Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How to Harness the Voice in Your Head | Psychologist, Dr. Ethan Kross

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, Ethan earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in social-affective neuroscience to learn about the neural systems that support self-control. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2008, where he founded the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory.As an award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, Ethan studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions, and relationships.And Ethan just published his first book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.I’d be surprised if anyone listening hasn’t experienced what Ethan describes as “Chatter.”That process where you have a thought such as, “Why did I screw up this shot or presentation at work?” But rather than just identify how to fix it and move on, you keep getting stuck. Our ability to reflect on what we’re doing, learn from our experiences and optimize how we navigate the world is an incredibly powerful tool, but that introspective capacity can also steer us off course.Ruminating and getting stuck in this cycle of negative thinking can make life miserable, so in this conversation, we discuss what to do when you find yourself stuck in that cycle._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And I think what we have the capacity to do is to shorten that stress response. And the same is true for other kinds of emotional experiences. Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. So I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist, which means these conversations on this podcast have much to do about the inner life. And these conversations are about getting to the center and the truth about what allows people to become their very best. And on that note, if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick reminder here to check out the online course I created with head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Pete Carroll. And you can find that at findingmastery.net forward slash course.

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in psychology from Columbia University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in social affective neuroscience, just to learn more about the neural systems that support self-control. He moved over to the University of Michigan in 2008, where he founded the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. Ethan studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health performance, decisions, and relationships. And Ethan just published his first book. It's really good. It's so solid. I'm so stoked to introduce this book to you and his thinking.

Now, the name of the book is called Chatter, The Voice Inside of Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. I'd be surprised if anyone listening hasn't experienced what Ethan describes as chatter. It's that process where you have a thought like, why did I screw up on this shot or presentation or whatever? But rather than just identifying how to fix it and move on, you get stuck there. And there's a rumination. There's a loop that takes place. And that's chatter. And our ability to reflect on what we're doing and learn from those experiences and then to optimize how we navigate the world, it's an incredibly powerful tool.

It's one of the most powerful tools known to humans. And where do we go train our mind? Like really, where do we go? And so that is actually what led me down my career path. That's what actually led me to build the online course that I mentioned earlier. And it's the same for Ethan. And so what Ethan's doing here is that he's trying to help people get unstuck by having, you know, this introspective capacity to be able to navigate the external world, stimulating the internal world, stimulating ideas, because thoughts come from lots of different directions, and to give people the tools to be able to navigate well. So with that, let us jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Ethan Cross. Ethan, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. How are you?

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, it's a difficult thing to answer in context of everything that we're going through right now. But for the most part, life for me is, it feels important. You know, like there's a lot of hard decisions and principles that are being challenged and tested. And I love all of that. And so I'm doing well. So, you know, thank you. Yeah, that's great. I think we can begin to see the light with vaccines and some other changes on the horizon. So for me, that gives some hope that there's something to look forward to. Okay, cool. So let's start from the beginning.

As a psychologist, are you licensed as a psychologist or did you spend most of your time on research? No, I'm a research guy. So I almost went into getting a license. And then I realized that what I was really passionate about was trying to understand how people work. And the thought was, if we can understand how things like emotions and thinking and how thoughts can influence feeling and behavior, then we can use that information to improve people's lives. And so it's been research for me. Yeah, these are the conversations I love because I am materially better because of people like you and your research because I'm interested in how it works in the amphitheater and I don't have the chops to do research.

I'm not built that way. I don't have the chops to do it. And so I love these conversations because I want to be hand in hand with science, with research, with best understanding. Someone shared with me early days, cause I was frustrated that I, I didn't have the appetite for research, but I really respected it. And he says, Mike, the best application is solid research. I was like, wow, that's really good. You know, so thank you for the life commitment you've made and then sharing some of your gems and pearls in this conversation. Yeah, well, thank you because it goes both ways.

You know, what gets me excited is not only rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty doing research, but then thinking about how we can use what we learn to actually make a difference in people's lives. And in fact, whenever we, in my lab, the way we figure out what kinds of projects to do, we ask ourselves two questions. Does this project have the potential to really advance our understanding of how people work in some way, or does it have the potential to substantially improve people's lives in some way? And so I've always been really interested in that application component. And I think talking to folks like yourself who are on the front line, so to speak, is a way of doing that. So what brought you to the University of Michigan

and to open up and build the lab that you're in? Well, you know, the way it works is I, I, I got my PhD. And when I got my PhD I was working at Columbia with a guy named Walter Michelle, who a lot of people know as the marshmallowmallow Man. He was the guy who developed the delay of gratification task. So you give kids a choice. You can have one cookie whenever you want it, or if you wait till I come back, you can have two. And it's a test of self control that turns out predicts lots of outcomes later on in life. So I was working with him. And when I graduated, you're really beholden to the market. So what institutions have jobs that you're interested in and you throw out your applications and Michigan was one that fit really well. And so it was my first job out of graduate school.

And it's been my only job. And it's really a magical place for both living and doing research for a variety of reasons. So I'll share something fun with you. That research that you're talking about, the marshmallow, which is really the self-control experiment, I guess you will. Maybe this isn't going to come out right, but my wife and I did it with my son, like when he was younger. And just to kind of get a sense of what that impulse control and sense of control is. And it was fun. He, he, he did great, meaning there's no real good and bad, but he did what I would hope he did. He waited. It was, I was like, okay, so I see where a natural asset or not asset, but proclivity for him is, and then maybe where I need to challenge and

support them on the risk-taking side of things. So, yeah, so it's, it's a fun experiment. Maybe if you could just take a quick beat, I know it's old for you, you know, this is circa maybe 2000, somewhere in there, um, 2000, early two thousands probably is, um, can you just walk through that test in case some folks have some kids and they want to they want to yeah i'm happy to i'll give you a personal anecdote too after i'm done so the way this test works is you take a you bring a child into a room and there's a research assistant there who establishes a close connection with the kids so they feel comfortable and then they sit down in front of a desk and on the desk, they see two treats that you know the kid likes. So for some kids, it's marshmallows and maybe a

cookie or a pretzel. M&M, whatever. M&M. And then you give the kids a choice. You say, the way we're going to do a little exercise and the way this exercise works is I'm going to leave the room. And if you wait till I come back, you can have both of these treats that the child desperately, desperately wants, right? Or if you want, when you want, you could take just one of the treats whenever, but, but, you know, you just ring this bell that you have here. I'll come back and I'll give you just one. But the only way you get two is if you wait until I come back. And the research assistant doesn't tell the kid how long they're going to be away. So it's really a challenging

task because the treats are right there in front of you. It's like if you're on a carb-free diet at a restaurant with the most amazing bread, right? And they put it right in front of you and the olive oil and the butter, you've got to withhold the response to reach it. And so it turns out that the kids who are able, the longer the kids wait on this task, the better they are at regulating themselves, at controlling themselves later on in life. So the idea is that this marshmallow test, this self-control test provides a way of tapping into a kid's ability to resist impulses. And, you know, I want to hear your personal anecdote, but, you know, inside of that, there's some great videos online, you know, there's like highlight reel videos where you

see like when they would put like brothers and sisters or two kids next to each other. And one of the kids is like trying to cheat and you're like, watch that one now, you know, like it's pretty obvious that I think it is at age three, we start to develop the concept of lying. I think it's, it's somewhere early in that age frame. And so you can start seeing the manipulation. You're like, what? Like that, that little boy or girl, whatever, like that one's going to be trouble now, you know, already working angles. When I used to teach this class to hundreds and hundreds of students, I mean, it brings the house down. So you see this one kid who he had Oreo cookies in front

of him. And what he does is he looks around, like make sure no one's looking, picks up an Oreo cookie, unscrews the top, licks the cream, and then carefully puts it back right down as if no one would see. And so, uh, pretty, pretty amazing. So, so I, like you did this test with, with my kids when they were young and with my oldest daughter, um, I, I laid it out super formally by the books, you know, research standards. And when I give her the choice, she goes, I'd like one cookie now. And I'd like to wait and have two cookies later. And so I was like, ah, well, that's kind of clever. So I called up Walter, like I've got the bat phone. I can actually call him and get a consultation from the world expert on this house. I'm like, Walter, have you ever seen a child make this response? You know,

what do you think? What does it predict? And then he pauses and he goes, it's not too soon to start therapy, Ethan. Or just, or just apply to law school early. Exactly. Exactly. It looks like, it looks like we're going the law school route with, with more years of observation of her. So, um, but Walter was, you know, just a, um, just a brilliant man. He passed away a couple of years ago. And when I went to work with him, what I was interested in doing was studying the ability to control ourselves, but not necessarily when it comes to controlling the impulse to eat a cookie or not, but rather how can we control our minds when we find our minds running off course. And so I've always been interested in

introspection, which I think is such an amazing tool, like our ability to reflect on what we're doing to learn from our experiences and optimize how we navigate the world, how we perform, think, feel. But that introspective capacity, as I know you know, often runs off course. People try to reflect on, hey, why did I screw up this shot or swing or presentation at work? And rather than just identify how to fix it and then move on, people end up getting stuck. They ruminate, they worry, they catastrophize. They engage in what I call chatter, which is what I wrote this book on, which is getting stuck in this cycle of negative thinking and feeling that can really make life miserable. And so I was working with Walter on that, and that's what really got me to Michigan.

Okay. So it's not necessarily for you about self-control. That's the name of your, what's the title of your lab? Well, the title of lab is actually the emotion and self-control lab. I think many people, when they think of self-control, they think, how do you refrain from alcohol or unprotected sex, or how do you diet? I think that's one facet of self-control, but the definition I use is a lot broader. So I think self-control is about aligning your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors with your

goals, right? And that covers a big, big, vast terrain. So that's about if I don't want to feel depressed, right? If my goal is to not be depressed or anxious or angry, self-control is about aligning how I think, feel, and behave to meet that goal. If my goal is to outperform the other person on the football field or in the boxing ring, self-control is about making that happen. So it really opens up the kinds of questions we can ask to a lot broader set of phenomena. Okay. So let's actually pause on this concept of introspection first. And there's lots of ways I want to go with this because we tend to hold that as a, oh, the ability to discern, the ability to look within, the ability to, or even the want, not necessarily the ability.

They're two separate things. Some people don't want to look within. They're too distracted and attracted by the shiny X-Turtles. But the want and the ability to look within and to discern and to understand. There is a dark side to it. And I want to talk to you about it because I haven't talked about this with anybody, but let's call it OCD, you know, or let's call it awareness without tools. So those two places I get really interested in because some of the folks that are highly aware, so they look within, they pull it apart, they deal with their internal responses to external events, and they pull it apart, and then they not stuck in it, but they just meander in it and they water it. And but they don't have the skills, the internal skills to go, right, this is how I'm going to deal with it.

That is. There's a bit of torture to that. And so, yeah. So can you, I mean, do you talk much because we told, um, the internal viewing of oneself as a, as a lauded approach as a, like a hierarchical, like high thing, not high thing, but aspirational thing to do, but do you ever deal with the dark side of this? Oh yeah, very much. I mean, in fact, that's the, so like the question that got me into this business was, was basically I had a, you tell me if this is a strange upbringing. From the time I was three years old, my dad used to encourage me to introspect. He'd say, go inside, try to find a solution to the problem.

You know, he called the Colonel. This was a guy who was super into Eastern philosophy, well-read. And so he just encouraged me to do it. I'm three years old. So what do I do? I listen to my dad, right? So we're talking either about the Yankees or introspection. Like that was childhood growing up and it served me well.

I will- What did dad do? What did dad do? He was just a salesman, right? Didn't finish college and jumped from one job to the next throughout my life and had a passion for reading Eastern philosophy and psychology and talking about it with his three-year-old son. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company.

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Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. There's something really important that I wanted to hit on when you were talking about Walter, which is mentors. Lineage. Yeah. So there's something important here I want to talk about, which is about mentorship and lineage. So Walter is somewhere in there. I don't know if he's a mentor of yours, but it was an early collaborator. Absolutely. Walter's a mentor.

Mentor. Okay. And then so dad is part of your heritage, part of your lineage that set you down this path. Would you say that he fundamentally shaped this part of your life? Very much so. My dad absolutely put me on this trajectory for thinking about questions surrounding the mind and introspection from an early age. I didn't know it back then, but he certainly put me on it. Did you have anyone in between dad and Walter that was materially, like right now that comes your mind, like this person kind of shifted my arc just a little bit as well? Not really. It was really dad growing up until I got to college. And when I got to college, something really interesting happened. For me, it was a spike

on my timeline because after the first semester, after I determined becoming an MD wasn't in it for me, where I grew up, I grew up in Brooklyn, well before Brooklyn was a seat of coolness and hipsterdom in the world, old, old fashioned kind of Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Brooklyn. And, and if you did well in school there growing up, you either became a doctor or a lawyer. And by doctor, I mean, a real doctor, not the kind that I am right now, as my mom would remind me and maybe still does. And so after I determined that I wasn't interested in that, I took a class on site just randomly. I thought, yeah, this looks interesting. And we finally, about halfway through the semester, got to the topic of introspection.

And I'm ready for this. I'm doing the equivalent of stretching, cracking my knuckles. This is my thing. And then what do I learn? I learned that actually, a lot of research suggests that introspection, as you suggested before, doesn't help people. It actually hurts them. And so this, for me, became a gigantic puzzle. Oh, I love this. I'm super motivated to try to figure out. Why does introspection help some people some of the time, but kill us in other situations? And how can we resolve that puzzle? And that's what I've been trying to figure out for the past 20 years. That's what I wrote this book about. Chatter. Chatter. Yeah, good.

The dark side of introspection yeah i didn't know you yeah see i would have picked up um it's the dark side of self-talk and so i didn't pick up um and i haven't fully completed your book but i wouldn't have picked up that it's a dark side of introspection so i can't wait to dive in and continue finishing the read here um and when I picked it up, I was gripped by it. And so this turnaround time for us happened really quickly because I want to make sure that like I was enthralled by it. I didn't want to wait until I finished the book. So sorry if I'm sloppy there. No worries at all. Yeah. Okay. And then so let's- The good news, Michael, is I have the book memorized.

Okay, good. So I can, you know, if you're interested in the passage, just let me know. Page 276, here you go. That's what happens when you work on a book for four years. Oh, my God. Okay, brilliant. Now, let's stay on the lineage thing for just a moment. Who was your dad's lineage, like before him? Was it Thich Nhat Hanh that's like from a distance way part of mine from the introspective?

Yeah, from my dad's lineage, I would say Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. No kidding. A TM guy. He was very much into TM when I was five years old. I didn't get a new bike for my birthday. I got a Mantra. That was quite an experience. I remember going to the TM center in New York city and walking into a room with all these mattresses on the floor. I'm like, what's the deal with the mattresses dad? And he looks at me and he's like,

it's for, it's for yogic hopping. You know, it's just people can levitate. It's not true as far as I know, but as a five-year-old, my dad tells me this and I'm like, oh, wow. So he was really, really taken with that way of thinking about the world from the Eastern philosophical point of view. And some of those ideas have come back in certain forms into the work we do um which we'll probably talk about in some um later on and then from the philosophical or psychological perspective who are some of the folks that you're connected to car car rogers for me william james i think all of us at some point point to yeah um you know who are some of the ones that you're like, these folks are important? You know, you know, William James, Walter Mischel is another big one.

Aaron Beck. So some of the founders of cognitive therapy, Albert Ellis. These are pivotal people. Susan Olin Huxema, who was a more contemporary psychologist, passed away recently. She was someone who really made her career studying rumination, the dark side of introspection and, and, and really thinking through when does introspection go bad? When does, and, self-talk is a part of introspection. And so when does self-talk and introspection go south? And so she was a pivotal figure too. Actually, it's funny. It's a great question. Probably the key person for me was

Viktor Frankl. Amen. Author of Man's Search for Meaning. I remember reading his book in college. I was a religious studies minor, actually read in the religion class. And I was just blown away by this guy. He was a guy who had everything taken away from him. And I mean, everything, his livelihood, his family slaughtered during the Holocaust in a concentration camp. And yet he managed to survive. And he wrote a book, Man's Search for Meaning, was about how he navigated that space. And he talks about the importance of hope and the ability to reframe how you think about things. And I remember reading that and thinking, my God, if this guy can live through what he lived through and make sense of his experience in a way that doesn't bring him

down, but lets him actually survive and thrive. That's something that I want to figure out how to do. What is your last name? What is your heritage from a familial standpoint? So my last name is Cross, but I come from Eastern European Jews for the most part. So my grandpa ran the Holocaust also. That's kind of what I thought. Yeah. So even more so connected to one of the greats. He altered my trajectory or my arc as well. And what people maybe don't talk about enough is he also

developed a branch in psychology, Logos Therapy, which know, this perspective shifting ability and also the importance of holding true to a vision of capability. And so it's kind of the bookends, you know, like amazing work, amazing work. Okay. All right. Now let's dive right into your work. Okay. And before we get right into the meat of it, what's the hardest thing you've been through that has been material? Because I want to understand like the inner part of why you did this academic research, but what's the hard stuff that you face down? And, you know, here's a axiom that I wonder if you'll share with me. Nobody gets through this life without experiencing trauma, big T or little t. And so if we don't talk about it some way,

it becomes this shame built. Only the weirdos like me feel we go through hard times, but really, it's all of us. Oh, and I think it's absolutely everyone experiences hardships. No one's perfect. And I think everyone also struggles at times with the voice in their head, which, you know, with chatter. So, you know, well, where to start with the hardships? There are a few I could choose from. Let me tell you about one that I tell a story in the book about that really opened up some of the work that we've done on self-talk. About 10 years ago, we did a study that um that ended up getting a lot of media attention uh so the study was it was a fun study we're trying to figure out

when people talk about their feelings hurting after being socially rejected so like you know i don't like you very much i don't want to date you i don't want to be on your show whatever it is people often describe when they're rejected they use the language of physical pain. Oh, my feelings hurt. And so what we wanted to figure out is, well, is there some overlap between the experience of social pain and physical pain, like when you're pinched or punched or hit? And so we did this, this, this fMRI, this brain imaging study where basically we brought people into the lab who had just been dumped by their romantic partner. And we showed them a picture of the person who dumped them while we were scanning their brains. And we asked them to think about how they felt in

the exact moment that they were dumped as they're looking at the former love of their life. The point there wasn't just to be cruel, but we're trying to get people to re-experience how they felt when they were rejected. And so we did that for about half the experiment. On the other half of the experiment, we took a device. It's like a little metal probe that we hooked up to their forearm and it gets really warm slash hot. So it heats up really hot and provides thermal pain. Now, I want to be very clear to listeners. I'm not in the business of torturing anyone or inflicting pain. The feeling was like holding a really hot cup of coffee from Starbucks without the protective

sleeve. So it hurts, but it's tolerable. And then what we did is we just looked at, do you find the same pain centers in the brain becoming active across both experiences. And we found that it did. The study got a lot of buzz. I went on the evening news, did an interview. It was great. My mom, who previously thought I wasn't a real doctor, now was, you know, it's okay, Ethan. It's okay. You're not an MD, but I love you anyway. And life was good for a couple of days. And then I went into my office about a week later, and there was a note hand addressed to me. And I opened the note, and it was essentially a threatening letter, threatening slurs of various sorts and all sorts of stuff you just never, ever hope to see. And, you know, the moment I started reading the letter,

I started sweating profusely, having a kind of panic threat response, and ended up going to filing a police report. And to make a long story short, for the next two days, two nights, I paced my house with a baseball bat peeking out the window, making sure no one was going to come in and get my family. My wife and I had just had our first child. She was a newborn. So this was a really challenging moment, and it was filled with chatter. And there's a real irony to it because I'm someone who directs a laboratory on controlling ourself, controlling our emotions. And for those two days, I was not in control at all, right?

I was really spinning in the most terrible way I had experienced up until that point. And so that was a really, really tricky thing. Well, okay. I had experienced up until that point. And so that was a really, really tricky thing. Okay. So I love that we're going to talk about this word control because I don't think we can control emotions. Now, this is your laboratory. Okay. This is me opining from what I've seen in the amphitheater of high risk and high consequence. As soon as emotions, I want to say there's an imaginary threshold, almost like an action potential from a physiological standpoint. But my experience of Mike, me, and then working with world-leading thinkers and doers is that once there's this emotion that's on board, there's no controlling

that the best we can do once it crosses a threshold is hold on, harness, adjust, guide, suggest. But once that thing happens and I'm looking for a better way to describe it. It's almost like a water table. Once it reaches the water table, now we're in the rapids. But underneath the water table, we're still not really controlling emotions because they're so potent and powerful and raw and big and energetic and physiological meets the collision of psychological interpretation that it is best we can do is, I'll use the words again, harness. So, of course, correct me. Yeah, I think this is the way we're using language. I mean, the subtitle of chatter is the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it. And so, when I say control, I mean harnessing, managing, channeling.

Once an emotion is triggered, that is a potent, potent response. It is a coordinated response that begins in your brain and leashes a cascade of biochemical reactions that course them throughout your body, feed back to your brain to at least at the first phase to try to prepare you for dealing with what is presenting itself in the world in front of you. Now, where we have the ability to intervene is I think we have the capacity to channel that response, to decrease its amplitude, how strongly it's triggered. We also have the ability to shorten it, to prevent it from staying active for a really long period of time. People often think of stress as like a killer. I think that's not actually true, right? Stress in and of itself, a stress reaction is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. You want to be able to quickly mobilize yourself for a threat in front of you.

When stress becomes dangerous, a killer, is when that stress response gets triggered and then it stays elevated. It stays activated over time. That exerts a wear and tear on our bodies that lots of research shows is harmful. And I think what we have the capacity to do is to shorten that stress response. And the same is true for other kinds of emotional experiences. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I

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that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Okay. So I think we might be saying the same thing, actually. Yeah, I think so. I work away from the word control, and I'll tell you why. It's because when it happens to me, I feel like a failure. I'm being really dramatic right now. But when I get to – this is going to sound judgment critical, but this is maybe why I've adopted this to get me out of this loop. But when I have a panic response, a physiological panic response to an external event and my interpretation of what that means, and I start sweating or I start whatever, getting cold or having that little shake or whatever the manifestation is,

that I've lost control. I don't have now the inner skills and abilities. And so I want to say, I just want to reframe it to say, right, once the tidal wave actually crashes, just go for the ride, work your ass off to try to make useful responses. But now you've got such cortisol and high levels of agitating neurochemicals inside that it takes 45 minutes to clear them, 90 minutes to clear them, you know, maybe nine hours for some of us, but like, so just work your way. But you said it right there. That's exactly, I think, where the harnessing, managing, controlling, and I think choose the word that you're most comfortable, but that's the power of what we're talking about.

The difference between 30 to 45 minutes to recover versus nine hours or nine days or nine months. Yeah. And sometimes we need like, let's go into high consequence environments. We have to respond in three seconds, nine seconds. And with all of that agitating cortisol, physiological responses that we don't are not ideal. And so I am so much more interested in, yes, I value flow state from a science, the science term of being in that beautiful, eloquent,

easy speed adjusting as if it's a musical, something that you've played many times and it's just awesome and beautiful but you know the other 90 of the time 85 95 of the time whatever it might be that's work that's what i love your work about yeah you know that's where the duck's feet are spinning underneath like working so hard so let's let's get to it oh you had something you're gonna say well you know just to put that in perspective, here's a great statistic that I present in chatter. So we spend, being in the moment, as I think you're describing with flow, is awesome. It's great. But we're not built to be in the moment all the time. And in fact, if you look at studies that try to index, how much time are people in general spending in the moment all the time. And in fact, if you look at studies that try to index how much time are people in general spending in the moment, they're between a third and a half of our waking

life. We're not in the moment. We're in our heads. We're either effectively working through our experiences and our problems, or I'd argue more of the time we're getting stuck as, as, as you're describing. So we're spending a huge amount of waking life in our heads. And I think if you're going to spend that much time in that space, let's try to think about how we can, how we can optimize the time we're in there. And, and, and, yeah. Yeah. So I'd love, uh, yes, this is my life purpose. I don't know if I shared this with you. Um, that's why we have so much fun chatting. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. This, this, to increase the frequency of time spent in the

present moment is my life purpose. And because I want to help people meet the demands of the moment in places where I was not able to do it as a young person and I'm still working now, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm on the mountaintop here, but so, but I'm better at it than I was two days ago. And certainly 20 years ago. So I hear, so again, living in the present moment more often. Okay. So one of the ways that I go about this, and this is where you and I sink is let's say the 50% of the time that you're not okay if you can just become more aware of your inner thinking and experiences and the awareness is actually being present with them so now we're taking that 50% to maybe 60% you know of time that you're connected to the present moment

even if the present moment is entertaining in a useful, helpful, um, observable, nonjudgmental, noncritical way that you're able to entertain and be connected to your inner life. I'm down with it. And so can you, can you, can you make that better? Can you sharpen that just a little bit for me? Yeah. So I think there are two things we can think about doing. One is increasing the amount of time we spend engaged in the present moment, as you're describing. And then two, the time that we're not in the present, we can get better at being with our thoughts, being in our mind. And

what you described as one tool to do that, right? Recognizing, just being aware of the fact, for example, that, hey, when I'm in my head, the thoughts that are running through my head, they're going to come and go. They're not me. Those are some mindfulness techniques that I think are very, very powerful. But what we've learned is that there's a whole toolbox of skills that people can use to manage that time they spend in their head. And different tools work for different people in different situations. And so part of what we've been doing in the lab is trying to identify the tools, like what are they? How do they work? And part of what I try to do in the book chatter is put all those tools in one place. So people can start thinking about how they work for them in their lives, because we tend to focus on just one tool. But but there's

no reason we need to limit ourselves in that way, when we know there are so many out there. So without butchering decades of your work, you know, and I want to pause and just encourage people to go check your book out. Okay. Because the essence of it is not going to come across in the time that we have together. Actually, the essence is, but the nuances and details are going to be best for this decade plus research. There are four years materially that you put into the book. So I'm sensitive that there's no hacks and shortcuts here.

But where you're advancing the field is by saying, here's some tools and here's the types of people or situations that can best use these tools. And then these people can use those tools, right? So a specificity is, I think, wanting in our field. And that's where I see you taking your research. And does that seem right? Yeah, absolutely. We're trying to, on the one hand, drill down rigorously using scientific methods to identify tools. And then at the other end, in conversations like this and through other kinds of outreach efforts, we're trying to communicate what we know about these tools and what we still don't know. We know a lot about the tools, but here's what we don't know, actually. We don't know

how different people, like what sets of tools work best for different people. Some people rely on some tools more than others. Let me even make this concrete. We're talking about tools. Let me go back to my threatening letter example. I'll tell you how I got out of that experience. So because I relied on a tool that we ended up then studying. So I'm pacing the house with my baseball bat. And it really, you know, when you experience chatter, when you get stuck in the dark side of introspection, what it does is it narrowly focuses you in on the threat so narrowly that you can't think of the big picture. So what did I do? I started having irrational thoughts. At one point, I sat down at my computer and I started typing bodyguards for academics. Now, this is not a thriving industry in the Midwest, right? As far as I know, and I didn't actually hit the search term because I recognized at that moment, I said to myself, Ethan, this is nuts. And then a light bulb went off, right? Because what I did there is I actually thought to myself using my own name, the kind of self-talk I engaged,

I didn't talk to myself in the first person. I talked to myself like I was talking to one of my best friends saying, what are you doing? This is crazy. And so one idea that I think can be powerful for listeners is the idea, we call it Solomon's paradox. It's the idea that we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are following that advice ourselves. I think this is a truism of the human experience. When I give talks to people, I often ask, has a friend ever come to you with a problem that they're spinning over?

They're ruminating, they're worrying, they're catastrophizing, they don't know what to do, and they present the problem to you, and it's relatively easy for you to coach them through that experience, and invariably a sea of hands go up in the auditoriums. What we've learned is that we possess tools that can help us think about our own problems and our own self like we were another person. And that gives us distance. It gives us mental space that can be really useful for improving the way we feel, performing better, and thinking better. And so the way I – yeah, go ahead. How do we do it? How does a person do that?

The way I did it in that instance is I talked to myself silently like I was someone else. I used my name. So we call this distant self-talk. It involves coaching yourself through a problem like you were coaching someone else and actually use your name to do it. Language itself is a really powerful tool for changing our perspective. Words can channel the way we think. And if you think about it, like when do you use names?

Nine times out of 10, you use names when you're thinking about and referring to another person. So if you use your name to think about yourself, it's almost like a psychological jujitsu move. It changes your perspective on your problems. It's getting you to think about your problems from a more objective standpoint, like they're happening to another person. And so that's one concrete tool you can use. You know, you're saying this and we laugh at the artist or the athlete because executives don't do this.

But, you know, the athlete that goes, I won't use the person's name I'm thinking about. I'll just use my name. Well, Mike is going to actually do something really special in this upcoming game. You know, it's like, what? What did you just do? Well, they're actually creating some distance so they can see it objectively. And so they're not so caught in the first person of it, right? And it's a way to, we see it as a narcissistic thing, but it's actually that distancing allows

them to see it from a more holistic global perspective where they're watching. When they're saying that, and this is when I talk to folks, they're actually seeing the crowd. So they're at the podium talking about something they're going to do in tonight's game. But when they're saying this thing, Mike's going to do something special. They're seeing the crowd. They're seeing the floor. They're seeing their competitors. They're seeing themselves do something that they want to do that they've worked out in practice or in their imagination. And they're like, yeah, Mike's going

to do that now watch. And so it's different than being like in a first person driver video game, where you just have to see the things unfold as they're happening, as opposed to zooming out. And I want to share, I want to share a funny story with you. When I surf, that's what I grew up doing. And when I'm doing it, you know, this, one of the kind of the arts of surfing is knowing how to open your shoulders to do the thing you want to do. But to do that, you have to be almost off balance. It's the envelope, you know, between power and speed that you're working on. And it's a technical thing. And when I don't do it and I fall or whatever happens instantly. Come on, Mike, I can open your arms

up, dude. Like what are you, and I'm paddling back out. And so I've been using your technique for a long time and it's a good one, but it's a little crazy making when you say it to other people. And so, yeah, so this is what I find so fascinating about it. So first of all, let's, let's just be very clear. I don't advocate doing this out loud in front of your employees or reporters. We've studied this a lot in the lab. We've gone deep into this technique. We've done brain imaging studies. We've done performance studies. We've done cognitive studies. Do tell, do tell. Get into the nerves. Well, so I'll tell you about it. But the one caveat is we always have people do this silently, right?

So don't do it out loud. Do it in your mind. Is that because socially it's weird? That's exactly right. We don't talk to ourselves. That is a powerful violator of social norms. So what do we think when someone does that? We think either, to use the technical term, there's a screw missing, or we think they don't give a crap

about what other people think. So maybe they're so narcissistic that they do this. In fact, there are so many examples of people who I would challenge you to think of as narcissists who do this. One example is Malama Yousafzai, the youngest girl to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. This was someone, a girl who was shot in the face in an attempted assassination by the Taliban. She was an advocate for women's rights. And so they tried to assassinate her. A couple of years later, she won the Nobel Prize. She went on the Jon Stewart show and he asked her, what went through your head when you found out that the Taliban was planning to assassinate you?

And she said, you know, I used to think to myself, well, if the Tali comes, what would you do Malawa? And then I used to say, well, Malawa, just take a shoe and hit him. So she, she's doing this. She's coaching herself. Julius Caesar wrote a, wrote a book in the third person. Henry Adams, a distinguished statesman did this. Examples abound. And I think what it, what it speaks to is that we, we human beings, we can sniff out, we have some sense of the tools that are helpful. And we sometimes just stumble on them and use them in our life, like you just described when you're on the ocean surfing. But what we've done in the lab then is then subjected these tools to tests. And so in one study, for example, we tell people, we try to model a really stressful performance task. And the way we could do that in a lab is

we bring people in for a study and we tell them, we want you to give a speech on a topic that you haven't prepared for in front of a panel of evaluators. And so that's a really stressful task. One of the most potent stressors, actually, performance, public performance. And we have half the people prepare for giving that speech. Try to work yourself through the anxiety you're experiencing right now in the first person. I mean, my, what am I feeling? And the other condition we tell people, use your name. So try to think, try to work, Ethan, try to work through the feelings that you're having.

What is Ethan feeling? We find that people who use their name, this distance self-talk, they actually perform better on the task. We tape them. We have judges evaluate them and they're evaluated as doing better. They report being less anxious. They ruminate less. In other studies, we put people in an fMRI machine, a brain scanner. We see that neural circuits that are involved in rumination are less activated when you're thinking about Ethan's problems rather than my problems. So again, it's that distance that's turning the volume down on the chatter. And when we turn the volume down, that can help us perform and feel better in significant ways. Okay. I got so much I want to say,

but I want to start with something uber practical. If somebody has OCD, okay. Clinical check the box, obsessive thoughts, not compulsions. Okay. But obsessive thoughts, and they can't get out of the loop and they know that it is a ridiculous loop that they're in, but it is problematic for their life, you know, the zest for life and, and, and vibrance. What is a, um, what is an innovation that you would suggest for that person and apply to innovation based on your research and in your lab that you would say, have them do this? Well, so, you know, um, OCD is, is not something that we've, we've looked at yet. I know. I'm asking you to stretch. Yeah. You want me to go there. But, you know, one of the things, so look, do I think it's

potentially useful? Like, might it work? Maybe. There's nothing that I've learned in doing this research, which would suggest that what I'm describing would be harmful. But because my bread and butter is science and the scientific method, before I could give the actual prescription recommendation, I'd want to see the study. I appreciate you. Ah, damn it. Damn it. Okay, so let me be a little fringe here for a moment. Okay, so you stay the lane.

Let me be fringe on this. Is that if somebody had some obsessive thoughts, so they're over-ruminating, they've got lots of chatter, they have the introspection to know that this chatter is not useful or helpful or even healthy. And then if they could say, wait a minute, let's use my name, Mike, it's just the thought as opposed to, hold on, I'm just thinking thoughts. These thoughts don't matter. If I say, Mike, this is just a thought, you've looked at it, examined it. Mike, do you want to, is this thought useful right now? Mike, this is not useful. Like I'm over-exaggerating, but would you say that that could be an interesting intervention to play with? Yeah. I think that would be tough. And you know, when you say obsessive thoughts, that's to me, that's different from OCD. I think a lot of us experience these,

like these thought loops that keep coming back that we can't break out of. Like that happens. It's incredibly common. We don't always experience it, but most people have had that moment at some point in their life. And I think those are circumstances where you could play with that technique. But here's the thing, like that's just one tool of maybe 20 or so tools that can likewise be brought to bear on this problem. So, you know, when I experience a thought loop on occasion, we all do, right? Like I'll use that technique that I just described, distant self-talk. I'll also use other ones too. I love the aspirational part of all tools and also the dark side. So can you chin check me on this? Is that I think men use this more than women and I'm cautious with any broad stroke that we're

going to make. But when I'm having an intimate conversation with somebody, and we're talking about emotions, and those emotions are difficult, here's the response I get that is saving them from going to the depths and feeling the emotion. They'll say, well, you know, when you feel so sad that you don't want to get out of bed and i go oh there's a moment here for me this is me as a yeah clinician there's a moment for me yeah keep them at distance or have them own it and it's a call and the way that you have them own is like well what do you feel where do you feel it? Who's the you? You know, like have them go inside and actually experience it. If it feels like it can take them to a place to unlock. So do you notice

that as well? Oh, yeah. You know, you teed up something else that we've looked at. So we've looked at a lot of these different, we call them linguistic shifts that can give people distance, help them cope with troubling experiences. And you just talked about another one. So the first one was like distance self-talk. So use your name to work through a problem. Something else that people often do when they're struggling, when they're trying to make meaning is they, they do something,

they use the universal you. Let me tell you how it works because it's, it's once I tell it, I think it'll come to life. So I'll give you an anecdote here. So Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook exec, when she, when her husband tragically died on vacation, she went into mourning and about a month after she finished grieving, I think it was a month, she wrote a response to her friends on Facebook, a blog post. And at one point in the blog post, she said something like, grieving is hard for anyone.

When you lose someone you love, you don't know what to do. So she's doing something really interesting there. She's talking about her own incredibly personal, idiosyncratic experience, right? It's her husband who died. But she's not saying when my husband died, I didn't know what to do. She's saying when your husband died. She's using the word you, a word we almost exclusively use to talk about other people. Like you is like verbally pointing my finger at you. She's using that word you to refer to the world. She's essentially saying when anyone loses

someone they love, anyone's heart is bleeding. So what we've learned is that this can be a very powerful tool for helping people make sense of the world and difficult negative problems, right? Because what it does is it does two things. It pushes the experience away from us just a little bit. We're still owning it. When, when your partner dies, there's no, it's hard not to own that experience. It's still very painful, but by making it about the world, it's not, it's not just me, right? It's anyone would respond this way. And so that normalizes our reactions. It says that we're not some odd person here, right? This is anyone will respond this way. And we find comfort in that. So we get distance and comfort. And that can be very effective for helping people work through negative experiences. I would

challenge you to go listen to a post-game interview with an athlete where they're talking about a loss or a really bad outing on the field and see them not do this. You see this happen time and time again in interviews. It's something that people reflexively do to make sense of their experiences. That's interesting. It can also be harnessed, right, because we know now what it does. So you can willfully talk about your feelings in these ways, which can help you. I always thought that this was actually a decelerant to growth, not an accelerant,

because it pulls them away from the truth of their experience and sharing their experience as part of the arc to get to the next iteration of how they want to do it again. But I totally see how you're seeing this, which is like, no, sometimes we just need a little space. And this is an eloquent way to do it. Well, and, you know, the view you're describing is a common one, but it's one that I actually, I disagree with in part, right? When we're talking about the kinds of negative experiences, high stakes negative experiences that you've made a career working with clients in that territory, and I study, what I find to be really helpful is turning down the temperature just a little bit. When we turn the temperature down a little bit, when we talk about Ethan's experience,

not my experiences or the generic you, we're not losing touch with our feelings. We're not turning emotions off. We're not making people cold robots, which can be problematic. We're just decreasing the volume a little bit. We're turning down the temperature. And I think that is actually a good thing. I don't think we have to fully flood ourselves with the emotion to get better. Now, there are techniques, specific techniques like exposure therapy that can be very useful in certain contexts. But as a general principle across the board, I don't think we, I don't think the science suggests that we need to totally bathe ourselves in the emotion fully.

We can experience them a little bit less intensely. And I think that can have real benefits. You know, what's fun about this conversation is I'm doing everything I can to not step on the middle of your sentence because you're saying things I'm going oh wait and and and oh oh oh and so I'm using every restraint I have to wait for the eloquent pause at the end because there's so much I want to respond to that I love what you're saying you're doing you're doing you're doing great unlike me who just cut you off right that's that's a New York thing West Coast is much better but you're controlled yeah brooklyn so so the thing that i'm going to take away from this unique part or this thread of the conversation is

i'm actually going to encourage the you at press conference and i think that it's going to do a couple things it's going to um downgrade the narcissism if somebody's talking about me me me i i i you know and it's going to down a couple of things. It's going to downgrade the narcissism. If somebody's talking about me, me, me, I, I, I, you know, and it a study where we show it also, it creates a connection between people and ideas. Because when I'm talking about something with the universal you, right, you're part of that. The people I'm talking to are part of that. And so you're naturally more connected and interested in what I have to say as a result. So there's also that interpersonal element advantage to communicating information about

yourself in that way. And then I'm going to double click to say when we get into a small room and we're doing the intimate work for growth, then we start to use the I word. But when we're using I publicly, it becomes like, oh, it's all about the person. It's all about the I, I, I, me, me, me. And so, yeah, I'm going to, that's a nice little bifurcated toggle that I'm going to play with. So thank you for that. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Some other tools. And I want to honor your time because. Yeah. Let me give you a framework for how I think about it and i'll give you one more um so i think there are tools that we ways that we can harness the chatter doing things

on our own in our own head that's one bucket and another bucket are other people other people in our life can be incredible tools to help us manage chatter but. But, and this is a really big but, they can also be a vulnerability. The conversations we have with others can turn our chatter down or up, depending on how we talk to them, what kinds of questions they ask, and how we respond. And so I talk a little bit about like, how do you give good chatter support? How are you a good chatter advisor, so to speak? How are you a good coach for others in the book? And sometimes there's some counterintuitive things that happen there because sometimes we just want to show that we care and love the person.

And that's good, but on its own, not sufficient. You can take it further. That's the second bucket. The third bucket are ways of interacting with our physical spaces, our environment around us. And there are ways of managing the chatter inside us from the outside in. And so let me give you one example. That's one of my favorites. guessing many of your listeners are familiar with. He wrote a book, a biography, an autobiography a couple of years ago, and I was really struck by it. I'm a huge sports fan, so I eat this stuff up. He wrote, let me back up. I think of Nadal as one of the greatest tennis players of all time. I think of this as a guy who is not only a student of the game, watching film all the time, but he's in the weight room. He's doing 100 serves

and backhands nonstop, homing his body for these matches. And so what he says in the book is the hardest thing I do on the court is not the physical exertion. The hardest thing I do is try to manage the voices inside my head. So his biggest task is managing the chatter. And what does he do to do it? What's his solution that he stumbled on in the same way that you stumbled on when you're on the waves coaching yourself with your name? He relies on rituals. In particular, he orders his environment, often to the amusement and bewilderment of lots of viewers. But he has these rituals, these routines. When he comes out, he always walks to the bench in a certain way, takes off his jacket and puts his

gear down in a very precise sequence. Multiple water bottles, perfectly aligned, sips from one a few times, then another, then places them back. And if you've watched the game, you've seen him do this throughout the game. What he is essentially doing, he's ordering his environment to provide the order he seeks in his head. And there are studies which show that by ordering our spaces, right, by making them tidy and neat, that gives us a sense of order and organization, which we're often lacking when the chatter is brewing inside. And it helps. And so I'm not a particularly orderly person. I'm free. There are usually papers all over the place, stacks of books in my office. And yet when I was writing my book, I found myself doing something very odd. And I did it reflexively. I'd walk to the kitchen and I'd make sure to clean all the dishes, towel them down, neatly put them away and then scrub down the island.

And my wife was like, what is going on here? Although she didn't press too much because she was happy with the outcome. But this was how I was stumbling on that too. And so this is an example of just one other tool that I think people can be really deliberate about, which is when you're struggling, organize your spaces, try to put things in order. That serves a compensatory function. And so that's just one other way of using the world around us, our physical spaces to help us. There are other things people can do too. Green space exposure, seeking out awe-inspiring experiences. These are all different tools that science has revealed that can be very helpful for managing what's happening inside our heads.

Ah, yeah. Okay. Hold on. I want to share a funny story. I did the same thing writing my book. So I thought I was actually doing something to create more tension, to finally have to create a forcing function to get it out. So I would straighten up my office. I would clean my bedroom. I would, wherever I was, I would organize and clean. I'd even dust and i knew that i had to get like seven pages out today on a particular topic to meet a goal that i set for myself and you know sometimes writing one page is really hard so sometimes one sentence is hard it's really yeah so um so i've got this goal that i want to meet and and here i am dusting. What am I doing? So what I thought was happening is that I was thinking and musing and whatever, and then distracting myself of getting the last kernel of dust, but also creating the space to no pressure yet, no pressure yet, just musing.

And then when I sat down, it was going to flood out because I had to do it under the gun. And what I hear you saying is actually what you're doing is creating an organization in your external world to organize your internal world when it came time to actually produce. That's exactly right. Yeah, cool. And to me, like, look, I'm a scientist. I've been doing this for 20 years and when i was researching for this for the book to me what you just described which is what we've learned this is a mind blower to me that interacting in with our environments in specific ways on the outside world are having these organizational effects on our minds like i just I just find that fascinating. And even more so that

we stumble, we often stumble on this, like you and I both know each other, we're both doing the same thing, we're struggling, what do we do, we naturally gravitate to things that at least for me, are the last thing I ever want to do is organize and clean and dust, you know, I mean, that's not my MO. And yet here, something subconsciously is telling me to do it. And so, you know, where the science I think is so useful is then you have people who have, who have observed these behaviors and like, all right, well, let's see, what are they actually doing? And lo and behold, they can have these, these chatter reducing effects. And there are other, other kinds of tools like that. Okay, Ethan, I could go on and on and on with you about these tools and the practices. I want to

encourage people to pick up your book and maybe pick one of the things that we've talked about today to practice, to begin to practice. And I'm fascinated by the middle column that you have, which is how to help other people in your environment be better at their chatter. And so maybe we pick up a round two at some point to go deep into that because relationships are so important. No, they're critical. Yeah, I'd love to pull on that thread a little bit with you. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you for the blood, sweat, and tears of doing the work that

is informing good science best practices for people that want to work with their inner dialogue. And I just want to say thank you. And I mean, who am I to thank you? But I found incredible value in what you're doing. So I want to say thank you from me. Well, thank you. I mean, I really think it's a yin and a yang. I think it's, you know, we could do the science. And if we don't communicate it and leverage it and get it out there, we're doing it for no one. And so thank you.

And as usual, this was incredibly fun. So I hope we get to do it again. Yeah, let's do something in the future. Let's figure it out. Definitely. Okay. All the best to you. And where can people find you? What are the websites,

the social media? What's all the good stuff? Yeah. www.ethancross.com. That'll have links to all the social media, the book, my lab, more information than people might actually want, but it's all there. And it's K-R-O-S-S. Cross with a K. That's right. With a K. Yeah. And awesome. Okay.

I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Michael. Take care. Oh, you know what? You know what? Hold on. Let's thank Angela, Dr. Duckworth for putting us together. Yeah.

Angela Duckworth. This was a match. Thank you, Ang. Yeah. Appreciate you. Okay. All the best to you, brother. All right.

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