, and others come from friends.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Get Yourself Together Chica Podcast, the show that helps you thrive, or, you know, sometimes just survive. I'm Rebecca Fernandez. In each episode, we dive deep into something that has an impact on our lives as women, whether that's money or love, motherhood or friendship, our careers, or just making space for joy. 

This is episode number 18, which is the first of a two-part series, all about managing your mind's chatter. From anxious rumination to depressive thoughts, to resisting reality, to self-limiting beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies, we will talk about how to manage all of that, and more. 

I'm going to share some helpful models and tools that I've picked up over the years. Some come from different forms of therapy, others come from great minds and spiritual thinkers, and others come from friends. Be sure to visit the show notes at GetYourselfTogetherChica.com/podcast for links to anything we talk about today. And you can email me at podcast @ getyourselftogetherChica.com to let me know what you thought of today's episode. 

But first, I want to share what's bringing me joy right now. My dog, Iggy, someone gave him a bone for Christmas, a pretty big bone given that he's not a very large dog. And it's been cracking me up, just watching him delight in chewing on this thing. He's like reverting to a wild animal. In fact, sometimes we have to take it away from him because he will sit on the couch and gnaw on it, and he'll just do this wild growl if anybody walks anywhere near the living room. So we have to then take it away and say, all right, it's a little more than he can handle right now. But it's just so cute to see how a domesticated creature like him can start to turn back into his wolfish self if you give him something like that to gnaw on. 

So let's dive on in to today's topic, managing our mind’s chatter. You know, I don't know about you, but my mind sometimes, I swear, it's like it has the Amazon AI bot inside of it. If I start to worry about something, it's like this little tiny robot says, you know, people who enjoy worrying about that also enjoy worrying about these other remote possibilities. And my mind just starts to offer up this steady stream of clickbait headlines and images that make me even more anxious. 

And for many of us, our minds also offer up lots of doubts, lots of criticism, self limiting thoughts. So what do we do about it? 

We learn to manage our mind’s chatter. You'll notice that I say this is about managing the chatter rather than quieting it or silencing it. 

Last year, I came across the most interesting talk from the spiritual leader, Sadhguru, where someone asked him, “how do you stop the mind's chatter? It's so negative and relentless.” And you know, I was really intrigued by his response. I'll link to it in the show notes so you can watch the whole thing. 

But the gist of it was, he said, well, maybe you're only bothered by it because it's negative. If that chattering voice made you feel great, you wouldn't want it to stop. But you don't expect your heart to stop beating or your lungs to stop breathing. So why do we expect our brains to stop doing their own amazing work of thinking? 

It's not about the chatter and stopping it. Instead, he suggests, think of that anxious, angry chatter in your mind as if it's mental diarrhea. What causes ordinary diarrhea? Well, often consuming some bad food. What causes mental diarrhea? Consuming something that's bad for you for your mind and your soul. 

It's such a simple metaphor, but it really stuck with me. When I start to really feel that mental, angry chatter kick up, I ask myself, what have I been eating that's bad for me? 

For me, bad food for my mind and my soul looks like the stuff that keeps you doom scrolling on your phone, scary news stories, outrage about politics or the state of the world, traumatizing and terrible things that are happening to someone somewhere. Stories about sexual abuse and sexual misconduct, they're very triggering. 

Sometimes you have to realize that some questions just don't have answers. So we have to just stop asking those questions. And for me, “why” is often one of those questions. Why is this happening? Why isn't anyone doing anything about this? Why is there nothing I can do that will help? Those are questions that just don't have answers. And I have to stop asking those questions because they are bad food for my mind and my soul. 

And you know, I know myself and the people around me well enough by now to know people who know me when they hear this episode, they're going to be surprised. I'm going to get messages that say, “Really? You have those kinds of thoughts and fears and beliefs? You carry those kinds of anxious preoccupations around with you? You work that hard to keep yourself from self-destructing sometimes? I never would have guessed that.” 

And what I hope you take away from me sharing that is: having those doubts and those thoughts and those fears and those beliefs, it doesn't hold me back much and it hasn't in a long time, because I manage my mind's chatter. And it doesn't have to hold you back either. 

There's a model from classic psychology, it's called the Big Five model and it lays out five different personality traits that people can be either high, average, or low on. 

I was reminded of this model recently when I was reading David Brooks' new book, How to Know a Person. And I love the explanation that he provides for the big five trait that's called neuroticism. So I'm just going to read it to you. 

“People who score high in neuroticism respond powerfully to negative emotions. [I'll use the word ‘we’ even though David Brooks uses ‘they,’ because I am high on neuroticism.] So we feel fear, anxiety, shame, disgust, and sadness very quickly and very acutely. We're sensitive to potential threats. We're more likely to worry than to be calm, more highly strong than laid back, more vulnerable than resilient. If there is an angry face in a crowd, we will fixate on it and have trouble drawing our attention away. People who score high in neuroticism have more emotional ups and downs over the course of the day. We can fall into a particular kind of emotional spiral. We're quick to see threats and negative emotions. We interpret ambiguous events more negatively, and therefore we are exposed to more negative experiences. This exposure causes us to believe even more strongly that the world is a dangerous place. And thus we grow even more likely to see threats and so on and so on. We often feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. We prefer the devil we know to the devil we don't know.” 

That truly is one of the best explanations I have ever read or come across for neuroticism. So tip of the hat to David Brooks for putting that so well. 

No matter where you are on that neuroticism spectrum, if you're above average, you can learn to manage it. I have. Many other people have too. And it will make you a much happier person who is able to manage the chatter in your mind. I will put a link to the big five model in the show notes, but I want to caution you if you recognize some of yourself in that neuroticism personality trait, be cautious about how you respond to the details about that in the big five model. It is predictive of a lot of negative things in people's lives, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be impossible for you to have a happy, healthy relationship or succeed in life. It just means that in most circumstances, if you're naturally higher on neuroticism, you've got to do some work to learn how to manage it. And you're already there listening to this podcast so that indicates that you have some, probably above average, other personality traits that help offset it. 

For example, I am extremely high on agreeableness and on openness. And both of those qualities are traits that actually offset some of the challenges with being higher on the neuroticism spectrum. 

So go easy on yourself, don't panic, but it's an interesting area to do a little digging. And just to give you an example of how you can become more self-aware and thoughtful, I noticed just now my voice started speeding up just the possibility that somebody might use this information to judge themselves rather than help themselves, I saw that threat was possible. And if you were observant, you noticed you could hear that in my voice, but I was able to pause and reign it in. 

So how does a person develop that kind of self-awareness, that awareness of your thoughts and the pace even at which you're speaking or the signs in your body that you're feeling keyed up? One of the best ways you can build that skill is by building a meditation practice. 

Now, I know if you are someone who has a lot of chatter in your mind, you tend to also be the sort of person who shies away from meditation. You're very uncomfortable with it if you haven't delved into it. It sounds like you're going to be expected to empty your mind, or worse, like you're going to give your mind free rain to just fill up with all kinds of wild thoughts. 

I used to feel that way too. And what I learned is that meditation is actually exercise for your mind. It's a way of learning how to pay attention to your thoughts, not try to push them away, but observe them, become separate from them. See your thoughts and that voice in your mind as someone who is not you at your essence. But rather it’s this busy thinker, or sometimes it's called a monkey mind, and it's up there chattering away, and it gives you the space to observe it and see what effect it's having on you. 

There's lots of evidence behind the value of meditation, that it does decrease anxiety, that improves your awareness over your thoughts, but it is a powerful technique to explore, and there's a whole range of kinds of meditation out there. So explore some of the free apps that are available. There's lots and lots of them, but just start with a basic learn how to breathe meditation. Sometimes, Samatra meditation, this is sometimes called. You can find lots of these in the Insight Timer app. You can also get a pretty good primer in-- what's the name of that book? 10% happier by Dan Harris. It's a really good book that is kind of like meditation for the skeptical and sarcastic of us. 

I want to share with you a model that comes from cognitive behavioral therapy called the ABC model. It's a really great way to change your negative thoughts, your negative beliefs, and the assumptions and consequences that flow from those. 

The A in the ABC model stands for Activating Event, or sometimes it's called Adversity or Adverse Event. Let's give the example of: you have a performance review at work, and you get the feedback, “hey, try to use the word we more often, instead of saying I all the time. It comes across like you're too focused on yourself, and you don't care as much about the team.” 

That's an activating event for some people, right? They might start to feel things kick up inside of them in response to that. 

The B stands for Beliefs. What are the beliefs that that activating event generates inside of you? So for example, when you get that performance review feedback, perhaps you start to have a stream of beliefs that are activated like: I'm a bad person. I'm selfish. I'm self-absorbed. People don't like me. And they can even spiral rapidly downhill from there. Everything is over. I need to start over fresh somewhere else before I get fired. 

You're recognizing the swirl that starts to happen sometimes? Your particular beliefs and the thoughts that you start to have, even if you don't recognize them as disparate thoughts, they might be very different to that same event, or that particular event may not be an activating event for you. You might just take it in stride. 

But the point is, in the ABC model, when you start having those intense feelings and the swirling thoughts, you want to take a little step back and say, OK, what happened that activated this? OK, that was the A. What am I believing about myself? 

Because C, the C in the model, is consequences. What starts to happen, that stems from those thoughts and feelings and emotions that have been kicked up, based on those beliefs? And so in this example, the consequences might look like I'm weeping in the bathroom at work. At night, I can't sleep. Maybe I eat a whole sleeve of Oreo cookies. Maybe I withdraw from my boss. I start avoiding my peers. I feel ashamed. Maybe I become defensive and angry. Maybe I feel afraid to speak at all. I start self-censoring because I'm afraid whatever comes out of my mouth, it's going to sound like me, me, me, I, I, I. 

You can see how things like this can become self-fulfilling prophecies. People who experience negative emotions as a serious threat to their safety, people who react in response to negative information more intensely… Well, we tend to respond in ways that then create more negative experiences for us. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a vicious cycle. You're afraid of this negativity that you're, you're kind of picking up the vibe on, even if it's subtle, and you're trying to protect yourself, but your ways that you protect yourself actually cause the situation to become worse. 

We've all seen this with little kids. And in many ways, those of us who struggle with that, you know, managing our emotions piece, those of us who really feel negativity as an intense threat, we can respond in childish ways if we're not careful. Ways that obviously are going to make the situation go from neutral to negative, or from bad to worse. 

But in the moment, you've got to learn that skill of how to respond rather than just instinctively react. So in the ABC model, what they teach you to do is to pause, to learn to become aware of the physical sensations inside your body that indicate, "Wait, wait, this is an activating event for me." Even if you don't understand why, you start to recognize, "Oh, I feel awful all of a sudden." 

Then you ask, "What am I thinking or believing right now?" And you really dig in, like, "Where is this? Where is this hitting me? What do I believe right now?" 

And you examine those beliefs. Are they flexible and reasonable? Or are they a bit rigid and extreme and illogical? You might have to get an outside perspective to know for sure. 

But you pause somewhere between the activating event and what you do with it, the consequences, the A and the C, you pause and you examine the beliefs. And then you do the work to reframe them. 

So I'm going to give you a bunch of examples of ways that I reframe beliefs that are not helpful. One of my favorites is, "I say to myself, it's possible that…" (Dot dot dot.) 

Right, so if the belief I'm having is, this person is really upset with me and that's why they haven't responded to my message. I can reframe it. 

It's possible that… they've just been busy. It's possible that… my message just got lost. It's possible that… they are upset and they're being thoughtful in their response back. 

So let's say that you've just been told that you're losing your job, you've been laid off. Maybe the beliefs that that kicks up for you are, I'm inferior. I've screwed up big time on this team. I'm not good enough. Right? Really negative intense beliefs. 

You can say, It's possible that… this was a really hard decision for the manager. It's possible that… they cut me because the work I've been doing wasn't as critical to the business bottom line. It's possible that… they didn't know the work I was doing. It's possible that… they didn't understand what I was doing because I'm pretty quiet. It's possible that… the manager didn't know who to pick and just rolled the dice. It's possible that… they used some algorithm that I will never have access to understand or agree with. 

Right? Many things are possible. And typically our most extreme, emotionally intense beliefs about the situation are not what is actually going on. So when you are struggling with these pretty extreme, rigid, difficult beliefs, try reframing them with "It's possible that." 

Another one that I use a lot when I'm struggling with my feelings about myself, when I'm really falling into black and white thinking, that I'm good or I'm bad. Think about that feedback, the way that in that example, this person interpreted “You word I a lot” to mean, "I must be selfish." So what you could say there is, Well, I am sometimes selfish, sure. And I am often caring and thoughtful. 

I use the word "I a lot" because my early life maybe taught me to rely on myself and not ask for help. 

It might be true that some of my team does think I'm a bit self-absorbed. That would be disappointing, but it's not the end of the world. We all have flaws. 

I can experiment with changing my language a little bit. Maybe I'll use the word "we" more and see what happens. 

Really take the time and make the effort to think about how you would respond to a friend who said, "Gosh, I just feel like they think I'm selfish, or they think I'm self-absorbed." 

You would probably give them that more balanced perspective, right? Maybe you can be sometimes, and I also know you to be a wonderful kind person. So be a friend to yourself and speak to yourself like a friend would. I might be this bad thing sometimes, and I also have these good qualities, right? We all have redeeming qualities that make up for our flaws. 

Another phrase that I just heard this week, I caught it on a special episode of She Grabs the Mike from guest Barbara Bizou, and she used this phrase, "Up until now..." (dot dot dot) Right? 

So, Up until now, I used the word "I" without thinking about it.

Up until now, I've been shy about talking about my accomplishments at work. 

(And right away, you start to fill in the blank)... and moving forward, I realized that might actually not help me during layoffs. So, up until now, I've done that out of modesty. Moving forward, maybe I'm going to do things differently. 

It's a very accepting way of looking at your past, and maybe where you could have done better, but not getting mired in regret. Instead, giving yourself the opportunity to make a pivot if you need to. 

All right, next time in part two, we're going to dig into many, many more ways that you can reframe those false beliefs and unhelpful ways of thinking. We'll explore a number of ways to manage your mind's chatter, including radical acceptance. 

Well, it's time to tell you what I've not been cooking up in the kitchen this week. I was watching the French show "Lupin" with my children the other night, and right in the middle of the show, in French, a woman named Claire on the show said, "Pasta with ketchup." 

And everybody in the room who was watching just froze and looked at each other, and my son said, "Wait, pause." So, we paused it, and we were all like, "Did she just say pasta with ketchup?" And we were all looking, and sure enough, they were eating ketchup on their pasta. 

So, of course, we had to pause the show completely, and go do some googling, and it turns out, apparently in France and in Germany, and maybe elsewhere, people eat pasta with ketchup on it, and it's exactly what it sounds like. 

So, we've had a fierce debate about whether this could possibly be good, should we try it? Who's going to try it? 

Maybe one of us will. But I have to confess, I really feel like this is just going to taste like pasta with ketchup on it. 

Well, Chicas, that's all for today. For more episodes or links to the resources I might have mentioned, visit GetYourselfTogetherChica.com/podcast. If you liked today's episode, please share it with your friends, post it on social media, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any episodes. I would value so much if you would leave a review on Apple Podcast, or whatever app you listen to podcasts. Until next time, Chicas.