How to Manage Our Internal Chatter with Ethan Kross

Episode Transcript:

Ethan Kross  00:39

When the problem isn’t happening to us, we can be really shrewd. But when it’s happening to us, we can often make bad decisions and that’s where the power of distance resides.

Chris Forbes 00:58

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. He’s an award winning professor at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business, and also the director of the emotion and self control laboratory. In addition to countless television appearances, Ethan’s research has been featured in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many others. Today, Ethan and Eric discuss his book, chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it.

Eric Zimmer  02:27

Hi, Ethan, welcome to the show.

Ethan Kross  02:28

Thanks for having me, Eric. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.

Eric Zimmer  02:31

Yeah, I’m really excited. Your book is called chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it, which is right in the basic ideas that we talked about on the show. But before we get into the book, let’s start like we always do with a parable. There is a grandfather who’s talking with his granddaughter. And he says in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, she looks up at her grandfather’s grandfather, which one wins. And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life. And in the work that you do?

Ethan Kross  03:19

Well, there are two thoughts that immediately come to mind. One is just how wonderful that parable scaffolds on to the content of my research and my book, you know, there’s the good wolf and the bad wolf. Or you could think of the good side or the dark side to our inner voice, the coach, the critic. And so I think we often do feel like in life we are battling between these two forces. And the big question we face is, how do we tilt the balance in the direction we want to spend most of our life living and I think for most of us, that is in the direction of the more positive Wolf. So I think that really connects that parable to what we know is a struggle that many of us almost maybe even all of us face at times. But the other point that it raises is a more nuanced one about emotion that I think a lot about lately, which is I think many of us reflexively want to rid our lives of negative emotions, the negative Wolf and and only really dance with that positive all the happy joy and so forth. And I think our emotional life, I don’t think I know, is more complicated than that, in the sense that negative emotions and small doses can actually be amazingly useful to us. So we don’t want to rid our life entirely of that bad wolf, if you want to stick with that metaphor, right? Like, if I don’t experience a small ping of anxiety before a big presentation. The presentation often doesn’t go as well. If I do have a small ping of anxiety, right because that negative emotion Is his information that’s motivating me to attend to the situation? And, and practice and prepare. So I don’t think we should try to rid ourselves of that dark side of us that that negative Wolf, however we want to describe it. But I think we want to figure out how to coexist with that negative offer or minimize their impact on us, but, but recognize that there’s still value that comes from it, if that makes sense,

Eric Zimmer  05:25

it totally makes sense. And it kind of leads me into where I want to start this conversation, which is around the way that thoughts and emotions work, you know, they co arise together, in essence, you know, we talked about the thought and emotion, but they tend to sort of show up together in a one may proceed the other. But the question I have for you is, there are two sort of schools out there I’ve seen of working with emotions and working with thoughts, and I’m vastly oversimplifying here. But one school is sort of saying, Look, you just be with what is you allow it, you give it space, but you be with it, what is you don’t resist, you just you kind of let it be there. The other school is more, get in there, and you know, work with your thoughts trying to, you know, turn your thoughts down, or turn them up, or change them this way or that way. And that’s the approach. And I’m kind of curious how you think about that? I’m not gonna say it’s a split, because I don’t think it’s that obvious. But there does seem to be sort of do I start with emotions? Do I start with thoughts? Does it depend? You know, how do you think about that?

Ethan Kross  06:39

Yeah, I think you’re capturing an important tension that exists not only in the field scientifically, but I think also more broadly, in our culture, where you have certain approaches that really emphasize let’s call it The mindfulness approach, be in the moment, except don’t try to engage with a thought, let it go and move on. And then there’s another camp that is much more coming out of the cognitive tradition, cognitive therapy, which is, hey, you can change how you think to change how you feel. I think it is unfortunate that we have splintered into these camps. Those two approaches that you described, which I just summarized back to you. These represent two different tools that we possess for managing our emotional lives. And I don’t privilege one tool over another different tools are useful for different people in different situations. And so when I hear people say, hey, the only thing you Well, first, let me say, if I hear some anyone say the only thing you need to do I stop at the only because although we often want single Magic Bullet solutions, none exist. As far as I’ve been able to deduce. Right? What we know is that we have evolved this capacity to use the very technical term drive ourselves nuts at times, they get stuck ruminating and worrying and catastrophizing. So we have that tendency that exists. But what we have also evolved is a boatload of tools that we can use to manage these negative conversations we have with ourselves in aversive states. And so if you come to me, and you asked me like, what tools can I give you to give you the best chance of succeeding in succeeding in the sense of living a fulfilling, productive life? I’m going to give you access to the whole whole toolkit, right? Why am I going to limit you to one tool, a carpenter doesn’t try to build a house with just a hammer, they have multiple toolboxes that they bring to the job site. And I think the same is true when it comes to our emotional lives. We try to oversimplify things sometimes and say, Hey, this is the one thing you need to do. But in fact, that’s not true.

Eric Zimmer  08:53

Yeah, yeah, I agree. 100%. And, you know, I keep wanting to try and simplify it. I do work with clients. And I, you know, I want to I want to make it like a here’s your four step method, but it just never reduces that way. I did think, though, that later in the book, you talked about conversations with other people. And you talked about that there’s two needs in conversation with other people. And this really resonated with me, and it resonated with me about the topic that we’re talking about here. And what you said was that people in a conversation if they’re going to talk to somebody else about a struggle they’re having, they have an emotional need, and they have a cognitive need. And I really love that because it sort of said, look, it’s not one or the other, they both those needs are there. And for it to be a really productive and satisfying conversation. You’ve got to have both those elements. So talk to me a little bit about what you mean by emotional need and cognitive need in that way. Well, we know from

Ethan Kross  09:51

lots of research that when people experience chatter, which I use as a term to just capture getting stuck in a negative thought loop, so if it’s a negative thought, about the past, that’s rumination if it’s the future, or President call that worry. But you’re just spinning, you’re trying to find a solution to a problem, but you’re not succeeding. And we know that when that happens, people are intensely motivated to find someone else to share that chatter with, to talk to that other person about what’s going through their head. They’re a couple exceptions, that rule we tend not to want to talk about certain kinds of trauma or experiences involving shame, but all the other sources of chatter, the anxiety, the sadness, the anger, we want to find someone to chat with. And what we know is that our intuitions regarding what makes for a good productive conversation are often off. So many people think that the key to having a productive, useful conversation about your Chatter is to find someone to venture emotions to just unload what is going through your head, get it off your chest. We know that when you vent to someone else about what you’re feeling, this can be really good for satisfying those social needs, that we have those social and emotional needs. It feels good to know that there’s someone out there in the world that is willing to take the time to hear what I’ve gone through to validate my experience. And indeed, research shows that when you vent to someone else that that often strengthens a friendship bonds between people. The problem is that if all you do is vent your emotions, all you do is that solidify. You wouldn’t believe what that guy asked me on the last podcast that was so rude and obnoxious. And they said they would do Can you believe it? And then you’re like, oh, that sounds terrible. Ethan, I would hate to be in that’s it. Yeah, you’re damn right. You know, if that’s all you do, you leave that conversation, feeling close and connected to the person who talked to you, but you’re just as upset if not more upset. By the time you’re finished talking than when you started. The best kinds of conversations when it comes to chatter, do toothpicks. You spend a little time expressing your emotions, getting it out, letting the other person learn about what you’ve gone through. But then at a certain point in the conversation, that person you’re talking to starts working to help you broaden your perspective, they start helping you try to reframe your experience. So you might say to me, Hey, Ethan, that, wow, that sounds terrible. I’ve been in situations like that, you know, the good news is they’re they’re one out of 100. But and when that happens, here’s how I think about it. So when we experience chatter, we get so stuck in a tunnel vision mindset, we’re thinking about the problem, we can’t break out of that, to think differently about we’re going through in ways that might make us feel better, and other people are in a prime position to help us do it. Because they’ve got the objectivity. They’ve got the distance from our problems to think more rationally about it. So you know, oftentimes talking can go terribly wrong. But it also has a potential to go really right. And what I think knowing about the scientific principles do for people is it does two things, I’ll speak in the first person from my own experience. You know, I used to be someone before I knew the science, like so many other people, I get upset, I instantly call this person and call that person, I would just look for people to share it with. And it didn’t always make me feel better. Now that I know this science, one thing allows me to do is I am exceptionally deliberate about who I contact. When I need chatter, support. Many people that I love dearly, they love me, I don’t talk to them about chatter at all, you know, it’s about the kids and about work, I keep it at that level. Because I know if I go into the chatter with them, they’re just going to make it worse, they don’t intend to, but by just getting me to vent it just going to not be a good situation. So there are like four or five people that I know I can trust to really help Listen to me, and then broaden my perspective. And like, that’s my chatter board, right. And I avail myself of that resource quite a bit. And it’s incredibly useful. So that’s one take home. The other take home is when people come to me for support when they Hey, you think I can get your you know, I get your take on this, I got to talk to you about this. I’m not helpless and just listening and trying to figure out what to do. I’ve got a game plan. I know I’m going to listen for a bit. And I’m gonna start feeling out the person who’s talking to me to see when they’re ready for me to give them advice. And there’s an art to doing that. You know, if my wife comes to me with a problem, and she’s going on and on and you know, at some point, I might say, totally, I’m so sorry, that happened. I have a thought, can I give it to you? And sometimes they’ll say, no, just listen, I just want to keep going. And then I’ll let her go. But at other times, she’s like, Please, yeah, tell me what I should do. I want some advice. And so you’ve got to feel that out a little bit. But this is science giving us a blueprint for how to interact profitably with other people when it comes to chatter and I think that is a really valuable commodity to have.

Eric Zimmer  14:54

Yeah. And what I love about that whole idea there is there is a stereotype out there of women just one event. And they get frustrated because they feel like they they vent to their male partner and their male partner immediately just wants to solve it. Yeah. And what I love about what you’re saying is, well, you’re both kind of right. That’s right, you know, that emotional need is is real, that venting that connecting. That’s an important part of it. And and I’ve often found, until that’s established, the second part can’t take off. But there is a point where it does make sense to say, okay, good. Now we’ve sort of gotten our feelings out about this. Is there anything we can do? Is there a way we can think about this differently? And I was a recovering heroin addict, or I guess I am, I found in a VA that the people that I talked to, that were the most helpful did both those things, right? They didn’t immediately cut you off and be like, Well, what you should do is this. But at a certain point, they went well, Eric, let’s look at this slightly differently. And and so I think that balance is so important. And I think it also for me pointed to internally for myself, needing that same balance, right, needing to say, Okay, I’m going to allow myself to feel what I feel it’s okay to feel what I feel, not try and squash the emotion by by changing my perspective immediately, but then not getting stuck there. Then moving into, Okay, are there ways that I can cognitively think about this differently? Are there tools I can use? So I just love that part of the book. But I kind of started you near the end of your book. Let’s hop back up a little bit. And talk about, you know, how we work more skillfully with chatter. Your book has a ton of tools in it. And I love that at the end of the book, you sort of summarized all of the tools that we can use, but let’s talk about what sort of things cause chatter for us most commonly, and then maybe we’ll move into some of the tools. Well, we all have

Ethan Kross  16:49

different chatter triggers. And I think that’s one thing to recognize, just like we have different tastes and food and partners, we have different kinds of experiences that light us up. So you know, for me, it may be my kids well being and health, I don’t worry at all about money stuff, or work stuff when it comes to their health, chatter, chatter, chatter, right. But for other people, it’s the exact opposite. Two common features, though, of of chatter, triggers are uncertainty and a lack of control. So not being certain about what is going to happen, or how something you did might affect you, and not having much control over those are like sparks that allow chatter to ignite. What’s interesting about those two properties is that we’re living through a time right now filled with a ton of uncertainty and a lack of control in the form of COVID. And the pandemic, right, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t have much control either. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that chatter in the form of anxiety and depression is the spiking quite a bit over the past year and a half, or however long we’ve been in this mess. I think it’s a little bit longer than a year and a half. Yeah. So those are some conditions that give rise to chatter. And you know, when we experience that chatter, we just get super zoomed in very narrowly, on whatever it is that’s bothering us. But what we’ve learned that is so exciting, and to go back to what where we started earlier on juxtaposing accepting emotions or trying to change it as these two different approaches that some people subscribe only to one or another. We know that there are so many different tools people can use to manage this chatter. So it really is handicapping us. If we try to restrict ourselves, I think, to just one or two approaches, I like to organize these tools into three categories just to give to try to simplify the space. There are things we could do on our own ways of shifting our thinking that can be useful. There are ways of interacting with other people skillfully, like we just described, right, like talking but also getting advice. And then there are environmental tools, which I find fascinating, which are ways of interacting with our physical spaces that affect how we talk to ourselves and think from the outside in, which can be quite powerful too. And I think knowing about what these tools are, what it does for us, is it gives us the opportunity to be much more deliberate about how we control our chatter. So people often ask me, Hey, do you ever experienced chatter, Ethan, you know, you’re an expert in it, in studying it and controlling it. And, you know, I usually pause. Yeah, of course, I experienced it at times, I mean, human. But what I think I’ve gotten really good at over the years is the moment I start to detect that the chatter is brewing. I shut it down by using these different tools. And it’s often different combinations. But having them at my disposal allows me to just recruit them right away to muffle this chatter response rather than let it really take over in ways that can be truly debilitating. Let me get a little concrete though, because I’m talking in a very abstract way about all this. So what are some things you can do to regulate chatter on your own. I’ll tell you about a few of my favorite tools. One category of them are we call distancing tools. So when you’re experiencing chatter, you’re super zoomed in on the problem, what we’ve learned is that if you could zoom out and get a broader perspective, that can be really useful. One of my favorites tools is something called distant self talk. And what this tool involves is trying to give yourself advice about how to work on a problem, like you would give your best friend advice and using language, harnessing the structure of language to help you do that effortlessly. And what it involves doing is using your own name and the second person pronoun you to coach yourself the problem doing this silently, I should give that caveat not not out loud while you’re walking down a city street or anything, how are you going to manage a situation? What are you going to do? Here’s what you should do. What we find in our studies is that it’s often much easier for us to give advice to other people than to take our own advice. You know, do as I say, not as I do, this is a very strong response that we see playing out across lots and lots of studies. What distance self talk does is it leverages the structure of language to automatically shift your perspective and get you to start relating to yourself talking to yourself, like you would talk to another person. If you think about when we use names, and second person pronouns words, like you, we use names and second person pronouns virtually exclusively, when we think about refer to other people. So the link in our mind between a name and someone else superduper, strong. And the idea is that when you use your own name, to reflect on your problems, that’s switching you into this coaching mode, where you’re not getting stuck in all of those irrational thoughts that you are probably ashamed to even articulate to someone else, let alone tell your best friend and say, Alright, here’s how you’re going to manage a situation, you’ve done this 1000 times before, you’re going to do it, and then you’re going to have dinner, and you’re going to get a good night’s sleep. And that’s in fact, what we see playing out in our study. So so that’s usually my first go to strategy. Actually, if I find myself getting a little bit of chatter, already thin, what are you going to do, and it snaps me out of the thought loop,

Eric Zimmer  22:18

I found that really interesting, that idea of distance, self talk and using you. And it took me back to early in recovery. And when we were in recovery groups, we used to say all the time, Use I statements, I feel this and when I heard you saying like use the you and you know distance self talk, and what I realized was that what we were after in early recovery, was connection back to ourselves not distancing from ourselves, because we’ve been doing that with addiction so effectively. And we had distanced ourselves from all the consequences from all of our emotions. So in that case, we wanted the opposite of distance, self talk, at least in the beginning to bring us closer to But your point is how effective this is, when we’re dealing with a problem. Are you the person who came up with the term Solomon’s paradox?

Ethan Kross  23:08

Yeah, it was a paper with one of my students, we coined that phrase,

Eric Zimmer  23:12

you’ve got to share what that is, because I must have read about that. Six or seven years ago, and I have used it countless times, because it’s so brilliant. So tell us about Solomon’s paradox.

Ethan Kross  23:22

Well, so Solomon’s paradox is named after the Bible’s King Solomon, who was famously adept at giving really great advice to other people and leaders from all over the world would travel to his kingdom to get his wisdom. But if you look carefully at Solomon’s own life, he was a terrible decision maker, he made a rash of really bad decisions, he got stuck in these like, love triangles would be generous was more like love octagons with different women, you know, built them temples, and it ultimately led to his kingdom’s demise. And I talked about this in my book, you see this playing out with so many people who we think are wise, you know, Abraham Lincoln struggled endlessly when it came to his own problems with depression, but was able to give his his buddy who was struggling with depression, great advice, Bill Clinton, Monica, Lo, you know, we can go to contemporary culture too with Monica Lewinsky and find all sorts of illustrations of people who can be very wise in one context, but very unwise in another. And so it really speaks to something I think fundamental about us, which is when the problem isn’t happening to us, we can be really shrewd, but when it’s happening to us, and we get overly zoomed in and sucked in, we can often make bad decisions and that’s where the power of distance resides. Because we have evolved the ability to use tools to counteract Solomon’s paradox to fight against it. And distance self talk is one example of such a tool. I want to go back Eric to the point you made though about recovery and taking ownership of your experience, I think it’s such an important point to emphasize. Because all the tools that we talk about are useful in particular contexts. That doesn’t mean they’re useful across the board, I would never tell someone that, hey, what you need to do moving forward is always talk to yourself in the third person, right, that would not be productive, there’s a time and place to do it. And the time in place is when you were overly zoomed in on a problem. In some context, though, being immersed can be amazingly helpful, like when you’re experiencing joy, and other kinds of positive states, you don’t want to distance there, you want to immerse yourself further, or in your example, if you are already distanced too much, then you want to reel a person back in and heat them up a little bit. And so I think it’s just useful to have that perspective on how all of these tools work, there’s a time and place for them.

Eric Zimmer  25:56

And I think that idea of distance is so helpful. You talked about one way of doing it, but you share other ways. You know, one of my favorite questions of all time is like, will this matter in five hours? Five days, five weeks, five months? Like, yeah, which is a time distancing tool, right?

Ethan Kross  26:12

Yeah. And that’s actually my second personal go to tool. We call that temporal distancing, or more colloquially, mental time travel. And I find this really useful. So first, I’ll I’ll do already, then how are you going to manage this. And then I’ll usually while still using my own name, I’ll think, Ethan, how you gonna feel about this next week, or next month, or next year, or 10 years from now. And what that does, is it breaks us out of this tunnel vision that is so debilitating. And it makes it clear to us that oftentimes what we’re going through is temporary, it’ll eventually fade. We recognize that because we’ve experienced life before. And we’ve learned that usually, there’s some exceptions, but in most cases, even though the worst emotions fade with time. And when we have that recognition, that does something really powerful for the human mind, it gives us hope. And hope is a powerful antidote for chatter. Now that’s going forward in time. And that’s probably the most commonly discussed form of mental time travel as a tool. But you can also go back in time in ways that are productive. I actually do this a lot with COVID. So I’ll think when I was mired in despair, washing fruit with Clorox wipes, and doing all that kind of stuff some of us did early on in the pandemic, I would think to myself, this is not so good. But what about like the last pandemic in 1917, or 18? Now, you know, things were arguably much worse back then, no, Uber, knows, boom, what about the the bubonic plague like oh, my god, that was way, way worse than what we’re going through right now. And so that’s another way of broadening my perspective, to put in perspective, the actual magnitude of what we’re experiencing, which, you know, if you look in the big grand scheme of things, vaccines in record time, technology, it could be much, much worse.

Eric Zimmer  28:34

You alluded to another type of backwards time travel, when you were just sort of off the cuff talking to yourself, which was, you’ve handled this 1000 times before. And that’s a big one for me is I just look back, it’s almost inevitable that at least once per week, I will start to feel my stress level about getting everything I have to get done, done, goes up, and I starts rising. And then I just remind myself, Eric, this has happened every week, for 20 years. And every single time it is worked out. And that sort of backwards time travel is really helpful to me,

Ethan Kross  29:09

it’s funny, because I use the same exact reframe, Eric and I likewise find it to be incredibly helpful. I’ve literally given hundreds of presentations over the course of my career. And inevitably, if it’s a high stakes event, you know, very, very big audience or a kind of audience that I know is going to be gunning for me in the academic world, you know, a pretty competitive environment. I’ll still begin to hear those whispers of doubt perk up in my head, and then I remind myself, even you’ve given hundreds of talks, you’ve never you’ve never lost it, it’s never gone. And having that broader perspective and actual evidence. It’s amazingly anxiolytic. I mean, it really takes the edge off. And that’s what I love about these tools, right? We’ve talked about too. Yeah, they’re like 27 that I cover In the book, many of these tools are very easy to implement. Right now, there are some tools I talked about that are more effortful, and they require more time and engagement. But a lot of these, these are just very subtle shifts, that can often make the difference between getting caught in that negative thoughts spiral in a way that allows it to take over and regaining control of our mind in ways that can be really helpful to us. And so that’s what I love about so many of these tools. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  30:29

let’s hit a few more of them in the tools you can implement on your own category. And then we can move to some of the others. We’ve hit distance self talk, we sort of talked about, imagine advising a friend, let’s talk about writing expressively. Let’s talk about why that’s a useful tool.

Ethan Kross  30:45

So expressive writing, the way it’s been studied. This is a form of journaling about negative experiences. And there’s been lots of research on this, which shows that writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings about something negative you’ve experienced, can be helpful for allowing you to essentially create a story that helps you understand what you’ve gone through, and then leave that experience behind and move on with your life. And one of the reasons why we think expressive writing is helpful is because it is a type of distancing tool, when you stop for a moment, and try to put pen to the page or I guess fingers to the keyboard nowadays, and pen a story, you yourself, you are the character of that story. So you are now writing about yourself. And there’s there’s distance that that creates when you’re thinking about yourself as a character in a story. So that gives you some mental space. But another thing that writing does is it it helps give us structure to our experience. Because when you when you write about an experience, there’s a form that that takes like, we often think in a very fragmented way, very emotional, what what Omar, you know, just pinging negative thoughts and images all over the place. But that’s not how we write, we we learn to write with, you know, there’s a subject a verb, oftentimes a punctuation mark. And, and when we write about things, there’s often like a beginning, middle, and end. So writing helps us create a narrative that helps us do something that we’re highly motivated to do, which is make meaning out of our lives. And then ability to make meaning. This is something that sometimes we really struggle with, and writing can help bring that process back on track in ways that are really helpful.

Eric Zimmer  32:28

Yeah, I think to your point, I often think of thoughts as being really slippery, on one hand, they sort of take over and yet, when you try and grab onto a lot of them, they tend to be kind of, you know, like I said, slippery, which is why I think that writing idea sort of slows the whole process down a little bit and allows a little bit more clarity,

Ethan Kross  32:46

completely agree is slowing it down is I think a great way of describing it, because we can often think quite fast, and in a very disorganized, incoherent way. And that’s just not how you write about things. And so so that’s another kind of distancing tool that I talk about, that tends to be a more effortful tool, because you’ve actually, you do have to stop and sit down, find the time to actually, you know, write about that experience, but it could be a really useful one.

Eric Zimmer  33:14

So what about changing the view, this is another slightly more effortful one than say, maybe just switching that the tense you’re using from AI to you. But what is changing the view, when we

Ethan Kross  33:27

think about negative experiences past or future, we often have a mental snapshot of that event in our mind. So if I asked you to think back to the last time you put your foot in your mouth in a conversation, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that before I have I can think about last time I did that it was just a couple hours ago. And I actually right now I’m seeing have a snapshot of that experience, I’m I could see the person’s face, who I didn’t mean to insult the dead. And what we know is that that image that we have in our mind is malleable. The more emotionally experiences the more you replay that event in a from a first person point of view, you’re right back there in the moment re experiencing it as though it’s happening all over again. But what we also know people can do is they can essentially take a step back in their own imagination and see themselves in the experience, they can adopt a fly on the wall perspective where they see the bigger picture. They see the whole scene. They’re looking at themselves in that event, doing the thing they did, almost like a director in a movie, like watching the actors interact. And that’s another way of getting distance, right? That’s another way of breaking yourself out of that very immersed state. And thinking about your experience from a more objective standpoint. It actually often goes hand in hand with linguistic distancing or the distance self talk. So in some studies, where we we’ve told people to talk about a negative experience using their name try to work through it When they’re done, we have them think about the event and tell us, hey, to what extent were you actually right back there reliving the event through your own eyes versus seeing yourself in it, the more you use your own name, the more you actually see yourself from afar. So these different kinds of distance are related.

Eric Zimmer  35:16

I’m going to change directions for a second, because I want to hit a word that’s in the title of your book before we forget it, or before I forget it, which is you use the word harness. And I really like that word a lot. I’d love to hear why. That’s the term you chose for dealing with Chatter is harnessing it. And I suppose we could say the same thing for negative emotions, you probably assume you might use a similar word, which would be that we want to harness that’s right. So why is that the word?

Ethan Kross  35:46

You know, I can’t tell you how many people when they learn about the negative implications that chatter can have for their life, how it can undermine their ability to think and perform, create friction in their relationships, negatively impact their physical health, the immediate question they asked me is, how do i Silence this inner voice. And what I respond to them is, hey, that’s not something you would want to do, given all of the amazing things that our inner voice actually does for us. We haven’t talked much about this. But right, but your inner voice is, it’s a tool, a tool of the mind, that is really, really helpful helps you keep information active in your head, simulate and plan, control yourself, create narratives. And so the challenge here is not to get rid of this vital human capacity. Instead, the challenge is to figure out how do you wheel that tool of the mind more effectively. And harness is a word that I think captures that it’s have got this tool, its ability to silently use language to reflect on my life. And it’s not being properly deployed, for whatever reason, the program is not working properly, I’m getting the equivalent of error messages. And it’s making me really upset. How can I regain control of that tool, harness it, but you don’t want to throw the tool out altogether. So that was a reason for choosing the word harness?

Eric Zimmer  37:10

Yeah, I love it. Because I think it speaks to what you’re saying, like, the brain isn’t going to turn off, the inner voice is not going to turn off. It’s just, it’s not the way the brain works. And to your point, we wouldn’t want it to, and emotions aren’t going to go away. But there is tremendous energy available there. I know you’re often thought of as a emotional regulation expert. And the way if somebody asked me defined emotional regulation, I would just say, working with my thoughts and emotions skillfully enough, that I could act according to my values, right. And so I love that idea of harness because it means I can sort of point this entire apparatus at my values, and I can use that energy that’s coming from all this to sort of move me in that direction. And when I thought about that word harness, in your title, I went, That’s kind of the word I’ve been looking for.

Ethan Kross  37:58

Absolutely. We’re thinking about things exactly the same way. This

Eric Zimmer  38:01

comes to me and I don’t quite recall if it was in your book or not. But it makes me think of a question. I think I got it from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, maybe interviewing Stephen C. Hayes or someone but it was this question of is this thought useful or not. And I love that idea. To your point, like we may define chatter as becoming maladaptive, but the internal voice, the thoughts, sometimes they are very useful. And so I do think it’s helpful to ask that question, is this useful or not? If it is, good, let’s stay with it. And if it’s not, then let’s start talking about deploying some of the tools you’re talking about.

Ethan Kross  38:38

Absolutely. I completely agree with that. You know, another distinction along those lines that I personally find very useful, is to also think about what aspects of your thoughts and beliefs you can control and what you can’t. So I don’t think you have control or human beings can control the thoughts that pop into our head, right? I don’t have any evidence suggesting how to control or how to determine why it is I’m walking down the street to work at a very dark, inappropriate thought runs through my head. Yep. I don’t know where that comes from. And I don’t think we figured out maybe one day we will I’m sure we will. But we don’t right now. Yep. So I can’t control the thoughts that pop into my head. But what I do have enormous control over is how I engage with those thoughts once they arise. And I’ve got a fantastic toolbox of skills that I could draw on to push those thoughts in different directions. I can accept it, I can reframe it. I can go deeper into it. You know, lots of things like do and that’s my playground. And so I think just being aware of that framework for how to think about thinking can be really useful because some people get down on themselves, they start experiencing chatter, like because a particular thought popped into their head. I remember teaching a class a few years ago, was a class on self control and emotion regulation. And I posed a question to this Students, what if you have the temptation to do something that you don’t want to do? And in this case, it was like eating after 10pm, right. But let’s say you’re on a diet, you want to be regulated there. So what if you have the temptation, but you are actually effective and not giving into that thought about half the class thought that just because you had the temptation meant that you hadn’t truly exercise self control. And my response to them is, you are setting a really high bar for being controlled in your life. You know, if that were the case, for me, I’m a complete self control failure, every hour of my existence, because I’m constantly experiencing temptations and thoughts that maybe I don’t want to be having. I don’t always give into them. In fact, I usually don’t. And I think that’s, that’s where self control resides.

Eric Zimmer  40:51

Totally. I mean, sit down to meditate for five minutes, and you learn very quickly, like, I think it’s actually one of the benefits of meditation that is often undersold, is that you sit there and you go, Okay, I am not going to think. And then it just happens. Yeah, it just goes and goes. And then again, you’re like, I’m gonna pay attention to my breath. And they just go and you realize very quickly, like, at least the eye is I think of myself is not running that show that factory is is producing on its own. And so yeah, since I can’t control that part of it, I can just relax around that. That’s

Ethan Kross  41:27

right. And it is so liberating. It’s incredibly liberating draws, all right, yeah, I just had that temptation, or I have a thought, Okay, if I didn’t act on it, or I didn’t let it take over. I mean, it really I think, lowers the bar for being satisfied with oneself in ways that I think are truly healthy and adaptive. I think one

Eric Zimmer  42:18

of the things that is most difficult for people, and I hear this a lot from people that I do work with is yeah, I remembered all those tools two hours after it was over. Do you have any ideas? or has any of your research led us to any insight into how we can more quickly recognize okay, I’m in the middle of a chatter storm. And I got tools I can use? Because that seems to be a very sort of common stumbling block

Ethan Kross  42:50

to responses to that excellent question that taps into, I think, that I agree, this is a real issue that a lot of people struggle with. First, one of the reasons why I find so many of the tools in that little skill box, I talk about that toolbox. So exciting is because they are easy to use. Now, just because they’re easy, should not in any way diminish their potential benefits. There’s a lot of complexity and science that went to the identification of these different tools. But some of them are just simple to use. And one of the things we know about people is, the easier it is to do it, the more likely they will be to do it. Yeah. And so I think just being aware of what some of those easy to use tools are can be really empowering, and potentially really useful, you know, temporal distancing, that mental time travel that you skillfully proactively use when you detect chatter. And then I do as well, if I wasn’t aware of that tool, I would just have to kind of wait to stumble on it. But I know how that works. Yeah, I can implement that in a matter of seconds. That’s not an exaggeration, how quickly that tool is to use. Same thing with distance self talk, we’ve done neuroscience work on that, looking at how quickly in the brain you see a reduction in emotional reactivity. It’s within milliseconds, because it’s so quick to use these tools. So that’s one thought. And the other thing to keep in mind is this there are things you can do to enhance the likelihood that you will use different tools when you’re struggling with chatter. And so there’s work on something called implementation intentions or creating if then plans I think is really fabulous scientific work. And what it involves doing is you come up with an if then plan that you rehearse ahead of time. If I find myself experiencing chatter about work, then I’m going to use distance self talk, mental time travel and talk to a chatter buddy and you rehearse that plan a little bit. And what ends up happening then when you come up with a simple plan. It’s a commitment device that essentially links specific tools with a specific situation, enhancing the likelihood that you We use those tools in that situation. And so if listeners are struggling to use the tools in the moment, I would encourage them to try creating some of those if then plans and then see if that makes a difference.

Eric Zimmer  45:12

Yeah, I think for some of those chatter ones for me, it’s not an if then it’s a when then. Yeah, yeah. And I experienced chatter about work, then there’s no if about it. It’s coming sooner or later. Yeah, I agree. I think those are really, really helpful tools. And I think there’s something about doing that and repeating that, as a professor, you may know what this term is called. I know it has a name. I can’t say what it is. But it’s basically like, if you think about buying a Toyota, you all of a sudden start seeing Toyota’s everywhere. It’s not that there’s any more, right, it’s just that you’re noticing them. And I think those implementation instructions can do a similar thing. Yeah, we’re priming ourselves to look for chatter storms.

Ethan Kross  45:50

Absolutely. It is remarkable to me, how much time we spend dealing with negative emotions and stumbling our way through those experiences, right, trying to find ways of managing it. I think that’s that’s the case for most people when they’re experiencing negative emotions. And yeah, the more you know about these tools, the less stumbling you’ll do and the more deliberate and skillful you can be about managing those states, let’s shift

Eric Zimmer  46:16

into talking about a couple tools that involve the environment, because like you said, I think these are very interesting. And as I’ve done a lot of work on habits study with people, we recognize more and more environmental cues are so hugely important. I love

Ethan Kross  46:33

this work. And I find it so fascinating that there are ways of interacting with our physical spaces that affect our internal conversations. And there are a couple of different tools that exist here, we’ll deal with the elephant in the room first, which is nature and Greenspaces. Lots of people probably have had the experience of enjoying going for a walk in a park, or a tree filled setting. What we know now from lots and lots of research is that exposing yourself to green spaces doesn’t just kind of like feel good. The benefits are much deeper than that when it comes to dealing with chatter. Going for a walk in a green setting can help you manage your chatter, and it can do so in two ways. One thing it does is it helps restore your attention. So when you’re experiencing chatter, all of your attention is devoted to the problem you’re worried or ruminating about. That’s why when you try to read a book, or watch a movie, when you’re dealing with chatter, you often don’t remember anything you’ve read or seen because your mind somewhere else. what nature does is it surrounds us with really interesting things that gently draw our attention away from our chatter onto so you’re going for a walk, you check it out the leaves and in the bushes, and they are not carefully scrutinizing the geometrical structure of the hedges, right, just kind of taking it in. And what that does for you is it gives you the opportunity for your attention to restore. So by the end of the walk, you have more attention to work with your chatter. Now that’s one way it can help. The other way nature can help is by providing us with opportunities to experience the emotion of all which is an emotion we experience when we’re in the presence of something that is much bigger than us that’s vast and indescribable. And nature is filled with awe inspiring. Triggers like a great view or a tree that’s been there for hundreds of years. You can also experience all from other other things in the world, like looking at a skyscraper or if it’s me, if I’m contemplating how we can get an airplanes and fly safely like that, those move, I still don’t quite understand how that all works. And what we know happens when you experience all is it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. So you feel smaller when you’re contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when you feel smaller, so does your chatter. So that’s another way of broadening our perspective. So those are some environmental tools. The other one that I would slip in really quick because it’s so easy to use, and many people find it useful is organizing and cleaning. When we are experiencing chatter, we often feel like we don’t have control over our thoughts and feelings. Our mind is racing, we can’t bring it all under our control. And what you can do in that instance is you could compensate for that feeling by exerting control around you by tightening up by organizing, and many people find that to be a really helpful tool as well. Before I knew about this work, I would reflexively clean and put things away when I experience chatter, which is interesting for me because I’m not an overly organized kind of guy. I’m someone who was groomed was always messy. Same thing is true in my adult life. There’s a trail of clothing usually from the shower to my office downstairs, but when I’m experiencing chatter, everything is always neat and tidy. And so that’s another way of tuning your mind from the outside in

Eric Zimmer  49:57

that fundamental like recognizing What we can and can’t control and you sort of pointed to that earlier that things that are out of control, fuel chatter. So if we can find something we can control and put some energy into. I do think it just it’s soothing. Totally. And the science bears that out. Ethan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I absolutely love the book. I’ve loved this conversation. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation about a couple other tools. Listeners if you’d like to get access to that and other great benefits of being a member go to one you feed dotnet slash join. Thanks again, Ethan. Really, really been fun.

Ethan Kross  50:35

Thanks so much for having the Eric who was truly fun and stimulating conversation.