Mental health, self-talk and the voices in our head….it seems these are issues that are gaining prominence in our lives the more the lockdown continues and it’s been a popular issue in recent weeks here on Real Health.

And for this week’s episode, I wanted to go in-depth on the topic of the conscious mind and the conversations we have with ourselves which can have such negative effects on our lives and the people around us.

But, if harnessed correctly, it can also be a very powerful and positive force too.

My guest is Ethan Kross, an award-winning psychologist who is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind and has participated in policy discussion at the White House.

He is also the author of Chatter, the Voice In Our Head and How to Harness It, and I speak to him about how Covid has been the ‘perfect’ chatter event affecting our mental health and find out how negative chatter impacts our life.

But the voice in our head can also be of benefit to us and Ethan takes me through some of the ways that we can harness it, including using distanced self-talk.

“You could coach yourself through a problem like you're giving advice to another person and actually use your name to do it,” he explains to me. “When you use your own name to refer to yourself, it changes the way you relate to yourself, as you're coaching yourself through the problem and it's another thing that a person can do on their own.”

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