by Ethan Kross
Ankiel would play in the majors for another seven years, known for his rocket arm in the outfield and his explosive swing at the plate. He was the pitcher who’d lost his career, he wrote, “at about the worst possible time, spent nearly five years fighting that with a determination that bordered on obsession, and turned up the hitter who could put a ball in the top deck and the outfielder whose arm was again golden. It was all so marvelous and strange.”
Even stranger and more marvelous, in 2018, four years after retiring, Ankiel took the pitching mound at an exhibition game of former professional players, the first time he’d done so in public in nearly twenty years since his incident against the Braves.
He faced one batter and struck him out.
Now, to begin learning the hidden techniques for harnessing our inner voice, we need look no further than one of the more remarkable students I’ve ever taught. A spy from West Philadelphia.
Chapter Three
Zooming Out
“Have you ever killed someone?” the examiner asked.
If she had been anywhere else, with anyone else, and if her future hadn’t been hanging in the balance with this absurd yet apparently crucial question, she would’ve rolled her eyes.
“Like I told you last time,” Tracey said. “No, I have never killed anyone.”
Of course, I haven’t, she thought. I’m seventeen! I’m not a killer.
This was her second polygraph with the National Security Agency, the United States’ highly secretive intelligence organization. Tracey’s body—her heart rate and her breathing—had betrayed her when she was asked this question the first time around, and the squiggly readout indicated that she was lying. Now, two months later, she found herself sitting in the same nondescript office in the middle of Maryland undergoing a second polygraph test.
What if they don’t believe me again? she wondered, her inner voice providing an anxious running commentary as the examiner looked at her inscrutably. She knew the answer to her own question: If they didn’t believe her, the future she had been dreaming of would disappear.
* * *
—
For as long as Tracey could remember, she knew she wanted more than the life she was born into. School and learning had always come easy to her, even if lots of other things hadn’t. She grew up in a tough neighborhood in West Philadelphia, and although her family wasn’t poor, money placed limitations on her future.
During her freshman year in high school, Tracey learned about a program at a boarding school in the Northeast that allowed gifted students from across the country to complete the last two years of high school on an accelerated track that set them up for success in elite colleges. While the thought of leaving her family and uprooting her existence to a new environment was daunting, the prospect of meeting new people, being challenged intellectually, and escaping the life she had known until then appealed to her. She worked hard on the application and got in.
Boarding school exposed Tracey to a new world of friends and ideas that, for the first time in her life, truly tested her. Although she sometimes felt out of place amid her mostly white peers from privileged backgrounds, she was happy.
As one of the few African American students in her program, Tracey frequently found herself invited to events to help raise money for the school. Stories like hers tended to open the wallets of wealthy donors. During one such event, she met a man named Bobby Inman, the former director of the U.S. National Security Agency.
During their conversation, Inman told her about a highly selective undergraduate training program the NSA offered to the country’s most talented and patriotic students. He encouraged her to apply. She did and the NSA called her in for the interview in which she failed her first polygraph test, making her doubt that her dreams would become a reality. The second time around, however, she managed to control her nerves, and the NSA no longer suspected her of murder, if they even really had in the first place. Her life was about to change in dramatic ways, though her first polygraph experience would end up being a harbinger of things to come: the challenges of managing her inner voice.
At first blush, the terms of the scholarship were everything she wanted. The NSA would cover the entire cost of Tracey’s college education and provide her with a generous monthly stipend. Of course, there were conditions. She would have to spend her summers training to become a top secret analyst and then work for the NSA for at least six years after graduating. Still, it was an incredible opportunity, especially when she got into Harvard that spring. Tracey had earned herself a free Ivy League education and a thrilling future.
A few weeks before classes at Harvard began, she got her first taste of what working with the NSA would be like. During her weeklong onboarding, she received top secret clearances allowing her to access highly classified information. She also learned about the details of the restrictions that came along with her scholarship. She could major only in a handful of subjects that were central to the NSA’s interests: subjects like electrical engineering, computer science, and math. She couldn’t date or maintain close friendships with students from other countries. She couldn’t study abroad. She was discouraged from playing varsity sports. Slowly but surely Tracey’s scholarship, her golden ticket, was morphing into a pair of golden handcuffs.
While other freshmen in her dorm mingled freely, Tracey found herself on guard. In the past, she had been the one profiled. Now at mixers she was doing the profiling, quickly scanning people’s faces and vocal intonations for clues about where they came from out of fear that she might become friends with—or even worse, perhaps even feel attracted to—someone from a distant land. She felt likewise constricted by the math and engineering classes she was enrolled in, which were unlike the excitingly diverse courses so many of her peers were taking. As she hurried along the tree-lined paths of Harvard Yard between classes, her thoughts curled inward on all the not-great things about this supposedly great opportunity. She wondered if she had made a mistake.
Time passed. As she went from being a freshman to a sophomore and then a junior, Tracey felt increasingly lonely. She was drowning, as she put it, in her “inner dialogue.” She couldn’t talk about how she spent her summers—the training in cryptography and circuit-board building, or learning how to scale rooftops to splice antennas. But her feelings of isolation were only one source of stress. Another was the fact that engineering, one of the most challenging majors at Harvard, was proving to be the hardest academic struggle she’d ever faced, and if her grades dipped below a 3.0 GPA, she would be kicked out of the NSA program and required to pay the government back the money it had already paid her—a terrifying possibility.
The stream of her ever more negative inner voice consumed her. Ruminations about what would happen if she didn’t make the grades she needed would spike before her tests. Consumed by anxiety, she began compulsively chewing on the tip of her pencil and twirling her hair during exams. Her nervous tics provided her with a strange sense of comfort. Despite her best attempts to maintain the outward appearance that everything was okay, her body disappointed her once again, in a different way than it had during her first polygraph exam. Precisely when she began to stress out about her grades, she would develop cystic acne on her face, pus-filled pimples beneath the top layer of her skin that required cortisone injections. It was as though the chatter brewing beneath her surface were too extreme to contain. She didn’t know how much more she could take.
She felt as if she had two options: fail out or drop out.
Becoming a Fly on the Wall
Tracey’s story, like the stories of most people whose internal conversations become pools of negativity, is an exercise in distance—the distance we do or don’t have from our problems.
We can think of the mind as a lens and our inner voice as a button that zooms it either in or out. In the simplest sense, chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on somethi
ng, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective. This dramatically narrowed view of one’s situation magnifies adversity and allows the negative side of the inner voice to play, enabling rumination and its companions: stress, anxiety, and depression. Of course, narrowing your attention isn’t a problem in and of itself. To the contrary, it’s often essential to helping us address challenging situations and the feelings that arise from them. But when we find ourselves stuck on our problems and lose the ability to flexibly zoom out—to gain perspective—that’s when our inner voice turns into rumination.
When our internal conversation loses perspective and gives rise to intensely negative emotions, the brain regions involved in self-referential processing (thinking about ourselves) and generating emotional responses become activated. In other words, our stress-response hardware starts firing, releasing adrenaline and cortisol, flooding us with negative emotions, which only serve to further rev up our negative verbal stream and zoom us in more. As a result, we’re unable to get a wider-angle view that might reveal more constructive ways of handling the emotionally trying situations we encounter.
But our brains evolved not just to zoom in when we confront difficulties but also to zoom out, though the latter is much more challenging during times of stress. The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it. If you have a fever, you can take something to bring it down. Likewise, our mind has a psychological immune system: We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.
Psychological distance, of course, doesn’t eliminate a problem. If, for instance, Tracey had been able to step back from her high-pressured predicament and settle into a less anguished state, she nonetheless would still have been in debt to the NSA, with her future hanging in the balance. Similarly, even if Rick Ankiel had been able to retain his pitch, he still would’ve been standing on the mound pitching in the playoffs on national television. Distance doesn’t solve our problems, but it increases the likelihood that we can. It unclouds our verbal stream.
The big question, then, is this: When chatter strikes, how do we gain psychological distance?
As it happened, around the same time that Tracey was sitting in her freshman dorm room at Harvard, I was three and a half hours south down the highway in Manhattan, a graduate student in psychology sitting in the basement of Columbia University’s dingy Schermerhorn Hall thinking about a remarkably similar question. How can people reflect on their negative experiences, I wondered, without getting sucked down the rumination vortex? Answering that question was the reason I had decided to attend Columbia to train with my adviser, Walter Mischel, a groundbreaking scientist whom most people know as the Marshmallow Man.
Walter was akin to royalty in psychology for developing what the public now calls the marshmallow test, a paradigm for studying self-control that involved bringing kids into the lab for an experiment and presenting them with a simple choice: They could have one marshmallow now, or if they waited for an experimenter to return, they could have two. It turned out that children who waited longer ended up performing better on their SATs as teens, were healthier as they got older, and coped better with stress in adulthood than those who immediately grabbed the gooey marshmallow. But even more important than documenting these striking long-term outcomes, the so-called marshmallow test (its real name is the delay of gratification test) helped revolutionize science’s understanding of the tools people have to control themselves.
By the time I arrived at Columbia, Walter and his then postdoctoral student Özlem Ayduk had already become interested in examining how to help people think about painful experiences without succumbing to chatter. At the time, one of the dominant approaches to battling inner-voice rumination was distraction. Several studies had shown that when people find themselves sucked into negative verbal thinking, diverting their attention away from their problems improved the way they felt. The downside of this approach, however, is that distraction constitutes a short-term fix—a Band-Aid that obscures the wound without healing it. If you go to the movies to escape the adversities of real life, your problems are still there waiting for you when you leave the theater. Out of sight, in other words, isn’t actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.
Oddly, at this time, the idea of distancing had fallen out of vogue in psychology. In 1970, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy and an influential figure in mental health, proposed that teaching patients how to objectively scrutinize their thoughts, a process he called “distancing,” was a central tool that therapists should employ with their patients. In the ensuing years, however, distancing had come to be equated with avoidance—with not thinking about your problems. But in my mind, there was nothing inherently avoidant about distancing. In theory, you could use your mind to frame your problems from a zoomed-out perspective.
This approach differed from the meditative practice of mindfulness in that the goal wasn’t to stand apart and watch one’s thoughts drift by without engaging with them. The point was to engage, but to do so from a distanced perspective, which isn’t the same thing as an emotionally avoidant one. That was the essence of my dad’s teachings and what I had spent so much time doing growing up. So, Walter, Özlem, and I began thinking about the different ways people could “step back” from their experiences to reflect on them more effectively. We landed on a tool we all possess: our ability to imaginatively visualize.
A powerful optical device of sorts is built into the human mind: the ability to see yourself from afar. This mental home theater, it turns out, projects scenes when we think about unpleasant experiences from the past or imagine possible anxiety-producing scenarios in the future. They are almost like videos stored on a phone. Yet these scenes aren’t entirely fixed. Studies show that we don’t see our memories and reveries from the same perspective every time. We can view them from different perspectives. For example, sometimes we replay a scene happening through our own eyes as though we were right back in the event in the first person. Yet we can also see ourselves from the outside, as if transplanted to another viewpoint. We become a fly on the wall. Could we harness this ability to better regulate our inner voice?
Özlem, Walter, and I brought participants into the lab to find out. To do so, we asked one group to replay an upsetting memory in their minds through their own eyes. We asked another group to do the same, only from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, visually observing themselves like a bystander. Then we asked the participants to work through their feelings from the perspective they had been asked to adopt. The differences in the verbal stream characterizing the two groups were striking.
The immersers—the people who viewed the event from a first-person perspective—got trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they released. In their accounts describing their stream of thoughts, they tended to zero in on the hurt. “Adrenaline infused. Pissed off. Betrayed,” one person wrote. “Angry. Victimized. Hurt. Shamed. Stepped-on. Shitted on. Humiliated. Abandoned. Unappreciated. Pushed. Boundaries trampled upon.” Their attempts to “go inside” and work through their internal conversations just led to more negative feelings.
The fly-on-the-wall group, meanwhile, offered contrasting narratives.
Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. “I was able to see the argument more clearly,” wrote one person. “I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation.” Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story. The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone
of our inner voice.
Soon after, in more studies, we and others discovered that zooming out in this way also reined in people’s fight-or-flight cardiovascular response to stress, dampened emotional activity in the brain, and led people to experience less hostility and aggression when they were provoked—the kind of situation that is fertile ground for stoking chatter. We also found that this distancing technique worked not just with random collections of college students but also with those struggling with more extreme forms of inner-voice torment. For example, people with depression and even highly anxious parents grappling with their children’s undergoing painful cancer treatments. Yet our findings were, at this point, still limited. They related only to how distancing affects us in the moment. We also wanted to know whether it would have lasting effects, shortening the amount of time people spent ruminating.
It turned out we weren’t the only ones interested in exploring this question.
Not long after we published our initial work, a research team at the University of Leuven in Belgium, led by Philippe Verduyn, devised a clever set of studies to look at whether people’s tendencies to distance in daily life, outside a laboratory setting, influenced how long their emotional episodes lasted. They found that distancing by adopting an observer perspective shortened the duration of people’s negative moods after they experienced events that led them to feel angry or sad. Distancing could put out chatter brush fires before they grew into longer-lasting conflagrations.