Consciousness@Work 53- June 2025 – Helping Ourselves and Others When Confronted with Upsetting Events: What Research Shows

The human mind is one of evolution’s greatest creations, not just because it allowed our species to survive and thrive, but because in spite of the inevitable pain that comes with life, it also endowed us with a voice in our head, capable of not only celebrating the best times, but also making meaning out of the worst. It is this voice, not the din of chatter that we should all listen to.
-Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

     Psychologist Ethan Kross has devoted his life to the subject of emotion regulation. He writes and teaches practical, research-based approaches for how anyone can help themselves and others manage their emotions. In his book, Chatter, he addresses managing the voice in our heads that cheers us on or cuts us down. In this month’s article, I will review key points that Ethan covers about how we can best help ourselves following a particularly upsetting event in our lives, where our internal voice can be challenging to manage.
     Ethan divides the tools that can help us into three groups: tools that we can implement on our own, tools that leverage our relationships with others, and tools that involve our environment.

We will begin with the tools we can use on our own.

1. Distance self-talk. Your name and the second person you refer to yourself is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and less negative emotion.
2. Imagine advising a friend. Think about advice you would give another person and apply it to yourself.
3. Broaden your perspective. Think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adversity events you or others have endured and how other people you admire might respond in the same situation.
4. Reframe your experience as a challenge. The situation is a challenge that you can handle. For example, you can remind yourself how you succeeded in a similar situation in the past.
5. Reinterpret your body’s chatter response to the bodily symptoms of stress, which are often themselves stressful, which perpetuates our chatter. When this happens, remind yourself that your bodily response is an adaptive evolutionary reaction. However, it can sabotage instead of helping you respond to the challenge.
6. Normalize your experience. Use the word “you” to refer to people in general when you think and talk about a negative experience. Healthy distancing helps remind us that what has happened is not unique, but part of the human experience.
7. Engage in mental time travel. Think about how you will feel in a month, a year or even longer. This highlights the impermanence of your situation.
8. Change the view. Visualize the negative experience from a “distance self.” View the scene of the upsetting event from a “fly on the wall” perspective. Being the observer removes emotion from the situation.
9. Write expressively. Journaling has long been identified as a way to gain control over emotional experiences. Write without holding emotion back. Let the emotions flow freely.
10. Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party. Assuming the position of a third person when you have had a difficult experience with someone else can allow you to distance the feelings, as if you are not emotionally involved.
11. Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Believing an object or superstition will relieve your chatter has proven to be helpful. This practice involves harnessing the energy of the brain and focusing on using the energy in a healthy, distancing way.
12. Perform a ritual. Using a fixed sequence of behaviors infused with meaning provides us with a sense of control and order. Prayer, meditation, for example, have been passed down to us, but when the ritual becomes our own, it holds more power with managing our emotional responses.

Tools that leverage our relationships with others

Tools for providing support:

1. Address people’s emotional and cognitive needs. People go to others for comfort and support. Responding to these needs is how we meet their emotional needs. Offering advice is a way to meet cognitive needs, but unless someone asks for advice, may not be well-received. Offering advice is not the same as validating someone’s suffering, providing hope, and normalizing their experience. Note: Research conducted as far back as the attacks of 9/11 continues to show the harm done by a popular workplace intervention, the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) Model. Research shows this approach to be an example of co-rumination. Co-rumination involves people continuing to express emotion about an event. This has been shown to increase symptoms. Interventions offered employees following a traumatic loss in the workplace should be based on what science is showing that helps, rather than continuing to use an approach that continues to be shown as harmful.
2. Provide invisible support. Providing practical support such as care team members are trained to do is reported as being helpful to everyone. Feeding people, helping with household chores are examples of what people consider helpful from other.
3. Advise children to see themselves as “Superheroes,” known as the “Batman effect”. This is a distancing strategy that allows children to see themselves as capable of managing an emotional situation.
4. Touching, respectfully. A gentle touch, hug, or affectionate display can trigger the release of endorphins and other chemicals in the brain, reducing stress.
5. Be someone’s placebo. Others can powerfully influence our beliefs about our ability to get through a difficult time. Providing an optimistic outlook is often important in offering support to others.

Tools for Receiving Chatter Support:

1. Build a board of advisers. Choose which friend, or family member can serve the best subject. A colleague may help with a work problem, a family member may be better for family matters.
2. Seek physical contact. Ask someone for a hug or a hand squeeze to stimulate healthy hormones in yourself. Hugging a teddy bear or a security blanket can also help.
3. Look at a photo of a loved one(s).
4. Perform a ritual with others. Group meditation, or prayer, and toasting a group accomplishment provide a means of reducing chatter. Shared experiences reduce individual pain.
5. Minimize passive social media. Scrolling through social media platforms triggers self-defeating and envy-inducing spirals.
6. Use social media to gain support. Broaden connections through carefully chosen support groups, carefully guarding how much you share with strangers. Reading about how others are coping with a challenge can often broaden our perspectives.

Tools that involve the environment

1. Create order in your environment. You boost your sense of control when you gain control over your environment. Organizing and tidying our space can be invaluable in creating a sense of mental control.
2. Increase your exposure to green space. Mother nature cannot be overestimated in reducing chatter. Also watching a film clip of nature or looking at pictures can serve this need if you cannot go outside.
3. Seek out awe-inspiring experiences. Feeling awe often allows us to put our current problems in perspective. Memories of a child accomplishing a feat, looking at an inspiring piece of art, are examples of how some people experience awe and transcend their current situation.

Summary

This article cannot possibly replace the power of reading Chatter. It is hoped that this short summary of the tools will cause you to read the book. Dr. Kross’s writing is entertaining and informative, and a great addition to every care team or survivor’s library. Follow us on LinkedIn to learn about our monthly recommendations, which include two of Ethan’s books and others we are confident you will find helpful.