Stop the “Misery-Go-Round” of Constant Worrying
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My brain is often in a state of excess rumination, loops of thought that plague me with doubt, worry, anxiety, or sadness and send volts of unease through my body on a regular basis. National and international news events, along with the pandemic, have only exacerbated my natural agita, as has been the case for many of us. I often turn to my spouse, Sabrina, and a close cadre of girlfriends to tease out my tangled cogitations. Recently, however, when my head couldn’t land on a solution to a difficult problem, my close friend Grace listened to me emote and overthink for nearly an hour with godly levels of patience when she finally said, “My answer to your problem is to purchase Ethan Kross's Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It.” Then she refused to get off the phone until my purchase was complete.
Juggling multiple projects and family responsibilities (including sweet ones, like my 6-year-old daughter, Marty) leaves little time for pleasure reading or contemplating self-help guides, but Grace was right: I was in mental free fall, and only I could catch (save) myself.
When Kross's slim volume arrived in the mail, I was hooked from page one. Kross, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies emotion and self-control, lays out an easy-to-implement set of tools to stop the endless rotation of what I've come to call my misery-go-round. I was relieved to learn that when I become irrationally stressed, scared, or worried, I'm in a zone of destructive thinking, and there are steps I can take to disrupt the chain of unsettling thoughts and redirect my thinking.
On a sunny day in New York City earlier this spring, I had the privilege of Zooming with Kross, fresh off a plane from a family sojourn in Hawaii, to hear more about the five science-backed tools he identifies in his book that can disrupt and end our self-punishing circles of thought. Dig into his advice below and see how the methods, which I've already started practicing, are working out for me.
Tap into the awesomeness of it all.
One way to turn down the volume on our self-focused (and self-harming) chatter is to seek out and contemplate awe. You can muse on the breathtaking enormity of the cosmos or anything that moves that sense of wonder in you, says Kross. Air and space travel fill him with the sense that “this is much bigger than anything I can do or have done,” he says. The effect of that is that it “shrinks the self” and puts our worries in perspective, he explains. “I was just on an airplane with my kids yesterday. We're at 30,000 feet, and I look over to my daughter Maya and say, ‘Just think: It wasn't that long ago when we were struggling to build fires. We went from that to learning how to fly and to do it safely.’”
For me, when I consider the vastness and beauty of the sky at sunrise and sunset or the sound of the wind through the trees, or the glow of the moon on a clear night, the same moon seen by fellow humans in lands unknown to me, I, too, am able to quiet the rattle in my head.
Walk into nature.
Similar to awe, the marvelous immensity of the natural environment can play an important role in giving perspective to our problems and calming our minds. In fact, countless studies demonstrate nature's ability to heal and improve our mental health. Kross, who points out the lush green plants in his immaculate office, says that research shows that even watching videos of nature for as little as a few minutes has “redemptive qualities.”
While the more immersive our experience is, the more beneficial it is, Kross encourages us to seek out nature in whatever dose and format we can, including asking Alexa to fire up some tunes from the great outdoors—waterfalls, birds, waves. “There is a paper that shows that listening to sounds from the natural world captures our attention in a very gentle, soft way, similar to how visual images of nature do,” he says.
Kross's sometimes-collaborator Ozlem Ayduk, PhD, a distinguished professor of psychology at U.C. Berkeley, weighing in from Turkey via Zoom, wonders whether the color green may also offer mental noise-canceling properties for the ways we identify it with nature, although, she's quick to add, research does not yet demonstrate this. Still, to help inspire and evoke thoughts of nature, I decided to buy a thin leather green bracelet from CaSales on Etsy to remind myself that I just have to “be” and nothing more when the wheels start spinning me inside out. It helps steady and settle my mind.
Talk to yourself in the second or third person.
Kross's research shows that one way to create distance between yourself and a problem you can't stop brooding on is to identify your first-person narrator and challenge it with constructive thoughts. For example, instead of saying, “I have to resolve this growing problem between me and my colleague” you might say, “Stephanie, you can and will resolve this issue between you and your colleague in due time.”
When Kross's chatter starts, he says, he has a whole ritual for calming it down that starts with distance self-talk. “I try to coach myself using my own name. Trying to think through the problem that way helps me be level-headed and objective,” he says. The space it creates also takes some of the charge or emotion out of it to help give you mental clarity on the issue.
When I do it, I visualize myself on my misery-go-round—a darker version of the merry-go-round—and say, “Stephanie, ask the attendant to let you off the ride and leave your unhelpful worries on the carousel.” I make my request, and the ride slows down, then stops. I leave my troubles on it. Then, I walk onto the nearby boardwalk to watch the ocean waves at sunset on a breezy, balmy night, conjuring nature, to calm and restore myself. It's surprisingly effective at relaxing my heightened emotional states and creating a sense of serenity.
Create temporal distance.
Considering how the issue troubling your mind will matter (or not) in the near (or far) future also helps give your perspective. “How am I going to feel about this next week or a month from now or a year from now?” Kross says. If you find that the problem that plagues you doesn't have tentacles that reach out beyond this fraught moment, it tempers your angst. “It makes you realize that this is going to be just one little part of your life,” Ayduk adds. “It's really temporary. It's not gonna be here forever. It basically shrinks its importance.” I take Kross and Ayduk's advice one anxious day, and imagine myself in 20 years, 66 years old, retired on the Cape with my spouse, Sabrina, where this worry has no place, and feel better.
Start a ritual to quiet chatter.
Similar to athletic teams that often perform idiosyncratic rituals to steady their minds and nerves before games, Kross says we can develop our own rituals. When he prepares for an important presentation, to quell his inner voice, he does the following: (1) He advises himself in the third person using his own name; (2) He exercises some temporal distancing to put things in perspective; and (3) He pounds his fist into the palm of his hand a few times. “The key is developing one and implementing it. What you do in the actual ritual doesn't really matter. It's the fact that you're doing it in a very rigid sequence or order,” he explains.
Heeding Kross's suggestion, once my perseverating starts, I now rely on a two-step ritual. First, I take deep diaphragmatic breaths, and it leads me back to a steadier feeling. Then I imagine myself on my misery-go-round, talking myself down in the third person, and I instantly feel calmer.
My friend Grace poignantly points out that Kross's model for slowing and quieting ruminative thoughts recalls children's behaviors in early youth, when we floated on clouds of wonder, enchanted with nature (even dirt!), and talked ourselves through difficult challenges like tying our shoes or stacking blocks, and naturally relied on little rituals for comfort (bedtime and morning routines). “I think it's a very astute observation,” Kross says, “and an interesting idea. It is the case that many of these tools are ones that we first learn when we're young. For example, we learn how to control ourselves by giving ourselves instructions, and repeating the things that our caretakers say to us. In an academic context, I often describe distance self-talk as a very primitive tool, something foundational to how we learn to self-control, but then we forget about it,” he explains.
Luckily, I have a pint-size family member to remind me of Kross's strategies for stopping my dizzying mental carousel: my 6-year-old daughter, Marty, who has taught me the most about what it means to love and be human, often marvels at the moon, loves rolling down grassy hills in our park, and ritualistically wakes each morning yelling, “Good morning, everybody!” She's the gift that brings Kross's tips to life, helping me escape overthinking and stay present for this moment.
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