I am currently listening to Chatter by Ethan Kross, a book about managing one’s own internal voice and self-talk. I haven’t finished it yet, but I wanted to write a little entry about an important technique that’s already come up in the book.
According to research done by Kross and his colleagues, when we get too sucked into our own internal narrative, we tend to make poor decisions and get even more stressed out than we were in the first place, and that whirlwind of feels can take us into bad places, whether those bad places are having a not-very-productive disagreement with a partner, making a bad financial decision, or just making ourselves so miserable that latent genetic switches can get flipped on, like that time I discovered that I got my mom’s eczema genes when I was stressed out about trying to repaint and sell my house. Once that genetic switch got flipped on, I was on the unscented Dove train for life, baby!
So, what are we supposed to do? Three things:
- Try to take a “fly on the wall” perspective
- Think about the advice you would give a friend who was in the same position
- Time travel to the future: will this matter in an hour? A year? 5 years?
Thanks to a lifetime of social media and getting distracted by my own internal monologue, I knew I would never remember this without some sort of help making it feel real. So, I invented Crow Friend. I am an old goth, so there are crows and ravens all over my house, so I chose Crow Friend so I would get reminded of this by the decor in basically every room of my house. Here’s how I implement WWCFD? (What Would Crow Friend Do?)
Fly On The Wall (Crow Friend describes the situation)
Pretend you are Crow Friend, and tell the story of what’s going on. The idea behind this is that it helps you distance yourself from the situation at hand, getting you out of your own head far enough to be able to reason through what’s going on. “She’s worried that a recession is coming that she can’t do anything about. Having lived through recessions before, she remembers feeling helpless and panicky, so she’s jumping from one piece of information about a possible recession straight into how the previous recessions actually felt, even though there’s no guarantee of any recession even happening right now.”
Think About Advice (Crow Friend gives helpful hints)
Still as Crow Friend, think about what Crow Friend would say. Crow Friend would probably remind you that nothing bad is actually happening right now, that you got through all of those previous hardships, and that you are smart and capable and will likely find a way to pivot and land on your feet even if a recession does happen. “Babe,” Crow Friend says, “you’ve gotten through so many things. If there even is something to respond to, you will. But! I need you to see that nothing has has actually happened yet, so you might be catastrophizing just a smidge?”
Time Travel (Crow Friend owns a Delorean)
Then, Crow Friend hops into the driver’s seat of his Delorean and taps a button with his left wing to open the passenger side door. “Come on babe, where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” You get in the Delorean. It doesn’t move.
“That was a metaphor; this thing has been broken since 1992, and there are absolutely NO flux capacitors on ebay these days. Not the point.”
Crow Friend then asks you how much you think this will matter in a day, a week, a year, five years. Crow Friend also reminds you that a thing isn’t automatically bad just because you think it’s going to be bad. “Not to give you some story about missing a flight because you had the flu, and then being relieved because the plane crashed, but you get my drift, yeah?”
You feel a little better. You take Crow Friend out for tacos.
