Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Huberman Lab
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Episode: Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience
Author: Scicomm Media
Duration: 03:09:01
Episode Shownotes
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Ethan Kross, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, director of the Emotion & Self-Control Laboratory, and author of the bestselling book Chatter. We discuss the purpose of the inner voice in your head and its impact on emotional well-being and
motivation. We also explore practical tools to manage negative internal chatter and eliminate intrusive thoughts. Topics include how music, exercise, mental distancing techniques, and expressive writing can help rescript your inner dialogue to be self-encouraging and effective in creating outward behavioral changes. Dr. Kross explains why venting to others is self-defeating and offers better alternatives. Throughout the episode, he provides research-supported, actionable protocols to help you shift your internal dialogue and accompanying emotional state, fostering greater happiness and resilience. Access the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Pre-order Andrew's new book, Protocols: protocolsbook.com Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Ethan Kross 00:02:45 Sponsors: ExpressVPN & Eight Sleep 00:05:38 Inner Voice & Benefits 00:10:33 Music & Emotions 00:15:09 Shifting Emotions, Emotional Congruency, Facial Expressions 00:20:25 Resistance to Shifting Emotion; Tool: Invisible Support, Affectionate Touch 00:27:16 Tool: Expressive Writing; Sensory Shifters 00:30:41 Sponsors: AG1 & Joovv 00:33:27 Inner Voice Benefits, Thinking vs. Writing, Tool: Journaling 00:44:01 Decision Making, Individualization; Tool: Exercise 00:50:24 “Chatter,” Trauma, Depression, Anxiety 00:54:37 Sponsor: Function 00:56:25 Tool: Combating Chatter, Mental Distancing; Distraction & Social Media 01:04:30 Tools: 2 AM Chatter Strategy, Mental Time Travel; Venting 01:13:41 Time, Chatter & Flow 01:18:01 Focusing on Present, Mental Time Travel 01:22:49 Texting, Social Media, Sharing Emotions 01:28:31 AI & Individualized Tools for Emotional Regulation 01:33:07 Imaginary Friend, Developing Inner Voice; Negative Emotions 01:40:20 Tool: Nature & Cognitive Restoration; Awe; Screens, Modifying Spaces 01:49:34 Cities vs. Nature, Organizing Space & Compensatory Control 01:56:00 Emotional Regulation & Shifters, Screens 02:01:19 Historical Approaches to Manage Emotions; Motivation & Mental Tools 02:10:12 Mechanical & Behavioral Interventions, Emotional Regulation 02:15:52 Tool: Stop Intrusive Voices; Anxiety 02:21:55 Assessing Risk & Consequence; Flow & Cognitive Engagement 02:31:02 “Cognitive Velocity”; Resetting 02:36:43 Transition States, Tool: Goal Pursuit & WOOP 02:43:59 Attention, Emotional Flexibility; Avoidance 02:54:15 Emotional Contagion 03:00:22 Validating Emotions, Wisdom; Shift Book 03:06:59 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Ethan Kross discusses the inner voice, or 'chatter,' highlighting its significant impact on emotional well-being. He provides strategies for managing negative internal dialogue, emphasizing techniques like music, expressive writing, and mental distancing to reshape one's inner narrative. Kross critiques the common practice of venting emotions, showing it can exacerbate feelings instead of alleviate them. The conversation also touches on how environmental factors influence our emotional states, the importance of supportive relationships, and the concept of emotional regulation to foster resilience and happiness.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_00
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
00:00:15 Speaker_00
And I'm wearing these Red Lens Wind Down Roka glasses because we are recording this late at night, which is unusual for us, and bright light, in particular, short wavelength bright light in the blue and green part of the spectrum, quashes melatonin and it makes it hard to sleep.
00:00:31 Speaker_00
And I want to sleep tonight. These Red Lens glasses filter out the green and blue short wavelengths that would otherwise disrupt my sleep. My guest today is Dr. Ethan Cross.
00:00:41 Speaker_00
Dr. Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. He is also the author of the best-selling book, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It.
00:00:54 Speaker_00
Today's discussion is a really special one because we discuss something that each and all of us have, which is a voice in our head that is our voice. And that voice can range from encouraging to discouraging.
00:01:08 Speaker_00
It can be repetitive in ways that can be very intrusive, and it has a profound effect on our emotional state, our confidence, our levels of anxiety, and indeed what we are capable of achieving in life.
00:01:19 Speaker_00
Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory has done groundbreaking research to understand what is the origin of this voice in our heads and can and should we control it? And indeed the answer is yes.
00:01:31 Speaker_00
Today's discussion gets into many things that people struggle with and many things that you can do to improve your life, such as how to regulate the chatter in your head, how to overcome ruminations and intrusive thoughts.
00:01:43 Speaker_00
And we also discuss what to do with your actual voice. For instance, data pointing to the fact that venting your negative emotions to others is actually bad. It tends to amplify bad emotions. We talk about that research.
00:01:55 Speaker_00
We also talk about other forms of outward speech and inward speech, that inner voice that you can partake in in order to improve your emotional state and shift your emotional state.
00:02:06 Speaker_00
So today's discussion really centers around common questions and common scenarios and common challenges that everybody grapples with. And of course, we all have a voice in our head.
00:02:16 Speaker_00
Today, you're gonna learn to listen to it, to regulate it, and indeed to steer it in the direction of mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm also excited to tell you that Dr. Ethan Cross soon has another book coming out entitled, Shift.
00:02:30 Speaker_00
managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And I tremendously enjoyed Chatter, his first book, and I very much look forward to reading Shift when it comes out.
00:02:38 Speaker_00
We provide links to the work in Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory as well as links to his previous and forthcoming book in the show note captions.
00:02:45 Speaker_00
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
00:02:51 Speaker_00
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
00:03:02 Speaker_00
Our first sponsor is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data.
00:03:17 Speaker_00
Now, I'm personally familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough. Several years ago, I had one of my bank accounts hacked, and it was a terrible amount of work to try and have that reversed and the account secured.
00:03:28 Speaker_00
So after that happened, I talked to my friends in the tech community, and they told me that even though you may think your internet connection is secure, oftentimes it is not, especially if you're using Wi-Fi networks such as those on planes and hotels and coffee shops and other public areas.
00:03:42 Speaker_00
In fact, even when you're on the internet at home, your data may not be as secure as you think. The great thing about ExpressVPN is that I don't even notice that it's running, since the connection it provides is so fast.
00:03:52 Speaker_00
I have it on my computer and on my phone, and I just keep it on whenever I'm connected to the internet. If you want to start protecting your internet activity using ExpressVPN,
00:04:00 Speaker_00
You can go to expressvpn.com slash Huberman, and you can get an extra three months free. Again, that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n dot com slash Huberman to get an extra three months free. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep.
00:04:17 Speaker_00
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00:04:27 Speaker_00
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00:04:41 Speaker_00
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00:04:49 Speaker_00
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00:05:25 Speaker_00
8Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Ethan Cross. Dr. Ethan Cross, welcome. Great to be here.
00:05:41 Speaker_00
Right before we went hot mics, as they say, we're talking about interrupting one another. And the fact that you're from New York, I'm going to try not to interrupt you because the audience doesn't like that.
00:05:52 Speaker_00
However, I am very interested in what you're going to tell us about emotion regulation, but especially this thing that you call chatter, the voice in our heads.
00:06:04 Speaker_00
And prior to learning about your work, I always thought that chatter and the voice in our heads was, you know, overwhelmingly negative. That's what we hear. How do you combat that negative voice in one's head?
00:06:15 Speaker_00
But you have some very interesting ideas about the utility of chatter, like maybe how it even arose and what it's for. So maybe we start there.
00:06:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I think this is a great question because the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is, right? And actually sometimes I get up there and speak to people.
00:06:39 Speaker_02
They often wonder like, what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads? And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool of the human mind.
00:06:52 Speaker_02
So when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives. And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things.
00:07:05 Speaker_02
So just from the outset, Let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations. I think of chatter as the dark side of the inner voice, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But having the ability to silently use language
00:07:23 Speaker_02
that is a boon to the human condition. So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves. What's your favorite sports team?
00:07:31 Speaker_00
The Harlem Globetrotters, because they're undefeated, as I understand. Yeah, best record in any sport. I don't think they've ever lost a game. Do they ever play against other teams? The Washington Generals.
00:07:41 Speaker_02
Okay. Sorry for the Washington Generals. So if you were to go to a game and root for them, what would you say? Go Globetrotters. Go Globetrotters. Okay, can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now? Yes.
00:08:00 Speaker_02
Okay, you've just used your inner voice. So your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system, basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary, but totally ordinary also.
00:08:14 Speaker_02
Your verbal working memory system, it's a mouthful, lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cell phones, How did you memorize phone numbers?
00:08:28 Speaker_00
Like, what would you do? Repeat it in your head. Yeah, and it had sort of a song to it. Yeah. I can remember my childhood phone number still, even though that number is long since gone. Long since gone. Yeah. Even the whole area code's gone, in fact. Really?
00:08:42 Speaker_00
Well, the number is probably still there, but under a different area code. I know, because I tried calling it every once in a while.
00:08:47 Speaker_02
Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's funny. When I go through this content, I give talks or workshops, I often say, 2090501, repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. I'm like, go give it a shot. Give them a call.
00:08:59 Speaker_02
So for all I know, that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not my phone number. But that's your verbal working memory system. You go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you were supposed to get.
00:09:12 Speaker_02
Most people don't do that out loud, like, oh crap, what was I supposed to get? Milk, cheese, eggs. You repeat that silently in your head. So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do. Keep information active, verbal information.
00:09:27 Speaker_02
your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan. So before presentations or interviews, a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event.
00:09:39 Speaker_00
Do you ever do this? Yeah, I mean, my mode of preparation for things like solo podcasts and talks is it's not scripted out line by line in advance, but I have a structure in my mind and it's more like,
00:09:56 Speaker_00
remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and then the rest just kind of falls out. Yeah, we have a very similar style.
00:10:03 Speaker_02
I will bullet out what the key ideas are and as long as I can bullet that out, I am good to go. But I will also rehearse those bullets in my head, A, B, C, D. But that's you using your inner voice as well.
00:10:19 Speaker_02
Now, before a big presentation like a live event, I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through when I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event.
00:10:33 Speaker_00
May I ask about the walk when I prepare for live events?
00:10:37 Speaker_00
or solo podcasts, and long before I was involved in either of those activities for lectures of any kind or classroom discussions where I had to stand up in front of the class, I would find that walking and listening to a song would, maybe simultaneously, maybe separately, would dramatically shape the kind of cadence and energy
00:11:01 Speaker_00
of the delivery of the talk.
00:11:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up songs there.
00:11:05 Speaker_02
So if we want to take a little detour here, so in my new book, Shift, we talk about or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation, sensory experiences are one powerful and I would argue often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions.
00:11:23 Speaker_02
So if you ask people, why do you listen to music? What do you think most people say?
00:11:29 Speaker_00
It makes me feel good.
00:11:30 Speaker_02
Feel, right? It's about emotions, feel good. So one study, the number was around like 95, 96% of participants who were asked said exactly gave the answer that you just gave.
00:11:41 Speaker_02
But then if you look at in other studies, hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to push your emotions around? The number of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%.
00:11:58 Speaker_02
Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions. I actually, an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer. I lived for these soccer games on the weekend.
00:12:18 Speaker_02
I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would, you know, go crazy on the sidelines. It was just such joy to just watch these kids play.
00:12:27 Speaker_02
And typically my daughter was really excited to go to the game, but one morning she was just like not into it at all. She was bummed, like she was bummed out. It was bumming me out. I was, you know, catching her emotions.
00:12:40 Speaker_02
We can talk about emotional contagion later. And got into the car, and it just so happened that my cell phone was connected, and the next song on the playlist happened to be Journeys Don't Stop Believin'. So you know the song, I presume.
00:12:59 Speaker_02
Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please. The song comes on, and I start jamming out to it, singing out loud like an embarrassing dad. And then I look in the back seat, and I find her bopping her head. And then the chorus comes.
00:13:15 Speaker_02
We get really excited, and then I pull up to the soccer. field, and she just bursts out of the car and is like invigorated. That is the power of music to impact us.
00:13:27 Speaker_02
So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I'm getting ready to, you know, get in that mental frame of mind. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many athletes do this as well.
00:13:42 Speaker_02
They've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience or our emotional trajectory in the direction we want it to point.
00:13:53 Speaker_00
So. It's interesting. I was thinking about music in reference to shifting emotion, as you just gave an example of. Yeah. You know, feeling like a motivated and then your daughter's motivated by the.
00:14:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. Don't stop.
00:14:07 Speaker_00
Right. Yeah. Okay. I'm not going to sing it. Keep going. No, no, no. We'll do it together. I will not do that. Someone will cut the clip and they'll run it out. They'll spool it out. And then no, I have a truly terrible singing voice, but
00:14:18 Speaker_00
I wonder, has the study ever been done or something similar to this where people who are feeling pretty good or very good are exposed to sadder music and vice versa, people are feeling sad exposed to sort of ecstatic music or positive lyrics.
00:14:38 Speaker_00
Because I've often wondered whether or not humans like or dislike when things or people try and shift their state. You know, I know in myself when I'm like feeling upset about something, I don't want to feel upset.
00:14:52 Speaker_00
I don't think anyone wants to feel upset, but. if I hear a song that's positive, there's a moment where I'm like, I can feel it kind of pulling on me. And you sort of know, like I could follow that trajectory and probably get out of this.
00:15:05 Speaker_00
And sometimes one does, and sometimes one doesn't.
00:15:08 Speaker_00
And this gets to, I think, a more fundamental issue, which is why I'm asking, which is, are we supposed to feel our emotions as a way to sort of dissolve them when we don't want them, kind of the cathartic approach, or would listening to sad music when we're sad just amplify the sadness?
00:15:24 Speaker_02
These are great questions and they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them serially. So number one, has the study been done when you expose people to different kinds of music, sad versus
00:15:42 Speaker_02
arousing, you know, happy music. Do you see that push people's emotions around? Yes.
00:15:46 Speaker_02
In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments. So we want to induce a particular kind of state.
00:16:03 Speaker_02
We can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or negative emotional experiences. So images being another sensory modality, vision. So that's number one.
00:16:18 Speaker_02
Number two, there's this very interesting phenomenon where when we are in a particular emotional state, let's say we're feeling sad, We often don't reflexively seek out the happy music. We don't go to Journey. Instead, we go to Adele, right?
00:16:34 Speaker_02
We're going to Chicago. I'm giving you my age bracket here, right? Like the music that has sad associations for me. So there's this mood congruency. If I'm feeling a certain way, I'm going to go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me.
00:16:51 Speaker_02
Why on earth would we do that? Are we all masochistic? Do we just want to feel even worse? This gets at, I think, a critically important point that is not always talked about, which
00:17:04 Speaker_02
is all emotions are functional when they are experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long. So sadness, as an example, is an emotion we experience when we've experienced some loss that we can't rectify right away.
00:17:20 Speaker_02
Like something has happened and you can't fix that. So you've lost someone. And so what does this emotion do? Well, it hijacks the way we are thinking, feeling, and our bodies are responding.
00:17:34 Speaker_02
So it motivates us to introspect, to turn our attention inward, to reflect on this situation, to now try to make sense of it, right? Something really important in my life has happened.
00:17:45 Speaker_02
I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life so I can find meaning and move on. My physiology is slowing down so I can engage in that slow introspection.
00:17:57 Speaker_02
But what's also really interesting about sadness is it's also impacting my facial display, giving a sign to all of the people in my environment to say, hey,
00:18:09 Speaker_02
Maybe we should check up on that person, that guy, because he looks like he's on his own in a corner, right? So can you detect when someone is sad, if you see like a sad facial expression?
00:18:20 Speaker_00
Yes. When I used to teach the summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor on the North Shore of Long Island, the students would come in from all over the world. I've been there. It's a great place. It's awesome. Summer camp for scientists.
00:18:30 Speaker_00
I'll go to their laboratories all year. And
00:18:33 Speaker_00
I eventually was director of a course there and my co-director and I used to have this debrief at the end of the first day or two where we would talk to one another and we would, you know, go over the list of names and we'd say – and she was remarkably good at this, just extraordinary, like a superpower at saying, you know, I think everyone's settling in well but I noticed that so-and-so was kind of like – might not be adjusted to the jet lag or might not be acclimating so well.
00:19:01 Speaker_00
It's a very tight-knit group. The course is quite long for a course like that, but it's important that everybody kind of feel engaged early on. And people have a tendency to dominate in those intellectually competitive environments.
00:19:16 Speaker_00
And she could just pinpoint who it was that was feeling a little bit outside the group. We knew how to ameliorate that really quickly. And from her, I learned a bit of how to recognize the signs. And it was rarely just facial expression included that.
00:19:31 Speaker_00
and some other cues that she just seemed to have a unconscious or conscious genius around. So for me, I learned some of that from her. I like to think I got better at it, but I think some people are just extraordinarily good at that detection.
00:19:45 Speaker_02
And it enhances social interactions. And so some people are really good at detecting it. Others are really good at displaying it. I'm going to go back to my daughter. So if something happens where she feels sad, she exhibits this exaggerated response.
00:20:03 Speaker_02
like she'll stick out her lower lip. And even if I'm kind of upset at her, like it is amazing the power that that has on me. It is so, so beautifully manipulative. Manipulative, you know, no, manipulative.
00:20:20 Speaker_02
And it's a testament to the power that these displays can have on us. So I wanna go back to one other question you raised in your last comment, and we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality.
00:20:33 Speaker_02
You raised the question about being shifted by others, other people, and perhaps either just our surroundings, music or spaces. Sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted.
00:20:47 Speaker_02
And in fact, when other people try to do that, it can elicit what we call reactants. Like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in the particular direction.
00:20:57 Speaker_02
I think that's a really important point that we need to be aware of as people living and working in these social environments where we're often well-intentioned, but sometimes our well-intentioned behaviors can backfire.
00:21:13 Speaker_02
And so there's this beautiful research which shows that If you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them, that can blow up in your face.
00:21:27 Speaker_02
Because what it does is it often communicates to people that you are thinking that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances. And most of us, like, we're motivated to think that we're capable of handling ourselves.
00:21:41 Speaker_02
And so there are still ways you can help people in those circumstances.
00:21:45 Speaker_02
It's called providing invisible support, which involves providing support to the person who can genuinely benefit from it, but not shining a spotlight on the fact that that is what you are doing. So how might this transpire?
00:22:01 Speaker_02
There's some really simple things you could do. So let's say my wife is, really overwhelmed with stuff. And she hasn't asked me for help, but I know she is at her wits end, work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate.
00:22:18 Speaker_02
I can proactively do things to lessen her burden. If it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning and the groceries, I'm doing that voluntarily. I'm doing that and I'm not coming home and saying, hey sweetie, look what I did today. I did all these things.
00:22:34 Speaker_02
Can I have a pat on my back? That's not what we're talking about. It's about your group, your lab is working under a deadline, right? To submit a grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab.
00:22:49 Speaker_02
It's those little things that can help. Give you two more examples. Let's say that someone on your team is really struggling with their ability to translate their work for for popular audiences and that's something they're motivated to do.
00:23:05 Speaker_02
Really important skill for a scientist to be able to translate what they do for others to consume.
00:23:11 Speaker_02
Before you pull them aside and say, hey, you know, I noticed that you're stumbling on a few different issues and here are a couple of things I think you can do better.
00:23:21 Speaker_02
Before you do that direct intervention, you might have a team meeting where you share out best practices. Hey, what are the two things that I've learned that really have benefited my ability to communicate with different audiences.
00:23:35 Speaker_02
What you're doing there is you're getting people the resources they can benefit from, but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are directing it to them. So it's kind of a back doorway of helping or of shifting.
00:23:51 Speaker_02
The last tool I'll mention brings it back to sensation. One of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is through touch, tactile sensation. You know, what's the first thing that you do with a child to soothe them when they are born? Hold them.
00:24:10 Speaker_02
Hold them. Skin-to-skin contact.
00:24:12 Speaker_02
I remember both times my kids were born, it was like, you know, I wanna get in on that, like, you know, because my wife got first dibs with both of our daughters, like, I want some of that, you know, skin-to-skin contact.
00:24:26 Speaker_02
That doesn't end after we leave the womb, the comfort that we experience, the release of stress-fighting chemicals that occurs when affectionate embraces are registered, that continues throughout the lifespan.
00:24:38 Speaker_02
So if my daughters who don't particularly like dad to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays. If I know they're having a bad day, I'll go over and I'll rub their back in a totally uncreepy way.
00:24:54 Speaker_02
That is an important caveat we should give to everyone who's listening. What we're talking about here is affectionate but not creepy or unwanted touch.
00:25:03 Speaker_02
It is touch that is mutually desired, and there is some research which shows actually that when it is not desired, you don't get these benefits, and in fact you get the opposite, plus usually like lawsuits as well.
00:25:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, sure. I definitely believe that as a primate species, which we are, we are old world primates, I think they call it allopathic grooming.
00:25:31 Speaker_00
You'll see these images of these monkeys and lots of different species of primates, you know, just sitting nearby one another where one just has it's, even just it's, I said it's hand. It's paw on the one next to it.
00:25:49 Speaker_00
And they'll just sit like that for long periods of time. And then sometimes they're doing like an active grooming of removing parasites. This is very important in the primate world, as we know.
00:25:59 Speaker_00
But, you know, grooming and, you know, picking in these kinds of things, you see it in couples, it's actually can be kind of endearing.
00:26:06 Speaker_00
I suppose at its extremes, it's kind of gross, but you know, it's rather endearing to see somebody kind of like remove a piece of,
00:26:15 Speaker_00
lint off somebody, you know, their partner's jacket or, you know, just, or even just touch that is, it's not, it doesn't look like it's geared towards any specific outcome. Right? It's, and it doesn't necessarily appear romantic or that it's grooming.
00:26:32 Speaker_00
So maybe the lint example isn't the best one, but where you just see people that are just like, actually on the flight down this morning, cause I had to fly in early, I was sitting on the aisle seat in the middle was a,
00:26:44 Speaker_00
boy, he was probably 14, 15, and his mom was at the window seat. And I went up to use the restroom, came back, and he had fallen asleep on his mom's shoulder. And I took a look, it was a very endearing moment.
00:26:56 Speaker_00
And then when we landed, I said, you know, the ability to sleep anywhere is a superpower. And he said, I learned it from my dad. And it was a moment where I just thought it was just a very pleasant thing to see them in this
00:27:07 Speaker_00
touch on the plane, he clearly felt comfortable enough to do that. I remember thinking like, yeah, humans were a lot like the other primates.
00:27:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, there's a beauty to it. And it is a tool, it is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions.
00:27:31 Speaker_02
And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all. We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure.
00:27:45 Speaker_02
But, you know, self-control, emotion regulation, like, let me roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there. Yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions and some of the tools that we have are effortful.
00:28:01 Speaker_02
One example would be expressive writing. It's a wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences. You sit down, just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days. This is the Pennebaker.
00:28:13 Speaker_02
This is the Pennebaker writing effect. This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect free, you could argue intervention for helping you deal with curve balls that life throws at you.
00:28:25 Speaker_00
You have vast amounts of data supporting the practice. Vast amounts of data.
00:28:30 Speaker_00
deserves, in my opinion, if not the psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize, I don't know what that is, but it deserves real deep praise for developing that method because it's essentially zero cost, takes a little bit of time, and there's just, what, hundreds of studies?
00:28:49 Speaker_00
Hundreds of studies, that's right. Showing that these 10 to 15 minute cathartic writing, just free associative writing, as I understand with a writing utensil, it's probably better. We did an episode where I talked about this and received a note from…
00:29:04 Speaker_00
from him and was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong. In fact, he was pleased with it. I think that he deserves a lot of credit. A powerful tool for self-healing.
00:29:16 Speaker_02
We actually just restarted a prestigious speaker series at Michigan, the Katz Newcomb Speaker Series, which is designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work.
00:29:34 Speaker_02
Because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity. And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool. It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that.
00:29:48 Speaker_02
Lots of things that we do in life are effortful, but we also know that We don't like exerting effort as a species. We like to conserve our resources as much as possible.
00:30:00 Speaker_02
So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And these sensory shifters, music, looking at images, right? These are modality, taste, touch. These are ways of pushing your emotions around.
00:30:17 Speaker_02
pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch, like when your daughter's not in a great mood or when you wanna get pumped up before an important event can be quite useful.
00:30:28 Speaker_02
And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them. So that's my plug for sensory shifters.
00:30:41 Speaker_00
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing it at a time when my budget was really limited.
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00:33:27 Speaker_02
Let's go back to just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides. So we talked about two. verbal working memory, keeping verbal information active for short periods of time.
00:33:42 Speaker_02
And we talked about simulating and planning things, like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to self-control and motivation. So you exercise, because you've talked about exercising.
00:34:02 Speaker_00
I try to exercise six days a week, although some are short workouts, some are longer.
00:34:08 Speaker_02
You ever talk to yourself on your exercise? Oh, all the time. So let's hear it. The world wants to know, Andrew, what do you say to yourself on your exercise?
00:34:17 Speaker_00
Depends on how well rested I am, how motivated I am. I'll give two examples at the opposite poles of the motivational scale.
00:34:26 Speaker_00
I was traveling two weeks ago and I was doing some exercise for the – there's a muscle on the back of the shoulder, the rear deltoid. And I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train, but it's a very important one for- That's when you do this one.
00:34:39 Speaker_00
You're right, for shoulder posture and stability and got to train that muscle group, because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating, like, you know, thumbs pointing toward the belly button and shoulders rolling forward thing.
00:34:52 Speaker_00
And there are a number of reasons why it's important. So you got to do the rear delt thing. And I sat down to do the first work set after a couple warmups. And I remember thinking like, I love training. I love training.
00:35:05 Speaker_00
I have since I started training when I was 16. And I thought to myself, for some reason, I don't want to do this this morning. And then I thought, okay, David Goggins would probably start swearing at himself in his head. So I started that a little bit.
00:35:15 Speaker_00
That didn't really work for me. Sorry, David. And then I thought I'm going to go through every possible inner voice I can think of. So I heard Jocko Willink's voice.
00:35:23 Speaker_00
I'm friends with Jocko and her just saying like, yeah, whatever, you're just weak, you know, or just like do it anyway kind of mentality. And I just started cycling through all of them and I made a deal with myself.
00:35:35 Speaker_00
that when I ran out of voices to use, that's when I would stop the set. And I probably tripled the number of repetitions that I would normally get with that weight. So it was like one part motivation, one part distraction, one part frustration.
00:35:47 Speaker_00
And I was just pulling from the catalog of possible voices of kind of coach like voices and worked out pretty well. And then at the other extreme, I can recall many times because I put effort into it where
00:36:05 Speaker_00
I'm well-rested, I'm hydrated, get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system, which I love, and sit down to train. And I absolutely love to train under those conditions. The sun is shining, music's playing.
00:36:17 Speaker_00
And I just remember this was during a set, this was a leg day, always the hardest day, set of heavy hack squats and just thinking,
00:36:26 Speaker_00
I love this, but I have this inner voice where every time I start a repetition, I go through the thing where I brace my midsection so I don't hurt my back. And I always look directly at the ceiling and I think about my bulldog Costello.
00:36:36 Speaker_00
And I think, I'm gonna do this one for you. I'm gonna do this one for you. And I know at those moments, my inner voice goes to, he would probably just be sitting there like, why are you working this hard? Bulldogs don't like to work.
00:36:47 Speaker_00
So I'm not really in a complete sentence generation, inner voice kind of thing.
00:36:53 Speaker_02
But you have a very rich inner world, right? Your verbal working memory stream is filled with words when you are working out.
00:37:04 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I'll tell you this, I was gonna ask you this later in the episode, but maybe it's relevant now, I think it is. When I was a kid, after my parents would tuck me in to go to sleep at night, I used to lie in bed
00:37:16 Speaker_00
and rehearse voices that I had heard throughout the day. And I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice, and then I'd make them say different things just for my own entertainment.
00:37:27 Speaker_00
So I could have them say whatever I wanted, but in a particular voice. And my friends sometimes tease me that I'll give people voices, like I'll give someone like a Marge Simpson voice or something.
00:37:36 Speaker_00
I'll just... They're like, she doesn't sound like that at all, but I'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind. So yeah, a lot of chatter in there, a lot of voices.
00:37:44 Speaker_01
Yeah.
00:37:46 Speaker_00
not super organized, it's not like I'm constructing a play, it's kind of, you know, it feels like things geyser up, I, you know, I toy with them, maybe, and then, but it's kind of a mishmash, it's not super regimented, these aren't complete sentences.
00:37:59 Speaker_02
Well, you know, one of the reasons why the Penny Baker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized.
00:38:12 Speaker_02
And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right? You're an idiot, such an idiot, or you're looping over a problem without making any progress.
00:38:26 Speaker_02
Putting those words in, actually taking that inner shaman and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do.
00:38:38 Speaker_02
Because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences, there's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking. Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all. It can go in all sorts of directions.
00:38:51 Speaker_02
And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.
00:38:57 Speaker_00
I'm so glad you're bringing this up. Our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Karl Deisseroth. He's a bioengineer. He's a practicing psychiatrist. He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience.
00:39:07 Speaker_00
He developed these light-sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neurons in animal models, but also now in human clinical work as well. And one thing that he shared was that
00:39:20 Speaker_00
after he puts his kids to sleep, I think now they're grown, but in the evening he'll sit, deliberately sit still, completely bodily still, close his eyes, and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so, maybe more.
00:39:37 Speaker_00
And I thought to myself, wow, that's a very disciplined practice. It also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default of the mind. So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is.
00:39:51 Speaker_00
He shared a few of them on that podcast episode, but I'm sure there are others as well. But I tried it.
00:39:58 Speaker_00
It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives, the stream sort of split into tributaries and then you dissolve into sleep or... A meditation experience.
00:40:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, almost dreamlike state where you're, you know, these liminal states.
00:40:15 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality.
00:40:24 Speaker_02
So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not, if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right?
00:40:38 Speaker_02
Because I would be unable to have a meaningful conversation with you.
00:40:43 Speaker_02
So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall a chatter-provoking experience, so think about something negative that's happened to you, and then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it, so i.e.
00:41:01 Speaker_02
a Penny Baker writing-like condition, or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking, because there's no guardrails to the way we think.
00:41:16 Speaker_02
That we are taught, I should add, because we're going to give people guardrails later in this episode.
00:41:22 Speaker_00
So in addition to using the Penny Baker approach, and by the way, we'll provide a link to some resources for the Penny Baker journaling, because there's some free online resources that I think are really powerful for people to use if they want to use that as a template.
00:41:37 Speaker_00
for cathartic reasons or just, you know, get one's mind around a problem or something I'm very familiar with, waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of not a storm in there but a bit too disorganized to get my head right, you know, and so I need things to get my head right.
00:41:53 Speaker_00
Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's writing. It sounds like journaling is just a really useful practice overall.
00:41:59 Speaker_02
It's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people, how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID. And we gave them
00:42:13 Speaker_02
a series of tools that they could check off if they used the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things. Number one, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for folks.
00:42:27 Speaker_02
So remarkable variability characterized the tools that worked for person A versus person B. Number two, it was seldom the case that people used one tool.
00:42:39 Speaker_02
In general, people used on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take home because I am often asked as, for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions?
00:42:53 Speaker_02
I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same. So it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's similar to physical exercise.
00:43:06 Speaker_02
You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day. You would have like funky looking shoulders if you did, right? And you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body. You're doing multiple things.
00:43:20 Speaker_02
And the multiple things that you do to exercise, I'm guessing are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise. Yet we may well be equally fit. Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me, but- I doubt it. You get the drift.
00:43:35 Speaker_02
So there's this beautiful, variability to how we manage our inner worlds. To bring it back to expressive writing, we found that expressive writing, when people used it, was really, really useful.
00:43:49 Speaker_02
It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety, but it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much. And I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.
00:44:01 Speaker_00
ask another question about movement that falls on the other end of the spectrum to what we're talking about now, which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing in order to parse an idea or work through an emotional state.
00:44:15 Speaker_00
In 2015, by the way, I use these anecdotes, not because I wanna focus on me, but just as generalizable anecdotes, okay?
00:44:23 Speaker_00
The specifics here don't matter, but I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh you know, path A versus path B. And I was in that place.
00:44:32 Speaker_00
I was actually choosing between a job at one institution and another institution, each of which had tremendous advantages, neither had any, you know, like striking disadvantages, but it was a really hard decision.
00:44:44 Speaker_00
And those close to me at that time will tell you that it was just brutal. Yeah, I made everybody around me suffer tremendously to the point where people were just like, flip a coin. Now I'm not an indecisive person. I think,
00:44:58 Speaker_00
you know, it's one of these things where big decisions I think deserve a lot of time and attention and it was a time constrained thing. So I was poring over this pro cons list.
00:45:08 Speaker_00
I was watching YouTube videos trying to figure out best ways for decision-making.
00:45:11 Speaker_02
I was trying to, I actually- Isn't it amazing by the way, when we're in those situations and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position.
00:45:20 Speaker_02
the things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are wacky. Like I'm sure you were Googling things that you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees. And I mean, it's wild.
00:45:33 Speaker_00
They're mathematical models that like there's the Actually, my colleague at NYU, Tony Moshin, I forget the name of the model, but there's a model about how many towns you should evaluate.
00:45:46 Speaker_00
It's an old kind of old example of towns you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business. Like, is it two, is it three? And there's an optimal strategy there. In any event, most of it wasn't helping.
00:45:57 Speaker_00
And I do believe that at some point you don't want too many committee members, because it just gets confusing. the two best pieces of information came from the following practices. One was a colleague said, forget all the superficial pro-con stuff.
00:46:12 Speaker_00
And I actually think this has proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me. He said, take yourself through a typical weekday in one place versus the other. Wake up, where are you going to go? How are you going to drive?
00:46:24 Speaker_00
Take yourself through the practicals of the day because everything else falls away once you're at a place or you're in a type of relationship. Take yourself through a given day.
00:46:33 Speaker_00
Don't think about the relationship or the institution that you're gonna work for, the school you're gonna go to. That's important, but take yourself through the entire day. So I did that.
00:46:43 Speaker_00
And then he said, also do it on a weekend because, you know, well, in our profession, we tend to work all the time, but occasionally you take a day off. And so that was very useful.
00:46:53 Speaker_00
The other thing that was very useful, which was completely surprising to me was at that time I was training in a boxing gym and I was doing some speed bag work and decent at it.
00:47:04 Speaker_00
You know, you get into a rhythm and what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way.
00:47:13 Speaker_00
These central pattern generators, as we call them in neuroscience, take over and you're just kind of, you know, turning your hands over in a way
00:47:20 Speaker_00
like every once in a while you can think, okay, I need to put a little more hip swivel into this or a little more head movement and practice my slips or something, but it's largely unconscious after a certain point.
00:47:33 Speaker_00
And I was doing that and all of a sudden, boom, a thought just geyser to the surface and I made my decision. And that was my final decision. And I never went back from that decision.
00:47:44 Speaker_00
And so it was in the act of not trying to parse things through words that words sprung up from my whatever unconscious somewhere in my brain, cortical or subcortical, I don't know. And it was like, that's it. And I was overwhelmed by that.
00:47:59 Speaker_00
And again, I don't share all that because I think it's speed bags or it's the example I gave before that's gonna solve it for everybody, but that these answers to hard problems seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches, verbal construction of complete sentences with paper or deliberately like Dyseroth does, and then also like
00:48:19 Speaker_00
not trying to get an answer at all, boom, the answer shows up. What in the world is that?
00:48:23 Speaker_02
So it speaks to this idea that, first of all, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and decisions we have to face. So there are different modalities to self-discovery and insight.
00:48:38 Speaker_02
And yes, you can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people. And then you can also allow your unconscious problem-solving machinery to do its thing.
00:48:51 Speaker_02
We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not infrequent. many people report having moments of insight when they are not otherwise engaged.
00:49:07 Speaker_02
And one line of thinking is that we are doing problem solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness. So I actually, this may be the wrong usage of terms, but I weaponize this process for myself.
00:49:22 Speaker_02
So before I exercise, before I get on the treadmill or row or do whatever I'm gonna do, I will load up the particular issue that I'm trying to find a solution for. Sometimes it's how to word a paragraph.
00:49:38 Speaker_02
It might be if I'm working on a book, how to find the right kind of story. If it's an interpersonal issue that I've got to...
00:49:46 Speaker_02
smooth over, I load that up, and then I just get on the device, it's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing, and I just, I don't really think about it in any fixed way, but inevitably, the ideas, the potential solutions bubble up into awareness.
00:50:05 Speaker_02
That is a real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to have success in various areas of my life. It also identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious.
00:50:23 Speaker_02
So we didn't get to all the benefits of the, there's one more benefit of the inner voice that I want to get to, but I'm going to take a detour here for a second because I think this is really important.
00:50:31 Speaker_02
If we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice, you're basically continuing to loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress. What if this happens? Why did this happen? I'm such an imbecile.
00:50:45 Speaker_02
You're just continually going over that negative. phenomenon or experience. You're not making any headway. One of the things that that does is it consumes our attentional resources. It acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources.
00:51:03 Speaker_02
And so what that means is when I get on the treadmill or rowing machine, and that's typically the time that I spend innovating, right, coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally,
00:51:17 Speaker_02
I don't have – my mind is not working to solve those problems. Instead, it is stuck dealing with this other muck where I'm not getting anywhere.
00:51:28 Speaker_02
So we actually see if you look at the literature that one of the ways that chatter undermines people is it interferes with their ability to focus and solve problems. That's just one way it undermines people but that is a huge, huge liability.
00:51:43 Speaker_00
Is there an association between trauma and elevated levels of internal chatter?
00:51:50 Speaker_02
I would say even more than an association. So we often think of chatter as what we call it is a transdiagnostic mechanism. So it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders.
00:52:04 Speaker_02
So what that means is chatter refers to a process, a process of looping, turning the same material over and over in your head. The content of that looping can take many different forms. You could inject some sad cognitions in there.
00:52:20 Speaker_02
I'm a shit, such a shit. Is it okay to say shit?
00:52:24 Speaker_00
Should I say that? Sure, people, I mean, David Goggins was on this podcast. Okay, so, you know. I mean, pretty much anything goes. Typically, we don't swear at each other, but- Okay, well, I should hope not.
00:52:32 Speaker_00
I'm pretty thick-skinned if you need to, you know, I've been called way worse than anything you've come up with here.
00:52:36 Speaker_02
You've been boxing. I actually boxed in high school.
00:52:38 Speaker_00
I don't recommend people box unless they're, you know, they're professional, and even then, I mean, I must say, as a neuroscientist- It's a lot of fun. Yeah, and on Wednesday nights, I'd spar a little bit, but I will say this.
00:52:52 Speaker_00
There are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10, much more safely for the brain, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and things like that. You know, where- You definitely don't want to insult the brain.
00:53:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, as a neuroscientist, I can't encourage people to box.
00:53:07 Speaker_02
I would agree. In any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same. Fair enough. Deal? Deal. So basically, chatter refers to this process of looping over and over.
00:53:21 Speaker_02
If you inject some sad cognitions in there, I'm an imbecile, I'm never gonna live up to my potential, I don't belong here, so then you get, if you take that to an extreme, high intensity, and you perseverate over time, then you're getting towards depression.
00:53:40 Speaker_02
If you inject anxiety-provoking cognitions, oh my god, what if this happens, and what if that happens, and you go down that path of uncertainty and fear, well, that leads you to more of the anxious route. And if you are filling that loop with
00:53:56 Speaker_02
traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences, you can get pushed towards trauma too. So it is a process that cuts across many different really serious conditions that we grapple with in society.
00:54:11 Speaker_02
But I want to also be clear to folks who are listening that If you experience chatter, that does not mean you have any of those disorders. If you experience chatter, welcome to the human condition, my friends, because most of us do at times.
00:54:27 Speaker_02
And so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time, which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups.
00:54:37 Speaker_00
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00:55:04 Speaker_00
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00:56:25 Speaker_00
If you had to highlight for now, and we'll get back to others in a moment, the best maybe one or two ways to combat chatter, what would those be?
00:56:38 Speaker_02
Well, let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally, because as we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences, different tools work for different people in different situations.
00:56:52 Speaker_02
you know, upwards of two dozen or more science-based tools that I covered when I wrote Chatter, when I got into Shift, the broader train of regulating your emotions, or even more tools out there.
00:57:05 Speaker_02
So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone. My first line of defense when it comes to Chatter are two distancing tools. So
00:57:18 Speaker_02
When I'm using the term distancing, what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se. We should talk about avoidance later.
00:57:24 Speaker_02
But what I'm talking about when I say distancing is the ability to step back and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective. And it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this.
00:57:38 Speaker_02
One tactic that I find very powerful is language. So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself. So I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem.
00:57:51 Speaker_02
Ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? If you think about when we use words like you, They are the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. And when you use your name and you to work through a problem,
00:58:08 Speaker_02
it's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you to relate to yourself like you're giving advice to someone else.
00:58:14 Speaker_02
And it turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves. Have you ever experienced this, Andrew? Gosh, no.
00:58:28 Speaker_00
Yes, of course. Absolutely. I mean, our optics are just much clearer when we're
00:58:37 Speaker_00
in observation than when we're internally, unless I find that I dedicate some real minutes or hours, basically a sort of meditation, not unlike the complete sentence construction exploration that we were talking about before, just going inward and really saying, okay, let's have a conversation about this and having a conversation with myself in there.
00:58:59 Speaker_00
And that always leads to an obvious truth or sometimes a decision node that, isn't clear to me yet, but it leads some place that feels like forward. Yeah.
00:59:13 Speaker_02
But you're taking special steps to be able to align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else. Like reflexively sometimes we stumble, right?
00:59:24 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. I mean, and the number of different ways that we can distract ourselves, this is what I was gonna ask in a few moments, but I'll take the opportunity now.
00:59:34 Speaker_00
I'm wondering as we're talking about this today, if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the scroll aspect, that with essentially zero effort, we can pick up a device and scroll through images and movies and it will update us according to... Update the...
00:59:55 Speaker_00
the imagery and topics, of course, according to what it senses as our dwell times on certain pages. And all of a sudden, we don't have to think about what's in our head.
01:00:04 Speaker_00
My dad used to refer to surfing the internet, because at that time it was that, and scrolling social media as kind of a cognitive chewing gum. It keeps us busy, but it doesn't provide any real nutrition.
01:00:15 Speaker_02
Well, you know, it's interesting, if you go back to when Facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to, do you remember what this was? What is on your mind?
01:00:32 Speaker_02
So you would be cued to share what is on your mind. And, you know, in some ways you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice, right?
01:00:48 Speaker_02
It's literally asking you, or it did, what is on your mind right now?
01:00:51 Speaker_00
So that's in terms of posting. Posting, exactly. Like what's on your mind. But in terms of consuming information, which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers more than creators. Absolutely.
01:01:02 Speaker_00
I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can, you know, pick up the phone and I have a specific phone with Instagram and X on it and it's those apps are not on any other phones so that it's segregated from. Yeah. Smart.
01:01:14 Speaker_00
Somebody sends me a tweet or sends me an Instagram post on, I'm not going to, I'm not going to open it. I can't open it on those phones. Right. And that's helped a lot.
01:01:21 Speaker_02
We should come back to that because that's also modifying your. your spaces, which is another tool that I think is underutilized. So we should talk about that too.
01:01:31 Speaker_00
We'll definitely touch on that. What I find is, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna take six minutes, it's six minutes till the hour, take six minutes on this. And what's incredible is how fast six minutes seems to go by. That's what's so striking.
01:01:45 Speaker_02
It's remarkable and not always bad. So we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. There are also some, I would argue, redemptive qualities to it.
01:02:04 Speaker_02
I'll give you one of my personal ones, which is sometimes like to unwind before bed, I'm thinking all day. I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short reels. Yeah, raccoon videos.
01:02:17 Speaker_00
Yeah.
01:02:18 Speaker_02
I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me, she's like, what are you laughing at? And then I, sometimes I show her and she goes, why are you laughing at that? Right. So, but, but you know, the algorithm has learned.
01:02:29 Speaker_02
the specific kinds of funny videos that I like and no, I'm not going to tell you what they are. And it just lightens the load.
01:02:37 Speaker_02
And so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction I want them to be shifted. at a certain time.
01:02:48 Speaker_02
I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives, the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals.
01:03:06 Speaker_02
We basically got thrown into social media without any rule book.
01:03:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, we're the experiment.
01:03:11 Speaker_02
We're the experiment. But if you think about it, it's a new environment
01:03:15 Speaker_02
We were born into this physical world and our parents, our caretakers from the time we're able to understand things and probably before, they're teaching us, they're socializing us how to navigate this space profitably.
01:03:29 Speaker_02
They don't just like Lord of the Flies throw us into the world and let us kind of figure it out. Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive.
01:03:42 Speaker_02
And we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand, hey, here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways. of navigating social media. And I'm talking about social media now, like it's this unitary environment.
01:03:57 Speaker_02
Different social media applications, of course, have their own norms and rules of the games. You could think of them as like little different countries. They have their own little microcultures that you wanna learn how to navigate.
01:04:09 Speaker_02
And scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function, but it's tricky. And it's tricky because creators can change how these applications govern by a press of a button, right?
01:04:25 Speaker_02
You could change the way the algorithm works and then you've got to start over to some extent.
01:04:30 Speaker_00
I've been told that by people in my life that one of the main reasons they get onto their phone in the middle of the night if they happen to wake up is that it allows a very soothing distraction compared to trying to wrestle with the, you know, fire hose of thoughts in their head.
01:04:50 Speaker_00
And that, yeah, it's kind of like the way you describe these funny videos that you won't disclose to us. That sounds like, you know- They typically involve pranks. Oh, okay, noted.
01:05:02 Speaker_00
We used to hear that people, you know, would have a drink after work to just kind of like, you know, take the edge off or something like that. I feel like social media is doing that for a lot of people. The way you describe it fits with that idea.
01:05:14 Speaker_00
And that I certainly believe that from everything we know about the circadian health literature, You want to avoid looking at your phone between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. most nights. Nobody's perfect.
01:05:26 Speaker_00
But that if you wake up in the middle of the night, one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone and start scrolling social media. But I'm guessing people do it because it feels even worse to just sit there with your thoughts in the dark.
01:05:37 Speaker_02
It's a shifter, but this is a perfect segue back to, you know, you asked me about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter, and I'm telling you about the ones I use.
01:05:45 Speaker_02
So there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I detect the chatter brewing, and I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy. And I call it my 2 a.m.
01:05:57 Speaker_02
chatter strategy because every, seemingly like four to six weeks, I will go to bed happy and content. And then I'll wake up at 2 a.m. and like it is all going to hell really fast. What time do you typically go to sleep? Usually around 11, 1130.
01:06:16 Speaker_00
Interesting. Yeah, this is a common problem for a lot of people. And there are some tools like long exhale breathing and things that clearly work. I long ago made a decision. I refuse to believe any thought that occurs between the hours of 2 a.m.
01:06:31 Speaker_00
and 5 a.m. I just refuse. I don't believe it. It's as if somebody is lying to me in my head. And one could argue, well, maybe that's where the truth is coming out because your forebrain is not so good at suppressing these.
01:06:42 Speaker_00
you know, unconscious thoughts, and sure, all good, but as you point out, they are rarely the kind of thoughts that one can work with, positive or negative.
01:06:51 Speaker_02
So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing. So at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes – and by the way, you say like, oh, this is common. This is more than common. When I present to audiences and
01:07:06 Speaker_02
You know, thousands and thousands of people over the years, and I ask, hey, you ever get 2 a.m. chatter? Maybe 2.30 a.m.? All the hands go up.
01:07:18 Speaker_02
I don't want to say universal affliction, but it is an incredibly common problem that people struggle with, like the chatter at night. So what I do is I use something called mental time travel, mental time travel into the future.
01:07:31 Speaker_02
And what I do is I ask myself, and I typically use my own name to do it, so I'm blending Another distancing tool, distance self-talk. I said, Ethan, how are you gonna feel about this tomorrow morning?
01:07:43 Speaker_02
No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m., to your point, when I wake up the next morning and my brain is fully awake and I have access to my prefrontal cortex and I could think constructively about things, it is never as bad that next morning as it is in the middle of the night.
01:08:04 Speaker_02
We of course have learned that over time because how many mornings have we woken up in our lives? We could do the math if I was more sophisticated, I'd do it on the fly. I can't, right?
01:08:16 Speaker_02
But like many, many mornings we've experienced this, like chatter at 2 a.m., at 7 a.m. not so bad.
01:08:24 Speaker_02
So when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning, next week, next year, 10 years from now, what that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through, as bad as it may seem,
01:08:41 Speaker_02
It is temporary. It will eventually subside. And that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter. It turns the volume down on it, which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed.
01:08:52 Speaker_02
So the official name for this tool is not mental time travel. It is called temporal distancing. And it's a flexible tool. You can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem, how are you gonna feel about it tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now.
01:09:06 Speaker_02
And it's another way of broadening your perspective. It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it. So those are the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own.
01:09:21 Speaker_02
And that nips a significant chunk of the chatter that I experience in the bud when it happens.
01:09:28 Speaker_02
And I should add that because I know about what chatter is, and I know about how these tools work, I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing. So people will often ask,
01:09:41 Speaker_02
Hey, do you ever experience chatter? Like, yeah, of course, pinch me, I'm a living, breathing human being, I do at times. But I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing tools in an almost automatic manner.
01:09:54 Speaker_02
If this happens, if the chatter strikes, then I'm gonna coach myself through the problem using my own name and you, and I'm gonna jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself, how am I gonna feel about this in the future?
01:10:06 Speaker_02
If that's not sufficient, then I'll go to the level two response, which consists of, if weather permits, I'll go for a walk in a safe, natural setting.
01:10:17 Speaker_02
I always feel the need to give the caveat about safe and natural, because where I grew up in Brooklyn, the natural settings were the place you got mugged, so they were not safe.
01:10:27 Speaker_02
But, you know, a park I find restorative and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces. But then what I'll also do is I'll dial up the chatter advisory board. So I have a couple of people that
01:10:46 Speaker_02
I have carefully thought about what these people do for me when I have a problem. And they importantly don't just let me vent my emotions or cathect, to use that term before. I don't just get it out.
01:11:01 Speaker_02
A lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to vent your emotions. There's research on this. Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people. It's good to know that
01:11:12 Speaker_02
You know, we're buddies now, I could call you up if I'm struggling, you're gonna listen to me and empathize with me, that's great for our relationship.
01:11:19 Speaker_02
But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through, and you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve, I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you, but the problem is still there.
01:11:35 Speaker_02
So, just venting ends up leading to what we call co-rumination, which can be pretty harmful. The people on my chat or advisory board, they know to first validate, empathize with me, learn about what I'm going through.
01:11:48 Speaker_02
They've got my back, they communicate that powerfully.
01:11:52 Speaker_02
But then once they do that, they start working with me to broaden the perspective, to try to think through that problem, which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really, really loud.
01:12:03 Speaker_02
And typically when I get to that stage, I'm in pretty good shape.
01:12:09 Speaker_00
I love your examples of how you deal with chatter. Your example of going to sleep and the reason I asked when you go to sleep at about 11 p.m. and waking up at two or three, and that being a very common issue,
01:12:22 Speaker_00
is as far as I understand, reflective of the fact that early in the night, our sleep is dominated by slow wave deep sleep with less rapid eye movement sleep. And then somewhere right about that transition time, it's not necessarily two or 3 a.m.
01:12:35 Speaker_00
per se, but given that you were asleep for about three, four hours, after about three, four hours of sleep, proportion of our sleep that is rapid eye movement sleep relative to deep slow wave sleep shifts dramatically.
01:12:48 Speaker_00
The intensity of our dreams shifts dramatically. They become more emotionally laden. And that whole process of having those rapid eye movement sleep associated dreams,
01:12:59 Speaker_00
is strongly associated with the removal of an emotional load in the morning when we wake. We know this because of you selectively deprive people of early night versus late night sleep and so on.
01:13:07 Speaker_00
The reason I mentioned this is that one tool that I certainly have found useful is that Well, two tools really, if people just understand that one of the reasons they'll wake up suddenly at two or three a.m.
01:13:21 Speaker_00
is that they're undergoing this transition from a one kind of one form of sleep to another. It's almost like a different beast altogether and that.
01:13:31 Speaker_00
heart racing, emotionally laden thoughts is characteristic of where they're supposed to be in the sleep architecture cycle. And so for me, so that's number one.
01:13:41 Speaker_00
The other is that the tool that you provided of getting into this mental time travel, I'd like to just double click on this notion of time perception. In sleep and dreaming, I mean, time is very fluid. You can be in one environment than another.
01:13:55 Speaker_00
It seems compressed. A lot happens in a short amount of time. when we are in chatter in the daytime, to what extent does it alter our perception of time?
01:14:05 Speaker_00
And I have a very specific reason for asking this, because I believe that one of the main unifying features among the tools for dealing with depression, anxiety, et cetera, when I survey the research is almost all of them, journaling, meditation, even some of the medications for that matter, involve taking people into a different sort of time perception mode,
01:14:27 Speaker_00
And it's a kind of an abstract idea but I think this may resonate with some of the issues related to chatter.
01:14:34 Speaker_00
That when we're in a mental frame that's not healthy for where we wanna be at that moment, awake when we need sleep, anxious when we wanna be calm and so forth.
01:14:44 Speaker_00
Changing our time perception seems to be the most useful thing that we can do, or at least among the most useful. So what's the relationship between chatter and time perception? And tell me more about what you mean by time perception.
01:14:56 Speaker_00
How broadly or finely we are bending time. So we know that as autonomic arousal let's call it stress, but wakefulness and autonomic arousal goes up. We're fine slicing time. In fact, the pupils get bigger.
01:15:07 Speaker_00
We actually see, you know, depth of field changes. We get higher resolution image of much less. This is, it makes every bit of evolutionary sense. You know, we can deal with fewer things better.
01:15:17 Speaker_00
And typically it's the thing that we're fixated or ruminating on. When we're relaxed, think about like sitting back on a beach and you're watching the clouds go by. It's almost like your frame rate is slower.
01:15:28 Speaker_00
So your, you know, higher frame rate is like slow motion. This is why people who experience trauma often feel like things are, or a car crash, like see it in slow motion. It's not in slow motion. You're fine slicing time.
01:15:38 Speaker_00
It's kind of a remarkable thing, right? This is also how athletes learn to play with their levels of autonomic arousal. Fighters can see punches coming in, and it's almost like slow motion, but they can react with full speed.
01:15:50 Speaker_00
Likewise, with tennis players, we'll describe it. So what we're talking about is dynamically changing the frame rate of one's experience.
01:15:55 Speaker_02
Yeah. It's a very interesting question, and there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with these with time perception the way you're describing it.
01:16:05 Speaker_02
But what does come to mind are our experiences of flow, which in many ways you might consider the opposite of chatter. Flow being this state where you're just in the moment and time is effortlessly passing.
01:16:22 Speaker_02
The demands of the situation completely match the skills that you bring to bear. It almost seems like the antithesis of what you're describing.
01:16:30 Speaker_02
When I think about time and chatter, what becomes most accessible for me is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly on the object of the chatter, on the thing that is causing that distress.
01:16:44 Speaker_02
And we focus so narrowly on it, which of course makes a great deal of sense because what are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem? Think about it, share it.
01:16:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, there you go.
01:16:58 Speaker_02
You got it on try number one, zoom in, focus on the problem, roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it. And so that's that kind of really, you're getting in there in fine grain detail.
01:17:09 Speaker_02
And that does work for us a lot of the time, but it turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation, that can get really troubling.
01:17:17 Speaker_02
And that's where this zooming out, taking this broader view, whether you do that through visual modalities, imagination modalities like mental time travel. You could time travel into the future, like I've just described. You can also go back in time.
01:17:32 Speaker_02
Like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity, I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life or someone else's life that I know of when times were even worse and they got through it.
01:17:46 Speaker_02
And oh, if I got through that, well, sure as heck I can get through this. And so that's expanding our perception of time or looking at that bigger picture to work through something in the present moment.
01:18:01 Speaker_00
How often do you think people, and I do believe this is related to chatter but if it's not we can set this aside for another day, how often do you think people are in kind of negative or positive fantasy, like as they move through their day.
01:18:18 Speaker_00
I'm sure a study has been done asking people what they're thinking about. I mean, how often is it actually tied to what they're doing or they're supposed to be doing?
01:18:24 Speaker_00
Or are they thinking about like what they're going to do this weekend or maybe even constructing entire narratives of things that are like non-existent that they would like to exist?
01:18:33 Speaker_00
Occasionally we'll see this person, I think we've all seen this person kind of mumbling to themselves and it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things. Yeah, it's because they've just been rejected by a journal editor, their article.
01:18:45 Speaker_00
The experience of every scientist. And it's of course always reviewer number two's fault. They didn't read the paper carefully enough, of course. And none of us have ever been reviewer number two.
01:18:54 Speaker_00
I'm being sarcastic by the way, we've all been reviewer number two. A little academic inside ball humor there. you'll see somebody mumbling to themselves. And it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things.
01:19:07 Speaker_00
We don't know what they're saying to themselves, but I'm guessing that if we tapped them and said, hey, what were you mumbling? I would guess that more than 50% of the time it was kind of frustration with stuff.
01:19:17 Speaker_00
You kind of see this like the frustrated person. It's a hard thing to observe actually.
01:19:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, so people have looked at this and my memory of this wonderful paper, I think it was published in science. I think the title was, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.
01:19:34 Speaker_02
And basically the take home from the article was that people spend between, well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it, what we can deduce is that people spend between one half and one third of their waking hours
01:19:48 Speaker_02
not focused on the present. So between one half and one third of the time we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things. And this one particular paper linked that process with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse.
01:20:00 Speaker_02
I think there's huge levels of variability there though. I think like being lost in thought can be a wonderful experience. I love, love, love, love, Mind-wandering. I think it's one of my strengths.
01:20:14 Speaker_02
It is the source of idea generation for me It is also the source of emotion regulation. I will one of you know, my sleeping pill metaphorically speaking is Mental time travel, it's getting away from the present.
01:20:29 Speaker_02
It is fantasizing about the future, right? Thinking about the good things that could happen, the potentialities or going into the past and savoring some of the positive things that happen.
01:20:41 Speaker_02
I'm thinking about, you know, the soccer game where my kids scored goals or something good happened to someone I know or to me. And that to me is a wonderful way of going to bed. That is mental time travel, it is not being in the moment.
01:20:57 Speaker_02
Which actually raises another really important point that I want to get in there and I'd love to get your take on this because in popular culture we often hear that it's really important to be in the moment.
01:21:09 Speaker_02
This has emerged as a type of cultural maxim, like be in the now. And this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment, we sometimes think there's something wrong with us.
01:21:23 Speaker_02
Like, oh, we got to train our attention to bring it back to the present. Being in the present can be very useful in many contexts.
01:21:32 Speaker_02
And certainly when we experience chatter, we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, refocusing on the present or breath, a mantra, yes, lots of data support the utility of that.
01:21:43 Speaker_02
But I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time. And lots of amazing things accompany that process. If I can't go into the past,
01:21:56 Speaker_02
Not only am I not savoring positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life, I'm also not learning from my screw-ups, which sadly happen to me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past.
01:22:11 Speaker_02
And if I'm not going into the future, then I'm not planning, I'm not simulating, I'm not fantasizing. So, We wanna be, we don't wanna shut down mental time travel.
01:22:24 Speaker_02
I think what we wanna learn how to do is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively without that time travel machine breaking down in the past, which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about.
01:22:41 Speaker_02
So being in the moment can be good, but it is not the end point I think we always want to strive for.
01:22:50 Speaker_00
To what extent do you think that texting and smartphones, but namely texting, has interfered with time-tested, meaning over hundreds of thousands of years, time-tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions and our thoughts to arrive at better ways of thinking, feeling, being?
01:23:13 Speaker_00
Nowadays, if you get on a train or a plane or you're in an Uber or you're walking to your car like a thought about something, oh, that grant, that idea, it's so easy to just get into a mode of texting.
01:23:27 Speaker_00
Passive participation, maybe through social media scrolling, again, not universally bad, but you can go to passive kind of, almost semi-dissociative state, like you're not really in the parking lot anymore, you're half in your phone and half in the parking lot.
01:23:41 Speaker_00
And texting, polling people around you, as opposed to, you know, quote unquote, in the old days where you had to actually grapple through this stuff as you describe your,
01:23:50 Speaker_00
the tools that you use to deal with chatter and to process information and to work with your thinking and your emotions.
01:23:56 Speaker_00
You strike me as somebody who has a rich jungle gym of things to play with in there and a toolkit and an emergency switch if you need it and all that stuff. Whereas most people, I think, just they have their phone. Who are you gonna call?
01:24:14 Speaker_00
What are you going to text? What site are you going to Google the Google search to? I mean, it can't be good.
01:24:23 Speaker_02
Well, it often isn't, but it can be harnessed.
01:24:28 Speaker_02
And here's what the way I think about texting and really how social media and the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want, how this has thrown a curve ball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions of not just other people, but
01:24:47 Speaker_02
groups of people and societies. So when we experience emotions, we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others.
01:24:57 Speaker_02
There's this wonderful research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Rimet, who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions?
01:25:07 Speaker_02
And he found over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize it, to get it out. And there are a couple of reasons for that. relate to other people, get their support, but we also want to usually process it.
01:25:22 Speaker_02
In the pre-social media era, two things had to happen typically to share our emotions. First, you had to find someone. to share them with.
01:25:35 Speaker_02
And typically in the process of looking for someone, either to find someone face to face or via phone, time would pass. Now, what we know about time is that as time proceeds, our emotions in general tend to fade.
01:25:49 Speaker_02
So there's this wonderful work on the duration of emotional experiences and our emotional experiences all follow a common trajectory.
01:25:57 Speaker_02
So something happens in the world or in our mind, we imagine something that is provoking in some way, our emotions get triggered, and then as time goes on they eventually peter out.
01:26:08 Speaker_02
And depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with, you know, some people may peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly, some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to subside, but they all follow that basic trajectory over time.
01:26:24 Speaker_02
So, let's go back to the pre-social media era, right? So, you gotta find someone to talk to. And while you're trying to find someone to talk to, time is passing. That's acting to temper our emotions.
01:26:37 Speaker_02
Now once you find someone to talk to, either face-to-face or via phone, the moment you start talking, you are now awash in all of this feedback.
01:26:47 Speaker_02
this emotional feedback, whether it's coming from your face, like you're giving me all sorts of information right now. I would benefit from smiling if you could. There we go, thank you. I'm just joking for those who are listening.
01:26:58 Speaker_02
But I'm getting information from you. And if I'm talking to someone on the phone, likewise, I'm getting, their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel. That is also working to constrain how we communicate with others.
01:27:11 Speaker_02
And it's typically keeping our emotions, I would argue, in check, in balance, in proportion. We're stripping away time with social media, and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback.
01:27:24 Speaker_02
This enables us to release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way. And I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text, or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone.
01:27:44 Speaker_02
And I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society.
01:27:49 Speaker_02
So cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context. Now that is not to say that social media
01:28:05 Speaker_02
isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress, it can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change.
01:28:20 Speaker_02
But I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information.
01:28:31 Speaker_00
when I think about the different ways to parse a problem, a real or imagined problem, and I think about the role of web searches, it immediately takes me to either social media or to, I don't know, it could be Reddit, could be some article that was written and posted online in 2019, you know, these will resurface, they repurpose these things all the time.
01:28:53 Speaker_00
I don't know why they do that.
01:28:55 Speaker_02
I just got emailed this morning about, and interviewed a fact-check that I did in 2019.
01:29:01 Speaker_00
Go figure. I mean, it's cool that there's, I guess, that there's archival material on the internet, that not everything is fleeting. Certainly in the podcast space, we like to think that the information on this podcast will- Evergreen.
01:29:14 Speaker_00
Archival, and we can update it over time. And that actually brings me to the very specific question, which is about AI. you know, with AI web searches are now changing fundamentally.
01:29:27 Speaker_00
They're no longer being brought to a site that is just a designated site. You're getting information back.
01:29:33 Speaker_00
That's the, you know, the amalgam of a lot of information funneled through presumably that large language models are changing all the time, but funneled through kind of your search behavior, your preferences, et cetera.
01:29:45 Speaker_00
So web searches are no longer just site destination journeys. They are,
01:29:52 Speaker_00
you know, recipes of information that are filtered and combined and given back to us, which makes me think that maybe AI can provide a kind of pseudo self that is wiser than ourselves in any moment.
01:30:07 Speaker_00
or potentially wiser than we are in any moment because they can access information that is not dependent on like bodily state shifts.
01:30:14 Speaker_00
Like at 2.30 in the morning, 3.30 in the morning, a small problem can seem huge and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming, just crushing us. At 7 a.m., it's different. When we search on the web now, like how to, you know,
01:30:29 Speaker_00
get through bankruptcy. Let's say somebody's dealing with bankruptcy. There's information to go to, but with AI, it can give you the information in the form and from the sources that are most meaningful to you.
01:30:39 Speaker_00
And it doesn't, even if it's 2.30 in the morning for you, the AI is fresh. It doesn't need to sleep. That seems to me like a distinct advantage over our own minds. And I know AI is controversial. Is it going to get smarter than us?
01:30:52 Speaker_00
Is it going to tell us to go do bad things? This kind of thing. Okay. That's a whole different discussion.
01:30:56 Speaker_00
But it seems to me that AI could be pretty good, maybe even terrific at helping us resolve problems because it doesn't have these state shifts and it's really tailored to us.
01:31:14 Speaker_02
And I actually think it has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourselves fixed.
01:31:25 Speaker_02
So if I look back at the last 20, 30 years of research on emotion regulation, I'm talking here not just about managing chatter, but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives.
01:31:38 Speaker_02
What I can do is I can point to several individual tools that are empirically supported science-based tools. And scientists have done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically.
01:31:53 Speaker_02
They've often gone down to the brain level. They've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between. So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work. But what we are now learning is,
01:32:05 Speaker_02
Individual tools are not the name of the game, because we are often doing multiple things to manage our emotions, and the combinations of tools we use Within people, they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand.
01:32:21 Speaker_02
And there's variability between people as well. So the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated. So if someone comes to me with a problem, I can go through all the tools in the toolbox.
01:32:34 Speaker_02
What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and say, hey,
01:32:39 Speaker_02
For the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are, here are the four things that you should do, but that person over there, they should do these six things.
01:32:48 Speaker_02
I think AI has the potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis. And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology.
01:33:07 Speaker_00
You mentioned you have kids. Yeah. When my sister, who's three years older than I am, was a kid, my dad tells the story that she had an imaginary friend, Larry. Larry was a girl, lived in a purple house. You know, this imaginary friend Larry had all the
01:33:27 Speaker_00
the components of a child's mind that is unrestricted by all the barriers of naming and things like that, you know.
01:33:35 Speaker_00
And my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry in her room for hours, just talking to Larry and like, you know, with her doll houses and her toys and her things and doing. And then one day my dad, he loves this story.
01:33:47 Speaker_00
I don't know why he loves this story in particular, but he was standing outside her door and she was playing with Larry, her imaginary friend, talking to Larry. And then she stopped and turned around and he said, how's Larry?
01:33:59 Speaker_00
And she said, Larry's dead. And she never talked about Larry again. Like it was this sort of collision between fantasy life and real world. This is how I interpret it. And that was it. Larry was done. Poor Larry. Well, maybe it was time.
01:34:15 Speaker_00
I mean, she was maybe gonna be seven soon and maybe it served her well. So I've always wanted to ask somebody this question. I think you are the person to ask this question. Are imaginary friends common in children?
01:34:26 Speaker_00
And are imaginary friends the primordial form of our internal dialogue with ourself? I'm just fascinated by it. And are there some adults who maintain imaginary friends?
01:34:40 Speaker_00
And I'll set an additional context, which will be especially relevant to the listeners of this podcast, which was in the very seat that you're sitting about this time last year, David Goggins was here and he was talking about
01:34:51 Speaker_00
how he pushes himself through tremendously hard things. And during that discussion, it became very clear that David has an array of different voices that are all him, but that serve different roles.
01:35:03 Speaker_00
And it was a remarkable thing to hear him articulate that because To those of us on the outside, we observe it as like one person, but he's constructed in an elaborate inner world to be able to equip himself to do the things he does.
01:35:15 Speaker_00
And I just have to wonder whether or not this whole thing of imaginary friends, provided it doesn't take us into the realm of psychosis and delusion, could actually be useful.
01:35:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, isn't it remarkable that this is such a common human experience? And for most people, they never talk about this with anyone else, because this is such a private experience.
01:35:34 Speaker_02
So I often start presentations with a quote from Rafael Nadal, the tennis great, him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with. And he says, it's managing the voices, plural, in my head.
01:35:47 Speaker_02
And I go to the audience and I say, hey, what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says they're struggling with the voices inside their head, right? Like that is typically a warning sign, right?
01:35:59 Speaker_02
That maybe something is awry here and someone needs support. Yet, this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on.
01:36:09 Speaker_02
So to answer your question, is it common for kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves? Yes. I believe this is called the study of pretense. According to one famous Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky,
01:36:26 Speaker_02
one of the ways self-control is first learned is actually through self-talk. And so what happens is you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things. Andrew, you should do this or don't do that and sit this way and not that way.
01:36:42 Speaker_02
And then what children will often do is go off on their own and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves. And so if you've ever been around young kids, you've probably seen them
01:36:54 Speaker_02
talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls. No, Jimmy shouldn't do this, Jimmy should do that.
01:37:00 Speaker_02
Some kids do it in the form, not with an actual toy, but they have an imaginary friend in their mind that they are engaging with these different interactions.
01:37:09 Speaker_02
And what the kids are doing in those contexts, according to this idea, is they're practicing self-control. They are repeating the things, the messages that their caretakers have told to them, right? They are reinforcing it in those ways.
01:37:24 Speaker_02
And then as time goes on, and your sister demonstrated this, that outer voice becomes our inner voice. And we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives. But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress,
01:37:40 Speaker_02
many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud, right?
01:37:46 Speaker_02
And there's very little research on this, and a lot of this is anecdotal, but I have, when speaking to a lot of individuals, they say, yeah, sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud, and I thought something was wrong with me, and it's always what I'm struggling with.
01:38:01 Speaker_02
like a major stressor. So if we go back to reviewer number two, right, in the academic world, I remember once I wrote this invited article and a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this response.
01:38:16 Speaker_02
And I remember just walking, it was so offensive. I remember walking around the neighborhood and I said, why don't you say that to my face?
01:38:26 Speaker_02
And I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working through it, but it almost seems like in real moments of stress
01:38:36 Speaker_02
we revert back to this very primordial way of regulating ourselves that we first exercised when we were kids, which is this self-talk.
01:38:47 Speaker_02
And so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices, according to you, to manage the challenges that he is facing.
01:38:56 Speaker_02
I've heard David talk on a number of occasions and I think there is another important point to bring up here, which is,
01:39:04 Speaker_02
I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices, they are not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and be kind to oneself. Quite the opposite. Sometimes, yes.
01:39:18 Speaker_02
And sometimes, this is important, because negative self-talk is often equated with harmful outcomes. Negative emotions are functional when they're activated in the right proportions. Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective.
01:39:36 Speaker_02
So if I go to, when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where coaches are telling me to do really painful things, like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself. I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me, right?
01:39:50 Speaker_02
You better like shape up, you can't wimp out here. That serves a motivating function for me there. So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per se. What is bad is if we start looping. That is what we really wanna equate with chatter.
01:40:11 Speaker_02
It's getting stuck in those thought loops. That's when things get harmful, when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long.
01:40:20 Speaker_00
couple of times we've talked about the relationship between physical activities and mental activities.
01:40:27 Speaker_00
In particular, taking a walk, going into green spaces, and I was delighted to hear when you said that there's a vast literature supporting the use of green spaces.
01:40:37 Speaker_01
Yeah.
01:40:37 Speaker_00
For calming ourselves? Is that essentially what the data show?
01:40:41 Speaker_02
Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming. So yes, there is data linking going for a walk in a beautiful setting with feeling better, but
01:40:53 Speaker_02
But scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the various mechanisms through which interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us. And so there are two major pathways that I often talk about.
01:41:07 Speaker_02
One is interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative. So as we talked about earlier, when people get stuck experiencing chatter, other kinds of big emotions, our attention often fixates on the problem at hand.
01:41:22 Speaker_02
We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources. When you go for a walk in a safe natural setting, you're surrounded by
01:41:34 Speaker_02
interesting cues that capture your attention in a very gentle way. So I'm talking about the flowers and the trees, the scents, the sounds. Our attention often drifts onto those features of our environment.
01:41:51 Speaker_02
Now, most of us are not doing the equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying the geometrical structure of the leaves and the flowers, right? We're just kind of taking it in.
01:42:02 Speaker_02
but the surroundings are sufficiently intriguing to capture, to grasp our attention, and that gives us this opportunity to restore that precious commodity.
01:42:14 Speaker_02
So there's work, there's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be cognitively restorative. That's another feature that, or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us.
01:42:27 Speaker_02
The other pathway that I just find so cool from a research point of view, going for walks in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves.
01:42:47 Speaker_02
So in the arboretum near my house, there are these trees that have been there for hundreds of years. And you look up at these trees and you think, my God,
01:42:56 Speaker_02
You've been there way longer than me and my parents and my grandparents, and you probably will be there longer than all of my progeny. Like, wow, that just broadens my perspective. Or an amazing sunset.
01:43:09 Speaker_02
You can also experience this emotion through feats of innovation. So I'm a science geek, I guess you could say. And for me, the two biggest awe triggers are
01:43:23 Speaker_02
Number one, the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces, which if you follow this, we some physicists have somehow figured out, engineers, how to take pictures of what the universe looked like billions of years ago.
01:43:40 Speaker_02
Somehow, I don't understand the physics, we can see what it looked like. this, you know, vast amounts of time ago. And we also of course have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars, sending us back footage of that planet.
01:43:55 Speaker_02
So when I think of that, like we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet. This vastly expands, like I am filled with awe. So when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that, this is the ultimate perspective broadener.
01:44:14 Speaker_02
So it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, guess what else feels smaller? Our problems.
01:44:25 Speaker_02
So this is an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manage your emotions. And so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight. They're waiting to be harnessed.
01:44:43 Speaker_02
And if you know where to look, you can often find them. And nature, by the way, isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist. There are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better.
01:44:56 Speaker_02
We often develop attachments to places, for example. So, you're probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures. So there are these figures from our childhood that we often, though not always, securely attach to.
01:45:12 Speaker_02
They are a source of safety and comfort, and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners. If we're in positive relationships, as I am, love you, as to my wife, she is an attachment figure for me.
01:45:29 Speaker_02
Well, we also develop these associations with places. And so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort. Going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating.
01:45:44 Speaker_02
I know one person who discovered that there was infidelity in his relationship. And what really helped him get a grip on the situation was going back to his childhood home and sleeping in his bedroom at home.
01:46:02 Speaker_02
That was the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life. That's an example of the power of places to affect us.
01:46:14 Speaker_02
So how many times do we think about, hey, what are the places that are my emotional oases, if you will, that I can go to when I need it? We can also structure our environments.
01:46:26 Speaker_02
Like you and I are both talking right now across the table from one another. We don't have our cell phones out on the table. No, not for me, not even in the room. Not in the room for me either.
01:46:37 Speaker_02
If we did, and we had it facing up, we would be distracted, but we're not.
01:46:42 Speaker_00
And even facing down, I think there's some literature on this, right? Still a cue. It's still an emotional cue. There's a cognitive tether, like we're sort of – I mean because the thing signals a particular – Reward.
01:46:53 Speaker_00
A particular reward and a particular set of behaviors, right? Just like a pen, there are only a few things you could – I mean there are probably many things you could do with a pen. typically one.
01:47:03 Speaker_02
This is not John Wick here.
01:47:05 Speaker_00
This is one thing that we're talking about. We're not getting innovative here with these objects. But Ray, when the phone is present, even if it's face down, it cues the
01:47:18 Speaker_00
the opportunity to make a call, receive a text, look on social media, scroll the internet, find out what's happened.
01:47:24 Speaker_02
And so by leaving our phones outside of the space, we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way.
01:47:32 Speaker_02
When laptop screens are open in my seminars, I know that I've already lost the battle because I know the object, the stimulus is so tempting.
01:47:42 Speaker_02
even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world, which I am not, I aspire to be captivating, but I know that I'm always going to lose compared to the screen, the email. I ask them to, yeah, no laptops in my class.
01:47:57 Speaker_00
That's right.
01:47:59 Speaker_02
So far, so good. You know, I explain to them, I actually explain to them the science behind this. I explain why I'm doing this. And I say that, hey, if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes, this is a divided attention task.
01:48:13 Speaker_02
I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open. And in the courses that I teach, it's more about discussion and thinking through things. So they don't really have a need to type notes for exams, which I think makes it easier for me.
01:48:28 Speaker_02
But modifying our space is really strategically, like this is another valuable tool in our toolbox.
01:48:37 Speaker_02
Like when we have people over for football watching parties let's say, it's pretty common where I come from in Ann Arbor, and my favorite food in the world is pizza and we have this wonderful New York City style pizza place in Ann Arbor now.
01:48:51 Speaker_02
I will order vast amounts of it, much more than we need, and when the game is over, I will insist that everyone take it with them because I know if it is in the refrigerator, and I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water, if I see the pizza box, the queue,
01:49:10 Speaker_02
it will elicit a emotional response, this desire, this appetitive response to consume the pizza, which is not the goal that I have from either in a fitness or emotion regulatory point of view.
01:49:23 Speaker_02
So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at meeting my regulatory goals.
01:49:34 Speaker_00
I'm so glad you brought up pizza and New York pizza and the fact that you're from New York. Here's why. And again, I give a personal example only as a template for people to think about themselves.
01:49:48 Speaker_00
Either where it matches or doesn't match what I'm about to ask. I love being in nature. I love being up in Yosemite and rural areas and at the coast. I just love being in nature and the quiet of nature.
01:50:00 Speaker_00
I find my mind slows and my thoughts and my emotions enter a pace that just is very soothing. I also love being in New York City. I was first in New York City when I was about five or six years old.
01:50:14 Speaker_00
And I remember telling my dad who's from another big city, Buenos Aires, I remember telling him like, I can't believe this exists. Like, can we come back here? And I swore that I would go back as many times as I possibly could.
01:50:24 Speaker_00
And I love going to New York City, despite it having many problems, it's still a wonderful city. When I'm in New York, there's tons of activity. There's tons of stimuli. And I also find that my mind achieves that slowed pace.
01:50:39 Speaker_00
another parallel construction here, and then I'll wage the specific question. I've worked with professors, my postdoc advisor, for instance, and my graduate advisor worked extremely effectively.
01:50:53 Speaker_00
These are hyper-focused, unfortunately, both of them have passed, but hyper-focused, brilliant people, truly brilliant. and their offices were a complete disaster. And we'd say, Ben, you need to clean your office.
01:51:06 Speaker_00
And he would say, no, no, no, don't move anything. Like, otherwise I won't know where anything is. And I'm like, how can you know where anything is? Like this, it looks like an earthquake hit yesterday. And he goes, don't touch anything.
01:51:17 Speaker_00
And he could find things in this like dizzyingly messy environment. He was the stereotype of the professor sitting hunched over at his keyboard at two in the morning, because at that time I worked really late.
01:51:29 Speaker_00
You'd go into Ben's office, he'd be like, hey. And he organized thinking amidst chaos. And the New York example would be the parallel. And at the other extreme, nature also seems to bring this about. Two specific questions.
01:51:45 Speaker_00
Is there a continuum of, let's say daytime, let's forget about middle of the night, of daytime kind of default levels of chatter? I think of this as kind of RPM in a car, like how is the car idling?
01:51:56 Speaker_00
Like when you turn on the car and you just sit there, like if the transmission's working well and everything's working well, it's like, hums at a nice, it's not redlining.
01:52:04 Speaker_00
Some people seem to be redlining all the time and they calm down in cluttered environments. So how much is, do we have a kind of a set point, a chatter set point, assuming everything else equal, well rested, et cetera, et cetera.
01:52:21 Speaker_00
And then why is it that external environment matching our internal chatter somehow like can adjust that internal set point, it seems. I realize this is very abstract, but for me, it's very useful to think about
01:52:35 Speaker_00
where my mind goes into its most pleasant and effective states.
01:52:38 Speaker_02
Yeah. Your example of your advisors resonates so strongly with myself.
01:52:44 Speaker_00
Is your office a mess?
01:52:46 Speaker_02
Well, it entirely depends on my mental state. And prior to really getting involved in this space, I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess and sometimes it is spick and span unbelievably organized and clean.
01:53:04 Speaker_02
And so let me share with you some of the research in the space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking. A lot of people find that when they are experiencing chatter, they reflexively start organizing their spaces.
01:53:19 Speaker_02
So I'm a great example of this. My entire life, if we called my mother up right now, please let's not do it, but if we did, she could attest to the fact that there would always be a trail of towels and clothing from the bathroom to my
01:53:34 Speaker_02
bedroom and all over the place and my office is similar, piles of papers and books and that's when life is good.
01:53:44 Speaker_02
I'm kind of free flowing, I'm getting in there, I'm being creative, I'm generating ideas and I'm not really worried about everything around me. In fact, I'm really good at typically like tuning out my surroundings to focus in on the task at hand.
01:53:58 Speaker_02
I can work in a coffee shop, I can work almost anywhere and I love it. When I'm experiencing chatter though, and this is true from the time I was little, I would always start putting things away.
01:54:11 Speaker_02
I would always start organizing things, making them nice and tidy. My office is always spotless. Sometimes I even take it further presently.
01:54:21 Speaker_02
When I'm experiencing chatter, I clean up my office, then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy. And if it's really bad, like I'll clean up my kids' rooms and things like that. This is a very common experience.
01:54:32 Speaker_02
When you're experiencing chatter, you don't feel like you are in control. You're not in the driver's seat. The thoughts and feelings are taking over and they're pushing you in directions and to places that you don't want to be.
01:54:45 Speaker_02
It's an aversive state and it's chronically activated for a lot of people. Human beings, In general, we crave control. We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable. There's some survival value that that communicates to us, right?
01:55:02 Speaker_02
If we know things are certain and proceeding in a predictable way. Creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside. It's called compensatory control.
01:55:18 Speaker_02
And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us augment our spaces to counteract, in this case, our emotional state.
01:55:29 Speaker_02
And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question, but it, for me, highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances.
01:55:43 Speaker_02
When I'm not experiencing chatter, it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not, like no big deal. But when I'm motivated to think, feel, and behave in a particular way, then my circumstances are becoming more important.
01:55:59 Speaker_00
I mean, the military is a very salient example where people have to have their kit in order in order to essentially be able to proceed with the job.
01:56:14 Speaker_00
And people can say what they will about the military, but the structure and the hierarchy of the military has provided a structure and an order for people to essentially harness, go from a chaotic life to a structured life.
01:56:30 Speaker_00
And it's an extreme example, but having everything squared away is one of those things. I got certified as scuba dive a few years ago,
01:56:41 Speaker_00
And it occurred to me early on in the first dives that if your kit isn't squared away and you don't have everything worked out, things can go badly wrong.
01:56:52 Speaker_00
And the severity of the potential consequences or the potential severity of the consequences, I suppose is the right way to say it, is a good reminder to have everything in check.
01:57:04 Speaker_00
This isn't the kind of thing where you can afford to forget a piece of gear or to not check a valve you know, it's potentially life or death, and that serves an adaptive role. It's kind of nice to have an activity actually where that's the case.
01:57:21 Speaker_00
Whereas we get into our cars and we might pull out of the driveway and then go down the street, and now you see people texting and driving all the time, hopefully less as time goes on.
01:57:28 Speaker_00
And, you know, you see... Then you might put on your seatbelt, you know, like a quarter mile down the road, you might put it on first, right? I always put mine on first when I remember, I'm sure now someone will catch me with my seatbelt off.
01:57:39 Speaker_00
I drive with a seatbelt and so on and so on.
01:57:43 Speaker_00
The physical steps that we take to organize ourselves and the environment and our relationship to the environment really do seem to change our brain into a different brain than were we to not do those things.
01:57:56 Speaker_02
The way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist. Some of those shifters are inside us. So there are these sensory shifters we talked about. There are attentional shifters.
01:58:08 Speaker_02
We haven't gotten into that yet, but we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions, and we can be strategic in how we do that.
01:58:20 Speaker_02
There are perspective shifters, the way we think about our circumstances, reframing, distancing. Those are all on the inside.
01:58:27 Speaker_02
But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships, how other people can push our emotions in different directions. Sometimes other people can be amazing assets, sometimes tremendous liabilities.
01:58:42 Speaker_02
There are physical shifters, like in our spaces, and we just talked about those. You can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter. People talk about culture as the air we breathe, right?
01:58:57 Speaker_02
We are in different cultures throughout our lives. And sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day.
01:59:03 Speaker_02
So, you know, if you're going to your lab or you're on campus at Stanford, that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and weird practices maybe. That's no offense to Stanford, by the way, that's more academics.
01:59:18 Speaker_02
Academia has some weird practices. If you then go to your podcast community, right? The team in the studio that we're sitting here, there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here.
01:59:32 Speaker_02
And those cultures that we are a part of, they powerfully shape our emotional lives. They influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value. So what kinds of emotional experience are we motivated to have?
01:59:48 Speaker_02
They give us practices, rituals to meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well. So that's another kind of influence that I don't think we often think about, but that is really quite powerful.
02:00:02 Speaker_00
It brings me back again to the smartphone. You know, the smartphone carries an infinite number of contexts into the different environments with us. So we're on the train, but we could be paying attention to something overseas.
02:00:18 Speaker_00
I was on the plane this morning and I, I just marveled at the number of screens on this, um, frankly, very densely packed plane. It was like probably fourth grade when a kid brought in a little mini TV.
02:00:32 Speaker_00
And I remember thinking, Oh my goodness, that's like a mini TV. It looked kind of like a walkie talkie and the resolution was terrible. And of course it was all black and white.
02:00:40 Speaker_00
They had colored TVs, by the way, when I was, when I was young, it just hadn't made it to the mini TV. And we were basically walking around with little mini TVs all day with near infinite number of channels combined with texting, sharing.
02:00:52 Speaker_00
I mean, it's wild.
02:00:54 Speaker_02
Remarkable. It's science fiction.
02:00:56 Speaker_02
If we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids to think about what we have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people, the classes that they are wearing, we probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids.
02:01:12 Speaker_00
I agree. I agree. And I'm just struck by the fact that our brains can adapt to this. But I do think that most people probably wonder about, you know, like, what's the optimal way to live?
02:01:26 Speaker_00
And the word optimal gets people a little, you know, a little triggered sometimes, believe it or not. I'm not talking about what puts people into their best performance mode or this or that. I'm not talking about biohacking. I'm referring to
02:01:38 Speaker_00
you know, there's an age old question, you know, what, what is a good life? And that's a completely different podcast that we should probably do at some point.
02:01:44 Speaker_00
But it probably involves being able to pay attention to things and be present, but also let one's mind drift and be socially present and have relationships and on and on.
02:01:55 Speaker_00
Do you think that we are, in fact, more challenged nowadays in the default mode of so many contexts arriving with us in our pocket when we arrive in a situation? Like you said, I've come to the studio.
02:02:09 Speaker_00
As long as my phone's face down or away from me, I'm in the studio. Otherwise, I brought the whole world with me.
02:02:15 Speaker_02
Yeah, this is a question that comes up quite a bit. And it's a really hard one to answer because we haven't, of course, been tracking people's chatter and emotion dysregulation levels over the centuries.
02:02:28 Speaker_02
I think it's absolutely true that we now have new forms of technology that are perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome, but they are also providing us with opportunities.
02:02:44 Speaker_02
So to be clear, I think social media and technology can and does do a lot of harm. And I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well.
02:02:58 Speaker_02
And the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to navigate those those digital technological landscapes. And I think we probably jumped into them without a user guide too quickly.
02:03:13 Speaker_02
And we're only learning now 15 years later, or whatever the number is, that that was the case. But But I don't know that I would... Well, I'll speak for myself. I think net positive, there's a lot of good that has come from these technologies.
02:03:31 Speaker_02
If we think back centuries ago... It's not clear to me that the world wasn't a challenging place either. I mean, you know, we used to get into fights and pull swords and there is huge, you know, people would invade readily if you go back further.
02:03:50 Speaker_02
And we, there was the threat of illness and, you know, we weren't living nearly as long. And so I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species.
02:04:04 Speaker_02
But, and this is I think a really important but, and I think about this often, the issues that we are talking about today on this podcast, this question of how we manage our emotional lives, this is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form.
02:04:23 Speaker_02
Because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies. We've always been challenged by circumstances. and those circumstances are constantly evolving, providing new threats to us that now we need to learn how to manage.
02:04:39 Speaker_02
When I was digging deep into the history of motion regulation for shift, I couldn't believe it that when I look back at the first surgical tool ever developed, you know what that is? Trephining. Trephining.
02:04:56 Speaker_02
So trephination, tell everyone who's listening what that involved.
02:04:59 Speaker_00
Trephining is where you bore a hole through the skull in order to let out Some volume of fluid. Some volume of fluid or... Or remove brain.
02:05:12 Speaker_02
Or brain, or if we go back eight to 10,000 years ago when this technology was first cutting edge, right? Like the new iPhone of the times, trepanation... For spirits. or maybe spirits, right?
02:05:26 Speaker_02
So one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation. So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we used to manage our emotions.
02:05:42 Speaker_02
Then let's jump into the mental time travel, or just the time travel machine and go to the late 1940s, where there was another major spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline.
02:05:53 Speaker_00
You know where I'm going with this? I'm guessing you're talking about the lobotomy.
02:05:57 Speaker_02
That's right.
02:05:58 Speaker_00
The frontal lobotomy.
02:05:59 Speaker_02
A Portuguese physician develops the lobotomy. I think it was initially called the leucotomy. Essentially making some holes in your frontal cortex.
02:06:09 Speaker_00
Going up through the orbit of the eye. Through the eye. Sweeping it back and forth. This was not just an outpatient surgery, but a mobile surgery. That's right. They would arrive to people's homes.
02:06:20 Speaker_00
I could be wrong, but I think a Nobel Prize was given for the lobotomy. Relieved anxiety. Unfortunately, it relieved a lot of other things too.
02:06:28 Speaker_02
Relieved people's interest in pursuing lots of... It caused major, major, major dysfunction. And to be clear, This is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention.
02:06:40 Speaker_00
It hasn't been for a while. Well, that's why I said don't box. Prefrontal cortical damage is a common feature of people with the box. Getting hit over and over.
02:06:49 Speaker_00
Or even, I don't know if this is true, someone needs to check, but I do hear that some, sadly, some soccer players who head the ball a lot deal with some frontal cortical related dementia type stuff. I'm guessing that's probably,
02:07:06 Speaker_00
related to some genetic susceptibility, because at least to me, the soccer ball is not very hard. It's not like they're, you know, but, and then again, there are, of course, people who play a whole career of football or box, less seldom boxing.
02:07:21 Speaker_00
People who get hit a lot in the head often have problems. They develop problems.
02:07:25 Speaker_02
Yeah, generally not a good thing. But, you know, just to go back to the lobotomy, what's amazing to me is like that was, perceived to be such an advance that it won the Nobel prize. Like the Nobel prize. It calmed people down. Calmed people down, right?
02:07:42 Speaker_02
And so I raise these issues to just point that like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage our emotions effectively for a really long time. And now fast forward to the present,
02:07:54 Speaker_02
We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet, but I would argue that we have made major advances in identifying non-invasive science-based tools that can be leveraged to help people lead more productive emotional lives.
02:08:09 Speaker_02
And so, you know, you raised this question earlier about what is a productive life? What is a good life? And I think answering that question is in part relevant to how I think about, how do you define self-control in many ways, or emotion regulation?
02:08:30 Speaker_02
Or let me, not just how you define it, but what are the component parts? So we've been talking about tools throughout this conversation. All these different tools that exist, these different shifters for pushing our emotions or chatter around.
02:08:44 Speaker_02
That's one core part of regulating effectively. But another core part is our motivation or our goals. And you need both motivation and tools. So I can know about all the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered.
02:09:04 Speaker_02
If I'm not motivated to manage my emotions, I'm not gonna use those tools.
02:09:09 Speaker_02
If on the other hand, I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions, but I don't know what the tools are, I'm not gonna be that effective and I may in fact, do some bad things, right?
02:09:20 Speaker_02
I may, you know, use unhealthy tools, substances that really can very powerfully map, you know, substance abuse I'm talking about, that can modulate my emotions, but has some negative consequences.
02:09:31 Speaker_02
So it's about what are my goals for me for my emotional life? And do I possess the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals? I think that is a formula for the good life. Hey, here are the goals that I have.
02:09:47 Speaker_02
And if these are healthy, productive goals, and I have the means to achieve them, that should bring me a sense of satisfaction.
02:09:54 Speaker_02
Sometimes our goals, of course, aren't optimal, and we use that maybe controversial word, but we do change our goals throughout our life.
02:10:02 Speaker_02
But it's about finding the right set of goals for us as individuals, and then identifying the tools that we can use to bring those goals to fruition.
02:10:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, in keeping with this historical arc of the tools that humans have used to try and regulate emotion, you mentioned trephining, frontal lobotomy, think about a barbaric appearing procedure, but one that actually is pretty effective in the right hands, and that is still commonly used today, electric shock therapy, which at a mechanistic level, you know, we- Don't understand.
02:10:34 Speaker_00
So we don't really understand, but it seems to lead to a kind of massive dump of a bunch of neuromodulators, dopamine, serotonin, you know, almost willy nilly, like just.
02:10:44 Speaker_00
And then nowadays there's a lot of, at least interest, if not enthusiasm, more work is needed on the various psychedelics. In particular, psilocybin and MDMA for depression and PTSD more specifically.
02:11:00 Speaker_00
And while those are more in the serotonergic pathway that, My read of the data is that they're creating more brain-wide connectivity at resting state.
02:11:11 Speaker_00
I mean, there's still fairly crude tools in terms of you're massively changing the levels of given neuromodulators. People are undergoing variable experiences. It's not like directed in any way.
02:11:23 Speaker_00
Nolan Williams at Stanford is combining those things with transcranial magnetic stimulation to try and essentially highlight the activity of particular circuits during the psychedelic journeys and after, things of that sort.
02:11:35 Speaker_00
So it's getting more specific, but I would say even today, we don't really have great pharmacologic or surgical tools for emotion. Now there's terrific neurosurgery going on, mind you,
02:11:49 Speaker_00
But when it comes to behavioral tools for emotion regulation, I feel like the psychologists, you all, you and your colleagues have done a tremendous job as have the people from, you know, for lack of a better name, the sort of ancient traditions and from the wellness community, you know, things like long exhale breathing, physiological size, meditation, Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU showing you 13 minutes a day of meditation improves focus, emotion, emotional state.
02:12:19 Speaker_00
So it seems to me that the behavioral tools are getting way out ahead of the surgical and even pharmacologic tools in terms of their specificity, their safety, and maybe even their potency.
02:12:31 Speaker_00
Would you care to reflect on what you see as the most valuable tools for emotion regulation? You've touched on some of them today, but already, but I mean,
02:12:42 Speaker_00
taking a walk, green spaces, time, you know, mental time travel, fantasy, I listed a few more of these off. I mean, these might seem kind of more modal, you know, top level contour things, but they work, right?
02:12:56 Speaker_00
I mean, the data say they work, journaling.
02:12:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, they're mechanistically, you know, we understand the mechanisms that are underlying the benefits of these tools.
02:13:09 Speaker_02
They are easy to implement, and not always, but for a lot of them they're easy, and I think that's in part where their power resides. We are still trying to understand how the brain functions. As you well know, you've contributed to this.
02:13:23 Speaker_02
I've worked on this a little bit myself too. The brain is a remarkably complicated organ and we still have a lot to learn.
02:13:32 Speaker_02
I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomena like emotion play out at different levels of analysis, at the psychological level of thinking and feeling, but also at the biological level in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on.
02:13:49 Speaker_02
And so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually down the road
02:13:57 Speaker_02
Try to help people manage their emotions through multiple different sources of intervention, through the pharmacological level, through the behavioral level, through the interpersonal level. But it's a messy, messy space right now.
02:14:10 Speaker_02
And I think one of the big problems is, and this is in part gets to bigger questions about science and how science is done, It can be hard to cross levels of analysis. And there are multiple practical constraints that become active here.
02:14:27 Speaker_02
So having the large enough samples and the right collaborators to look at how different kinds of interventions interact with one another, work in different populations. And so we tend not to do those more complicated designs
02:14:44 Speaker_02
because they're a lot harder to do. They take a ton more money, a ton more time and effort, and oftentimes scientists are on timelines and their incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do. But big picture, down the road?
02:15:00 Speaker_02
I think the big questions are about how do these different kinds of interventions interact with one another.
02:15:07 Speaker_02
The good news is, though, that for any person who is watching or listening who's motivated to manage their emotions right now, there are many things you can do to start. And it begins, step one, learning about what these tools are.
02:15:22 Speaker_02
and then starting this process of experimenting with the tools. I don't use that word experimenting lightly.
02:15:27 Speaker_02
I wouldn't advocate experimenting with agents that have serious side effects of the sort that some of the biological interventions you articulated earlier do. Those kinds of tools I think should be used in the context of medical supervision.
02:15:41 Speaker_02
But a lot of these other tools that we're talking about, small changes in how you think and behave and interact with your environments, those are things people can start doing right now.
02:15:52 Speaker_00
One of the most common questions I've received over the years is on YouTube in particular, is how to stop intrusive voices.
02:16:01 Speaker_00
And occasionally when people ask these questions, they'll highlight that some parent or an ex or something will kind of a judge voice in there.
02:16:14 Speaker_00
And they don't know if it's their voice or the other person's voice, but it's in their head and it's very unpleasant.
02:16:20 Speaker_00
Presumably this circles back to childhood traumas or other forms of traumas, but irrespective of the origins, are there any tools specifically to deal with intrusive thoughts and thought patterns, maybe even OCD-like thought patterns?
02:16:36 Speaker_02
So a couple of responses to that. So first of all, I think step one is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice, like if you can hear your dad's voice in your head,
02:16:49 Speaker_02
it's not your dad who is in your head, that is a simulation that you are engaging in, that your brain is capable of producing. And so that I think can be informative for people who are curious about these inner worlds.
02:17:02 Speaker_00
Like I could hear- Yeah, I'm not referring to auditory hallucinations. I'm referring to the language of somebody, maybe not in that person's voice, but they're hearing like, maybe not you're a bad person, but
02:17:17 Speaker_00
You're not good enough, like it's not enough or just feeling like they can't enjoy the good things in life because of these intrusive negative voices.
02:17:25 Speaker_02
Here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating as I have found liberating from just knowing the science. So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in shift. They are incredibly normative.
02:17:42 Speaker_02
And so there's research which looks at like, how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought over the past week or a month or two months? The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally high.
02:17:54 Speaker_02
I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling. I will do an exercise with my classes, my undergraduate classes, where I will ask them to anonymously
02:18:07 Speaker_02
describe whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week. Almost all of them are capable of generating, and some of these thoughts are really, really dark.
02:18:20 Speaker_02
I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym. You're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now.
02:18:28 Speaker_00
No, I'm not concerned, I'm just fascinated. I have ideas about why this may be, but I'm just fascinated. I don't know that I've had dark thoughts in the gym, It's interesting. Here's my dark thought, watch out if you see me in the gym from here on.
02:18:41 Speaker_02
So if I'm carrying a heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack, I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it on the face of another person on a mat. It's terribly dark. It's a terrible, terrible thought. So why am I experiencing that?
02:19:00 Speaker_02
It is most likely the brain's simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing it. Of course, I don't wanna drop a dumbbell on someone I never have. And so that's one explanation for why this is so normative.
02:19:14 Speaker_02
It's your brain's way of constantly, there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen.
02:19:24 Speaker_02
And most of these simulations, the probability of them coming to fruition are exceptionally low, infinitesimally small. But on occasion, some of the wacky ones do escape into awareness.
02:19:35 Speaker_02
And that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal in a pretty aggressive, you know, egregious way, or in my case, dropping the dumbbell on, you know, the person stretching on their face.
02:19:47 Speaker_02
And so here's what I find liberating. Me understanding that this is just how my brain works. Well, that doesn't mean now that I'm something wrong with me as a human being, right? That I'm morally corrupt in any way.
02:20:05 Speaker_02
My brain's gonna sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts. I'm not gonna act on them. And as long as I'm not acting on them, it's all good. It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety,
02:20:21 Speaker_02
before they know what is happening, that can often be an incredibly distressing experience. Like all of a sudden, your stomach is churning, your palms are sweating.
02:20:31 Speaker_02
But in research, which shows like if you communicate to people, hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance you face. All of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame. And now,
02:20:49 Speaker_02
I'm a Lamborghini, right? I am rising to the occasion. My body's doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here. That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks.
02:21:05 Speaker_02
So step one is just recognizing if you experience intrusive thoughts at times, again, welcome to the human condition. It's a little blip in how our brain operates. But a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful for nipping
02:21:18 Speaker_02
repetitive thinking in the bud. So when you're curtailing chatter, you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating. The reason why we often perseverate on problems we're experiencing is we're highly motivated
02:21:35 Speaker_02
to make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives. And our brain, this wonderful problem-solving organ that we possess, it just keeps churning until we've solved that problem.
02:21:45 Speaker_02
And that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you get there. And so when you solve the problem, those thoughts tend to subside too.
02:21:54 Speaker_00
I have two points, both of which are essentially questions.
02:22:02 Speaker_00
I think it's relatively common for people when they go to a bridge or a dam or something like something very high with the potential for, you know, essentially a fatal fall where they to jump off to, to have the thought, you know, what keeps me from jumping off when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off.
02:22:19 Speaker_00
And it seems like it's another example of like, it's registering the danger and the severity of the consequences. It also, I realize, helps us understand the level of risk.
02:22:28 Speaker_00
You know, I think Alex Honnold, who famously did free solo to El Cap, a remarkable movie, by the way, just along the lines of what we're talking about,
02:22:39 Speaker_00
the way the movie is constructed, and I think Jimmy Chin and colleagues who made that movie did such an incredible job, not just with the cinematography, but you know he survives from the very beginning of the movie, and yet it's terrifying to watch the whole thing.
02:22:52 Speaker_00
And it's kind of a hour, 45 minute expedition of exactly what we're talking about. In that movie, as I recall, Alex spells out the assessment of risk and consequence, right?
02:23:05 Speaker_00
you know, level of risk, level of consequence, and how that's a those are key parameters to evaluate. And he's obviously done that for himself, and he succeeded.
02:23:13 Speaker_00
And I hope he never does it again, only because he seems like a really delightful person would be nice to keep him around. And he's doing other important work now. But
02:23:23 Speaker_00
The point being that I think it's a very natural thing to evaluate risk and consequence in a way that quote unquote feels dark, but it's actually highly adaptive through the lens that we're talking about it. So that's one point.
02:23:38 Speaker_02
Well, just to that point, if I can interject. So just to normalize this further for folks. So my family is very special to me as it is to most people.
02:23:50 Speaker_02
When my first daughter was born, we used to live in this house that had this, on the second floor there was a, I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass, but it was open to the floor beneath.
02:24:00 Speaker_02
And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper or whatever, I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then
02:24:12 Speaker_02
dropping her over into the, you know, and splat, like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the night.
02:24:20 Speaker_02
It speaks to this point that you are raising that was likely my mind's way of homing in on a really, really important issue in my life that I want to make sure never, ever, ever happens.
02:24:32 Speaker_02
It is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt or incredibly dark person.
02:24:37 Speaker_00
It's how my brain is operating. Yeah, you're assessing risk and consequence in an adaptive way. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about. The second comment slash question I'd love your thoughts on is, you know,
02:24:56 Speaker_00
I had this bulldog, I talk about him all the time, this bulldog Mastiff, and he had one default behavior that if he couldn't engage in it, would create anxiety in him. And that was, he liked to chew. He liked to gnaw on things.
02:25:09 Speaker_00
As a puppy, he actually would teeth on bricks in the backyard. I was like, oh my goodness, it looks so painful to me. Sometimes he'd bite through a lip.
02:25:18 Speaker_00
The bulldog, part of their phenotype is that a lot of the pain receptors have been bred out of their face.
02:25:22 Speaker_00
And I just think, oh my goodness, I go out there and I was like distraught at how much pain he must be causing himself, it was obviously less than I perceived.
02:25:30 Speaker_00
But nonetheless, this gnawing behavior was, you could just see it, it gave him such pleasure, right? You give him something to chew on and you could just see the anxiety like dissolve out of him.
02:25:43 Speaker_00
I've known a number of people that are fairly high intensity in terms of they speak fast, high density of thought, information, et cetera, at least outwardly, who claim that they have got sort of a high RPM internally.
02:25:54 Speaker_00
And I vary depending on time of day and time of year on this, but I place myself more or less into that category. Engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention,
02:26:07 Speaker_00
perhaps we could call it flow, but nonetheless engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention feels to me so unbelievably satisfying. So unbelievably satisfying. I think it's for two reasons.
02:26:22 Speaker_00
One is the benefits of doing those activities, studying, learning, podcasting, doing research, connecting with someone in a really directed way, like getting into that tunnel with them as we're doing now.
02:26:33 Speaker_00
there's a positive feature, and then there's also the removal of a negative, like those RPM are not humming in the background.
02:26:41 Speaker_00
And I think for a lot of people, like ultra runners, and I know a lot of former addicts that start running marathons and get sober and stay sober.
02:26:52 Speaker_00
it's remarkable how physical activity or cognitive activity can kind of take us into that plane of focus that both makes us productive, makes us fitter, but also relieves this inner voice.
02:27:04 Speaker_00
It kind of like lets the tension out the same way that I observed Costello letting the tension out through gnawing on these bricks or rock hides or whatever it was. And so my question is, is there as I'm assuming a relationship between
02:27:20 Speaker_00
the physical and the mental, do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us and it varies between people and we need to harness and or adjust that level of energy and to do that in ways that hopefully make us a living or bring our social relationships more closely together.
02:27:35 Speaker_02
Well, it certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing, but it also, as you alluded to, plays out in cognitive context.
02:27:42 Speaker_02
when there is this match, this sweet spot between the demands, like you're in a situation that is actually challenging, either physically or cognitively, and the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands.
02:28:02 Speaker_02
So it's a taxing situation, but you are able to engage with it completely. That is the formula for getting,
02:28:10 Speaker_02
stuck is the wrong word for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states, which are for many people, the goal that they have in their lives, both recreationally and professionally.
02:28:21 Speaker_02
And so you as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests, I would hope and imagine, and that's always the aspiration, right? That must feel really good. I mean, you talk for a long time with people,
02:28:35 Speaker_00
Does it feel like a long time when you're having those conversations? No, time perception completely changes.
02:28:40 Speaker_00
And when I do this for two or three hours a week, and then when we do a solo episode, sometimes the recordings longest ever yet is 11 hours, you know, edited down.
02:28:48 Speaker_00
But those can be anywhere from, you know, 90 minutes to four hours and, or a live event. And I couldn't tell you, it just seems like time just, time dissolves away.
02:29:01 Speaker_02
And when, you know, that is because you are so absorbed in the moment and meeting the challenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that moment.
02:29:13 Speaker_02
point in time, that moment, and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the chatter to percolate in the background. And so, you know, one often – you might think like an ultra-marathon or what's the correct term? Is that it? Ultra?
02:29:28 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus Oh, it's called an ultra. I think we have some triathletes here in the room, our producer Rob Moore. sitting to my left. We've never done this before, but how long is an ultra anything longer than a marathon? Is that right?
02:29:41 Speaker_00
He's giving a nod. He's going to remain silent. Anything longer than a marathon is considered an ultra.
02:29:47 Speaker_02
And so that's a lot of time on the one hand to be alone with your thoughts, right? And you might think that might just be crowns.
02:29:55 Speaker_02
for experiencing chatter, but it's also a particularly challenging kind of physical feat that you have to devote a lot of resources to meeting those physical demands. And right, so that can propel you into a state of flow.
02:30:07 Speaker_02
And then you get some runners high to boot, some like chemical boost to enhance your mood. And all of a sudden now you have people running, you know, 130 miles. I'm exaggerating. How long is it?
02:30:19 Speaker_00
Oh, people, I mean, people have done 200-mile ultras, 150-mile ultras. People, we have a friend, you know, again, my producer Rob Moore and I have a friend, Ken Rideout, who does these sorts of races in the Gobi Desert.
02:30:32 Speaker_00
He did it without any prior training in the desert, then won. I mean, there, but, you know, these, Ken in particular, I'm thinking about right now, he's a very high energy guy. I would be concerned about
02:30:43 Speaker_00
Ken and his family, not their safety, but their sanity, if Ken didn't run that much, because he's just... He needs to burn it off. He just has that much energy. And the whole concept of energy is something that I'm getting more and more interested in.
02:30:57 Speaker_00
As we age, we tend to have less energy. What is that? Is it mitochondrial density and function? Probably. But what we're talking about here is a sort of cognitive velocity. It's not an official term, but it's one that I'm using more and more nowadays.
02:31:11 Speaker_00
People should try this. I'm curious, have you ever done this? You sit down to read a page of a book. trying to remember the information, maybe it's technical, maybe it's not.
02:31:19 Speaker_00
And then you flip the page and you try and read a page of the very same book a little bit faster than you're comfortable while trying to retain the information.
02:31:26 Speaker_00
And I find that there's this like sweet spot for reading where kind of like there's a sweet spot for running where going a little faster sometimes actually feels Like it requires less effort? Yeah.
02:31:37 Speaker_02
Well, it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently. So, you know, I'm constantly reading for my job, right?
02:31:49 Speaker_02
If I'm not reading journal articles, I'm reading books for, you know, research that I'm doing, writing books. the way I do it is often through an audio form and I will put the speed rate up to 2x. I'll often go as high as I can go on the app.
02:32:05 Speaker_02
And I can retain a huge amount of information going that fast, but it does require that I'm very vigilant. I'm really carefully attending to that audio book when I'm moving at that speed.
02:32:18 Speaker_02
And so it's not what I would do on vacation when I'm trying to consume a book or information for fun.
02:32:27 Speaker_02
There, I just want to kind of just gently go, let the paragraph kind of pass my gaze and take it in slowly and almost even savor the words on the page. But in other contexts, I do channel up the velocity and it can be incredibly engaging.
02:32:45 Speaker_02
It can also be depleting. when you have conversations that really you find immensely rewarding and cognitive philosophy, and I love that term is a 10 out of 10, when you're done, do you ever find it a little tiring?
02:33:03 Speaker_00
Not immediately, but my personal challenge in life is I don't transition states very well. So it takes me a little while to drop into a state, but then I stay there.
02:33:12 Speaker_00
So I'll come out of here still thinking about and talking about this to myself or with others for a fair amount of time, maybe on the order of half an hour to hours. I've learned this about myself over the years.
02:33:26 Speaker_00
It's very effective for science and for certain things, less effective for other areas of life. I've learned ways to transition faster.
02:33:35 Speaker_00
then I will notice if I do record a solo and a guest episode and some intros and stuff in the same week, that yeah, on Saturday, I'm kinda like my mind feels like it's like white noise. Yeah, yeah. And I've long thought that
02:33:51 Speaker_00
having, I used to call them low cortisol days, you know, just a day where I'm just kind of like veg.
02:33:57 Speaker_02
And you're more tired probably on those days, huh?
02:33:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, I just let myself reset. It was actually in my list of questions to ask you about resetting, going into kind of a state of wordlessness and just letting things just spool out
02:34:10 Speaker_00
for an hour, not trying to control anything, not trying to control anything in the universe except basic functions, right?
02:34:19 Speaker_02
Cooking shows, prank reels... These are yours? These are mine. And I am... You know, we often take for granted too that the TV in front of us is another emotion regulation device, right?
02:34:34 Speaker_02
And actually people who are creating programs are deliberately trying to push your emotions in particular directions from the score that accompanies movies and- News. And the news.
02:34:46 Speaker_02
I don't want my emotions being shifted in a direction that is contrary to my goals right before I go to bed.
02:34:52 Speaker_02
I am at a typically high velocity level throughout the day, starting with physical stuff and exercise to the cognitive stuff and the politicking and the science talks and all that stuff.
02:35:05 Speaker_02
When I'm finally done going through my email at night, I want like a good hour of just total mindless vegetation.
02:35:14 Speaker_02
And it puts me in a wonderfully serene state to then slide into bed, jump into that mental time travel machine, like do the fantasizing or savoring, and then puts me to sleep. And so, you know, I really value technology there for helping me do that.
02:35:29 Speaker_02
And I think that is the counterpoint. to having this high velocity kind of experience. I will often, when I teach, like sometimes I'll teach for like three hours. So it's, you know, equivalent to what we're doing right now.
02:35:44 Speaker_02
It is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding. And like, this is why I got into this business.
02:35:48 Speaker_02
You are, you're, you know, you're having great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things, getting them to discover interest, all that good stuff.
02:35:58 Speaker_02
a couple hours later when I come home, first of all, I need a little refractory period to switch out of work life into home life, which can often be challenging on the personal front. Cause like my kids are just waiting there.
02:36:11 Speaker_02
Well, my youngest kid is waiting there. My oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing, but they want to play right away. And I need some time just to decompress. But then once I do, I've got to lean further into that state. And so that's,
02:36:25 Speaker_02
that is shifting and understanding how to shift. That's a different kind of shift, but it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand how to do that well.
02:36:39 Speaker_02
And I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here.
02:36:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's such an important aspect of life. And I do think that everyone would do well to evaluate for themselves how
02:36:51 Speaker_00
quickly, well, not well, we're not trying to place a grade on it, but how quickly or slowly one transitions into and out of stance, how much of your thoughts and emotions and experience you're carrying forward from one context to the next.
02:37:06 Speaker_00
I think about that a lot. And it's something that I try and work with a lot, especially arriving home and there's people home and you wanna engage in a particular way. Yeah.
02:37:16 Speaker_02
And there's actually a framework to help people do this that I really like. And it's interesting because you mentioned the military earlier and there's a...
02:37:25 Speaker_02
a wonderful corollary and it's, I haven't experienced this too often in my life where I see something in science that scaffolds onto a practice that another organization, in this case, the military implements to help people number one, identify what are their, in the context of what we're talking about, what are their emotion regulation goals?
02:37:47 Speaker_02
What are their shifting goals? And how do you, go from having those goals to bringing them to fruition.
02:37:55 Speaker_02
And so, so in the military, like special forces before they have complex complicated operations, they will often first think about, okay, what's our goal?
02:38:06 Speaker_02
what's the outcome we hope to achieve, then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal?
02:38:14 Speaker_02
And they'll go around the room and, you know, the person in charge will like cold call Socratic style on folks, like what is the... Potential obstacle.
02:38:25 Speaker_02
And then for every obstacle that they identify, they come up with a very specific, if this happens, then we will do this. And they have multiple if-then plans for each of those different obstacles.
02:38:38 Speaker_02
So if we go back to the research landscape, there's a technique called WOOP. Have you ever heard of this? Okay, so it's, WOOP's an acronym, and I promise you I wouldn't use any acronyms, but this is a useful one, it's a mnemonic to remember something.
02:38:53 Speaker_02
How do you go from knowing to doing? Whoop is designed to help you do that. Because what it is explicitly designed to do is target each of the places where goal pursuit often breaks down. Step one, what's your wish?
02:39:12 Speaker_02
What's the thing you hope to accomplish? Let's be really clear about what that goal is. We often don't stop to even think about what our specific concrete goals are. Okay, now that we have that goal, let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize.
02:39:26 Speaker_02
What is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that goal? And what that's doing is giving us this motivation now, really energizing us to pursue it even further. Okay, we've got the outcome, but now let's get realistic. What are the obstacles?
02:39:42 Speaker_02
What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those goals? All right, so let's say my wish is to be more present with my family after work.
02:39:51 Speaker_02
The outcome that I hope to achieve is to be a better father, a better husband, to have a richer social life in those regards. Now, what are the obstacles? Okay, internal obstacles, I got plenty.
02:40:05 Speaker_02
Like the temptation to check my email and get to inbox zero before the night is done. Or I love my science and I also wanna do some of that work. Or maybe I'm gonna get distracted by friends who call.
02:40:19 Speaker_02
All of those things are obstacles that might get in the way of me achieving the goal of being more present with my family. Now, the final step, let me come up with an if-then plan.
02:40:30 Speaker_02
If I'm tempted to check my email after 7 or 8, then I'm going to remind myself about how important it is to be a dad, so I'll do a little reframing. If someone calls after 9 p.m.
02:40:47 Speaker_02
and I'm engaging in activity with my kids, then I'm gonna politely decline. And you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans for different levels of sophistication.
02:40:57 Speaker_02
What those if-then plans do is they try to make emotion regulation automatic because they identify a specific trigger If, that's the if, if this happens, and then they pair that trigger with a response. If-then, if-then, you rehearse that.
02:41:15 Speaker_02
And this way, when the trigger occurs, boom. You don't have to stop and think, what should I do? How should I behave? You've got the plan and you implement it. I've got if-then plans for chatter.
02:41:26 Speaker_02
If the chatter strikes, then I do distant self-talk and mental time travel. If the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work, then I go to nature and I go to my chatter advisors.
02:41:38 Speaker_02
And so I have these if-then plans that are linked up with my goals. And that's an important technology that I think we can invite people to try to exercise in their own lives to make it more likely that they will achieve their regulatory goals.
02:41:55 Speaker_00
I love it. So WOOP, spelled W-O-O-P, the W, if I have this correct, What's the goal? What's your wish? What's your wish? The first O is the opportunity to energize yourself around achieving that wish, aka motivation. That's right.
02:42:14 Speaker_00
What's the outcome you hope to achieve? Yep. Great. Okay, even better because of what you said was shorter. The first O is what's the outcome you hope to achieve? The second O, what are the obstacles you can anticipate?
02:42:26 Speaker_02
That's right and in the research space it's mostly been personal obstacles but you can generalize out as you know the Navy SEALs do as an example.
02:42:35 Speaker_02
That's the branch of the military I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to Now you have me self-conscious about using the word optimize.
02:42:47 Speaker_02
To optimize the way they respond to missions and challenges, this is what they, so they're not only dealing with internal obstacles, obviously, but also ones from the world around them.
02:42:58 Speaker_00
Don't worry about using the word optimize. You did it optimally, and we'll soon squelch any pejorative around optimize during this episode. And then the P in whoop is the plan. an if-then plan.
02:43:11 Speaker_00
So it's not a vague plan, it's a very specific plan so that you know exactly which strategies and steps to implement should A occur, B occur, C occur.
02:43:20 Speaker_02
That's right. And so it's a general framework which in part is I think why it has so much value and there's research behind this showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals.
02:43:31 Speaker_02
Now there of course will be many situations that you have not developed whoops for. And that's okay because you're gonna have all these other tools in your toolbox to manage those situations on the fly when they occur.
02:43:46 Speaker_02
But then once you encounter new situations and you discover what tools are effective, then you learn, you create your whoop, and then you could become more strategic, automatic, and effortless with how you engage them down the road.
02:43:59 Speaker_00
Earlier, you mentioned attentional spotlights, and I'm fascinated by this. I know that most people hear that we can't multitask, but primates, again, of which we are, old world primates in particular, can do covert attention.
02:44:14 Speaker_00
If I were not completely focused on you, I could focus an attentional spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you, but I could also monitor components of the room. I can merge those spotlights. I can divorce those spotlights.
02:44:27 Speaker_00
But it's very hard to generate three kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once. It seems like we kind of have two. Maybe some people can manage three, but I'm betting most people can't manage more than three.
02:44:41 Speaker_02
Well, and I think it becomes especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing an emotional episode that is essentially hijacking your attention. And attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons. So number one,
02:44:58 Speaker_02
As a species, we have the most sophisticated attention deployment system on the planet.
02:45:03 Speaker_02
We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention, so we can willfully place it on the things we want, or yank it away from the things we don't want, or we can saccade our attention back and forth.
02:45:18 Speaker_02
When it comes to emotion, though, we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic because they fall into the category of prescriptive advice about magic pills.
02:45:36 Speaker_02
So often we hear, for example, that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions, things that you're anxious about or fearful, you should not avoid the problem. You should focus on it.
02:45:49 Speaker_02
And there's been a lot of research on this and what we have learned is on the one hand chronically avoiding things is not good. It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical lives to our health.
02:46:03 Speaker_02
But oftentimes, the the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand, Deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break, and then come back to it.
02:46:18 Speaker_02
So this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently. My grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in Poland during World War II, had her entire family slaughtered during the war.
02:46:32 Speaker_02
one of these kind of devastating experiences, lived in the forest for years, back and forth, all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth. And growing up, she made it out of the war, moved to the States.
02:46:45 Speaker_02
I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it.
02:46:53 Speaker_02
And whenever I would ask her questions about this, she would always say, you know, don't ask me why or what happened, why is a crooked letter?
02:47:01 Speaker_02
That was a phrase she would use, which was really interesting because she didn't speak English very well at all, heavily accented language, but she'd mastered this curious idiom, like why is a crooked letter? In other words, nothing good
02:47:15 Speaker_02
comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things, your life is awesome, you're in a safe place, you have a loving family, just enjoy life. So she's trying to shelter me.
02:47:26 Speaker_02
So she, for most of the time that I would know her during the year, she would never focus on this horrific event that she experienced, except one day a year,
02:47:39 Speaker_02
There would be this remembrance day and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about, or I would listen to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would come out. So she would dose. her exposure to the emotional information.
02:47:58 Speaker_02
Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention.
02:48:03 Speaker_02
She was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her, but at other times when it didn't serve her well, she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences.
02:48:15 Speaker_02
And a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that This capacity to be flexible in how we wield our attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really, really useful asset.
02:48:30 Speaker_02
And so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing, a problem, or always avoid it, they aren't always true.
02:48:41 Speaker_02
And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation, I mean the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surrounding it, is in being really facile in how we can deploy our attention.
02:48:54 Speaker_00
Really appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote. I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the sayings that were fed, like, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Well, yeah. Well, I also heard out of sight, out of mind.
02:49:10 Speaker_00
So which one is it? That's right. You know, and that's why eventually I became a scientist. That's right. Because, you know, it's both right. And, you know, And you can see this in the fields of nutrition and exercise.
02:49:21 Speaker_00
I mean, there are certain core truths, and I think the goal is always to get to those core truths, and then there's some flexibility around those truths, there's margins of error. I love what she shared, you know, why is it a crooked letter.
02:49:32 Speaker_00
It reminds me of the Bob Dylan, like don't look back. I mean, these are profound questions, right?
02:49:39 Speaker_00
Like how much of our consciousness should we use to enforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past and therefore miss out on the present and creating a best possible future.
02:49:49 Speaker_00
And yet we don't want elements from the past to kind of ferret into our psyche and then show up in ways that are destructive. It's a complicated dance.
02:49:59 Speaker_02
Oh, I mean, our emotional lives are anything but straightforward, but we do have guideposts to steer us in how we deploy our attention.
02:50:09 Speaker_02
And so a couple of common heuristics that I like to use and describe to folks is, so let's say something bad happens.
02:50:21 Speaker_02
and you divert your attention away, you distract with a positive distraction, not a harmful distraction, and then the problem doesn't resurface, keep going. You don't have to go back in time.
02:50:32 Speaker_02
There's actually, I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue. So my parents were divorced and I dealt with the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life. When I think about it now, I don't get upset.
02:50:48 Speaker_02
I understand why it happened. I love both of my parents. I've moved on, I'm well-adjusted. But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak, and he will often bring it up. And when he does, I'm like, well, we don't have to talk about it.
02:51:03 Speaker_02
I'm actually totally fine. This isn't a source of ongoing distress. Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives. And when that happens, You know, that's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well.
02:51:20 Speaker_02
We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing.
02:51:24 Speaker_02
If, on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting and we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting, that is then a cue, okay, well let's focus in on it.
02:51:38 Speaker_02
And then once you focus in on it, of course there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience. Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation.
02:51:53 Speaker_02
So getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts. Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance and we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things.
02:52:06 Speaker_02
We can look at it from different perspectives. We can focus on the silver lining. We can contextualize it. So you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus, but you don't always need to refocus on the problem. So you want to be flexible.
02:52:22 Speaker_02
Flexibility and how you deploy your attention is really the mantra that I personally live by based on what I know of how all of this works. There are a couple of caveats I wanna throw out there.
02:52:34 Speaker_02
When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding, I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance. There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are not productive like substance abuse.
02:52:50 Speaker_02
We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding, not good. So you wanna be balanced.
02:52:59 Speaker_00
Could we add to the list of tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy?
02:53:04 Speaker_00
And this isn't one that I default to, but I know someone that told me that she used to default into overconsumption of story, like of audio books, not that audio books are bad, but of fiction audio books and just kind of when there was a problem rather than dealing with the problem, overindulgence in narratives that would just kind of consume the mind.
02:53:26 Speaker_00
I guess any behavior where we're not I'm dealing with the kind of itch that we probably need to scratch at least for a short while, it's probably going to be maladaptive in the long run.
02:53:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean if the problem keeps – like you want to be – you want to listen to what your mind and body are telling you. And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it.
02:53:51 Speaker_02
But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis, which may not be positive, negative experiences, as time moves on, sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives.
02:54:03 Speaker_02
And we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks, like you have to do it this way, that tends not to work out very well.
02:54:15 Speaker_00
Most of what we've been discussing today is one's emotional life and experience and chatter and inner narratives with oneself and their environment, technology, nature, and to some extent relationships.
02:54:30 Speaker_00
But one powerful aspect of emotions that I think a lot of people wonder about and frankly participate in is this notion of emotional contagion, both positive and negative. I think of like a, you mentioned football, football's big in Michigan, right?
02:54:46 Speaker_00
I remember from the movie, The Big Chill, they like actually go out and play football. I think they were all alum of University of Michigan.
02:54:51 Speaker_02
It's a religion in the city that I live in, that's right.
02:54:54 Speaker_00
Is it right? Okay. And how many people go to one of these games?
02:54:59 Speaker_02
So we actually, it's called the big house, actually the largest football stadium in the country. So close to 110,000. Whoa, that's a lot of people. It's a lot of people and we sing in unison.
02:55:11 Speaker_02
And it's actually, I never really was into football before moving to Ann Arbor and now I embrace it. It helps when you're the national championships, which we were champions, which we were last year. Congratulations. We're working on it this year.
02:55:27 Speaker_00
Cool, maybe sometime I'll go to a game. I don't dislike football, I like football. I don't think I've ever been to a professional football game.
02:55:35 Speaker_02
We should definitely have you out there. It is a load of fun.
02:55:38 Speaker_00
Okay, I'll skip one game of the Globetrotter season to go to a Michigan game. Emotional contagion occurs in football stadiums. It occurs in digesting news. We just had an election, so a lot of emotional contagion.
02:55:54 Speaker_00
essentially opposite directions, post-election, and on and on. What do we know about emotional contagion? It makes sense to me why we would be so prone to it, but where are the sort of rumble strips, so to speak, and the ditch on emotional contagion?
02:56:17 Speaker_00
That's a driving analogy. The rumble strips are the goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo that when you start to drift towards the ditch.
02:56:22 Speaker_00
you know, obviously the ditch is losing control in the negative direction, maladaptive direction, but like, how can we start to identify the rumble strips in emotional contagion?
02:56:31 Speaker_02
Yeah, so emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon. Emotions can spread within seconds. They tend to,
02:56:41 Speaker_02
We tend to catch emotions more quickly when we're not sure of how we should be thinking or feeling in a particular situation so we often are referencing other people in those instances as a source of information. The people around us of course are
02:56:58 Speaker_02
a rich source of information. This is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently, right? We're trying to learn something about how to respond.
02:57:05 Speaker_02
And we know it can have these cascading effects both in everyday life, in both the positive and the negative direction. But also, you know, in the digital world we see these emotions that can spread really fast too. So it's a very powerful phenomenon.
02:57:23 Speaker_02
It's one I'm often very attentive to when I come into the classroom, like you're trying to you tend to not want to have a negative mood spread through an audience when you are teaching to them.
02:57:36 Speaker_02
And so you're sensitive to that kind of, certain kinds of displays or tones that might convey that kind of emotional response.
02:57:46 Speaker_02
And I think it's something that we need to be increasingly aware of, especially when we're working in any kind of group context. Like when you're working in a team, it is really important to keep the team
02:57:58 Speaker_02
at the level of emotional tone that you feel if you're the leader or even just a member of this team that is committed to it, you want to keep that tone at the most productive level.
02:58:11 Speaker_02
Because if it dips below or above, that can sabotage how well you perform. And there's a lot of research on that.
02:58:20 Speaker_00
Both from directing my laboratory for a good number of years and from teaching and from certainly the podcast, which is a small team of seven of us, I'm familiar with what you just described.
02:58:31 Speaker_00
And also from being a camp counselor, that's probably where I learned it, being a summer camp counselor when I was in college, that if you get,
02:58:41 Speaker_00
two or three kids that are like really pissed off about what you have to do over the next couple of hours, it can send everything south. You have to nip that in the bud right away. You have to repair that.
02:58:52 Speaker_02
And I'm very, very attentive to this when I am in group context, especially when I'm leading those groups, those teams, those labs, like really making sure that that kind of negative mojo does not spread.
02:59:06 Speaker_00
Do you think nowadays on university campuses there's more of a tendency for students to raise their hands and say, like, let's spark an issue? And I'll just preface this by saying a guy that I worked for as an undergraduate, a physiologist,
02:59:25 Speaker_00
he told me that when he was teaching during the Vietnam War era, he would be in the middle of a lecture about cold thermogenesis physiology, his area of expertise. And someone would just stand up and say, what about the war in Vietnam?
02:59:37 Speaker_00
And I remember him telling me that story. I thought, that's outrageous. Like, really? He said, oh yeah, all the time. And you would have to stop and have to acknowledge it and let them have their expression. I thought, that's wild.
02:59:47 Speaker_00
Now we're living in times when that's not all that unusual in the university classroom and on campuses and online. So it's interesting that that previous example from the 1960s and 70s is now very relevant again. So do we let people emote or
03:00:09 Speaker_00
You know, as a summer camp counselor, someone pulled me aside and said, you know, these kids have a lot of energy. My only advice is be a channel, not a dam. Something that I never forgot.
03:00:17 Speaker_00
It's very useful in other areas of life to be a channel, not a dam. So how do you be a channel, not a dam when people are having really having the need to externalize negative stuff and it holds the potential for emotional contagion?
03:00:34 Speaker_02
Well, you know, I haven't experienced firsthand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom, but obviously a lot of my colleagues have, and we see this playing out on lots of universities. These are very turbulent times.
03:00:46 Speaker_02
Turbulence activates emotion, and we know, going back to An earlier part of our conversation when people experience strong emotions are often motivated to share those emotions with other people.
03:00:58 Speaker_02
That often takes the form of vocalizing them and that can elicit contagion throughout. And so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are making their way through people, groups, and societies.
03:01:14 Speaker_02
what should you do in those circumstances? Well, I think it depends a lot on the context and what the nature of the emotional response is. And is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful?
03:01:31 Speaker_02
And there are differing views about when you should intervene and how to do it. I think in general though, you bring the playbook of always wanting to
03:01:43 Speaker_02
kind of validate, like, your emotional experience is a genuine response that you are having to the situation. In most cases, yes, we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicitous way.
03:01:57 Speaker_02
But I think in a lot of cases, the kinds of phenomenon we're talking about, like, these are just honest emotional reactions. These are really difficult times. And I think
03:02:07 Speaker_02
Trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really great first step.
03:02:14 Speaker_02
I mentioned to you before we started talking that I had this wonderful conflict mediator come to one of my classes recently to talk about how do you not just engage with emotional groups, but how do you engage with
03:02:29 Speaker_02
emotional groups at the same time that are having emotions because of one another.
03:02:34 Speaker_02
And the approach that she has found to be very successful in her career as a mediator is to ask folks, to train them, not to enter conversations to try to change each other's minds, but to enter those conversations with
03:02:51 Speaker_02
a state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest in first and foremost trying to just understand the other group's position.
03:02:59 Speaker_02
I haven't done that myself, but it strikes me as a pretty viable approach to a first step to having conversations about difficult issues. And it makes me think about how in the lab we often define wisdom. So wisdom is,
03:03:20 Speaker_02
this concept of it indexes how well you are able to deal with social situations involving uncertainty. Like we don't know how these social situations are gonna play out and wise individuals are skillful in navigating those circumstances.
03:03:36 Speaker_02
How do you define wisdom? What are its features? Well, a few of its core features are humility, recognizing that I don't know everything, a commitment to perspective taking, putting myself in the other person's shoes,
03:03:50 Speaker_02
dialecticism, recognizing that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing and we need to be aware of that. And then also a general orientation towards the social good, like doing good in the world.
03:04:05 Speaker_02
And it strikes me that entering these difficult situations with that kind of mindset is potentially productive for bridging divides.
03:04:15 Speaker_00
I love that. What an appropriate area for us to round up in. I think that right now, clearly things are tense, but what you've talked about today, and at least from what I understand of how the human mind works in and around emotions,
03:04:32 Speaker_00
our own and observing others and potentially contagion is that these tools can really help us do better, that they're not just research papers, they are implementable chunks of knowledge, and in some cases, such as what you've discussed today, real gems.
03:04:52 Speaker_00
For that reason, and for taking the time out of your research schedule, I mean, your researcher, teacher, your dad, your husband, you do many things, you make it a football game somehow also into the gym, where you don't drop dumbbells on people's faces intentionally, because you realize the dire consequences, you're just doing a ton of amazing work in the world.
03:05:09 Speaker_00
I'd heard about and read chatter some time ago. And I just think it's incredible what you brought to people's attention that has always, no pun intended, been on and in their minds.
03:05:21 Speaker_00
And I'm sure there are others in your field, but I want to specifically thank you on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching for paying so much careful research attention and public education attention to this thing that we call chatter.
03:05:38 Speaker_00
and the inner voice and emotion regulation because this is really what makes up our lives. It's as important in my mind, certainly as cardiovascular health or any other aspect of mental or physical health.
03:05:50 Speaker_00
So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you so much. Please come back again because your research is evolving. We'd love to hear about.
03:05:59 Speaker_00
The Next Steps will definitely provide links to your work and to the upcoming book, which comes out in February of 2025. Do you wanna tell us the title of the book? That's right, it's called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You.
03:06:11 Speaker_02
Great, and presumably it's available for pre-sale now or soon? Yeah, it's available and it is essentially designed, it is written
03:06:22 Speaker_02
to kind of just open the book on what emotions are, what we often get wrong about them, and what are the tools that we have to rein them in.
03:06:30 Speaker_02
And my hope is that it addresses this big problem that I think we've been facing for a while, which is how to wrangle these emotions that sometimes get the best of us.
03:06:41 Speaker_00
Great. Well, I am personally going to order a copy by presale. insist on that. I don't take free copies. I buy books because I'm a believer in books. So thank you for writing Shift and come back and talk to us again.
03:06:53 Speaker_02
Well, thanks for having me. It was an incredible conversation, so I appreciate it. I feel the same way. Thank you so much.
03:06:58 Speaker_00
Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ethan Cross. I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did.
03:07:06 Speaker_00
To learn more about Dr. Cross's work and to find links to his previous book, Chatter, as well as his forthcoming book, Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Do Not Manage You, please see the show note captions.
03:07:18 Speaker_00
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03:07:50 Speaker_00
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03:08:00 Speaker_00
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03:08:11 Speaker_00
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03:08:26 Speaker_00
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03:08:48 Speaker_00
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