Podcast Book Club
I love podcasts and listen to them often. They keep me company while I’m cleaning, commuting, or taking a walk. I have a playlist saved of mental health-related podcasts that I love because I revisit them for myself and often recommend them to clients, too. Consider this a peek into my therapy podcast playlist!
Today I wanted to share a reflection on an episode of A Slight Change of Plans with Dr. Maya Shankar. Dr. Shankar is a cognitive scientist and does a beautiful job of storytelling that makes me look more compassionately at how my brain works. The episode I want to focus on today is called “The Science of Our Inner Voice”. They talk about the running dialogue that goes on in our heads, or “mental chatter”. This inner monologue is a useful tool and works for us in many ways (think: remembering a list of things our partner asked us to accomplish through the course of the afternoon). However, that’s not to say that it is always helpful. When mental chatter becomes unhelpful it is typically because it is “zooming us in on our problem” which can narrow our thinking and obstruct our view of the bigger picture. This tends to happen if we experienced something uncomfortable or anxiety inducing. The mental chatter feels like it will help us get to the bottom of things when in fact, it will likely keep us in the same circle of thought and result in unhelpful ruminations.
In the episode, they talk about a few tools we can use to interrupt this cycle. I’ll be referring to this process as “zooming out”. One way to zoom out is to pretend we are helping a friend with this problem. It can feel silly, but they suggest “coaching” yourself through your problem using third person because it can help us see the problem in a more objective way. And as an added bonus, using this third person strategy can help us approach the problem with increased self compassion since we aren’t usually as hard on others as we are on ourselves. They also suggest using something called “temporal distancing” to think about how we may feel about this problem in a week, a month, or a year from now. And finally, one of my favorite strategies is to seek out an experience that gives you a sense of awe. Living in Chicago, we are lucky to have the lake as an easy access to this tool. Seeing something that feels vast can make us feel small (in a good way!) and help us zoom out and gain additional perspective on our situation. Not to mention, being near a body of water or nature more generally tend to have calming, grounding effects. The link for the episode is below - check it out and let us know what you think!
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/a-slight-change-of-plans/the-science-of-our-inner-voice