How Writing Reduces Anxiety | Dr. Ethan Kross & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | When you find that inner verbal stream

00:00:04.440 | going in the negative direction,

00:00:05.840 | so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right?

00:00:09.120 | You're an idiot, such an idiot,

00:00:10.480 | or you're looping over a problem

00:00:12.820 | without making any progress.

00:00:14.420 | Putting those words in, you know,

00:00:19.440 | actually taking that inner stream

00:00:21.200 | and making a story out of it

00:00:23.120 | is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do,

00:00:27.920 | because we are taught when we write,

00:00:30.360 | we write in sentences.

00:00:32.600 | There's a structure to our writing

00:00:34.560 | that we impose on our thinking.

00:00:36.920 | Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all.

00:00:40.320 | It can go in all sorts of directions,

00:00:41.740 | and that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.

00:00:46.080 | - I'm so glad you're bringing this up.

00:00:48.980 | Our very first guest ever on this podcast

00:00:51.480 | was a guy named Carl Deisseroth.

00:00:53.560 | Bioengineer, he's a practicing psychiatrist.

00:00:56.080 | He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience.

00:00:57.600 | He developed these light-sensitive channels

00:01:00.520 | to be able to manipulate neurons in animal models,

00:01:03.280 | but also now in human clinical work as well.

00:01:06.160 | And one thing that he shared was that

00:01:09.080 | after he puts his kids to sleep,

00:01:11.880 | I think now they're grown,

00:01:12.880 | but in the evening, he'll sit, deliberately sit still,

00:01:17.360 | completely bodily still, close his eyes,

00:01:21.000 | and force himself to think in complete sentences

00:01:24.380 | for maybe an hour or so, maybe more.

00:01:26.900 | And I thought to myself,

00:01:27.740 | "Wow, that's a very disciplined practice."

00:01:30.440 | It also speaks to what you're saying,

00:01:31.640 | which is that typically thinking in complete sentences

00:01:35.560 | is not the default of the mind.

00:01:38.000 | So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is.

00:01:41.240 | He shared a few of them on that podcast episode,

00:01:44.500 | but I'm sure there are others as well.

00:01:46.360 | But I tried it.

00:01:48.520 | It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed,

00:01:51.160 | to not drift into multiple narratives,

00:01:53.920 | that the stream sort of split into your tributaries,

00:01:56.740 | and then it sort of, you dissolve into sleep or-

00:02:00.860 | - A meditation experience.

00:02:01.980 | - Yeah, an almost dream-like state

00:02:03.260 | where you're in these liminal states.

00:02:06.060 | - Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides

00:02:09.100 | a tool to structure your thinking.

00:02:11.260 | Talking has a similar modality.

00:02:13.980 | So when we talk to people,

00:02:15.860 | there is a structure to the way we converse,

00:02:18.860 | where we're not, if I were to just talk to you

00:02:21.700 | the way I pinball in my mind,

00:02:23.580 | you wouldn't be able to understand me,

00:02:25.940 | and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right?

00:02:28.580 | Because I would be unable

00:02:29.980 | to have a meaningful conversation with you.

00:02:33.660 | So there's some research which shows that

00:02:36.060 | if you get people to think of,

00:02:37.980 | to recall a chatter-provoking experience,

00:02:41.100 | so think about something negative that's happened to you,

00:02:43.300 | and then you randomly assign them to just think about it

00:02:47.080 | and work it through in their mind versus write about it,

00:02:50.140 | so i.e. a Pennebaker writing-like condition,

00:02:53.780 | or talk about it to someone else.

00:02:56.140 | The talking and the writing both do better

00:02:59.140 | in terms of how they feel when they're done

00:03:00.740 | as compared to the just thinking,

00:03:02.640 | because there's no guardrails to the way we think.

00:03:06.220 | That we are taught, I should add,

00:03:08.720 | because we're gonna give people guardrails

00:03:10.400 | later in this episode.

00:03:11.500 | - So in addition to using the Pennebaker approach,

00:03:15.900 | and by the way, we'll provide a link

00:03:17.460 | to some resources for the Pennebaker journaling,

00:03:20.740 | 'cause there's some free online resources

00:03:22.380 | that I think are really powerful for people to use

00:03:24.100 | if they wanna use that as a template,

00:03:25.940 | for cathartic reasons,

00:03:28.220 | or just get one's mind around a problem,

00:03:30.740 | or something I'm very familiar with,

00:03:32.940 | waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of,

00:03:35.500 | not a storm in there, but a bit too disorganized

00:03:38.360 | to get my head right, you know?

00:03:41.180 | And so I'd need things to get my head right.

00:03:42.860 | Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's writing.

00:03:45.300 | It sounds like journaling

00:03:46.140 | is just a really useful practice overall.

00:03:49.000 | - It's a useful practice,

00:03:50.540 | and it's an underutilized practice.

00:03:52.060 | So we did two pretty large studies during COVID

00:03:55.260 | to look at how people,

00:03:57.200 | how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis

00:04:00.060 | to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID?

00:04:02.180 | And we gave them a series of tools that they could check off

00:04:06.460 | if they use the tools that day.

00:04:08.980 | And we learned a couple of really interesting things.

00:04:11.980 | Number one, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions

00:04:16.020 | for folks.

00:04:16.860 | So remarkable variability characterized the tools

00:04:20.500 | that work for person A versus person B.

00:04:22.980 | Number two, it was seldom the case

00:04:26.520 | that people used one tool.

00:04:29.140 | In general, people used on average

00:04:30.740 | three or four tools each day,

00:04:33.100 | which I think is another really important take-home

00:04:35.600 | because I am often asked as, for example,

00:04:39.360 | what is my favorite tool for managing emotions?

00:04:42.100 | I don't have a favorite tool

00:04:45.100 | because I'm typically using multiple tools,

00:04:47.180 | and most people are doing exactly the same.

00:04:49.900 | So it's kind of like what we're learning

00:04:51.560 | about emotion regulation is,

00:04:53.240 | in some ways it's similar to physical exercise.

00:04:56.580 | You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids

00:05:00.620 | with the same exercise every day.

00:05:02.940 | You would have like funky looking shoulders if you did,

00:05:05.340 | right, and you'd probably be pretty weak

00:05:06.620 | in lots of other parts of your body.

00:05:08.300 | You're doing multiple things,

00:05:10.580 | and the multiple things that you do to exercise,

00:05:13.700 | I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things

00:05:15.900 | that I do to exercise, yet we may well be equally fit.

00:05:20.820 | Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me,

00:05:22.680 | but you get the drift.

00:05:25.040 | So there's this beautiful variability

00:05:29.420 | to how we manage our inner worlds.

00:05:31.340 | To bring it back to expressive writing,

00:05:34.020 | we found that expressive writing,

00:05:35.580 | when people used it, was really, really useful.

00:05:39.360 | It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety,

00:05:42.220 | but it was an underutilized tool.

00:05:45.040 | People didn't do it very much,

00:05:46.420 | and I think that's in part

00:05:47.540 | because it is somewhat effortful.

00:05:49.240 | (upbeat music)

00:05:52.660 | (upbeat music)

00:05:55.240 | (upbeat music)

How Writing Reduces Anxiety | Dr. Ethan Kross & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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