The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - How To Learn To Control & Understand The Voice In Your Head With Ethan Kross, PhD, Author of Chatter

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

#427: Today we are joined by Ethan Kross, PhD to discuss his new book "Chatter, The Voice In our Head, Why It Matters, & How To Harness It". Ethan Kross, PhD, is one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business, he is the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. In this episode we discuss how we can start to understand and control the voice in our head.  To connect with Ethan Kross click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) Check Out Lauryn's NEW BOOK, Get The Fuck Out Of The Sun HERE This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential  The Hot Mess Ice Roller is here to help you contour, tighten, and de-puff your facial skin and It's paired alongside the Ice Queen Facial Oil which is packed with anti-oxidants that penetrates quickly to help hydrate, firm, and reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, leaving skin soft and supple. To check them out visit www.shopskinnyconfidential.com now.  This episode is brought to you by Better Help We want you to start living a happier life today. Get connected online to licensed therapists at accessible prices to make sure yu are taking care of your mental health. As a listener, you’ll get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at www.BetterHelp.com/skinny This episode is brought to you by ARRAE Arrae was created to help women feel the best so they can be their best, through targeted products which are 100% natural, filler-free, organic, and formulated by a Naturopathic Doctor. For 10% off, go to arrae.com and use code ‘tsc’ at checkout. Produced by Dear Media 

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

Aha! Him and her. It gives people an opportunity to start learning how to use this toolbox that we all possess. So the challenge I like to leave readers and listeners with is, hey, here are the 26 or so tools that are out there that we know about. Now is the opportunity for you to start figuring out how to incorporate those tools into your life. So start self-experimenting and try to pay this forward and share these tools with others. Because I think that's how we can actually make a dent in this problem of chatter, which is so pervasive the voice inside our head. And today we go deep with Dr. Ethan Cross. He wrote a book called Chatter, the voice in our head and why it matters and how

to harness it. I know for a fact, every single person who is listening to this episode has experienced brain chatter. It happens for me when I have anxiety. It happens sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't shut my brain off. It happens if I'm not meditating enough. It happened so bad during postpartum. After I had Zaza, I had all these intrusive thoughts that didn't even make sense.

And I could not shut the chatter off. So since then, I personally have become obsessed with finding out how to tame the chatter. And I have done everything from implementing meditation every day to Wim Hof breathwork, to cold showers, to sitting still, to having think weeks, to doing tiny things like just like sitting and enjoying my coffee or my peak gender tea, to CBD at night, to red light therapy, to facials, whatever. I've tried it. And I wanted to get, we wanted to get an expert on the podcast on chatter. I wanted someone to give us the science behind it. I think this is something that every single fucking person that's listening can relate to.

And so we went to the expert. Who is the expert? He is Dr. Ethan Cross. He has a PhD and he's one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. He's an award-winning professor in the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department.

And he's the director of the Emotional Self-Control Laboratory. He's been on everything, okay? He's the go-to for CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, NPR's Morning Edition, the New York Times, the New Yorker,

the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Science. He is a smart cookie. And he really helps Michael and I in this episode. Michael is someone who experiences chatter all the time. And I'm really proud of him because he's learned how to harness it. And I also do experience it.

So both of us kind of dive deep here in our own experiences. And Dr. Ethan helps us, which will also help you. So with that, let's meet Dr. Ethan Cross and welcome him to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her podcast. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. Does everyone have an inner monologue? Yes. Everyone in the world? Everyone who has a well-functioning brain that isn't impaired, that can use language the way we often do, has an inner voice. And so it's an

interesting question because a couple of years ago, there was actually a whole brouhaha on the internet about some people claiming that they don't have an inner voice. And I like to actually explain what it actually means from the scientific point of view to have an inner voice. Because I think once you realize what it is, it becomes much easier to understand why we all have it. So the inner voice, I like to think of this as a kind of Swiss army knife of the mind that lets you do lots of different things. So we're going to start with the first most basic function. I want you to repeat in your head silently your phone number. You do it? Successful? No. You couldn't repeat it? I just got a new number. Ah, okay. Repeat, say, I love my husband over three times. That's hard after the fight we just had in the car, but I guess I'll do it.

Silently, silently. Sorry. Did you do it? I did it. All right, you just used your inner voice. So your inner voice is actually part of what we call our working memory system. Okay.

Basic system in the mind lets you hold information active for really short periods of time. So you go to the grocery store and you walk down the aisle and you think to yourself, what's on my list? Cheese, eggs. That's me using my inner voice. And so it is a basic, basic feature of the mind. And everyone has that working memory system. If you don't have a working memory system, you're in big trouble. That's one thing your inner voice lets you do.

But it also lets you do lots of other things like tell stories. So when people experience adversity, problems, deals don't work out, they don't get the job they're applying for, what we often do is we turn our attention inward and we try to figure out, like, why did that happen? Why didn't I get the job? Why did they reject me? And we use our inner voice to come up with a story to help explain what we've gone through.

And that's your inner voice too. That's how it gives rise to your sense of who you are. It's also where we often get really, really stuck, which we'll talk a little bit about later. So those are two things you could use your inner voice to do. Really quick, two other things. Coaching yourself long. So when I'm exercising, I don't know about you, but I've been doing a lot of virtual exercising since the pandemic started.

And it's interesting because the virtual instructors are no nicer to me than the real world instructors. And I get to say filthy things to them when they're telling me to do very painful things in my head, right? They're having me do exercises and I'm cursing up a storm as I count down the number of sets. Three, two, one. That's my inner voice. Come on, you could do it. it four more so you use your inner voice to coach yourself along too and then the final thing i'll say the final place we use our inner voice is to is to is to to rehearse and plan like before you go on a date you think about hey what am i going to say if they ask me that or before this conversation i actually went over in my head

a couple of the talking points that I wanted to hit on maybe. And oh, well, what if they asked me about this? Well, maybe I'll say that and so forth. So your inner voice lets you do all of these different things. You'd be in big trouble if you didn't have one. Out of all the things that you just mentioned, for me, the positive thing that I think I do is I visualize what something is going to look like, but then I also visualize what it's going to feel like. But I also think I do a lot of negative things too. And I told you off air, I would talk about this. I think after I had a baby, I was so hard on myself. My inner voice was, I would never talk to anyone in my life the way

I was talking to myself. It was cruel the way I was talking to myself. And I actually think that inner voice made me sabotage myself. It made the whole process of losing weight and getting back into my body more difficult. How are some negative ways that we're using our inner voice affecting us? Well, I think you just described a really, really common one when our inner voice becomes our inner critic, our inner saboteur. It's interesting. I spent several years researching chatter and talking to people about their experiences with their inner voice. And many people describe having these inner critic experiences, but they actually give their inner critic different names. So one person named their inner voice Marvin. Another one called it the itty bitty shitty committee in my head. And it was just really

interesting. Ariana Huffington called it the obnoxious roommate in my college roommate in my head, the one who always told me I'm not good enough. So I think that is one of the really harmful ways that our inner dialogues can sink us. I want to just draw your attention to one thing you said, though, because it actually speaks to one of the solutions that we find is so useful. We say things to ourselves at our lowest moments that we would never dream of saying to our best friends or even our worst enemies, I would argue. I think that is fascinating, how hard we can be on ourselves. And actually, one of the tools that we find is really useful for helping people break out of an inner critic chatter funk is actually trying to talk to yourself, give yourself advice like you would give advice to another person and actually using your name to help you do it silently in your head. All right, Ethan,

how are you going to manage this situation? We use names when we think about other people. And so when you use your name to think about yourself silently, not out loud, that shifts your perspective. It makes it much easier for us to coach ourselves through a problem and not give ourselves the kind of self-berating advice that you just described. I was just going to say, do you think that because I've found when I started speaking to myself with affirmation and positivity and saying the things that I want to actually happen as opposed to the things that I don't want to happen, that was the unlock for me. Stop saying the things that I don't want to happen and start saying the things that I do want to happen. There was a shift. Do you find that with inner dialogue when people are thinking more positively

than negatively that they have sort of like an unlock? Well, certainly when they shift perspective and they start talking to themselves like they're giving advice to a friend, I mean, the narrative shifts quite dramatically. So we'll often do these studies where we will bring people into the lab and we'll create stress. Not because we're really mean, but because we have to create stress to figure out how to help people navigate stressful circumstances more effectively. what the most powerful way of inducing stress in college students is that the university will allow us to do ethically. Maybe. Well, at first I was going to say for people, and I'll say basically hit them in the pocketbook.

But for students, I was going to say basically hit their grades. Could you say you're going to flunk? I'd probably be fired. So I couldn't say that. You can't say that. That would work if that was… They won't let you do that. That's interesting that you went to that. I went be fired. So I couldn't say that. You can't say that. That would work if that was... They won't let you do that. Okay.

That's interesting that you went to that. I went to sensory. So like physical pain. Yeah. No, I went to like turning the lights up so strong and making like a bomb sound or something. But you went to saying something to them. Well, you could do both.

So sensory, like you could cause temporary discomfort, like asking people to hold their hand in ice water, like really cold water for a long period of time, or even hooking up a little probe on their arm that heats up to a hot temperature. But you know why I thought that, why I didn't go there? It's like the example you just used, I feel like most people would be like, okay, this is a temporary thing I could get out of. But if they start to think this is a prolonged thing that I won't get out of, that's when you start to spiral. Yeah, but like when you turn on the lights in the morning.

But you know that I can turn them down. You get what I'm saying? Yes, yes. If you can shorten and explore, let someone know there's an end experience in a short period of time, maybe it doesn't stress them out as much as if you said, hey, like. Right, because you know it's going to. It is interesting, the lights though, because i get in trouble for opening the shades even a peek by my wife if if i let any light in like it's it's morning time so well so the way we do so it turns out there are lots of ways we can we can

induce this really negative chatter like stake in the mind and when i use the term chatter what i'm talking about is getting stuck in a negative thought loop, right? You start spinning. Oh my God, what is going to happen? If it's about the future, that tends to give a speech on why you're ideally qualified to land your dream job. I want you to talk about your strengths and weaknesses and how you've overcome your weaknesses in ways that perfectly position you for this opportunity. And we give them virtually no time to prepare that speech. So no paper, pencil, no computer computer and then we actually have them give the speech in front of actors who are trained to to to have these stoic disapproving facial expressions all the time like and and they do it and so it's a really powerful way of inducing a stress response how do you think you would do that situation fine i was just gonna say that's it's so funny because as i was talking

you're resonating with this and I'm seeing in you like, I got this. I would way, way, way rather do that than have someone turn the lights up like a DMV, play super... If you want to get to me, like play the loudest of loud music that's like heavy metal

and make things clacking and clanking and loud voices. You married that. But no, it resonates with me because Lauren's a freak. So she can't be in this control group because she's one of those people that from the time she came out of the womb, just wants to go on stage and she's happy with it. But for me, and I've talked about this on the show for the longest period of time, my biggest fear was public speaking. And I think that many people feel that way, right? The only reason that I can do it decently well now

is because I do it all the time with this and other things. But it took a lot of practice. If you would have put me in a college classroom and told me to do that, I for sure would have been stressed, for sure. All right, we have discussed Array so many times on this podcast, on my blog, on Instagram. I'm about the bloat solvers and their bloat capsules work. But you have to know and you should know that they just launched a bloat latte. That's right, you guys. You can eliminate bloat with every sip. It is sold out. You can go get notified when it's restocked again. I am telling you it is

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So we'll get to those later. But the reason I bring up the study is, so most people are really affected by it. They get really nervous. And half of the people are asked to just it. They get really nervous. And half of the people are asked just try to work through your problem, right? And tell us what are you thinking about as you do it? And the other half of the people are told, hey, try to coach yourself through the problem, like using your own name, try to work through it.

And the difference in what people say to themselves in those situations is really striking. So in the normal condition where you're just trying to work through the chatter without changing the way you think about it, people are thinking like, oh my God, I can't give a speech. I usually need to have weeks to prepare. I'm going to be terrible. I'm going to stutter. They're going to look at me bad. I'll stutter some more.

And it's a feedback loop and it's going to be disastrous. And people in the other group, they start giving themselves pep talks. They're like, you got this, man. It's not a big deal. It's a five minute speech. And then you get your payday from the experimenters. It's going to be over and then you'll move on. And so totally different narratives, which in turn actually affect people's performance. So the people in those two groups, right? So ones who are performing better that are going to get the job that they're interviewing for if you take this into the real world. So I think being able to manage this chatter is, it's actually one of the big obstacles we face. And then if you figure out how to do it well, that is pretty important for being happy, having good relationships, and being physically healthy as well. There was a question that I wanted to ask you earlier.

In all of your research or in your studies, did you find a group or is there a default state that maybe you can, like maybe, you know, when you're a child, let's take our daughter, two years old, the chatter in her head now, it's probably cookies. It's not a lot of, you know, is there like a certain age that you get to where that chatter starts to go from playful, happy, joyful to, you know, maybe some of these darker thoughts that we have as adults? Yeah. So you do see chatter begin to emerge in kids. And, you know, it tends to come out in the elementary school ages. There's variability with all of us, of course. But you can see that beginning to emerge. And it's really interesting because I have two daughters now. And the oldest daughter just started middle school. She, by the

way, loves it when I talk about her during podcasts. So I have to tread carefully. But it's interesting seeing the text messaging and the different kinds of comparisons that are being made. You can begin to see the chatter beginning to brew among her friends. And I will say this, when people say, hey, I experience chatter at times, what I often say to them is like, welcome to the human condition. Most people do at some point in their lives. So there's nothing inherently wrong with experiencing chatter. It's a byproduct of how the mind works. And

ideally you have some tools to manage it. Yeah. I want to tread carefully when I say this, but I feel like as you go through life, a lot of success is dependent on how well you start to manage that chatter. And I don't know if that's a fair argument to make or not, but I think you could potentially make the argument that if you don't learn to manage the chatter in your head well, using your term chatter, maybe there's negative thought patterns that they will kind of carry you away in that poor direction. But if you do, there's the famous book, Think and Grow Rich, right? And it's basically all about having the right mindset and abundant mindset so that opportunity can come your way and that when it does come, you can seize it, right? That's it in a nutshell. But I think that's basically the book is trying to teach you in a way to manage

your thoughts in a more positive way compared to if you don't, the negative can kind of sweep you away. Also, I think too, for me, I always want to get better in every area of my life. And one of the things that I'm constantly trying to get better in or on is my thought process. And I think with COVID, with everything that's going on, I think there's been two narratives in people's head. But is that process, would you agree with that statement that I made? I'm going to use a phrase that I hate because it's used way too much in the past couple of years, but 100%. People use that phrase so much nowadays. Have you heard this come up over and over again? Yeah, people do use it. It's like, I hear it all the time. I think chatter is one of the big problems we face as a culture.

And the reason for that is it undermines us in three domains of life that I think make life really worth living for most of us. So it makes it incredibly hard for us to think and perform. Thinking and performance, like think about the context in which we care about that. Have you ever had, have you ever tried to like read a couple of pages in a book or a magazine when you were worried or ruminating about something? You read the words.

You're confident that you've read the passage, but you don't remember anything that you said. Has this ever happened to you? That's because chatter is consuming your attention. And we only have so much attention we can focus at any given moment of time. Like when you get three pages down and you're like, what the hell did I just read? And you have no idea.

No idea. But you know you read it. Totally. That also scaffolds onto our conversations with other people, by the way. When you're sitting at the dinner table and someone may be telling you about their day and they spend 10 minutes talking to you and you don't remember anything they've actually said. You've actually heard the information, but your

mind was somewhere else. If this happens to you, if this happens to listeners, again, welcome to the human condition. I think it happens to most of us at times, but if it's chronic, what happens if that's happening at work when you're trying to actually execute tasks or on the ball field when you're trying to sink a free throw? Big, big problems. So it makes it hard for us to think and perform. It creates friction in our relationships with the people we love and care about. Because they think you're not paying attention. Think you're not paying attention or you're talking so much about your chatter that there's only so much that other people can take

before they start to pull away. Because the chatter keeps going and you keep on talking and talking and you're not listening to what you get back from someone else. That's not good either. It's like somebody talking about a relationship that they know is a poor relationship

and they go on and on and on. That's right. I mean, it's not, you want to help that person, but at a certain point, you've got to pull back. Otherwise, you're brought down too. We also, when we're full of chatter, I mean, this is something that I've experienced with my daughter and daughters. And it really pains me when I realize it happens. On occasion, I'll have a rough day at work, and I'm going, and I'm working from home, and my daughter comes in, and she wants to tell me about her day, and I'm like, all right, one second. I'm just finishing something up, and then she can't contain the excitement, so she comes back at me. One. And then the third time and the third time it's always met with, I said one minute, cause then I've lost. And what I'm doing there, this is a

very common phenomenon. I'm displacing my frustration on them. And if you do that over and over and over again, that can also create problems in relationships. So, so what do we say? We talked about thinking, performance, relationships. The last thing I would say is our physical health. And this is something that I think is really important because a lot of people still think that what happens in our minds, because we can't see the chatter, it's just this kind of subjective feeling we have. It doesn't actually affect the way our body works. What we know is that is not true because what chatter does is it takes your ability to experience stress and then it stretches it out over time. So it keeps your stress reaction going chronically over hours and days and longer. And that's how you get stress predicting things like cardiovascular disease,

problems of information, and all the other boogeyman diseases and disorders that aren't fun to talk about. So this is a serious, serious issue. And it's why I'm so passionate about talking about what we know about what chatter is and how you can manage it. You talked about displacing emotions. Like when someone comes at you and then all of a sudden they freak out on you and you're like, whoa, this reaction did not match up.

Has that ever happened to you? All the time. You have such a good poker face though. I couldn't tell when I was talking about it. You have such a good poker face though. I couldn't tell when I was talking about it. You were like, I couldn't tell. I don't know about a poker face. I don't know about that. What can we do if your daughter comes at you three times or your wife comes to you and then all of a sudden they experienced that snap? Like the person that's snapping, what can they do in the moment to not be so reactive?

Oh, so in that case, me? Yes. Well, so I think ideally you cut the chatter off before it even puts you in the position to snap. That's the best case scenario, right? You've got the tools and you're managing yourself so you're not even in a position to displace the emotion. Now, you're never going to be able to do that all the time. I think we can get much, much better at not experiencing chatter, but I've been studying this stuff formally for 20 years, and I still experience chatter at times. It's just part of the human condition. Knowing, I think just knowing about how all of this works is incredibly empowering because if you know how it works, then once it happens, so like once I do, if I do snap, I will immediately recognize, oh, I just did it.

And then I will, I'll apologize. And really I, and really I'll, I'll try to diffuse it. And I think that's much better than just letting it prolong. So, so I think just learning about how all of this works is just so incredibly important. And we're actually doing some work with schools to teach kids about how all this works. I think it's remarkable that if you think about what we learn in middle school and high school, you'd think that we are taught information that is going to help us navigate the world successfully. And then I think back to like what I learned about in high school. And for some reason, I always go to the same example, biology and the digestive system.

I remember learning about the digestive system over and over again throughout middle school and high school. And for the only thing that stuck with me, this is hopefully not too gross, but no boundaries here, right? No boundaries. No boundaries. Was how you get the process that explains how you get food from one hole, your mouth, to the other, right? Peristalsis. It's how you get food. For some reason, I thought that was really cool. Ask me how many times in my adult life have I had occasion to use that information? This might have been the only one.

Well, no, it's close. Two others. Both of my daughters independently asked me while upside down how they can swallow food. I'm like, here we go. But like so much time spent studying that topic. Why didn't anyone teach me about what is an emotion? Why do we have emotions? Are bad emotions good for us?

Is there a reason we have anger or anxiety or chatter? What are the tools that exist to manage our emotions? Like we have occasion to use that information, I would argue, every single day. And the ability to use that information to manage yourself, I think translates into better wellbeing, better performance, and lots of other good stuff. So. Okay. So my family tree wall in my new house is really coming along. It's almost done. And that is thanks to Framebridge. So first, I tried to do it myself. Downstairs, I tried to do this family

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We've done about 450 of these episodes. And at the top, a lot of these episodes, you can see it's like there's a mindset expert. There's somebody that's going to teach you how to meditate. There's somebody that's going to teach you how to work through it. All of these things, right? And they're great. And I'm not diminishing any of those episodes. I love having those types of people on. But I think the reason I bring them up is they sit at the top of these charts on all

of these episodes because clearly people want to know how to manage their mind. They want to know how to quiet. And you hear that term like quiet the mind, but I think it is why I find this so fascinating. It's an exercise in actually function. Why do things happen? And when they do happen, how do you recognize that they are happening, right? Because you go on these spirals and you say, okay, I better meditate now. I got to go to the gym. I got to do things to try to quiet it. But there's very little conversation about what actually understanding it, what the function is and why. That's right. And so, you know, I think about what really excites me and I'm probably just an outlier here. You know, I'm a, I'm a dorky college professor, right? But what excites me is

opening up the hood of the mind and understanding how it works. So like a car, we know how a car works. You open up the hood, although I don't have a hood on an electric car. You know what I mean, right? And we know like, oh, it's not driving well. It's making these sounds. We know what to fix. We know the mechanics. And we've actually learned a lot about the mechanics of human emotion. And I think we would all benefit from understanding what those mechanics are. So if you find yourself displacing on someone else or overly self-critical, you recognize, oh, this is why it's happening. And here are the seven things I can do to make myself feel better. Not just one. And I think that's really important because we often talk about single solutions to our problems. There are no single solutions to managing our emotional life. What we know is we've got this vast toolbox of tools we can pull

from. And I think the challenge for all of us is to figure out what tools work best for us. So let's make up a person. Let's say a person's at home and they're thinking, let's say they just lost their job. And they're thinking, I'm worthless. I'm never going to get the job that I want. Instagram's giving me anxiety. Everyone's doing everything that I can't be doing. I'm not making enough money. What tools would you give this person to change the chatter in their brain? You want to come? You want to come work in our lab? Me? Yeah. You want to come by and start doing some research? Because the question you are asking is a fantastic question. And it is the question that I end chatter on. Here's both the downside and

the upside of this. Here's what we know. And I'm just here to tell you what science can say with some reasonable level of authority. I'm not going beyond that. We know what the individual tools that are out there. We've done a really good job, I think, of identifying, let's say, 30 different tools that exist that might help this person in this situation. And I can give that person every single one of those tools and explain to them how they work. And most of these tools, really, really simple, by the way. Like a lot of complexity went into discovering them,

but at the end of the day, they're very simple to implement. What I can't do and what science can't yet do is write that person a prescription and say, given who you are and given the specific kind of situation you're dealing with, these are the four tools I want you to use for the next two weeks. And then I want you to use another three after that. We do not yet know enough to answer that question. That's what we're trying to do in the lab is answer that. And while everyone's waiting for us to do that, I think the challenge that we all face is to try to do some self-experimentation. So figure out, hey, what are the tools that work best for me? There are like four tools I use when I experience some chatter. Which are?

Okay, so the first thing I do is something we call distance self-talk. So I coach myself through a problem using my own name. All right, Ethan, here you go again. How are you going to manage this situation? I do it silently. And there's a whole science behind why that is effective. And you have to use your name? Or the second person pronoun, you.

So the idea is you want to use words that we typically use when we're communicating with other people. Okay, I do that. I do that, but I use you. You, yeah, use you. People vary on this. Some people think that this is something

that only raging narcissists do, right? You talk to yourself out loud using your own name. You don't want to talk about yourself out loud while walking down the streets of Austin using your name,. You don't want to talk about yourself out loud while walking down the streets of Austin using your name, not advocating that. But there's actually a lot of science that shows why this is helpful. It switches our perspective without even thinking.

Is it because it gives you kind of like an outside perspective? Totally. It takes you out of it? It takes you out of it. When you experience chatter, we get zoomed in so narrowly on the problem. That's all we could think about. Oh my God, I didn't sleep last night. And I know because I had narrowly on the problem, that's all we could think about. Oh my God, I didn't sleep

last night. And I know because I had a scientist on the podcast a few weeks ago that now I'm going to be at greater risk for cancer. Not true, just to clear that up. It's almost like when you talk to those people, they just keep saying the problem over and over again. It's exactly it. Over and over. This is the problem. This is the problem. Which makes sense if you think about it, right? We're zooming in on the issue that's bugging us, but then once we zoom in, we get stuck. The emotions kind of get us fixated there, and we can't then see solutions to the problem. So zooming out, getting perspective, really helpful. So I'll use distance self-talk to help me do that. Then I'll do something that I call mental time

travel. I'll think about, and I do this when I wake up on occasion in the middle of the night with, oh my God, has this ever happened to you, the chatter? I'm like, what do you do when that happens? Short of just queuing up Netflix for a while. I remind myself, how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning when you're fully cognizant or a week from now or a month from now? We have this remarkable ability to travel in time in our

minds. Lots of people actually talk about this as a bad thing. We often hear you want to be in the moment. This is a very popular idea. Being in the moment can be good when you want to be in the moment, but the ability to travel in time in our mind, this is an amazing tool. So if I'm struggling with something, I think, how am I going to feel about it a month from now? Most of the time, I feel better a month from now. Not to be morbid about this, but I think people who end up committing suicide are unable to do this. Well, if that's true, then that would be exactly a tool that you would want to use. And I think that it's like exact, it makes sense because someone who's suicidal sees nothing else. And so then they end up killing themselves.

But if they were able, not all of them, I'm just saying if some of them were able to see time and how things change, I think that would help in the moment. Broadening people's perspective. There has been research on depression. I don't know if work specifically on suicidality, but on people who are depressed and this ability to broaden your perspective, to break out of this very immersed, zoomed in state can be very useful. I was going to ask you if, for the people that,

when they're in that zoomed in perspective, if they can't, to Lauren's point, for people that maybe commit suicide, do they not have the ability to go into the future? Well, you know... Because you're saying they can work on it, but if they can't, how can they work on that?

Yeah, well, I think that if they were getting help, that might be one skill that a therapist might work with them on this ability to broaden their perspective. These tools like mental time travel, this is not a demanding, overly effortful tool. That's why it's so great though. Right? These are easy tools to implement. So, you know, but if you don't know what the tools are, then you're not going to use them. It's kind of like, I think I was telling you earlier that several years ago, I had gone to South Africa with my family. So it turns out my

wife's family's from South Africa. So that's the connection. And I had this very interesting experience there for me anyway. I'm a city boy, Brooklyn, you know, I don't usually do well with animals and the non-human variety, that kind of thing. And we were in the bush one day on a nature walk and we had this, this, this, this, I get ranger guiding us. And, you know, I look around and I just see like danger threat, you know, like lions, like literally lions, not too far and, too far and bushes that will be itchy and all sorts of things. This guy, he looks around the world around us and sees totally different things. He points to that bush over there. You see that bush? That's Charmin. You

know what? Toilet paper. You know, that bush over there, that's aloe vera. So he knew where to look to find all sorts of tools to help him navigate that territory. To a certain extent, I think the same is true when it comes to managing the mind. Like there are tools all around us. A hundred percent. But you need to know where they are. And also, especially with the way of the world right now.

Absolutely. You have to be the person that's looking for Charmin and aloe vera right now, or else it's going to just eat you alive. That's right. And you want to know how to navigate this space skillfully. And science gives us a blueprint for doing that. A map that tells us how to find, you know, I'm looking right behind you and I see all these green shrubs and trees and turns out like, you know, green spaces can be very useful for managing your chatter, right? Like before I started doing this work, I didn't know that. And what that ended up meaning for me was I'd go for a walk in the park if my daughter wanted to or my wife wanted to, but I didn't strategically do that when I was experiencing chatter. Since learning about how green spaces

can help us, I now change the way I walk to work every day. So I walk down the tree-lined path to work, not the busy street path. I love that. That is amazing. It is a new year. And I don't know about you, but I did a think week where I sat down and I wrote everything that fills me up and everything that sucks me dry. Anything that was interfering with my happiness, if you will. And it was very, very valuable. It was a very valuable exercise, if you will, because I was able to see everything visually. If you haven't done this, I highly recommend it. If there's something that keeps showing up for you that's interfering with your happiness, I highly recommend BetterHelp. What BetterHelp does is it assesses your needs and matches you with your own licensed professional therapist. So if there's

something that you just can't get out of your life that's toxic, it could be anything from you feeling depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, sleeping trauma, anger, LGBT matters, grief, family conflicts, self-esteem, whatever it is on this list, you can really help troubleshoot it with better help. So this is not a crisis line. It's not a self-help line. It's a professional counseling line and it's done all online. So you can send a message to your counselor at any time and you get this timely, thoughtful response. I think this is amazing because people don't want to go in to a doctor's office anymore. I know you guys are probably like me

and you find it very time consuming. It's also just like a drag to park and go in and check in and blah, blah, blah, especially with everything going on. This service is available for clients worldwide. So what I would recommend is you do what I did in my think week. This is one of the exercises.

What fills me up? What drains me? And then maybe you can see if you are a candidate for betterhelp.com. We want you to start living a happier life today. And as a listener, you get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at betterhelp.com slash skinny. Join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health. Again, that's betterhelp.com. You didn't give us number three and number four, because you said there were four tools. Before you go to three and four, though, I think this is important to stay on for this topic of looking into the future, because I think

some people, they look into the future and then let's say that there's a future worry. Maybe you're somebody that's in debt and that debt is going to be called soon. Let's say credit credit. And so what happens is maybe you're fixated on that problem. And what happens in your mind is you make it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think it takes some time to realize, at least in my own life, it's taken me time and years of practice to be like, okay, when I get there, when I actually have to deal with a problem, then I'll deal with it. But until then, if I can't do anything right now, I'm not going to just sit here and ruminate

and ruminate and ruminate. I'm not perfect. Everyone does it. But how do you get people to not get fixated on a future problem? Because I think that's common for a lot of people. Absolutely. And I should say, harkening back to one of the points we talked about before, not every tool is appropriate for every situation. That's why I think it's so empowering to have the

big toolbox because you can then pick and choose. So there are, you know, I was talking to a group that it was a homeless group in LA. I was talking at a shelter and some of the problems that this group was experiencing were enduring problems. They weren't going to get better in a week, a month, a year. And so this mental time travel there would not be an appropriate strategy to use because moving forward in time isn't going to give them more hope. It would be worse. So there you want to be strategic. In many situations though, that mental time travel to the future can be helpful. Like if I get the upsetting email from a colleague and I'm super pissed off, I know, I think, how am I going to feel about this next weekend? It's going to diffuse. So we want to tailor some of these tools to the situation. I will say there's one other side to mental time travel that is actually very relevant

to the pandemic right now for me, which is I go into the past, right? So we can also go back in time. And I often think to myself, as awful as COVID has been, what if I was living 100 years ago? Bingo. Right? Spanish flu. Arguably much, much worse than what we're dealing with right now. No Uber, no FaceTime, no vaccines. And if that doesn't do-

The Black Plague. That's my next one. You do it too. See, we are kindred spirits. I go to the Black Plague, right? That ravaged Europe for a long, long time. Much, much worse. That's broadening my perspective.

And that is just a valuable tool that can help people. So that's the second tool. I have a board of chatter advisors. Do you want me to tell you about what those are? Sounds amazing. So other people can be a really helpful tool. Real other people. Real other people.

Okay, okay. I didn't know if this was an advisory. No, no, no. That's a topic of a different book when we start having the different voices. So when we experience emotion, we know from lots of research that we're often highly motivated to share those feelings with other people. There are some exceptions our quest to work through our chatter or make it worse. And oftentimes, they unfortunately make it worse because they don't understand how all this works. So what makes someone helpful when it comes to talking about your chatter? What you don't want to do is just vent your emotions.

And I like talking about this because a lot of people think that venting, expressing your emotions, this is the way to feel better. Oh my God, let's be honest. A lot of women do that. I did it the other day. I did it for like an hour at Michael. I just wanted to vent. I just vented and vented and vented

and it was just pointless. I didn't want to say anything. No, women do tend to do this more than men. You know, if I would have led this conversation that women do this, then we would have had a whole different conversation. I'm just being honest. But I'll go with it if Lauren wants to go down this road.

I'm not saying anything about this. I noticed the women do this more than men. Sometimes you use the phrase, sometimes you just need to listen, which I agree with. I probably do. But let's hear the point on this. Well, this is great. So I will say this. So both men and women are motivated to share their emotions. It is the case that there are findings showing that women get stuck co-ruminating with

friends about things more than men. So there is that gender difference. We'll get into that in a little bit. But men ruminate. I got plenty of male friends who just like to- We'll add Michael to the list because he's one of those too. You don't shut the fuck up sometimes either. So don't try to think that you're out of it. Listen, this is a touchy subject. I'm just going to let it go. All right. Well, let me break it down for you. So many people think that the way to feel better is by just getting it out. Venting your emotions to someone else can be really good for maintaining and strengthening the friendship bonds between two people. It feels good to know that there's someone out there who's willing to take the time to really listen to us and learn about our circumstances and connect

with us. The fact that you guys can do that with one another, I think is really healthy. Who knows if he was listening though, let's be honest. But we were doing that. We were doing that. But as long as he was nodding, that's something, right? And so that piece of expressing emotion can be useful. The problem is that if all you do is vent your emotions, you leave that conversation. You feel really good, close and connected to your partner, but you're just as upset as when you started because you've essentially just kept on adding logs to the burning fire within you. That's exactly how I felt.

I'm so upset. That's exactly how I felt. Michael looked at me like he had a lobotomy. Yeah. And then I just felt like I just fueled the fire even more. That's right. So venting, it turns out, doesn't make people feel better and actually often makes people feel worse about what's happening. And you see this playing out a lot with teens also, co-rumination spirals. So you don't want to do that.

Can I ask you some stupid questions? Please. I doubt they're stupid. Well, they might be. Do they end up feeling bad or worse because they share all these problems and nothing gets solved after they share them? Or do they feel worse because they vent their problems and somebody doesn't have the same response to the seriousness of their problems? Like, for example, say Lauren gives me a problem and I'm like, that's not a big deal. Maybe that makes her feel worse. I don't know. Or is it making the chatter in the head worse because you've activated the chatter? You've almost put a spark plug on it because you were already upset and then you talked about it more and now you're even more upset.

So both of these can happen. And you're definitely doing what you just described, Lauren. So you are, in technical terms, we'd say you're increasing how accessible these negative thoughts are. Yes. Because you're just, you're rehearsing them over and over. It's like a pinball game. Ping, ping, ping, ping. And keeping them all active

in your head. You're not reworking how you're thinking about this problem in a way to make yourself feel better. Now, if you as the partner aren't saying things that are perceived as being responsive, that can create all sorts of other issues. And there could be a hair trigger if you're already on edge in either direction. So talking is like, it's interesting because we take talking for granted, right? This is another one of those things. We just do it, right? But there are ways of doing it better or well, especially when it comes to our chatter. So let me get to the solution, how to do it better. So ideally what happens in a conversation is you start off by allowing the person.

So let's say I'm the person you come to chat with about whatever's bugging you. I ask you about what's going on and you tell me, and I really truly am listening actively and empathically connecting. And you get that. And that feels good to know we're connected in that way. At a certain point in the conversation, what I will do is start feeling out when you're ready to try to think a little bit broadly about this situation, right? Because I'm in a great position to help you as someone I care about think through and work through the problem. Because it's not happening to me. I have that perspective. And so I can start trying to know. So that sounds really awful. Like that last podcast, the person who said that during the

podcast, sounded like a son of a bitch, right? Well, yeah, I get it. Well, here's how I've dealt with that kind of situation, right? So this happened to me actually a couple of weeks ago and I said this, or yeah, that makes sense. You'd feel this way, but what if you were in their shoes? What would you have said? So little things to try to nudge that person to broaden their perspective. Now, there is an art to doing this well. And as a scientist, I don't often talk about the art here, but there is an art form to this because depending on the person and the situation, some people may need to spend more time just in emotion mode expressing before they're ready to have someone help them think

through the problem. So like when my wife comes to me with something that she's experiencing chatter about, I'll listen, engage. And at a certain point in the conversation, I'll say, oh, that sounds terrible. I have a thought. Can I offer you my advice? And sometimes she'll be like, no, just listen. I'm not done. And I go, all right. We set the clock back and we keep going. Other times she'll go, please, that's why I'm here. Help me work through it. You never know. That's the best part. Right?

And you don't. So you want to be skillful in trying to detect your openings and feel this out. But here is why I think this science is so valuable. Most people, when they go into a conversation, they don't know what they're necessarily looking for. They're just trying to get it out. And it's almost like throwing a dart at the dart. You hope that it's going to make you feel better. And on the receiving end, when someone comes to me or not me, but other people with a problem, they don't actually know. They don't have a guide like, okay, here's what I'm trying to do. They're just talking. And that can oftentimes just not

make this very useful. So back to the third tip, I have people in my life, I've thought really carefully about this. They're my chatter advisors. There are like three or four people I know, they're super skilled at not just listening to me, but helping me actually work through the problem. These are not therapists. These are buddies, you know, and that's a resource that I use and it really serves me well. It's, my friend calls this request for coaching. So like if I talk to him, he'll look at me and be like, are you at request for coaching? That's exactly right. And sometimes I'll say, fuck you.

And sometimes I'll say yes. So I think like- You've just like, you just captured my wife perfectly. It sounds like your advisors though, you know you're going to get coaching if you go to them and you are at request for coaching. That's why I'm going to them. And actually I don't go to the people who are not good at doing this.

So there are people in my life who I know and love a lot. DNA determines that I love these people, if you know what I mean. We're actually related, right? I don't talk to them about my chatter. I tell them about how work's going. I talk to them about the kids. I don't go near them because I know it just is going to make me feel worse. Well, this is a tough subject too, because I think there's like, you could take any topic. And we all probably, we all know people

like this. Say that you're somebody that's in a bad relationship and you have a friend that's also always in bad relationships and you go to them with relationship problems. And it almost, instead of being able to advise you, it's almost like they enter a sphere of kind of like that chatter with you. Or somebody who's always, maybe you're having a problem in business, but they also have a negative mindset. And you go to them and instead of pulling you out of it,

they kind of pile onto it. I think people have to be conscious of who those types of people are in their life as well. And then also be aware of who potentially could be their advisors. You said it perfectly. We have to be conscious about this. This is another case where knowing about how this works is so incredibly empowering because what it means is I can be deliberate about who I speak to about my chatter. So I don't have to like randomly dial people until I find someone who can help me.

I go right to the people who help. And on the flip side, when my wife or my friend or my daughter comes to me with a problem, I know what to do. I have a playbook for helping them work through the issue rather than just listening over and over and not necessarily helping them get where they need to be. These three tips are so genius. I'm writing them down so far. Taking yourself out of it saying you or Lauren and then using the, you called it mental time travel, mental time travel. And then this third tip is obviously amazing to see who your committee is. What is the fourth tip? Michael and I have recently been obsessed with optimizing our sleep. With a toddler and two dogs, it can get a little tricky, if you know what I mean. So everything in our room at night is really geared towards getting the best night's sleep. That includes

no lights. We do red lights in our room. And then a product we always use to wind down is CBD. You know this from all of my stories. And there is a CBD that is launched that is completely geared towards sleep. So I did some research before this podcast and I found that sleeping less than six to seven hours per night is linked to reduced white blood cell count, which is so crazy. This is what we need to protect our body against illness. And CBD is linked to helping this, which is so amazing. I feel like it's taken over the wellness world. Everyone is talking about it. So if you feel like your sleep could be optimized more, I personally, after trying CBD so much, would highly recommend implementing it into your nighttime routine.

It's so easy to do. I think that it's also important to note that most CBD products on the marketplace don't include some of the beneficial compounds that are naturally found in CBD. And Beam products do, which is so awesome when you're winding down. And today, our listeners get a special discount on Beam's sleep products. They have a dream powder. It's their best-selling healthy hot cocoa that's here to give you your best sleep ever. It's the ultimate sleep-promoting ingredients. You got everything going on. And just like a side note, this contains no THC. So there's no grogginess the next morning. It takes 30 seconds to mix the dream powder into hot water or as I like to do into

almond milk, you stir and enjoy before bedtime. And for a limited time, get $20 off, $75 or more when you go to beamorganics.com slash skinny and use code skinny at checkouts. That is B-E-A-M organics dot com slash skinny and use code skinny. You get $20 off delicious almond milk hot cocoa that's going to put you to bed. Enjoy. What is the fourth tip? So can I tell you about that? Now I think about it, they're actually like five. us five okay for me there are like 30 out there that I talk about so just to be clear giving us the top five giving you my top five so here's one this was an interesting moment of self-discovery for me when I was working on on chatter the book it's it's hard by the way to talk about like something and experience

chatter and then the book's the same name, chatter. And so you have to distinguish them. I've never been an overly organized, neat guy at home. Very carefree. I think of myself as an organized thinker and when it comes to work, but there's usually a trail of clothing from the shower, through the the bedroom down to my office and drives my wife crazy. When I experience chatter, I do something very out of character for me. I start putting things away. I start organizing. Does this sound familiar? First of all, the trail of clothing. And if this is, now you guys are going to relate. Now you are. No, when I experience chatter, I have to clean.

She will clean to the point where she doesn't know she's cleaned stuff. No. She'll put stuff away that she doesn't know she put away. If the microphone wasn't… I'm going to explain why this works. I'll say you put something away and she says, no, I didn't. And then I'll find it in a random place that only she would know where to put it.

So when I experience chatter and you will definitely relate and you will as the observer here. First thing I do is I organize my office. Like usually my office has stacks of books and papers all over. Everything is perfect. Then I go into the kitchen. The scientist does it. I wash all the dishes.

Oh. I put everything. I scrub the counters down. Then I'll go up to the bathroom. I'll make sure there's nothing on the floor. It's in the hamper. I like to joke, but I think it's somewhat true that I actually think my wife secretly wants me to be in a constant mild state of chatter because she's so happy with what the

house looks like when I am. Science explains what is happening here. And it highlights another tool. When we're experiencing chatter, we often feel like we don't have control over what's happening. Oh my God. This is like my childhood. This is what I did. And I would clean when I would get stressed about something in my childhood. You don't have control over that. And so when that happens, one way you can compensate for that experience is by exerting control on your surroundings. Oh my God, no one's ever explained it like this. Is this a bit of like an OCD characteristic or no?

It can be. And that is an example of taking a tool that is effective in the proper dosage and taking it to an extreme. And that's true of all tools, I would argue. Any tool can be taken to a shame. It's like a hammer, if you think about it, is what we use to build homes.

But in the wrong hands, a hammer can be a source of destruction. So you don't want to take any tool. Even the simple one of looking in the future, you could take that too far. Any tool. Like I actually know people who are too optimistic. Every single time.

Like some people say, is it possible to be too optimistic? Yeah. Because you positively reframe everything that happens so you never get that negative feedback to correct your behavior. So anything can be taken to an extreme. But in small doses,

organizing, cleaning can be a useful way of managing your chatter. This is also why many people perform rituals when they're experiencing chatter. So is also why many people perform rituals when they're experiencing chatter. So if you look at athletes, many athletes develop a ritual when they're in a stress-provoking situation. It's like right before they have to sink a free throw or on the tennis court. And what a ritual is, it's a rigid sequence of behaviors. You do it the same way every time. It's under your control. So there's a name for this.

It's called compensatory control. You're compensating for the not feeling like you're controlling your head by controlling something else in the world. This is, no one's ever described this so eloquently. This is exactly what I have. And I have to do rituals before I write. I have to do rituals for I write. I have to do rituals for my morning routine. And he calls me OCD. I don't think it's OCD.

Is it interfere? It sounds to me like- It helps. It helps. It facilitates. Now, where things can get problematic is if you become so beholden to performing these acts that if you don't do something, then it can be incredibly disruptive. And that's a different situation. But if this is something that is helping you and you're doing it and that allows me to do better,

that can be really useful. So let me burst a lot of people's bubbles on this podcast because a lot of it's about routines and rituals and all these things, which is great. But what I would argue and what I try to push people in the direction of, and listen, I'm not perfect, but based on what you're saying, I think if you have to start a morning with a very specific thing, or you have to start a, you can't go to bed without doing a specific thing, or you can't perform a certain act, I think then you're beholden to that act. So I try to, rituals and all these

things and routines are good, but if you can't do something without doing another thing, then I believe it's not good. Yes. You want to be flexible and flexibility is really the name of the game when it comes to, I think, how we use these tools in our lives. I would agree. There are levels at which things become problematic, of course. And sometimes, if you're just too rigidly clinging to a behavior, that might be disruptive, but not pathological in a disordered sense, but you could take it further. But you know what I mean? When people say, I can't start my day without doing my morning routine, and it's like, or their whole day's fucked up because they can't like that to me is is not good i think i i i do

agree and it's fun so i have a i have an anecdote to share from from um one of my kids who at a certain point they just started accumulating like all these stuffed animals for their bed and like the next thing i knew there wasn't room for me to tuck them in at night and lay with them and read them a book because there were so many goddamn stuffed animals so i would start i would start story to us right i think we're in that phase you're in that phase so i would start doing something i made my it has been described as obnoxious by some but so i would start as as this daughter was putting something away i would take one of the the thing you know i do that too and i i get i donate it to charity i have a little box.

You have a box. I do it slow. And I did it. Well, I would actually do it in front of my daughter sometimes. Oh, okay. And she would get so upset. But the reason I did it was to convey that it's fine to want everything in order. I understand.

I know the science that explains why that helps people feel better, but it's also okay if it's out of order. If you were my dad and you did that to me when I was little, that would set me off. If I had my stuff organized and you came in and just took one, and I would- I'm constantly trying to keep my daughters on edge about this. That's good. That's good. Yeah. And it's- Smart. It's like cognitive therapy. I'm going to go home my daughters on edge about this. I'm trying to. Yeah. Smart. It's like cognitive therapy. I'm going to go home and fuck up that whole room. I make the bed perfect and then you sit on it.

And I'm like, oh. Or like take the charger out of the iPad before bed. No, no, no. When I like organize something how I want it, and then he comes in and does one annoying thing. I love the cleanliness. What I don't love is, and this is now couples therapy. I know for a fact, because I don't do this because I'm maybe not the cleanest,

but I know for a fact, we'll take something as simple as like the iPad charger because you're trying to find it. I'll say, where's the iPad charger? I have no idea. I have no idea what the iPad. And I go, well, I know I didn't move it. I know it goes here. She goes, I didn't touch it.

And of course, then I'll find it randomly like in one of her random drawers. But I have a tick about when he says, where's my? I call it the where's my. I can't. But the reason I asked where's my is because she does the, what did you call it again?

The compulsory. Compensatory control. Yeah, compensatory control. I'm going to say that. Everything's your fault. Take accountability. And I don't know. And I say say where's my

because she moves it but then she doesn't know where it is so it's almost like two people have no idea where the thing is and that's why I say where's my

and I almost sometimes I can't if we ever have more kids I'm just going to blame it on them last thing sometimes I feel like I'm the crazy one and maybe I did move it

even though I know I didn't perfect that's how I want you to feel what's number five so number five is actually going out in nature and outside. And that can be helpful in two ways. So one thing that nature does is it helps us restore our attention. And the way this works is as follows. We've only got so much attention that you can focus at any given moment in time.

And if your chatter is soaking all that attention up, not good, right? You don't have any resources to think differently about stuff. What nature does is it provides us with an opportunity to restore that precious attention. And the way it works is as follows. When you go for a walk in a tree-lined street or a park, you're surrounded by really interesting stuff, right? Assuming this is like a tree-lined street or a park, you're surrounded by really interesting stuff. Assuming this is like a safe place to walk, and I always give that caveat because where I grew up, the parks were not a safe place, and so you wouldn't let your guard down. But if you're going for a walk in nature, you're taking in the flowers and the trees, and you're just kind of letting it all soak in. And your attention is

gently drifting away from the chatter onto your surroundings. Now you're not super carefully studying like the structure, the shape of the flower petals. Most people aren't. I don't know how into, you're not, you're just taking it in. And that just lets, gives us the ability to restore our attention. So it can be really restorative. So that's one way that it can help. The other thing it can do though is something that I find pretty magical in a scientific way. Nature gives you the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe. Awe is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something bigger than us, something vast and indescribable, an amazing sunset or a tree that's lived for hundreds and

hundreds of years, just something amazingly beautiful. You can also get nature from the human-made world, like a skyscraper or a spaceship. What happens when we experience awe is something that we call a shrinking of the self. So you feel smaller when you're thinking about something vast and indescribable. And when you feel smaller, you know what else feels smaller? Your chatter. That is so funny you say that because my grandma used to say when I told her I was depressed, she'd say, get outside yourself. Get outside yourself. I do that all the time. And it just really puts it in perspective. Totally. That's exactly... Your grandmother, you see, I invited you to the lab and your

grandmother was a lay psychologist. I'm going to put on a white coat. I mean, just give me a degree. Yeah. This is, you know, we'll have to talk to the regents. Before I go, I want to ask you about using things in a negative way. Actually, I'm not going to use the word negative. In a... I don't know the right word. In a way that...

That doesn't serve you? That doesn't serve you. Alcohol, drugs, anything that is... Oh, going on your cell phone to just quiet it or watching a Netflix show. I don't know. People say like, oh, I need a drink because I'm stressed or like, I just wanted to find... I think alcohol is a good one to start with. Yeah. I mean, what do you say to that when people are using things to quiet their chatter,

maybe on a daily basis, maybe on a weekly basis, whatever that is? Well, it's a slippery slope when talking about substances like alcohol. In moderation, alcohol consumption can actually be good for you, right? There's data showing wine in particular, has some medicinal benefits. And so if it has some stress relieving effects and it's not a problem in the sense of addiction, then that can be fine. It's a slippery slope though, because we know how easy it is to become addicted to substances, alcohol and drugs and things of that sort. And if that's your primary tool for managing your chatter, I would say I've got many, many more that have much fewer side effects,

are cheaper, and can likely serve a pretty useful function. And I think that they would be in the book. What can our audience find in your book that we didn't talk about today? What are some tangible takeaways that we can expect? So we talked about five tools. There are close to 30 in the book. And I should say the book is a story about how these tools work and how they play out in people's lives and the science behind them. And so the book describes all that. And then at the end of the book, there's also an appendix that lists very concretely all the tools that were covered in the book. And I think what it does, or I hope what it does, I should say, is it gives people an opportunity to start learning how to use

this toolbox that we all possess. So the challenge I like to leave readers and listeners with is, hey, here are the 26 or so tools that are out there that we know about. Now's the opportunity for you to start figuring out how to incorporate those tools into your life. So start self-experimenting and try to pay this forward and share these tools with others. Because I think that's how we can actually make a dent in this problem of chatter, which is so pervasive and toxic for our culture. Your national bestselling book, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It is available on Amazon. And I'm sure where all books are sold. It's a beautiful book.

That was so interesting. I learned a lot. I hope my husband was actively listening and eliminated his chatter to get some tips on how to deal with me. So thank you. What I think would be fun to do with you at some point, if you're open to it, is have some of the listeners write in some questions about what's going on with specific things and then talk about some specific tools they can use. Because I think this applies to everybody, right? Everybody's got chatter. I think that would just be an interesting exercise and fun show to do. I would love to do that. We Like everybody's got chatter. And I think that would just be an interesting exercise and fun show to do. I would love to do that. We can call it listener chatter.

Yeah, totally. Maybe if you guys want to do that, let me know on my latest Instagram at Lauren Bostic. Where can everyone find you? Pimp yourself out, your website, Instagram, everything.

www.ethancross with a K, dot com, K-R-O-S-S. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. Atancross.com, K-R-O-S-S. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. At Ethan Cross. Thank you so much. You guys go check out his book and we'll see you next time. We'll talk about listeners' questions. That'd be great. Thanks for a great conversation. Thank you so much, Ethan. Super fun. That was a 10. Wait, don't go. Do you want to win a book specifically called Shatter? The voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it by Dr. Ethan Cross.

This is a great book. I have mine highlighted and dog-eared. I think you'll enjoy it. All you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram, at Lauren Bostic. As always, to enter these giveaways, make sure you've rated

and reviewed the podcast. It takes like two seconds and it really helps to grow the community. We love you guys. We'll see you on Thursday. I hope you enjoyed this episode.