فصل 5

Chapter Five

The Power and Peril of Other People

Tragedy arrived swiftly and without warning on the campus of Northern Illinois University on a Thursday in February 2008, when a twenty-seven-year-old with a history of mental illness named Steven Kazmierczak kicked open the door to a lecture hall where a geology class was in session. Armed with a shotgun and three handguns, he stepped onto the stage that the professor was lecturing from. The 119 students sitting in the class watched in confusion, then disbelief, then terror, as the unexpected guest fired a shotgun at them, followed by another blast at their professor. Then he opened fire on them again. After discharging more than fifty rounds from different guns, he concluded his rampage by turning one of them on himself and taking his own life. Minutes later, the police descended on the gruesome scene. Twenty-one people were injured and five dead, not including Kazmierczak. The university and the small city of DeKalb, where it is located, were devastated.

After the tragedy, the community held public vigils, but many students chose to express their feelings online, posting on Facebook and memorial websites and using chat messaging programs to talk about what had happened.

One hundred and seventy miles south of DeKalb, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the psychologists Amanda Vicary and R. Chris Fraley saw the Northern Illinois tragedy as a heartbreaking but valuable opportunity to further a line of research they were already pursuing to better understand grief and emotional sharing in real time. In science we sometimes need to look at the most painful experiences people endure to learn something valuable about how to help people navigate such events. To do so takes both delicacy and compassion, as well as commitment to the scientific method and its potential to yield insights that benefit the greater good. This was the task that Vicary and Fraley set themselves to in the aftermath of the shooting in DeKalb.

They started by emailing a large number of students from Northern Illinois to participate in a study to track how they were coping. Ten months earlier, a gunman had gone on an even more destructive rampage at Virginia Tech, killing thirty-two people and similarly leaving behind a grief-stricken community. Vicary and Fraley had also reached out to a group of Virginia Tech students shortly after that attack. Now they had two samples to pool together to get a picture of how the survivors recovered from the resulting welter of emotions.

Two weeks after the shootings, roughly three-quarters of the students in the two samples displayed symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress. This was to be expected. Most of them were grappling with the most disturbing experience of their lives. Tragedies of the sort that the students had gone through in both Illinois and Virginia challenge a person’s worldview. When that happens, some people try to avoid focusing on their traumatic memories to blunt the pain. But others actively try to make sense of their feelings, and a principal way of doing so is by communicating with others, which is what the students did. Eighty-nine percent of them joined a Facebook group to talk and read about what happened. Seventy-eight percent, meanwhile, chatted online about it, and 74 percent texted about it using their cellphones.

Most of the students found this way of releasing their chatter comforting. It allowed them to express their thoughts and feelings with others who were dealing with a similar experience, which can be a valuable form of normalization. As one Virginia Tech student said, “When I have a bout of loneliness, I can log on to Facebook or send someone an IM and I’ll feel just a little more connected to people.” None of this was particularly surprising. As we already know, people are naturally disposed to sharing their thoughts with others when they are struggling with chatter, and social media and other forms of virtual connectivity provide convenient avenues for doing so. What was surprising was what Vicary and Fraley discovered when the study ended two months after the shootings.

While the students at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University thought that expressing their emotions to others made them feel better, the degree to which they shared their emotions didn’t actually influence their depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms.

All that emoting, writing, connecting, and remembering—it hadn’t been beneficial.

From Aristotle to Freud

The same year that the Northern Illinois massacre occurred, a related study was published that examined the emotional resiliency of a nationally representative sample of people living in the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The researchers examined whether more than two thousand people living across the country chose to express their feelings about 9/11 during the ten days following the fall of the Twin Towers. Then they tracked the participants’ physical and mental health over the next two years. The terrain of human behavior they were looking at was complicated, but their question was simple: Does sharing emotions impact how we feel over time?

What they found was remarkably consistent with what Vicary and Fraley discovered.

The people who shared their thoughts and feelings about 9/11 right after it happened didn’t feel better. In fact, on the whole, they fared worse than the people in the study who didn’t open up about how they felt. They experienced more chatter and engaged in more avoidant coping. Moreover, among those who did choose to express their feelings, the people who shared the most had the highest levels of general distress and worst physical health.

Once again, sharing emotions didn’t help. In this case, it hurt.

Of course, both the college shootings and 9/11 were rare acts of extraordinary violence, which might lead you to think that sharing emotions with others is only unhelpful in the wake of tragic events. That brings us back to the work of the Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé.

Recall the fundamental pattern in human behavior that Rimé uncovered. When people are upset, they are strongly driven to share their feelings with others; emotions act like jet fuel that propels us to talk to other people about the thoughts and feelings streaming through our heads. But alongside this discovery, he uncovered something equally important—and certainly more surprising—which confirms that these studies on the emotional fallout of major tragedies aren’t isolated cases.

In study after study, Rimé found that talking to others about our negative experiences doesn’t help us recover in any meaningful way. Sure, sharing our emotions with others makes us feel closer to and more supported by the people we open up to. But the ways most of us commonly talk and listen to each other do little to reduce our chatter. Quite frequently, they exacerbate it.

Rimé’s finding, along with many others, clashes dramatically with conventional wisdom. Talking, we are often told by popular culture, makes you feel better. Much self-help literature tells us this, as do many of the people around us. We hear that venting our emotions is healthy and supporting others is indispensable. It’s not that simple, though there are reasons it might seem that it is.

The idea that talking about negative emotions with others is good for us isn’t a recent development. It has been a part of Western culture for more than two thousand years. One of the earliest proponents of this approach was Aristotle, who suggested that people need to purge themselves of their emotions after watching a tragic event, a process he called catharsis. But this practice didn’t really gain traction more broadly until two millennia later. As modern psychology was bursting to life in Europe in the late 1890s, Sigmund Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer picked up Aristotle’s thread and argued that the path to a sound mind required people to bring the dark pain of their inner lives into the light. You can think of this as the hydraulic model of emotion: Strong feelings need to be released like the steam escaping from a boiling kettle.

While these cultural trappings urge us from a young age to talk to others about our feelings, the underlying drive to air our inner voice is actually implanted in our minds at an even earlier stage of our development—when we are drooling, screaming babies.

As newborns, helpless to care for ourselves or manage our emotions, we signal our distress to our caretakers, usually by wailing like little banshees (or at least my daughters did). After we get our needs met and the feeling of threat passes, our physiological arousal levels return to normal. Engaging in this process establishes an attachment to the caretaker, who often talks to the baby even before the infant can understand words.

Over time, our rapidly developing brains acquire language and soak up what our caregivers tell us about cause and effect, how to remedy our problems and deal with our emotions. This not only provides us with useful information for managing how we feel; it also provides us with the storytelling tools we need to talk to others about our experiences. This is one explanation for why communication is so entwined with chatter and why chatter is so entwined with seeking out other people.

Fortunately, there is a reason why the support we get from others so often backfires and a way to circumvent this phenomenon. Other people can be an invaluable tool for helping us subdue our chatter, and we can likewise help others with theirs. But as with any tool, to benefit from it we need to know how to properly use it, and in the case of giving and receiving support, that knowledge begins with understanding two basic needs that all humans have.

The Co-rumination Trap

When we’re upset and feel vulnerable or hurt or overwhelmed, we want to vent our emotions and feel consoled, validated, and understood. This provides an immediate sense of security and connection and feeds the basic need we have to belong. As a result, the first thing we usually seek out in others when our inner voice gets swamped in negativity is a fulfillment of our emotional needs.

We often think of fight or flight as the main defensive reaction human beings turn to when faced with a threat. When under stress, we flee or hunker down for the impending battle. While this reaction does characterize a pervasive human tendency, researchers have documented another stress-response system that many people engage in when under threat: a “tend and befriend” response. They seek out other people for support and care.

From an evolutionary perspective, the value of this approach comes from the fact that two people are more likely to ward off a predator than one; banding together during times of need can have a concrete advantage. Supporting this idea, research indicates that affiliating with others while under stress provides us with a sense of security and connection. It triggers a cascade of stress-attenuating biochemical reactions—involving naturally produced opioids as well as oxytocin, the so-called cuddle hormone—and feeds the basic need humans have to belong. And of course, a principal way we do this is by talking. Through active listening and displays of empathy, those who counsel us on our chatter can address these needs. Satisfying them can feel good in the moment, offering one sort of relief. But this is just one-half of the equation. That is because we also need to satisfy our cognitive needs.

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 backfires, 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 overfocus 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.

Co-rumination is the crucial juncture where support subtly becomes egging on. People who care about us prompt us to talk more about our negative experience, which leads us to become more upset, which then leads them to ask still more questions. A vicious cycle ensues, one that is all too easy to get sucked into, especially because it is driven by good intentions.

In practice, co-rumination amounts to tossing fresh logs onto the fire of an already flaming inner voice. The rehashing of the narrative revives the unpleasantness and keeps us brooding. While we feel more connected and supported by those who engage us this way, it doesn’t help us generate a plan or creatively reframe the problem at hand. Instead, it fuels our negative emotions and biological threat response.

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.

To illustrate this idea, take a moment to imagine a cat. When you read the word “cat,” you probably thought of cats you have known or seen, or actually pictured them in your mind. But you also had thoughts and images of purring sounds, soft fur, and, if you’re allergic like me, bouts of sneezing. Now take this associative neural dominoing and apply it to the realm of talking about our emotions. It means that when our friends and loved ones ask us to recount our troubles in detail, related negative thoughts, beliefs, and experiences also spring to mind, which reactivate how bad we feel.

The associative nature of memory, combined with the bias we have to prioritize emotional needs over cognitive ones when we’re upset, is why talking often fails to lift our troubled internal dialogues into a more tranquil state. This is one possible explanation for why the Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech students who actively shared their thoughts and feelings about the shootings with other people didn’t get any measurable long-term benefit from doing so. And it’s why people in the national survey after 9/11 who shared their feelings may have ended up suffering from more physical and mental ills. All of which, of course, raises an urgent question: What’s the solution to co-rumination making us feel worse?

Kirk or Spock?

The common shorthand in psychology circles for the tension between emotion and cognition—between what we feel and what we think—is to use the Star Trek characters of Captain Kirk and Officer Spock. Kirk is all heart, a man of intense and compelling emotions. He’s fire. By contrast, Spock, that lovable, pointy-eared half human half Vulcan, is all head; he’s a cerebral problem solver unencumbered by the distractions of feelings. He’s ice.

The key to avoid rumination is to combine the two Starship Enterprise crew members. When supporting others, we need to offer the comfort of Kirk and the intellect of Spock.

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. Indeed, the latter task is critical for helping people harness their inner voice in ways that lead them to experience less chatter over time.

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.

As it turns out, one version of this balancing act was codified decades ago by the New York Police Department Hostage Negotiations Team, which emerged in the early 1970s after a series of disastrous situations not just in New York City but also worldwide. To name just a few: the 1971 Attica prison riot, the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, and the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery featured in the film Dog Day Afternoon. A police officer and clinical psychologist named Harvey Schlossberg was tasked with creating the playbook for the new unit, whose unofficial motto became “Talk to me.” Along with prioritizing the need for compassionate engagement over the use of force, he stressed patience. Once the hostage takers understood that they weren’t in immediate danger, their autonomic threat response (presumably) eased. This reduced the negative frenzy of their inner voice, allowing the negotiator to shift the dialogue toward ending the standoff.

As soon as the NYPD Hostage Negotiations Team was up and running, the city saw an immediate decrease in bad outcomes for hostage situations. This breakthrough spurred law-enforcement agencies around the globe to follow suit, including the FBI. The bureau developed its own approach called the Behavioral Change Stairway Model, a progression of steps to guide negotiators: Active Listening → Empathy → Rapport → Influence → Behavioral Change. In essence, it’s a road map for satisfying people’s social-emotional needs that nudges them toward a solution drawing on their cognitive abilities. While law-enforcement negotiators are naturally trying to defuse dangerous situations and arrest criminals, their work bears some similarities to coaching someone we care about through a problem. In both cases, there is a person who can benefit from the right kind of verbal support.

While all of these strategies apply to how you help the people in your life manage their inner voices, they can also help you make better choices when selecting the people you go to for emotional support. After they’ve made you feel validated and understood, do they guide you toward brainstorming practical solutions? Or do they excessively extract details and revive the upsetting experience by repeating things like “He’s such a jerk! I can’t believe he did that.” By reflecting after the fact, you can often determine if someone helped you immerse or distance. Most likely, it’ll be a combination of the two, which can be a starting point for a dialogue about how the person can better help you next time. By thinking through other experiences with your “chatter advisers,” you can also narrow in on which people are right for which problems.

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, and in the internet age we can find unprecedented new resources online.

A powerful example is the case of the journalist, sex columnist, and activist Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller, who in September 2010 were looking for a way to respond to the news of yet another gay teenager committing suicide after relentless bullying. This time it was a fifteen-year-old named Billy Lucas; he had hanged himself in his grandmother’s barn in Greensburg, Indiana. Savage had blogged about his death, and a reader had left a comment saying that he wished he could have told the boy that things—his life—would get better. This prompted Savage and Miller to film themselves talking about how, though their teenage years were hard, they lived happy lives as adults, filled with love and a sense of belonging. They posted the video, and within a week it went viral. Thousands of people made similar videos, and gay teens across the country wrote to Savage to say how it was making them feel more hopeful.

Ten years later—as of this writing—the sentiment that drove that first video is much more than a mere viral phenomenon. It Gets Better is an innovative nonprofit organization and global grassroots movement. More than seventy thousand people have shared their inspiring stories, almost ten times more have pledged support, and untold numbers of young gay people have found comfort, strength, and reasons not to end their lives before they’ve truly begun. It Gets Better has rescued the inner voices of so many emotionally vulnerable people because, in essence, it acts as a distancing tool promoting normalization—everybody gets picked on, but we all get through it—and mental time travel. Most fascinating of all is the fact that people who watch the video don’t have to actually know the speakers to benefit from their advice, a principle that applies to all sorts of similar social-support videos available online. We can find people to coach us through our chatter in the form of prerecorded strangers.

Our discussion of whom we go to for support and how they verbally engage us when we’re dealing with chatter raises a question about therapy and its effectiveness, because it obviously involves lots of talking. Does the talking cure, as it is sometimes called, truly cure?

The first thing to keep in mind is that there are countless forms of talk therapy and they often differ drastically in approach. Many empirically validated forms of therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy employ precisely the kinds of techniques we’ve been talking about throughout this chapter; they provide clients with emotional support while also crucially helping them engage in cognitive problem solving.

Yet some interventions continue to focus on in-depth emotional venting as a tool for mitigating chatter. Case in point: psychological debriefing, an approach that emphasizes the value of emotional unburdening in the immediate aftermath of negative experiences despite overwhelming evidence arguing against its benefits. The take-home point is that if you find yourself needing more than a conversation with a friend or loved one to deal with your chatter, given what you now know, have a conversation with your prospective mental-health providers to learn about their approach and find out whether it is empirically supported.

Invisible Support

Everything we’ve explored thus far concerns situations in which people seek support. Yet we all know people who experience chatter and sometimes don’t reach out for help. They may be trying to manage a problem on their own or may be concerned about how asking for help might impact the way others view them, or how they see themselves. But often we still want to provide support in some way. After all, observing those we care about in need is a powerful neurobiological experience. It triggers empathy, which motivates us to want to act on their behalf.

Under such circumstances, however, caution is needed. Research shows that there’s a danger in trying to dole out unsolicited advice, no matter how skilled you are at blending the strengths of Kirk and Spock. When we give advice at the wrong time, this too can backfire.

Think about the archetypal experience of a parent advising a child how to do a math problem she is struggling with. The parent earnestly looks over the problem, sure that a patient, clear explanation is exactly what their kid needs to succeed at the assignment and feel better about herself. It’s a cognitive solution that should lead to positive emotion, right? Except it doesn’t play out that way. As the parent explains, the child turns surly and gets agitated. The clean mathematical logic somehow gets lost in emotional static as an argument breaks out.

“I know how to do it!” the kid says.

“But you were having trouble, so that’s why I was trying to help,” the parent responds.

“I don’t need your help!”

The kid storms off to her room. The parent is baffled. What just happened?

(Note: This might or might not have been an autobiographical experience.) Offering advice without considering the person’s needs can undermine a person’s sense of self-efficacy—the crucial belief that we are capable of managing challenges. In other words, when we are aware that others are helping us but we haven’t invited their assistance, we interpret this to mean that we must be helpless or ineffective in some way—a feeling that our inner voice may latch on to. A long history of psychological research into self-efficacy has shown that when it is compromised, it damages not only our self-esteem but also our health, decision making, and relationships.

In the late 1990s, the Columbia psychologist Niall Bolger and his colleagues took advantage of the New York bar exam to examine when people’s attempts to provide support for another are most effective. The bar, as all lawyers and their loved ones know, is a grueling, chatter-churning test. Bolger recruited couples in which one person was studying for the bar and, for a little over a month, asked the examinees to answer a set of questions capturing how anxious and depressed they felt, as well as how much support they received from their partner. He also asked the partners of the examinees to report how much support they provided. Bolger was primarily interested in whether benefits that people derive from receiving social support depend on whether a person is aware of the fact that a partner is trying to help.

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.

Since Bolger’s first experiment pioneered this domain, other research has converged to validate the effectiveness of invisible support. A study on marriages, for example, found that partners felt more satisfaction about their relationships the day after receiving invisible support. Another experiment found that people were more successful in meeting their self-improvement goals if the support they received from their partner toward those goals was delivered under the radar.

Further research has yielded insights into the circumstances in which such invisible support is most effective: when people are under evaluation or preparing to be. For example, when they’re studying for exams, preparing for interviews, or rehearsing the talking points of a presentation. During such times people feel most vulnerable. In contrast, when people want to manage their chatter as quickly and efficiently as possible, it’s not necessary to be subtle or crafty in how you support. In this case, direct advice that blends Kirk and Spock is most needed, appropriate, and likely to succeed.

Along with the forms of invisible support we’ve discussed, there is one other pathway for subtly aiding people we are very close to who find themselves submerged in chatter, and it’s completely nonverbal: affectionate touch.

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.

What we give to and receive from other people in our daily interactions constitutes a rich portfolio of comfort for the inner voice. The science of how these techniques work is becoming increasingly clear, though of course employing them with people we love takes a certain art, not to mention practice.

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Ultimately, the conversations we have with others aren’t all that different from the conversations we have with ourselves. They can make us feel better or worse. Depending on how we engage other people, and how they engage us, we experience more or less chatter. This has likely been the case since our species started sharing its problems. We just didn’t understand the underlying psychological mechanisms until recently.

Yet in our young twenty-first century, our relationships have begun to migrate to a novel environment for our species and our chatter, the same place the students at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech went in the wake of their respective tragedies: the internet. A natural question is if the ways in which verbal support succeeds and fails carry over to how we “talk” on social media, over texts, and through other forms of digital communication.

While psychology is only just beginning to grapple with this question, we’re already seeing some clues. For example, in the mid-2010s, my colleagues and I wanted to better understand the nature of co-rumination via social media, so we asked people who were in the midst of grappling with an upsetting experience to chat with another person via a computer messaging app. What they didn’t know was that the other person was an actor who had been carefully trained to nudge half of the participants to keep talking about what happened. For the other half, he gently encouraged them to zoom out and focus on the bigger picture.

Sure enough, the participants who were led to rehearse their feelings became increasingly upset during the conversations. Their negative emotions skyrocketed from the time they sat down at the keyboard until they left. In contrast, the participants whom the actor helped to zoom out remained just as calm and collected as they were when they first came into the lab.

The thing we don’t often think about when we seek or give support, online or off-, is that, objectively speaking, the people in our lives form a social environment. What we’ve been learning is how to navigate that environment to maximize positive outcomes for the inner voice. Our surroundings are inseparable from the human beings who inhabit them, and when we use the resources that are available to us in our relationships with others, the benefits are powerful. But other people are only one facet of our environment that we can harness to improve our internal conversations.

We can also go outside for a walk, attend a concert, or simply tidy up our living space, and each of these seemingly small actions can have surprising effects on our chatter.