When you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right? You're an idiot, such an idiot, or you're looping over a problem without making any progress. Putting those words in, you know, actually taking that inner stream and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do, because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences.

There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking. Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all. It can go in all sorts of directions, and that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive. - I'm so glad you're bringing this up. Our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Carl Deisseroth.

Bioengineer, he's a practicing psychiatrist. He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience. He developed these light-sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neurons in animal models, but also now in human clinical work as well. And one thing that he shared was that after he puts his kids to sleep, I think now they're grown, but in the evening, he'll sit, deliberately sit still, completely bodily still, close his eyes, and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so, maybe more.

And I thought to myself, "Wow, that's a very disciplined practice." It also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default of the mind. So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is. He shared a few of them on that podcast episode, but I'm sure there are others as well.

But I tried it. It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives, that the stream sort of split into your tributaries, and then it sort of, you dissolve into sleep or- - A meditation experience. - Yeah, an almost dream-like state where you're in these liminal states.

- Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality. So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse, where we're not, if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me, and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right?

Because I would be unable to have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall a chatter-provoking experience, so think about something negative that's happened to you, and then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it, so i.e.

a Pennebaker writing-like condition, or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking, because there's no guardrails to the way we think. That we are taught, I should add, because we're gonna give people guardrails later in this episode.

- So in addition to using the Pennebaker approach, and by the way, we'll provide a link to some resources for the Pennebaker journaling, 'cause there's some free online resources that I think are really powerful for people to use if they wanna use that as a template, for cathartic reasons, or just get one's mind around a problem, or something I'm very familiar with, waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of, not a storm in there, but a bit too disorganized to get my head right, you know?

And so I'd need things to get my head right. Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's writing. It sounds like journaling is just a really useful practice overall. - It's a useful practice, and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people, how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID?

And we gave them a series of tools that they could check off if they use the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things. Number one, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for folks. So remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person A versus person B.

Number two, it was seldom the case that people used one tool. In general, people used on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take-home because I am often asked as, for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions? I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools, and most people are doing exactly the same.

So it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is, in some ways it's similar to physical exercise. You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day. You would have like funky looking shoulders if you did, right, and you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body.

You're doing multiple things, and the multiple things that you do to exercise, I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise, yet we may well be equally fit. Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me, but you get the drift. So there's this beautiful variability to how we manage our inner worlds.

To bring it back to expressive writing, we found that expressive writing, when people used it, was really, really useful. It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety, but it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much, and I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.

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