Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Ethan Kross: Harness Your Internal Chatter | E122

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Calm that internal chatter!   In this episode, we are talking with Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind, best-selling author, and an award-winning profe...ssor at the University of Michigan. Ethan studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships. His book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters and How to Harness It, is a national bestseller and was chosen as one of the best new books of the year by the Washington Post, CNN and USA Today. Ethan’s research has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, The Economist, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Time.  In today’s episode, we talk about how Ethan first got interested in introspection, the power of internal dialogue, and the wide spectrum of chatter. We’ll also dive deeper into the connection between emotion and pain, actionable tools you can use when you experience chatter, and the best ways to get in ‘the zone’ in a short amount of time!   Sponsored by -    Fiverr Business - Go to Fiverr.com/business to get 1 free year and save 10% on your purchase with promo code YAP.   Podbean - Visit podbean.com/hala to start podcast advertising.     Timestamps:   00:35 - What Sparked Ethan’s Interest in Introspection 04:38 - How Internal Dialogue is The Brain’s Swiss Army Knife 09:43 - The Spectrum of Chatter 13:30 - The Connection Between Emotions and Pain 16:08 - How Ethan Got Out of His Negative Thought Loop 25:52 - What Not To Do When Experiencing Chatter 29:57 - Strategies To Be a Good Advisor to Problems 38:20 - Tools in The Chatter Toolbox 44:01 - Ways To Refocus in a Short Amount of Time 52:55 - Perspective on Focusing on The Present Versus The Future 56:47 - How to Deal With The Ever-Digital World 1:05:31 - Ethan’s Secret to Profiting in Life     Mentioned in the Episode:   Ethan’s Website: https://www.ethankross.com/ Ethan’s Book, Chatter: https://www.ethankross.com/chatter/ Ethan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethan_kross     Social Media:    Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at Hala@YoungandProfiting.com Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on ClubHouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show.
Starting point is 00:00:25 I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests
Starting point is 00:00:50 by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of XFBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhanced and productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button, because you'll
Starting point is 00:01:14 love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast. This week on YAP, we're chatting with Ethan Cross, one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. He's a best-selling author and an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan. Ethan studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions, and relationships. His book, Chatter, The Voice in Her Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harnas it, is a national bestseller.
Starting point is 00:01:45 Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS evening news, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper and other media outlets. His pioneering research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, and so many more. In today's episode, we talk about how Ethan first got interested in introspection, the power of internal dialogue, and the wide spectrum of chatter. We'll also dive deeper into the connection between emotion and pain, actionable tools you can use when you're experiencing chatter, and the best ways to get in the zone in a
Starting point is 00:02:22 short amount of time. Hey, even welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Yeah, same here. So we love to start with background stories, childhood journeys, how you ended up fulfilling your purpose in life. And so let's start there.
Starting point is 00:02:43 I know right now you are a best-selling author. You came up with a book called Chatter, which is a smash hit. You've been on so many huge podcasts. Definitely wanna dig into that. But first I wanna understand how did you get into the topic of introspection? Like what first sparked that interest in you?
Starting point is 00:03:00 I'd love to hear about that. Well, the interest goes way back, actually to about 38, 37 years when I was a little kid. And I had a very unconventional dad. What I mean by that is, you know, my dad was not a college grad. He never held down a series of sales jobs over the course of his life, nothing ever to permanent. But he loved two things. He loved the New York Yankees and he loved Eastern philosophy and meditation and he'd spent a lot of time talking to me about both of those things. And so,
Starting point is 00:03:36 from the time I was three years old, he would tell me whenever I experienced a curveball in life, experience some adversity, the direction was, focus your attention inward, try to tap into that inner voice that you have, and come up with a solution for how to navigate that adversity. And that was a piece of advice that, although I didn't know it at the time when he was first telling me about this, it was a piece of advice that would go on to serve me really well throughout my childhood and adolescence. Like most of us, I would experience different kinds of adversity. Something didn't work out at school, a person I asked about didn't say yes,
Starting point is 00:04:13 an argument with my mom or dad. Whenever that happened, I turned my attention inward. I tried to figure out what's the problem I'm dealing with, I come up with a solution, and I'd move on, I never really got stuck. So introspection served me really well growing up. Then I got to college and in the second semester of my freshman year, I took my first psychology class and about halfway through the semester. We came up to the topic of introspection and I thought to myself, in my head, I was effectively rolling up my sleeves, cracking my knuckles, I'm thinking I've been doing this for you know for ages So I what do I need to learn? Well turns out I needed to learn a lot because what I encountered when I started reading about introspection at that point in the class was
Starting point is 00:04:59 For a lot of people a lot of the time introspection serve them really well just as it had served me well. But for those same people and other situations, introspection could end up being a curse. So people would experience problems, turn their attention inward, and rather than come up with solutions, they'd get stuck. They'd worry. They'd ruminate. They'd catastrophize, think about the worst case scenarios. And so this struck me as a ginormous puzzle that was really important to understand. Why is it that we possess this remarkable ability, this ability to turn our attention inward,
Starting point is 00:05:36 to use our mind to make sense of our problems. This capacity makes us unique as a species. It's what allows us to do things like develop vaccines and record amounts of time, build spaceships up last us off into outer space. And yet, when we experience strong negative emotions, feelings like anxiety or sadness, we often can't use this tool that we possess
Starting point is 00:06:01 to get out of that problem. And so I ended up going to graduate school to figure out how do you science to weigh in on this puzzle. And that's what I've been doing ever since. And that's what I talk about in my book, Jadder. So cool. And I love that your father, like from such a young age, to really instilled the importance of mental health.
Starting point is 00:06:21 Because it's not something they teach in school. It's not something you learn about. You don't learn about how to navigate your emotions. So I think the work that you do is super important. I'm so glad that you're doing it. So you touched on a topic just now saying that this internal dialogue makes humans unique. And I've heard you talk about how that's actually one of the reasons why we're different from other animals.
Starting point is 00:06:44 And we've advanced as a human species over time. So talk to us about that. How does this internal dialogue actually help us as humans, and how has it helped us become more civilized than other animals? Sure. So I'd like to think about this internal dialogue or our inner voice, if you will, as it's a kind of Swiss army knife of a human mind. And it lets us do a number of remarkable things.
Starting point is 00:07:07 And so let me, I'll just rattle off some of the key functions it serves. At the most basic end of the spectrum, our inner voice allows us to keep verbal information active in our heads. And so concrete example of that, you go to the grocery store, You don't have your iPhone, you need to remind yourself, what do I need to buy? When people need to remind themselves of that, they'll repeat those things in their head. All right, eggs, geesticks, bread, paper towels.
Starting point is 00:07:35 Paper towels. I don't do paper towels on my grocery runs. It's all about the breakfast items. But yeah, you repeat those things silently in your head. That's your inner voice. Your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system. It's a basic system of the human mind that is vital to our ability to navigate the world. Keep information active.
Starting point is 00:07:56 So our inner voice lets us do that. But then it lets us do other things like simulate and plan for the future. So before I have to give a presentation, I will repeat what I'm going to say in my head. I'll take a walk around my neighborhood if the weather cooperates, and I'll go through the presentation in my mind. I'll start to finish, and when I get to the end,
Starting point is 00:08:16 I'll even anticipate what questions someone in the audience is gonna ask me. I'll hear the questions, and then I'll respond. So I'm gearing in this dialogue in my head, this mental simulation. This is vital to my ability to perform well under the spotlight. This is another service that our inner voice provides us with, this ability to simulate and plan.
Starting point is 00:08:40 Our inner voice, that's just co-chust, there are problems, right? So, you know, I go downstairs, I subscribe to like no eating after 8 p.m., I go downstairs at 9 p.m., I open the fridge, my daughter is constantly conspiring against my fitness goals because she's making delicious things and putting them right where I could see them. And I see the chocolate cake or last night it was rhubarb
Starting point is 00:09:01 pie and I say, I don't eat it Ethan, don't do it. So we often use our inner voice to coach us along, to coach us through our problems. And then finally, in a certain sense, most magically in some ways are romantically, our inner voice helps us understand who we are. It gives shape to our sense of self and our identity. So when we experience problems in life,
Starting point is 00:09:29 we often pause and try to make sense of those experience. So when we're rejected by someone, we probably just rejected, was it something about me? Was it something about them? Was it the wrong situation? And what we essentially do is we use our inner voice to create a story that explains our experiences, that story that explains really who we are as individuals.
Starting point is 00:09:52 And our inner voice helps us do that. So keeping information active in our heads, planning for the future, controlling ourselves, creating these stories that shape our understanding of who we are. Our inner voice is really vital to our ability to thrive in this world and that's why when when I hear people say, you know, I meet people and they're like, oh you just wrote a book about the inner voice and how to manage it. Please, please Ethan, tell me how can I silence this inner voice? Just, I want to get rid of it. And I say, you know, that's not what we want to do. We want to figure out how to
Starting point is 00:10:25 harness this tool because it is a tool. We don't want to get rid of it. I actually tell a story in the book about a woman who experienced a stroke and the stroke wiped out temporarily her ability to use language, both to talk to other people, but also to talk to herself. And her experience was really captivating because what she said at first was, when she first lost her ability to talk to herself, to engage in this inner dialogue, she found it strangely liberating, gone were her worries and reminations.
Starting point is 00:10:56 But as she went on, as the days went on, she realized what also left her was this ability to make sense of who she was. And that was really destructive and disorienting and so so the challenges into silence it we want to figure out how to harness it that's what my research and and the book chatter is all about yeah i think that's a really great distinction because when we think about chatter we think it's always negative and to your point that you know we hear about meditation like silence your voice like just being peace being the now being the present. When really it's okay, it's healthy to have some of this negative self-talk. So let's talk about the spectrum of
Starting point is 00:11:36 this internal chatter. Some people, for example, say that they never dream. Is it a case where people say, like, I don't have internal chatter? And is there kind of like a spectrum to this in terms of, like, good amounts of internal chatter versus bad amounts? That's a great question. So let me try to break it down a little bit further. So we've talked about the good side of the inner voice. And I actually want to come back to meditation and mindfulness and being in the moment because I think there's an important point to mention around that. But we'll save that for later. So we've talked about what the inner voice can do for us.
Starting point is 00:12:10 Let's talk about the negative side. And when we talk about the negative side of the inner voice, I want to distinguish between experiencing a negative verbal thought, like so, temporarily experiencing a ping of anxiety versus chatter, because they're not the same thing. When I use the term chatter, when I'm using that term to refer to as getting thought, not getting thought, getting stuck in a negative thought loop. So you're experiencing a problem.
Starting point is 00:12:37 You turn your attention in order to make sense of it, but you don't make any progress towards making sense of it, and instead you just keep on loop looping around focusing on the awfulness of the situation instead. When we experience chatter about the past, we call that rumination, chatter about the future or present that typically takes the form of worrying. There is a difference between experiencing chatter and experiencing an isolated, momentary bleep of negative emotions. Negative emotions and small doses are elegantly adaptive. You wouldn't want to live your life without the capacity to experience a negative emotion. When I experience a little bit of anxiety, what that does is that
Starting point is 00:13:21 that is motivating me to deal with a situation at hand. It's telling me, okay, Ethan, stop fudzing around on ESPN or the New York Times or whatever and work on your presentation, work on the article. That is arguably adaptive. What makes anxiety and all of its offshoots and the other negative emotions harmful is when we experience those emotions, but then we get stuck in them and we keep experiencing them chronically. That's the difference between a healthy versus an unhealthy negative emotion. Just to drive that point home, you know, there are children who are born into the world
Starting point is 00:13:57 every year and they are sadly incapable of experiencing physical pain due to a genetic anomaly. They put their hand on a flame and their pain receptors don't communicate a painful sensation. What happens to these children is they die young. They die because they don't experience that physical pain signal that tells them to pull their hand away from the fire or to stop scratching that mosquito bite after it's infected. So that at an extreme really highlights, I think, just how valuable experiencing negative emotions can be. But we don't want to get overwhelmed by them. And that's what chatter is all about.
Starting point is 00:14:35 When we experience chatter, that becomes really destructive. It can make it hard for us to think and perform while it works, can create problems in our relationships and also our physical health. So did that address the terrain well? work, can create problems in our relationships and often also our physical health. So did that address the terrain well? Oh yeah, 100%. I think you totally cleared it up. And since you brought up the topic of pain, and I love this example of you saying that some people are born with a disease where they can't feel pain, and it actually is dangerous. It's like you said, it's part of our evolution to have this negative thought so that we can thrive,
Starting point is 00:15:06 whether it's at work or whether it just means surviving, right? And so I totally agree there. But I would love to hear about the connection between emotions and pain. Like when we think negatively, it actually can impact our physical health. So can you talk to us about that? It's interesting because our emotions, we often think of them as these fuzzy subjective states. But what we know is that our emotions,
Starting point is 00:15:31 our negative emotions, when they take the form of chat or when they're experienced chronically over time, they can really get under the skin. Most listeners have probably heard the phrase stress kills. That is not exactly accurate. A better way of saying that would be chronic stress kills. A stress response is a really adaptive response to be capable of having. So what happens when you experience a stress response, there's some threat that we perceive in the environment. And then when we experience stress, that mobilizes us to
Starting point is 00:16:03 respond quickly to that threat. We approach it or we avoid it. What makes stress chronic is when our stress response is activated and then remains chronically activated over time. That's exactly what Chatter does to us because we think about that stressor, that anger provoking event or anxiety provoking event or screw up that we, when we think about those things over and over again, what happens is our stress response goes up and it remains chronically activated over time. And that's how you get chatter predicting things like cardiovascular disease and various problems of inflammation and even certain forms of cancer.
Starting point is 00:16:42 So the mind is grounded in the brain, and the brain is the quarterback that controls the body. And if chatter is pulling the strings, so to speak, you can get physical problems occurring. I totally agree. I mean, for me, I actually am having this issue with my neck and actually right before this interview, I like creaked my neck a little bit and keeps happening. And I'm like, issue with my neck and actually right before this interview, I like creaked
Starting point is 00:17:05 my neck a little bit and keeps happening and I'm like, oh, there's something negative that I keep thinking about that keeps screwing up my damn neck. So I can completely relate and agree there. So let's talk about why you wrote chatter. And I want to start with a story that you, I think you opened up your book with about how you were googling bodyguards for academics. And it was one of the reasons why you decided you just had to write this book.
Starting point is 00:17:29 So, tell us about this story and why you ended up doing that. And how did you get out of this negative thought loop? There, there really two precipitating factors. And the story I opened up the book with was interesting enough, it goes back to what we're just talking about physical pain and emotional pain. About 10 years ago, maybe we published a study where we showed that the links between emotional and physical pain were much deeper than science tests previously thought. And so, the study was a really, it was a neat one. What we did is we recruited people who had just been dumped in a romantic relationship.
Starting point is 00:18:07 A serious romantic relationship. People often use the language of physical pain to describe how they feel after they experience profound social rejection. My feelings hurt. I'm in pain. My stomach doesn't feel good. What we wanted to do in this experiment was really push the envelope and ask the question, does the experience of social pain being rejected? Does that in any way approximate the experience
Starting point is 00:18:33 of physical pain, experiencing a physically painful sensation on your body? And so what we did in the study is we recruited these people who had been dumped and we brought them into the FMRI lab, and we put them through us an experiment where during some of the time, we were scanning their brain activity while we had them look at a picture of the person who had just rejected them. And right beneath the picture, there was a little phrase
Starting point is 00:18:58 that captured the moment of rejection. So dumped at part. And the idea was just think about how you felt in that exact instance when you were dumped. It sounds really mean, but we were doing this in the service of ultimately learning about rejection to help people. I want to give that caveat. So we have that we people relive this experience of social pain during half the study. The other half, we hook up a device called a thermo, which is like a little metal plate to their forearm. And what this thermo heats up to temperatures that are hot and physically painful. Now, to
Starting point is 00:19:35 give another disclaimer, just so listeners don't think I'm totally maniacal and evil here, the sensation that that the participants felt, it was like holding a cup of coffee from Starbucks without the protective sleeve. So it does hurt, but in no way it leaves a lasting marker bruise. So what we did in the experiment is we wanted to compare the results. So do the patterns of brain activity that we see corresponding to what when people were experiencing social rejection. Does that overlap with the patterns of brain activity that underlie this experience of
Starting point is 00:20:09 physical pain? And we found that, in fact, they did quite a bit. And so a couple of days after news of this study was released, I got a letter in the mail back when people used to send letters. And essentially it was a really ugly, personally threatening message. You know, the likes of which led me, I showed it to a couple of people,
Starting point is 00:20:32 they said go to the police, I had a file, not file I spoke to a police officer, who wasn't particularly reassuring, they said, yeah, these things happened from time to time. It's probably nothing but just in case you might wanna drive home a Different route from work each day for the next couple of weeks Which was a little a little tricky hollow because I at the time I only lived about four blocks away from my office
Starting point is 00:20:56 So there wasn't much flexibility. I had anyway. This got my chatter brewing. I had just my wife and I just had our first child I'm thinking what did I do? Why did I publish this paper? I put everyone. It wasn't even that bad. I was a big deal with it. I was in the name of science. I'm so surprised this person was so offended.
Starting point is 00:21:16 They were offended. I'll leave it at that. They were drawings and slurs and all sorts of really ugly things. It was not pleasant. Oh my God. So I ended up like pacing my house for a couple of nights with a baseball bat. And at my lowest point, I sat down in front of my computer and I didn't actually hit enter, but I started typing body
Starting point is 00:21:37 guards for academics. And the moment I did that, I realized, before I hit enter, I thought to myself, this is absolutely crazy, Ethan. What are you doing? You know, you don't hit enter because people will think you've lost your mind, you know, forget it. No more experiments. You're not doing. You're going to be out of a job. And so, interestingly enough, what I did in that moment, we would end up doing research on and finding it was a tool tool I just stumbled on that is quite
Starting point is 00:22:05 useful. I basically used what we call distance self talk. I used my own name to try to coach myself through the problem I was dealing with. We all know it's much easier to give advice to other people than it is to take our own advice when we're mired in chatter. It can be so challenging to follow, to objectively follow what we know to be the right path. But interestingly, when other people are experiencing problems, it's often really easy for us to give them advice.
Starting point is 00:22:31 And what I did in that moment is I switched my perspective. Ethan, what are you doing? Get your act together, go to bed, and essentially I use language to shift my perspective. And so, that's a tool that I talk about in the book that is really useful. And so that's one experience that really has connected me with the subject matter that I study in a way that has given me new insight around it. And so I wanted to share it with readers
Starting point is 00:22:57 because, you know, like I'm an expert on this topic, but that doesn't mean I don't experience chatter at time to think most of us do. I think recognizing the commonality of that experience, that in and of itself, can be really helpful for managing these kinds of states. Yeah, I love that story. I thought it would help give everybody some context. And I love this tool that you're talking about distancing. Essentially, you're becoming your own coach. We all want to hire a coach and it's easier to get advice from other people. And you listen to other people's advice more than you listen to your own advice,
Starting point is 00:23:33 which is just so interesting. And I think it's really natural. I find myself, before I knew this was an actual term or thing, I find myself always saying, like, holla, relax, or holla, you know, whatever I'm telling myself, I do that all the time. So it's if I could jump in, I find that fascinating, holla. I mean, that to me is remarkable. So in the book, I talk, people have been doing this throughout history. There are records of Julia Caesar doing it in an ancient
Starting point is 00:24:01 times to Henry Adams, the former US statesman, to in more contemporary moments, Malalee Sofzi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, youngest person ever, when the prize LeBron James, if anyone's heard of that person, Jennifer Lawrence, during moments of stress, they reflexively start using their name to coach themselves through a problem. Now, some people have attributed this to narcissism. Like, who would have the audacity to talk about themselves in the third person? We've done studies on this, no link whatsoever between the tendency to coach yourself through a problem using your name and narcissism.
Starting point is 00:24:42 What we do find is that people tend to do this when they're under stress, when they need that advice. And what, as a scientist, what I find remarkable is, where did we learn to do this? It's not like, I'm in a guest's hollow that growing up, no one in elementary school told you to do this. Your parents probably didn't say, ha, la, when you get really worried about something, use your name to talk yourself through a problem. Did they ever tell you that? No, nobody talks about mental health until I was in my 20s.
Starting point is 00:25:12 Literally, I never even thought about it. Well, that's a big problem. It's something that I'm hoping Chadder can help address. We can come back to that maybe a little bit later. But in Chadder, I talk about 26 different tools. We have stumbled on some of these tools on our own. In our attempts to manage our own mental life, I think we've, many people just discovered things that work. And I think knowing about the science that explains how those tools that we sometimes use work, that can be really
Starting point is 00:25:41 empowering because what allows us to do is we don't have to wait to hat hazardly do this. We can be much more deliberate about doing it. So the moment I detect some chatter brewing, I, it's already been, what are we going to do? I use that tool very deliberately. And so that's one value I think that the science provides. The other value is sometimes we do things that we think are going to help us, but science tells us they actually don't help us and can make things worse.
Starting point is 00:26:10 And then of course there are tools out there that we just don't even know about that science is revealed. So there are lots of different kinds of tools that I think that I hope readers will encounter when they read the book. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea but you don't know how to move forward with it? Going into debt for a four-year degree isn't the only path to success. Instead, learn everything you need to know about running
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Starting point is 00:35:07 Get one free year and save 10% on your first purchase on Fiverr Business with promo code YAP. Just go to Fiverr.com-business and don't forget promo code YAP. We are like so in sync right now because you always finish off and I'm like that's literally what I'm about to ask you and what I thought about. So let's talk about when we do things like venting, for example, we think it's going to help, but actually it has the adverse effect on us. So let's talk about when we are experiencing chatter, what are the things we should not
Starting point is 00:35:40 do that most people do because it's just routine, they're not trained, they don't know how to help themselves. Well, you hit the nail on the head with venting. When we experience chatter, the first thing to recognize is that most of us are intensely motivated to share our chatter with other people, to find someone to talk to. This is true not only of women, it is equally true of men, the stereotype that men don't talk about their problems, that has been studied and it is not true. So when the chatter brews, we want to find someone to help us with it. And our culture often tells us that the
Starting point is 00:36:17 way to get help is to express our emotions, just let it out. There's been a lot of research on venting and its consequences. And what we've learned is that venting to someone else, that can be really good for strengthening the friendship bonds that two people share. So you and I are now buddies. It's great to know that in a moment of weakness or turmoil, I could call you up, Hala, and share with you when I'm feeling and you're there to listen, it feels good to know that there's someone else out there that cares enough about me, that they're willing to take the time to listen, empathize, and validate what I'm going through. But if all we do in a conversation is vent to one another, or in technical terms, we call that co-rumination, we're just kind of revving each other out.
Starting point is 00:37:05 What happens is we leave that conversation feeling really good about our relationship with one another. But in terms of the chatter that got us to talking in the first place, it's still screaming in our minds, right? Because we haven't done anything in that conversation to deal with the chatter, to reframe how we're thinking about that problem in ways that ultimately help us manage it. So the best kinds of conversations when it comes to chatter, they actually do two things. First you do want to share what you're going through with the other person.
Starting point is 00:37:39 It is important to express your emotions to a certain degree. But at a certain point in a conversation, the person you're talking to ideally helps you broaden your perspective. When we're experiencing chatter, we get so lost in the emotions. We get stuck in this tunnel vision. It's often hard for us to see the bigger picture, right? Like, there's, hey, there's more to it than just getting rejected. They're more fish in the sea. It's happened, you know, everyone's been rejected or, you know, everyone experiences anxiety times. Other people are in a prime position to help us see that bigger picture. And so ideally, they start nudging you to go to that place at the appropriate
Starting point is 00:38:19 time during the conversation. That's the formula for a really productive conversation about chat or doing both of those things. Listening and then helping the person reframe their experience. And I think being mindful of those two features of the conversation can be important both for helping listeners figure out who they should go to for chat or support, because there are some people out there who wanna help, but they think that the way to help
Starting point is 00:38:48 is to just get you to event your feelings. That's not gonna be good, right? So be really careful about who you go to for advice. There are only like three or four people I seek out support from in my life when I'm experiencing chatter. And then on the flip side, knowing about these two elements of productive conversations,
Starting point is 00:39:07 it puts you in a position to be a better advisor, a better chatter advisor to other people. Yeah, while we're on this topic, let's just like dive deep into it. What are some of the strategies as somebody who's trying to help someone get out of chatter? What are the things we can do? I think there's a placebo effect that you talk about that we can kind of utilize. Talk to us about some strategies in terms of being a good advisor.
Starting point is 00:39:30 So I'll try to break it down one, two, three, four. Make it very concrete. If someone comes to you specifically for chatter support, hey, I have this problem, I need your need your input. Do the two step dance that we just talked about. So take your time to listen and then feel them out in the conversation and try to broaden their perspective. There is, I should say, an art to doing this, depending on the situation of person. Some people may need to spend more time venting than others before they're ready to go broad. So you want to feel that out and you can ask the person you're talking to, hey, you want to keep keep just expressing or can I offer you some other advice or, you know, my perspective, if you want to keep talking totally fine, you
Starting point is 00:40:14 know, just keep going. So feel that out. Another set of strategies for helping others is something we call invisible forms of support. I think this is really important for people in relationships, people who are managing teams, people who have kids, in other words it's important for everyone. Sometimes you are going to come across situations where you see someone in your world who is experiencing chatter, but they haven't come to you for help. But because we tend to be an empathic species and particularly when it comes to people we care about, we often want to help people when we see them in need, seeing someone else we care about in distress, creates distress in our cells, you want to
Starting point is 00:40:55 reduce those feelings. You need to be careful though, because there can be some negative consequences associated with volunteering your support if a person doesn't ask for it. Unsolicited advice can blow up in our face. The canonical example is one between parents and kids of all ages. I experience this with my kids sometimes. I see my daughter. She's struggling with her homework.
Starting point is 00:41:22 I go over to her. She hasn't asked me for help. Hey, sweetie, can I try to help you with this? Here's another way to do this. I'm a teacher for a living like let me try to help Did I ask you for help? You think I can't do this myself and next I know my my wife is being called I'm in trouble so That's an example of of a well intentioned response that I'm trying to help That's an example of a well-intentioned response that I'm trying to help blowing up in my face. It's blowing up because what I've done by volunteering support when it hasn't been asked for, I'm threatening my daughter's sense of self-efficacy and autonomy, the idea that she is capable of doing something on our own.
Starting point is 00:42:00 This is really important to many people, this knowledge that they are capable of achieving things on their own without the help of others. And so we don't want to encroach upon that. The good news is that there are still ways we can help people when we see them in experiencing chatter and they don't ask for help. And that's where the invisible element of support comes in. And there are lots of ways you could do this. So, at one end of the spectrum, if my wife is experiencing, I know she's stressed out, she's ruminating about stuff. I can just try to make things easier. And ruminating means thinking about the past. Yeah, oh my God, with this client I had, did I mess up, did I mess up how I, and the advice I gave them, and then we also got to get the kids set up for camp.
Starting point is 00:42:45 And so sometimes the ping ponging in our heads with chatter goes from rumination to worry and back and forth. And so let's say she's in that state, I could try to ease her burden by taking care of things without being asked to do so. So taking care of dinner, picking up the groceries and managing that and picking up the kids even though she was going to do that. So doing things to ease her load without asking me for help, that's one form of invisible support that could be useful.
Starting point is 00:43:16 Another is getting people the information they need without shining a spotlight on the fact that they need that information. So let's say someone in my lab is really struggling with their ability to communicate their findings clearly to a broad audience. I see them struggling in their presentations. They're not excelling. Rather than pulling that person aside, it's a hey, we need to get you better in this regard. Here are some books and resources. I can do things like send a note to my entire team and say, hey,
Starting point is 00:43:52 here are a couple of books I recently came across that are really useful. I find them really useful for improving my public speaking craft. If you want to check them out, here they are. I'm a lab. So I'm getting the information out there, both out shining a spotlight on that one person's weakness. Another kind of invisible support brings us to another powerful form of helping, which is touch. And there are a couple of caveats I need to give here before I go into it, but affectionate touch, a hug, a rub on the shoulder, a warm embrace, this is arguably one of the most primitive tools we have for managing chat. If you think about little kids when they're born into this world,
Starting point is 00:44:35 right, they are overcome with negativity. They're screaming their heads off. The way we sue them is skin-to-skin contact we hold them. There's been studies which have looked at the consequences of affectionate touch, not just for little kids, but throughout the life span. And what we know is that it can be a really useful tool for managing chatter. And it helps in two ways. The simple affectionate embrace of one another person, when it desired and mutual not creepy will get to the creepiness in a little bit When you get an affection brace that automatically
Starting point is 00:45:11 releases a cascade of stress-fighting chemical reactions yet Oxytocin is released and other kinds of feel-good chemicals at a more conscious level When someone we love gives us a hug or rubs our back when we're stressed out that reminds us, hey, as bad as things are, there are people out there in the world who really care about me and that can feel comforting as well. So, touch is another way to help. The caveat, of course, is for it to be useful, it has to be mutual and desired.
Starting point is 00:45:45 So with your kids and partners or even close friends, you're probably fine, but with your coworkers and colleagues, you might want to be a little bit careful with the hugs and paths on the back. So those are a bunch of ways that other people can help us with the last thing, I guess I should mention mention about the placebo is the
Starting point is 00:46:05 power of belief is incredibly strong. We know that if we give people who are overcome with chatter a sugar pill and we tell them, hey, this is going to improve how you feel. You're going to feel much better after you take this pill. Just trust me. I know it's going to help you. If the person believes you that this taking this pill will make them feel better, the pill has that effect. Even if the pill has no active ingredients, even if it is just sugar and water, right? That is the definition of a placebo. And what we know is that other people can be a placebo for us. And the way that works is,
Starting point is 00:46:47 other people can then still within us hope and a positive outlook, which can be really, really helpful for managing chatter as well. So again, you wanna be really thoughtful about who you surround yourself with and who you approach for support when you're experiencing chatter,
Starting point is 00:47:03 because other people can be an amazing tool. I think this is all really great helping us to be advisors, but like you said, most people in our lives are not going to be able to help us in this way, and so we need to learn how to manage it ourselves. So let's talk about some of our tools. I know you list 10 tools in your book. You call it chatter toolbox. So let's talk about some of these tools. Why don't we start with zooming out? What is the benefit of zooming out when we have internal chatter? How can we do that?
Starting point is 00:47:30 If you can give us an example, that would be great. Sure, so when we experience chatter, we tend to zoom in. Tunnel vision, we're just, we're totally immersed in the negativity, and we're thinking about in a very narrow way. And so what we've learned over the years is if you can do the opposite of that, if you could zoom out, take a step back and try to think about the experience from a more objective
Starting point is 00:47:54 or what we call distance perspective, that can be useful. And there are lots of ways of zooming out. We've already talked about one, so language provides us a tool for zooming out, rather than trying to work through your problems in the first person. Why am I feeling this way? What am I going to do? Why is Ethan feeling this way? What is he going to do? It's like you're talking to someone else. So you've got some mental space there. Another way. Can I ask you a question about that?
Starting point is 00:48:20 Yeah, please. Do you recommend that we write things down? Or do you recommend that this is all internal talk or talking out loud? Like, like, what do you recommend there? Well, writing things down. So when I do distance self-talk, I do it internally in my head. I just try to think through the problem using my name. You can do it out loud with a couple of caveats. I would not encourage you to do it out loud while walking down the streets of a major city, because we tend not to talk to ourselves out loud, and if you do, that violates social conventions pretty strongly in ways that might have some negative consequences.
Starting point is 00:48:59 If you feel compelled to coach yourself through a problem out loud in public, make sure you have a pair of AirPods in or headphones. So at least it looks like you're talking to someone else. But I typically do this in my head and the way it's been studied is doing it internally. But we also know that there can be value from trying to work through our experiences and writing. We call this expressive writing. That's another way of distancing because when you're writing about your feelings, trying to work through your problems, essentially what you're doing,
Starting point is 00:49:28 is you're writing a story. And stories have characters in them. And you are the character of your story. So when you're writing that story, you're already in this distanced mode of thinking about your problem, right? What happened to eat them there? Another distancing tool people can use, if you're visualizing a past experience or a future one that you're worried about, rather than see that experience happen through your own eyes. So let's say I'm thinking about a fight I had with someone else. Why did I respond that way? Rather than seeing that person insult me from a first-person vantage point, adopt the perspective of flying the wall, see yourself in the scene interacting
Starting point is 00:50:11 with that other person, almost like you're in a director's seat, watching the two actors engage in the interaction. And then try to figure out, well, why did that person over there? Actually, that was me. Why did he respond that way? That's another way of distancing. And I can keep going with other tools, and they're all in the book and listed. The point, I think, that's really important for listeners to hear is that, and this is something I feel very strongly about. There are no single magic pills that help when it come to chatter.
Starting point is 00:50:45 Instead, what we've learned is that there are a variety of tools that exist. I've just rattled off, I don't know, three or four, 26 of them in the book. And I think the real challenge for listeners is to figure out what are the unique combinations of tools that work best for them, given the unique types of chatter that they're experiencing in their life. You know, when I come, if I'm experiencing chatter,
Starting point is 00:51:12 I have like four or five tools that are my go-to tools. I'll coach myself using my own name. I'll do something called mental time travel. We haven't talked about it. If I'm really stressed out about something like a talk I've got to give, I'll think about, well, how am I going to feel next week when the talk is over? Usually, once a talk is done, I know as bad as it can possibly be, and it never is that bad, but as bad as I can imagine a being, it'll be over in an hour. And then I'll go on my life, and there'll be other things. And so just reminding yourself of that by thinking,
Starting point is 00:51:45 how are you going to feel a month from now about this, or a year from now? That's another tool I use. I go to other people, I have my chatter advisors that I can rely on. And then there are things I do with nature that maybe we'll talk about a little bit. But those are the tools that work best for me.
Starting point is 00:52:01 The tools that my wife relies on are a different set of tools. So there really is some self-exploration that I think listeners need to do to really figure out what are those tools that work best for them. Yeah, and I also think it matters in terms of what the circumstances, because I imagine that sometimes you don't have time to really have that internal dialogue or write anything down or ask yourself questions or zoom out. Sometimes you just don't have time like if you're an athlete and you're on the court and you need to make that shot and you have one chance or you're taking a test and you feel
Starting point is 00:52:37 anxious and you have a time limit to finish your test. So what do we do in those moments where we have, we don't have time, like what are some things that we can do to kind of Re-focus and get out of that very quickly Yeah, and I think this is precisely why I mean you really hit the now in the head right like there's so many different kinds of situations that we experience in life And they pose different kinds of challenges. So it's so interesting like the human mind and this is true of all of us We like simplicity, right? We really want simple solutions to things.
Starting point is 00:53:09 That's why we're usually looking for, you know, one shot fixes all approaches, but life isn't that simple, right? There's a lot of complexity. And so it makes sense that the mind has evolved in ways to help us manage that complexity. And it doesn't involve using a hammer if I use the metaphor to deal with every kind of problem we possess. We have the emotional tool equivalent of hammers, employers, and screwdrivers, and drills.
Starting point is 00:53:42 We've got a whole elaborate toolbox to help us manage the different problems we encounter. So what can people do in the moment? So I think distance self-talk is one tool that is really useful in the moment, because it's super easy to use. We've done brain-image studies. We know that benefits kick in with a matter of microseconds. And again, that's talking in third person.
Starting point is 00:54:04 Talking with Ethan. All relapse, focus. Ethan, this is yours. You're going to nail the shot. Do it, right? Very easy to use. Another tool that is somewhat misunderstood, but can be very useful. It's often used by athletes and performers quite a bit
Starting point is 00:54:20 is engaging in a ritual. So a ritual, this is a structured sequence of behaviors, something you do the same way every single time. So I've got to write to my left, you can't see it. I've got a little sculpture that my father-in-law gave me. A little head, it sits on a little platform. And before I give a big presentation, I'll go, I'll rub the sculpture's head.
Starting point is 00:54:44 I'll say the same message in my head, and then I do it. And I always do that behavior the exact same way. That's a little ritual I've developed. What we know about rituals is they can help people managing chatter. And the way they work is, as follows, when we're experiencing chatter, we often feel like we don't have control of
Starting point is 00:55:05 our thoughts. They're controlling us, everything's out of order. What we've learned is that by performing a ritual, that helps us compensate for that feeling of a lack of control, because when rituals are under our control, they're highly ordered. So when we do something the exact same way every single time, that makes us feel in control, which helps us manage a chatter. This is also one of the reasons why so many people report cleaning and organizing when they're experiencing chatter. This is true for me as well. I'm not like my NO in the house is you know constantly accused correctly of leaving a trail of clothing
Starting point is 00:55:49 from like the shower to my office downstairs right like you know very free big you know and doesn't always sounds just like me yeah and so what you know this stuff everywhere and so I it just doesn't bother me but when I'm experiencing, I will like make the rounds in the house, clean all of the dishes, neatly stack the pots, organize my bookcases, right? What that's doing, it's giving me a sense of order and control. And that can be really useful. There's a great anecdote from the tennis player, Rafael Nadal,
Starting point is 00:56:22 who was once asked, he's famous, I should say, for doing these really elaborate rituals every time he plays tennis. And he was once asked, well, what's the hardest thing you struggle to do on the tennis court? And his answer was really striking. It wasn't keep up with his opponents. Instead, he says, the hardest thing I struggle to do is manage the voices inside my head.
Starting point is 00:56:44 And he then goes on to say he engages in rituals the hardest thing I struggle to do is manage the voices inside my head. And he then goes on to say he engages in rituals because it provides him with a sense of order that he often lacks, a sense of control. And so knowing about this, again, allows us to be really deliberate about folding these practices into our life. So if you find yourself experiencing chatter, develop a ritual and implement that ritual right before the chatter provoking event or while you're experiencing it. Yeah, and I feel like so many talented people do these little rituals. You'll see these
Starting point is 00:57:15 basketball players whenever they take a free throw, they're like, you know, brushing their shoulders off, whatever they're doing, bouncing the ball a few times, taking a pause. I think it's really interesting, my boyfriend, he'll have to vacuum the whole house before he can, he's a music producer. He says, he can't get creative until everything is in order and he's like so crazy about it. But there is sanity in what you just described as craziness and that's what I love about the science here, right? Because we're like, so many people are naturally doing this. Why are they doing it? Well, that's where we can turn to science
Starting point is 00:57:48 because scientists have done the experiments to show. Actually, this serves a function we're more likely to do it when we're under stress. And it helps alleviate it. When I was writing chatter, when there were moments of of chatter and oh my God, I'm ever going to work out this chapter and make the deadline I would just I'd start doing what your boyfriend does. I'd start going around the house and initially my wife thought I think she was a little concerned to be quite honest
Starting point is 00:58:17 because this behavior was so out of character and then I think she began secretly, she would not admit it even under pain of many things she would not admit this. But I suspect that she was not, she was sometimes rooting for a little bit of chatter. So for me to experience a little chatter because she was so happy with the condition of the home. So, um, and unexpected benefit. That's right. So, so, you know, here's another way to think about this.
Starting point is 00:58:46 There are things we could do on our own in our heads to manage chatter. There are ways of harnessing our relationships with other people to manage our chatter. And then there are ways of interacting with our physical spaces, the world around us, that can help us manage chatter. There are literally tools within us and all around us. And a real motivation for writing this book was to bring all those different findings and strands of evidence all together in one place, both so that people can better understand this mysterious facet of the human condition like this voice in our head and when it conspires against what can we do about it and then
Starting point is 00:59:32 to help give them tools that they can be extremely deliberate about using in their lives. Yeah, bam. If you're ready to take your business to New Heights, break through to the 6 or 7 figure mark or learn from the world's most successful people, look no further because the Kelly Roach show has got you covered. Kelly Roach is a best-selling author, a top-ranked podcast host and an extremely talented marketer. She's the owner of NotOne, but 6th thriving companies, and now she's ready to share her knowledge and experience with you on the Kelly Roach show.
Starting point is 01:00:02 Kelly is an inspirational entrepreneur and I highly respect her. She's been a guest on YAP. She was a former social client. She's a podcast client. And I remember when she came on Young and Profiting and she talked about her conviction marketing framework. It was like mind blowing to me. I remember immediately implementing what she taught me in the interview in my company and the marketing efforts that we were doing and as a marketer I really really respect all Kelly has done all Kelly has built in the corporate world Kelly secured seven promotions in just eight years But she didn't just stop there. She was working in I to five and at the same time she built her eight figure company as a side hustle Then eventually took it and made her full-time hustle and her strategic business goals led her to win the prestigious Inc. 500 award for the fastest
Starting point is 01:00:49 growing business in the United States. She's built an empire, she's earned a life-changing wealth, and on top of all that, she maintains a happy marriage and healthy home life. On the Kelly Road Show, you'll learn that it's possible to have it all. Tune into the Kelly Road Show as she unveils her secrets for growing your business. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out in your career or if you're already a seasoned entrepreneur. In each episode, Kelly shares the truth about what it takes to create rapid, exponential growth. Unlock your potential, unleash your success, and start living your dream life today.
Starting point is 01:01:19 Tune into the Kelly Road Show available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, Yap fam! As you may know, I've been a full-time entrepreneur for three years now. Yet media blew up so fast, it was really hard to keep everything under control, but things have settled a bit, and I'm really focused on revamping and improving our company culture. I have 16 employees, so it's a lot of people to try to rally and motivate. And I recently had best selling author Kim Scott on the show. And after previewing her content in our conversation, I just knew I had to take her class on master class, tackle the hard conversations with radical candor to really absorb all she has to offer. And now I'm using her radical candor method every day with my team to give in solicit feedback, to cultivate a more inclusive culture, and to empower them with my honesty.
Starting point is 01:02:09 And I can see my team feeling more motivated and energized already. They are really receptive to this framework, and I'm so happy because I really needed this class. With masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best, anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. And we all know that profiting in life doesn't just mean thriving in business. With Masterclass, you can brush up on your art skills or your cooking skills or even your modeling skills. With over 180 classes from a range of world-class instructors, that thing you've always wanted to do better is just a few clicks away. On Masterclass, you'll find courses from many app Alstere guests like Chris Voss and Daniel Pink. I've been taking their sales and negotiation classes and I've been feeling like a real shark lately.
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Starting point is 01:03:35 Get unlimited access to every class. And right now as a app listener, you can get 15% off when you go to masterclass.com slash profiting. That's masterclass.com slash profiting for 15% off an annual to masterclass.com-profiting. That's masterclass.com-profiting for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com-profiting. I love this topic because I feel like it is the foundation of being productive. I feel like harnessing your internal chatter and kind of being in a healthy mental state is the first step in actually being productive, which is the foundation of being successful. You know what I mean? So it's like you have to figure this out so that you can actually focus and do good work. I couldn't agree more. We know that
Starting point is 01:04:16 so we've got a limited ability to focus at any given moment in time and what happens with chatter is our chatter consumes all of those focus resources we have. And so if you've ever experienced chatter, which most people have, you've probably had the experience of trying to read a few pages in a book, you read those pages while you're experiencing the chatter, you're sure that you've read the words, but you don't remember anything that you've read by the time you're done with the pages. That's because your mind was with somewhere else, it was on the chatter, not what you're trying to do.
Starting point is 01:04:48 This is why, one of the reasons why the World Health Organization just put a statistic on what the cost to the global economy of anxiety and depression are. And we know chatter fuels those states. That cost was put at over a trillion dollars. So this is not a trivial issue, chatter, right? I really think this is one of the great problems that our species, i.e. we human being struggle with.
Starting point is 01:05:18 And so the good news is that there are things we can do about it to be more productive, have better relationships, have better health. So there's one point that I want to drill home, which is this idea of thinking towards the future. And it goes against a lot of this self-improvement advice that's out there, which is all about being in the now, being in the present. I am very always thinking about the future. That is, actually, people tell me that's, I've been told that's a negative trait, that
Starting point is 01:05:42 I have to be in the present, and that, like, I'm not in the present enough. I'm always worried about the future. That's what I hear sometimes. So talk to us about like what's your perspective on that? So my perspective is there can be great benefits associated with refocusing our attention on the now being in the moment at particular times when you're experiencing chatter. The message we often hear, though, is that we should constantly strive to be in the moment. I think A, this is not possible. It works against the way the human mind operates. And B, I don't think it would be particularly productive. The human mind evolved to allow us to travel in time, to think about the past and the future,
Starting point is 01:06:23 as well as focus on the present. This ability to travel in time is super power. It allows us to do things like learn from our past, right? How important is it for us to learn from our past experiences? Think about the changes that are occurring to society right now, at least in the United States, with the, you know, the various kinds of social movements where we're now thinking about the past and trying to improve in various ways. This is true at a societal but also a personal level. Did I mentor that person properly?
Starting point is 01:06:57 Could I have done this better? That ability to learn from the past is crucial. The ability to plan and simulate for the future is I think also vital to our success, right? The ability to anticipate where something might go wrong so we can take action to prevent that from happening, right? Like I don't wanna live a life without that capacity. I also don't wanna live a life without the ability to experience nostalgia,
Starting point is 01:07:22 to think about the vacations that I once in a former pre-COVID lifetime took with my family that were just magical or fantasized about the vacations I'm going to take in the future with my family and the fun we're going to have. Those experiences make life worth living to me. So the challenge I think we face is not to figure out how we can stop traveling in time in our minds to always be in the present. The challenge I think we face is how can we make people better mental time travelers?
Starting point is 01:07:57 How can we help people go back in time to learn from a past negative experience without getting stuck in it? How can we allow people to think about a negative potential future consequence without getting stuck there? That's the challenge. And what we know is that things like refocusing on the present and mindfulness meditation, those are some empirically supported tools that can be effective, but there's a giant boatload of additional tools that also exist, and they
Starting point is 01:08:26 don't involve doing that. And I think the more we can educate people about what the diversity of tools are that are out there, the better we will be able to help people live the kinds of lives they want to lead. 100 percent. And I think everybody should go get Ethan's book chatter because it is amazing and I know we're running up on time here So I want to talk about this digital world that we live in because we are so distracted There's so much going on in it and COVID. I'm literally on my computer on my phone 16 hours a day
Starting point is 01:09:02 You know a little bit after I wake up till I'm when I'm in bed, like everyone is on their phones on social media. Is there some way that we're supposed to interact with these digital mediums that is healthy or unhealthy in terms of navigating our mental health and things like that? Like how do you suggest we use social media in a healthy way rather than a negative way. I love the way you frame that question because it's easy to try to reduce social media, to oversimplify things and say it's, you know, this is the end of society now that we're on social media or it's the best thing that ever happened to society. It's neither. It's both. I think of social media as a new kind of environment that we spend a lot of time interacting and an environment
Starting point is 01:09:47 Ten not to be good or bad whether they help or harm us depends on how we navigate those environments So if we if we take the offline world There are ways of navigating the offline world that can do as harm you you know Interacting the wrong ways with the wrong people and the wrong places. You can get in deep trouble. Interact with the right people and the right ways and the right places, really good things come of that. Now what's interesting is, if we think about this offline world, we're taught how to navigate that space from a very young age. Our parents, our caretakers, our friends, our teachers, they socialize us into how to navigate the world in a way that
Starting point is 01:10:27 Will ideally give us some advantage, right? And the lessons that were taught have been handed down from generation to generation and curated in a certain sense What's interesting about social media and that online environment is that because it is so new. And we're really, we're talking like less than maybe it's about 15 years and maybe around that, maybe 10 that people have really been on it. We haven't had the time to develop that cultural knowledge about how to navigate the space. And social media is really complicated because And social media is really complicated because unlike the offline world, which the offline world has looked more or less the same for centuries in the sense that there's gravity, right? The physical principles are the same, you speak to other people and so forth and so on.
Starting point is 01:11:20 Every social media application is different. They have different rules. And, you know, if the creators change the algorithm, they could change how the social media application is different. They have different rules and you know if the creators change the algorithm they could change how the social media universe works. And so those lessons about how to navigate that space. We're only beginning to identify them and so the good news here is that there's been a ton of science devoted to this over the past decade and we are beginning to learn about what some of the levers are, the social media levers that we can pull to experience good or bad things. So if we start with the dark side, the bad stuff,
Starting point is 01:11:55 we now know that if you are passively consuming information about other people that you tend to be competitive with, this can make you not feel so good about your own life because what social media allows us to do is curate the way we present ourselves, where we present our best selves on social media for a variety of very good reasons. And when you are just scrolling through your feeds and bombarded with these amazing experiences of others, that
Starting point is 01:12:25 can lead you to not feel so great about your own life because you obviously understand that your own life is typically filled with both highs and lows. So passively consuming that information, especially for people who are competitive and engage in social comparisons, this can lead to chatter. We also know that social media can make it easier for us to act ugly to other people, to engage in things like cyberbullying and trolling, right? Right now, as I'm talking, I can see how you're reacting, you're nodding your head, you're smiling, your eyes are lifted, you're giving me a wealth of information that tells me how what I'm saying is affecting you emotionally. And I'm actually calibrating how I
Starting point is 01:13:12 respond in turn, right? If I saw you beginning to look away and you're on, I might start speaking a lot quicker and try to wrap things up. So, like, there's so much information we're getting and social media strips all that information away because we're just talking to a screen. It makes it a lot easier for us to act in ugly ways that can create real emotional harm and physical harm in other people. So, social comparisons, envy, cyberbullying, trolling, these are the bad things that we want to try to avoid. Can I add one thing to the bad, just to- Yeah, please. And maybe you haven't thought about it, and sorry if I haven't heard you talk about it,
Starting point is 01:13:51 but with social justice things going on. So for example, Black Lives Matter, I'm Palestinian. So me and my Palestinian friends going crazy right now, like it, and because I have a lot of Palestinian family friends, I see all their social media all the time. It is, I every time I'm on social media, the first thing I want to do is look at the negative. Like, I want what's going on? What's going on? How do I, like, like, you know, and that's probably not healthy either. And I think contributes to internal chatter. So I'd love to hear like your thoughts about that aspect as well. And the fact that you kind of hear more of what you're already hearing about, you know?
Starting point is 01:14:27 Yeah, no, I think this is an area that is being actively researched. And I think it is, it's a huge issue that we need to figure out. Because essentially what I see happening is we are engaging, we talk before about vent sessions and this co-rumination. I think when we have these different kinds of social justice issues, we often see a lot
Starting point is 01:14:51 of people engaging in this massive co-rumination session, themselves, that takes on, it's like co-rumination on steroids, right? Because many people are getting in on it and pinging back and forth. And it's keeping it active in our minds. It's making us aware of it in a way that we wouldn't be if we were offline because we're not always with other people. But instead, every time you look at your feed, you see more of this negative information
Starting point is 01:15:19 about this particular topic. You're also not necessarily seeing people who are espousing opposing viewpoints that I think in an ideal world, we always want to consider, right? We always want to try to take the perspective of the other party and then have them take ours and try to find some middle ground because if we're just thinking about our own position, what that can lead to is this kind of polarization that drives grooves, grooves. I'm going to start to say the third time, not grooves as in the music, but groups, drives groups apart. And so
Starting point is 01:15:54 the fact that you're aware of this is I think step one, and it's a huge first step. Step two is to then begin to take action. And I think this is really where we get into the wild, wild west of social media when it comes to science, which is both exciting and daunting. I think we need to start thinking a lot about what are the networks that we are engaged in, right? We're creating these networks. We have control over the networks, our Facebook network, our Instagram network, our Twitter network. How does the composition of our network affect
Starting point is 01:16:32 what is getting in our own head? If you look at the prompt in Facebook, the prompt says, what is on your mind? It is beckoning us to express our chatter to everyone out there in our network. Social media is providing us in a certain sense with a giant megaphone to broadcast our chatter to the world. And what I, you know, I think what your question is really getting to the very hard of is what
Starting point is 01:16:58 the consequences of doing that, of broadcasting, what is on our mind, our verbal thoughts to others, can be. And I think we've seen lots of instances where it can have massive effects on people. And so it's a big issue. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. Honestly, one of my favorite conversations from the recent times, I hope we get you
Starting point is 01:17:19 back on Young & Profiting Podcast. So the last question I ask all my guests, and this is definitely your chance to give any sort of last value bomb that you want to give, is what is your secret to profiting in life? My secret to profiting in life. Number one, I manage my chatter. People ask me often, do I have experience of it as an expert on it? Yes, I do. I'm a human, but I'm really good at detecting when it's happening and then implementing tools. That helps me be really productive in life, as does the simple rule of treating other people with kindness and respect. That doesn't mean I'm endormat, but it does mean that
Starting point is 01:18:01 I always try to find the bright side and empathize and connect. And I think that is something that has been helpful. Awesome. And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? www.ethincross.com. It's crossed with a K-K-R-O-S-S. And they can find out about me and the book and our research and lots of other stuff. So check it out.
Starting point is 01:18:26 Yes, so that's Dr. Ethan Cross. He wrote the book called Chatter Elstick, All the Links in the Show Notes. This was an awesome conversation. I absolutely loved it. I hope to have you back on again. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. The feeling is totally mutual.
Starting point is 01:18:39 Thanks for doing what you do. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you haven't yet, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast. I truly enjoyed this conversation with Ethan. He gave us so many different internal dialogue and mental health tips, and we talked about introspection, which is the ability to turn our attention inwards and change your mindset. Ethan reminded us that we are the only species in the whole world that can do this, but feelings like anxiety and sadness usually suppress our ability to introspect. Our inner dialogue can be both harmful and helpful. On one hand, it helps us understand
Starting point is 01:19:16 who we are and it helps us achieve our goals. On the other hand, it can become our chatter. Ethan describes chatter as getting stuck in a negative whirlpool. It's when we're focusing on the awful part of our situations instead of the positive. When we ruminate or chronically worry about the past, we can become really overwhelmed. So I'd like to highlight a couple of my favorite tools in Ethan's chatter toolbox that we talked about today
Starting point is 01:19:42 to help it really stick in your minds. I want to drill home the idea of distance self-talk. Ethan says that we should use our ability to step back from the echo chamber of our own minds so that we can adopt a new perspective on our situation. When you're trying to work through a difficult experience, you can use your own name to coach yourself through the problem. Another way to think about your experience from a distance perspective is to imagine what you would say
Starting point is 01:20:09 to a friend who's experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you'd give them and then apply it to yourself, take your own advice. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you'll feel in a month, a year, or five years from now. Mental time travel, so to speak, reminds yourself that you know, you'll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future, and it will seem much less upsetting. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state, and you'll feel much better. Remember, the key
Starting point is 01:20:42 to beating chatter isn't to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do it more effectively. Again, if you're interested in the psychology of the mind and how to comment, take a listen to episode number 46, mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting with Emily Fletcher. If you love YAP, please drop a review on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts Reviews act as social proof for new listeners and they largely impact our podcast rankings. It is the number one way to thank us here at Young & Profiting Podcasts. If you don't have access to Apple Podcasts, go ahead and drop us a review on Castbox,
Starting point is 01:21:19 Podbean, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to this show. As always, I'm going to shout out a recent Apple Podcast reviewer and this week's review is from Clarice Gomez. Awesome podcast, Hala, host of Young and Proffing Podcast, highlights all the aspects of how to, education, and more in this can't miss podcast. The host and expert guests offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens. Thank you so much for your awesome review, Clarice, and remember if you guys want to be featured on Young & Profiting Podcast, give us a 5 star review and maybe I'll shout you out on
Starting point is 01:21:56 an upcoming episode. And go ahead, share Young & Profiting Podcasts with your friends and family on social media. We are so grateful for our listeners and we thank you for all your support. You can find me on Instagram at YAHB with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search my name, it's Hala Taha. And now on Clubhouse, I'm hosting rooms in there every single week. My username is Hala Taha. Be sure to follow me on there.
Starting point is 01:22:20 Big thanks to the YAHB team as always. This is Hala, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and happiness gu Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences
Starting point is 01:22:56 about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time energy or money. Suggestions such as follow the one minute rule. Choose a one word theme for the year or design your summer. We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like are you an over buyer or an under buyer? Morning person or night person, abundance lever or simplicity lever? And every episode includes a happiness hack, a quick, easy shortcut to more happiness. Listen and follow the podcast happier with Gretchen Rubin.

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