What to do if your inner voice is cruel | Ethan Kross



Half our day is spent not living in the moment. Here’s how to change that.

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Your inner voice isn’t always very nice or helpful. When we turn our attention inward, we tend to focus on problems rather than solutions.

This causes us to worry, ruminate, and catastrophize, which traps us in a negative thought cycle.

The good news is that there is a science-based toolkit that can help you regain control of your inner voice.

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Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/videos/mental-chatter/

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About Ethan Kross:
Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships.

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34 thoughts on “What to do if your inner voice is cruel | Ethan Kross”

  1. You know something? This was good info but the title is misleading. This taught me nothing. This is all definitions and subjective advice. How is a ritual going to help me manage my inner voice. Glad for whoever this video helps, but this was just a waste of time for me.

    Reply
  2. In my opinion living in the moment is all you need. I plead for having no inner voice at all.
    Surely, at some point, we needed the voice. But once you become aware of the fact that you have an inner voice, you should let go of it.

    Reply
  3. What about meditation? Isn't this the perfect tool to watch your inner chatter come and go and realize mental chatter is never permanent nor realistic (in opposition to what you really are)?

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  4. I came up with the conclusion that what the Bible is about is God and the Devil. Meaning God thoughts and Devil thought. Once we realise this it's much easier to catch the devil chatter saying i got ya……..now back the f**k off. 😉

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  5. Showing people playing music in this video made me realize I already figured out my way of managing chatter at a very young age, and I've just been neglecting it for very long. I need to get back into playing and writing music. It's like all my stress and problems fall away and there's nothing between me and the instrument.

    Reply
  6. As a mathematician, I find these advices somewhat illogical. Your inner voice is a feedback which grows to toxicity only due to you ignoring it. Your inner voice is a moral compass and it's mostly right. Listen to it, analyze it, admit mistakes and lower your vastly overblown self-confidence to the internally agreeable level. You will find out that even geniuses make mistakes all the time – but they have no problems admitting it. On the contrary, the self-righteous people proclaiming themselves 100% good, are indeed immoral morons who can't do anything without destroying something else, certainly incapable of accomplishing anything, and constantly blaming others for … whatever. The cruelty of your inner voice is a true mirror of how you treat others – or how you would treat others if you could. Listening to your inner voice as a moral compass will bring peace to your soul – but don't expect your life in the society to become any easier. You will be perceived as a soft target, a useful idiot, and exploited without mercy.

    Reply
  7. You give things to much power they’re just thoughts if you having too many “ dark”
    Thoughts then just make yourself think one positive thought for every garbage thought yiu have. This new world where most people are actually healthy and unaffected by these things it’s become so popular to have and conjure up some trouble or diagnosis issue etc because you’re bored and you feel
    Like you need to invent or claim
    To have some kinda of struggle like this to validate your small petty soft sane lives . While people who actually suffer from these types of things do their best not to advertise it to the world and do everything in their power to lead and live normal lives. This video is itself CHATTER 👎🏽

    Reply
  8. I’m autistic/ADHD. I used to be full of life crippling anxiety and self doubt. I managed to improve my life significantly by reminding myself of the following.

    1. You have tens of thousands of thoughts every single day.
    2. Only a small quantity of those thoughts are of any value. Many are basically, bullshit.
    3. Every thought that you breath life into, creates a feeling.
    4.Thoughts themselves are neutral.
    5. You are not your thoughts.
    6. By slowing the speed of your thoughts down and not breathing life into the negative ones, you are able to slow down and allow new thinking/new thoughts. Higher quality thoughts.
    7. Remember it’s ok to have days where you are not at your best. that’s completely normal. Just don’t let your negative thinking make you feel worse.
    8. The following quote helps me out sometimes😂… “You don’t have a shit day. The day has a shit, you”

    Reply
  9. Life is but a story you tell yourself, your entire existence is what you have conscious knowledge of, nothing more, nothing less. Your life will only change if you consciously will it to do so.

    Reply
  10. Sometimes negative self talk is good. Like when I’ve mastered a skill, I still tell myself I’m terrible at it reinforcing in my mind that there is so much more work to do to get better.

    Reply
  11. I feel like I experience a severity that is difficult to consciously manage. I have worked out crisis strategies with therapists but there is also a strong non-verbal 'inner-voice' that often wants to recreate physical sensations (or even trauma) completely separate from any language based description or motivation. The issue is further complicated when may people distort mental defences and find pleasure in suffering.

    There seems to be common and more healthy ways for managing certain aspects of these things for some people, but the point about strategies not being universally helpful is an important one.

    Reply
  12. just let go of that thought. that's all it takes to end anger or stupid thoughts. the instant you stop thinking about what pissed you off. the anger instantly disappears. no fuel, no fire. that simple, me son.

    Reply
  13. You can also become comfortable with feeling chaos and a lack of control and thus inherit the intrinsic control that comes with having the willingness to feel all natural human feelings instead of running from them and creating OCD habbits like you suggest.

    Reply

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