Good Life Project - Ethan Kross | Chatter: Harnessing Our Inner Dialogue

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

If you’re like most people, there’s a certain amount of chatter that goes on in your head throughout the day. But, did you know that inner dialogue can have a profound effect on nearly every aspect of your life? Today’s guest, Ethan Kross, is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships.Earning his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University, Ethan completed a post-doctoral 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. Ethan’s research has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has participated in policy discussions at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, The Economist, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Time. And, he’s the author of the National Bestseller Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters and How to Harness It (https://amzn.to/3wngqGH).You can find Ethan at:Website : https://www.ethankross.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/ethankross/If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Adam Grant about the value of not getting too dug in on your thinking : https://tinyurl.com/GLP-AdamGrant-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So if you're like most people, there's a certain amount of chatter that goes on in your head throughout the day. But did you know that that inner dialogue can have a profound effect on nearly every aspect of your life? Today's guest, Ethan Cross, is one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor and best-selling author in the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, their performance, their decisions, and relationships. Earning his PhD in psychology from Columbia University, Ethan completed his postdoctoral fellowship in social effective neuroscience, which I asked him about. I'm kind of fascinated by that. To learn about

the neural systems that support self-control. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2008, where he founded the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. And Ethan's research has been published in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, among other peer-reviewed journals. He's participated in policy discussion at the White House, has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper, Full Circle, NPR's Morning Edition, and his pioneering research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, and so many other places. And he is the author of the national bestseller,

Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. I knew you were going to be fun. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So I kind of want to start off in a bit of a direction. I want to go deep into the world of inner voice and chatter and how that works with

and against us sometimes. But you run a lab built around emotion and self-control, which I'm fascinated by. And you have a background in psychology and neuroscience and sort of the way those two things interplay. So I have to ask you about something else because I have this opportunity to ask you about it. And it may take us down an entire different, you know, like dark, dark place, ego depletion. Baumeister and Tice, was it 1990 or so? And they finally, you know, they come out with the original work. It's replicated thousands of times, this whole idea that, you know, we have a limited supply of willpower and that, you know, it can get depleted. And it's sort of the law of the land

for a couple of decades. And then a couple of years ago, people start saying, maybe that's actually not true. You know. Maybe this thing called willpower self-regulation, it's not necessarily this depletable resource. And the research is really kind of more all over the place. I'm curious what your thoughts are on it. Well, so I don't think it's nearly that cut and dry. I don't think we've been able to pinpoint a particular resource that exists that goes down over time. Instead, what we do know, and I think a lot of this actually comes from the cognitive neuroscience literature more so than even social psych, is that we do have a limited

amount of attention, of executive resources, lots of different phrases to refer to ostensibly similar processes that involve carefully attending to refer to ostensibly similar processes that involve carefully attending to something to bring a goal to light. So there's a lot of evidence that we possess the ability to directly attend to something, to focus intently is a limited resource that can wane the more we use it. But we also know that there's flexibility. There's a lot of latitude around how we use that resource. So for example, it's, yeah, I can get more tired after focusing really hard on a difficult problem and maybe less inclined to exert self-control, but I can also easily reframe how I'm thinking about the experience in that moment that I'm fatigued and then exert control effectively. And that's been

shown empirically in many studies. Greg Walton, Carol Dweck, and Veronica Jobe have some great papers on this topic. And so is there something to the idea that when we do something effortful that can be depleting? Yeah, I think there is something to that idea. But is self-control this based on this one resource that goes down all the time? No, I think that's not the case. And the sidebar on the depletion phenomenon too is a lot of the discussion around that has had to do with the methods that have been used to test that idea over time. And I don't think we need to go down that path. But in the cognitive literature, there is a lot of work showing that our executive functions, they're effortful to use those functions. And so the more we use them, the more difficulty we have continuing to do so. But we

still can motivate ourselves to engage. And that's, I think, the critical piece that was lost in much of this discussion surrounding depletion. The idea that even if you are feeling tired as the day goes on and you've exerted yourself throughout the day, that's not deterministic in the sense that no, that means you can't control yourself at night. No way. Like you can, you can certainly muster the resources if you are motivated to do so. So that's my take on that phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting also, because when I saw a lot of the pushback come out,

which I guess is probably four or five years ago now, and sort of like all the dust started to get shaken up again, a lot of the talk was about the methodologies that you were speaking about, but also this notion that it was potentially a lot more dependent on whether you believed it was depletable or not. So literally, if you believe that it was this renewable resource and you could essentially just tap back into it, you were good. But if you didn't believe that, then you weren't. And I was fascinated whether I actually was reading that right. Yeah. And that's actually the work that I referred to earlier by Dweck and Walton and Jobes. It's a beautiful work. I love those papers. And it's a good segue into talking about what self-control is, at least in my eyes. Because if you take my definition at face value,

then I think those findings make a great deal of sense. So I think of self-control as having two pieces. First of all, what self-control is, or it's our ability to align our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with our goals. So we've got goals and how do we bring those goals to light? And it has two, there are two key pieces, motivation and ability, right? So motivation, you need to be motivated to exert some control, right? If you're not motivated, you can have all the tools in the world. You can know every technique that right? If you're not motivated, you can have all the tools in the world. You can know every technique that exists. If you're not motivated to use those tools for a reason, you're not going to use them, right? On the flip side, if you're highly motivated to do something, but you don't know what the tools are to help you do that, then you're not going to

succeed. I can be intensely motivated to write a computer program this afternoon. I don't know a damn thing about how to write a computer program. I don't have the skills. So you need both of those pieces in order to be effective at self-control. And so when you go back to some of that work that you just mentioned on your mindset, well, if you are reframing how you're thinking about this, hey, self-control is limitless. I can do it as much as I want, right? That changes your whole motivational orientation, how you approach the situation. I mean, I can do this if I want to, right? But if you at the outset say, this is pointless, there's no way I can do this. You're not going to be motivated to do so. So I think those findings fit really well with this normative definition of self-control that really guides a lot of the work that I do. Yeah, I love that. It makes a lot of sense to me.

It's interesting you brought up the relationship between motivation and ability also, because it feels like it also ties in with BJ Fogg's behavioral model, which is sort of like any behavior change is about some blend of motivation, ability, and some kind of trigger. What's fascinating about his work to me is that he really says that one of the biggest problems in his mind is that we tend to look at those two things and we think, well, the thing we should really be focusing on is motivation. Let's flip the switch in the mind that makes you believe this is possible and give you reasons to want to actually do it. And his lens I know is that it's the wrong thing to focus on, that it's

the much harder needle to move. And that, you know, he breaks it into these three windows, spot span, and then sort of like long-term, it's easy to motivate somebody to do somebody for a heartbeat. It's harder to motivate them to keep it going for a span of time. And it's nearly impossible if it's something they don't really want to do to tell them, make this change for life. But if you make changes to environment, to skill, to circumstance, to their ability to do it, his lens is, that's the thing that is the much bigger lever mover. I'm curious how that lands with you. Well, I think this goes back to the idea of these tiny habits and making these small changes and how those can snowball. And I think there's a lot to that idea. And I think his model generally, motivation, ability, and situational triggers also scaffolds really nicely onto what we know about

how self-control works based on the science. So, you know, in general, I think his perspective resonates really well with me. When someone comes to me with a self-control problem, I do think that sometimes it is about, it is a motivational issue. And if that's the case, then we try to work on motivation. I think there are ways of enhancing people's motivation to do things. For example, I coach my daughter's soccer team and she had to play goalie. She didn't want to. And, you know, like there are ways of motivating her. She, you know, initially she was on the side.

All right, Maya, every goal that's scored, you're going to lose your iPad for a week. This really motivated her. Now, I'm joking. She knew I was joking, but there are things we got, to be clear, that was a joke. But there are ways that we know you can push around people's motivations with rewards and punishments. Rewards tend to be a lot more effective. A lot of how we develop habits has to do with rewarding certain behaviors over and over to motivate further change. So I think there are ways of intervening for motivation, but sometimes people are really motivated and just don't have the tools. They don't have the skills. I think this is actually in my world when it comes to chatter in the inner voice, this is more often the situation, right?

Most of the people that I talk to, they're highly motivated to not experience chatter, worry, rumination, catastrophizing. It's an aversive state and they don't want to be in that state of mind. And so the problem there is though, they don't always know what tools to use to help them modulate the chatter. And so that's where a lot of the interventions focus. But then there are other people who need some help with both motivation and tools. So I think just understanding

that self-control has these different pieces can be really effective as a first step for trying to break down this problem of self-control or lack of, which is a huge problem in society, right? We have a lot of problems controlling our feelings, controlling our thoughts, controlling our behavior. So once we can break it down into these little buckets, it then becomes more tractable how to engage with this problem. Yeah, I love that frame. I think it's also useful, you know, to kind of zoom out and say, okay, well, it's not

super helpful to say that there's this one model and everybody has the same challenge or struggle or invitation within it. Sort of like, no, you know, these are the things that, that matter. These are the factors that we want to look at. And you take each person as they come. That's right. That's right. And, you know, there are clearly like the science that, that we bring to bear that I know BJ talks about, that I talk about and lots of others in this space, we know that these tools on average, you know, are more effective than other tools that we compare them against in our experiments. But there's always huge variability within any given experiment about how effective a

given tool is. Some people find it more effective than others. And I think that's a nuance that really speaks to the complexity of the human condition that we really want to honor and not dismiss, namely the idea that some people, given their unique situations, may benefit more from using certain combinations of tools than others. Like my wife and I, by virtue of the fact that we live together and we experience much of our lives together, we often encounter very similar kinds of stress triggers or chatter triggers, but we rely on different tools to manage those triggers. Like in the Venn, there's a Venn

diagram of overlapping circles that, you know, my toolbox and hers, and there's a little bit of overlap, but also some differences too. And recognizing that there's nothing wrong with that, that we evolve the capacity to regulate ourselves, to control ourselves through lots of different means, I think that opens up lots of possibilities for how to help ourselves and help others that don't exist if you're trying to pin everything on one or two magical interventions. And I think a lot of the zeitgeist right now and historically has been, let's identify one specific thing that people can do to control themselves. Exercise, meditate, eat well, do headstands before dinner. I'm making stuff up now, but we tend to look for one single magic pill, one tool that's easy to use. And that's just not

the way we work. At least that's my understanding based on the research that I've been doing for the past 20 years, right? It's not just one tool we use, it's many. And I think the more we can adopt that perspective, the better off we'll be. Yeah, completely agree with you there. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. You brought up this word shatter, which is the focus of your recent work. I want to dive into that, but I think we need to, let's go upstream a little bit and talk about sort of like the broader term inner voice. There's this notion that there's the voice that we speak out loud,

that we share with other people, that we use to interact with other human beings. It's the interpersonal. But then there's this notion that within us is this other voice. It's the intrapersonal, the voice where we're literally speaking to our capital S or little s self. Somehow there's a voice in our head that is talking to only us, that only we can hear. I guess one of my first questions is, and I guess this led to a little bit of like a fun time on social media was, you know, I think a lot of us, if you have that voice, you just assume it's there for everybody, but, but is it? Yeah. Yes. I'm just kidding. I'll elaborate on my answer. Yeah. There, there are a couple of, um, there've been some explosions

on social media over the last couple of years where people say, I don't have an inner voice. I don't ever talk to myself. I think part of that has to do with how people define and think about their inner voice. And so the first thing I like to do when I talk about this topic is really break down how scientists like myself think about the inner voice. What is it? And at its most basic sense, what the inner voice involves is using language silently in your head. So silently saying a word or a set of words or sentences. And we use this inner voice. It serves many different functions. It's not just one thing. And I think this is where some of the confusion lies with respect to whether we all have an inner

voice. If you have the capacity to speak out loud, then I would argue you have the capacity to speak to yourself too and have an inner voice. So all well-functioning human minds have an inner voice. And as evidence of that, I'll go over one of the most basic functions it provides, which is our inner voice is part of our verbal working memory system. This is a system of the mind that all well-functioning minds possess. And what it involves is being able to rehearse a nugget of verbal information in your head. So if you go to the grocery store and you ask yourself, all right, what do I have to get? Cheese, cheese sticks, milk, barbecue sauce, you know, repeat whatever your favorite items are. You've

just used your inner voice. If you're walking down the street and go over in your head, you repeat in your head what's on your to-do list, you've used your inner voice. Our verbal working memory system, vital to our ability to navigate this world, when people's working memory systems stop working well for various reasons, big problems ensue. So that's fundamental to who we are as human beings people's working memory systems stop working well for various reasons, big problems ensue. So that's fundamental to who we are as human beings, that working memory system. And your inner voice plays a key component in that system. And I think everyone, again, who has the capacity to use language has that capability and uses their inner voice in that way.

Now, that's not the only way in which we use our inner voice. We also use it to do other things. So I use it a lot when I'm preparing for things like presentations. I'll often go for a walk and rehearse the talking points about what I'm going to say in my head. I'll simulate the presentations I'm going to give. I'll hear other people comment on my presentation, and then I'll simulate how I'm going to respond. That's my inner voice. We use our inner voice to control ourselves, right? So sometimes you go to the fridge late at night, I'm projecting here, and I say to myself, all right, Ethan, don't do it. Don't take the cake. You'll regret it in the morning. That's my inner voice too. And finally, we often use our inner voice to make stories out of our experiences in ways that they're really

impact how we make sense of who we are. So when we experience adversity, rejections, losses, betrayals, anger, fill it, you know, fill in your favorite at aversive experience, many people turn their attention and we're tough to make sense of what just, what just happened. How can I make sense of the fact that I was just rejected after working so hard on this presentation, right? That's jarring when we experience those kinds of experiences in life. And when they happen, we usually just stop in our tracks

and have to make sense of them so we could continue living on autopilot more or less. And we use our inner voice to create those stories that explain our experiences. So I think there's a lot more variability in the degree to which people are constantly trying to storify their life. There's variability in how often people are using their inner voice to control themselves. And that's probably where some of this response comes up on social media. I don't have an inner voice. I think. And that's probably where some of this response comes up on social media. I don't have an inner voice. I think those people are saying,

I don't go over my life with this constant running inner monologue. But that doesn't mean that they can't repeat the to-do list in their head. That doesn't mean that they can't remind themselves when they're on the grocery list what they need. So the inner voice is not one thing. It's a Swiss army knife of the mind that lets us do many different things. Yeah. I wonder if some of the pushback was also around some sort of intrinsic negative bias against being the type of person who says, I'm constantly talking to myself in my head, because that's got to be like, I'm quote babbling and I'm not a babbler. Like that's not who I am. I am curious, you know, if using our inner voice serves these purposes,

you know, like we're doing this because it's getting us to a place where there's sense-making, memorization, whatever, you know, attentiveness. We do other things. Like we use a written voice to accomplish the same thing and we use a spoken voice to accomplish all of those same things. Are you aware of a difference in efficacy between those three modes?

Like if I'm trying to make sense of a situation and I'm talking it through in my head versus talking it out loud versus writing it through, maybe I'm journaling about it. Is there a difference in how we land in the place we seek to land based on our choice of those different modalities of processing? Yes. There's actually a study that actually compared those three modalities exactly to see which were more effective for helping people deal with adversity. And both writing and talking, I believe talking was in the study, definitely writing, were more effective than thinking. What happened when people were thinking about a negative event and trying to make a story out of it is it naturally led them to ruminate about the event, to get stuck in a thought loop of the sort that I call chatter. But when they wrote about it or talked about it, those modalities

steered people towards more of this meaning-making mode where they were actually able to create a story. And part of the reason why I think that happens, I say I think because this hasn't been shown empirically, is when you're writing that naturally, like we write typically in full sentences, right? And there's a beginning of a story, a middle and an end. And when we talk to other people too, in order to be coherent, right? We don't just pinball all over the place. Shit. Oh my God, what's going to happen? Embarrassed, terrible, which is often how we think. We often think in these small bursts of activity, inner speech can often come in a very condensed form, almost like the verbal equivalent of taking notes in shorthand. And when you're talking to other people, you can't talk like that or even

talking out loud because you wouldn't make any sense. Same thing with writing. And so talking out loud and writing helps us actually craft meaningful stories in ways that thinking doesn't always allow us to do. So I think first thing in the morning, they bang out three pages of, but the instructions are very specific, which is do not try and make this coherent. Literally just open your mind, pick up a pen or a pencil and go and assume that nobody on the planet will ever see this other than you. And it's even not even for you to go back to and judge and try and refine. This is just process and get it out. It's an exorcism more than anything else. Well, but I think the sheer act of writing puts a structure, like there's a structure that you're adhering to. Like you're writing, I'm going to guess most people in this country who are writing in English are still writing from left to right, you know, more or less on a straight line.

They're not writing up and down, right? They're using like subject, verb, now, like there's a basic structure to it that writing naturally imposes on how we organize our thoughts. Like think about how much experience we have writing, right? When we teach kids to write at a very young age, we teach them how to write coherently. And that's typically the way you do it. Even when you're texting and using these emoticons that drive me crazy nowadays, because I'm not very skilled with them, you're still, there's a coherence. It's communicable to someone else. And so I think the moment you put someone

into that framework, you're essentially queuing up the template for talking about something or writing about it in a coherent manner. You know, actually a lot of work, there's been a lot of work on expressive writing over the years that has been shown to be useful for helping people deal with adversity.

And actually the instructions there are very similar to what you just described. Really let yourself go, write about your deepest thoughts and feelings. Don't pay attention to grammar and spelling, just get it out. And what you find happening, first of all, we've done some of these studies in my lab, people are writing coherent essays, right? You also find that over time, they tend to shift in coherence. They improve, right, in terms of their narrative quality. So you're getting even more, you're making more connections and showing more evidence of insight as you move along. But even at the beginning, they're still interpretable. And we've done other studies where we get these thought records of what's streaming

through people's heads when they're in different states, when they're in a chatter-filled state as one example versus a more adaptive, reflective state in another. When people are overcome with chatter, their thoughts are often really hard to make sense of. One subject I remember writing something to the effect of when we asked them, we asked them to recall and work through an experience that made them feel really upset, a time when they were really overwhelmed with anger and hostility. And their essay read like, angry, upset, victimized, shamed, stepped on, shitted on, humiliated, abandoned, pushed,

worst experience ever. It was just this kind of machine gun firing of negative emotion. You know, there was no attempt to storify it or make meaning out of it. And then you look in the more deliberate reflective conditions and their people are, well, I was rejected by someone I really cared about, but I probably did deserve it because I did do something bad. And in the grand scheme of things, there'll be other situations. So that was much more story-like. So long-winded way of saying, I think writing in part is useful because it helps us create those coherent stories, which lots of research show are essential for helping us live good lives that are not lives filled with chatter. Yeah, that lands is absolutely true with me.

I remember hearing the author Nailed Game and actually writes all of his novels longhand with a fountain pen. And one of the reasons he does it is because he knows he can't stop writing for more than a couple of seconds because the ink gets a little bit sticky on the tip so it forces him to you know his creative output is different when he's writing longhand versus typing on a computer but also it forces him into a cadence that he's kind of not in control of and he knows he just has to keep going because there's a there's a literal physical constraint on his ability to slow down which changes the nature of what comes out, which I think is kind of fascinating. I love that.

I mean, it is fascinating. And I don't know that research that speaks to this. I'm just riffing here. But it certainly slows you down, making you more reflective. I find that sometimes, depending on where I am in the writing process, being able to go fast versus slow has different benefits. So sometimes, like when I first get a thought, I'll sometimes just grab my tape recorder and just record it because I just need to get it out before I forget it. And my mind, sadly, is like a sieve nowadays after two kids and lots of other stuff.

And so I'll lose it. So I'll just like frantically grab like recorded or scribble down some notes just so I could come back and elaborate on it. But at other times, going slow in writing things down can be very, very helpful. So I suspect in part, and this would be really useful for writers in any industry, if you knew when it's useful for you to get things down quick versus when it's useful to go slow, you could then use the technology that helps facilitate that. That might be, you know, helpful for productivity. Yeah, that would be really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned like the way that ideas come to you and you sort of like madly just try and get them somehow memorialized.

I'm the exact same way because they're gone three seconds later. Oh, yeah. I'm a longtime meditator. And very often, you know, like these theoretically amazing ideas drop into my orbit when I'm in the middle of meditation. And I remember years ago, a teacher of mine saying, if they're really worth pursuing, they'll come back after the meditation. Don't stop, don't write them down, don't memorialize them.

They'll come back. And the New Yorker in me is kind of like, really? Really? Because I've had a whole lot of ideas in the moment I thought were really, really good. And I have, and by the end of the meditation, they were gone and they have never come back. Yeah. You know, I think it depends on what you're prioritizing there, whether, whether it's

peace of mind through meditation or, or your next, you know, Pulitzer or, you know, I've been known to, to sometimes to, you know, my wife and, my wife and children's embarrassment, be walking around the neighborhood with a little notebook sometimes. I'll just stop in the middle of the street and just scribble down, what are you doing? I'm like, I can't lose the idea. Or even leave a voicemail to myself with the idea. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I have a lot of voice memos that have been recorded in the middle of the street in dangerous situations.

Yeah. Yeah. You brought up this word chatter a bunch of times now, which is different, or maybe it's a subset of the bigger notion of inner voice. What are we actually talking about when we're talking about chatter? So when we're talking about chatter, we're talking about the dark side, the dark manifestation of the inner voice. And I want to be clear that the inner voice, as I hope to have already explained, does a lot of good for us. You know, when people tell me, oh, just get rid of that inner voice, I want to silence it.

My initial response is you wouldn't want to do that. In fact, there are case studies in which that's happened. I talk about one of them in my book where a person experienced a stroke, lost her ability to use language temporarily, initially described the experience as euphoric because she no longer worried and ruminated. But shortly after that, found it completely disorienting because once her inner voice left her, so did her ability to make sense of her experience's life and who she was. And she couldn't, you know, her working memory system was gone. She couldn't do the most basic things like remember what to do in the grocery store and so forth and so on. So inner voice on the whole, really good for us, an important tool

that you wouldn't want to live without. But as many listeners will no doubt relate to, at times when we try to use this tool, it seems like it backfires on us. We experience adverse events, we go inside to try to make sense of them with language, and we end up ruminating about the past instead or worrying about the future or catastrophizing. The common thread that runs across those different states, rumination, worry, catastrophization, is that we're getting stuck in a negative thought loop. We have this goal.

We're trying to make sense of an experience, but we're not progressing. We're not succeeding. And that in turn has a really negative effect on our ability to think and perform. It can negatively influence our relationships and our health. And that is the phenomenon that I call chatter. I use that term chatter to capture getting stuck in a negative thought loop, sometimes about the past, sometimes about what's happening in the moment, sometimes it's about the future. But the common theme is we're

trying to make sense of something, but we're not progressing. And I think it is, without trying to exaggerate at all, one of the big problems we face as a species, I think the research documenting the negative effects of chatter in the domains that I just mentioned, thinking and performance, relationships and health, it's astounding how consequential chatter can be for those different domains of life, which just happened to be three domains of life that I think make life worth living for many of us. And so trying to understand how people can manage chatter is, I think, a really important question. And it's what I've been doing for the past 20 years. Yeah. And I want to dive into those three domains a bit. But before we get there, there's a sort of like a question that's floating in my head, which is, is chatter changing or is the rate of chatter changing?

You know, and I guess my curiosity is, you know, there's the rate of so much, the rate of information, the rate of exposure to all sorts of different things is accelerating dramatically and has been over the last decade or so. You know, we are bombarded with so much. We are constantly connected. So the throughput and the input has gone up exponentially. And I guess I'm wondering, and I don't even know if there's a way to measure it or if you've done the research on it, whether there is an understanding of whether the level, the volume, the frequency, the rate of acceleration of chatter is changing in a meaningful way or in a negative way? Well, I can partially answer that question. And so I can answer it with respect to the pandemic that we're now going through. And we know that chatter in the form of anxiety and depression, and we know that chatter factor is very prominently in those conditions, has increased exponentially over the course of the pandemic. 30-something

percent increases last I checked, which makes sense, right? Because abnormal situations call for abnormal responses. So we're definitely seeing elevation there. With respect to whether societal changes and changes in technology like the advent of social media have increased the frequency of chatter, that's a more difficult question to answer. What we know is that social media has certainly provided us with more opportunities to have our chatter triggered and to trigger it in others. But at the same time, it's also provided us with new opportunities to help other people with their chatter and to get help. So I've been studying social media's effects on well-being and how chatter factors into

this for over 10 years now, really since social media came into play. And there's been a real evolution in the way that both I and the field, I think I could say the field, think about it. Early on, there were many people who thought social media was de facto toxic. It just had consistent negative effects for your well-being, so just stay away. What we've learned is that that is not true. It really depends on how you use it, on who uses it, and so forth. What we know is that on the one hand, social media provides us with a giant megaphone for our inner voice. And I think that's just fascinating, right? Like if you log into Facebook, it says, what is on your mind? It's essentially prompting you to share your deepest

thoughts and feelings. I like to joke to people that like, one day we may have the technology to listen in to our inner voice. I mean, you know, 50, 100 years from now, I would hate to be a subject in that study. Like, I don't want anyone listening in on my inner voice, right? Like, you know, the stuff that comes up here, that's for me to know and no one else, unless I choose to share it with them. But, but this technology is really kind of encouraging us to share those inner thoughts and feelings. And on the one hand, I think what we're seeing is it can, doing that can lead to chatter in others, because one of the things that social media allows us to do is, is curate the way we present ourselves to others, right? Presenting these incredible Photoshop lives and really witty posts that can make other people at times feel

insecure about themselves, lead them to experience envy about how their lives are deficient by comparison. We also know that social media makes it easy to express our frustrations with others in ways that can manifest in the form of cyberbullying and trolling, which are really societal ills. I mean, the harmful effects that those behaviors are having on others is quite astounding. Engaging in those behaviors can have negative effects for the perpetrators as well in terms of our reputation. So that's the dark side that is certainly linked to lots of chatter, chatter, chatter. But on the flip side, it's remarkable how social media can corral resources. If you've got a network and you really need help, you could

get help from thousands of people or tens of thousands or more by a push of a button. And so there's evidence that many people's networks are supportive and can help them. So I think it's a very mixed bag. And for that reason, it's hard to know if at least a technological shift in the form of social media is actually accelerating chatter or accelerating the rate at which we manage it effectively. And the next 10 years are going to be really exciting as we continue to do research on it. Yeah. I love the idea of sort of like the evolution of thought around the technology and the platforms. Cause I remember, you know, it was probably about seven or eight years ago,

this really big study came out and basically said the year that, you know, the use of that, that, that smartphones came out and social platforms became, they were mass adopted. The rates of anxiety and depression skyrocketed in kids. And since then there's been a lot more, much more nuanced parsing of that data, you know, and, and like you said, also saying, well, yes, there are things that we need to look at and be concerned about. And at the same time, let's look at what this is giving us to the channels for expression and connection and all these other things. Yeah, I think, you know, it's fascinating to me how sort of like our evolution of thought is around that, not just the technology, but like what is our responsibility in the context of how we use it and relate to it or get used by it? Well, I think two points here. Number one, I think this is the beauty of science and how it evolves, right? And we do studies, we interpret the results, and then we build on

those studies and we learn new things which allow us to revise our opinions and our appraisals of how things work. And I think that's just programmatic science and that's science at its best. But the other complicating factor here with social media is that social media actually isn't one thing. Every platform is different and the platforms themselves are evolving. So I've often compared social media to the offline world. I often say, is social media good or bad? Well, it's an environment, a new kind of environment. Environments aren't good or bad. It depends on how you engage with those environments.

So in the offline world, if you go into the wrong neighborhoods and do the wrong things, you get in big trouble. If you go in the right neighborhoods and you act the right way with the right people, that benefits you. At a broad level, that's also true of social media with one important difference. Every social media platform, if the people who are in charge of the algorithms that govern how that platform works choose to do so with a few finger strokes. Maybe I'm simplifying. I don't know how to code. Maybe it's a lot of finger strokes, but they can actually

change the dimensions of this environment. In a certain sense, if they wanted to, they could essentially reverse gravity by a few finger strokes. And that makes it really tricky for us to study social media because it's constantly changing. It's a moving target. And Zuckerberg and Facebook leadership, if they discover something isn't helping people, they could change that really quick and then see, well, is that making a difference or going the opposite direction. And so I think that also is in part why really developing these science-based insights, this blueprint, here's how to use social media to make it work for you rather than against you. It's not such an easy thing to do, but we are making progress. Yeah. It's that old line, I think,

in the world of tech and social media. If you're not paying, you're the product. And, you know, and whoever's sort of like the middle person or making the money is going to manipulate your behavior, not for your own benefit, not for the benefit of society, but to optimize, you know, shareholder value, to optimize around revenue. So, and we're sort of like caught in the middle of that. I think we're waking up to that to a large extent also, and people are being more intentional, you know. or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time

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will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. You mentioned these three buckets.

We've kind of been talking about chatter and how it relates to social media and technology and then ties into one of those buckets, physical and mental health. Chatter in general, though, when you talk about how that sort of cyclical negative spin in your head more broadly relates to well-being, I think a lot of people can sort of make the connection between mental health, between anxiety and depression. Okay, so if you're constantly spinning, you get into this anxious state, maybe even obsessive compulsive at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Is there also a similar connection to actual, to physiological wellbeing? I mean,

I know there is through the modality, at least of your mind and your body are not disconnected. There are seamless feedback mechanism, but does it go even beyond that? It absolutely does go beyond it. So we know that chatter can have negative physical health implications. And in part, how it does so is it prolongs our stress response. So we often hear that stress kills. That's not exactly true. The stress response, we evolve the capacity to have this response for a reason.

It serves a vital function. When we're in the presence of a threat, the ability to respond very quickly, fight or flee, good, good thing. What makes stress toxic is when that response becomes prolonged. And that's precisely what chatter does because we experience something negative in our lives and we don't leave it behind. We then, after the experience has ended, after I've gotten the rejection letter on my last paper or after I've been insulted in the car, I think about that event over and over and

over again. And thinking about that event keeps it active in our minds as well as the corresponding physiological response that is associated with it. So that prolonged stress response in turn predicts things like cardiovascular disease, problems of inflammation, even certain forms of cancer. There's also some work now even showing that chatter-like chronic stress can alter the way our genes are expressed, turning on genes that are involved in inflammatory responses and turning off genes that are involved in fighting off viruses. So even at the genetic level, at the epigenetic level, we're seeing

effects of chatter. So I'm hesitant to say it's not all in the mind because I believe that the mind is grounded in the body and in the brain. But what we know is that the effects extend beneath your shoulders into every corner of your body in ways that can have really consequential negative physical health implications. And so that again is why one of the reasons why I think this is such a huge problem. Yeah. I mean, what's fascinating about what you just shared also, to me in particular, is the notion that the level of chatter can potentially affect your epigenetic state, which is effectively, for those listening, it's whether certain genes are activated or not. And if it's a gene or a state that leads to inflammation or disease, and that becomes

sort of like effectively turned on, that's a bad thing. And then what spins through my mind is the more recent research that shows that not just genetics, but epigenetic states may be heritable. And then if you start to project out, and maybe that's a bad thing to do if you're already prone to chatter, because you're like, wait a minute, my chatter is potentially not only causing

inflammation, illness, disease in me, but that propensity may then be passed on to children and their children. On the one hand, it probably freaks you out even more. But on the other hand, maybe that actually goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation about, well, maybe that goes into the stack of motivation that lets you say, let me figure this out. Well, you know, like so many things, it really depends on how you frame the situation. I am a huge advocate of option B, which is to say, okay, we recognize what the stakes are, but there's really, really good news, which is at the same time that we've evolved to be able to have this chatter-like response, we've also evolved to possess a boatload of different tools that we can use to manage it. And so one thing I like to tell people is,

if you experience chatter, congratulations, welcome to the human condition. Most of us do at times. And just because you experience chatter does not mean you're clinically anxious or depressed. Those are extreme manifestations of chatter, but most normal healthy individuals experience chatter in small to moderate doses, you know, at various points in their life. But that's okay. And, you know, experiencing small blips of chatter aren't necessarily going to predict, you know, developing these physical ills because we have so many tools that we can use to nip it in the bud when it strikes and regain the ability to manage our inner voice. And so that's why I chose to spend one chapter of the

book talking about the negative stuff. And I think six talking about tools, because I think that is really where much of the action is and most of the opportunities surrounding being agentic about being proactive, you know, revolve around these tools with respect to how to manage our chatter. Let's talk about a few of those tools also. There's a lot of them, as you mentioned, and you dive into a whole bunch of them. One of the approaches is something, I may characterize it wrong, but effectively creating psychological distance. Tell me more about this. Well, you've characterized it perfectly. So when we experience chatter, we often

zoom in on our problem, tunnel vision, we're focusing explicitly on what happened, what we felt, what's going wrong, and we lose sight of the bigger picture. And so what we've learned is one natural antidote to that state is to pull people back, to have them step back from the immediacy of what they're experiencing so they could focus on the big picture and develop alternative ways of thinking about what they're going through that ultimately help them feel better. The real world example I like people to think about to really drive home the power of distance for helping people manage situations is to ask them to think about a time when a friend

or a loved one came to them with a problem that they were spinning about. Chatter, chatter, chatter, can't get through it. They don't know what to do. They come to you for advice. And when they present the problem to you, it's relatively easy for you to give them advice, to weigh in and coach them. When I pose that scenario to audiences and ask, has anyone ever experienced this? Consistently, every hand in the audience goes up, right? It's a very powerful response. The reason why it's so easy for you as the friend to weigh in on the problem is because it's not happening to you.

You have some psychological distance from that experience and you could bring this wonderful, gorgeous brain you have to bear in all of its capacity to weigh in on the problem and come up with a solution. We often lack that distance when we're experiencing chatter. But what we've learned is that there are many different things you can do to regain it. And so that characterizes one set of tools that people can use when they're experiencing chatter. And so to make that more concrete,

one tool that you can use is something we call distance self-talk. And it involves using your name or the second person pronoun you to coach yourself through a problem. So if I'm spinning over something, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? Here's what you need to do. If you think about when we use names and second person pronouns, we typically use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. So there's a very tight link between a name and thinking about someone else, someone who's distant from us. And so what we've learned is that when people use their own names to work through their problems, it virtually automatically shifts their perspective.

It puts them into this, it activates the neural machinery involved in thinking about other people. And it puts us into this coach mode that is much more constructive than when we're trying to work through a problem in the first person. So that's one thing that people can do. I would advise that if they do it though, that they should do it silently, or if they feel the need to really do it out loud while walking down the streets of their neighborhood to make sure that they have a pair of AirPods in their ears. Right. Looks like you're on the phone call. That's right.

I was just thinking that same thing. We had Janine Roth on the show a couple of years back. And she described something which is similar but different. She's sort of like lived with this voice nonstop in her head and like tons and tons of chatter. She gave the voice a different name. It was like the crazy aunt in the attic or something like that. And she, she created a character out of the voice of the chatter that was not her. And then would have these conversations with that person. That's distancing right there. It's another manifestation of it. And in fact, one of the, one of the experiences that I found so interesting while researching the book, and you know, I talked to a lot of people about that voice in their head. And in fact, one of the experiences that I found so interesting while researching the book,

and I talked to a lot of people about that voice in their head. And interestingly enough, just as an aside, I interviewed C-level executives, Starbucks baristas, and everyone in between and outside those distinctions, and they all resonated with this experience. Many of them spontaneously, and they didn't know why, had named the voice in their head. I heard things like itty bitty shitty committee. Ariana Huffington, I think, said the obnoxious roommate in my head. I saw an interview with her. One of my favorites was someone who named their chatter Marvin. It's just Marvin. It doesn't sound like a nice person in there. And those are in fact, it's not me, right? And if it's not me, I can engage with it differently. So that's just one kind of distancing tool that exists. And I really want to emphasize

that because I think it is fascinating how many different tools we have. Like just to give you one other example of probably 10 or 12 distancing tools, a tool that I've relied on a lot during the pandemic is something that is technically called temporal distancing, but I call it mental time travel. So when you're dealing with an acute stressor and you're zoomed in on the awfulness of it, oh my God, I'm still at home. I can't exercise. My kids are doing zoom sessions at my ankles. All these negative things.

It's easy to get filled with chatter. In those circumstances, what I would often do is think about how I would feel six months from now when I'm vaccinated, when I'm traveling again, when I'm seeing friends. And when I engage in that mental time travel, what it made it clear was when I got some distance by traveling in time from the moment, it made it clear that what I'm going through, as awful as it is, it's temporary. It's eventually going to pass. And that gave me a sense of hope, which we know is really powerful for managing chatter. So I mental time traveled into the future to get some distance to broaden my perspective. I also traveled into the past. I thought of the last great pandemic

we experienced in 1918. I think it was, it was a 1918. I think so. Yeah. And, and my God, like as bad as things are now, they were even worse back then. You know, that the death rate was higher, no zoom, no takeout, lots more adversity. And guess what? We got through that and we came roaring back. And so we'll get through this. It's another very simple mental shift that a person can engage in when they find themselves experiencing chatter that has the potential to provide them with relief.

So what's interesting is a lot of tools that you, some of the tools you just talked about, and also a lot of the broader set of tools that you've explored. And I'm sure there's so many others also that we can just adapt individually. When I zoomed the lens out and I was thinking about them as a sort of a coherent toolbox, I started thinking to myself, you know, these sound a lot like the identical tools that you see used day in, day out in cognitive behavioral therapy, which made me wonder, is it just that these tools tend to be effective in a broad array of experiences and circumstances? Or is it that one of the fundamental drivers of so much of what manifests as systems that would lead people to seek therapy is chatter?

Or is it just yes end? Well, so we do know, number one, that the chatter is what we call a transdiagnostic factor that predicts many different kinds of mood disorders, like various kinds of forms of anxiety and depression. So it does cut across many different kinds of debilitating conditions. It's not the same. It's not as synonymous with depression, but it certainly propels those states. And so there is a grain of truth to that. With respect to the overlap between these tools and things that happen in cognitive therapy or even third wave forms of cognitive therapy like mindfulness-based therapy, on the one hand, there is some overlap. On the other hand, there's some non-overlap too. As an example, some of the

language stuff really hasn't factored into cognitive therapy historically, but certainly thought disputation and recognizing there are alternative ways of thinking about it. Those definitely have. Aaron Beck, who is one of the founders of cognitive therapy back in the 70s, actually talked about distancing as being one of the active ingredients that allows for a client to make change, to actually improve. But something interesting happened after he wrote that article in the 70s, which is people stopped talking about distancing. And in fact, for a long time, people thought of distancing as antithetical to good coping because the idea of distancing became equated with the idea of avoidance, with not focusing

on your feelings. And so when I started doing work on distancing, people thought I was proposing something harmful, like why would you tell a person to distance? We know you have to engage with your emotions. And the key point to keep in mind with these distancing strategies is we're often having people step back in order to then approach and make sense of their feelings. We're not having them step back to avoid thinking about them. That's not a good thing, right? That's something bad. So there's nuance to how all this works. But there are certainly lots of individual tools in CT that I think you don't have to be clinically anxious or depressed to be able to benefit from.

And I think the more we can do to identify what are these with pinpoint precision, these tools that we can use to manage our inner voice and give those to people, the better off we're going to be for helping people and society. Yeah. It occurs to me also, you know, one of the really big things is we've got to be aware of the tools. You know, we kind of, we need to A, know they exist and then B, know at least what some are, you know, so we can start to deepen into and find more. But there's another, there's another thing. We can't actually use the tools until we become self-aware enough that we actually, we know

when we're in the grips of chatter. We can actually understand like, oh, like, oh, let me zoom the lens out for a moment. Oh, oh, I'm spinning. That's exactly right. And that's sort of like a meta skill that we need because we can't access the tools until we actually understand, oh, we're in a moment where we need them. Yeah. And I, so that's where I think just having an understanding of what chatter is, being able to define it and recognize once, oh, I'm experiencing chatter. That's not a recognition that is obvious to a lot of people. Being able to put a label on it in that way is, I think, in and of itself quite useful. So people ask me all the time, do you experience chatter? And I say, yeah, I experience

chatter. I'm a human being and I come from New York City. It's like predestined that I experience chatter, right? Of course I do at times. And they ask me, do I use the tools that I talk about? And I emphatically do use many of those tools, not all of them because I have my favorites. What I've become really good at over the years is A, recognizing the moment I start slipping into chatter. And then the instance that I find myself slipping into it, I rapidly take that chatter fighting cocktail that I have at my disposal, non-alcoholic, and it's the tools. There are like four or five tools that I will instantly deploy. And usually they're quite effective at nipping it in the bud.

So that's exactly the two-step process that you're describing, being able to know what chatter is and practicing recognizing it, and then making the conscious intention, making the specific plan. If I find myself experiencing chatter, then I will use the tools in my repertoire. And doing some self-experimentation, we've talked about two tools, but as I've said before, lots of others. And some of them don't involve things you do on your own, but rather they involve other people or actually our physical environments. And so there's a really broad repertoire out there of tools that exist. And I think what science has done really well

is profile individual tools. We've identified specific tools. We've studied how they work. What are the mechanisms that explain how they work? But what we are only beginning to do is study how those tools come together in daily life in different combinations to help people. And whether the combinations of tools that help you are different from those that help me. And so while we wait for science to give us answers to those questions, I think there's an opportunity for people who are listening or reading to do some self-experimentation, to try out these different tools. And if they serve you well, continue using them. And if they don't serve you well, don't use them anymore. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. I am a daily

meditator for over a decade now. And I've noticed that one of the not immediate, but longer term benefits has been being able to more quickly recognize where my attention is, what is happening inside of my head, so that I can step into a place of agency, so that I can harness whatever tools are available to me sooner. And it's also because my practice is mindfulness, it's a practice of dropping as much as it is a practice of focusing, which keeps training me every single day. And, okay, that's not the

constructive place. Let's let that go. And then it comes back a thousand times. But that practice over years, you get better and better and it happens faster and faster. It doesn't eliminate the chatter, but it trains you in becoming aware of when you're in it, when it's rising up, and then in intervening more quickly, which I found, like that's this really interesting single practice that I feel like sort of like gives you multiple skills and tools. Yeah. And you know, there's an important distinction that I think comes across from what comes

out of what you're saying that I think is important for people to be aware of. And it's certainly a distinction that has helped me, which is the following. We don't possess the ability to control the thoughts that pop up into our head. I don't know of any research that provides us with tools that can prevent us from experiencing certain thoughts. I don't know that we even know why we experience certain thoughts that just pop up in our head. So we can't control the thoughts that pop up into our head, but we can control how we engage with those thoughts, whether we elaborate on them, whether we drop them as you're describing, whether we do any number of different things to manage them. And the reason I like to convey that to people is I think a lot of people,

a lot of students that have taken my classes over the years on self-control, I've often asked them, so let's say it's 10 o'clock at night, you're in the pantry and you really want the Oreo cookie, but you decide not to take it. Have you been successful at self-control? And some of them say yes, but a lot of them say no, because the fact that they experienced the temptation in the first place, that's evidence of not succeeding. And my response to those students is, if that's your definition of self-control, then your bar for being effective is really, really high. Because I don't know that you're ever going to be able to manage those tempting thoughts that pop up in your head or those dark thoughts. But what we can manage is how you manage them.

So I think that's just an important additional distinction that can be useful for understanding how the mind works and maybe also not being so hard on ourselves if we find ourselves experiencing thoughts that aren't necessarily ones that we are proud of or like. Yeah. The forgiveness is a part of all of this, I think. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Engage with other people, give to other people, learn how to manage your chatter, and indulge every now and again. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this conversation, safe bet you will also love the conversation that we had with Adam Grant

about the value of not getting too dug in on your thinking. You'll find a link to Adam's episode in the show notes. Even if you don't listen now, be sure to click and download so it's ready to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference

between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.