Well with Arielle Lorre - 126: Harnessing Our Inner Voice with Ethan Kross, PhD

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

In this episode I’m talking to Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships. We discuss his new book, Chatter, and how we can harness our inner voice to improve our mental and physical health; specific tools to redirect negative self-talk and ruminating thoughts; the power of placebo; how to maintain a healthy perspective around our problems and so much more.    www.Helloned.com/BLONDE for 15% off your first one-time order or 20% off your first subscription plus free shipping. www.DrinkLMNT.com/BlondeFiles to get your LMNT sample pack for the cost of shipping. www.Getcanopy.co to save $25 on your Canopy Humidifier purchase with their filter subscription, plus a free aroma kit. www.Grove.com/BLONDE to get a free starter set with your first order.   Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Go to your re-sadviseur or sunnycars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome to the Blond Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in

between, no topic is off limits. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I have such a good episode for you today.

I am talking to Ethan Cross. He is one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. He's an award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department and it's Ross School of Business. And he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impacts their health, performance, decisions, and relationships. And he has a book called Chatter, which I have posted about in the past. I'll post about it again because it is so good. It's such an easy, interesting read with so many

practical tips. And this is something that we all deal with. We all have this inner voice. And it's really important to learn how to use it because it can be a really powerful tool and it can also be harmful in some situations. So we discussed that book, Chatter, in this episode. We talk about how we can harness our inner voice to improve our mental and physical health. We talk specific tools to redirect negative self-talk and ruminating thoughts. We talk about the power of placebo and so much more. It is such a fascinating conversation, such a fascinating topic that everybody can relate to. So please enjoy Ethan Cross.

Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really looking forward to talking to you. I'm happy to be here and I've been looking forward to the conversation as well. So to start, why don't you just introduce yourself to the listeners if they're not familiar with you and your work and just give them a little background on who you are and what you do? Sure. So my name is Ethan Cross and I'm a professor at the University of Michigan in both the psych department and the business school here. And I direct a lab called the Emotion and Self-control

Lab. And essentially what we do in that lab is we do research to try to figure out if people want to think, feel, or behave a specific way, how can they bring those goals into fruition? So what stands in the way of people achieving their goals and how can we help them do so more effectively? And a lot of that work has dealt with the goal to control our emotions and, you know, how do we not worry and ruminate or engage in what I call chatter? So getting stuck in those negative thought loops that can make life not so much fun at times. And so a lot of the, spent a lot of time trying to figure out when bad things happen and we think about them and we find ourselves rather than being able to come up with clear ways of navigating those upsetting experiences,

we find ourselves falling down that rabbit hole of rumination and worry. What can we do to help bring people back on track? So that's what we study. I wrote a book on that topic recently, which I've been talking a lot of people about, which has been fun. And I think that's that's the main intro. I'm so fascinated in the study of emotional regulation and self-control. I'm very open about being a person in recovery. I've been sober for seven and a half years. And emotional regulation, thank you.

And self-control are two things that I did not have in abundance before I got sober. We'll put it that way. So I'm really fascinated by that. And I know just for myself, when I did end up getting sober, I really had to look within. and meditation became a huge part of my recovery and just learning how to self-regulate, you know, that deliberate self-reflection that I've heard you talk about in other interviews can be both harmful and can be beneficial. And I think it's so interesting to have that kind of dichotomy where something like

meditation, self-reflection can be so incredibly helpful and it can also be harmful in some cases. Yeah. So, you know, in terms of addiction, we can come to that. We've looked at a few studies on, like with smokers and or people who are struggling with like eating goals, obesity to try to figure out how they can regulate those kinds of strong, rewarding experiences that can have counterproductive consequences if they consume too much of that. So we could get into some of that later.

But this question of self-reflection and it can be good or bad, I mean, this is a question that really got me interested in psychology. And it's what I've devoted most of my career to study. And I find it fascinating. And my interest in this topic really goes way, way, way back to the time I'm three years old because one of the things that my dad taught me to do when I was a little kid was when bad things happened, he would encourage me to introspect, to go inside, try to figure out, well, why did this happen?

If you screwed something up, like, okay, well, think about what you do. did so you can do better than the next time. And that capacity to self-reflect, like, really serve me well throughout my childhood and adolescence. Like, I'd ask a girl out in high school. They'd say, no, I'd reflect. Like, I'd move on. I'd ask someone else, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? So the test didn't go as well. This was something very, very useful to me. And then I got to college and I realized in taking a psych class that, well, self-reflection works a lot of the time. And this is arguably, you could call it a superpower that people possess, right, our ability to learn from our mistakes, our ability to plan for the future. Like, that's what lets us build spaceships,

right, and develop vaccines and do these wonderful things. But at the same time, lots and lots of people struggle enormously with this capacity, right? Like, bad things. happen, rather than come up with solutions, they end up becoming anxious and depressed and overcome with shame and all sorts of really toxic negative emotional states. And so for me, the big question has been, all right, we have this amazing tool, this power to self-reflect. How can we figure out how to make people more effective in how they use it? How can we figure out how they can wield it more effectively. If we use the analogy of like a hammer, a hammer is a tool that serves our species really well. Like we build homes. I don't build homes. I don't have a handy

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I actually did a poll on Instagram yesterday in preparation for this interview. And I just asked people a really basic question. Do you find that your inner voice or your chatter is helpful or harmful? And I think it was, I would have to check again, but around 85 or 90 percent said harmful. And of course, there's a lot of nuance in there. And some people said, well, both. It depends. But I think especially just after this past year, a lot of people are, obviously a lot of people are really struggling.

But I think that, you know, in some ways, we've kind of been stuck with ourselves and really reckoning with that. Before we get into your book and how to harness that inner voice in a good way, we just go back and talk about how that developed. I've heard you talk about that in other interviews. And I know my audience really appreciate some science and history. So obviously that inner voice developed through evolution. It had a purpose. So can you talk about that a little bit? So when I use, you know, the inner voice is such an.

interesting term because it's used in so many different contexts and almost to the point where I think people don't really know what it actually refers to. So from the scientific point of view, when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our capacity to use language to silently reflect on our life. So if I asked you right now, if I told you my, I'm going to give you my childhood phone number. I realized early on doing interviews, probably not a good idea to give the actual So 209, 0501. Can you repeat that in your head right now? Congratulations.

You just used your inner voice. So the inner voice is you could think about it as a kind of Swiss army knife of the human mind that lets us do lots of things. On the one hand, the most basic thing it helps us do is keep nuggets of verbal information active in our head. So if you were to go to the grocery store and you're willing to. walking down the aisle and you're trying to think, okay, well, what do I have to get? Scalions, yogurt, cheese sticks. And I'm projecting here, this is my grocery list. Like, that's you using your inner voice to keep information active. We use our inner voice all the time towards that end, right? But we also use our inner voice to do lots of other things like simulate and plan for the

future. So before I go on an interview or if I have a presentation, I'll usually like walk around my neighborhood or house. And in my head, I'll go over. I'll rehearse what I'm going to say. I'll not only like go through all the talking points, I'll then imagine what the audience member is going to ask me. I'll hear them ask me the question. It's usually by the way, an terribly obnoxious question. So I'm simulating the worst case scenario. And then I respond. So that's me using my inner voice to, to simulate and plan. serves a huge benefit to me in my life to be able to do that. We also use our inner voice to control ourselves. Like when you're trying to figure out, you go

down the sweets aisle in the grocery store like, probably shouldn't get that. Don't get that. That's your inner voice. And then finally, and you know, most magic may be the wrong word, but most romantically, I would describe it. We use our inner voice to create stories that really give shape to our sense of who we are. So we navigate the world. We experience things that sometimes we don't, we don't quite understand why this happened or what this means about us or society. So, you know, maybe you get rejected or maybe someone insults you. Like, how do you reconcile that experience with your sense of who you are? Well, it turns out we make stories to explain

those events and we use our own voice to do that. So keeping information. active in our heads, simulating and planning for the future, controlling ourselves and creating narratives. You use your inner voice to do all of those things. And so it's an amazing tool. The dark side of it that 80% of your poll takers, though, are likely thinking about. And they're sure are not alone. Many people have this experience is oftentimes when we experience problems in our life, we reflexively go to our inner voice to help us. But it does it. We end up getting stuck in those negative thought loops where we become our own worst enemy. And it's a debilitary, it can be at the extreme, a debilitating issue, one that undermines your physical and mental health,

your well-being, your relationship. So I think of it as one of the big problems we face. And the good news is that there's lots that science has to offer with respect to tools that people can use to manage their inner voice when it takes that darker turn. Are some people just more naturally predisposed to having more of that negative inner voice and maybe the rumination and obviously to an extreme, I think that would probably look like something like OCD, but I'm just curious if that's like a chemical thing, if it's kind of hereditary, if it's both, if it's like genetic and environmental? You know, with most of these psychological attributes,

it's usually a little bit of genes, a little bit of our environmental experiences, and how those two come together. So one interesting development in science is that, like, when I was growing up and maybe you as well, I used to learn that genes were responsible for a part of, how you think, feel, and behave. And then your experiences in the world,

your experiences with your parents and in school and current, like that also plays a role in shaping who you are. But those were two separate influences, right? Both impacted us, but separately. What we've learned more recently is our experiences in the world can actually influence how our genes are expressed. And one useful metaphor for thinking about this is, you can imagine yourselves as we have genes in our in our cells right and you think of them as like a piano

and we all more or less have the same keys on that piano but the same songs aren't played right and and our experiences in the world leads different keys to be pressed and so that's what we call gene expression and so different experiences that we have can function to turn certain genes on and turn certain genes off. And so on the one hand, I think that's really interesting and beautiful and remarkable because it suggests that the biological hand that we were dealt is not our destiny, right? To a certain extent, we can shape the way our genes impact us. But it also highlights how complicated all this can be.

But are there differences in how prone people are to this? Absolutely. So there's a lot of variability. Some people are more prone to ruminate than others. There are some gender differences in proneness to experiencing chatter. Women engage in it more than men. I always like to give a caveat here. That's not to say men don't have their own bag of problems. They do plenty of other things more than women. But men certainly do ruminate and worry as well. but there is a gender difference. The good news is that the tools, though, that exist work equally well for women and men. In fact, there's some evidence that the more intense the chatter you're experiencing,

the more room there is for these tools to make a difference. So, you know, your intuitions about vulnerability are spot on. And let me say one more thing. I think the fact that you think about worst case scenarios and you tend to tell stories, is like, this is not a bad thing. This is, these are attributes that serve you well, right? But if taken to an extreme, maybe can get you into some trouble. So it's not about turning that off, right?

It's about figuring out how can we really, really tweak it so that you can, you can be performing optimally. Like, I think about worst case snares. I think it's good. Like, I end up being prepared. Yeah. I think that I've become a lot better with it. I always think of the quote.

we suffer more in imagination than in reality. That really resonates with me. And when I was reading your book, I could relate to your story in the beginning so much when you're like up at night waiting for a madman to come attack you and your family because I've been in those situations where, you know, I look back on it and I'm like, get a grip.

One of the things that happens when we get stuck in those negative thought loops and, you know, I will say to listeners, if you've ever gotten stuck in one of those thought loops that they're much more common than you might think. among people. I mean, I've talked to people through my research and also just researching the book with people from all walks of existence. And, you know, even the people who you think might never experience rumination and worry, like they do. So you say, really, you're not alone. I think there is,

there's value in knowing that. What happens when we get stuck in these negative thought loops is we tend to get so immersed in the worry or the thing that's bothering us, right, that, we focus on it very narrowly, often on what the most awful part of that experience is. And we can't get a grasp on the bigger picture. So the story that you briefly mentioned, my story that I opened a book with, that's a story where I got a pretty threatening, objectively threatening letter from someone and proceeded to like pace my house with a baseball back to protect my wife and kid, you know, even though no one was there.

But in my head, all I could think about, all I could see was the images that were in that letter and what was said to me. And it was, it was terrifying and led me to do some irrational things like, you know, start thinking about bodyguards for academics, which I have yet, by the way, to find any company that specializes in that. That was going to be my next question. Yeah. So if we're so hyper-focused, we're zoomed in on the problem, we can't get objectivity, what's the same? solution. Well, one solution is to identify ways to step back and think about the experience more objectively. Similar to how we might think about someone else's problems, right? So one of the things we've learned over the years is that we are much, much better at giving advice to other

people than we are following our own advice. There's a name for this. It's called Solomon's paradox named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famously adept at coaching other people, giving wisdom. People traveled from all over the world to get his advice. When he came to his own life, he made terrible decisions. And so what we've learned is there are tools that we've evolved to possess that can help us think about our own circumstances from a more detached or or distanced perspective. And when we're able to step back from that experience and think about it more objectively, that often can make the difference between reflecting adaptively in ways that help you work

through the problem and nip it in the bud as compared to getting stuck in rumination and worry. And what I have found really so interesting is the variety of tools that exist for helping us distance, some of which are not things that I think are obvious to be. For example, what ended up getting me through that frightening moment was at one point when I was literally contemplating Googling to find bodyguards to protect me, which is outrageously ridiculous. I stopped and I said to myself, Ethan, you're being ridiculous. Get a hold of yourself.

And what I did there is I used language to help me distance. So I used my own name, Ethan. and the second person pronoun you to talk to myself, like I were giving advice to one of my best friends. If you think about when we use names and second person pronouns, words like you, you almost exclusively use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. So these are the words of others. And what we've learned happens in your mind when you use your own name to coach yourself through a problem.

it turns on the brain machinery for thinking about others. So you're in this, you're relating to yourself in a fundamentally different way. And people end up being much better able to coach themselves through a problem when they adopt that perspective as opposed to sticking with, hey, what should I do? And so that's a really easy tool to use. And in fact, that's my go-to tool. Whenever I smell a little bit of chatter brewing, right, Ethan? you know, how are you going to imagine just get a hold of us? You don't want to do it out loud while you're walking down the streets of L.A.

or any other city, you might get some weird looks. But doing it silently in your head can be a very easy thing, an easy first step to try to get a handle on things. I was really fascinated by the placebo effect that you talked about in the book. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, the placebo is wild. I think I titled this chapter, Mind Magic, and it's just remarkable to me.

So what the placebo effect involves is if you tell a person that they're going to feel better or if you tell a person that they're going to have, their headaches going to go away or their GI problems are going to resolve, and they actually believe you, what we see happening time and time again is that that belief brings about those psychological and physiological changes. So to me, what the placebo effects speaks to is the power of the mind to heal the body. Now, the placebo effect certainly has limits.

A placebo effect isn't going to cure you of cancer or many other intractable kinds of illnesses. It's not going to help you with COVID. But the range of conditions that has been shown to help with are quite astounding. And in particular, we know that the placebo effect can be utilized when people are dealing with chatter experiences, when they're sad, when they're anxious, when they're angry. And there are, of course, no side effects of using this placebo effect, right? It's just changing the way you think about something. The one catch to the placebo effect up until recently has been that for it to work, you basically have to lie to people.

So let's say you go into a doctor's office and I say, hey, take this pill. And the pill is nothing but a sugar pill. There's nothing in the pill but sugar. This is going to take your pain away. Well, if you believe them, then the placebo effect literature suggests it should have that effect. But that involves lying, which we don't endorse. We've learned recently, if you explain how placebos work to people and they really understand the science behind it and they believe it,

then you can give people placebos and they can still help people, even though they know they're taking a placebo, which is a bit of a mind blower. So I'll often drink my orange juice when I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. I know that there's nothing really in the orange juice that's going to, you know, the vitamins you may have a small effect, but not a huge effect. But I say, you know what, I'm going to tell myself that this is going to help me. and it may in fact have those kinds of benefits.

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I know that just the effect of being on social media a lot, especially with people in my audience, which is primarily women, has caused them to compare a lot and be very aware. of themselves and how they look and this idea of like negative self-talk is so prevalent. I think so many women deal with it. I've done episodes in the past with other psychologists who have touched on this. But do you have any advice for somebody who's getting caught up in a loop of experiencing negative self-talk throughout the day? Oh, yeah.

I've got I've got lots of advice. So, well, let me first give, give you my like overall perspective on on how people can manage their negative inner voice, however it manifests. So sometimes it can manifest as this like inner critic, you suck, you're ugly, you're never going to be good. It can manifest itself in other ways too, like obsessive worrying about things or harping on the past. So there are lots of different ways that we can use language over and over and over to make us feel suboptimal. And the cool thing is that we know that there are lots of different tools that exist that can be useful in those instances. So in my book, I talk about like 26 different tools. We know what those

individual tools are and we can tell people about them and describe how to use them. But there is a challenge for people who are looking to apply these tools, which is to try to figure out, hey, what is a unique combination of tools that work best for me, given my unique inner voice and the struggles I'm dealing with? So different tools work for different people in different situations. It's not a one-size-fits-all, which to me makes a great deal of sense because life isn't a one-size-fits-all experience, right? It's different for many of us. If we want to break it down and go concrete, though, I like to start with the easiest tools you can use because you can do them in the moment, on the fly, and then as needed work up to more complicated tools. So if you find yourself like disparaging yourself, stop.

and ask yourself, like, what would you say to a friend who was doing this, saying this to themselves? Like, talk to yourself. Give yourself advice like you would coach and advise a friend and use your name to do it because that will really help you get into that coach mode to yourself. Oftentimes what we find in experiments is that this really alters your inner narrative. Like when people are in the first person, when they're stuck, you know, when they're thinking about, oh my God, why am I not doing this or looking this way? It's all about negativity and threat. Like, you suck.

This is never going to work out. When you put yourself in that coach mode, it's like you're giving a pep talk to a friend. Like, I'm going to pin the spotlight on you here for a second. So I'm going to guess at some points in your life you've experienced negative self-talk. Fair, fair to say. Definitely. You know, a lot of people report that when they experience negative self-talk, they're actually embarrassed to say out loud what they say to

themselves because it is actually so outlandish. It's so over-the-top negative, right? So you're aware of what you say to yourself and listeners are aware of what they may think to themselves. Now ask yourself, if a loved one ever came to you with a similar kind of problem that you were struggling with, would you ever say to them what you say to yourself? And that's a question for you. Oh, no, no. Never. It would be like inhumane. You would be the worst person, worst friend like in the world.

I'm never talking to you again. So like let's be mindful of that, that it's easy to slip down this really, you know, self-dispairaging mode and recognize that one quick switch involves, hey, let's just, let's, you know, coach ourselves like we would our friends, use your name. So that's one, one tool you can use. if you're feeling really bad about something that just happened, right? So, you know, a bad experience with someone else and I can't believe I said that or that, you know, that interview or date didn't go well. You can also do something called mental time travel or temporal distancing.

And what this involves is think about how you're going to feel about this experience a week from now or a month from now or a year from now. what engaging in that mental time travel does for us is it makes us realize that what we're going through as awful as it is, it will eventually pass, right? Because emotions fade with time. Time does heal overall. And that gives us hope, which can also be really useful for breaking us out of a negative thought spiral. So when I'm really consumed about something, I'll often do like, so how am I going to feel about this next week after the big stressful presentation is over. How am I going to feel about it, you know, in December when I'm on vacation? I can even think about it. And that's another way of like taking the edge off this stressful event.

And oftentimes it's all you need to do is just take the edge off, right? We don't want to rid ourselves of the negativity overall. We just want to, we want to titrate it down. So those are two things that I think people can do. Those are two tools that I use. The third one that is like, my third go-to is talking to other people, finding the right, you know, I call them chatter advisors, people who are skilled at helping you get out of that rabbit hole. And I think this is a,

this is an important tool worth, worth maybe taking a couple of minutes to talk about because not everyone in your life is going to be adapt, useful, and helping you manage your chatter. a lot of people think that the way to feel better about something that you're worried and ruminating about is to is to vent about it. So just find someone to talk to and just unload. Oh my God, do you know what happened to me this morning? I cannot tell you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the person who's coming to you, they're in venting mode. And if you're the, if you're the friend, you're just really like they said that, that totally, I can't believe they did that. You're right for how you So you're trying to be really empathic.

What that ends up doing, if all you do is vent in a conversation, it leads to something called co-rumination. So it's kind of like throwing logs on a burning flame. It gets it to stoke even more. So two people who are venting with each other, they feel really close and connected. Like it's nice for me to know that you're there for me if I came to you with a problem and you're willing to take the time to connect with me. but that doesn't help me work through the problem.

So the best kind of conversations, they actually do two things. You do get a person to tell you about what they're feeling going through. You do want to connect with them. But after you learn about the situation, you want to help them step back and see that bigger picture.

And that might involve me volunteering to you. Hey, like, so I've been in that situation. Here's how I've dealt with it. Or, hey, but let's look at this. Let's look at the big picture. like this was one crappy interview among many other like really good ones and you know like that's every podcaster deals with that kind of thing so like I'm connecting with you but then I'm trying to break you out of that funk and that's really the signature of a productive conversation a useful

conversation when it comes to chatter and and so I advise people to think really carefully about who they go to chat with about their chatter there are some people who I'm super close to who love me a lot, 99.9% sure of that. I don't talk to them about chatter because I leave the conversation. I'm just as upset. So they're like three or four people I go to

for professional, you know, like work problems and three or four other advisors that I go to for personal issues. And like, and I really make use of that resource, but it's a very curated sense, a set of people.

I was taught to, self-reflect, a level of self-reflection. I have trusted people who I go to to talk to about whatever issue I'm having, who don't just commiserate with me, who offer really sound advice and sometimes kind of pull me out of self-victim mode, self-pity mode, all of that. And then I've been taught to turn my attention towards someone else. So pick up the phone, call somebody else, ask them how they're doing, listen to their problems, and kind of let my problems, whatever I'm going through, die of neglect. So how do you feel about that? I'm curious. Well, I think helping others is a fantastic way of helping ourselves. And there's a lot of research

which shows that one of the best ways to boost our happiness is actually to help other people. And there's something really beautiful about that finding. So I think there's a lot of lot of good that comes from that approach. Now, whether the turning to others serves as a distraction from your problems versus helps heal them, I think that's a bigger question. I think ultimately, you do want, like little, little blips of distraction can be helpful, for sure, right? But ultimately, we want to be able to come back to our problems and work through them. you know, the way I think about these problems that we have in our lives and whether they really cause enormous distress or not is something bad happens. And we often have to come up

with an explanation, a way of making sense of that experience. If you can make sense of that experience, then you can like file it away and move on with your life. But if you can't make sense of it, if you can't see that bigger picture in a way that gives you some sense of closure, then it tends to persist. And in those instances, a distraction may provide you with a temporary relief, but if the problem is still there, it often recurs. And so I think that really speaks to the need to always try to address the issue fully. So I think there's great value to the approach. And I think what you're doing is tackling it from multiple angles. So have you found it to be effective? I have. I've had to, over the years, find that balance, though, to ensure that I'm not just

distracting from it, because inevitably it's going to come up again if I'm not dealing with it. So that's why I kind of have that system of like maybe writing about it, journaling, looking at it, understanding my part, bringing it to somebody else who is a positive sounding board, whether that's a therapist or just a trusted friend or whatever. And then, of course, that last piece always just makes it feel a little bit less urgent and kind of like you were saying before, takes the edge off. So like turning my attention towards someone else takes the edge off. And then, you know, if it's recurring, then I know that it's really something that I have to deal with. Well, two interesting things you said. So you said you write about it. And we've shown that that's a way of getting distance from your

problems too that can be really helpful. Because when you're writing about your experiences, is you're essentially writing a kind of story and stories have characters. And like the character is you. So you become that object that you're writing about. So that can be a useful distancing tool. And there's lots of benefits behind writing about your feelings that have been documented. The other thing that I think as I was listening to you talk that calling others and trying to help them out does is it's another way of broadening our perspective.

It's a way of making us realize that, hey, we're not the only ones here who are dealing with crap. And that can be, I think, another useful tool for getting some space from our problems and ways that can help us work through them. There's some work that I just love about experiencing awe, this emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast that we have trouble explaining. So something indescribable, like,

you know, redwood tree, I guess those are a little bit north of you in LA, but like some people get it, a lot of people get it from nature, like an amazing sunset or mountains. Like, Mike, it's so amazingly beautiful. How did this come to be? Some people get it from music, listening to music or looking at art or watching their kid do something amazing. What research shows happened when we experience this emotion is it broadens us, right? Like we realize like how is this possible? Like, like, how is this possible? Like, These trees have been here for hundreds of years and have endured so much. And then here I am worried about the thing I may have said to someone in this one meeting. So when we experience all it leads to what we call shrinking of the self, we feel smaller. And along with us feeling smaller, so do our problems. And that can be quite helpful too. So like a walk in in nature, a green space exposure, like tons of research behind the benefits that that can have for chatter.

So we only have a couple minutes left, but there is a huge portion of this that we didn't really touch on, so maybe we can kind of summarize it to conclude. But obviously this work is so important for our emotional health and well-being, but it also affects our physical health too. So can you just touch on that a little bit before we end? Sure. So when we get stuck in these thought spirals,

they impact us negatively in three domains. The first domain is they make it hard for us to think and perform well. And the reason one way that that happens is we only have so much mental space that we can devote to thinking about something in any given moment in time. So if all of those resources are focused on your worries and ruminations, nothing left over to do your job basically or attend to your kids and partners and so forth. That gets us to the second one, relationships. So we know that chatter negatively impacts our relationships.

And it does so in a few ways. One of which is if you're in your own head, you're not there for someone else. Right. So you're at the dinner table and your partner or friend is talking to you, they're telling you about stuff and you're not listening. This is not good for relationships. So that's another way that chatter can undermine us. And then the final way is our physical health.

And the way this works has to do with stress. experiencing stress we often hear is really bad for us it's a killer not true a stress response is a really adaptive physiological response that we possess it allows us to quickly respond to a threat in the environment when stress becomes toxic is when it becomes prolonged and that's exactly what chatter does because we experience something negative and our stress response doesn't just go up and then come down after the negative experience is over. But when we replay those negative experiences in our head over and over, that's keeping our stress response chronically activated over time. And that chronic activation of our stress, that predicts things like

cardiovascular disease and inflammation and certain forms of cancer and a host of other not pleasant things to talk about. So the stakes here, I think, are quite significant. But I don't want to end on a negative scary note. I do want to emphasize that if listeners experience chatter, like congratulations, welcome to the human condition, most of us do. And in most cases, if you use these tools, they can really help you manage it in ways that prevent those negative consequences from coming to fruition. So I think there really is a positive.

ending to this story. And your book lays all of it out so beautifully, and there are so many interesting stories. And so we'll link that so that everybody can check that out. And where can everybody find you? They can go to my website, www.etheathencross, cross with a K-K-R-O-S-S dot com. And that has info about my lab, me, the book, and you can take a quiz, see how well you know your inner voice. And there are lots of downloads and info there.

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there

or over on my personal page at Ariel Lori.