Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Ethan Kross on the Hidden Power of Our Inner Voice EP 245

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Today I am joined on the Pasion Struck podcast by the award-winning psychologist and author Dr. Ethan Kross, who reveals the hidden power of our inner voice and how we can harness it to live healthier, more satisfying, and more productive lives. Dr. Kross is the author of "Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It." What We Discuss About The Power of Our Inner Voice Ethan Kross delves into the inner dialogue we engage in with ourselves. Through research from his lab and real-world examples, such as a struggling pitcher and a spy balancing her dual identities, Kross demonstrates how these internal conversations shape our lives, careers, and relationships. He cautions that succumbing to negative self-talk, referred to as "chatter" by Kross, can harm our physical and mental health, undermine our mood, damage our social connections, and make us falter under stress. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/ethan-kross-power-of-our-inner-voice/  Brought to you by Policygenius. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview:  https://youtu.be/i_Qwtwcv0yg  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast, we're born into the world with this remarkable set of tools, our emotions, but we don't get a user's manual that teaches us how to use those tools. So we're just stumbling along and our experiences in the world teach us things. And sometimes the lessons we learn are really good ones. When it comes to how to manage our emotions, the things our parents and culture teaches us, but sometimes they're not. And so we're not calibrated. And where I see science as being able to really contribute is by helping provide people with those really guidelines

for how to optimize the usage of these tools. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.

We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 245 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by Interview Valet

is the third best podcast in the world for mindset. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly. Well, listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episodes starter packs, and these

are collections of our fans favorite episodes. And we organize them in a convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed it, last week I interviewed Burry Levine, who's the co-founder of Ways, and the author of the brand new book, All in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution. I also interviewed John U Bacon,

who's a seven-time New York time best-selling author, and we talk about his brand new book, which is all about how he took the worst performing high school hockey team in America, and changed it into one of the best. A really fun discussion that you don't want to miss. Please check them both out in case you miss them. And I wanted to thank you so much for your continued support of the show. All your ratings and reviews go such a long way in helping us improve the popularity of the show. And more importantly, introducing people into the passion start community where we can bring them weekly doses of inspiration, hope, connection, and meaning.

Now let's talk about today's episode. We all have an inner voice that we can use to evaluate our actions, learn from past mistakes, and better prepare for the future. Unfortunately, all too often, this voice turns into a stream of negative thoughts as well as emotions, and rather than help us improve, it can hold into a stream of negative thoughts, as well as emotions. And rather than help us improve, it can hold us back by causing remination, anxiety, and even self-sabotage. But what if you contain, and properly harness, your inner voice, and enjoy many of the benefits that come from self-reflection and introspection, while greatly reducing, unproductive, and

negative self-talk? Ethan Cross joins us today to discuss precisely how to do it. Ethan is one of the world's leading experts on how to control a conscious mind, an award-winning professor and best-selling author of the book Chatter. He teaches in the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department and its Ross School of Business. He studies how the conversations that people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions, and relationships.

He moved to the University of Michigan in 2008 where he founded the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am a static and honored today to welcome Dr. Ethan Cross under the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome, Ethan. Thanks so much for having me really, really excited to be here, John. Yeah, I have to start this off by saying go blue.

I'm even more excited to be here right now. Go blue indeed. Well, I always like to start the interviews out by allowing the audience to get to know who I'm interviewing. And a question I'd like to ask that I'm going to change up a little bit today is we all have moments that define us. But in your case, I'm going to ask it this way. We all have periods that define us. case, I'm going to ask it this way. We all have periods that define us. How did the first psychology lab that you entered into impact you and this passion that you have for studying how to control the conscious mind? Well, the first lab I entered into was seriously entered into as a full-fledged member was in graduate school. And I started working in the lab of a guy named Walter Michelle who many people probably know as the scientist

who developed the marshmallow task. So you give a kid a choice. They can have one treat now, or if they wait a little while for an experiment or to come back to the room, they're waiting in, they can get two treats. It's really difficult to lemma for kids and turns out the kids who wait longer

and end up benefiting a various ways from improved self-control later on in life. So Walter, when I started working with him in his lab, he was this legendary figure in the field. And I had come in to graduate school with this really burning interest to understand how people can manage their emotions more effectively. But beyond that burning interest and I think some raw potential from college, I didn't know what I was doing.

I felt like this huge imposter and Walter broke things down for me very simply during our very first meeting in a way that I will never forget that I continue to think about this to this day. He said, well, Ethan, when we're talking about things like self-control or emotion management, they're basically two things. You can make this really simple for people. You've got to have motivation and you've got to have ability. You can be motivated to control yourself. Ad nausea. If you don't actually know what tools to use, to bring that goal to fruition, you're not going to succeed. The flip side is also true.

You can have all the tools that scientists have discovered. You can know all the exercises, if you will. But if you're not motivated to actually use those tools, nothing's going to happen. And so motivation and ability, those were the two building blocks for solving this problem that I was so fascinated about how can we manage ourselves. And Walter's ability to just crystallize things so simply in that way really struck me and provided me with a framework that I've used to approach most of the research that I've done over the past 20 years. Yeah, motivation is a strange thing.

And before we came on today, we were talking about your peer from University of Chicago, I let Fishback's new book. But I loved a story that she had in there about Vietnam. And how when the French were still a ruling Vietnam, they put in these canals and then they developed this rap problem. So they started to incentivize people to capture rats and turn in their tails to try to reduce the issue. And then over time, the rats just started to go completely out of control. And what they found was a whole ton of rats without tails. And I think it's so interesting because oftentimes, we've

got to be careful about the awards that we're putting out there for motivation. And I think that's either for people we lead or or even for ourselves, because we can often give ourselves awards that elicit the wrong type of reaction to them. Absolutely, and I think this is where IAILA's book, which is a fantastic book. If you have not taken a look at it, you certainly should. IAILA, it's a brilliant scientist. This is the work that she and many of her colleagues that they're doing on motivation is so incredibly important. And so having a broad framework for thinking about how these processes work, I think that's

really useful for just keeping your eye on the prize and knowing where to direct your science. But then we've got to drill down into the specifics. So what makes motivation effective versus not? Their entire fields of study that have dealt with those questions, which I'll review in her book, and the same is true on the strategy or ability side of things.

What are the specific tools that make this possible? And we tend to like to think in very simple terms about how all this works. There's of course, this complexity, for example, one thing I see often when I'm talking to people about how to manage ourselves, self-controlers, this tendency to wanna find one tool that we can use to just take us through our lives effectively.

So people often will ask me, hey, what's the one tool you'd recommend for me to use? And I wish I could offer one tool, but that's not how we human beings work. In some ways, I think it's doing a disservice to the complexity of human life to suggest that there's this one magic pill you could take that will help you deal with all of your emotions and all situations. Instead, what we've learned is we have evolved to possess this remarkably diverse toolbox of skills that we have in our disposal and that we need to be smart.

We need to identify what those tools are and then know when to use them. It's not unlike a carpenter who shows up at a job. Like my grandfather is a carpenter, so I often think about him and some of my work. My grandfather would never show up to a housing job with just his hammer and a screwdriver. He showed up with two huge bags of tools and he knew when to use each one. And I think that's the challenge

that we all face right now. We're faced with a variety of different emotional challenges in our lives. All of us are. That is a universal. And I think the challenge we face is to be able to identify, hey, what are the specific tools or combinations of tools that work best for me in this particular situation? And I think science has a little bit off along those lines which is exciting. Yes, and one of the groups that I think is doing a ton of good

around science is one that you're that I think is doing a ton of good around science is one that you're affiliated with, which is the Better Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania led by Angela Duckworth and Katie Milkman. Why did you get involved with that initiative? And what do you think are some of the promises that it can bring to bear? Well, there are a couple of reasons I got involved. I think are some of the promises that it can bring to bear. Well, there are a couple of reasons I got involved. First, I have enormous respect for Angela and Katie. I think they're world-class scientists.

And I think there's often a stereotype of a scientist working alone in their laboratory, not talking to other people. That's certainly a stereotype I used to have. But in fact, much of what we do is teamwork with other individuals and just working with people that have beautiful minds and hearts, which is how I would describe them, really makes for better science. So when they asked me to join their initiative, I was happy to do so. There's also a number of other top, top notch people in that group. I think about that organization is it is trying to fill a needed gap in society in the sense of taking science and figuring out ways to use that science to address real world problems.

That's not a trivial thing to do because the way we often do science in the laboratory is we test our ideas under very tightly controlled conditions that don't always perfectly scaffold onto the kinds of conditions we're trying to speak to in daily lives. And going from the lab to everyday life to see, do our findings actually impact people where we want and hope them to impact people. I think that is an essential question to be asking and this organization is playing an instrumental role in doing it so it's been a really fun group to be involved

with. Yes and I love the aspect of how they're doing the mega studies. My uncle is a psychologist similar to you and he spent 30 years working at Northwestern and he always told me one of he thought the shortfalls of the grant situation was that typically you're working on these projects and isolation when I think what this is doing and these mega studies are doing is they're taking all these brilliant ideas that are coming from a myriad of scientists and researchers and etc. that multiplier effect is going to lead to much better results. So I just want to recognize that. I think we need all kinds of contributions. There's a lot of work on diversity. What are the benefits of diversity in science? And there are many benefits, but one of them is pulling together a diversity

of perspective ideas and approaches, I think, is the best chance of being successful. And so what that means is I think we still are going to always need the kind of creatives who kind of forge alone and in isolation and come up with new ideas and test them, but we also need the aggregators and the connectors who bring different groups together to weigh in on the same problem. We really haven't had the moon shot effort when it comes to many of the problems that psychologists are trying to solve, emotion regulation, depression, anxiety, things of that sort.

And I think it's a huge problem because we know these issues are some of the greatest that we now face as a species. If you look at the data, it's pretty astounding. The degree to which we currently struggle with our emotions and have historically, like, it's just remarkable. I saw a statistic recently that put a price tag on cost that anxiety and depression have on the global economy. And that number was $1 trillion

and estimated to grow exponentially. That's a big number. I don't have a way of wrapping my head around what a trillion dollars actually captures. But that's what the inability to effectively regulate our emotional state translates into. So I think we need to keep doing what Katie and Angela are doing and even go further.

Yes, well, I'm gonna take this a little bit different way than I thought I was gonna take it, but I'm glad you brought up this huge thing with emotions. And I started this podcast because I think we have these global epidemics going on outside of COVID of hopelessness, helplessness, loneliness. I just did an episode a number of weeks ago on loneliness, and when I started to look at statistics, it was incredible. R.P. did a study of American adults and found that 45% are lonely. There was another longitudinal study

that was done over a 20-year period and 117 countries that found 33% of all humans over that 20-year period registered that way. And then the country that surprised me that has the highest loneliness in the world is Brazil, which is over 50%. So it just leads me to see just how widespread these things are. And I think to your point, and I think Susan Cain did a great job

of exploring this in her book, Bittersweet earlier this year. A lot of people want to run away from these feelings of melancholy, et cetera. And we're going to talk about this a lot in today's conversation because it's what your book is really about is exploring these inner thoughts that are inner minds. On a much larger level, why do you think we tend to self-sabotage ourselves, or I call it, we become a visionary arsonist where we arson our very dreams by allowing these fears and thoughts to come into our minds. It's a great phrase visionary arsonist and it is pretty astounding when

you stop to think about how remarkably creative and effective we are at mowing ourselves down. I mean if if you stop and ask people, for example, what they say to themselves during their worst moments, which we've done in my research, because that's what we study. In part, the conversations that people have with ourselves, I should be clear when I say that, I'm talking about the very normal conversations

that we all have with ourselves at times, or most of us. The things that people come up with, it's wild. What would possess you to actually say that to yourself when you would never, ever dream of saying that to another human being? And yet we see those kinds of inner monologues of self critique and self-loathing come up quite frequently. But you asked me a question about why I think this is happening. And I have an answer to that. I think we are born into this world

with a remarkable set of tools. And those tools are emotions. And our emotions, both the good ones and the bad ones, serve us really well. I think we often think like we strive to live lives that are filled with just positive emotions and not negative ones. I think we often think like we strive to live lives that are filled with just positive emotions and not negative ones. I like to remind people that probably wouldn't be a very good idea nor is it feasible, but your ability to experience a small ping of anxiety before an upcoming deadline,

that's a really, really useful response. If you didn't experience that emotion, you wouldn't be preparing yourself adequately. Your ability to experience some anger when your personal space is violated in some way. Again, really useful response. The same is true of all negative emotions. When they are experienced in the right proportions, to the right degree, and for the right period of time, they serve us really well. We don't want to live life without them. The problem is some of the time our emotions run away with us. And so we're born into the world with this remarkable set of tools, our emotions.

But we don't get a user's manual that teaches us how to use those tools. So we're just stumbling along and our experiences in the world teach us things. And sometimes the lessons we learn are really good ones. When it comes to how to manage our emotions of things, our parents and culture teaches us, but sometimes they're not. And so we're not calibrated. And where I see science as being able to really contribute is by helping provide people with those really guidelines for how to optimize the usage of these tools. And the data would suggest that if you calibrate your usage of tools, you're going to be better off in terms of thinking, performing, relationships, well, being, and so forth. Actually, I have one illustration I share with you one illustration of we sometimes go wrong when

it comes to like our learning experiences with these tools. A lot of people are taught that when you're struggling with something what you want to do is find someone to vent your emotions to just get it out, express don't keep a bottled up inside. It's a very common belief in popular culture. And there's been a lot of research on it. And what we've learned is that venting your emotions to someone else, that does have the benefit of bringing two people closer together. So there's something that we gain from knowing that there's another human being

in this world that's willing to take the time to listen, to validate, to empathically connect with us. That's good. But if your goal is to actually get past the negative experience or emotion, to work through it to move on with your life, what the studies show is that simply rehashing what you're feeling out of John, you're never going to believe what happened to me yesterday. This person said this, I was so pissed off. All that venting does is keep your negative emotions active. So people leave studies after venting just as upset, if not more upset, than when

they started. So if you have an idea, you're taking around with you that, hey, the way to feel better, it's about something, it's to find someone to vent. In fact, that's going to have the opposite outcomes. That's just one illustration of a way that science can help us course correct. Now, I think that's great. And we're gonna explore a ton more about these ideas as we unpack your incredible book.

And I just wanted to give a shout out to it because as I told you before we started today's interview, it is so well-written and I highly encourage all the listeners to reach out and we'll make sure on the YouTube video we put a bit of picture of it so we can help them to do that. But before we dive into it, I wanted to ask you a philosophical question.

Today, I released an episode that's already getting interesting responses from both sides of the argument and that is, does free will exist or not? And I decided to tackle it in a way that would leave my audience thinking and debating on it. But one of the illustrations that I bring out is the study that your fellow neuroscientist Benjamin Limit did where he proved that our mind makes decisions before we act. Now this has been debated now for decades since that research came out,

but I wanted to ask you, what is your perspective being a fellow neuroscientist and psychologist on this topic? Yes, we have, like, me to elaborate. Yes. So, yeah, this is a perennial debate, and I acknowledge that the mind, a prediction machine, and it is constantly creating simulations about what's going to happen in the future. And there are many processes that are occurring in our minds that happen outside of awareness unconsciously before before concepts and ideas reach our awareness. Having said that, I find it useful to break down rather than ask this global question about,

do we have agency or not? I think it's useful to think about what step in the timeline of an emerging thought or emotion we're talking about. And let me break this down for you. This actually goes back to a six month debate I had with a graduate student about this very topic, she was saying.

Six months, wow. Six months. Well, so I direct a laboratory at the University of Michigan called the laboratory on emotion and self-control. And so the idea of self-control implicit in that idea is that we do have some agency over our ability to manage our emotional lives. And Laura came into my lab one day and said, I think I'd like to study this idea that we don't have really control over our thoughts and beliefs. Come again. What do you mean? And so where we ended up and we're doing research in this space is let's think about when a thought just pops into your head or a feeling just emerges. If you ask me, do people have control? Do people have agency over the thoughts and feelings that just bubble up into awareness? Can I will myself to just bubble up

certain thoughts and into awareness? I don't know of data that suggests that we can. I don't know John why I sometimes walk down the street to work and think a think an inappropriate thought. Right, why is this pop into my eye? And I'm not revealing what those are. But they happen every now and again as I'm guessing the same is true for you. Would that be a fair assumption to make? It happens to everyone. It happens to everyone, right? And we don't yet know enough about the human mind to be able to predict why you're going to experience this one thought bubble up into where it is or feeling in a given situation. So do we have control over that mental, that internal mental experience? No. But do we have control over how we engage with that thought or belief or feeling once it is activated?

Absolutely. This is where we have a remarkable set of tools we can choose to elaborate on a thought, we can choose to let it go, we can choose to try to suppress it, we can choose to interrogate it. There are a multitude of other mental exercises that we can engage in once that thought is actually and I think we do have agency over that step in the process. That's interesting. I ended the episode by saying if life is a game of poker and the hand we are dealt is determinism, then how we play that hand is free well.

So you're on the same side as I am when it comes to this then. Well, I happen to be, but for the audience, I kind of argued both sides of it to elicit people to have conversations about it. But to me, given that the whole point of this podcast is teaching people how to be intentional, I think you can't be intentional if something is not guiding your decisions and how you're going about the daily microchois that you're making thousands of times per day because that's what ultimately creates the outcome that your life is going to have. That's where my beliefs lay at and I think it's fundamental if you look at those who become legendary, however, you want to look at that, they are extremely intentional about how they're living their life.

And I think that's one of the biggest hidden secrets for what makes someone achieve their best life. Or you want to look at Maslow's self-actualization as compared to someone who does, and it's choosing growth in the way that you're carrying your life forward. So, well, I mean, John, people often ask me as someone who studies and wrote a book on the topic of chatter, getting stuck in those negative thought loops. Do I ever experience it? And my response is, yes, on occasion, but what I'm very good at is turning the volume on that chatter down the moment I detect it. And

the reason I'm good at that is I'm intentional. I have a plan. I know exactly what tools to implement. I don't have to think twice about what I should do to manage a state because I'm aware of this science, I can implement those tools in the exact moment that I need them and that really helps in that way. And that I think speaks to this point about being intentional about how we manage our emotional lives, availing ourselves of the tools that are out there and then making a commitment to implementing them when we need them. Yes, well, I think before we dive deeper into the concepts in the book, perhaps it's best to start out with a definition of what chatter is

so we can level set the audience. Another amazing tool that we possess is language, and we can silently use language to reflect on our lives, which we do all the time in very different ways. It has various manifestations. We often use language to rehearse what we're gonna say during a presentation or before an interview or date. We also use language to motivate ourselves

and make sense of our experiences, like when we're, we experience adversity, we turn our attention over to come up with a story. Why did this happen to me? How can I learn from this? Sometimes our attempts to do that, though, backfire. We turn our attention inward order to come up with a story. Why did this happen to me? How can I learn from this? Sometimes our attempts to do that though backfire. We turn our attention inward, we introspect and we get stuck in a negative thought loop. We start overthinking things. Well, well, oh my god, what am I going to do? Why did this happen? And we just keep spinning.

That's what Chatter refers to this process of getting stuck in a negative thought. It captures phenomena like rumination and worry. Rumination tends to be about things that happen in the past when we're dwelling on them. Worry is about things in the present or future. Oh my God, what if this happens? The key is that you are just, you're trying to make progress towards some goal, but you're not making that progress. You're like one of those hamsters on an exercise. Will you keep really putting effort into it, but not going anywhere? I think it's a tremendous

problem that that we face as a species. Well, in November 2017, I had started my morning off, by dropping my daughter off at school, going to the gym, which I did on our everyday basis. And the gym, unfortunately, had a fire in their mechanical system. And so the fire engines came and I went home unexpectedly outside of the typical window I would go. And when I walked into the house, there were a pair of workmen's boots sitting in the middle of my floor leading up to the stairs.

And I was renting at this point. So I just thought that this person was one of the maintenance people from the rental company and I start asking who's there. I know someone's in the house. I don't get a response. I think they're on their headset and can't hear me. And as I go up the staircase, there is a gentleman pointing a gun at me

who is in my house. And I replay that situation now as of times in my head and this inner voice relives that trauma and comes back to me and says, you did this wrong, you did that wrong. Why didn't you just leave when you had the chance and call the cops and that, but I bring it up because you started the book out by talking about

not the same situation, but a similar situation where you felt an emergent threat. And I was hoping maybe you could describe that and what was going through your own head. Well, first of all, I'm delighted that that situation resolved itself. Yeah, I'm still here. I'm still here. So, that's great news, and now maybe after talking, we can get rid of the inner voice aftermath

of it. But look, I totally identify with you. I mean, my situation was, I would say, overtly less extreme, but in my mind psychologically it was just as acute about I don't know, 12 or 13 years ago my team published a study that ended up getting a lot of national attention. I went on the evening news, talked about the results. We basically showed that the experience of being socially rejected emotional pain that that experience when you looked at underlying neural activity it shared some features with the experience of physical pain so the idea was that when people

use this language of physical pain to describe how they feel when they're socially isolated rejected and alone I mean my feelings hurt that they might actually be referring to physically painful sensations in their body. So it was really exciting. Made my mom really happy. First time she finally acknowledged what I did. I think she liked was like, it's okay. You didn't become a real doctor, which by that, I mean, a medical doctor. Super fun. We're all riding high. A couple of days later, maybe it was a week or so. I show up in my office and there's a letter in my mailbox, never used to get mail, still don't really.

Hand addressed to me, I open it up and instantly experience the physiological symptoms of panic. I start racing, my stomach isn't not, and it's basically a threat, a really hostile threatening letter with all sorts of slurs and images written. This mind you was not me sensationalizing. I showed it to a couple people. They advised that I go to the local police office, which I did. They tried to be comforting, but weren't really, to be honest. Their advice to me was to drive home a different way from work each day, which I looked at

them in the eyes when they said this. And I said, you realize I live about four blocks away from work each day, which I looked at them in the eyes when they said this and I said, you realize I live about four blocks away from work. There's only so many permutations that I take to get home. And fast forward, I was erect for a couple of nights. I just had my first child. I'm thinking to myself, what did I go on TV? Can we move? Can we get a bodyguard, I'm pacing my house with a baseball bat, and it's just totally stuck in the chatter. It was an objectively frightening incident, but the way I was engaging with it psychologically was suboptimal because the looping that I was going through wasn't doing anything, tell me deal with that situation.

And in fact, it was causing all sorts of collateral damage. I couldn't stop talking about my concerns with my wife and even though she was great and wanting to be supportive, like how much can you listen to this ad nauseam? I wasn't able to engage with my lab because I was so consumed with this problem. I didn't have attention to devote to anything else and I wasn't eating, so my health began to erode,

which I think is a great example of how chatter, when it activates, it wraps its tentacles around us in ways that have all sorts of negative consequences. And I'm sure you experienced some of these with your own incident. That was like a great moment for me in retrospect, because there I was, someone who studies this stuff and runs a lab on it, but I was suffering.

And ultimately I broke through, it helped me identify some tools that we later went on to study, and it's never happened again. But it was a great opportunity to experience really what I had spent so much studying, but never so much time, so I never experienced myself. Yeah, so I wanted to open up with that because later on in the book, you say that there's nothing inherently harmful about returning to the past or imagining the future.

And I just wanted to give the book another shout out that you were recognized by the next big idea club, which has Susan Cain, Dan Pink, Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, who picked a very select group of books. But I had the privilege of interviewing Dan Pink, Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, who pick a very select group of books, but I had the privilege of interviewing Dan Pink just a couple weeks ago about his last book, The Power of Regret. And there's a large subculture that believes in this concept of no regrets. And based on your research, I wanted to ask you, how can regret be something that helps us achieve our best

life? I think that's the fallacy, the subculture that believes in our regress. This is this fallacy of thinking that negative emotions are bad for us. There's nothing bad about them per se. There's bad when they take over. In small doses, all emotions are functional. Redret can shine our spotlight on actions that we've taken or not taken in some cases that haven't ultimately served us well.

And being aware of that can help guide us in terms of behaving more optically moving forward. So, redretts can help us learn from our past experiences in ways that help us grow. I don't know of anyone who doesn't have regrets of some sort. So you want to have the regret shine your spotlight on some experience

so that you can then interrogate it rationally, objectively, without being consumed by it in ways that make you feel bad about yourself. So you want to have the regret focus you in on the experience, you then want to extract some information, learn from it, and then file it away and move on and not have it reverberate in awareness. I think that's the sophisticated way of managing that kind of emotional experience that we should be aspiring towards. And I think Dan's book provides some great guidelines for how to do that.

Yes, as well as some groundbreaking research on why this whole subculture of no regrets as you just explained really needs to be rethought because regrets can have such a profound impact when you use them in the right way to take your life to a better place. So yeah, I think it speaks more broadly to this temptation we all have to simplify. Life is really nice when it's very simple in terms of things are good versus bad. Black, white, just very clear cut in categories. But when it comes to our emotional experiences, we know that there's a lot more nuance. It's about finding sweet spots with respect to different experiences rather than having some of these and none of these. I think that's one way

to maybe think about it. Okay, and yesterday I released an episode with Don DePonni. I'm not sure if you know who that is, but he's a Hindu priest, he was a Hindu monk for about 10 years. And throughout a lot of that discussion, we covered the topic of distraction and how so many people today are living lives of distraction instead of

lives of focus and consciousness and etc. And my question for you is why is distraction leading to so many people not performing at their best? Well, distraction can be useful as a short-term fix, as a short-term tool. Let's say you're experiencing some weedy negative experience. Being able to temporarily take your mind off the problem can be useful. One thing that does is it activates, it gives your psychological immune system some time to operate. So, I don't know if you've talked on this show about the psychological immune system, but the basic idea is many people will likely be familiar with the idea that we have this physical immune system that is like a little army inside us with all sorts of specialized sets of troops, special forces, the cavalry and so forth that are designed by evolution to help ward off threats, like physical threats. Turns out, we've also developed what we call a psychological or behavioral immune system,

which consists of a set of psychological processes that help us deal with emotional threats. One example of a player in that psychological immune system is time. So we know that as time passes, our emotions tend to fade in terms of their intensity. So I get an email, oh my god, has this email lit me up. You wouldn't believe what that person said. And my temptation is to respond right now, but if I distract and give myself an hour or a day, the emotions tend to subside, that would be an example of a place where distracting for a bit can be helpful. The problem with distraction is it can be a blunt tool in the following sense.

Because distraction is so useful if you can do it at turning the temperature down on negative emotions, a lot of us are tempted to just keep doing it. Problem is that once you stop distracting, if the experience is still really powerful and activated, then all of the negative thoughts come back. So if I go to a movie to get my mind off a problem, and it's a really good movie, and I engage with it, I'm happy for an hour and a half or however long movies are nowadays,

I'd spend a while since I went to one. Like three hours. Like three hours, oh my gosh, that'd be hard. They're getting ridiculous. It's longer. But when I get out of the movie, and then I look at my cell phone and I see the instant message or the notification, then I'm reminded about the problem and it just comes back.

So ideally what you want to have happen in that situation is you can distract for a little bit, but then you want to be able to approach the problem and cognitively reframe it, work through it so that you can file it away to move on with our lives. So distraction, I think of it as one tool in your toolbox and it's a tool that we want to teach people how to use in a skillful way. There are many misabuses of distraction, but I think we don't want to say distraction is across the board harmful. That's just not how the mind works, right? We have

these different tools. These tools aren't good or bad. They're useful or harmful depending on how and when you use them. Okay, and I wanted to ask you that because I was setting up the next question. There are these buzzwords out there like mindfulness, being present, multitasking that get thrown around a lot at us. I found a fact in your book, Startling. You wrote, we spend one third to one half of our waking life not living in the present. But we have this default state of wanting to live in the present.

Why does this run counter to our biology? So we're not designed to always be focusing on the here and now, and that's a really good thing I would argue. We have this mind that allows us to travel in time. We can go back in time to learn from our experiences to do better in the future. We can go back in time to promote positivity by savoring our conquests and vacations and accomplishments. We can transport ourselves into the future to simulate how we're gonna behave, to plan, to fantasize.

This ability to flexively travel in time in our mind is a veritable superpower of the human condition. There are some evidence that other species can engage in mental time travel to some degree, but not nearly to the extent that we human beings are capable of doing it. Now, it is true that sometimes this mental time travel machine that many of us jump into throughout the day. Sometimes it breaks down. We get stuck like Marty McFly if that reference is resonating with anyone back to the future classic classic movie of the 80s.

Sometimes we go back in time or into the future to deal with something negative and we get stuck there. Now when that that happens, it can be extremely painful. And another thing we know about human beings is the bad stuff stands out in our mind much more powerfully than the good experience. It's bad is stronger than good. That is a finding that we've learned a lot about over the years.

And so when that happens, when you're stuck in the past or the future, the negative past or future, one solution is to refocus on the present. And I think we've gone from recognizing that is one solution for dealing with that predicament, to generalizing and saying, hey, we need to be in the present all the time. That's not what we want to do. And I would add to that that there are actually lots of other things you could do besides refocusing on the present

and being mindful when you're ruminating and worrying. Mindfulness is great. There's tons of data behind it, but it is one tool amidst many others. Okay, and on that topic of mindfulness and how to properly do what you're talking about here, which is concentration. We generally think of concentration as a skill that we're born with rather than a skill. We need to be taught and then cultivate by practicing over time. How do you develop that willpower to control all these flows that are going on in your mind? Well, I think it does go back to where we started the conversation with Walter Michelle's

simple self-control framework of motivation and ability. I think step one is being motivated and recognizing that you can actually control your feelings. If you're not to use your language concentrating, well, you can do that. That is not an obvious idea to everyone. I recently came across a study that indexed people's beliefs about whether they could actually control their emotions. Do you want to guess what the

percentage of people who guessed that they could not control their emotions was? Could not control. I would say it's very low. I would say it's like 15, 18%. 40% of participants in the study, approximately. I believe it was a study of teens, adolescents, judged that they could not control their emotions. If you don't believe that you can control your emotions, then you're not going to take efforts to do so. If you don't believe that you can enhance your emotions, then you're not going to take efforts to do so.

If you don't believe that you can enhance those concentration skills, you're not going to do it. So I think step one is recognizing that it is possible giving people that hope. Hope is powerful as a motivating agent that directs us to take actions to bring our hopes into alignment. And so that's step one, step two then is look learn about tools. What are the skills that are out there when you talk about concentration and free will and agency. That feels very burdensome I think to a lot of people. Oh my god. Like the act of concentrating right that's hard work. We've got to sit down and put our fingers on our temples and massage them as we stare intently to try to figure this out.

And we, in general, like human beings don't like to do things that are effortful. Here's the optimistic upshot of the science, which is this. We've identified many strategies, many tools that people can use to manage emotion. I'll give you some specifics so that to make it concrete. The tools vary in how effortful they are. Some are. Some do take practice and hard work, like meditation, like expressive writing. So writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings for 15, 20 minutes a day for several days. That helps people work through negative experiences. But a lot of the tools that we've learned about are also really simple to use and implement.

And I think that's important because the simpler something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. This is not to say that these are lightweight, flighty tools. There's enormous complexity that has gone into their identification, but the take-home, though, are simple. So here's some examples. There's a category of tools that we call distancing tools. When you are overcome with negative emotions or a specific manifestation of a chatter, being able to step back and weigh in on your situation more objectively, like you would offer counsel to another person or a friend, this can be really helpful for allowing people to reason wisely about their circumstances.

And there are many simple ways to give people distance, to help them distance. One linguistic tool is something we call distance self-talk. Use your name and the second person pronoun you to actually coach yourself through a situation already, than how you can imagine this. One of the things we've shown is that when you use your name and the second person pronoun you, that activates neural networks that allow people to think like they do about other people as compared to ourselves, it switches their perspectives. So that's really easy to do.

We can also do something called temporal distancing when you are struggling with a problem and you have this tendency to zoom in on all its averse to features. Oh my God, how am I possibly going to prepare for this workshop I'm doing next week? This is a true story here. Like, when I think about what I have to do for next Tuesday, I get filled with uncomfortable feelings. But then I say, Ethan, how are you going to feel about that workshop a week after it's done? I'm going to feel great because it's over with.

Or I go back in time, and I think, Ethan, how many other workshops have you had to plan and have any of them ever knock on well? Well, they've all been pretty good, right? So those are ways of getting some distance from the circumstance widening the lens to be more objective. That's just one category.

There are dozens and dozens others of tools out there. A lot of them are really simple to use. Yeah, so it is so interesting, though, how we have this normalcy to see ourselves differently with this distance than we see insights and how we see other people. I think your book does a great job of exploring that, and you named a couple of the tools, but they're, I think, a total of seven throughout the book.

I wanted to just ask you, how do we go about maintaining our moral compass and our values when we're measuring our inner voice against our actions? Well, that's a great question. So I think the moral compass is a set of beliefs that we have about how to live a good life, at least in the way I would define it. So how do you know the difference between what's right and wrong? And when you're judging your behavior is giving you a readout on whether you are following that compass or deviating from it. And I think when we detect deviations,

then the challenge is to bring us back on track. And your inner voice can be really helpful in that regard, because your inner voice and your ability to motivate us, we use our inner voice to motivate us and problem solve, when we detect that something's wrong, like, now let's come up with a plan, a solution, to get us back on track. So I think having a moral compass is essential

and the inner voice is a way of keeping it properly tuned to where it should be heading. Okay, and just to follow on that, we all have, I think, this desire to live our purpose. But sometimes, I think we let these inner voices get in the way of finding and living. What would be your advice to someone who's out there saying, I don't have any purpose in my life, I don't know what I'm meant to do. And I think a lot of that has to do with we don't quiet ourselves

to sit with ourselves long enough to deal with it. And these voices build up, but the listeners dealing with this, what would you say to them? It immediately makes me think of Victor Frankl, one of the greats in psychology, who in his book he quotes the famous philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a why to live for can deal with almost any how. And the idea is having that purpose is really essential as a guide. Finding that why, finding that purpose is not always straightforward, but I think you could put yourself in positions to discover it. I think taking the time to reflect on it.

Going for walks in nature for example, free of distractions, there's some wonderful research shown how that can be very helpful for getting you to broaden your perspective and look at that bigger picture in ways that sometimes can be useful for it discovering this, this why. Another tool is to look at your own behavior. We often learn about ourselves by looking at what we do and what brings us down versus energizes us. This has happened to me at several points in my life, actually, one of the ways that I discovered

that psychology was the route I wanted to take in my life was I was at the Crossroads in college. I was majoring in a couple of different areas and doing reasonably well. I could have gone in a few different directions. And I began to think that I used to do this thing. I would study in the bookstore on my college's campus and work really hard. I constantly, and then I take a break. And when I take a break from studying, I'd always just find myself going over to

the psychology section of the bookstore and thumbing through all the psychology books. And that was the break. And then I'd be walking to the bookstore and thumbing through all the psychology books and that was the break and then I'd be Walking to the bars and parties with my friends would be 11 30 on a Saturday night I'd be talking to them about what I learned in class or what I was thinking about like Maslow and Self-actualization and this and that and my friends would maybe looking me and What's the hacker you talking about? 11 30 on a Saturday night? We should be talking about other things. I chuckled and I I suppressed. But the insight that I had

back then was, Hey, if I'm spending my spare time thinking about these things and finding the sheer process of thinking about psychology, energizing and exciting, then maybe I should get paid to do this. Maybe this should become my career. Maybe I should spend my work hours energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, and that rule has always served me really well. So stopping to think what actually brings you and meaning and then really not overthinking it, just continuing to do more of that, that would be another piece of advice. Okay, and I always like to end interviews by asking the author if there was one thing

the audience where the reader should take away from the book or you would hope they would take away from the book, what would it be? Should take away from the book or you would hope they would take away from the book? What would it be? That Well, I'm gonna give you a part A, B, and C. The take-homes are if you experience chatter Welcome to the human condition and know that there are many tools that you can use to manage it more effectively So a value yourself of those tools and share them with others so that we work not only to help ourselves, but those around us to deal with this pernicious issue. Okay, well, Ethan, if a listener would like to know more about you and your research, what's the best way for them to my website, www.ethancrosswithacaros.com.

There's information about me, my lab, our research, my book, and a bunch of other goodies on there. So please check it out. And if you're a youngster looking, we're to go to college. I know where they have the top ranked psychology department. Come on down to Wolverine Country. We would love to have you here. Well, Ethan, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was an honor to have you. And your book is incredible. I highly encourage the listeners to get a copy of it. We just covered

a small aspect of it, but thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John, it was a true delight. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Ethan Cross. I wanted to thank Ethan, the University of Michigan, Sarah Bervogal and Penguin wanted to thank Ethan, the University of Michigan, Sarah Bervogal, and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having him here today on the PassionStruck podcast. Links to all things Ethan will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the authors that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and keeping it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube, both at John Armiles,

as well as PassionStruck Clips. Please check both of them out and subscribe if you haven't already. Advertiser deals and discount codes in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Armiles on both Twitter and Instagram. And you're about to hear a preview

of the PassionStruck podcast episode I did with Drew Plocken, who is Emmy-nominated and founder of the launch DRTV Agency, where he has created and directed award-winning TV broadcast commercials for major celebrities including Jennifer Lopez, Serena Williams, Cindy Crawford, Ellen Pompeo, Dwayne Wade, Kristen Davis, Jane Seymour, Harris Hilton, Drew Breeze, and many more. In addition, he is the founder and chief dood officer. Yes, you heard that correctly. Of the skincare line, Derm Dude,

which produces products specifically for men's beards, balls, and tattoos. There's a sequential benefit to it is knowing when to go all in. And in life, there are times where you need to hit the gas and you have to stop thinking about, well, I'm on a losing streak. Well, this just happened.

Well, I had some bad luck the last few days, the last few weeks. It's easy to get into a rut for a slum. But the way to break out of that is that when you see a ray of light, man, hit the gas and go, don't drown it. The fee for this show is that you share it with family and friends. When you find something useful or interesting,

if you know someone who can take inspiration from the interview I just did with Ethan Frost, please share this with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life Ash and Str about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life Ash and Stroke.

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