[MUSIC] So we're continuing all the strategies we have to come up with thought patterns that will make us a little bit happier. And in this lecture, we're going to be talking about ways that we can hack thought patterns that often don't feel very good. If you think about the kinds of stories that you have going on in your head, sometimes it's not stories that make you mindful and present things about the here and now. Sometimes it's really anxious thoughts about what went on in the past and what might go on in the future. And so scientists have words for these, right? One of these words is rumination. This is the perceptive thought, so it's going and going which is filled with tons of negative content about the past. Or what could be going on right now? What's about to happen, right? The things that happened before, had that terrible conversation with my mom. I'm really worried about how I did on that test back in the day. It's just stuff in the past that you can't control, but your thoughts get spiraled on them. That's rumination. And it has a kind of sister which is worry, the very same thing. This is a repetitive thought pattern, but this time it's about the future. I'm never going to get into college. I'm really worried about what's going to happen with my health, things that are not in the here and now, but are often the future, right? So these things when we worry, when we ruminate, it doesn't feel good, right? It feels pretty awful. And that raises this question of, why do we do this in the first place? And I think the problem is that we mistakenly think it's a good thing to do especially with worry, I think we sometimes think, if I really worry about this upcoming test that I'm going to study more and do better on it. But is that really true, right? Our minds lie to us. Maybe this is another spot where we're getting it wrong. And this is why we have some lovely studies that have looked at this. In fact, Von Der Embse and colleagues back in 2018 tried to look at this. And they use this technique that we love in this class which is they used a meta-analysis, remember where you bring all the different studies together. And they did this big meta-analysis on all the studies about worry and academic outcomes, and what do they find? They find that the more you worry about your academic performance the worse you do. Whether that's measured in your test performance, how you do in your GPA, how you do on a standardized test, more worry equals worse academic performance. So we have this idea that we're supposed to worry but in fact, it's making all our performance worse. And so that raises a question of is there some effective strategy for controlling our worry, controlling our rumination, what can we do to shut that stuff off? And this is the point where if I was giving you all homework, I would recommend that literally every high school student watching this, read this fantastic book by the psychologist Ethan Kross on Chatter. It's all these ways that you can control your inner dialogue, your inner monologue to do better. But rather than have you all read the book, I'm going to digest everything into what we love even more. Just PSYCHROTIPS. And so PSYCHROTIP number one, which comes directly from Ethan's work, is that if you want to control your worry and your rumination, you need to invest in what he calls distanced self-talk. What is distant self talk? Well, we're going to define it as the act of talking to yourself in a particular way using a particular set of pronouns rather than talk to yourself in the first person. So I really need to study, I need to pay attention so I can study more for the SATs, and so on. Where you're like I, me, you talk to yourself in the second person, you say Laurie you need to do this, right? Or in the third-person Laurie study, you're actually referring to yourself by name, right? And this sounds dumb, it sounds like you're Yoda talking to yourself or something if you know the Star Wars reference, right? But it turns out that just that switch and how you talk to yourself matters. And it matters because when you hear that second person, hey, Laura, you should do, da, da, you don't think it's you talking to yourself. You think it's kind of a wise counsel, some outside person who's giving you advice and helping you, and that gives you some psychological distance. What seemed like a worry that was going on in your head now, it feels like a more distant conversation you're having with a colleague. And the evidence suggests that this kind of pattern of self-talk can reduce our anxiety, but it can also improve our performance. Ethan Kross has one study on this where he looked at something that was a tough performance for college students, he brings them and he says, you have to give a big public speech in front of a really scary audience and this is something college students do not want to do, they're actively very scared about this. But he tells them how to engage in self-talk. He either says, do what you would normally do and use that first person to like, my gosh, I'm so scared, how am I going to do this? Or he instructs people, hey, use this non-first person, use this distant self-talk, use your own name, say you, hey, you can do this, and so. And what he finds is that if you look at how the students perform after this, first, I'm going to show you a measure of their effect and in this case, bigger bars as worst effect is more negative. What he finds that if you watch the switch from the baseline, you've just heard that you're going to give this speech to after a few minutes later. What you find is that when you engage in first-person self-talk, you feel worse afterwards because you just kind of ruminated and gotten that spiral. But if you use the distant self-talk now all of a sudden you're feeling better and that feeling better translates not just in terms of your mood and your overall affect, it also translates to how you felt like you did. If I ask you, how much shame do you have about the talk? Are you feeling bad about it? You have more when you talk to yourself using that first person. But what's interesting is even if you have external people rate how you did on your speech, you wind up having done better on your speech when you use this distant self-talk, when you talk to yourself in the third person. So it's making you less anxious and it's allowing you to have some distance between that spiral in your brain about what you're thinking about and you can just focus on your performance. It's a super great strategy whenever you're doing something academics. So bring all of this into your tests and your standardized tests and all this other stuff. So that's PSYCHPROTIP number one, we should use some distance self-talk. But even has other tips that I think we should all pay attention to. And another one is that whenever you're kind of in that anxious spiral, you should picture a wise outside observer. All these strategies are finding ways to get distanced, right? Think about your problem as though you are fly on the wall, far away, looking at it of from somewhere else, right? And you just from taking that external perspective, you kind of can get a little bit of a different vantage point. Doesn't feel so extreme. It doesn't feel so emotional to you. But Ethan recommends not just having an outside observer, some random fly on the wall, pick some awesome wise observer, someone you really respect your respected teacher or coach, or if you're like me, pick some buddy that you think is awesome that you look up to. So for me, it's always Beyonce. I'm asking, what would Beyonce do? So you're in some rapid spiral, how am I going to say for this test? What would Beyonce do? And the beauty of using Beyonce, in this case, is that if you look at Beyonce's interviews, she uses the strategy of having a wise observer too. But she doesn't pick Beyonce, she picks a fictional character that she calls Sasha Fierce and so here's this lovely story from her. She's when I hear the chords, I'm at a concert, I'm putting on my stiletto shoes and I'm getting really nervous and that's when I call in Sasha Fierce, I say Sasha fierce, what would she do? And she would have her posture like this and she would come and speak, and I use that strategy and everything is different. So not only would I do what Beyonce would do, I would do what Beyonce is literally doing, where it's pulling in this wise observer, right? And so there's lovely studies that do this, not just with college students and teenagers like you, but with little kids where you teach little kids the strategy of what would a wise observer do. For little kids, it's often Batman where you ask, what would Batman do? And one of the studies that looked at this gave kids this really hard problem-solving tasks. They had to do this puzzle that was really hard, but they told kids, hey, you know, don't just do the task as you pretend you're somebody who'd be really good at this game, pretend you're Batman, which cards would batman pick? And what you find is two things happen, one is that kids who pretend to be Batman do better on the test just because they're in the mode of, what would batman do? But the reason they do better on the test and the reason the strategy works is that they're less anxious. When you call on this wise person, whether it's Batman or Sasha Fierce or whoever, you're not you anymore experiencing all that anxiety and that room, a native spiral, you're like this outside person and then you can kind of engage with a little bit more perspective. So that's use the wise observer strategy. Finally, there's a really fantastic strategy that you can employ whenever you get in these ruminative or worrying spirals. And that's to engage in some expressive writing. Maybe some of you all journal, maybe heard of some of the benefits of journaling and it really is the case that journaling can help with your thought patterns. Why? Often when you're writing about something, even if you're writing as you, you're getting a little bit of distance from it. You're writing this narrative story, you're not in the moment. And it turns out that can let us process things in ways we don't expect. Especially if you commit to writing just as openly and honestly as possible about whatever you're feeling. It gets back to some of the things we talked about in the mindfulness lecture, right? Non-judgmentally, you're just going to write what you're feeling, I'm feeling nervous, I'm feeling stressed right now, right? And so one study that looked at this really carefully actually brought college students in to try to see if this kind of journaling could help with exam stress. They bring college students in, right around finals period the most stressful time of the semester. And they gave students a kind of pretty hard math test that they weren't expecting. So students do this math test, everybody does badly, but they're, that was just a practice and now you've got the real one, a true high stakes once, everybody's feeling really nervous. But then they have half of the students do this expressive writing as openly as possible about your feelings about the exam. I'm really scared, I'm really worried. It's even better if you use distant self-talk, like Laurie, you're feeling really scared about this exam. But when you're writing, it's you instantly start coming up with solutions. But, I can study, I can do this thing, right? The question is whether or not this expressive writing helps you. And what they find is if you look, again, not just at how you're feeling but your accuracy. What you find is that the students who did the expressive writing wind up doing better on this test. And in fact, they do much better than those who didn't use the strategy, who are so stressed out, they do much worse on the second time. And this is the problem when we don't get a hold of that ruminative, worry spiral, we're just in our heads, right? We can't think of how to do some calculus problem because we just don't have the cognitive bandwidth to do it. But if you can just shut that up, get the worries on paper, then you open up a little bit more space and it can really improve not just how you feel in your thoughts but actually your academic performance. So all of these strategies where we can use the way we talk to ourselves to get a little bit of distance can really improve how we feel. And often in unexpected ways improve our performance too. [MUSIC]
