Top Quotes: “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It” — Ethan Kross

“In the most basic sense, introspection simply means actively paying attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings. The ability to do this is what allows us to imagine, remember, reflect, and then use these reveries to problem solve, innovate, and create. Many scientists, including myself, see this as one of the central evolutionary advances that distinguishes human beings from other species.”

“Humans weren’t made to hold fast to the present all the time. That’s just not what our brains evolved to do.

In recent years, cutting-edge methods that examine how the brain processes information and allow us to monitor behavior in real time have unlocked the hidden mechanics of the human mind. In doing so, they have uncovered something remarkable about our species: We spend one-third to one-half of our waking life not living in the present.

As naturally as we breathe, we “decouple” from the here and now, our brains transporting us to past events, imagined scenarios, and other internal musings. This tendency is so fundamental it has a name: our “default state.” It is the activity our brain automatically reverts to when not otherwise engaged, and often even when we are otherwise engaged.”

“Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud. To put this in perspective, consider that contemporary American presidents’ State of the Union speeches normally run around six thousand words and last over an hour. Our brains pack nearly the same verbiage into a mere sixty seconds.”

“The key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively.”

“He believed that the way we learn to manage our emotions begins with our relationships with our primary caretakers (typically our parents). These authorities give us instructions, and we repeat those instructions to ourselves aloud, often mimicking what they say. At first, we do this audibly. Over time, though, we come to internalize their message in silent inner speech. And then later, as we develop further, we come to use our own words to control ourselves for the rest of our lives. As we all know, this doesn’t mean that we always end up doing what our parents want — our verbal stream eventually develops its own unique contours that creatively direct our behavior — but these early developmental experiences influence us significantly.”

“Emerging evidence suggests that dreams are often functional and highly attuned to our practical needs. You can think of them as a slightly zany flight simulator. They aid us in preparing for the future by simulating events that are still to come, pointing our attention to potentially real scenarios and even threats to be wary of.”

“Not only can our thoughts taint experience. They can blot out nearly everything else.

A study published in 2010 drives home this point. The scientists found that inner experiences consistently dwarf outer ones. What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing. This speaks to a sour experience many people have had: You’re in a situation in which you should be happy (spending time with friends, say, or celebrating an accomplishment), but a ruminative thought swallows your mind. Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.”

“Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. Verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us. In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a “dual task” — the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, that’s how chatter divides and blurs our attention.

All of us are familiar with the distractions of a negative verbal stream. Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources. The problem for most of us, however, is that usually we’re engaged in activities with much higher stakes than retaining information in a book. We’re doing our jobs, pursuing our dreams, interacting with others, and being evaluated.

Chatter in the form of repetitive anxious thought is a marvelous saboteur when it comes to focused tasks. Countless studies reveal its debilitating effects. It leads students to perform worse on tests, produces stage fright and a tendency to catastrophize among artistic performers, and undermines negotiations in business.”

“Again and again, Rimé landed on the same finding: People feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences. But that wasn’t all. The more intense the emotion was, the more they wanted to talk about it. Additionally, they returned to talking about what had occurred more often, doing so repeatedly over the course of hours, days, weeks, and months, and sometimes even for the remainder of their lives.”

“While this sounds normal and harmless, repeatedly sharing our negative inner voice with others produces one of the great ironies of chatter and social life: We voice the thoughts in our minds to the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. It’s as though the pain of chatter makes people less sensitive to the normal social cues that tell us when enough is enough. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that talking to others about your problems is harmful per se. But it highlights how chatter can transform an otherwise helpful experience into something negative.

Many of us have a limited threshold for how much venting we can listen to, even from the people we love, as well as how often we can tolerate this venting while not feeling listened to ourselves.”

“Chatter also leads us to displace our aggression against people when they don’t deserve it. Our boss upsets us, for example, and we take it out on our kids.”

“Social media allows us to connect with others in the immediate aftermath of a negative emotional response, before time provides us with the opportunity to rethink how we’re feeling or what we’re planning to do. Thanks to twenty-first-century connectivity, during the very peak of our inner flare-ups, right when our inner voice wants to rant from the rooftops, it can.

We post. We tweet. We comment.

With the passage of time and physical elicitors of empathy removed, social media becomes a place amenable to the unseemly sides of the inner voice. This can lead to increased conflict, hostility, and chatter for both individuals and arguably society as a whole. It also means that we overshare more than ever before.”

“Research shows that the same brain circuitry that becomes active when we are attracted to someone or consume desirable substances (everything from cocaine to chocolate) also activates when we share information about ourselves with others. In a particularly compelling illustration, one study by Harvard neuroscientists published in 2012 showed that people would prefer to share information about themselves with others than receive money.”

“Chemical messengers are also working to curb the systems in your body that aren’t vital to your ability to respond to an immediate threat, like your digestive and reproductive systems. If you’ve ever noticed your appetite for food or sex disappear when you’re in the midst of a crisis, these chemical messengers are the reason why. All of these changes have a singular goal: to enhance your ability to respond quickly to the stressors you face, regardless of whether you’re actively confronting those stressors in the moment (like seeing a burglar enter your home) or simply conjuring them up in your mind.”

“One way to think about this is to imagine that your DNA is like a piano buried deep in your cells. The keys on the piano are your genes, which can be played in a variety of ways. Some keys will never be pressed. Others will be struck frequently and in steady combinations.”

“He and his colleagues discovered that experiencing chatter-fueled chronic threat influences how our genes are expressed.

Cole and others have found that a similar set of inflammation genes are expressed more strongly among people who experience chronic threat, regardless of whether those feelings emerge from feeling lonely or dealing with the stress of poverty or the diagnoses of disease. This happens because our cells interpret the experience of chronic psychological threat as a viscerally hostile situation akin to being physically attacked. When our internal conversations activate our threat system frequently over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, which are meant to protect us in the short term but cause harm in the long term. At the same time, the cells carrying out normal daily functions, like warding off viral pathogens, are suppressed, opening the way for illnesses and infections. Cole calls this effect of chatter “death at the molecular level.””

“When our internal conversation loses perspective and gives rise to intensely negative emotions, the brain regions involved in self-referential processing (thinking about ourselves) and generating emotional responses become activated. In other words, our stress-response hardware starts firing, releasing adrenaline and cortisol, flooding us with negative emotions, which only serve to further rev up our negative verbal stream and zoom us in more. As a result, we’re unable to get a wider-angle view that might reveal more constructive ways of handling the emotionally trying situations we encounter.”

“We asked one group to replay an upsetting memory in their minds through their own eyes. We asked another group to do the same, only from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, visually observing themselves like a bystander. Then we asked the participants to work through their feelings from the perspective they had been asked to adopt. The differences in the verbal stream characterizing the two groups were striking.”

“Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. “I was able to see the argument more clearly,” wrote one person. “I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation.” Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story.”

“Distancing shortened both negative and positive experiences. In other words, if you got a promotion at work and stepped back to remind yourself that status and money don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things and that we all die in the end anyway, your well-deserved joy would decrease. The takeaway: If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.”

“Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together. If not exactly a love potion, distancing does seem to keep the flame of love from being extinguished.”

“Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.”

“He has shown that simply asking people to write about their most upsetting negative experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes — to create a narrative about what happened, if you will — leads them to feel better, visit the doctor less, and have healthier immune function. By focusing on our experiences from the perspective of a narrator who has to create a story, journaling creates distance from our experience. We feel less tied to it.”

“I stopped, leaned back from my computer, and said to myself in my mind, Ethan, what are you doing? This is crazy!

Then something strange happened: Saying my own name in my head, addressing myself as if I were speaking to someone else, allowed me to immediately step back. Suddenly I was able to focus on my predicament more objectively.”

“Once I had this realization, others quickly followed.

How is pacing the house with a baseball bat going to help? I thought. You have a state-of-the-art alarm system. Nothing else disconcerting has happened since you first received the letter. It was probably just a hoax. So, what are you worried about? Enjoy your life the way you used to. Think about your family, students, and research. Plenty of people receive threats that amount to nothing. You’ve managed worse situations. You can deal with this.

Ethan, I said to myself. Go to bed.”

“The pattern recognition software in my mind for people talking to themselves as if they were communicating with someone else using their names and other non-first-person pronouns — was activated.”

“Research had indicated that a high usage of first-person-singular pronouns, a phenomenon called I-talk, is a reliable marker of negative emotion. For example, one large study performed in six labs across two countries with close to five thousand participants revealed a robust positive link between I-talk and negative emotion. Another study showed that you can predict future occurrences of depression in people’s medical records by computing the amount of I-talk in their Facebook posts. All of which is to say, talking to oneself using first-person-singular pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my” can be a form of linguistic immersion.”

“Instead of thinking Why did I blow up at my co-worker today? a person could think, Why did Ethan blow up at his co-worker today?”

“Psychologists have shown that when you place people in stressful situations; one of the first things they do is ask themselves (usually subconsciously) two questions: What is required of me in these circumstances, and do I have the personal resources to cope with what’s required? If we scan the situation and conclude that we don’t have the wherewithal needed to handle things, that leads us to appraise the stress as a threat. If, on the other hand, we appraise the situation and determine that we have what it takes to respond adequately, then we think of it as a challenge. Which way we choose to talk about the predicament to ourselves makes all the difference for our inner voice. And unsurprisingly, the more constructive framing of a challenge leads to more positive results.”

“The psychological experience of challenge and threat have unique biological signatures. When you put a person in a threatening state, their heart starts pumping blood faster throughout his body. The same is true of a challenge. A key difference between the two states is how the tangle of arteries and veins that carry blood in the body responds. When a person is in a threat state, their vasculature constricts, leaving less room for their blood to flow, which over time can lead to burst blood vessels and heart attacks. In contrast, when people are in challenge mode, their vasculature relaxes, allowing blood to move easily throughout the body.”

“Participants who were asked to use their name to reflect on stress before giving a public speech displayed a challenge-mode cardiovascular response. People in the immersed-language group displayed a textbook biological threat response.

If distanced self-talk can help adults, it’s natural to wonder if it can benefit children as well. One of the great tasks of being a parent is teaching your children how to persevere in situations that are difficult but important, such as finding ways to help them study. With this question in mind, the psychologists Stephanie Carlson and Rachel White discovered what is known as the Batman Effect.

In one experiment, they had a group of children pretend they were a superhero as they performed a boring task designed to simulate the experience of having to complete a tedious homework assignment. The kids were asked to assume the role of the character and then ask themselves how they were performing on the task using the character’s name. For example, a girl in the study who was pretending to be Dora the Explorer was instructed to ask herself, “Is Dora working hard?” during the study.

Carlson and White found that the kids who did this persevered longer than children who reflected on their experierice the normal way using “I.” (Kids in a third group who used their own names also outperformed the I-group.)

Taking this phenomenon into even more stressful circumstances, other research with kids has linked distanced self-talk with healthy coping following the loss of a parent. For example, one child said, “No matter what, their dad loved them, and they have to think of the good things that happened… they can hold on to the good memories and just let the bad ones go.” Conversely, children who employed more immersed language had higher incidences of post-traumatic stress symptoms and more avoidant, unhealthy coping. One child heartbreakingly said, “I still picture it — how he looked at the end. I wish he didn’t have to be in pain. I’m upset that he died that way.””

“We also know people use the universal “you” to make sense of negative experiences, to think about difficult events as not unique to the self but instead characteristic of life in general, as Sandberg did in her Facebook post. For example, in one study we instructed people to either relive a negative experience or think about the lessons they could learn from the event. Participants were almost five times more likely to use the universal “you” when they were trying to learn from their negative experience than when they simply rehashed what happened. It connected their personal adversity more generally to how the world works. Participants who were asked to learn from their experience wrote statements like “When you take a step back and cool off, sometimes we see things from a different perspective,” and “You can actually learn a lot from others who see things differently than you.”

These kinds of normalizations provide us with the perspective we lack when mired in chatter. They help us learn lessons from our experiences that contribute to us feeling better. In other words, our use of the universal “you” in speech isn’t arbitrary. It’s one more emotion-management gadget that human language provides.”

“When we’re dealing with chatter, we confront a riddle that demands solving. Inhibited by our inner voice run amok, we at times need outside help to work through the problem at hand, see the bigger picture, and decide on the most constructive course of action. All of this can’t be addressed solely by the caring presence and listening ear of a supportive person. We often need others to help us distance, normalize, and change the way we’re thinking about the experiences we’re going through. By doing so, we allow our emotions to cool down, pulling us out of dead-end rumination and aiding us in redirecting our verbal stream.

Yet this is why talking about emotions so often back-fires, in spite of its enormous potential to help. When our minds are bathed in chatter, we display a strong bias toward satisfying our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. In other words, when we’re upset, we tend to over focus on receiving empathy rather than finding practical solutions.

This dilemma is compounded by a commensurate problem on the helper side of the equation: The people we seek out for help respond in kind, prioritizing our emotional needs over our cognitive ones. They see our pain and first and foremost strive to provide us with love and validation. This is natural, a gesture of caring, and sometimes even useful in the short term. But even if we do signal that we want more cognitive assistance, research demonstrates that our interlocutors tend to miss these cues. One set of experiments demonstrated that even when support providers are explicitly asked to provide advice to address cognitive needs, they still believe it is more important to address people’s emotional needs. And it turns out that our attempts to satisfy those emotional needs often end up backfiring in ways that lead our friends to feel worse.

Here’s how talking goes wrong.

To demonstrate that they are there to offer emotional support, people are usually motivated to find out exactly what happened to upset us — the who-what-when-where-why of the problem. They ask us to relate what we felt and tell them in detail what occurred. And though they may nod and communicate empathy when we narrate what happened, this commonly results in leading us to relive the very feelings and experiences that have driven us to seek out support in the first place, a phenomenon called co-rumination.”

“Harmful co-ruminative dynamics emerge out of otherwise healthy, supportive relationships because our emotional, inner-voice mechanics aren’t actually like a hydraulic system, as Freud and Aristotle and conventional wisdom suggest. Letting out steam doesn’t relieve the pressure buildup inside. This is because when it comes to our inner voice, the game of dominoes provides a more appropriate metaphor.

When we focus on a negative aspect of our experience, that tends to activate a related negative thought, which activates another negative thought, and another, and so on. These dominoes continue to hit one another in a game where there is a potentially infinite supply of tiles. That is because our memories of emotional experiences are governed by principles of associationism, which means that related concepts are linked together in our mind.”

How to Help Other Chatterers

“The most effective verbal exchanges are those that integrate both the social and the cognitive needs of the person seeking support. The interlocutor ideally acknowledges the person’s feelings and reflections, but then helps her put the situation in perspective. The advantage of such approaches is that you’re able to make people who are upset feel validated and connected, yet you can then pivot to providing them with the kind of big-picture advice that you, as someone who is not immersed in their chatter, are uniquely equipped to provide.”

“Time, of course, plays a role in our ability to offer perspective-broadening support to the people in our lives. Studies consistently show that people prefer to not cognitively reframe their feelings during the very height of an emotional experience when emotions are worked up; they choose to engage in more intellectual forms of interventions later on. This is where a certain art in talking to other people comes into play, because you must walk a tightrope to take upset people from addressing their emotional needs to the more practical cognitive ones.”

“While some friends, colleagues, and loved ones will be useful for a broad range of emotional adversities, when the problems are more specialized, specific people may be more helpful. Your brother might be the right person to coach you through family drama (or, perhaps just as likely, he might be the wrong person). Your spouse might be the perfect chatter adviser for professional challenges, or maybe it’s that person from another department at work. Indeed, research indicates that people who diversify their sources of support — turning to different relationships for different needs — benefit the most. The most important point here is to think critically after a chatter-provoking event occurs and reflect on who helped you — or didn’t. This is how you build your chatter board of advisers.”

“The study revealed that helping without the recipient being aware of it, a phenomenon called “invisible support,” was the formula for supporting others while not making them feel bad about lacking the resources to cope on their own. As a result of receiving indirect assistance, the participants felt less depressed. In practice, this could be any form of surreptitious practical support, like taking care of housework without being asked or creating more quiet space for the person to work. Or it can involve skillfully providing people with perspective-broadening advice without their realizing that it is explicitly directed to them. For example, asking someone else for input that has implications for your friend or loved one in the presence of the person who needs it (a kind of invisible advice) or normalizing the experience by talking about how other people have dealt with similar experiences. Doing these things transmits needed information and support, but without shining a spotlight on the vulnerable person’s seeming shortcomings.”

“Touch is actually one of the most basic tools that we use to help those we care most about turn a negative internal dialogue around. Like language, it is inseparable from our ability to manage our emotions from infancy onward, because our caregivers use affectionate physical contact to calm us from the moment we leave the womb. Research shows that when people feel the welcome, affectionate touch or embrace of those they are close to, they often interpret that as a sign that they are safe, loved, and supported. Caring physical contact from people we know and trust lowers our biological threat response, improves our ability to deal with stress, promotes relationship satisfaction, and reduces feelings of loneliness. It also activates the brain’s reward circuitry and triggers the release of stress-relieving neurochemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins.

Affectionate touch is so potent, in fact, that one set of studies found that a mere one second of contact on the shoulder led people with low self-esteem to be less anxious about death and feel more connected with others. More striking still, even the touch of just a comforting inanimate object, like a teddy bear, can be beneficial. This is most likely a result of the brain coding contact with a stuffed animal similar to how it codes interpersonal touch. Indeed, many scientists consider the skin a social organ. In this sense, our contact with others is part of an ongoing nonverbal conversation that can benefit our emotions.”

Nature

“A 2015 high-resolution satellite imagery study of the Canadian city of Toronto found that having just ten more trees on a city block was associated with improvements in people’s health comparable to an increase in their annual income of $10,000 or being seven years younger.”

“The Kaplans believed that nature draws our involuntary attention because it is rife with soft fascinations: subtly stimulating properties that our mind is pulled to unconsciously. The natural world delicately captures our attention with artifacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals. We may glance at these things, and approach them for greater appreciation like that musician playing on the corner, but we’re not carefully focusing on them as we would if we were memorizing talking points for a speech or driving in city traffic. Activities like those drain our executive-function batteries, whereas effortlessly absorbing nature does the opposite: It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.”

“Researchers there designed an experiment that had participants take a ninety-minute walk either on a congested avenue or through a green space adjacent to Stanford’s campus. When the scientists compared people’s rumination levels at the end of the study, they found that participants in the nature-walk group reported experiencing less chatter and less activity in a network of brain regions that support rumination.”

“Marc Berman and his collaborator Kathryn Schertz have developed an app called ReTUNE, short for Restoring Through Urban Nature Experience. It integrates information concerning the greenness, noisiness, and crime frequency of every city block in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago to come up with a naturalness score. When users input their travel destination, the app generates directions that maximize the restorative nature of the walk, taking into account such practical issues as number of road crossings and length of the walk.”

Awe

“Awe is considered a self-transcendent emotion in that it allows people to think and feel beyond their own needs and wants. This is reflected in what happens in the brain during awe-inspiring experiences: The neural activity associated with self-immersion decreases, similar to how the brain responds when people meditate or take psychedelics like LSD, which are notorious for blurring the line between a person’s sense of self and the surrounding world.

The feeling of awe, however, is by no means restricted to nature and the great outdoors. Some people experience it when they see Bruce Springsteen in concert, read an Emily Dickinson poem, or take in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Others may have awe-drenched experiences when they see something extraordinary in person, like a high-stakes sports event or a legendary object such as the U.S. Constitution, or witness something intimately monumental, like an infant taking its first steps. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that we developed this emotion because it helps unite us with others by reducing our self-interest, which provides us with a survival advantage because groups fare better against threats and can achieve loftier goals by working together.”

“When you’re in the presence of something vast and indescribable, it’s hard to maintain the view that you — and the voice in your head — are the center of the world. This changes the synaptic flow of your thoughts in similar ways as other distancing techniques we’ve examined. In the case of awe, however, you don’t have to focus your mind on a visual exercise or on reframing an upsetting experience. In this sense, it’s similar to saying your own name: You just have the experience, whatever it happens to be, and relief follows.”

“Another study, for instance, showed that awe leads people to perceive time as being more available, pushing them to prioritize time-intensive but highly rewarding experiences like going to a Broadway show over less time-intensive — but also less rewarding — material ones like purchasing a new watch. Meanwhile, on the physiological level, awe is linked with reduced inflammation.

The influence of awe on behavior is so strong, in fact, that others can’t help but notice it. One set of studies found that “awe-prone” people came across as humbler to their friends. They also reported higher humility and had a more balanced view of their strengths and weak-nesses — both hallmark features of wisdom — and more accurately credited the role of outside influences on their successes.”

Order

“By always placing his ID faceup, carefully arranging his water bottles so they are perfectly aligned in front of his bench, and making sure that his hair is just right before a serve, Nadal is engaging in a process called compensatory control; he’s creating order in his physical environment to provide him with the order he seeks internally.”

“But how does the ordering of our surroundings influence what’s happening inside our minds? To answer this question, it’s crucial to understand the pivotal role that perceptions of control — the belief that we possess the ability to impact the world in the ways we desire — play in our lives.

The desire to have control over oneself is a strong human drive. Believing that we have the ability to control our fate influences whether we try to achieve goals, how much effort we exert to do so, and how long we persist when we encounter challenges. Given all this, it is not surprising that increasing people’s sense of control has been linked to benefits that span the gamut from improved physical health and emotional well-being, to heightened performance at school and work, to more satisfying interpersonal relationships. Conversely, feeling out of control often causes our chatter to spike and propels us to try to regain it. Which is where turning to our physical environments becomes relevant.

In order for you to truly feel in control, you have to believe not only that you are capable of exerting your will to influence outcomes but that the world around you, in turn, is an orderly place where any actions you engage in will have their intended effect. Seeing order in the world is comforting because it makes life easier to navigate and more predictable.”

Placebos

“Participants who thought they received a painkiller reported experiencing substantially less distress when they relived their rejection. What’s more, their brain data told a similar story; they displayed significantly less activity in their brain’s social pain circuitry compared with people who knew they had inhaled a saline solution. We discovered that placebos can directly help people with chatter. A spray with nothing chemically meaningful in it could work like a painkiller for the inner voice. It was both strange and exciting: Our minds can cause emotional distress while simultaneously and covertly reducing that distress.

The findings from our study complemented other work documenting the benefits of placebo for managing a range of conditions in which chatter features prominently, like clinical manifestations of depression and anxiety. And in many cases the benefits aren’t fleeting. For instance, one large analysis of eight studies found that the benefits of consuming a placebo for reducing depressive symptoms endured for several months.”

“Believing that you’ll feel less pain is linked with lower levels of activation in pain circuitry in the brain and spinal cord, thinking that you’re drinking an expensive wine can increase activation in the brain’s pleasure circuitry. Believing you’re consuming a fatty (versus healthy) milk shake even leads to lower levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin. In effect, once you believe something, your neural machinery brings it to fruition by increasing or decreasing the activation levels of other parts of the brain or body related to the processes you are forming beliefs about.”

“Over the course of the twenty-one-day experiment, the participants who were educated about the science behind placebo effects and then informed that they were taking a placebo displayed fewer IBS symptoms and greater relief compared with people who were educated about placebos and didn’t receive any pills. Understanding how a placebo could make their IBS better actually did just that.”

Rituals

“Rituals can also help with meeting goals. One experiment found that engaging in a ritual before meals helped women who struggled to eat healthier consume fewer calories than women who tried to be “mindful” about their eating.

Rituals also positively influence performance in high-pressure situations like math exams and (much more fun but even more chatter inducing) performing karaoke. One memorable experiment had participants sing the band Journey’s epic song “Don’t Stop Believin’” in front of another person. Those who did a ritual beforehand felt less anxiety, had a lower heart rate, and sang better than the participants who didn’t. Lesson learned: Start believing in rituals.

It’s important to point out that rituals aren’t simply habits or routines. Several features distinguish them from the more prosaic customs that fill our lives.”

First, they tend to consist of a rigid sequence of behaviors often performed in the same order.”

“The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of the inner voice. This might explain why pregame rituals abound in sports, providing a distraction at the most anxiety-filled moment.

Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control.”

“They also make us feel connected to important values and communities, which fulfill our emotional needs and serve as a hedge against isolation.

This symbolic feature of rituals also often furnishes us with awe, which broadens our perspective in ways that minimize how preoccupied we are with our concerns. Of course, rituals also frequently activate the placebo mechanism: If we believe they will aid us, then they do.”