Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 365: The Voice in Your Head | Ethan Kross

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

The craving, complaining, and comparing voice in our heads can be the source of incalculable suffering, but is it all bad? And are there ways to talk to yourself that can turn your inner voice into a powerful ally?  Ethan Kross is a Professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business and the author of the new book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It.  In this conversation, we talk about why we have voices inside our head, how they can be either a blessing or a curse, how to access your inner coach rather than your inner critic, how changing our outer environment can impact your inner environment, and how you can use the much-maligned social media for support. Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ethan-kross-365  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, we got a good one for you today. I got a lot out of this conversation. Actually I've been using some of the suggestions from my guest in my own mind in the subsequent days and weeks since we first recorded this and it's been very, very helpful.

Anyway, so what am I talking about here? I'm talking about the craving, complaining, comparing voice in our heads that can, to state, the obvious B, the source of incalculable suffering. But here's a provocative question, is that voice all bad? And are there ways to talk to yourself that can turn your inner voice into a powerful ally? My guest today has a ton of research-backed strategies for inner counter-programming, and he has actually personally done a lot of this research. And as I said earlier, many of these strategies

I have found personally to be deeply helpful. Ethan Cross is a professor in the University of Michigan's top ranked psychology department and its Ross School of Business. He's also the author of a pretty new book called Chatter. The subtitle is The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harnasit. I was very flattered when I learned that Ethan had used a line from one of my books,

10% happier, as one of the epigraphs in his book, The Line He Chose, was, The Voice in My Head is an expletive that begins with the letter A. In this conversation, we talk about why we have voices in our heads, how these voices can either be blessings or curses, in other words, that they're not always exploatives that begin with A, how to access your inner coach rather than your inner critic, why mental time travel can actually be very helpful, not withstanding the emphasis in the meditation world on staying in the now. the power of rituals and lucky charms. I was kind of surprised to hear a scientist talk about that.

How changing your outer environment can impact your inner environment, how you can help other people with their chatter, and how you can use the much-maligned social media world for support. Before we dive in here, a little item of business as you're about to hear, Ethan and I are going to talk a lot about how the voice in our head can actually be a blessing. But of course, this process of harnessing the inner critic and transforming it into an inner coach can be a difficult one. As you may remember this past January during our New Year's challenge, we ran a

whole series that helped you do just that. We took a fresh look at the admittedly, at least for some of us somewhat gooey notion of self-love and explained exactly how to meet your self-identified failings with compassion rather than shame and self-loathing. The sessions from the New Year's Challenge are actually now available to subscribers on the 10% happier app in the Courses tab. So go download the app today to check out the sessions and practice disarming your inner critic. For more now on that very same subject, and I should say he adds a lot that we haven't really covered before in TPH World, so he's going to add a lot of value here. Here we go now with Ethan Cross. Ethan Cross, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Me too. Why do we have this voice in our heads? What, can we blame evolution? And what was evolution thinking? What was natural selection thinking to the extent that natural selection thinks at all when it

But Quique does this racing mind we can point evolution But whether we blame evolution or thank it I think is an open question And I'd like to suggest that we should thank evolution not blame it And so the reason for that is this voice in our head although we often describe it as a terrible nuisance. Some people have been known to use explotives even when describing the voice in their head. I don't know if you've heard of those folks. But if we take a few steps back and think about what we're

talking about, when we talk about this voice, we're talking about our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And that capacity distinguishes us from all other species. And it provides us with a remarkable set of tools. And so just to give you a couple of examples of what this voice in our head allows us to do, in the most basic sense, it allows us to keep a nugget of verbal information active in our heads. So you are the grocery store and you need to remember what you have to buy. G-stick, yogurt, eggs. I'm projecting here, by the way. When I articulate that in my mind, not out loud, but silently, that's the voice in my head allowing me to do that.

The voice in our head is part of what we call our our verbal working memory system. It's a very basic system in the human mind that is absolutely essential for us to live the kind of lives that we normally do. So that's one thing that the voice in our head lets us do. It also lets us do other things like simulate and plan. So before I give a presentation, I'll often go for a walk around the neighborhood or a bike ride. And I'll simulate what I'm going to say on that stage the next day in my head. I'll go through all the talking points. I'll get to the end. And then because I have maybe some

masochistic tendencies, I'll even imagine the worst possible thing that a person in the audience can ask me, and then I'll simulate how I'm going to respond. That's the voice in my head. For me, that ability to simulate is critical to me doing the kind of job that I hope to do, which is a good one. And then finally, the voice in our head helps us make sense of who we are. So when bad things happen, we experience loss or adversity, we often turn our attention inward to try to make sense of what we're going through to try to create

a story or a narrative to explain our circumstances. And we use the voice in our head to help us do that. So I think this voice in our head is really a remarkable tool with the caveat that it often can conspire against us. So often when we do try to use this tool to help us live our life. So we experience something bad, we turn our attention and we try to tell a story, we often get stuck ruminating and worrying and catastrophizing, which are not particularly nice mental states. And that's an example of when the tool is no longer serving as well, and the question becomes, what do we do when we find ourselves in those circumstances?

So I don't think it is a curse of evolution. I think it's a blessing that can sometimes morph into a curse. And the real challenge we face as a species is to figure out how do we harness this tool to make it work for us rather than against us. I think it makes a lot of sense, not withstanding my prominent use of expletives to describe the voice in my head. It is a blessing, but it can be a curse. Do you think of it as one voice in our heads or that we all have multiple voices different modes we can go into because I know there are schools of thought in psychology that we have many voices might have a jealous voice and angry voice, the generous voice. And this is a healthy mind, not some sort of mental illness. sort of mental illness. Yes, that's right. I mean, this is a healthy mind and a mind in all its glory. It's a flexible mind. That's capable of having us hear different messages.

So some people can hear that critical voice. And that's often what people bemoan. Oh, my God, I'm being so hard on myself. We could also be a coach ourselves. We could be supportive. Sometimes, you know, when I'm struggling with a bit of warrior anxiety, I'll often hear my high school wrestling coach give me a directive, call me by my nickname, and tell me I can do it. And actually, we could actually hear and simulate other people's voices as well. So I can hear my mom or my dad. I mean, can you, I would throw that back to you. Is it easy for you if you just, you know, you want to hear your mom say something? Can you actually hear her voice in your head? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's totally normal. The divide between normalcy and abnormalcy, or, you know, healthy functioning and less healthy functioning, is when we hear different voices, and we don't realize that they're coming from our own mind. We think that these voices are being implanted by other organizations or beings or my mom is literally in my head. That's when we get into the domain of psychopathology. But if you can hear different voices,

the angry, the confident, the mom, the dad, you know, welcome to the beauty of the human mind and the human condition. So you you talked before about how this voice in our head or as we've now sort of complicated it usually voices this system, this mind is a blessing, but it can be a curse and it really comes down to how do you harness the voice or voices? How do you access the inner coach as opposed to the intercritic? Because I think many of us are quite familiar with the letter. Well, you know, that's the question that I've been interested in that for over 20 years and studying it for that on.

And the first message I think that's important to convey is there's no single tool that works for all people in all situations. What we've learned is that there are multiple tools that people can use to harness this voice, make it more supportive, less critical, and dysfunctional. In my book, I talked about 26 different tools. So there really is quite a variety. And one of the things that we're learning is that the people who do best in managing

their chatter, their worry, their rumination, are the people who are skilled at using combinations of healthy tools. Not just one, but combinations like having these cocktails that serve them, non-alcoholic. As cheesy as that sounds, I do need to give the disclaimer because some people resort to alcohol to do this and that's an unhealthy tool. I like to break it down. These tools is falling into three buckets. There are things you could do on your own. There are ways of harnessing your relationships with other people. And then, and I find this last bucket truly fascinating. There are ways of interacting with your physical spaces, the world around us, that can be useful for managing the conversation that we're having inside ourselves. So if we go back to the first bucket, one of the things we know

is that when people are experiencing chatter, they often get stuck in this tunnel vision. They zoom in on the problem. What's happening, how am I feeling? When they zoom in so narrowly, it often becomes difficult for them to think about what they're going through that might make them feel better. One of the things we've learned is that one one antidote to chatter is to help people step back, to distance themselves so that they could focus on their experience more objectively, to get some mental space from the event. And there are lots of ways that people can do this.

This idea is certainly prevalent in many forms of mindfulness and meditation, being that kind of observing mind. But there are other modalities that allow people to activate this distancing that don't involve meditation. So let me tell you about two. These also happen to be two tools that I personally rely on quite a bit. One tool is something called distance self-talk.

And what it involves doing is silently coaching ourselves through a problem like we would give advice to another person and to actually use language to help us do that. And what I mean by that is use your own name and the second person pronoun you, when you're struggling with chatter to try to work through it already,

then how are you gonna manage this situation? One of the things we know from lots of research is that we are much better at advising other people than we are taking our own advice. And what distance self-talk does, is it uses language to shift our perspective, to get us to relate to ourselves like we were communicating with another person,

which thrusts us into this coaching mode. And we've didn't research on this, and it's really amazing when you look at, when you ask people what's going through their head, when they're trying to work through a problem in the first person, I mean, they're saying things to themselves that they would never say to another person. Like when you're thrust in chatter and you're going down the dark side, I mean, would you ever say to your wife or your friend what you are thinking and saying to yourself,

that's a question to you. No, definitely not. Well, maybe on my worst day, but no, generally not. Right, we don't say those things. When a friend comes to us with a problem, we are supportive, we are their coach and what we see happening is when you start using your name that puts you into that mode of responding.

Why does that work? Why does that work so quickly? If you think about when we use names, most of the time that we use names, we use names and second person pronouns and we think about and refer to other people. So the linguistic link between those parts of speech and thinking about others is super tight. And so when you use your own name to think about yourself, it puts us into this mode of interacting with ourselves like we were our own friend. So that's one thing you could do. Another really easy thing to do that is nonetheless quite effective is something we call

temporal distancing or mental time travel. So if you're really struggling with an acute stressor, think about how you'll feel about it six months from now or a year from now. What jumping into that mental time travel machine allows us to do is Recognize that what we're going through as awful as it is when we think about how things will be in the future or How they were in the past that makes it clear that we're going through right now as awful as it is. It's temporary. It'll eventually pass. And that gives us hope, which can also be pretty useful for when people are dealing with chatter.

We've arrived at that point in the interview where I have a thousand questions and I'm just trying to figure out what order to go in because I want to really unpack some of these practical techniques you just described. But first, just terms of definitions, you've referred to chatter a couple of times. Now chatter is a term of art of yours. It's a specific subgroup of the voice in our head, if I understand correctly. Am I right about that? You've got it. Chatter is the dark side of the inner voice and what it refers to specifically

is getting stuck in a negative thought loop. So, you know, negative thoughts themselves aren't something that we want to avoid or rid ourselves of. Negative emotions really, really useful to be able to experience negative emotion in small doses. They are elegantly adaptive. Like if a child can't experience pain, if a child doesn't know to pull their hand away from a stove when

their hand is being burned, that's not good for them. The ability to experience a little bit of anxiety, anger, that's useful. When it gets not useful or maladaptive is when we persevering on these negative experiences over and over and over again. And that's what chatter is. In technical terms, when we're experiencing chatter about the past, that's rumination, when it's chatter about the future, that's often called worry. The constant theme is this looping over and over again.

So you talked about a couple of ways to knock ourselves out of chatter or nudge ourselves out of chatter might be more gentle verb. The first one was distance self talk. It reminded me of techniques that I've heard described by the researchers and experts in this field of self compassion, including Kristen Neff and Chris Gurmur, who both been on the show and they talk about talking to yourself like a friend, often accompanying it with physical touch, you know, for me, just kind of pat my chest. And I don't necessarily refer to myself as Dan, but I may refer to myself as Dude. Does what I'm describing square with what

you're recommending? It does. There's a lot of overlap. Dude, E-man, that's one of my high school nicknames that I'll sometimes use. All of those give us some psychological space, and they involve using language to help us do that. Now, when we do studies on this, we often put, bring people into the lab and put them in really stressful conditions and then have them try to work through their stress in the first person or using their name. And then we'll, we'll get them to say out loud what, what's going through their heads. People are in a coach mode for sure when they're

using their name, but it's not always super soothing in the way that my wife might be soothing to me after I put my foot in my mouth at a cocktail party. All right. So sometimes it's like, get your act together, stop this nonsense, and do your job. You've done it before. So pretty sure, I mean, kind of like my wrestling coach, right? And so there's variability in the tonality to how we coach ourselves through a problem. And I think that's an important point to convey.

We want to be absolutely compassionate with ourselves and treat ourselves with the same kind of dignity that we treat others. But there's variability in how that can manifest. And it doesn't always take the form of, it's gonna be okay, at least not in our studies. But otherwise, yeah, it squares away really well. The touching part, touch is a powerful tool. It's probably the most primitive tool

that we have for soothing, soothing others, right? When babies are born into the world, skin to skin contact, we hold them. The studies have looked at what's the motion on the skin of affection, attention, there's like this kind of gentle caressing motion that characterizes it. That activates a stress-fighting response in the body. So you have an automatic release of various stress-fighting chemicals that can help alleviate the chatter. I typically think about that as a form of, it is falling into that second bucket of tools, the people tools that exist.

I think touch is one kind of tool that involves relationships. If my wife is really struggling with chatter, me going over to her and putting my hand on her back, and saying, how's it going? That's a useful way of me helping her with her chatter. I haven't thought about in the context of the self-touching, which is interesting to see if that those findings would generalize there. My sense and I'm guessing, and Kristen or Chris can wrap me, so I was going to leave

they what, but my guess is that they would say tough love is still love. And that it's totally a co-shawery within their worldview to speak like a coach who still wants the best for you, but might need to jar you out of whatever rut you in with a little bit more intensity. Yeah, that then squares beautifully with this linguistic tool. What I think is neat about focusing on the linguistic element of it, use your name, the pronoun you or your favorite nickname is it's a nudge. It works really quickly that you can rely on in a crotch, right?

So rather than having to adopt the mindset, all right, let me try to coach myself through this, like I was talking to my buddy. You just use your name and it instantly gets you to that point. So it's a way of intervening with precision as soon as the chatter strikes. It gets you to the point of seeing the chatter for what it is as chatter. And putting you into that coach mode right away. So I already, you know, people often ask me, hey, you study chatter. Have you ever experienced it? You know, I pause.

I'm like, yeah, I've experienced it. And what I've told them is, knowing about these different tools that exist doesn't rid you from experiencing chatter. It's often hard to predict when it's going to happen. But what knowing about these different tools does allow you to do is be a lot more deliberate about how you engage with the chatter. And for me and others,

it has allowed me to nip it in the bud much more quickly than if I just waited to stumble on different ways of making myself feel better if I didn't know about these science-based tools. Just a bit of a digression here on the on coach mode. Coach mode feels good and it feels good to me at least internally and externally. And I just wonder whether maybe we're now into your second bucket here. But in recent years, I've tried to make it a practice to make myself more available to other people to coach them to the extent that I have anything useful to say. You do. It's occasionally episodically, but I have noticed that that is actually really enlightened self-interest because the more my mind is in coach mode, either vis-a-vis

my own chatter or vis-a-vis somebody else's chatter, the balmy or the weather internally. Does that make sense to you? Is there any research to back this up or do you think I'm just pulling stuff out of my rear here? No, not at all. Two findings come to mind. The first is, there's a lot of evidence showing that one of the best ways to make ourselves feel better is to make other people feel better. So helping others helps ourselves. And so if you're being a good advisor or coach or you know friend to someone else and really constructively helping them work through their chatter, being a mentor, the science would suggest that shouldn't just help that other person, but it should actually help you as well because by building them up that has these reverberating effects for

yourself. So that's one element of it. There's another element which is there's some research which shows that giving advice to other people helps us with our own problems, right? For very similar reasons that we talked about before, distance self-talk, like, you know, let's say a buddy comes to me with a problem and here I give them advice and maybe I'm dealing with a very similar problem at work. Well, look, I just gave them a really objective, thoughtful response without all the muck of the chatter, which would contaminate possibly my own attempt

to help myself, right? So by giving the advice to others, we're still listening to what we're saying to that person. And that's another way that being a good advisor to someone else can feedback to help ourselves. That makes sense. And also, I just noticed that when I'm in coach mode with other people, I'm less self centered, I'm less stuck in my own story, which generally in my experience feels better than less stuck in my own story, which generally in my experience feels better than being stuck in my own story. Well, I think you're talking about distancing, at least in the language that I tend to use to describe these things. And if chatter is all about being totally immersed,

self-centered, right, in the awfulness that is my current predicament, right? If you can broad in your perspective, and there are lots of ways you could do it, talking to other people is another way that should relieve the chatter based on the science. What's interesting though Dan and I'd actually like to maybe turn the tables here and ask you a couple more questions about this because you mentioned that you recently started doing this in the sense of you know you've discovered that talking to others and helping them helps you. Presumably, it helps them too, I would think, right?

We'd like to theoretically. We're etiquette. Well, here's what's really interesting to me. There are lots of beliefs about how we can get help from other people and how we can help others. A lot of the science suggests that many of these common assumptions we have don't actually help other people or ourselves. To make that concrete, a lot of us think that if you're dealing with chatter, find someone to talk to and just let it out.

Venture Emot motions express it. And there's been research which has looked at the consequences of that kind of venting and expression for how we feel. And what we've learned is venting can be really good for strengthening the friendship bonds between two people. Makes us feel closer and connected. It's great to know that I can call you and you're willing to empathically listen and engage with me. And to be clear, that is important to have good friendship on in one's life. But if all you do is vent in a conversation, all you do is express your emotions that doesn't do anything to help us reframe the way we're thinking about the problem.

Doesn't do anything to provide us with solutions or advice that ultimately help us nip that problem in the bud. And so in experiments, people leave these ven sessions and they feel great about the person they've just talked to, but they're fuming over what they just talked about because it's kind of like you're just throwing fuel on the fire. Hey, what happened to you in your last interview? No way. You said that. I can't believe it. What is it? You know, so you're just reactivating the negativity. So the best kinds of conversations when it comes to chatter actually do two things. One, we do want to vent a little bit. It is important for the other person we're talking to to be able to understand what we're going through, what happened to us

to establish those empathic connections. But at a certain point in the conversation, they ideally nudge you to broaden your perspective to think about that bigger picture. Hey, it was one crappy interview. You've done thousands of interviews and succeeded. Next one's going to be fine. Or, you know, here's what I do when I have a bad interview. So anything to kind of broaden that perspective to help the person reframe. That's the two step process to getting

good support from others. And on the flip side, being a better chatter advisor to other people in our lives. Yeah, I mean, that two step makes a lot of sense to me. And the mistake that I was making interestingly, and I don't think this is uncommon, is when I was talking to other people, I would sometimes not let the vent and go on long enough, and I would rush to solutions because I was trying to alleviate my own pain, because the other person would be making me anxious, and I didn't want that, so I'd be trying to put out the fire

and make them feel better, but also make myself feel better. It seems like what I've learned over time is to really validate whatever's going on for people and make sure that they feel heard or seen or whatever. Then move to, okay, well, can we contextualize this? Can we think about what the ways to move forward might be? That's exactly right. And there's an art to doing this, right? Because the amount of time a person needs to vent

is gonna depend on the person, and it's gonna depend on the nature of the situation that they're experiencing chatter about. So you've gotta feel it out. And so when I'm talking to people, if they're coming to me for support, I'll listen, I'll let them go. I'll ask them questions. Hey, you want to keep going? Or can I ask you, can I, can I, can I suggest something else? Or either way, it's fine by me. And sometimes I say, I just want to keep talking, you know, just, yes, just listen.

And other times you have, please give me advice. That's why I'm here for support. So I think knowing about the structure of this, this two-step process, validate and broaden, that gives us a bit of a blueprint for how to enter into these conversations, and then you can adjust based on who you're talking to and what they're dealing with, with how long you stay in each stage. So I think that's one way you can use the science in your life. The other way and the other important I think take them that comes out of this element of a conversation is knowing about these principles, it allows us to be deliberate about who we go to for support when it comes to our chatter. I often joke, but I'm actually being serious, that there are many people in my life

who love me dearly, and I love them dearly. And I know this with certainty. Lots of people who really, they want to be there for me, but I know that if I go and talk to them about my chatter, all they're going to do is rev me up, because they're going to keep me in that venting mode. And so when I leave that conversation, I'm not going to be experiencing last chatter. In fact, I'm going to be predisposed to experience more. So I'm really deliberate about who I go to for support. Right? There are like three people I go to in my personal life, four people I go to for work-related

issues. And that's like, that's my board. And I use that board of advisors quite a bit. And they in turn use me. And so again, it's about being deliberate using the science to be more deliberate about how we try to harness the chatter in our lives. And if memory serves in your book, you recommend that we all set up boards. Yeah, think about what do boards do for companies, boards of advisors? They're there. You've carefully selected individuals who have the expertise to guide this company to success, and you rely on that board during hard difficult times. And, you know, I think that's we would all benefit from

having a personal board of advisors that we can rely on when we're experiencing difficult times. There's certainly enough data to back up the value that having the right kinds of social relationships can have for our health. Early on, you mentioned that we're going to go through several buckets here when it comes to harnessing in a healthy way, the voices in our head and minimizing chatter, which is the dark side of the voice. And the first bucket was individual techniques. The second is techniques that involve other people. And the third was techniques that involve your environment around you.

We haven't even sort of dipped our toe in the third bucket. But I want to go back to the first bucket for a second because a while ago you talked about mental time travel. I think it'd be interesting for this audience because a lot of the folks who listen to this show are interested in meditation and in meditation there's a way in which you can get the idea that if you're not in the present moment always you're misbehaving as a meditator. But your argument is okay, sure, yes, being in the present moment, which is what mindfulness requires, you know, being able to step out of whatever thought urge emotion is

flitting across your consciousness right now. Yes, that can have lots of salutary effects, but there are ways to harness the thinking mind to travel forward and backwards that don't involve the pitfall of remination or anxiety and really do involve providing a broader context that might knock us out of chatter. Please tell me if I've stepped out of accuracy there. No, you've stepped into accuracy, and I'm so glad you brought this up because being in the moment can be great as you suggested. And there's a wealth of data suggesting that mindfulness and

that meditations that focus on doing that can have real value. Just as an aside, I think of meditation mindfulness as one kind of tool that can be very helpful when it comes to chatter, but there are lots of other tools that exist as well. And I think if we want to give people the best shot at managing their chatter effectively in their lives. You really want to give them the whole toolbox, right? Not just one. So, let's talk about time.

The human mind did not evolve to always be in the present. We are mental time travelers. We spend most of our time not in fact being in the present, going back and forth in time. And there are lots of wonderful things that being able to being in the present, going back and forth in time. And there are lots of wonderful things that being able to travel in time can do for us. We can learn from our past. We can save our past conquests and victories. Makes it sound like I'm a gangus con here, you know, conquering the world. But you know, like a presentation that went really well, or like my my daughter, like scoring two goals last weekend in the soccer know, like a presentation that went really well or like my, my daughter, like scoring

two goals last weekend in the soccer game, like, savoring those moments, like, that's the source of enormous satisfaction, right? Like, there's research which shows that if you want to really boost people's happiness, have them focus on experiences, spend money on experiences, go on a great, fun vacation with your family. And part of the reason for that is unlike a watch whose value quickly wears off, you could think about those amazing moments you've had with your family throughout your life and it gives you joy. So traveling in time like into the past can be really

helpful. Going into the future likewise. Like, you know, I'm going to guess that you often prepare for your interviews with other people. You think really carefully about what you're going to say and you do the kinds of simulations that I talked about earlier, right, that are in a voice helps us to, right? You think, what if I say this and they say, I mean, do you do that? I will make it less than you might say. Now you're making me feel bad because I'm doing it too much. So I'm a rookie here. But at times you've probably done it, yeah? Yes, of course.

And for conversations too. And for conversations. So, we're traveling in time. We're using our mind in all its glory, so to speak. What we've learned is we can get stuck when we're traveling in time. We could get stuck in the past or stuck in the future, you know, when we're traveling in time. We could get stuck in the past or stuck in the future. You know, when we're worried or ruminating, one solution to that is to bring us back to the moment. But what we also know is that there are ways of just making us better mental time travelers. And that's what I think a lot of these tools let us do. They let us go back in time into territories that

might otherwise be sticky, right? That might otherwise lead us to ruminate, but some of these tools allow us to grapple with those past or future experiences more effectively in ways that don't lead us to spiral. So I don't think we should always be in the moment. I think we want to be strategic about when we're in the moment. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it's hard to be in the moment and we are not programmed to be in the moment. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it's hard to be in the moment and we are not programmed to be in the moment that much and I think that is to our detriment. And

so it is worth training up the skill of being in the moment because there is some evidence that we are often happier when we are paying attention to what's happening right now as opposed to stuck in fretful projection or rumination about the past. The second thing I'd say is it seems to me that there's a Buddhist analog to what you're describing here about traveling back in time to think about when Eman scored that lacrosse goal or whatever it is. You pass triumphs, pass glories, or your daughter scores some goals in a soccer game

that that can ease the mind right now. The Buddhist analog is sometimes referred to as contemplating your seala. Seala is ancient words spelled S-I-L-A in English, and it just basically means ethical context. So contemplating your seala is something a teacher, a Buddhist teacher might tell you to do, meaning thinking about the good things you've done.

That is not being in the moment. That is using mental time travel to savor your capacity to not be a schmuck. And I don't do that enough because I can easily run a story about what a rotten person I am, I've been running it for a long time. And it can land for some people as either a solid statistic or like contemplating your sealo, wow, I haven't done anything good. This is going to be some sort of punishment. But in fact, I think there's a lot to recommend this technique. Anyway, I said a lot there. Does any of that land with you? Yeah, I think, you know, what you're describing is the nuance that exists in Buddhist philosophy

and many of these Eastern philosophical traditions that is sometimes lost in its translation for mass consumption. When I talk to people in the Buddhist philosophical world or Eastern philosophical world, the ideas that I'm talking about aren't typically thought of as heretical, but instead very much compatible with these traditions, but the message is often conveyed to people in society as be in the moment all the time.

And that is a gross oversimplification, I think, of these very sophisticated practices, which have multiple components to them as well. No, no, no, what you're saying is heretical to me, at least. Yeah, well, that's good. It keeps the conversation a little bit more pleasant. One other thing that, you know, just as like a general framework that I often use when thinking about how to help

people harness their mind is, let's work with the machine, not against it. You know, the mind was set up to travel in time, right? Served as well. So let's figure out how to make us better at doing that, rather than work entirely against it, which I do think if you told someone to always be in the moment, first of all, it's impossible. Maybe if you've gotten to, I forget the terms, cosmic consciousness,

or totally bootlevel enlightenment, it's possible. I haven't met anyone who's always in the moment. Although I do know some children who are always in the moment, it doesn't do much for them or their parents. I've got some cats who are always in the moment too, yes. But it usually involves scooting across the carpet. But you just said it, you've got a cat that's always in the moment, right?

We're not cats, even though I might get more loved if I was a cat, because many people in my family love cats sometimes seemingly more than me, but we're not built to be in the moment. And that's what allows us to build spaceships, right? And land rovers on Mars, right? Forward thinking. Much more of my conversation with Ethan Cross,

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So we're sloshing around still in bucket number one of techniques that an individual could use to nudge oneself out of chatter. And so let's stay here for a second. There are a few others under list. Another is to reframe your experience as a challenge. What does that look like? So typically when you put a person in a situation involving the potential for social stress, anxiety, we ask ourselves two kinds of questions.

What's required of me, and can I do it? If you ask yourself those questions, we do it automatically. And you say, nope, not possible. That elicits what we call a threat response. That has a biological manifestation. Your heart starts beating blood out of it really fast. And your vasculature, your arteries and veins, they start

Constricting so more blood going into a smaller space not good for The operation of your body and it elicits all sorts of ways of thinking about your circumstances that are counterproductive and Disructive like oh my god. I'm never going to be able to do this you suck inner critic mode and so forth Oh my God, I'm never going to be able to do this. You suck inner critic mode and so forth. You can take the same person in the same situation, though. And you can have them answer those questions differently. What's required of me? Can I do it?

Yeah, I can do this. People who generate those kinds of, we call those appraisals of the situations they're in, we call that a challenge response. What happens when you're in a challenge mode, your heart starts beating blood just as fast, but your arteries start relaxing. So there's more room for the blood to flow. You perform better under stress and you feel better. And so it's a slight switch in how you're framing the situation that can make a huge difference. in how you're framing the situation that can make a huge difference. And it's not totally unrelated to what we talked about before,

the coaching yourself like your friend. I'll give you an example. A couple of weeks ago, I had to do reasonably high stakes presentation for me. And the organizers, I mean, it was like I was a subject in my own experiment. They kept on changing the rules on me. One minute, I mean, it was like I was a subject in my own experiment. They kept on changing the rules on me. One minute, one minute, it was record this in advance. The next minute is do it live. No, we want you to do it in advance.

And they kept on switching it like four times. Next thing I know, it's like T minus 30 minutes, and I'm so not sure of what I've got to do. And, you know, I started going a little bit into chatter mode. Oh my God, this is crazy. I'm not even sad and blah, blah. And then I step back at Ethan. You've literally given probably close to a thousand presentations.

You've never screwed one up. You're gonna do it. It basically put me into that challenge mode and the presentation as far as I know one pretty well. So we often help other people, right? We act as an agent that helps other people reframe their circumstances. They come to us in threat mode and we give them the advice to flip the switch and put them into challenge mode, but we can do that for ourselves as well. It's almost like the practice of psychological jujitsu, like very, very subtle shifts in how we're thinking about things that do change our perspective in ways that can really be

quite constructive. And so sometimes I'm in threat mode and then I make the conscious effort to switch into challenge mode. So I'll do it for myself. And then because sometimes I want to like double dosage of challenge mode, I'll call a buddy and who I know will also help me put me into challenge mode. And then there are these compounding effects that we see happen when you start activating multiple tools from your toolbox.

Let me just keep going in your toolbox here and the first bucket of individual practices. I'll list three in a row and you can pick all of them or pick one of them, but these I found these just a little bit surprising. One is to write expressively. The other is to clutch a lucky charm or engage in a superstition and the final one is to perform a ritual. Yeah. So, but hold forth, please. Yes. Rituals are fascinating. Our cultures have been giving us rituals likely since we've been a part of a culture to deal with adversity. If you think about when people die, our institutions, our cultural institutions, they give us rituals to manage that adversity, right?

So different kinds of morning periods and practices that often differ quite a bit, but nonetheless help people feel good. Many people reflexively turn to engaging in their own idiosyncratic rituals when they're under stress. There are these studies of looking at people who are in war conditions. And you see elevations of engagement in rituals when you're under threat of attack. So what's going on? What does a science have to say?

One of the things we know about chatter is that when you're experiencing it, it often feels like you don't have control over your circumstances. Our mind is controlling us. It's controlling us in ways that we don't like. We're feeling bad. We can't stop thinking this way. And that's really disorienting. What we've learned is you can compensate for that experience of a lack of control by exerting control on your surroundings. And so this to some extent bleeds into our third bucket, too, of our environment.

But what a ritual is, our ritual is a rigid sequence of behaviors. You do it the exact same way every single time. It's a very structured control progression. Rafi Al-Nadal, he's been known to engage in these rituals on the tennis court before every serve. And he does some really wacky elaborate ones like he'll like, you know, before a serve, he'll take his hair and like put it behind his ear and then pick his wedgie out of his butt a few times and

then it'll bounce about. Always exactly the same way. And when asked why he does it, he says, I know I engage in these kinds of rituals to provide me with the order in my head that I'm missing. And so, so a ritual can be quite effective for helping people with chatter. Now, there is, of course, a caveat here. You don't want to take it to an extreme, as is sometimes done with certain forms of anxiety, like obsessive compulsive disorder, but rituals and the appropriate dosage can be quite helpful. Yeah, I've developed a little ritual that I do this little checklist in my mind of every time. I in the 30 seconds before I anchor Good Morning America, as to the little cheesy, but these kind of three Ps preparation. In other words, have I done my

research? Have I checked all the scripts? So I know I'm about to say, presentation is my a little cheesy, but these kind of three P's, preparation. In other words, have I done my research and have I checked all the scripts so I know I'm about to say, presentation is my tie straight and presence. Meaning, can I drop all of those concerns and just react to what is happening now so I can be spontaneous with my co-hosts or whoever I'm interviewing?

And I found that just running through that very quickly right before I go in the air is really, really helpful. I have my own little personal ritual that I do, you know, right before I give a presentation as well. Like I say the same thing to myself every time and it really helps me. It's a way of essentially regulating what's happening inside your head

by doing something typically on the outside, by something very rigid and structured the same way each time. That gives us a sense of control and human beings are just, we're thirsty for control. We like things to be ordered and tidy and predictable, and rituals give us that. So that's one way that a ritual can help us. So now you asked about lucky charms also. So what's going on over there? You help us. So now you asked about lucky charms also. So what's going on over there? You know, lucky charms, what we're dealing with there

from the science point of view is the placebo effect, the power of expectation. And essentially what we've learned is that if you believe something is going to make you feel better, that activates a set of psychological and neural processes that often bring that outcome to fruition. There's a ton of data on the benefits of placebo, so people are suffering from mild to moderate forms of depression. If you give them a sugar pill and you tell them, hey, trust me,

I've been seeing patients for a really long time. You take this pill, it's gonna make you feel better. Just make sure you take it twice a day, every day. People who believe that message end up feeling better over time. And when you then go to lucky charms or things like crystals, what I think those objects are doing is they're capitalizing on the power of the placebo to affect change in people's lives.

There is one thing to keep in mind when it comes to placebos. On the one hand, I think it's a remarkable testament to the power of the mind to control ourselves, but we can also do better than placebos because there are a lot of practices out there that don't really have any active ingredients, right? There's no scientific explanation for why they work, but they are promoted as being able to help people, and a lot of people who engage in those practices awesome report feeling better. And that I think is an example of a giant placebo, right? You're engaging with a person or institution who you really trust and believe. And because you're buying into the message, whatever it is you're taking or

doing, you think that that's making you feel better. So it may be, but not for the reasons you think it is. What about writing expressively? Writing expressively can be can be really great. I think that is another kind of distancing tool. When you write about your deepest thoughts and feelings, you're essentially becoming a character and a story. You're thinking about yourself as someone else, and that makes it a lot easier for us to create this story that usually has a beginning, middle, and end. End is really critical, right? Because what chatter is often defined as is a lack of an end. It's just getting stuck in the cyclical nature

of thinking where you're just pinballing around negativity, but when you write about something negative that's happened to you and create that story, that often gives us closure, which allows us to move on. The writing of memoirs has been really helpful to me. It helped me understand things I didn't understand about my own life, about concepts that were intriguing to me. It puts a lot of order on what can seem like just a morass of events over the course of

years. I know that journaling is helpful for a lot of people. There's one interesting little tidbit I'll throw in there. Takes us back to language and it's relevant to writing and making meaning. There's a way that you can use the word you to refer to people in general that we find is really useful for helping people make meaning in their lives in ways that help with chatter. And once I point this out, I suspect you'll see it all over the place because I do once we started studying this.

So when you get a person, you know, a politician who's done something bad and is doing an interview about reflecting on it and or an athlete who screwed up and is, you know, post game in the locker room doing an interview, you'll often hear them say things like, when you, when you miss a shot, you don't know what to do. You just got to go on. If you stop and think about what they've just said, it's a little puzzling, right? They're using the word you.

A word we typically use to refer to other people, right? It's like verbally pointing a finger. They're using it to refer to their own flub, right? When you screw up, what are you gonna do? We call this the universal you and it's another way that we use language to make meaning. It gives us some space, right? It says, it's not about me we use language to make meaning. It gives us some space, right? It says, it's not about me.

This is about the world. Effectively, when you use that word you and that way, you're saying, when anyone misses a shot, anyone would feel this way. And there's a real comfort that comes from normalizing your experience in that way. And you often see this happening over the course of expressive writing. So people start off in iMode,

and then as they build their stories, they shift into referring to their experiences in those universal terms. And so another little sidebar, geeky sidebar, but there's a tool there that people can nonetheless use. Yeah, to normalize. So let's go into the second bucket now. bar, but there's a tool there that people can nonetheless use to normalize. So let's go into the second bucket now. There are a few other tools here that are more collective than individual.

We talked about rituals, but you say that we can perform rituals with other people. Does that kind of supercharge the whole thing? Yeah, there's, I mean, that's the thought. And we're still doing research on this, but the thought is that the communal element of doing a ritual with someone else can impart supercharge that process by eliciting a sense of awe. So the feeling of awe, this is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast that we have trouble explaining. For me, my last awe experience was watching the Mars Rover land on Mars. It blows my mind. I do not understand how we figured out how to build this SUV embedded in a

spaceship blasted across space. Like we're talking like interplanetary travel. This is mind-blowing to me. We then land it with a helicopter and project images back. My simple mind can't contemplate how we figured out how to do that. And what we know happens when people experience awe, it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self. When you're contemplating something vast and indescribable, like interplanetary travel,

that makes you and your own concerns feel a little bit smaller. And it reduces how immersed we are in our own chatter in ways that can be really helpful. And so you often get these experiences of awe when people are in communal settings. So doing a ritual with lots of other people can activate those feelings in ways that are helpful. You know, rituals, they're a type of cocktail. There are multiple ways that they can benefit us and giving us a sense of order is one, awe is another. The fact that they're also often, intentionally demanding is a third way they work.

So rituals are often complicated and to execute them, you've got to divert your attention away from the chatter and onto the actual ritual. And that can be helpful too. You talk in the book about social media. My understanding is you kind of talk about it as a double-edged sword. I think most of us on the show, we talk about the unpleasant edge of the social media sword,

but you also say there are ways to use social media that can help with your chatter. That's right. I started doing research on social media in our lab about almost 15 years ago, and most of our early work just pointed out the negative consequences of doing so for our chatter, right? You log into Instagram or Facebook.

You see these wonderful experiences of your peers and friends and you feel awful about your own life. And then you continue to think about how much better their lives are than our own, not good. But what we've learned is that social media, it's a new environment and environments aren't good or bad per se. If we use like the physical world as a counterpoint. There are ways of navigating the physical world that can be very harmful for us, right?

You go to the wrong neighborhoods and say the wrong things to the wrong people, big, big trouble. If you go to other places and talk to other people in different ways, you can really benefit, right? So it really depends on how you navigate the space and I think the same is true for social media when it comes to chatter.

There are studies which show that social media provides us with opportunities to get support for our chatter, to get that kind of chatter advice that we simply cannot get in the offline world. By putting out a request for help, you can have thousands of people come to you for assistance, or hundreds or even tens. That's often a lot more than we can get in the physical world if we've got a way to find someone to talk to. So the opportunities to get support via social media are really quite remarkable. In the book, I tell the story of Dan Savage and that it gets better movement. This was a movement several years ago where you had many, many young teens who were struggling with their LGBTQ identity, right? They went

on to social media and there were messages being promoted by lots of people like it gets better. People would tell their stories and other people would chime in like, stick it out, it gets better, it will get better. And that seemed to help lots and lots of people. And so I think there is enormous value that social media can have. The big problem is that up until recently, we haven't really had a playbook for how to navigate social media. We get a playbook for how to navigate our physical worlds very early on in our lives. It's called socialization, right? Our parents teach us how to navigate the world. Here's how you talk to someone. You say, please, and thank you. You don't say this to other people. And those socialization messages are then reinforced by the schools we go to and the organizations we belong to.

So we're constantly getting information from a young age about how to navigate the world successfully. But social media is so new and constantly changing that we haven't really had the time to develop that playbook. So how do you socialize your kids into using Facebook and Instagram and Twitter effectively? The message that I often hear is, I tell them I can't use it, right? That's a pretty blunt intervention tool. So the hope is that as we learn more about what the healthy versus harmful ways of using

these technologies are, we can then use that information to be much more strategic about how we navigate social media. Because it's not going away. So it sounds like the headline thumbnail version of what you're describing for healthy social media usage as it pertains to the chatter would be unhealthy is passive, FOMO inducing Instagram scrolling or passive doom scrolling on Twitter. Healthy would be intentionally seeking out support or intentionally providing support to those who are seeking support. Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. I might throw in cyberbullying and trolling into the

negative bucket too, but you know, we're quibbling there. No, I post down like worthy additions to the negative bucket. Be kind of bucket. Let's talk about the third bucket of techniques for managing our own chatter. We've kind of dipped into this bucket a little bit, but can you just describe what you're talking about in this bucket generally, and then we'll get a little more specific from there? Yeah, we're talking about ways of regulating the conversations that we have on the inside by doing things in the external world, the world around us. So engaging with our physical spaces in specific ways that have implications for

our experience of chatter. And there are a couple of things that people can do, and we have touched on them already. One is organizing and tidying up. But when I found myself experiencing blips of chatter when working on the book, I would start putting everything away. I'd clean up my office and I'd go into the kitchen and I wash the dishes and I'd scrub down the island and put everything very nice neatly away. And I liked to joke that at one point, I used to think that my wife was hoping that I would experience a little bit of chatter. You know, when it was going pretty well, because she was so happy with how good the house looked. So, many people do this when they're stressed out, when they're experiencing chat, or they organize.

And what the research shows is that this actually serves a regulatory function. And it does so through that same pathway that rituals do, right? You're ordering your surroundings. And that gives you a sense of control. Like, I have control over what is going on in my physical world. That enhances this sense of control that we know is often lacking when we're experiencing chatter. So again, that's one very simple, easy thing you can do.

Another tool that involves the environment, involves increasing our exposure to green spaces. There's been a ton of work on this, and as anyone who has experienced chatter knows, it can be all-consuming, right? All of your attention is focused on the thing you're ruminating or worrying about. And that can be really problematic

when it comes to our lives because we need our attention to do things like our jobs or be good listeners to our partners and kids. And so if all your attention is on your chatter and not on those things, big problems in suit. The way nature exposure, green space exposure factors into all of this is We've learned that when you go for a walk in a safe green space I always feel the need to say safe because where I grew up in Brooklyn parks were not safe So it was actually they had the opposite association you had to be vigilant for getting mugged But if you find a park nearby or a tree line street

that is safe and you can let your guard down, what happens is our attention gently drifts onto the very interesting natural surroundings, the leaves, the flowers, the hedges, and those interesting surroundings, even the noises of nature, the crickets chirping at night, our tension is grasped by those objects, but in a very gentle way, right?

But it's, huh, that's interesting. And that allows us to essentially recharge our attention that was previously depleted from all the chatter. And interestingly, there's research which shows that even if you can't get out in nature, like watching a movie of a natural, like, you know, one of these Natgeo movies that are immersive can be really useful too. So, so that's one way that nature can help. The other way that nature helps is by providing us opportunities to experience all. And a lot of the triggers that we have for experiencing all are found in nature. So like an amazing sunset or looking

at, you know, a tree that's been here for hundreds of years and whether it all these storms or the beauty of these flowers. And so a lot of, there are a lot of all triggers waiting to be activated. This has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot and it's really been helpful. Did I miss anything? Did I fail to take us somewhere I should have? There's only one other tidbit that we might want to take a 120 second detour to hit. What we talked about earlier involving the two steps of getting help when we're dealing with chatter, finding someone who can validate and then broaden your perspective. That pertains to situations in which a person is explicitly coming to you for support.

They want help with their chatter. There are lots of instances in which we see people we know and love who are struggling with chatter, but they haven't necessarily asked us for help. And the question is, is do you volunteer it or do you do nothing? Research shows that if you volunteer support in those circumstances, just get ready for what might happen after you do because that can often elicit a defensive reaction from other people. And this is something that is very familiar to parents. I've got two young kids and sometimes I don't follow the science and I'm a human, forgive me.

And like I'll see my daughter struggling with her homework and I'll go over and, hey, let me kind of show you how to do this. I teach for, no, I teach, I know how to do this stuff. And like instantly it's, I ask you for help. Do you not think I know how to do this? And essentially what happens there, and you see this happening in lots of different situations between partners, older parents and kids,

when advice is volunteered without being asked for, it can threaten a person's sense of self-efficacy, the idea that we are capable of doing things on our own. And that can create tension in social relationships. So the answer is not to just don't help at all. Instead, the answer is to find ways of helping in what I call invisibly or in a kind of outside of awareness way. There are lots of ways we could do that when people are experiencing chatter.

If my wife's particularly stressed about work and other things, doing things as simple as alleviating the burden on her plate, taking care of dinner, picking up the dry cleaning, doing things to just make her life a little bit easier. That's a way without being asked. That's a way of helping her invisibly. If there's someone struggling in on my team with their presentation skills, rather than contact that individual, hey, you really need to up your game here. Here's a couple of books that I can help. I might send a note to the entire group. Hey, here's a couple of books I just came across really helpful. You know, maybe let's have a lab meeting to discuss them. Getting them the information, but without shining a spotlight on one person's vulnerability.

The final thing you can do is bring it full circle. You could touch, right? If it's the right individual and it's appropriate in the context, if it's a partner or a child, another way of helping invisibly is to put that arm on their shoulder, give them a hug, give them a kiss. As cheesy as that sounds, there is hardcore science behind the value of affectionate touch as a tool

to help people with chatter, and that's another way of doing it invisibly. Listening to that conversation with your daughter, I was reminded of, so I have a six-year-old son and he was out playing with his mother the other day. And I guess she was being irritating to him. And he said, Mommy, you're being so annoying, I almost feel like I'm talking to daddy. We should have a chatter support for just you and me and our kids. Exactly. Sounds just about right. Before we go, can you remind everybody the name of the book and any other sources of information

or all things, Ethan Cross? Sure. The book is called Shatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it. And you can find tons of information about the book. A lot of the ideas we talked about about me on my website, www.ethancrosswithacay.com. Thank you very much. Eman, great job. Yeah, that was super fun and really great conversation.

So, thanks for having me. Pleasure. Big thanks to Ethan, really enjoyed meeting him. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, Jen Plant, and we get audio engineering from ultraviolet audio as always. A hearty salute to my ABC News comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you all on Wednesday when we come back with another episode. Hey, hey, prime members.

You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.