Welcome and Setup
David Lowry: Welcome to the Fifth Season Podcast: Conversations on Successful Aging. I’m David Lowry, and I’m joined by my friend and co-host, Don Drew. We believe aging is a privilege and we want to have conversations on how to do it well.
Identity to Inner Noise
Don: David, last week, we talked about deconstructing our identities. In fact, the last several weeks we’ve been talking about identity, okay? Moving away from being producers that we had to be in the first half of our life and closer toward our, our true essence. But to find that essence, we have to address a major roadblock, which is frankly, the sheer volume of mental noise going on all around us.
David Lowry: There is a lot of mental noise going on around us and it’s worthy of talking about. It Reminds me of that old, well this is going to be a blast to the past, Simon and Garfunkel song, you know, The Sounds of Silence.
Don: Sing, please don’t sing!
David Lowry: Okay. I won’t sing, but I
Don: I felt that. I felt you warming up there a little bit.
David Lowry: There’s an inner voice wanting come out. A frustrated singer that never made it. It’s more than a zen cone. There is a sound to silence sometimes, and sometimes the people who are the most silent may have the most inner noise going on. And it’s really the isolation of modern life. But today, the irony is if we feel isolated, not because of too much silence, but because of too much noise and it’s in that noise that we lose herself.
Don: Exactly.
What Is Mental Noise
Don: So today we’re going to focus on how to quiet that noise in your head to feel happier and more present.
David Lowry: We’re going to define what mental noise is. It’s not just thinking. In my area of communication, Don, there’s a thing we call intrapersonal communication, Intrapersonal communication. And it’s communication with yourself. And it can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. But it’s in the background. And I used to be an old radio guy and I call myself K-David, it’s going on all the time. There’s a voice in my head saying one thing or another, and sometimes it’s nice to me and sometimes it’s really unkind.
Don: Yeah, there’s been quite a bit of research on we’ll just call it mental radio for our purposes today. And, it can cause severe cognitive overload that reduces our ability to process information scientists say by as much as 80%. And so it manifests as things like rumination, overthinking, anxiety, or that nagging self-criticism, that self-talk that we have, that tells us we’re just not doing enough or we’re not enough.
Common Noise Triggers
Don: There’s just a lot of good research and information on all of these things that comes up, I know in my life is perfectionism, right? Things like imposter syndrome. You’ve been promoted to a certain position or advanced to something or given responsibility for something. And on the outside you need to look like you have it all under control, when in fact you feel inside, like you really don’t.
Then there’s also this tendency we have sometimes to try and people please and, become overly active, if you will, in our efforts to please others, constantly worrying that we’re not good enough or not where we should be.
David Lowry: Don, uh, a friend of ours, a Cia Vershelden, Dr. Vershelden, has written a book on bandwidth. And in a sense, happens is when we’re going through all this inner talk, this noise inside of our head, this rumination this perfectionism that you were talking about, the self-criticism. It chews up our ability to interact with other people because our mind is in You mentioned cognitive overload while ago. Well, that’s a really great way of putting it, and it us because we’re not able to do it. There’s a woman by the name of Alexa Michail who wrote a book about this for Fortune, and she noted that while self-realization is healthy, brain noise is different. And it’s what happens when these thoughts become repetitive and distressing and unhealthy for us. And so, wow! It’s something we’ve gotta think about.
Don, I don’t know I don’t which ones of these might be a problem for you, but for me, it’s always this existential questions. You know, the ideas about responsibility and freedom and the meaning of life and mortality and those sorts of things. But, you mentioned a few others. Do you have anything that sometimes are gotchas for you on the bandwidth problem?
Don: Okay, so you and I are both, academics and we probably in many ways wrestle more regularly, if you will, with existential questions, I guess, maybe not, I don’t know. But I do know that that is a big deal with me. I also mentioned imposter syndrome that I have felt at various times, and almost everybody at some point in their career or in their life is gonna feel like that. The issue of perfectionism and people pleasing. Those all keep the mental radio volume really high.
Fix It Bias Explained
Don: And then there’s another one that I know I fall prey to, and that’s what’s called fix it bias. And it’s difficult to quiet the noise because our brain is biologically wired to seek solutions. If you’ve ever taken one of those or seen one of those tests or examples where they give you a paragraph and remove all the vowels and say, can you still read this? Well, you can. Why? Well, because your brain is good at filling in gaps and that’s what it does. So our brain really works hard to fill in what we don’t understand or what we don’t know. And of course, there’s a lot we don’t understand and don’t know. So the more the situation we’re in seems uncertain the more our brain works to fill that in and that overwork becomes problematic.
Why It’s Louder Now
Don: So, David, I’ve always been aware of the mental static in my head, but it also seems that in earlier years it wasn’t as bad as it is now. In our case, understanding the why behind all the noise is useful, but we might actually get more from trying to understand why the volume seems to be so much louder now than before.
David Lowry: Yes. I think as you live longer, as you have more experiences and interactions with people, that volume cranks right up there. And it feels increasingly loud and noisy on the inside. I think some of it could be that as we age, we become, some people say we become a little more fretful or internally reflective. And, sometimes we remember things in the past that trouble us and we think about them in ways that aren’t always the most helpful.
But then Don, i’d that we’re in era where technology, artificial intelligence, social media, I don’t think our brain was meant to have so much stimulation and overload. Think about it. If we could go back in our country 200 years ago, the traveling person in the wagon coming through town was the most information you got or maybe a newspaper or a letter. The stimulation wasn’t there like it is today. And today we get thousands upon thousands of messages and we need machine help to sort out the spam and we need things on our phone to keep our phones from ringing constantly all day long. I think it affects the neural. Wires in our head. I don’t know what we would call it’s the neurons or the connections, but, it’s a real thing. And, also known that it creates a biological cortisol spike. Our amygdalas fire and puts us in fight or flight mode. So there’s that as well.
Don: That’s a a great point. we live in an age now where, young people are exposed to more information than we ever were by their age. But that also means we had more time to, grow up process things.if you think about you and i’s life, David, We have seen just remarkable,expansion of information and technology and learningand all those things. And we’ve had to absorb that. And, you’re right, our brains are trying to catch up with our biology in a sense,which, is really an impossible task. It takes a long time for, for those kind of changes to occur.
So yeah, this idea of neural rewiring and cortisol spikes and all those kind of things are really important.
Social Media and Doomscrolling
Don: Let’s, pick on social media, for a minute here. It’s talked about a lot. I was listening to a really good,radio show on it the other day about the impact of social media on young people. what do you, what do you know about that?
David Lowry: One of the things we know is that our young people are spending upwards of six hours a day on media. And you know what? I’m not so sure that we are not doing it too as seniors.I think everybody’s on the media a lot more than we actually say we are. We’re constantly checking. I asked, students in my class the other day, what they thought wasa good amount of time to your phone for messages or just it. And they said two to three times an hour would be minimal for them. I think it goes more than that with them, if I were to be honest. But I mean, think about it 36 times, of checking your phone during the day. We might even call that an obsessive compulsive habit because I think the definition of obsessive compulsive is when it eats up an your time and you have to do it or else. And if you think about it, people are checking for emails and responses and texts and there’s this sense of urgency about it. You know, the new term is called doom scrolling. You’ve probably seen that too. Does that line up with what you’ve been thinking?
Don: Well doom scrolling is actually a term that’s used in a number of different areas, and it could be used with social media. It can be used with negative news or news in general. It’s like this 24 7 negative news that we’re getting or that it’s in your face political tension that’s going on. It just goes on all the time. Growing up, once again, you may have already made the point, we knew that the news was on at 6:00 PM and if we were interested on the news, we’d go listen to that in the evening for an hour. And that was pretty much, unless you were a newspaper reader and I wasn’t when I was young, I did later. That’s gone now.
Now we are constantly bombarded with news and it’s usually negative things. And it’s interesting. We had Kelly Roberts on here, oh gosh, this has been a long time ago on Peaceful Life Radio. And she talked about different kinds of trauma. And one of those kinds of traumas, what’s called vicarious trauma. That’s trauma that you experience just from witnessing. Just from being there. Even though it doesn’t necessarily happen to you, there’s a really a bad shot of stress that comes when we’re exposed to traumatic news all the time. Then also this negative news we have just thrives on uncertainty. Okay. Our brain hates uncertainty.
I taught in the business school. I used to say business hates uncertainty. Well, our brain hates uncertainty, right? And we try to solve it by overplaying and, and replaying information and trying to make sense of it and so forth. And we get in this vicious circle of worry, that consumes our brains and it impacts our feelings about ourselves and our wellness really. Then there’s the current situation with all the, in your face politics and identity friction going on. And I know you’ve been exposed to a lot of that, David and have had several things to say about that.
Mean World Syndrome
David Lowry: Don, before we continue, there was a landmark study done many years ago before. Social media was even a thing or a thought. And there was a scientist called Gerner out at the University of Southern California who came up with what he called the Mean World Syndrome.
What he found was that people who watched a lot of news came away believing that the was more dangerous than it was. So, for instance, when I lived in Southern California, I lived in one of the safest places in the nation. It was Thousand Oaks, California, and at that time it was considered second only to Simi Valley as one of the safest places in the United states. But people believed that they were going to be robbed. They believed that their homes were unsafe. It statistically is a safe place, because all the news, you think it’s a safe place.
Well, just ramp this up a hundred million times with our social media today, and we’ve got people believing that the world they live in is just going to hell in a hand basket. And honestly, there’s a lot of things that we look at that really scare us. But I believe that we have a much more deluded notion of what the world is like than reality would suggest if we were really honest.
I mean, you, call identity. Friction. Well, if you’re not careful, you’ll believe in everybody in is your person because, they don’t some sort of political point of view. And that’s not the world we actually live in. I know people here in my home state who would give you the shirt off of their back and help you in any kind of a crisis. And I’m pretty sure I’m a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of them. But we, get caught up in this social friction. That’s the kind of mental noise that causes you to distrust your neighbor, maybe separate from your kids and family members, because you can’t handle all of that and you have this dissonance inside of yourself that’s just fed by all of these in your face politics you were just discussing. I mean, this is the thing Don, we’ve got to learn how to shut some of that down, and.
Practical Ways to Quiet
David Lowry: I think that’s a great lead into maybe our next section, which is where we’re talking about practical solutions to shutting off this noise.
Don: , That’s a great point. I’m looking forward to talking about that. I think the reality is that we have limited ability to control the source in terms of it just being there. The question is, what do we do with it? Okay. How do we respond to it? Do we partake? Do we control what we can? And that’s what we probably need to talk about next.
David Lowry: Yes, turning down the volume. We’ve got to find a way of reducing the unhealthy mental chatter. Now I’m a big believer in contemplation and reflection. That is very different from rumination over negative things happening and fear-based rumination. I believe that it’s good to sit in quietness and to move your mind towards something a little more positive or to open it up to something a little more edifying. But we’ve gotta find ways of bringing this into our lives and feeding ourselves maybe now than ever before.
I’m going to offer you a couple of things that might interrupt the negativity coming at us all the time and the calculated fear messages that are just running rampant on our social media.
A method to reset the times of dread where you just count to five. It’s just like you read something and just put it down for a moment. It’s like, I’m just gonna take a deep breath for about five seconds here. When you see something that’s really moving you towards a big charge, just put your tablet down for a moment. Take a deep breath in. Make it last at least five seconds. There’s some other things we can do too, right?
Don: Yeah, but let me ask you something about that five second rule. David, you’re a, an expert in conflict resolution. It’s one of your areas of specialty. Isn’t there a rule that goes something like that when you’re feeling a conflict coming on? Isn’t there a similar kind of a, a recommendation?
David Lowry: Yeah, there really is. But it requires you to recognize when charge is building up inside of you. And it requires a little bit of mindfulness that I’m getting angry, I’m getting scared, or my body is getting anxious and you can just feel the tightness in your chest and everything. Yes, it does require some awareness. But to answer your question directly, yes. When you find your separating yourself from people at time, you might say, I need a break. I’ll come back in a moment. Or, I think we both need to calm down a bit and I know I need to calm down a bit and I’ll be back with you in a bit. I need a break. We just have to advocate for ourselves like that. So five seconds is, believe it or not, five seconds can do a lot just to calm you down, just by taking a deep breath.
Don: Right.
Limit Stimuli and Phones
Don: And the need to be calmed down means you’re exposing yourself to some things and perhaps, and we’ve already talked about this, one of the things that we really need to focus on is limiting the stimuli, and meaning controlling, the amount of time we expose ourselves or the opportunity for those things to be exposed to that ourselves with. Limiting stimuli might be, well, we were discussing earlier social media and young people who are checking their social media several times throughout the day. That can be problematic, right? I know that I fall prey like I’ve seen so many other people, even my age fall prey to looking at their phone constantly. Or when somebody’s talking to me, I catch myself looking at my phone and checking things. And it’s just this constant information source that we’ve got to try and put some breaks on it, put some controls on our own use, but that requires a lot of self-discipline. And that Means we’ve got to try just like losing weight or learning to walk faster or whatever it is, it takes practice.
David Lowry: I think it would be really wise of us if we would challenge ourselves to leave our phones in the car sometimes. I go to my yoga studio a couple of times a week and there’s a lot of folks that got their phone right by their yoga mat and I’m thinking, this is not the place for that. But then I’ve caught myself in church having my phone in my hand and the minister’s talking, and I should be listening and paying attention. And I go, oh my goodness, look at this. And I have started trying just to leave it in the car and saying, I know if I have it, I’m going to look at it. And I don’t want to be looking at it in these environments. And we need to have some spaces that we hold sacred enough. It might be morning coffee with someone you love, or it might be the church or it might be, a group of people that you’re meeting up and, you know, instead of just holding your phone in front of your, could be visiting your grandma.
Don: Yeah and there’s some things that you can do. I mean, we tend to think of mindfulness or meditation as times that are quiet and so on. But sometimes it’s just simple acts like journaling or walking or observing, your physical surroundings, for a few minutes, taking a break.
Christie, my wife has recommended to me ,that I spent a lot of time in my home office and so on, and she says about every 15 minutes, you ought to get up and walk around. She’s right. You know, I need to give myself a bit of a break and it’s just a simple act.
Of course all of these are great, but it’s my personality to want to go to the source and start there, right? So for me, controlling the source and attempting to limit stimuli is where I’m inclined to go first. I’m thinking of limiting my phone time and things like doom scrolling, also avoiding political conversations that I know are gonna go nowhere. One of our former guests, Dr. Adam Dorsey, talked with us about FOMO, or the fear of missing out. That’s something we’ve all probably heard of, and he suggested we replace it with JOMO or the joy of missing out. But even with this, I suspect there’s more needed to quiet the constant noise.
David Lowry: There is.
Quiet Head Clear Heart
David Lowry: And I think we’ve just got to find a way to have a more quiet head. And one of the beauties of aging should be that we can be a little more patient than we have been in the past. And we are able to say, now this is a good good for you. It’s not going to be good for me. have that not watching, the news isn’t all that scary as I thought it would be. You’ll know, all the major things that’s going on. There’s still plenty of people who are willing to tell me how terrible the world is. And if there’s anything really important, I can always go back and find it,. and I get enough news without having to bring it into my face all the time.
The goal is a quiet head. What I call a clear heart. learning to the uncertainty of the world. and look, there’s a lot of things going on. It’s beyond my ability to do anything about. And this isn’t trying to say I don’t have to do anything. It’s just saying, manage all of these things. The only thing I can do is know how I want to show up. So, I have to have a little bit of self compassion instead of caught up and spun up, have to say I can’t solve all of this, but I can solve how I up and start learning to be the person I want to be.
Don: I really think that’s key, David. We spend our lives, or have spent our lives, being rewarded for knowing things and having answers, right. But in this fifth season where we’re at in our lives now, the reward is often in the questioning. We need to learn how to reward ourselves for finding peace in that noise rather than just finding anxiety because of it.
David Lowry: Don, you and I may have fed that thing. I’ve taught students answers for exams and things like this. But really sometimes I haven’t taught them how to question or to say. complex place and i’m not gonna figure it all out. And I can learn to live with a little bit of ambiguity if I need to. So, if we want greater insight and we want resulting greater peace, we have to find a way of reducing the interruptions that come into our life, and we can do something about it. We’re not helpless. We can turn off our TVs. We can take those walks. We can reach out to a friend and offer something encouraging to them. We don’t have to always expose ourselves to the latest political arguments going on between the right and the left or whatever. There’s a lot more in our power than we’re giving ourselves credit for I think.
Don: We can’t always change the world around us, but we can reorder our outward intentions and internal world.
Challenge and Wrap Up
David Lowry: So we just give a challenge to all of our listeners today. What’s one noisy worry you can release to make room for a little more silence and peace?
Don: That’s it today for us. Listeners, please visit our [email protected] and like, or share us with your friends. We want to hear from you. So please email us with your questions or suggestions for future podcasts. And thank you for joining us on this journey of successful aging. Next week we’ll be talking about how successful aging means treating health as maintenance instead of crisis where consistency beats intensity. David and I look forward to helping you continue to age well next week on The Fifth Season. Have a great week.