Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.280 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.480 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.440 | And I'm wearing these Red Lens Wind Down Roka glasses

00:00:18.360 | because we are recording this late at night,

00:00:21.280 | which is unusual for us.

00:00:23.000 | And bright light,

00:00:24.040 | in particular short wavelength bright light

00:00:26.560 | in the blue and green part of the spectrum

00:00:29.040 | quashes melatonin and it makes it hard to sleep.

00:00:31.440 | And I wanna sleep tonight.

00:00:32.600 | These Red Lens glasses filter out

00:00:34.720 | the green and blue short wavelengths

00:00:36.720 | that would otherwise disrupt my sleep.

00:00:39.320 | My guest today is Dr. Ethan Cross.

00:00:41.840 | Dr. Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology

00:00:44.280 | at the University of Michigan

00:00:45.880 | and the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

00:00:49.400 | He is also the author of the best-selling book, "Chatter,"

00:00:52.160 | the voice in our head and how to harness it.

00:00:54.840 | Today's discussion is a really special one

00:00:57.000 | because we discuss something that each and all of us have,

00:00:59.920 | which is a voice in our head that is our voice.

00:01:03.520 | And that voice can range from encouraging to discouraging.

00:01:08.400 | It can be repetitive in ways that can be very intrusive,

00:01:11.480 | and it has a profound effect on our emotional state,

00:01:14.600 | our confidence, our levels of anxiety,

00:01:16.840 | and indeed what we are capable of achieving in life.

00:01:19.920 | Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory

00:01:21.400 | has done groundbreaking research to understand

00:01:24.480 | what is the origin of this voice in our heads

00:01:27.080 | and can and should we control it?

00:01:29.040 | And indeed the answer is yes.

00:01:30.940 | Today's discussion gets into many things

00:01:33.000 | that people struggle with

00:01:34.320 | and many things that you can do to improve your life,

00:01:36.800 | such as how to regulate the chatter in your head,

00:01:40.200 | how to overcome ruminations and intrusive thoughts.

00:01:43.080 | And we also discuss what to do with your actual voice.

00:01:45.940 | For instance, data pointing to the fact

00:01:48.200 | that venting your negative emotions to others

00:01:51.100 | is actually bad.

00:01:52.120 | It tends to amplify bad emotions.

00:01:54.520 | We talk about that research.

00:01:55.580 | We also talk about other forms of outward speech

00:01:58.860 | and inward speech, that inner voice that you can partake in

00:02:02.440 | in order to improve your emotional state

00:02:04.440 | and shift your emotional state.

00:02:06.280 | So today's discussion really centers around common questions

00:02:09.320 | and common scenarios and common challenges

00:02:12.480 | that everybody grapples with.

00:02:14.480 | And of course, we all have a voice in our head.

00:02:16.940 | Today you're gonna learn to listen to it, to regulate it,

00:02:19.880 | and indeed to steer it in the direction of mental health,

00:02:22.760 | physical health, and performance.

00:02:24.600 | I'm also excited to tell you that Dr. Ethan Cross

00:02:26.880 | soon has another book coming out entitled

00:02:29.100 | "Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You."

00:02:32.800 | And I tremendously enjoyed "Chatter," his first book,

00:02:35.480 | and I very much look forward to reading "Shift"

00:02:37.640 | when it comes out.

00:02:38.560 | We provide links to the work in Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory

00:02:41.480 | as well as links to his previous and forthcoming book

00:02:44.160 | in the show note captions.

00:02:45.660 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:48.380 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:51.180 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:53.380 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:55.340 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:57.340 | to the general public.

00:02:58.720 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:59.820 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:05:34.640 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Ethan Cross.

00:05:38.040 | Dr. Ethan Cross, welcome.

00:05:40.380 | - Great to be here.

00:05:41.640 | - Right before we went hot mics, as they say,

00:05:44.920 | we were talking about interrupting one another

00:05:46.800 | and the fact that you're from New York.

00:05:48.660 | I'm gonna try not to interrupt you

00:05:50.040 | because the audience doesn't like that.

00:05:52.480 | However, I am very interested

00:05:53.800 | in what you're gonna tell us about emotion regulation,

00:05:58.320 | but especially this thing that you call chatter,

00:06:01.920 | the voice in our heads.

00:06:04.000 | And prior to learning about your work,

00:06:06.240 | I always thought that chatter and the voice in our heads

00:06:09.120 | was overwhelmingly negative.

00:06:11.620 | That's what we hear.

00:06:12.460 | How do you combat that negative voice in one's head?

00:06:15.220 | But you have some very interesting ideas

00:06:17.300 | about the utility of chatter,

00:06:18.700 | like maybe how it even arose and what it's for.

00:06:20.800 | So maybe we start there.

00:06:22.540 | - Yeah, so I think this is a great question

00:06:24.460 | because the inner voice is something that we carry with us

00:06:29.180 | wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is.

00:06:32.660 | And actually sometimes I get up there and speak to people

00:06:36.580 | and they often wonder like,

00:06:40.780 | what is a purported serious scientist doing

00:06:43.340 | talking about a squishy topic

00:06:45.020 | like the voice inside our heads?

00:06:47.480 | And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool

00:06:51.060 | of the human mind.

00:06:51.960 | So when I use the term inner voice,

00:06:53.380 | what I'm talking about is our ability

00:06:55.220 | to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives.

00:06:59.800 | And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife

00:07:01.980 | that we possess.

00:07:02.820 | It lets us do many different things.

00:07:05.060 | So just from the outset,

00:07:07.740 | let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations.

00:07:12.740 | I think of chatter as a dark side of the inner voice.

00:07:17.140 | And we'll get to that in a little bit.

00:07:19.140 | But having the ability to silently use language,

00:07:23.660 | that is a boon to the human condition.

00:07:26.060 | So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves.

00:07:28.900 | What's your favorite sports team?

00:07:31.060 | - The Harlem Globetrotters

00:07:32.200 | because they're undefeated as I understand.

00:07:34.420 | - Oh.

00:07:35.260 | - Yeah, the best record in any sport.

00:07:36.580 | I don't think they've ever lost a game.

00:07:37.940 | - Do they ever play against other teams?

00:07:39.860 | - The Washington Generals.

00:07:40.980 | - Okay, sorry for the Washington Generals.

00:07:43.380 | So if you were to go to a game and root for them,

00:07:48.620 | what would you say?

00:07:50.220 | - Go Globetrotters.

00:07:51.300 | - Go Globetrotters.

00:07:52.140 | Okay, can you repeat that phrase silently

00:07:54.300 | three times in your head right now?

00:07:56.100 | - Yes.

00:08:00.460 | - Okay, you've just used your inner voice.

00:08:02.300 | So your inner voice is part of what we call

00:08:04.860 | our verbal working memory system,

00:08:07.360 | basic system of the human mind

00:08:08.940 | that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary

00:08:12.880 | but totally ordinary also.

00:08:14.860 | Your verbal working memory system, it's a mouthful,

00:08:18.660 | lets you keep information active for short periods of time.

00:08:22.460 | So before we had cell phones,

00:08:25.980 | how did you memorize phone numbers?

00:08:28.740 | Like what would you do?

00:08:29.580 | Repeat it in your head.

00:08:30.700 | - Yeah, and it has sort of a song to it.

00:08:33.340 | - Yeah.

00:08:34.180 | - I can remember my childhood phone number still

00:08:35.780 | even though that number is long since gone.

00:08:38.900 | - Long since gone.

00:08:39.980 | - Even the whole area code's gone in fact.

00:08:41.980 | - Really?

00:08:42.820 | - Well, the number is probably still there

00:08:44.500 | but under a different area code.

00:08:45.660 | I know 'cause I tried calling it every once in a while.

00:08:47.100 | - Interesting.

00:08:47.940 | Well, it's funny when I go through this content,

00:08:50.740 | I give talks or workshops, I often say 2090501,

00:08:54.540 | repeat that in your head three times.

00:08:56.460 | That's my childhood phone number.

00:08:57.780 | I'm like, go give it a shot, give them a call.

00:08:59.480 | So for all I know,

00:09:00.820 | that person may be getting lots of phone calls.

00:09:02.580 | It's not my phone number.

00:09:04.520 | But that's your verbal working memory system.

00:09:08.740 | You go to the grocery store

00:09:09.900 | and you try to remember what you were supposed to get.

00:09:12.660 | Most people don't do that out loud.

00:09:14.380 | Like, oh crap, what was I supposed to get?

00:09:16.660 | Milk, cheese, eggs.

00:09:18.180 | You repeat that silently in your head.

00:09:20.280 | So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do.

00:09:24.140 | Keep information active, verbal information.

00:09:27.180 | Your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan.

00:09:30.780 | So before presentations or interviews,

00:09:34.240 | a lot of people report going over what they're going to say

00:09:38.340 | before that event.

00:09:39.940 | Do you ever do this?

00:09:41.780 | - Yeah, my mode of preparation

00:09:44.820 | for things like solo podcasts and talks

00:09:47.580 | is it's not scripted out line by line in advance,

00:09:52.580 | but I have a structure in my mind.

00:09:54.980 | And it's more like remembering the first line

00:09:58.180 | of each paragraph in my head,

00:09:59.380 | and then the rest just kind of falls out.

00:10:01.380 | - Yeah, we have a very similar style.

00:10:03.540 | I will bullet out what the key ideas are.

00:10:07.220 | And as long as I could bullet that out, I am good to go.

00:10:10.820 | But I will also rehearse those bullets in my head, A, B, C, D.

00:10:15.220 | So that's you using your inner voice as well.

00:10:19.340 | Now, before a big presentation, like a live event,

00:10:22.180 | I will go over the opening to my presentation,

00:10:25.940 | and sometimes just carry that dialogue through

00:10:29.020 | when I'm going for a walk around the hotel

00:10:31.260 | before the event.

00:10:33.180 | - May I ask about the walk?

00:10:35.360 | When I prepare for live events or solo podcasts,

00:10:38.660 | and long before I was involved in either of those activities

00:10:43.180 | for lectures of any kind or classroom discussions

00:10:47.020 | where I had to stand up in front of the class,

00:10:48.980 | I would find that walking and listening to a song

00:10:53.740 | would, maybe simultaneously, maybe separately,

00:10:57.260 | would dramatically shape the kind of cadence and energy

00:11:01.360 | of the delivery of the talk.

00:11:03.300 | - Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up songs there.

00:11:05.500 | So if we wanna take a little detour here,

00:11:08.780 | so in my new book, "Shift," we talk about,

00:11:11.460 | or I talk about how the different shifters that exist

00:11:15.180 | to push your emotions around and sensation,

00:11:17.620 | sensory experiences are one powerful,

00:11:19.580 | and I would argue often overlooked modality

00:11:22.620 | for shifting our emotions.

00:11:23.900 | So if you ask people, "Why do you listen to music?"

00:11:27.700 | What do you think most people say?

00:11:29.380 | - It makes me feel good.

00:11:30.580 | - Feel, right?

00:11:31.500 | It's about emotions, feel good.

00:11:32.900 | So one study, the number was around like 95, 96%

00:11:36.780 | of participants who were asked said,

00:11:38.740 | "Exactly gave the answer that you just gave."

00:11:41.620 | But then if you look at, in other studies,

00:11:43.980 | "Hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad,

00:11:47.540 | "what did you do to push your emotions around?"

00:11:51.100 | The number of people who report using music

00:11:53.740 | to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%.

00:11:58.020 | Music is a really powerful tool

00:12:01.740 | for modulating our emotions.

00:12:03.200 | I actually, an unintentional parenting victory for me

00:12:08.200 | was when my youngest daughter was around five or six

00:12:12.260 | and I was coaching soccer.

00:12:14.140 | I lived for these soccer games on the weekend.

00:12:18.300 | I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches

00:12:20.260 | who would go crazy on the sidelines.

00:12:22.260 | It was just such joy to just watch these kids play.

00:12:27.260 | And typically my daughter was really excited

00:12:30.140 | to go to the game.

00:12:31.020 | But one morning she was just like not into it at all.

00:12:35.860 | She was bummed out, it was bumming me out.

00:12:39.180 | I was catching her emotions.

00:12:40.840 | We can talk about emotional contagion later.

00:12:43.420 | And got into the car and it just so happened

00:12:48.420 | that my cell phone was connected

00:12:51.260 | and the next song on the playlist

00:12:53.620 | happened to be "Journey's Don't Stop Believin'".

00:12:56.500 | So you know the song, I presume.

00:12:58.160 | Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please.

00:13:02.680 | The song comes on and I start jamming out to it,

00:13:07.680 | singing out loud like an embarrassing dad.

00:13:10.140 | And then I look in the back seat

00:13:11.900 | and I find her bopping her head.

00:13:13.940 | And then the chorus comes, we get really excited

00:13:16.260 | and then I pull up to the soccer field

00:13:19.420 | and she just bursts out of the car and is like invigorated.

00:13:23.860 | That is the power of music to impact us.

00:13:27.720 | So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks

00:13:32.720 | that I'm getting ready to get in that mental frame of mind.

00:13:37.460 | And I don't think it's a coincidence

00:13:39.720 | that many athletes do this as well.

00:13:42.840 | They've stumbled onto this tool

00:13:45.360 | that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience

00:13:50.240 | or our emotional trajectory

00:13:51.640 | in the direction we want it to point, so.

00:13:54.660 | - It's interesting.

00:13:55.500 | I was thinking about music in reference to shifting emotion

00:14:00.000 | as you just gave an example of.

00:14:02.080 | You know, feeling like amotivated

00:14:03.780 | and then your daughter's motivated by the don't stop.

00:14:07.120 | Right, you know, okay, I'm not gonna sing it.

00:14:08.420 | - Keep going.

00:14:09.260 | - We'll do it together.

00:14:10.100 | - I will not do that.

00:14:10.920 | Someone will cut the clip and they'll run it out.

00:14:13.540 | They'll spill it out and then no,

00:14:14.840 | I have a truly terrible singing voice.

00:14:16.140 | But I wonder, has the study ever been done

00:14:20.280 | or something similar to this

00:14:21.400 | where people who are feeling pretty good or very good

00:14:26.400 | are exposed to sadder music and vice versa?

00:14:30.640 | People are feeling sad as opposed to sort of ecstatic music

00:14:35.640 | or positive lyrics.

00:14:38.560 | Because I've often wondered whether or not humans

00:14:41.140 | like or dislike when things

00:14:45.920 | or people try and shift their state.

00:14:48.120 | You know, I know in myself,

00:14:49.040 | when I'm like feeling upset about something,

00:14:51.400 | I don't want to feel upset.

00:14:52.560 | I don't think anyone wants to feel upset.

00:14:54.000 | But if I hear a song that's positive,

00:14:59.000 | there's a moment where I'm like,

00:14:59.960 | I can feel it kind of pulling on me.

00:15:01.960 | And you sort of know, like I could follow that trajectory

00:15:04.040 | and probably get out of this.

00:15:05.080 | And sometimes one does, and sometimes one doesn't.

00:15:07.480 | - You know, and this gets to,

00:15:09.040 | I think a more fundamental issue,

00:15:10.400 | which is why I'm asking,

00:15:11.900 | which is, are we supposed to feel our emotions

00:15:16.000 | as a way to sort of dissolve them when we don't want them,

00:15:18.640 | kind of the cathartic approach,

00:15:20.440 | or would listening to sad music when we're sad

00:15:22.520 | just amplify the sadness?

00:15:24.440 | - These are great questions.

00:15:25.680 | And I have a couple of,

00:15:27.360 | they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues

00:15:30.200 | that we need to get into.

00:15:31.080 | So let's just do them serially.

00:15:33.260 | So number one, has the study been done

00:15:36.240 | where you expose people to different kinds of music,

00:15:40.220 | sad versus arousing, you know, happy music?

00:15:44.040 | Do you see that push people's emotions around?

00:15:46.220 | Yes.

00:15:47.060 | In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images

00:15:50.680 | are one of the most powerful tools

00:15:52.640 | that we have in our arsenal

00:15:54.660 | for pushing people's emotions around

00:15:57.520 | in the context of experiments.

00:16:00.080 | So we want to induce a particular kind of state.

00:16:02.960 | We can play certain kinds of music

00:16:04.740 | or show people images that are designed to elicit positive

00:16:09.440 | or negative emotional experiences.

00:16:12.200 | So images being another sensory modality, vision.

00:16:16.120 | So that's number one.

00:16:17.960 | Number two, there's this very interesting phenomenon

00:16:20.640 | where when we are in a particular emotional state,

00:16:25.480 | let's say we're feeling sad,

00:16:27.580 | we often don't reflexively seek out the happy music.

00:16:31.080 | We don't go to Journey.

00:16:32.440 | Instead, we go to Adele, right?

00:16:34.280 | We're going to Chicago.

00:16:35.520 | I'm giving you my age bracket here, right?

00:16:37.340 | Like the music that has sad associations for me.

00:16:41.080 | So there's this mood congruency.

00:16:43.960 | If I'm feeling a certain way,

00:16:45.360 | I'm gonna go deeper into that state

00:16:48.640 | and have the music facilitate me.

00:16:51.080 | Why on earth would we do that?

00:16:53.040 | Are we all masochistic?

00:16:54.200 | Do we just want to feel even worse?

00:16:56.680 | This gets at, I think, a critically important point

00:16:59.960 | that is not always talked about,

00:17:02.720 | which is all emotions are functional

00:17:07.720 | when they are experienced in the right proportions,

00:17:10.080 | not too intensely and not too long.

00:17:11.720 | So sadness, as an example, is an emotion we experience

00:17:15.480 | when we've experienced some loss

00:17:17.340 | that we can't rectify right away.

00:17:20.440 | Like something has happened and you can't fix that.

00:17:23.480 | So you've lost someone.

00:17:25.480 | And so what does this emotion do?

00:17:27.860 | Well, it hijacks the way we are thinking,

00:17:32.080 | feeling, and our bodies are responding.

00:17:34.240 | So it motivates us to introspect,

00:17:36.880 | to turn our attention inward,

00:17:38.440 | to reflect on this situation,

00:17:40.260 | to now try to make sense of it, right?

00:17:43.200 | Something really important in my life has happened.

00:17:45.520 | I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life

00:17:48.720 | so I can find meaning and move on.

00:17:51.260 | My physiology is slowing down

00:17:54.200 | so I can engage in that slow introspection.

00:17:57.360 | But what's also really interesting about sadness is

00:18:00.420 | it's also impacting my facial display,

00:18:03.680 | giving a sign to all of the people in my environment

00:18:07.960 | to say, "Hey, maybe we should check up on that person,

00:18:11.580 | "that guy, 'cause he looks like he's on his own

00:18:14.780 | "in a corner," right?

00:18:15.920 | So can you detect when someone is sad,

00:18:17.880 | if you see like a sad facial expression?

00:18:20.080 | - Yes, when I used to teach the summer courses

00:18:22.800 | at Cold Spring Harbor on the North Shore of Long Island,

00:18:24.960 | that students would come in from all over the world.

00:18:27.720 | - I've been there.

00:18:28.560 | - It's a great place. - Yeah, it's awesome.

00:18:29.720 | - Summer camp for scientists,

00:18:30.740 | I'll have their laboratories all year.

00:18:32.400 | And I eventually was director of a course there

00:18:35.960 | and my co-director and I used to have this debrief

00:18:38.980 | at the end of the first day or two

00:18:40.800 | where we would talk to one another

00:18:42.360 | and we would go over the list of names and we'd say,

00:18:45.680 | and she was remarkably good at this,

00:18:47.600 | just extraordinary, like a superpower at saying,

00:18:51.940 | "You know, I think everyone's settling in well,

00:18:54.020 | "but I noticed that so-and-so was kind of like,

00:18:57.600 | "might not be adjusted to the jet lag

00:18:59.100 | "or might not be acclimating so well."

00:19:01.320 | And it's a very tight-knit group

00:19:02.780 | and the course is quite long for a course like that,

00:19:06.320 | but it's important that everybody

00:19:08.320 | kind of feel engaged early on.

00:19:10.440 | - Yeah.

00:19:11.360 | - And people have a tendency to dominate

00:19:12.880 | in those intellectually competitive environments

00:19:16.120 | and she could just pinpoint who it was

00:19:19.160 | that was feeling a little bit outside the group.

00:19:22.120 | We knew how to ameliorate that really quickly.

00:19:24.560 | And from her, I learned a bit of how to recognize the signs

00:19:28.160 | and it was rarely just facial expression included that

00:19:31.900 | and some other cues that she just seemed to have

00:19:33.820 | a unconscious or conscious genius around.

00:19:37.120 | So for me, I learned some of that from her.

00:19:40.260 | I like to think I got better at it,

00:19:41.540 | but I think some people are just extraordinarily good

00:19:43.780 | at that detection.

00:19:44.980 | - And it enhances social interactions.

00:19:47.420 | And so some people are really good at detecting it.

00:19:49.940 | Others are really good at displaying it.

00:19:52.940 | I'm gonna go back to my daughter.

00:19:55.460 | So, you know, if something happens where she feels sad,

00:19:58.240 | she exhibits this exaggerated response,

00:20:02.360 | like she'll stick out her lower lip.

00:20:04.640 | And even if I'm kind of upset at her,

00:20:06.960 | like it is amazing the power that that has on me.

00:20:09.560 | - Melted, melted.

00:20:10.960 | - It is so, so beautifully manipulating.

00:20:15.960 | - Manipulative, you know, no, manipulative.

00:20:19.920 | And it's a testament to the power

00:20:23.440 | that these displays can have on us.

00:20:25.200 | - So I wanna go back to one other question you raised

00:20:28.300 | in your last comment.

00:20:29.700 | And we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality.

00:20:33.160 | You raised the question about being shifted by others,

00:20:37.780 | other people, and perhaps either just our surroundings,

00:20:42.080 | music or spaces.

00:20:43.140 | Sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted.

00:20:47.180 | And in fact, when other people try to do that,

00:20:50.140 | it can elicit what we call reactance.

00:20:52.420 | Like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me

00:20:56.340 | in a particular direction.

00:20:57.600 | I think that's a really important point

00:21:00.060 | that we need to be aware of as people living and working

00:21:05.060 | in these social environments

00:21:06.660 | where we're often well-intentioned,

00:21:09.420 | but sometimes our well-intentioned behaviors can backfire.

00:21:13.860 | And so there's this beautiful research

00:21:16.220 | which shows that if you see someone suffering

00:21:20.500 | and you volunteer to help them

00:21:23.520 | and they haven't asked you to help them,

00:21:26.300 | that can blow up in your face.

00:21:27.940 | Because what it does is it often communicates to people

00:21:30.860 | that you are thinking that they're not capable

00:21:33.160 | of handling their own circumstances.

00:21:35.620 | And most of us, we're motivated to think

00:21:38.900 | that we're capable of handling ourselves.

00:21:41.600 | And so there are still ways you can help people

00:21:43.940 | in those circumstances.

00:21:45.060 | It's called providing invisible support,

00:21:48.740 | which involves providing support to the person

00:21:52.220 | who can genuinely benefit from it,

00:21:54.860 | but not shining a spotlight on the fact

00:21:57.720 | that that is what you are doing.

00:21:59.240 | So how might this transpire?

00:22:02.460 | There's some really simple things you could do.

00:22:04.140 | So let's say my wife is really overwhelmed with stuff

00:22:09.140 | and she hasn't asked me for help,

00:22:10.960 | but I know she is at her wits end work

00:22:13.380 | and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate.

00:22:18.300 | I can proactively do things to lessen her burden.

00:22:22.900 | If it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning

00:22:25.220 | in the groceries, I'm doing that voluntarily.

00:22:28.500 | I'm doing that and I'm not coming home and saying,

00:22:31.820 | hey sweetie, look what I did today.

00:22:33.540 | I did all these things, can I have a pat on my back?

00:22:35.940 | That's not what we're talking about.

00:22:37.960 | It's about your group, your lab is working under a deadline

00:22:42.960 | to submit a grant application

00:22:45.340 | and they don't have time to eat

00:22:47.100 | and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab.

00:22:49.780 | It's those little things that can help.

00:22:52.380 | Give you two more examples.

00:22:53.660 | Let's say that someone on your team is really struggling

00:22:57.880 | with their ability to translate their work

00:23:01.540 | for popular audiences

00:23:03.580 | and that's something they're motivated to do.

00:23:05.580 | Really important skill for a scientist

00:23:07.260 | to be able to translate what they do for others to consume.

00:23:11.260 | Before you pull them aside and say,

00:23:13.260 | hey, you know, I noticed that you're stumbling

00:23:16.500 | on a few different issues

00:23:18.300 | and here are a couple of things I think you can do better.

00:23:21.160 | Before you do that direct intervention,

00:23:24.180 | you might have a team meeting

00:23:25.940 | where you share out best practices.

00:23:27.620 | Hey, what are the two things that I've learned

00:23:29.320 | that really have benefited my ability

00:23:33.180 | to communicate with different audiences?

00:23:35.180 | What you're doing there is you're getting people

00:23:37.780 | the resources they can benefit from,

00:23:41.220 | but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact

00:23:43.420 | that you are directing it to them.

00:23:45.900 | So it's kind of a back doorway of helping or of shifting.

00:23:50.900 | The last tool I'll mention brings it back to sensation.

00:23:55.740 | One of the most powerful ways we can shift other people

00:23:58.620 | is through touch, tactile sensation.

00:24:02.100 | You know, what's the first thing that you do with a child

00:24:06.740 | to soothe them when they are born?

00:24:10.300 | Hold them, hold them.

00:24:11.500 | Skin-to-skin contact.

00:24:12.900 | I remember both times my kids were born,

00:24:15.780 | it was like, you know, I wanna get in on that,

00:24:18.580 | like, you know, 'cause my wife got first dibs

00:24:20.660 | with both of our daughters.

00:24:21.780 | Like, I want some of that, you know, skin-to-skin contact.

00:24:24.680 | That doesn't end after we leave the womb.

00:24:28.780 | The comfort that we experience,

00:24:30.940 | the release of stress-fighting chemicals that occurs

00:24:33.820 | when affectionate embraces are registered,

00:24:36.780 | that continues throughout the lifespan.

00:24:38.780 | So if my daughters, who don't particularly like dad

00:24:42.860 | to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays,

00:24:46.660 | if I know they're having a bad day, like, I'll go over

00:24:50.100 | and I'll rub their back in a totally uncreepy way.

00:24:54.220 | That is an important caveat we should give

00:24:56.020 | to everyone who's listening.

00:24:57.540 | What we're talking about here is affectionate

00:25:00.940 | but not creepy or unwanted touch.

00:25:03.800 | It is touch that is mutually desired,

00:25:06.940 | and there is some research which shows actually

00:25:08.820 | that when it is not desired, you don't get these benefits.

00:25:12.740 | And in fact, you get the opposite,

00:25:14.940 | plus usually like lawsuits as well.

00:25:17.660 | - Yeah, sure.

00:25:18.500 | No, I definitely believe that as a primate species,

00:25:23.500 | which we are, we are old world primates,

00:25:27.260 | I think they call it allopathic grooming.

00:25:31.500 | You'll see these images of these monkeys

00:25:34.400 | and lots of different species of primates,

00:25:37.360 | just sitting nearby one another where one just has

00:25:41.100 | it's even just it's hand, it's paw on the one next to it.

00:25:46.100 | And they'll just sit like that for long periods of time.

00:25:51.660 | And then sometimes they're doing like an active grooming

00:25:53.820 | of removing parasites.

00:25:55.700 | This is very important in the primate world, as we know.

00:25:59.840 | But grooming and picking in these kinds of things,

00:26:03.840 | you see it in couples.

00:26:04.820 | It's actually can be kind of endearing.

00:26:06.380 | I suppose at its extremes, it's kind of gross,

00:26:08.140 | but it's rather endearing to see somebody

00:26:13.140 | kind of like remove a piece of lint off somebody,

00:26:17.540 | their partner's jacket, or even just touch that is,

00:26:22.540 | it doesn't look like it's geared

00:26:24.620 | towards any specific outcome.

00:26:26.220 | - Yeah.

00:26:27.060 | - And it doesn't necessarily appear romantic

00:26:31.300 | or that it's grooming.

00:26:32.600 | So maybe the lint example isn't the best one,

00:26:34.500 | but where you just see people that are just like,

00:26:36.220 | actually on the flight down this morning,

00:26:37.940 | so I had to fly in early, I was sitting on the aisle seat.

00:26:41.300 | In the middle was a boy.

00:26:44.740 | He was probably 14, 15.

00:26:47.500 | And his mom was at the window seat.

00:26:49.580 | And I went up to use the restroom, came back,

00:26:52.260 | and he had fallen asleep on his mom's shoulder.

00:26:54.420 | And I took a look, it was a very endearing moment.

00:26:56.540 | And then when we landed, I said,

00:26:57.820 | the ability to sleep anywhere is a superpower.

00:26:59.820 | And he said, I learned it from my dad.

00:27:01.700 | And it was a moment where I just thought,

00:27:04.040 | it was just a very pleasant thing to see them

00:27:06.080 | in this touch on the plane.

00:27:08.200 | He clearly felt comfortable enough to do that.

00:27:10.440 | I remember thinking like, yeah,

00:27:11.600 | humans were a lot like the other primates.

00:27:14.480 | - Yeah, there's a beauty to it.

00:27:16.120 | And it is a tool.

00:27:18.080 | It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used

00:27:22.000 | in the appropriate context.

00:27:24.460 | All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools

00:27:27.080 | for, I would argue, relatively effortlessly

00:27:30.680 | shifting our emotions.

00:27:31.780 | And I think that's really important

00:27:33.160 | because people often think that regulating our emotions

00:27:38.160 | is hard work to the extent that they believe

00:27:41.440 | you can regulate your emotions at all.

00:27:43.040 | We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure.

00:27:45.260 | But self-control, emotion regulation,

00:27:48.920 | like let me roll up my sleeves

00:27:50.640 | and really kind of get in there.

00:27:52.280 | Yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult

00:27:56.680 | to manage our emotions.

00:27:57.880 | And some of the tools that we have are effortful.

00:28:01.320 | One example would be expressive writing.

00:28:04.320 | It's a wonderful tool

00:28:05.600 | for working through problematic experiences.

00:28:08.160 | You sit down, just let yourself go

00:28:10.140 | for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days.

00:28:12.680 | - This is the Pennebaker.

00:28:13.520 | - This is the Pennebaker writing effect.

00:28:15.040 | This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect free,

00:28:20.040 | you could argue intervention for helping you deal

00:28:23.840 | with curve balls that life throws at you.

00:28:25.680 | We have vast amounts of data supporting the practice.

00:28:28.140 | - Vast amounts of data.

00:28:28.980 | - The Pennebaker really deserves, in my opinion,

00:28:32.160 | if not the psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize,

00:28:35.500 | I don't know what that is,

00:28:36.340 | but it deserves real deep praise

00:28:41.320 | for developing that method

00:28:43.080 | because it's essentially zero cost,

00:28:45.280 | takes a little bit of time.

00:28:46.680 | And there's just, what, hundreds of studies?

00:28:48.960 | - Hundreds of studies, that's right.

00:28:49.800 | - Showing that these 10 to 15 minute cathartic writing,

00:28:53.440 | just free associative writing,

00:28:54.600 | usually, as I understand with a writing utensil,

00:28:57.800 | it's probably better.

00:28:58.880 | We did an episode where I talked about this

00:29:01.600 | and received a note from him

00:29:05.580 | and was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong.

00:29:10.460 | In fact, he was pleased with it.

00:29:11.640 | I think that he deserves a lot of credit.

00:29:14.560 | - Well, we-- - A powerful tool

00:29:15.960 | for self-healing.

00:29:16.880 | - We actually just restarted a prestigious speaker series

00:29:21.920 | at Michigan, the Katz Newcomb Speaker Series,

00:29:24.680 | which is designed to honor luminaries in the field.

00:29:28.600 | And we actually kicked it off with Jamie

00:29:30.440 | coming to speak about his extraordinary work

00:29:33.080 | because this is really a gift, I think,

00:29:35.840 | not just to the field, but humanity.

00:29:38.540 | And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool.

00:29:43.300 | It takes 15 minutes to use.

00:29:46.760 | There is nothing wrong with that.

00:29:48.720 | Lots of things that we do in life are effortful,

00:29:51.680 | but we also know that we don't like exerting effort

00:29:55.920 | as a species.

00:29:56.760 | We like to conserve our resources as much as possible.

00:30:00.000 | So if there are easy things you could do as well,

00:30:02.920 | it's good to know about what those are.

00:30:04.880 | And these sensory shifters, music,

00:30:08.120 | looking at images, right?

00:30:11.320 | These are modality, taste, touch.

00:30:14.400 | These are ways of pushing your emotions around

00:30:17.680 | pretty effectively for short periods of time

00:30:20.280 | that in a pinch, like when your daughter's

00:30:23.080 | not in a great mood, or when you wanna get pumped up

00:30:25.600 | before an important event, can be quite useful.

00:30:28.880 | And we often just go through our lives

00:30:31.600 | not recognizing how we can strategically harness them.

00:30:35.580 | So that's my plug for sensory shifters.

00:30:39.320 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:33:26.780 | Let's go back to just close the loop

00:33:30.940 | on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides.

00:33:34.720 | So we talked about two, verbal working memory, right?

00:33:38.400 | Keeping verbal information active for short periods of time.

00:33:42.080 | And we talked about simulating and planning things,

00:33:45.280 | like going over what you're going to say

00:33:46.800 | before an interview or an important presentation.

00:33:51.800 | Let's turn to self-control and motivation.

00:33:56.800 | So you exercise, you've talked about exercising.

00:34:02.320 | - I try to exercise six days a week,

00:34:05.440 | although some are short workouts, some are longer.

00:34:08.080 | - You ever talk to yourself when you exercise?

00:34:09.760 | - Oh, all the time.

00:34:10.840 | - So let's hear it.

00:34:11.880 | The world wants to know, Andrew,

00:34:13.600 | what do you say to yourself when you exercise?

00:34:16.920 | - Depends on how well-rested I am, how motivated I am.

00:34:19.920 | I'll give two examples at the opposite poles

00:34:24.680 | of the motivational scale.

00:34:26.700 | I was traveling two weeks ago

00:34:28.600 | and I was doing some exercise for the,

00:34:31.800 | there's a muscle on the back of the shoulder,

00:34:33.520 | the rear deltoid.

00:34:34.440 | It's, I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train,

00:34:37.520 | but it's a very important one for-

00:34:38.560 | - That's when you do this one.

00:34:39.520 | - You're right, for shoulder posture and stability

00:34:41.620 | and got to train those, that muscle group,

00:34:46.500 | because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating,

00:34:49.400 | like, you know, thumbs pointing toward belly button

00:34:51.040 | and shoulders rolling forward thing.

00:34:52.460 | And there are a number of reasons why it's important.

00:34:54.880 | So you got to do the rear delt thing.

00:34:56.520 | And I sat down to do the first work set

00:34:59.680 | after a couple warmups.

00:35:01.280 | And I remember thinking like, I love training.

00:35:04.500 | I love training.

00:35:05.340 | I have since I started training when I was 16.

00:35:07.240 | And I thought to myself,

00:35:08.080 | for some reason I don't want to do this this morning.

00:35:09.920 | And then I thought, okay, David Goggins

00:35:12.000 | would probably start swearing at himself in his head.

00:35:14.040 | So I started that a little bit

00:35:15.800 | and that didn't really work for me.

00:35:16.960 | Sorry, David.

00:35:17.800 | And then I thought,

00:35:19.500 | I'm going to go through every possible inner voice

00:35:21.720 | I can think of.

00:35:22.560 | So I heard Jocko Willink's voice.

00:35:23.520 | I'm friends with Jocko and her just saying like,

00:35:26.540 | yeah, whatever, you're just weak, you know,

00:35:28.260 | or just like do it anyway kind of mentality.

00:35:30.980 | And I just started cycling through all of them.

00:35:32.940 | And I made a deal with myself

00:35:34.980 | that when I ran out of voices to use,

00:35:37.020 | that's when I would stop the set.

00:35:38.620 | And I probably tripled the number of repetitions

00:35:40.840 | that I would normally get with that weight.

00:35:42.640 | So it was like one part motivation, one part distraction,

00:35:45.480 | one part frustration.

00:35:46.960 | And I was just pulling from the catalog of possible voices

00:35:51.880 | of kind of coach like voices and worked out pretty well.

00:35:56.880 | And then at the other extreme,

00:35:59.820 | I can recall many times because I put effort into it

00:36:04.480 | where I'm well-rested, I'm hydrated,

00:36:08.040 | get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system,

00:36:10.440 | which I love and sit down to train.

00:36:13.280 | And I absolutely love to train under those conditions.

00:36:15.680 | The sun is shining, music's playing.

00:36:17.600 | And I just remember this was during a set,

00:36:20.440 | this was a leg day, always the hardest day,

00:36:23.400 | set of heavy hack squats.

00:36:24.640 | And just thinking, I love this,

00:36:27.160 | but I have this inner voice where every time

00:36:28.940 | I start a repetition,

00:36:30.600 | I go through the thing where I brace my midsection

00:36:32.280 | so I don't hurt my back.

00:36:33.200 | And I always look directly at the ceiling

00:36:34.600 | and I think about my bulldog Costello.

00:36:36.840 | And I think, I'm gonna do this one for you.

00:36:39.000 | I'm gonna do this one for you.

00:36:39.840 | And I know at those moments, my inner voice goes to,

00:36:42.080 | he would probably just be sitting there like,

00:36:43.640 | why are you working this hard?

00:36:45.320 | Bulldogs don't like to work.

00:36:47.520 | So I'm not really in a complete sentence generation,

00:36:51.360 | inner voice kind of thing.

00:36:52.720 | - But you have a very rich inner world, right?

00:36:56.560 | Your verbal working memory stream is filled with words

00:37:01.560 | when you are working out.

00:37:04.520 | - Yeah, and I'll tell you this.

00:37:05.760 | I was gonna ask you this later in the episode,

00:37:07.440 | but maybe it's relevant now.

00:37:09.480 | I think it is.

00:37:10.400 | When I was a kid, after my parents would tuck me in

00:37:13.560 | to go to sleep at night,

00:37:14.560 | I used to lie in bed and rehearse voices

00:37:17.720 | that I had heard throughout the day.

00:37:19.680 | And I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice.

00:37:22.800 | And then I'd make them say different things

00:37:25.560 | just for my own entertainment.

00:37:27.280 | So I could have them say whatever I wanted,

00:37:29.120 | but in a particular voice.

00:37:30.960 | And my friends sometimes tease me

00:37:33.120 | that I'll give people voices.

00:37:34.340 | Like I'll give someone like a Marge Simpson voice

00:37:36.040 | or something.

00:37:36.880 | They're like, she doesn't sound like that at all,

00:37:39.040 | but I'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind.

00:37:41.600 | So yeah, a lot of chatter in there, a lot of voices.

00:37:45.440 | But not super organized.

00:37:47.280 | It's not like I'm constructing a play.

00:37:49.600 | It's kind of, it feels like things geyser up.

00:37:52.800 | I toy with them, maybe a little.

00:37:55.800 | But it's kind of a mishmash.

00:37:56.920 | It's not super regimented.

00:37:58.640 | These aren't complete sentences.

00:37:59.840 | - Well, one of the reasons why the Penny Baker effect

00:38:03.520 | is believed to be so useful

00:38:05.000 | is because it imposes a structure

00:38:07.760 | on the stream going through our head,

00:38:09.380 | which is oftentimes not organized.

00:38:12.320 | And when you find that inner verbal stream

00:38:14.560 | going in the negative direction,

00:38:15.960 | so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right?

00:38:19.240 | You're an idiot, such an idiot,

00:38:20.600 | or you're looping over a problem

00:38:22.960 | without making any progress.

00:38:24.560 | Putting those words in,

00:38:29.560 | actually taking that inner stream

00:38:31.680 | and making a story out of it

00:38:33.280 | is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do.

00:38:38.040 | Because we are taught when we write,

00:38:40.480 | we write in sentences,

00:38:42.720 | there's a structure to our writing

00:38:44.680 | that we impose on our thinking.

00:38:47.040 | Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all.

00:38:50.460 | It can go in all sorts of directions.

00:38:51.880 | And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.

00:38:56.220 | - I'm so glad you're bringing this up.

00:38:59.120 | Our very first guest ever on this podcast

00:39:01.600 | was a guy named Karl Deisseroth.

00:39:03.160 | He's a bioengineer, he's a practicing psychiatrist.

00:39:06.200 | He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience.

00:39:07.720 | He developed these light-sensitive channels

00:39:10.640 | to be able to manipulate neurons in animal models,

00:39:13.400 | but also now in human clinical work as well.

00:39:16.280 | And one thing that he shared was that

00:39:19.200 | after he puts his kids to sleep,

00:39:22.000 | I think now they're grown,

00:39:23.000 | but in the evening, he'll deliberately sit still,

00:39:27.480 | completely bodily still, close his eyes,

00:39:31.120 | and force himself to think in complete sentences

00:39:34.520 | for maybe an hour or so, maybe more.

00:39:37.040 | And I thought to myself,

00:39:37.860 | "Wow, that's a very disciplined practice."

00:39:40.560 | It also speaks to what you're saying,

00:39:41.760 | which is that typically thinking in complete sentences

00:39:45.680 | is not the default of the mind.

00:39:48.100 | So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is.

00:39:51.340 | He shared a few of them on that podcast episode,

00:39:54.620 | but I'm sure there are others as well.

00:39:56.520 | But I tried it.

00:39:58.640 | It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed,

00:40:01.280 | to not drift into multiple narratives,

00:40:04.040 | the stream sort of split into your tributaries,

00:40:06.840 | and then you dissolve into sleep or-

00:40:10.960 | - A meditation experience.

00:40:11.800 | - Yeah, an almost dream-like state

00:40:13.400 | where you're in these liminal states.

00:40:16.180 | - Well, that's, I think,

00:40:17.020 | where the writing provides a tool

00:40:19.860 | to structure your thinking.

00:40:21.400 | Talking has a similar modality.

00:40:24.080 | So when we talk to people,

00:40:26.000 | there is a structure to the way we converse

00:40:29.000 | where we're not,

00:40:29.880 | if I were to just talk to you

00:40:31.840 | the way I pinball in my mind,

00:40:33.720 | you wouldn't be able to understand me,

00:40:36.060 | and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right?

00:40:38.720 | Because I would be unable

00:40:40.100 | to have a meaningful conversation with you.

00:40:43.780 | So there's some research which shows that

00:40:46.180 | if you get people to think of,

00:40:48.100 | to recall a chatter-provoking experience,

00:40:51.200 | so think about something negative that's happened to you,

00:40:53.640 | and then you randomly assign them to just think about it

00:40:57.240 | and work it through in their mind versus write about it,

00:41:00.320 | so i.e. a penny-baker writing-like condition,

00:41:03.940 | or talk about it to someone else,

00:41:06.280 | the talking and the writing both do better

00:41:09.280 | in terms of how they feel when they're done

00:41:10.920 | as compared to the just thinking,

00:41:12.800 | because there's no guardrails to the way we think.

00:41:16.360 | That we are taught, I should add,

00:41:18.880 | because we're gonna give people guardrails

00:41:20.560 | later in this episode.

00:41:22.640 | - So in addition to using the penny-baker approach,

00:41:26.080 | and by the way, we'll provide a link to some resources

00:41:29.320 | for the penny-baker journaling,

00:41:30.880 | 'cause there's some free online resources

00:41:32.560 | that I think are really powerful for people to use

00:41:34.260 | if they wanna use that as a template,

00:41:36.120 | for cathartic reasons,

00:41:38.380 | or just get one's mind around a problem,

00:41:40.920 | or something I'm very familiar with,

00:41:43.120 | waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of,

00:41:45.680 | not a storm in there,

00:41:46.680 | but a bit too disorganized to get my head right,

00:41:51.040 | you know, and so I need things to get my head right.

00:41:53.040 | Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's writing.

00:41:55.440 | It sounds like journaling

00:41:56.280 | is just a really useful practice overall.

00:41:59.160 | - It's a useful practice,

00:42:00.680 | and it's an underutilized practice.

00:42:02.180 | So we did two pretty large studies during COVID

00:42:05.400 | to look at how people,

00:42:07.320 | how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis

00:42:10.180 | to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID?

00:42:12.280 | And we gave them a series of tools

00:42:15.320 | that they could check off if they use the tools that day.

00:42:19.100 | And we learned a couple of really interesting things.

00:42:22.100 | Number one, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions

00:42:26.160 | for folks.

00:42:27.000 | So remarkable variability characterized

00:42:30.200 | the tools that work for person A versus person B.

00:42:33.080 | Number two, it was seldom the case

00:42:36.640 | that people used one tool.

00:42:39.240 | In general, people used, on average,

00:42:40.880 | three or four tools each day,

00:42:43.220 | which I think is another really important take-home

00:42:45.720 | because I am often asked as, for example,

00:42:49.460 | what is my favorite tool for managing emotions?

00:42:52.220 | I don't have a favorite tool

00:42:55.220 | because I'm typically using multiple tools,

00:42:57.300 | and most people are doing exactly the same.

00:43:00.020 | So it's kind of like what we're learning

00:43:01.700 | about emotion regulation is, in some ways,

00:43:03.900 | it's similar to physical exercise.

00:43:06.700 | You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids

00:43:10.740 | with the same exercise every day.

00:43:13.060 | You would have funky-looking shoulders if you did, right?

00:43:15.700 | You'd probably be pretty weak

00:43:16.720 | in lots of other parts of your body.

00:43:18.440 | You're doing multiple things,

00:43:20.720 | and the multiple things that you do to exercise,

00:43:23.840 | I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things

00:43:26.000 | that I do to exercise,

00:43:28.360 | yet we may well be equally fit.

00:43:30.940 | Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me,

00:43:32.800 | but you get the drift.

00:43:35.160 | So there's this beautiful variability

00:43:39.560 | to how we manage our inner worlds.

00:43:41.440 | To bring it back to expressive writing,

00:43:44.140 | we found that expressive writing,

00:43:45.700 | when people used it, was really, really useful.

00:43:49.480 | It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety,

00:43:52.340 | but it was an underutilized tool.

00:43:55.160 | People didn't do it very much,

00:43:56.560 | and I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.

00:43:59.560 | - Let me ask another question about movement

00:44:03.160 | that falls on the other end of the spectrum

00:44:05.960 | to what we're talking about now,

00:44:07.480 | which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing

00:44:10.560 | in order to parse an idea

00:44:12.160 | or work through an emotional state.

00:44:14.620 | In 2015, by the way, I use these anecdotes,

00:44:18.520 | not because I want to focus on me,

00:44:20.660 | but just as generalizable anecdotes, okay?

00:44:23.340 | The specifics here don't matter,

00:44:24.700 | but I think probably most people are familiar

00:44:26.660 | with having an important decision

00:44:27.780 | where they have to weigh path A versus path B.

00:44:31.940 | And I was in that place.

00:44:32.860 | I was actually choosing between a job

00:44:34.600 | at one institution and another institution,

00:44:37.340 | each of which had tremendous advantages,

00:44:39.500 | neither had any striking disadvantages,

00:44:42.980 | but it was a really hard decision.

00:44:44.780 | And those close to me at that time

00:44:45.940 | will tell you that it was just brutal.

00:44:47.980 | - Been there.

00:44:48.820 | - Yeah, I made everybody around me suffer tremendously

00:44:51.740 | to the point where people were just like, "Flip a coin."

00:44:53.580 | Now, I'm not an indecisive person.

00:44:56.320 | I think it's one of these things where big decisions,

00:45:01.320 | I think, deserve time and attention,

00:45:04.580 | and it was a time-constrained thing.

00:45:05.860 | So I was poring over this pro/cons list.

00:45:08.060 | I was watching YouTube videos,

00:45:09.420 | trying to figure out best ways for decision-making.

00:45:11.260 | I was trying to, I actually-

00:45:13.140 | - Isn't it amazing, by the way,

00:45:14.220 | when we're in those situations,

00:45:15.300 | and I know exactly what you're talking about

00:45:16.780 | because I was pretty sure I was in exactly

00:45:18.820 | the same position.

00:45:20.300 | The things you do in those circumstances

00:45:22.900 | to get some insight are wacky.

00:45:25.620 | Like, I'm sure you were Googling things

00:45:27.180 | that you had no business Googling

00:45:29.200 | these kinds of decision trees and-

00:45:31.780 | - Oh, yeah. - Right?

00:45:32.620 | I mean, it's wild.

00:45:33.440 | - It turns out they're mathematical models

00:45:34.740 | that, like, there's the,

00:45:36.920 | actually, my colleague at NYU, Tony Movshin,

00:45:41.500 | I forget the name of the model,

00:45:42.540 | but there's a model about how many towns

00:45:45.380 | you should evaluate.

00:45:46.220 | It's an old, kind of old example of towns

00:45:48.300 | you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business.

00:45:51.460 | Like, is it two, is it three?

00:45:52.740 | And there's an optimal strategy there.

00:45:54.580 | In any event, most of it wasn't helping.

00:45:56.900 | And I do believe that, at some point,

00:45:58.220 | you don't want too many committee members

00:46:00.180 | 'cause it just gets confusing.

00:46:01.500 | So the two best pieces of information

00:46:04.960 | came from the following practices.

00:46:06.500 | One was a colleague said,

00:46:09.660 | "Forget all the superficial pro-con stuff."

00:46:12.540 | And I actually think this has proved to be very useful

00:46:15.300 | in all domains of life for me.

00:46:17.380 | He said, "Take yourself through a typical weekday

00:46:20.820 | "in one place versus the other.

00:46:22.200 | "Wake up, where are you going to go?

00:46:23.360 | "How are you going to travel?

00:46:24.340 | "Take yourself through the practicals of the day

00:46:26.720 | "because everything else falls away

00:46:28.280 | "once you're at a place

00:46:29.620 | "or you're in a type of relationship.

00:46:31.040 | "Take yourself through a given day."

00:46:33.340 | Don't think about the relationship

00:46:34.900 | or the institution that you're going to work for,

00:46:36.860 | the school you're going to go to.

00:46:38.340 | That's important, but take yourself through the entire day.

00:46:41.980 | So I did that.

00:46:43.240 | And then he said, "Also do it on a weekend."

00:46:45.660 | Because, you know, well, in our profession,

00:46:49.300 | we tend to work all the time,

00:46:50.240 | but occasionally you take a day off.

00:46:52.020 | And so that was very useful.

00:46:53.380 | The other thing that was very useful,

00:46:54.840 | which was completely surprising to me,

00:46:56.660 | was at that time I was training in a boxing gym

00:47:00.840 | and I was doing some speed bag work and decent at it.

00:47:04.100 | You know, you get into a rhythm.

00:47:05.620 | And what's so great about speed bag work

00:47:07.520 | is that you get into a rhythm

00:47:09.620 | where you forget that you're trying to do the movement

00:47:12.220 | in a particular way.

00:47:13.060 | These central pattern generators,

00:47:14.920 | as we call them in neuroscience, take over.

00:47:16.940 | And you're just kind of, you know,

00:47:18.140 | turning your hands over in a way.

00:47:19.400 | And you're like, every once in a while,

00:47:21.220 | you can think, okay,

00:47:22.060 | you need to put a little more hip swivel into this

00:47:23.620 | or a little more head movement

00:47:24.940 | and practice my slips or something.

00:47:27.280 | But it's largely unconscious after a certain point.

00:47:32.040 | And I was doing that.

00:47:35.060 | And all of a sudden, boom,

00:47:36.340 | a thought just geyser to the surface.

00:47:38.620 | And I made my decision.

00:47:40.100 | And that was my final decision.

00:47:42.220 | And I never went back from that decision.

00:47:43.940 | And so it was in the act of not trying to parse things

00:47:47.420 | in words, that words sprung up from my whatever,

00:47:50.700 | unconscious somewhere in my brain,

00:47:52.940 | cortical or something, cortical, I don't know.

00:47:55.020 | And it was like, that's it.

00:47:56.980 | And I was overwhelmed by that.

00:47:59.740 | And again, I don't share all that

00:48:00.980 | because I think it's speed bags

00:48:03.340 | or it's the example I gave before

00:48:05.540 | that's gonna solve it for everybody.

00:48:06.820 | But that these answers to hard problems

00:48:09.460 | seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches.

00:48:12.580 | Verbal construction of complete sentences with paper

00:48:15.380 | or deliberately like Dyseroth does.

00:48:17.140 | And then also like not trying to get an answer at all.

00:48:20.660 | Boom, the answer shows up.

00:48:21.820 | What in the world is that?

00:48:23.260 | - So it speaks to this idea that first of all,

00:48:25.620 | there are no one size fits all solutions

00:48:28.180 | to addressing many of the big kinds of problems

00:48:32.060 | and decisions we have to face.

00:48:33.700 | So there are different modalities

00:48:35.960 | to self-discovery and insight.

00:48:38.420 | And yes, you can think very rationally

00:48:40.580 | and work it through and write about it

00:48:42.620 | and have conversations with other people.

00:48:44.540 | And then you can also allow

00:48:46.220 | your unconscious problem solving machinery to do its thing.

00:48:51.220 | We don't understand completely how this works,

00:48:54.540 | but we do know that your experience is not infrequent.

00:48:59.540 | Many people report having moments of insight

00:49:03.380 | when they are not otherwise engaged.

00:49:07.340 | And one line of thinking is that

00:49:10.680 | we are doing problem solving behind the scenes

00:49:13.300 | that we're not aware of

00:49:14.340 | and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness.

00:49:17.060 | So I actually, this may be the wrong usage of terms,

00:49:20.420 | but I weaponize this process for myself.

00:49:22.880 | So before I exercise, before I get on the treadmill or row

00:49:27.620 | or do whatever I'm gonna do,

00:49:29.420 | I will load up the particular issue

00:49:32.880 | that I'm trying to find a solution for.

00:49:35.060 | Sometimes it's how to word a paragraph.

00:49:38.460 | It might be if I'm working on a book,

00:49:40.300 | how to find the right kind of story.

00:49:42.680 | If it's an interpersonal issue

00:49:45.060 | that I've got to smooth over, I load that up.

00:49:48.880 | And then I just get on the device.

00:49:51.540 | It's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing.

00:49:53.920 | And I just, I don't really think about it in any fixed way,

00:49:59.300 | but inevitably the ideas,

00:50:01.840 | the potential solutions bubble up into awareness.

00:50:05.720 | That is a real valuable tool that I possess

00:50:10.320 | that I think allows me to have success

00:50:13.480 | in various areas of my life.

00:50:16.100 | It also identifies one of the reasons why chatter

00:50:20.660 | can be so unbelievably pernicious.

00:50:23.400 | So we didn't get to all the benefits of the,

00:50:25.960 | there's one more benefit of the inner voice

00:50:27.280 | that I wanna get to,

00:50:28.120 | but I'm gonna take a detour here for a second

00:50:29.840 | 'cause I think this is really important.

00:50:31.880 | If we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice,

00:50:35.100 | you're basically continuing to loop over

00:50:37.820 | the same problem in your head without making any progress.

00:50:41.440 | What if this happens?

00:50:42.400 | Why did this happen?

00:50:43.360 | I'm such a imbecile.

00:50:45.400 | You're just continually going over

00:50:47.040 | that negative phenomenon or experience.

00:50:50.200 | You're not making any headway.

00:50:52.680 | One of the things that that does

00:50:54.380 | is it consumes our attentional resources.

00:50:58.520 | It acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources.

00:51:02.840 | And so what that means

00:51:04.600 | is when I get on the treadmill or rowing machine,

00:51:07.800 | and that's typically the time that I spend innovating,

00:51:11.280 | right, coming up with solutions

00:51:12.860 | that allow me to progress personally and professionally,

00:51:17.720 | I don't have, my mind's not working to solve those problems.

00:51:21.840 | Instead, it is stuck dealing with this other muck

00:51:25.760 | where I'm not getting anywhere.

00:51:27.600 | And so we actually see, if you look at the literature,

00:51:30.480 | that one of the ways that chatter undermines people

00:51:33.520 | is it interferes with their ability

00:51:34.960 | to focus and solve problems.

00:51:37.160 | And that's just one way it undermines people,

00:51:39.680 | but that is a huge, huge liability.

00:51:41.980 | - Is there an association between trauma

00:51:46.640 | and elevated levels of internal chatter?

00:51:49.040 | - I would say even more than an association.

00:51:52.840 | So we often think of chatter

00:51:55.480 | as what we call it as a transdiagnostic mechanism.

00:51:59.600 | So it's a mouthful

00:52:01.000 | that predicts various kinds of mood disorders.

00:52:04.240 | So what that means is chatter refers to a process,

00:52:07.900 | a process of looping,

00:52:10.160 | turning the same material over and over in your head.

00:52:13.200 | The content of that looping can take many different forms.

00:52:17.200 | You could inject some sad cognitions in there.

00:52:20.840 | I'm a shit, such a shit.

00:52:23.140 | Is it okay to say shit?

00:52:24.280 | Should I say that?

00:52:25.120 | - Sure, people, I mean, David Goggins was on this podcast.

00:52:27.080 | - Okay, so, you know.

00:52:28.680 | - I mean, pretty much anything goes.

00:52:29.780 | Typically, we don't swear at each other.

00:52:31.440 | - Okay, well, I should hope not.

00:52:32.640 | - I'm pretty thick-skinned if you need to, you know,

00:52:34.780 | I've been called way worse than anything.

00:52:36.280 | - You've been boxing.

00:52:37.240 | I actually boxed in high school.

00:52:38.800 | - I don't recommend people box

00:52:40.000 | unless they're, you know, they're professional.

00:52:42.360 | And even then, I mean, I must say, as a neuroscientist.

00:52:45.320 | - It's a lot of fun.

00:52:46.160 | - Yeah, and on Wednesday nights, I'd spar a little bit,

00:52:49.040 | but I will say this, it's,

00:52:50.340 | there are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10.

00:52:55.640 | - Yeah.

00:52:56.480 | - More safely, much more safely for the brain,

00:52:58.840 | like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and things like that, you know.

00:53:01.440 | - You typically don't want to insult the brain.

00:53:03.560 | - Yeah, as a neuroscientist,

00:53:05.320 | I can't encourage people to box.

00:53:06.960 | - I would agree.

00:53:09.440 | In any case, I promise not to leap across the table

00:53:12.320 | if you do the same.

00:53:13.680 | - Fair enough.

00:53:14.520 | - Deal?

00:53:15.360 | - Deal.

00:53:16.180 | - So basically, chatter refers to this process

00:53:19.240 | of looping over and over.

00:53:20.880 | If you inject some sad cognitions in there,

00:53:23.240 | I'm an imbecile, how can I, you know,

00:53:26.760 | I'm never going to live up to my potential,

00:53:29.940 | I don't belong here.

00:53:31.120 | Like, so then you get, if you take that to an extreme,

00:53:34.560 | high intensity, and you perseverate over time,

00:53:38.240 | then you're getting towards depression.

00:53:40.400 | If you inject anxiety provoking cognitions,

00:53:44.000 | oh my God, what if this happens?

00:53:45.440 | And what if that happens?

00:53:46.360 | And you go down that path of uncertainty and fear,

00:53:50.040 | well, that leads you to more of the anxious route.

00:53:53.200 | And if you are filling that loop with traumatic memories

00:53:58.000 | and reminders of really painful experiences,

00:54:00.720 | you can get pushed towards trauma too.

00:54:02.880 | So it is a process that cuts across many different,

00:54:07.080 | really serious conditions that we grapple with in society.

00:54:11.000 | But I wanna also be clear to folks who are listening that,

00:54:15.340 | if you experience chatter,

00:54:17.720 | that does not mean you have any of those disorders.

00:54:20.520 | If you experience chatter,

00:54:22.200 | welcome to the human condition, my friends,

00:54:24.900 | because most of us do at times.

00:54:27.160 | And so we often don't experience it as intensely

00:54:31.280 | or for long stretches of time,

00:54:33.000 | which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups.

00:54:37.000 | I'd like to take a quick break

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00:56:24.160 | If you had to highlight for now,

00:56:27.280 | and we'll get back to others in a moment,

00:56:31.000 | the best maybe one or two ways to combat chatter,

00:56:35.280 | what would those be?

00:56:37.460 | - Well, let me tell you about a couple of things

00:56:41.200 | that I do personally,

00:56:42.280 | because as we try to regulate

00:56:46.640 | lots of different emotional experiences,

00:56:48.560 | different tools work for different people

00:56:50.200 | in different situations.

00:56:51.520 | There are upwards of two dozen or more

00:56:55.200 | science-based tools that I covered when I wrote "Chatter,"

00:56:59.560 | when I got into "Shift," the broader train

00:57:01.400 | of regulating your emotions,

00:57:02.660 | there are even more tools out there.

00:57:05.080 | So I don't wanna presume that the tools that work for me

00:57:08.500 | are gonna work for everyone.

00:57:09.900 | My first line of defense when it comes to chatter

00:57:14.960 | are two distancing tools.

00:57:16.920 | So when I'm using the term distancing,

00:57:19.320 | what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se.

00:57:22.140 | We should talk about avoidance later.

00:57:24.060 | But what I'm talking about when I say distancing

00:57:26.560 | is the ability to step back

00:57:28.240 | and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective.

00:57:32.640 | And it turns out there are many different tactics

00:57:34.940 | that exist for doing this.

00:57:36.400 | One tactic that I find very powerful is language.

00:57:42.000 | So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself.

00:57:47.000 | So I will often use my name

00:57:49.200 | and the second person pronoun you

00:57:50.680 | to try to think through a problem.

00:57:51.680 | Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation?

00:57:55.040 | If you think about when we use words like you,

00:57:59.000 | they are the verbal equivalent

00:58:00.840 | of pointing a finger at someone else.

00:58:03.880 | And when you use your name and you to work through a problem,

00:58:07.680 | it's automatically switching your perspective.

00:58:10.640 | It's getting you to relate to yourself,

00:58:12.520 | like you're giving advice to someone else.

00:58:14.320 | And it turns out that's a really powerful tool

00:58:18.060 | because one of the things we know about human beings

00:58:20.880 | is we are much better at giving advice to others

00:58:23.760 | than we are taking that advice ourselves.

00:58:26.520 | Have you ever experienced this, Andrew?

00:58:28.120 | - Gosh, no.

00:58:28.940 | Yes, of course.

00:58:29.780 | Absolutely.

00:58:32.240 | I mean, our optics are just much clearer

00:58:35.800 | when we're in observation than when we're internally,

00:58:39.840 | unless I find that I dedicate some real minutes or hours,

00:58:44.840 | basically a sort of meditation,

00:58:49.440 | not unlike the complete sentence construction exploration

00:58:52.680 | that we were talking about before of just going inward

00:58:54.480 | and really saying, okay,

00:58:55.680 | let's have a conversation about this, Andrew,

00:58:58.120 | and having a conversation with myself in there.

00:58:59.920 | And that always leads to an obvious truth

00:59:02.840 | or sometimes a decision node that isn't clear to me yet,

00:59:08.480 | but it leads someplace that feels like forward.

00:59:11.200 | - Yeah.

00:59:12.040 | But you're taking special steps

00:59:16.000 | to be able to align yourself

00:59:19.520 | with the advice that you would give to someone else,

00:59:21.240 | like reflexively sometimes we stumble, right?

00:59:24.640 | - Oh, absolutely.

00:59:25.520 | I mean, and the number of different ways

00:59:27.560 | that we can distract ourselves,

00:59:28.840 | this is what I was gonna ask in a few moments,

00:59:31.200 | but I'll take the opportunity now.

00:59:32.760 | I am wondering, as we're talking about this today,

00:59:36.400 | if one of the more powerful hooks of social media

00:59:41.320 | is the scroll aspect that with essentially zero effort,

00:59:46.320 | we can pick up a device and scroll through images

00:59:50.800 | and movies and it will update us according to,

00:59:54.080 | update the imagery and topics, of course,

00:59:57.480 | according to what it senses as our dwell times

00:59:59.960 | on certain pages.

01:00:01.040 | And all of a sudden we don't have to think

01:00:02.760 | about what's in our head.

01:00:04.360 | My dad used to refer to surfing the internet,

01:00:06.880 | 'cause at that time it was that,

01:00:07.880 | and scrolling social media

01:00:09.040 | as kind of a cognitive chewing gum.

01:00:12.560 | It keeps us busy, but it doesn't provide any real nutrition.

01:00:15.800 | - Well, it's interesting if you go back

01:00:17.600 | to when Facebook first came on the scene,

01:00:21.240 | one of the early prompts that it would use

01:00:24.080 | to get people to contribute textual information to,

01:00:28.440 | do you remember what this was?

01:00:30.160 | What is on your mind?

01:00:32.160 | So you would be cued to share what is on your mind.

01:00:35.640 | And in some ways you could think of various forms

01:00:40.640 | of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone

01:00:45.800 | for their inner voice.

01:00:47.920 | It is literally asking you where it did,

01:00:49.800 | what is on your mind right now?

01:00:51.280 | - So that's in terms of posting.

01:00:53.640 | - Posting, exactly. - Like what's on your mind.

01:00:54.840 | But in terms of consuming information,

01:00:56.720 | which I think most people on social media

01:00:58.520 | seem to be consumers more than creators.

01:01:00.520 | I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can pick up the phone

01:01:06.720 | and I have a specific phone with Instagram and X on it,

01:01:09.520 | and those apps are not on any other phones,

01:01:12.040 | so that it's segregated from.

01:01:13.440 | - Yeah, smart.

01:01:14.280 | - If somebody sends me a tweet

01:01:15.920 | or sends me an Instagram post on,

01:01:18.000 | I'm not gonna open it, I can't open it on those phones.

01:01:20.520 | - Right.

01:01:21.360 | - And that's helped a lot.

01:01:22.180 | - We should come back to that

01:01:23.020 | because that's also modifying your spaces,

01:01:26.160 | which is another tool that I think is underutilized.

01:01:30.200 | So we should talk about that too.

01:01:31.840 | - We'll definitely touch on that.

01:01:34.040 | What I find is, I'll say, okay,

01:01:36.440 | I'm gonna take six minutes.

01:01:37.920 | It's six minutes till the hour, take six minutes.

01:01:39.880 | - Yeah.

01:01:40.720 | - And what's incredible is how fast six minutes

01:01:42.680 | seems to go by. - Oh.

01:01:43.840 | - That's what's so striking.

01:01:44.960 | - It's remarkable and not always bad.

01:01:49.240 | So we often talk about social media

01:01:51.280 | like it is a de facto harm to society.

01:01:55.920 | There are negative features of social media

01:01:58.720 | that are well-documented.

01:02:00.680 | There are also some, I would argue,

01:02:02.000 | redemptive qualities to it.

01:02:04.240 | I'll give you one of my personal ones,

01:02:06.300 | which is sometimes like to unwind before bed,

01:02:10.240 | I'm thinking all day,

01:02:12.360 | I wanna just watch some ridiculously funny short reels.

01:02:16.400 | - Yeah, raccoon videos.

01:02:17.480 | - Yeah, I mean, my wife looks over at me,

01:02:20.360 | she's like, what are you laughing at?

01:02:22.040 | And then I sometimes I show her and she goes,

01:02:24.200 | why are you laughing at that?

01:02:26.320 | But the algorithm has learned

01:02:29.240 | the specific kinds of funny videos that I like

01:02:32.120 | and no, I'm not gonna tell you what they are.

01:02:34.280 | And it just lightens the load.

01:02:37.160 | And so that's a way that I'm using social media

01:02:39.800 | very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction

01:02:43.920 | I want them to be shifted at a certain time.

01:02:48.520 | I think when we talk about social media

01:02:50.280 | and our emotional lives,

01:02:52.320 | the real challenge we face is how to learn,

01:02:56.920 | how to navigate these new digital environments

01:03:00.920 | in ways that serve us rather than serve against us

01:03:04.880 | and undermine our goals.

01:03:06.360 | We basically got thrown into social media

01:03:09.140 | without any rule book.

01:03:10.600 | - Yeah, we're the experiment.

01:03:11.680 | - We're the experiment.

01:03:12.960 | But if you think about it, it's a new environment.

01:03:15.880 | We were born into this physical world

01:03:17.840 | and our parents, our caretakers,

01:03:20.080 | from the time we're able to understand things

01:03:22.520 | and probably before, they're teaching us,

01:03:25.080 | they're socializing us

01:03:26.720 | how to navigate this space profitably.

01:03:29.160 | They don't just like Lord of the flies,

01:03:30.640 | throw us into the world and let us kind of figure it out.

01:03:35.280 | Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us

01:03:39.100 | if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive.

01:03:42.880 | And we're only now developing that knowledge base

01:03:45.920 | to understand, hey, here are the healthy

01:03:48.000 | versus harmful versus benign ways

01:03:50.760 | of navigating social media.

01:03:52.160 | And I'm talking about social media now,

01:03:53.640 | like it's this unitary environment.

01:03:57.320 | Different social media applications, of course,

01:04:00.100 | have their own norms and rules of the games.

01:04:02.320 | You could think of them as like little different countries.

01:04:05.400 | They have their own little microcultures

01:04:07.000 | that you want to learn how to navigate.

01:04:09.860 | And scientists are really busy trying to understand

01:04:13.220 | how they function, but it's tricky.

01:04:16.000 | And it's tricky because creators can change

01:04:20.900 | how these applications govern by a press of a button, right?

01:04:25.460 | You could change the way the algorithm works

01:04:27.060 | and then you've got to start over to some extent.

01:04:29.500 | - I've been told that by people in my life

01:04:33.500 | that one of the main reasons they get onto their phone

01:04:36.460 | in the middle of the night if they happen to wake up

01:04:38.400 | is that it allows a very soothing distraction

01:04:43.400 | compared to trying to wrestle with the fire hose

01:04:48.320 | of thoughts in their head.

01:04:50.040 | And that, yeah, it's kind of like the way you describe

01:04:53.200 | these funny videos that you won't disclose to us.

01:04:56.680 | That sounds like, you know...

01:04:58.840 | - They typically involve pranks.

01:05:00.680 | - Oh, okay, noted.

01:05:02.480 | We used to hear that people would have a drink after work

01:05:06.460 | to just kind of take the edge off or something like that.

01:05:09.380 | I feel like social media is doing that for a lot of people.

01:05:12.300 | The way you describe it fits with that idea.

01:05:14.420 | And I certainly believe that from everything we know

01:05:17.340 | about the circadian health literature

01:05:19.020 | that you want to avoid looking at your phone

01:05:21.780 | between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m.

01:05:24.940 | most nights, nobody's perfect.

01:05:26.820 | But that if you wake up in the middle of the night,

01:05:28.260 | one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone

01:05:30.020 | and start scrolling social media.

01:05:31.300 | But I'm guessing people do it because it feels even worse

01:05:35.440 | to just sit there with your thoughts in the dark.

01:05:37.720 | - It's a shifter, but this is a perfect segue back to,

01:05:41.480 | you know, you asked me about the tools

01:05:42.960 | that you recommend for fighting chatter,

01:05:44.480 | and I'm telling you about the ones I use.

01:05:45.840 | So there's a second tool that I will use automatically

01:05:49.800 | when I detect the chatter brewing.

01:05:52.920 | And I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy.

01:05:56.200 | And I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy

01:05:57.960 | because every seemingly like four to six weeks,

01:06:02.340 | I will go to bed happy and content.

01:06:06.540 | And then I'll wake up at 2 a.m.

01:06:07.940 | and like, it is all going to hell really fast.

01:06:11.420 | - What time do you typically go to sleep?

01:06:13.740 | - Usually around 11, 11.30.

01:06:16.620 | - Interesting.

01:06:17.460 | Yeah, this is a common problem for a lot of people.

01:06:19.660 | And there are some tools like long exhale breathing

01:06:22.100 | and things that clearly work.

01:06:23.600 | I long ago made a decision.

01:06:26.140 | I refuse to believe any thought that occurs

01:06:29.600 | between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.

01:06:32.960 | I just refuse.

01:06:33.920 | I don't believe it.

01:06:34.800 | It's as if somebody is lying to me in my head.

01:06:37.360 | And one could argue,

01:06:38.200 | well, maybe that's where the truth is coming out

01:06:39.560 | because your forebrain is not so good

01:06:41.320 | at suppressing these, you know, unconscious thoughts.

01:06:44.360 | And sure, all good, but as you point out,

01:06:46.640 | they are rarely the kind of thoughts

01:06:48.520 | that one can work with, positive or negative.

01:06:50.960 | So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates

01:06:55.960 | an idea like the one you are describing.

01:06:58.500 | So at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes,

01:07:01.020 | and by the way, you say like, oh, this is common.

01:07:03.940 | This is more than common.

01:07:04.980 | When I present to audiences and, you know,

01:07:07.140 | thousands and thousands of people over the years,

01:07:10.100 | and I ask, "Hey, you ever get 2 a.m. chatter?

01:07:13.540 | "Maybe 2.30 a.m."

01:07:15.480 | All the hands go up.

01:07:16.580 | This is, I don't want to say universal affliction,

01:07:20.500 | but it is an incredibly common problem

01:07:23.440 | that people struggle with, like the chatter at night.

01:07:25.980 | So what I do is I use something called mental time travel,

01:07:30.080 | mental time travel into the future.

01:07:31.500 | And what I do is I ask myself,

01:07:34.060 | and I typically use my own name to do it.

01:07:35.640 | So I'm blending another distancing tool,

01:07:39.220 | distance self-talk.

01:07:40.060 | I say, "Ethan, how are you gonna feel

01:07:41.380 | "about this tomorrow morning?"

01:07:43.260 | No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m.,

01:07:47.340 | to your point, when I wake up the next morning

01:07:50.100 | and my brain is fully, fully awake,

01:07:53.260 | and I have access to my prefrontal cortex,

01:07:55.820 | and I can think constructively about things,

01:07:58.440 | it is never as bad that next morning

01:08:01.500 | as it is in the middle of the night.

01:08:03.340 | We, of course, have learned that over time

01:08:08.140 | because how many mornings have we woken up in our lives?

01:08:13.140 | We could do the math.

01:08:14.020 | If I was more sophisticated, I'd do it on the fly.

01:08:15.800 | I can't, right?

01:08:16.700 | But like many, many mornings, we've experienced this.

01:08:19.940 | Like, chatter at 2 a.m., at 7 a.m., not so bad.

01:08:24.520 | So when you jump into this mental time travel machine

01:08:26.980 | and you ask yourself,

01:08:27.980 | "How am I gonna feel about this tomorrow morning,

01:08:29.940 | "next week, next year, 10 years from now?"

01:08:33.300 | What that does is it activates this understanding

01:08:37.460 | that what you are going through, as bad as it may seem,

01:08:40.980 | it is temporary, it will eventually subside.

01:08:43.460 | And that does something very powerful

01:08:45.220 | for a mind that is consumed with chatter.

01:08:46.820 | It turns the volume down on it,

01:08:48.580 | which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed.

01:08:52.340 | So the official name for this tool

01:08:53.820 | is not mental time travel.

01:08:55.100 | It is called temporal distancing.

01:08:57.780 | And it's a flexible tool.

01:08:59.740 | You can ask yourself, if you're struggling with a problem,

01:09:02.220 | "How are you gonna feel about it tomorrow,

01:09:03.840 | "next week, 10 years from now?"

01:09:06.140 | And it's another way of broadening your perspective.

01:09:10.180 | It's another kind of distancing tool

01:09:12.420 | that has a lot of science behind it.

01:09:14.540 | So those are the two of the cognitive things

01:09:18.600 | that I do on my own.

01:09:21.220 | And that nips a significant chunk of the chatter

01:09:24.580 | that I experience in the bud when it happens.

01:09:28.060 | And I should add that because I know about what chatter is,

01:09:31.660 | and I know about how these tools work,

01:09:34.260 | I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools

01:09:38.020 | the moment I detect the chatter brewing.

01:09:40.060 | So people will often ask,

01:09:41.660 | "Hey, do you ever experience chatter?"

01:09:44.420 | I'm like, "Yeah, of course, pinch me.

01:09:46.300 | "I'm a living, breathing human being, I do at times."

01:09:49.220 | But I'm really good at detecting it

01:09:51.340 | and then implementing tools in an almost automatic manner.

01:09:54.780 | If this happens, if the chatter strikes,

01:09:57.620 | then I'm gonna coach myself through the problem

01:09:59.260 | using my own name and you,

01:10:00.700 | and I'm gonna jump into the mental time travel machine

01:10:03.220 | and ask myself,

01:10:04.060 | "How am I gonna feel about this in the future?"

01:10:06.260 | If that's not sufficient,

01:10:07.900 | then I'll go to like the level two response,

01:10:10.980 | which consists of, if weather permits,

01:10:14.060 | I'll go for a walk in a safe, natural setting.

01:10:17.420 | I always feel the need to give the caveat

01:10:19.980 | about safe and natural,

01:10:21.140 | because where I grew up in Brooklyn,

01:10:23.540 | like the natural settings were the place you got mugged,

01:10:26.220 | so they were not safe.

01:10:27.940 | But a park, I find restorative,

01:10:30.580 | and there's a ton of work

01:10:31.940 | highlighting the restorative features of green spaces.

01:10:35.700 | But then what I'll also do

01:10:37.140 | is I'll dial up the chatter advisory board.

01:10:43.460 | So I have a couple of people

01:10:44.900 | that I have carefully thought about

01:10:48.660 | what these people do for me when I have a problem.

01:10:53.780 | And they, importantly, don't just let me vent my emotions,

01:10:57.560 | or cathect, to use that term before,

01:10:59.940 | just, I don't just get it out.

01:11:01.540 | A lot of people think that the key to feeling better

01:11:03.580 | is to vent your emotions.

01:11:05.460 | There's research on this.

01:11:06.840 | Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people.

01:11:10.660 | It's good to know that, you know,

01:11:12.500 | we're buddies now, I could call you up if I'm struggling,

01:11:14.740 | you're gonna listen to me and empathize with me,

01:11:16.500 | that's great for our relationship.

01:11:19.160 | But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through,

01:11:23.220 | and you don't take the next step

01:11:24.780 | to additionally help me look at that bigger picture

01:11:28.020 | and problem solve,

01:11:29.540 | I leave the conversation feeling really good

01:11:31.960 | about my relationship with you,

01:11:33.140 | but the problem is still there.

01:11:35.060 | So just venting ends up leading

01:11:37.100 | to what we call co-rumination,

01:11:38.720 | which can be pretty harmful.

01:11:41.160 | The people on my chatter advisory board,

01:11:43.020 | they know to first validate, empathize with me,

01:11:46.880 | learn about what I'm going through.

01:11:48.660 | They've got my back, they communicate that powerfully.

01:11:52.080 | But then once they do that,

01:11:53.420 | they start working with me to broaden the perspective,

01:11:56.260 | to try to think through that problem,

01:11:57.540 | which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes

01:12:00.140 | when the chatter is really, really loud.

01:12:03.260 | And, you know, typically when I get to that stage,

01:12:06.060 | I'm in pretty good shape.

01:12:09.300 | - I love your examples of how you deal with chatter.

01:12:13.040 | Your example of going to sleep,

01:12:14.760 | and the reason I asked when you go to sleep

01:12:16.400 | at about 11 p.m. and waking up at two or three,

01:12:19.600 | and that being a very common issue,

01:12:21.840 | is as far as I understand,

01:12:24.280 | reflective of the fact that early in the night,

01:12:26.280 | our sleep is dominated by slow wave deep sleep

01:12:28.640 | with less rapid eye movement sleep.

01:12:30.960 | And then somewhere right about that transition time,

01:12:34.040 | it's not necessarily two or 3 a.m. per se,

01:12:36.440 | but given that you were asleep for about three, four hours,

01:12:39.660 | after about three, four hours of sleep,

01:12:41.980 | the proportion of our sleep that is rapid eye movement sleep

01:12:45.620 | relative to deep slow wave sleep shifts dramatically.

01:12:48.680 | The intensity of our dreams shifts dramatically.

01:12:51.300 | They become more emotionally laden.

01:12:53.220 | And that whole process of having those rapid eye movement

01:12:56.860 | sleep associated dreams is strongly associated

01:13:00.420 | with the removal of an emotional load

01:13:02.600 | in the morning when we wake.

01:13:03.780 | We know this because if you selectively deprive people

01:13:05.820 | of early night versus late night sleep and so on.

01:13:07.780 | The reason I mentioned this is that one tool

01:13:11.100 | that I certainly have found useful is that,

01:13:15.020 | well, two tools really.

01:13:16.920 | If people just understand that one of the reasons

01:13:19.180 | they'll wake up suddenly at two or 3 a.m.

01:13:21.840 | is that they're undergoing this transition

01:13:23.660 | from kind of one form of sleep to another,

01:13:27.240 | it's almost like a different beast altogether.

01:13:30.220 | And that heart racing, emotionally laden thoughts

01:13:34.300 | is characteristic of where they're supposed to be

01:13:36.700 | in the sleep architecture cycle.

01:13:38.420 | And so for me, so that's number one.

01:13:41.380 | The other is that the tool that you provided

01:13:44.140 | of getting into this mental time travel,

01:13:46.420 | I'd like to just double click on this notion

01:13:49.500 | of time perception.

01:13:51.340 | In sleep and dreaming, I mean, time is very fluid.

01:13:53.560 | You can be one environment than another.

01:13:55.100 | It seems compressed.

01:13:55.980 | A lot happens in a short amount of time.

01:13:58.080 | When we are in chatter in the daytime,

01:14:01.060 | to what extent does it alter our perception of time?

01:14:04.820 | And I have a very specific reason for asking this

01:14:07.300 | because I believe that one of the main unifying features

01:14:12.300 | among the tools for dealing with depression, anxiety,

01:14:15.220 | et cetera, when I survey the research

01:14:17.140 | is almost all of them, journaling, meditation,

01:14:20.860 | even some of the medications for that matter

01:14:23.060 | involve taking people into a different

01:14:25.300 | sort of time perception mode.

01:14:27.820 | And it's a kind of an abstract idea,

01:14:29.560 | but I think this may resonate

01:14:32.180 | with some of the issues related to chatter,

01:14:34.300 | that when we're in a mental frame

01:14:36.260 | that's not healthy for where we wanna be at that moment,

01:14:39.220 | awake when we need to sleep,

01:14:40.580 | anxious when we wanna be calm and so forth,

01:14:42.820 | that changing our time perception

01:14:46.260 | seems to be the most useful thing that we can do,

01:14:48.980 | or at least among the most useful.

01:14:50.580 | So what's the relationship

01:14:51.500 | between chatter and time perception?

01:14:53.260 | - Tell me more about what you mean by time perception.

01:14:56.300 | - How broadly or finely we are bending time.

01:14:58.980 | So we know that as autonomic arousal, let's call it stress,

01:15:02.080 | but wakefulness and autonomic arousal goes up,

01:15:04.360 | we're fine slicing time.

01:15:05.840 | In fact, the pupils get bigger.

01:15:07.320 | We actually see depth of field changes.

01:15:09.760 | We get higher resolution image of much less.

01:15:12.120 | This is, it makes every bit of evolutionary sense.

01:15:14.520 | We can deal with fewer things better.

01:15:17.280 | And typically it's the thing

01:15:18.120 | that we're fixated or ruminating on.

01:15:19.940 | When we're relaxed,

01:15:20.880 | think about like sitting back on a beach

01:15:22.320 | and you're watching the clouds go by,

01:15:23.740 | it's almost like your frame rate is slower.

01:15:28.280 | So your higher frame rate is like slow motion.

01:15:31.000 | This is why people who experienced trauma

01:15:32.800 | often feel like things are, or a car crash,

01:15:35.000 | like see it in slow motion, or it's not in slow motion,

01:15:37.080 | you're fine slicing time.

01:15:38.920 | It's kind of a remarkable thing, right?

01:15:40.520 | This is also how athletes learn to play

01:15:42.880 | with their levels of autonomic arousal.

01:15:45.120 | Fighters can see punches coming in

01:15:47.080 | and it's almost like slow motion,

01:15:48.560 | but they can react with full speed.

01:15:50.080 | Likewise with tennis players, we'll describe this.

01:15:51.740 | So what we're talking about is dynamically changing

01:15:53.740 | the frame rate of one's experience.

01:15:56.000 | - It's a very interesting question.

01:15:57.560 | And there's not much data that I'm aware of

01:15:59.720 | directly linking chatter with these,

01:16:03.560 | with time perception, the way you're describing it.

01:16:05.840 | But what does come to mind are our experiences of flow,

01:16:09.180 | which in many ways you might consider

01:16:11.920 | the opposite of chatter.

01:16:13.080 | Flow being this state where, you know,

01:16:16.900 | you're just in the moment and time is effortlessly passing.

01:16:21.960 | The demands of the situation completely match

01:16:24.820 | the skills that you bring to bear.

01:16:26.560 | It almost seems like the antithesis

01:16:28.800 | of what you're describing.

01:16:30.640 | When I think about time and chatter,

01:16:32.960 | what becomes most accessible for me

01:16:36.060 | is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly

01:16:40.280 | on the object of the chatter,

01:16:42.400 | on the thing that is causing that distress.

01:16:44.800 | And we focus, you know, so narrowly on it,

01:16:48.400 | which of course makes a great deal of sense,

01:16:50.380 | because what are we taught to do

01:16:52.360 | from the time we're little kids when we have a problem?

01:16:56.200 | - Think about it, share it.

01:16:57.880 | - Yeah, there you go.

01:16:58.840 | You got it on try number one, zoom in, focus on the problem,

01:17:02.320 | roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it.

01:17:04.360 | And so that's that kind of really,

01:17:06.620 | you're getting in there in fine grain detail.

01:17:09.280 | And, you know, that does work for us a lot of the time,

01:17:13.240 | but it turns out when you inject a lot of emotion

01:17:15.200 | into the equation, that can get really troubling.

01:17:17.680 | And that's where this zooming out,

01:17:19.920 | taking this broader view,

01:17:21.720 | whether you do that through visual modalities,

01:17:24.720 | imagination modalities, like mental time travel.

01:17:27.840 | You could time travel into the future,

01:17:29.640 | like I've just described.

01:17:30.880 | You can also go back in time.

01:17:32.720 | Like I do this quite a bit,

01:17:33.840 | when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity,

01:17:36.940 | I will go back in time and think of another experience

01:17:39.760 | in my life or someone else's life that I know of,

01:17:43.440 | when times were even worse and they got through it.

01:17:46.320 | And, oh, if I got through that,

01:17:48.120 | well, sure as heck I can get through this.

01:17:51.340 | And so that's expanding our perception of time,

01:17:55.680 | or looking at that bigger picture

01:17:58.200 | to work through something in the present moment.

01:18:01.520 | - How often do you think people,

01:18:03.720 | and I do believe this is related to chatter,

01:18:05.240 | but if it's not, we can set this aside for another day.

01:18:08.700 | How often do you think people are in kind of negative

01:18:13.700 | or positive fantasy?

01:18:16.600 | Like as they move through their day,

01:18:18.480 | I'm sure a study has been done asking people

01:18:19.960 | what they're thinking about.

01:18:20.920 | I mean, how often is it actually tied to what they're doing

01:18:22.960 | or they're supposed to be doing?

01:18:23.900 | Or are they thinking about like

01:18:25.680 | what they're gonna do this weekend?

01:18:26.640 | Or maybe even constructing entire narratives

01:18:28.720 | of things that are like non-existent

01:18:31.280 | that they would like to exist.

01:18:32.440 | Or occasionally we'll see this person,

01:18:35.600 | I think we've all seen this person

01:18:37.000 | kind of mumbling to themselves,

01:18:38.520 | and it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things.

01:18:41.160 | - Yeah, it's because they've just been rejected

01:18:42.760 | by a journal editor, their article.

01:18:45.080 | - The experience of every scientist.

01:18:47.200 | And it's of course always reviewer number two's fault.

01:18:49.400 | They didn't read the paper carefully enough, of course.

01:18:51.940 | And none of us have ever been reviewer number two.

01:18:54.080 | I'm being sarcastic by the way,

01:18:55.340 | we've all been reviewer number two.

01:18:57.800 | Little academic inside ball humor there.

01:19:00.260 | You know, you'll see somebody mumbling to themselves.

01:19:04.600 | And it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things.

01:19:07.800 | We don't know what they're saying to themselves,

01:19:09.380 | but I'm guessing that if we tapped them and said,

01:19:11.080 | "Hey, what were you mumbling?"

01:19:13.080 | I would guess that more than 50% of the time

01:19:15.380 | it was kind of frustration with stuff.

01:19:17.880 | You kind of see this like the frustrated person.

01:19:19.840 | It's a hard thing to observe actually.

01:19:22.120 | - Yeah, so people have looked at this.

01:19:24.760 | And my memory of this wonderful paper,

01:19:26.860 | I think it was published in Science.

01:19:28.800 | I think the title was,

01:19:31.280 | "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind."

01:19:34.620 | And basically the take home from the article

01:19:37.840 | was that people spend between,

01:19:39.940 | well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it,

01:19:42.880 | what we can deduce is that people spend

01:19:45.080 | between 1/2 and 1/3 of their waking hours

01:19:48.000 | not focused on the present.

01:19:49.720 | So between 1/2 and 1/3 of the time we're drifting away

01:19:52.440 | and we're thinking about other things.

01:19:54.000 | And this one particular paper linked that process

01:19:56.760 | with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse.

01:20:00.680 | I think there's huge levels of variability there though.

01:20:03.520 | I think like being lost in thought

01:20:07.000 | can be a wonderful experience.

01:20:08.160 | I love, love, love, love mind wandering.

01:20:12.200 | I think it's one of my strengths.

01:20:13.840 | It is the source of idea generation for me.

01:20:16.840 | It is also the source of emotion regulation.

01:20:19.120 | I will, one of, you know, my sleeping pill,

01:20:23.280 | metaphorically speaking, is mental time travel.

01:20:27.940 | It's getting away from the present.

01:20:29.200 | It is fantasizing about the future, right?

01:20:33.260 | Thinking about the good things that could happen,

01:20:35.480 | the potentialities, or going into the past

01:20:38.560 | and savoring some of the positive things that happen.

01:20:41.360 | I'm thinking about, you know, the soccer game

01:20:44.280 | where my kids scored goals

01:20:45.640 | or something good happened to someone I know or to me.

01:20:48.920 | And that to me is a wonderful way of going to bed.

01:20:53.800 | That is mental time travel.

01:20:55.760 | It is not being in the moment,

01:20:57.660 | which actually raises another really important point

01:21:00.560 | that I wanna get in there.

01:21:01.440 | And I'd love to get your take on this

01:21:03.080 | because in popular culture,

01:21:05.540 | we often hear that it's really important

01:21:08.460 | to be in the moment.

01:21:09.720 | This has emerged as a type of cultural maxim,

01:21:12.360 | like be in the now.

01:21:14.400 | And this idea is often conveyed so strongly

01:21:17.880 | that if you're not in the moment,

01:21:20.800 | we sometimes think there's something wrong with us.

01:21:23.320 | Like, oh, we gotta train our attention

01:21:25.240 | to bring it back to the present.

01:21:28.160 | Being in the present can be very useful in many contexts.

01:21:32.280 | And certainly when we experience chatter,

01:21:34.440 | we start worrying about the future

01:21:35.680 | or ruminating about the past,

01:21:37.400 | refocusing on the present or breath, a mantra.

01:21:40.240 | Yes, lots of data support the utility of that.

01:21:43.720 | But I always like to remind people

01:21:46.080 | that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time.

01:21:50.360 | And lots of amazing things accompany that process.

01:21:53.700 | If I can't go into the past,

01:21:56.560 | not only am I not savoring positive experiences,

01:21:59.720 | which add joy and vitality to my life,

01:22:02.360 | I'm also not learning from my screw ups,

01:22:04.260 | which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis.

01:22:07.720 | Right, I'm learning from my mistakes

01:22:09.680 | by revisiting the past.

01:22:11.080 | And if I'm not going into the future,

01:22:13.600 | then I'm not planning, I'm not simulating,

01:22:17.080 | I'm not fantasizing.

01:22:18.920 | So we wanna be,

01:22:21.520 | we don't wanna shut down mental time travel.

01:22:24.140 | I think what we wanna learn how to do

01:22:26.960 | is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively

01:22:30.280 | without that time travel machine breaking down in the past,

01:22:34.160 | which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience

01:22:36.840 | or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating

01:22:39.480 | on something that we're anxious about.

01:22:41.540 | So being in the moment can be good,

01:22:44.640 | but it is not the endpoint I think

01:22:47.000 | we always want to strive for.

01:22:48.700 | - To what extent do you think that texting and smartphones,

01:22:54.240 | but namely texting has interfered with sort of time tested,

01:22:59.240 | meaning over hundreds of thousands of years,

01:23:04.080 | time-tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions

01:23:08.160 | and our thoughts to arrive at better ways

01:23:10.160 | of thinking, feeling, being.

01:23:12.020 | Nowadays, if you get on a train or a plane

01:23:16.940 | or you're in an Uber or you're walking to your car

01:23:19.420 | and you have a thought about something,

01:23:21.600 | oh, that grant that idea,

01:23:22.800 | it's so easy to just get into a mode of texting.

01:23:27.720 | Passive participation,

01:23:29.000 | maybe through social media scrolling,

01:23:31.120 | again, not universally bad,

01:23:32.660 | but you can go to passive kind of

01:23:34.300 | almost semi-dissociative state.

01:23:36.040 | Like they're not really in the parking lot anymore.

01:23:38.080 | You're half in your phone and half in the parking lot.

01:23:41.040 | And texting, polling people around you,

01:23:43.120 | as opposed to quote unquote in the old days

01:23:45.920 | where you had to actually grapple through this stuff.

01:23:47.800 | As you describe the tools that you use

01:23:51.360 | to deal with chatter and to process information

01:23:53.820 | and to work with your thinking and your emotions,

01:23:56.780 | you strike me as somebody who has a rich jungle gym

01:24:00.520 | of things to play with in there

01:24:02.720 | and a toolkit and an emergency switch if you need it

01:24:06.500 | and all that stuff.

01:24:08.080 | Whereas most people, I think, just, they have their phone.

01:24:13.080 | Who are you gonna call?

01:24:14.280 | Who are you gonna text?

01:24:15.240 | What site are you gonna Google the Google search to?

01:24:18.200 | I mean, it can't be good.

01:24:22.400 | - Well, it often isn't, but it can be harnessed.

01:24:27.880 | And here's what the way I think about texting

01:24:30.560 | and really how social media and the opportunities

01:24:34.280 | it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want,

01:24:37.920 | how this has thrown a curve ball

01:24:40.040 | into the way we manage our own emotions

01:24:42.300 | and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions

01:24:45.460 | of not just other people,

01:24:46.940 | but groups of people and societies.

01:24:50.240 | So when we experience emotions,

01:24:52.600 | we are often intensely motivated

01:24:54.960 | to share those experiences with others.

01:24:57.360 | There's this wonderful research program

01:24:59.760 | by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Rimet

01:25:02.520 | who spent his whole life looking at

01:25:05.520 | what do you do when you experience emotions?

01:25:07.720 | And he found over many decades of work

01:25:10.440 | that you're motivated to verbalize it, to get it out.

01:25:14.240 | And there are a couple of reasons for that.

01:25:15.440 | We wanna relate to other people, get their support,

01:25:18.680 | but we also wanna usually process it.

01:25:22.600 | In the pre-social media era,

01:25:25.880 | two things had to happen typically to share our emotions.

01:25:30.320 | First, you had to find someone to share them with.

01:25:34.280 | And typically in the process of looking for someone,

01:25:37.360 | either to find someone face-to-face or via phone,

01:25:40.480 | time would pass.

01:25:41.640 | Now, what we know about time is that as time proceeds,

01:25:46.640 | our emotions in general tend to fade.

01:25:49.320 | So there's this wonderful work

01:25:50.920 | on the duration of emotional experiences

01:25:53.120 | and our emotional experiences

01:25:54.800 | all follow a common trajectory.

01:25:57.280 | So something happens in the world or in our mind,

01:25:59.720 | we imagine something that is provoking in some way,

01:26:03.160 | our emotions get triggered.

01:26:04.600 | And then as time goes on, they eventually peter out.

01:26:08.280 | And depending on who the person is

01:26:09.920 | and what they're dealing with,

01:26:11.420 | some people may peak more intensely than others

01:26:15.120 | and fade more quickly.

01:26:16.800 | Some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to subside,

01:26:19.920 | but they all follow that basic trajectory over time.

01:26:24.000 | So let's go back to the pre-social media era, right?

01:26:27.500 | So you gotta find someone to talk to.

01:26:30.800 | And while you're trying to find someone to talk to,

01:26:33.460 | time is passing, that's acting to temper our emotions.

01:26:37.120 | Now, once you find someone to talk to,

01:26:39.040 | either face-to-face or via phone,

01:26:41.920 | the moment you start talking,

01:26:43.880 | you are now awash in all of this feedback,

01:26:47.760 | this emotional feedback,

01:26:49.360 | whether it's coming from your face,

01:26:50.640 | like you're giving me all sorts of information right now.

01:26:53.240 | I would benefit from smiling if you could.

01:26:55.360 | There we go, thank you.

01:26:56.600 | I'm just joking for those who are listening,

01:26:58.720 | but I'm getting information from you.

01:27:00.460 | And if I'm talking to someone on the phone,

01:27:02.160 | likewise, I'm getting,

01:27:03.800 | their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel.

01:27:06.600 | That is also working to constrain

01:27:10.040 | how we communicate with others.

01:27:11.340 | And it's typically keeping our emotions, I would argue,

01:27:14.840 | in check and balance and proportion.

01:27:18.240 | We're stripping away time with social media,

01:27:21.240 | and we're also stripping away

01:27:22.240 | that kind of emotional feedback.

01:27:24.420 | This enables us to release our emotions

01:27:28.760 | in a much more unfiltered way.

01:27:31.920 | And I think this is why you often have situations

01:27:34.400 | that people are saying things via text or online

01:27:39.400 | that they would never say to another person's face

01:27:42.640 | or over the phone.

01:27:43.920 | And I think this is one of the factors

01:27:45.600 | that can promote some pretty negative forces in society.

01:27:49.720 | So cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage

01:27:54.520 | surrounding certain issues

01:27:55.860 | that might take a more constructive form

01:27:59.720 | if they were done in a different context.

01:28:02.360 | Now, that is not to say that social media isn't useful

01:28:06.500 | for spreading certain kinds of messages

01:28:09.540 | that require attention

01:28:11.940 | and are deserving of collective distress.

01:28:15.120 | It can be an amazingly useful tool

01:28:18.680 | that brings about needed change.

01:28:20.960 | But I think we do need to be conscious

01:28:22.820 | of how interacting with this technology

01:28:25.980 | has really fundamentally altered

01:28:28.500 | the way we communicate emotional information.

01:28:30.700 | - When I think about the different ways to parse a problem,

01:28:35.620 | a real or imagined problem,

01:28:38.780 | and I think about the role of web searches,

01:28:42.240 | it immediately takes me to either social media

01:28:45.100 | or to, I don't know, it could be Reddit,

01:28:47.060 | could be some article that was written

01:28:49.060 | and posted online in 2019.

01:28:50.900 | You know, these will resurface.

01:28:52.220 | They repurpose these things all the time.

01:28:53.860 | I don't know why they do that.

01:28:55.140 | - I just got emailed this morning

01:28:56.560 | about an interview to a fact check that I did in 2019.

01:29:01.340 | You go figure.

01:29:02.180 | - I mean, it's cool that there's, I guess,

01:29:04.300 | that there's archival material on the internet

01:29:07.140 | that not everything is fleeting.

01:29:09.340 | Certainly in the podcast space,

01:29:11.420 | we like to think that the information on this podcast

01:29:13.420 | will archival, and we can update it over time.

01:29:16.820 | And that actually brings me to the very specific question,

01:29:21.380 | which is about AI.

01:29:23.220 | You know, with AI,

01:29:24.500 | web searches are now changing fundamentally.

01:29:28.360 | You're no longer being brought to a site

01:29:30.180 | that is just a designated site.

01:29:32.380 | You're getting information back

01:29:33.580 | that's the amalgam of a lot of information.

01:29:37.100 | Funneled through, presumably,

01:29:38.620 | the large language models are changing all the time,

01:29:40.540 | but funneled through kind of your search behavior,

01:29:43.820 | your preferences, et cetera.

01:29:45.060 | So web searches are no longer

01:29:46.980 | just site destination journeys.

01:29:50.800 | They are, you know, recipes of information

01:29:55.280 | that are filtered and combined and given back to us,

01:29:59.420 | which makes me think that maybe AI can provide

01:30:02.260 | a kind of pseudo self that is wiser

01:30:05.180 | than ourselves in any moment,

01:30:07.660 | or potentially wiser than we are in any moment,

01:30:09.780 | because it can access information

01:30:11.260 | that is not dependent on like bodily state shifts.

01:30:14.140 | Like at 2.30 in the morning, 3.30 in the morning,

01:30:17.260 | a small problem can seem huge,

01:30:18.900 | and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming,

01:30:21.340 | just crushing us.

01:30:23.460 | At 7 a.m., it's different.

01:30:25.380 | When we search on the web now,

01:30:27.060 | like how to get through bankruptcy,

01:30:29.960 | let's say somebody is dealing with bankruptcy,

01:30:31.900 | there's information to go to,

01:30:33.620 | but with AI, it can give you the information in the form

01:30:36.740 | and from the sources that are most meaningful to you.

01:30:39.780 | And it doesn't, even if it's 2.30 in the morning for you,

01:30:43.060 | the AI is fresh, it doesn't need to sleep.

01:30:45.820 | That seems to me like a distinct advantage

01:30:48.220 | over our own minds.

01:30:49.500 | And I know AI is controversial.

01:30:51.300 | Is it going to get smarter than us?

01:30:52.500 | Is it going to tell us to go do bad things,

01:30:53.940 | this kind of thing?

01:30:54.760 | Okay, that's a whole different discussion.

01:30:56.420 | But it seems to me that AI could be pretty good,

01:30:58.820 | maybe even terrific at helping us resolve problems

01:31:01.500 | because it doesn't have these state shifts,

01:31:02.940 | and it's really tailored to us.

01:31:05.020 | - Well, it can be.

01:31:06.460 | And I think AI, I think of it as a new tool

01:31:09.860 | that has amazing potential.

01:31:13.360 | And I actually think it has the potential

01:31:16.300 | to help us advance on a problem

01:31:19.060 | where psychologists like myself

01:31:21.820 | currently find ourselves fixed.

01:31:24.900 | So if I look back at the last 20, 30 years of research

01:31:29.220 | on emotion regulation,

01:31:30.860 | I'm talking here not just about managing chatter,

01:31:32.820 | but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states

01:31:36.380 | that we might encounter in our lives.

01:31:38.620 | What I can do is I can point to several individual tools

01:31:43.380 | that are empirically supported, science-based tools.

01:31:46.620 | And scientists have done a really good job

01:31:49.340 | profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically.

01:31:53.120 | They've often gone down to the brain level.

01:31:56.060 | They've looked at them in intervention context

01:31:57.820 | and everything in between.

01:31:59.180 | So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work.

01:32:02.600 | But what we are now learning is individual tools

01:32:06.400 | are not the name of the game

01:32:08.080 | because we are often doing multiple things

01:32:10.220 | to manage our emotions.

01:32:11.780 | And the combinations of tools we use within people,

01:32:16.060 | they often vary across situations

01:32:18.060 | in ways that we don't completely understand.

01:32:21.140 | And there's variability between people as well.

01:32:23.820 | So the blends or cocktails of tools

01:32:26.540 | that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated.

01:32:30.460 | So if someone comes to me with a problem,

01:32:31.980 | I can go through all the tools in the toolbox.

01:32:34.940 | What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools

01:32:38.340 | and say, "Hey, for the kinds of problems

01:32:40.500 | that you are experiencing and the kind of person

01:32:42.300 | that you are, here are the four things that you should do,

01:32:45.360 | but that person over there,

01:32:46.420 | they should do these six things."

01:32:48.280 | I think AI has the potential with the right inputs

01:32:52.400 | to help us learn about those patterns

01:32:55.660 | that explain how to optimize emotion regulation

01:32:59.780 | on an individual basis.

01:33:01.280 | And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility

01:33:05.500 | for that technology.

01:33:06.660 | - You mentioned you have kids.

01:33:09.380 | - Yeah.

01:33:10.640 | - When my sister, who's three years older than I am,

01:33:13.820 | was a kid, my dad tells the story

01:33:16.860 | that she had an imaginary friend, Larry.

01:33:21.020 | Larry was a girl, lived in a purple house.

01:33:23.820 | This imaginary friend, Larry,

01:33:25.060 | had all the components of a child's mind

01:33:30.900 | that was unrestricted by all the barriers of naming

01:33:34.100 | and things like that.

01:33:35.200 | And my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry

01:33:39.020 | in her room for hours, just talking to Larry

01:33:41.920 | and with her doll houses and her toys

01:33:43.920 | and her things and doing.

01:33:44.760 | And then one day, my dad, he loves this story.

01:33:47.640 | I don't know why he loves this story in particular,

01:33:49.160 | but he was standing outside her door

01:33:51.680 | and she was playing with Larry,

01:33:53.140 | her imaginary friend, talking to Larry.

01:33:55.260 | And then she stopped and turned around and he said,

01:33:57.940 | "How's Larry?"

01:33:59.240 | And she said, "Larry's dead."

01:34:01.760 | And she never talked about Larry again.

01:34:04.640 | Like it was this sort of collision

01:34:06.080 | between fantasy life and real world,

01:34:08.360 | this is how I interpret it, and that was it.

01:34:10.740 | Larry was done.

01:34:11.760 | - Yeah, poor Larry.

01:34:12.840 | - Poor Larry.

01:34:13.660 | Well, maybe it was time.

01:34:15.000 | I mean, she was maybe gonna be seven soon

01:34:17.040 | and maybe it served her well.

01:34:19.040 | So I've always wanted to ask somebody this question.

01:34:21.040 | I think you are the person to ask this question.

01:34:23.440 | Are imaginary friends common in children?

01:34:26.500 | And are imaginary friends the primordial form

01:34:31.500 | of our internal dialogue with ourself?

01:34:34.720 | I'm just fascinated by it.

01:34:37.100 | And are there some adults who maintain imaginary friends?

01:34:39.980 | And I'll set an additional context,

01:34:42.540 | which will be especially relevant

01:34:43.940 | to the listeners of this podcast,

01:34:45.220 | which was in the very seat that you're sitting

01:34:48.020 | about this time last year, David Goggins was here

01:34:50.280 | and he was talking about how he pushes himself

01:34:52.820 | through tremendously hard things.

01:34:54.100 | And during that discussion,

01:34:55.460 | it became very clear that David has an array

01:34:59.100 | of different voices that are all him,

01:35:01.260 | but that serve different roles.

01:35:03.320 | And it was a remarkable thing to hear him articulate that

01:35:06.380 | because to those of us on the outside,

01:35:08.740 | we observe it as like one person,

01:35:10.220 | but he's constructed an elaborate inner world

01:35:13.000 | to be able to equip himself to do the things he does.

01:35:15.620 | And I just have to wonder whether or not

01:35:16.860 | this whole thing of imaginary friends,

01:35:18.260 | provided it doesn't take us

01:35:19.260 | into the realm of psychosis and delusion,

01:35:21.500 | could actually be useful.

01:35:22.560 | - Yeah.

01:35:23.400 | Isn't it remarkable that this is such

01:35:25.760 | a common human experience?

01:35:27.560 | And for most people,

01:35:29.780 | they never talk about this with anyone else

01:35:31.800 | because this is such a private experience.

01:35:34.080 | So I often start presentations with a quote

01:35:36.760 | from Raphael Nadal, the tennis great,

01:35:40.160 | him answering a question about what's the hardest thing

01:35:42.400 | that he struggles with.

01:35:43.240 | And he says, "It's managing the voices, plural, in my head."

01:35:47.120 | And I go to the audience and I say,

01:35:49.240 | "Hey, what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party

01:35:52.840 | and says they're struggling

01:35:54.080 | with the voices inside their head?"

01:35:55.960 | Right?

01:35:56.800 | Like, that is typically warning sign, right?

01:35:59.820 | That maybe something is awry here and someone needs support.

01:36:04.040 | Yet, this is a very common feature of the human experience

01:36:07.240 | that we just never really touch on.

01:36:09.360 | So to answer your question,

01:36:10.260 | is it common for kids to have imaginary friends

01:36:13.560 | and maybe talk to themselves?

01:36:15.060 | Yes.

01:36:15.900 | I believe this is called the study of pretense.

01:36:20.760 | According to one famous Soviet psychologist

01:36:23.960 | named Lev Vygotsky,

01:36:25.840 | one of the ways self-control is first learned

01:36:29.400 | is actually through self-talk.

01:36:31.520 | And so what happens is you as a child

01:36:35.200 | will hear your parents telling you to do things.

01:36:38.760 | "Andrew, you should do this," or, "Don't do that,"

01:36:40.760 | and, "Sit this way and not that way."

01:36:42.840 | And then what children will often do is go off on their own

01:36:46.320 | and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud

01:36:50.520 | to themselves.

01:36:51.360 | And so if you've ever been around young kids,

01:36:52.600 | you've probably seen them talking out loud to themselves

01:36:55.480 | or playing with dolls.

01:36:56.960 | "No, Jimmy shouldn't do this, Jimmy should do that."

01:37:00.440 | Some kids do it in the form not of with an actual toy,

01:37:03.520 | but they have an imaginary friend in their mind

01:37:05.840 | that they are engaging with these different interactions.

01:37:09.040 | And what the kids are doing in those contexts,

01:37:10.840 | according to this idea,

01:37:12.240 | is they're practicing self-control.

01:37:16.440 | They are repeating the things,

01:37:18.220 | the messages that their caretakers have told to them, right?

01:37:22.800 | They are reinforcing it in those ways.

01:37:24.920 | And then as time goes on,

01:37:26.320 | and your sister demonstrated this,

01:37:28.640 | that outer voice becomes our inner voice.

01:37:32.200 | And we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice

01:37:34.960 | then throughout our lives.

01:37:36.340 | But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress,

01:37:40.560 | many people sometimes report

01:37:43.080 | actually talking to themselves out loud, right?

01:37:46.320 | And there's very little research on this,

01:37:47.680 | and a lot of this is anecdotal.

01:37:50.120 | But I have, when speaking to a lot of individuals,

01:37:53.480 | they say, "Yeah, sometimes I will actually just start

01:37:55.640 | "talking to myself out loud,

01:37:56.680 | "and I thought something was wrong with me,

01:37:58.360 | "and it's always what I'm struggling with,"

01:38:01.200 | like a major stressor.

01:38:02.320 | So if we go back to reviewer number two, right,

01:38:05.200 | in the academic world,

01:38:06.840 | I remember once I wrote this invited article,

01:38:10.040 | and a reviewer did not say very nice things to me

01:38:14.240 | in this response.

01:38:16.560 | And I remember just walking,

01:38:17.720 | I was, it was so offensive.

01:38:20.760 | I remember walking around the neighborhood,

01:38:22.660 | and I said, "Why don't you say that to my face?"

01:38:25.220 | You know, and I was just repeating what they said,

01:38:27.880 | and I was rehearsing it.

01:38:29.000 | I was getting more and more upset,

01:38:30.360 | and then ultimately working through it.

01:38:32.380 | But it almost seems like in real moments of stress,

01:38:36.680 | we revert back to this very primordial way

01:38:41.380 | of regulating ourselves

01:38:42.680 | that we first exercised when we were kids,

01:38:45.600 | which is this self-talk.

01:38:47.200 | And so David has become exceptionally skilled

01:38:50.880 | at harnessing different voices, according to you,

01:38:53.640 | to manage the challenges that he is facing.

01:38:56.440 | I've heard David talk on a number of occasions,

01:38:58.920 | and I think there is another important point

01:39:02.160 | to bring up here, which is,

01:39:04.400 | I'm pretty sure that when David

01:39:06.480 | is activating different voices,

01:39:08.360 | they are not always a very gentle voice

01:39:11.080 | that is encouraging him to take it easy

01:39:14.160 | and be kind to oneself.

01:39:15.900 | Sometimes, yes.

01:39:17.920 | And sometimes, this is important,

01:39:20.760 | because negative self-talk is often equated

01:39:24.960 | with harmful outcomes.

01:39:28.000 | Negative emotions are functional

01:39:30.920 | when they are activated in the right proportions.

01:39:32.640 | Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective.

01:39:36.280 | So if I go to when I'm exercising,

01:39:38.520 | and I'm doing classes sometimes

01:39:40.480 | where coaches are telling me to do really painful things,

01:39:43.320 | like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself.

01:39:45.840 | I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach

01:39:48.040 | who is really hard on me, right?

01:39:50.000 | You better shape up, you can't wimp out here.

01:39:55.000 | That serves a motivating function for me there.

01:39:59.280 | So if we're recruiting some negative voices,

01:40:02.440 | that isn't bad per se.

01:40:05.400 | What is bad is if we start looping.

01:40:07.600 | That is what we really wanna equate with chatter.

01:40:11.040 | It's getting stuck in those thought loops.

01:40:12.920 | That's when things get harmful,

01:40:15.480 | when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely

01:40:18.240 | or for too long.

01:40:19.160 | - A couple of times, we've talked about the relationship

01:40:22.720 | between physical activities and mental activities,

01:40:26.260 | in particular, taking a walk, going into green spaces.

01:40:30.540 | And I was delighted to hear when you said

01:40:33.420 | that there's a vast literature

01:40:35.380 | supporting the use of green spaces for calming ourselves.

01:40:39.620 | Is that essentially what the data show?

01:40:41.520 | - Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming.

01:40:44.240 | So yes, there is data linking,

01:40:47.120 | going for a walk in a beautiful setting with feeling better.

01:40:51.500 | But scientists have actually gone even deeper

01:40:55.760 | to understand the various mechanisms

01:40:58.440 | through which interacting with green spaces

01:41:00.800 | and other kinds of environments can help us.

01:41:03.800 | And so there are two major pathways

01:41:06.600 | that I often talk about.

01:41:07.680 | One is interacting with a green space

01:41:10.400 | can be cognitively restorative.

01:41:12.680 | So as we talked about earlier,

01:41:14.280 | when people get stuck experiencing chatter

01:41:17.080 | or other kinds of big emotions,

01:41:19.160 | our attention often fixates on the problem at hand.

01:41:22.600 | We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem

01:41:25.320 | and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources.

01:41:29.520 | Well, when you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting,

01:41:32.660 | you're surrounded by interesting cues

01:41:37.220 | that capture your attention in a very gentle way.

01:41:40.680 | So I'm talking about the flowers and the trees,

01:41:45.120 | the scents, the sounds.

01:41:46.760 | Our attention often drifts

01:41:48.720 | onto those features of our environment.

01:41:51.080 | Now, most of us are not doing the equivalent

01:41:54.800 | of carrying a magnifying glass

01:41:56.320 | and studying the geometrical structure

01:41:58.600 | of the leaves and the flowers, right?

01:42:00.640 | We're just kind of taking it in.

01:42:02.600 | But the surroundings are sufficiently intriguing

01:42:06.120 | to capture, to grasp our attention.

01:42:08.460 | And that gives us this opportunity

01:42:11.180 | to restore that precious commodity.

01:42:14.160 | So there's work, there's a lot of work showing that

01:42:16.480 | going for a walk in a safe, natural setting

01:42:19.120 | can be cognitively restorative.

01:42:21.480 | That's another feature that,

01:42:24.160 | or another mechanism through which

01:42:25.720 | nature exposure can help us.

01:42:27.800 | The other pathway that I just find so,

01:42:30.920 | it's so cool from a research point of view.

01:42:34.900 | Going for walks in natural settings

01:42:37.520 | often elicit the emotion of awe,

01:42:40.200 | which is an emotion we experience

01:42:41.900 | when we're in the presence of something vast

01:42:44.480 | and indescribable.

01:42:45.680 | Something that just feels bigger than ourselves.

01:42:47.520 | So in the arboretum near my house,

01:42:50.740 | there are these trees that have been there

01:42:52.040 | for hundreds of years.

01:42:53.160 | And you look up at these trees and you think,

01:42:55.360 | my God, like you've been there way longer than me

01:42:58.640 | and my parents and my grandparents,

01:43:00.720 | and you probably will be there longer

01:43:03.200 | than all of my progeny.

01:43:04.160 | It's like, wow, that just broadens my perspective.

01:43:07.660 | Or an amazing sunset.

01:43:09.540 | You can also experience this emotion

01:43:11.900 | through feats of innovation.

01:43:14.220 | So I'm a science geek, I guess you could say.

01:43:19.060 | And for me, the two biggest awe triggers

01:43:22.580 | are number one, the images of the galaxy

01:43:26.840 | that the latest telescope produces,

01:43:28.860 | which if you follow this,

01:43:30.740 | maybe some physicists have somehow figured out,

01:43:33.500 | engineers, how to take pictures

01:43:35.740 | of what the universe looked like billions of years ago.

01:43:40.240 | Somehow, I don't understand the physics,

01:43:42.180 | we can see what it looked like

01:43:44.380 | this vast amounts of time ago.

01:43:47.900 | And we also, of course, have the equivalent

01:43:49.700 | of an SUV currently roaming on Mars,

01:43:52.660 | sending us back footage of that planet.

01:43:55.700 | So when I think of that,

01:43:57.680 | like we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet,

01:44:02.060 | this vastly expands, like I am filled with awe.

01:44:06.700 | So when we are experiencing something vast

01:44:09.340 | and indescribable like that,

01:44:11.300 | this is the ultimate perspective broadener.

01:44:14.040 | So it leads to what we call shrinking of the self.

01:44:16.340 | We feel smaller when we're contemplating

01:44:18.620 | something vast and indescribable.

01:44:21.380 | And when we feel smaller, guess what else feels smaller?

01:44:24.260 | Problems.

01:44:25.080 | Our problems.

01:44:25.920 | So this is an easy way of utilizing the world around you

01:44:30.920 | to powerfully manage your emotions.

01:44:34.360 | And so what I love about that work

01:44:37.040 | is it highlights the fact that there are tools

01:44:39.480 | that are just hidden in plain sight.

01:44:41.480 | They're waiting to be harnessed.

01:44:43.120 | And if you know where to look, you can often find them.

01:44:45.400 | And that nature, by the way,

01:44:47.080 | isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist.

01:44:50.360 | There are lots of ways that you can interact

01:44:53.200 | with your environment strategically

01:44:55.320 | to help you feel better.

01:44:56.920 | We often develop attachments to places, for example.

01:45:00.000 | So you're probably familiar

01:45:02.880 | with the concept of attachment figures.

01:45:04.720 | So there are these figures from our childhood

01:45:08.080 | that we often, though not always, securely attach to.

01:45:12.720 | They are a source of safety and comfort,

01:45:15.920 | and they serve a powerful regulatory role

01:45:19.080 | in our lives and our partners.

01:45:20.880 | If we're in positive relationships, as I am, love you.

01:45:24.800 | As to my wife, she is an attachment figure for me.

01:45:29.040 | Well, we also develop these associations with places.

01:45:32.600 | And so sometimes places

01:45:34.120 | can be the source of safety and comfort.

01:45:37.380 | Going back to those places during times of distress

01:45:41.140 | can be really rejuvenating.

01:45:43.380 | I know one person who discovered that

01:45:48.200 | there was infidelity in his relationship.

01:45:52.800 | And what really helped him get a grip on the situation

01:45:57.160 | was going back to his childhood home

01:45:59.360 | and sleeping in his bedroom at home.

01:46:01.800 | That was the turning point

01:46:04.400 | that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life.

01:46:09.400 | That's an example of the power of places to affect us.

01:46:13.720 | So how many times do we think about,

01:46:16.360 | hey, what are the places that are my emotional oases,

01:46:21.480 | if you will, that I can go to when I need it?

01:46:23.900 | We can also structure our environments.

01:46:26.960 | Like you and I are both talking right now

01:46:29.400 | across the table from one another.

01:46:31.640 | We don't have our cell phones out on the table.

01:46:33.800 | - No, not for me, not even in the room.

01:46:35.640 | - Not in the room for me either.

01:46:37.240 | If we did, and we had it facing up,

01:46:40.160 | we would be distracted, but would we not?

01:46:42.040 | Without question.

01:46:42.880 | - Even facing down,

01:46:43.700 | I think there's some literature on this, right?

01:46:45.120 | - Still a cue.

01:46:45.960 | It's still an emotional cue.

01:46:47.280 | - There's a cognitive tether.

01:46:49.600 | Because the thing signals a particular--

01:46:52.680 | - Reward.

01:46:53.520 | - A particular reward and a particular set of behaviors.

01:46:58.160 | Just like a pen, there are only a few things you can,

01:46:59.980 | I mean, there are probably many things you can do with a pen,

01:47:01.520 | but typically one.

01:47:03.640 | - This is not John Wick here.

01:47:05.320 | This is one thing that we're talking about.

01:47:06.760 | - We're not getting innovative here with these objects.

01:47:10.560 | But right, when the phone is present,

01:47:13.600 | even if it's faced down,

01:47:15.600 | it cues the opportunity to make a call, receive a text,

01:47:20.600 | look on social media, scroll the internet,

01:47:23.240 | and find out what's happened.

01:47:24.400 | - And so by leaving our phones outside of this space,

01:47:26.760 | we are managing our emotions

01:47:29.280 | in a very blunt and effective way.

01:47:32.320 | When laptop screens are open in my seminars,

01:47:35.060 | I know that I've already lost the battle

01:47:38.120 | because I know the object, the stimulus is so tempting.

01:47:42.720 | Even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world,

01:47:45.360 | which I am not, I aspire to be captivating,

01:47:47.600 | but I know that I'm always going to lose

01:47:51.720 | compared to the screen, the email.

01:47:54.520 | - Do you ask them to close the laptop?

01:47:55.360 | - I ask them to, yeah, no laptops in my class.

01:47:57.760 | - Wow, how is that received?

01:47:59.640 | - So far, so good.

01:48:01.160 | You know, I explain to them,

01:48:02.960 | I actually explain to them the science behind this.

01:48:05.280 | I explain why I'm doing this.

01:48:06.640 | And I say that, hey, if I have my laptop open

01:48:09.600 | and I'm in your shoes, this is a divided attention task.

01:48:13.360 | I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open.

01:48:16.920 | And in the courses that I teach,

01:48:18.560 | it's more about discussion and thinking through things.

01:48:21.240 | So they don't really have a need to type notes for exams,

01:48:25.220 | which I think makes it easier for me.

01:48:27.160 | But modifying our spaces really strategically,

01:48:31.200 | like this is another valuable tool in our toolbox.

01:48:36.200 | Like when we have people over

01:48:38.740 | for football watching parties, let's say,

01:48:41.360 | it's pretty common where I come from in Ann Arbor.

01:48:43.880 | And my favorite food in the world is pizza.

01:48:47.240 | And we have this wonderful New York City style pizza place

01:48:50.360 | in Ann Arbor now.

01:48:51.640 | I will order vast amounts of it, much more than we need.

01:48:55.560 | And when the game is over,

01:48:58.780 | I will insist that everyone take it with them.

01:49:02.120 | Because I know if it is in the refrigerator

01:49:04.880 | and I open the refrigerator later that night

01:49:06.700 | to just get some water, if I see the pizza box, the queue,

01:49:10.840 | it will elicit a emotional response,

01:49:13.920 | this desire, this appetitive response to consume the pizza,

01:49:17.760 | which is not the goal that I have

01:49:19.880 | from either in a fitness

01:49:22.140 | or emotion regulatory point of view.

01:49:23.960 | So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time

01:49:28.360 | to give me the best chance of being successful

01:49:31.760 | at meeting my regulatory goals.

01:49:34.120 | - I'm so glad you brought up pizza and New York pizza

01:49:37.160 | and the fact that you're from New York.

01:49:39.280 | Here's why, and again, I give a personal example

01:49:43.400 | only as a template for people to think about themselves.

01:49:47.720 | - Sure.

01:49:48.560 | - Either where it matches or doesn't match

01:49:49.560 | what I'm about to ask.

01:49:51.080 | I love being in nature.

01:49:52.440 | I love being up in Yosemite and rural areas and at the coast.

01:49:56.080 | I just love being in nature and the quiet of nature.

01:50:00.000 | I find my mind slows and my thoughts and my emotions

01:50:05.620 | enter a pace that just is very soothing.

01:50:08.980 | I also love being in New York City.

01:50:12.100 | I was first in New York City

01:50:13.280 | when I was about five or six years old.

01:50:14.660 | And I remember telling my dad,

01:50:15.700 | who's from another big city, Buenos Aires,

01:50:17.300 | I remember telling him like,

01:50:18.340 | I can't believe this exists.

01:50:19.900 | Like, can we come back here?

01:50:20.900 | And I swore that I would go back as many times

01:50:23.660 | as I possibly could.

01:50:24.620 | And I love going to New York City,

01:50:26.180 | despite it having many problems,

01:50:27.880 | it's still a wonderful city.

01:50:30.060 | When I'm in New York, there's tons of activity.

01:50:32.100 | There's tons of stimuli.

01:50:33.540 | - Yeah.

01:50:34.620 | - And I also find that my mind achieves that slowed pace.

01:50:38.780 | Another parallel construction here,

01:50:41.100 | and then I'll wage the specific question.

01:50:44.060 | I've worked with professors.

01:50:46.300 | My postdoc advisor, for instance,

01:50:47.980 | and my graduate advisor worked extremely effectively.

01:50:52.980 | These are hyper-focused.

01:50:54.700 | Unfortunately, both of them have passed,

01:50:55.980 | but hyper-focused, brilliant people, truly brilliant.

01:50:59.660 | And their offices were a complete disaster.

01:51:03.740 | And we'd say, "Ben, you need to clean your office."

01:51:06.420 | And he would say, "No, no, no, don't move anything.

01:51:08.180 | "Otherwise, I won't know where anything is."

01:51:09.580 | And I'm like, "How can you know where anything is?"

01:51:10.900 | Like this, it looks like an earthquake hit yesterday.

01:51:14.660 | And he goes, "Don't touch anything."

01:51:17.120 | And he could find things

01:51:18.780 | in this like dizzyingly messy environment.

01:51:22.500 | As somebody, he was the stereotype of the professor

01:51:25.100 | sitting hunched over at his keyboard at two in the morning.

01:51:28.340 | 'Cause at that time I worked really late.

01:51:29.500 | You'd go into Ben's office, he'd be like, "Hey."

01:51:31.260 | And he organized thinking amidst chaos.

01:51:35.740 | And the New York example would be the parallel.

01:51:38.580 | And at the other extreme,

01:51:39.500 | nature also seems to bring this about.

01:51:42.200 | So two specific questions.

01:51:45.180 | Is there a continuum of, let's say daytime,

01:51:47.880 | let's forget about middle of the night,

01:51:48.980 | of daytime kind of default levels of chatter?

01:51:53.300 | I think of this as kind of RPM in a car.

01:51:55.340 | Like how is the car idling?

01:51:56.860 | Like when you turn on the car and you just sit there,

01:51:58.100 | like if the transmission's working well

01:51:59.540 | and everything's working well, it's like.

01:52:01.100 | - Yeah.

01:52:01.940 | - Hums at a nice, it's not red lining.

01:52:03.700 | - Yeah.

01:52:04.540 | - Some people seem to be red lining all the time.

01:52:06.740 | - Yeah.

01:52:07.580 | - And they calm down in cluttered environments.

01:52:10.780 | So how much is, do we have a kind of a set point,

01:52:15.980 | a chatter set point?

01:52:17.820 | Assuming everything else equal,

01:52:18.900 | well-rested, et cetera, et cetera.

01:52:20.980 | And then why is it that external environment

01:52:23.700 | matching our internal chatter

01:52:26.100 | somehow like can adjust that internal set point, it seems.

01:52:31.060 | I realize this is very abstract,

01:52:32.900 | but for me, it's very useful to think about

01:52:35.140 | where my mind goes into its most pleasant

01:52:37.700 | and effective states.

01:52:38.660 | - Yeah.

01:52:39.500 | Your example of your advisors resonates

01:52:43.080 | so strongly with myself.

01:52:44.700 | - Is your office a mess?

01:52:46.020 | - Well, it entirely depends on my mental state.

01:52:49.860 | And prior to really getting involved in this space,

01:52:53.100 | I had no insight into why sometimes my office

01:52:57.620 | was a total mess.

01:52:59.220 | And sometimes it is spick and span,

01:53:01.780 | unbelievably organized and clean.

01:53:03.740 | And so let me share with you

01:53:07.180 | some of the research in the space,

01:53:08.340 | 'cause I think it'll bear on this question you're asking.

01:53:11.320 | A lot of people find that

01:53:13.260 | when they are experiencing chatter,

01:53:15.580 | they reflexively start organizing their spaces.

01:53:19.540 | So I'm a great example of this.

01:53:22.140 | My entire life, if we called my mother up right now,

01:53:24.500 | please let's not do it.

01:53:25.460 | But if we did, she could attest to the fact

01:53:28.340 | that there would always be a trail of towels and clothing

01:53:32.660 | from the bathroom to my bedroom and all over the place.

01:53:36.320 | And my office is similar, piles of papers and books.

01:53:40.660 | And that's when life is good.

01:53:43.460 | I'm kind of free flowing, I'm getting in there,

01:53:47.340 | I'm being creative, I'm generating ideas,

01:53:49.900 | and I'm not really worried about everything around me.

01:53:51.980 | In fact, I'm really good at typically

01:53:54.620 | like tuning out my surroundings

01:53:56.980 | to focus in on the task at hand.

01:53:58.820 | I can work in a coffee shop,

01:54:00.740 | I can work almost anywhere and I love it.

01:54:02.960 | When I'm experiencing chatter though,

01:54:06.180 | and this is true from the time I was little,

01:54:09.260 | I would always start putting things away.

01:54:11.180 | I would always start organizing things,

01:54:12.820 | making them nice and tidy.

01:54:14.880 | My office is always spotless.

01:54:18.340 | Sometimes I even take it further presently

01:54:20.980 | when I'm experiencing chatter, I clean up my office,

01:54:23.100 | then I go into the kitchen

01:54:24.060 | and I make sure that's nice and tidy.

01:54:25.940 | And if it's really bad, like I'll clean up my kids' rooms

01:54:28.780 | and things like that.

01:54:29.820 | This is a very common experience.

01:54:32.760 | When you're experiencing chatter,

01:54:34.380 | you don't feel like you are in control.

01:54:37.220 | You're not in the driver's seat.

01:54:38.740 | The thoughts and feelings are taking over

01:54:40.880 | and they're pushing you in directions

01:54:42.460 | and to places that you don't wanna be.

01:54:45.140 | It's an aversive state

01:54:46.460 | and it's chronically activated for a lot of people.

01:54:50.220 | Human beings in general, we crave control.

01:54:55.220 | We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable.

01:54:58.580 | There's some survival value

01:55:00.540 | that that communicates to us, right?

01:55:02.180 | If we know things are certain

01:55:04.380 | and proceeding in a predictable way.

01:55:07.920 | Creating order around us compensates

01:55:12.640 | for the lack of order and control we feel inside.

01:55:15.540 | It's called compensatory control.

01:55:18.500 | And this is the explanation that is often provided

01:55:20.860 | for why so many of us augment our spaces

01:55:25.820 | to counteract in this case, our emotional state.

01:55:29.660 | And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question,

01:55:33.100 | but it for me highlights the way

01:55:35.520 | that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings

01:55:40.020 | in some circumstances.

01:55:42.200 | When I'm not experiencing chatter,

01:55:44.700 | it really doesn't matter if the place is nice

01:55:47.900 | and tidy versus not, like no big deal.

01:55:51.460 | But when I'm motivated to think, feel

01:55:54.660 | and behave in a particular way,

01:55:56.460 | then my circumstances are becoming more important.

01:55:59.860 | - I mean, the military is a very salient example

01:56:02.760 | where people have to have their kit in order

01:56:07.100 | in order to essentially be able to proceed with the job.

01:56:13.380 | And people can say what they will about the military,

01:56:16.060 | but the structure and the hierarchy of the military

01:56:18.540 | is provided a structure and an order for people

01:56:22.180 | to essentially harness it,

01:56:25.660 | take go from a chaotic life to a structured life.

01:56:29.700 | - That's right.

01:56:30.540 | - And it's an extreme example,

01:56:34.140 | but having everything squared away is one of those things.

01:56:38.460 | I got certified to scuba dive a few years ago,

01:56:41.020 | and it occurred to me early on in the first dives

01:56:44.820 | that if your kit isn't squared away

01:56:48.380 | and you don't have everything worked out,

01:56:50.500 | things can go badly wrong.

01:56:51.900 | And the severity of the potential consequences

01:56:55.860 | or the potential severity of the consequences,

01:56:58.020 | I suppose is the right way to say it,

01:56:59.820 | is a good reminder to have everything in check.

01:57:04.260 | This isn't the kind of thing where you can afford

01:57:06.740 | to forget a piece of gear or to not check a valve

01:57:10.580 | or it's potentially life or death.

01:57:14.300 | And that serves an adaptive role.

01:57:17.060 | It's kind of nice to have an activity, actually,

01:57:19.620 | where that's the case.

01:57:21.140 | Whereas we get into our cars

01:57:22.300 | and we might pull out of the driveway

01:57:23.420 | and then go down the street.

01:57:24.260 | And now you see people texting and driving all the time,

01:57:26.180 | or hopefully less as time goes on.

01:57:28.180 | And then you might put on your seatbelt

01:57:31.020 | like a quarter mile down the road.

01:57:32.860 | You might put it on first, right?

01:57:33.920 | I always put mine on first when I remember.

01:57:36.620 | I'm sure now someone will catch me with my seatbelt off,

01:57:38.420 | but I drive with a seatbelt and so on and so on.

01:57:42.900 | The physical steps that we take to organize ourselves

01:57:46.900 | and the environment and our relationship to the environment

01:57:50.620 | really do seem to change our brain into a different brain

01:57:54.540 | than were we to not do those things.

01:57:56.220 | - The way I carve up the emotion regulation space

01:57:59.180 | is there are multiple shifters that exist.

01:58:02.980 | Some of those shifters are inside us.

01:58:05.180 | So there are these sensory shifters we talked about.

01:58:07.740 | There are attentional shifters.

01:58:08.940 | We haven't gotten into that yet,

01:58:09.900 | but we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things

01:58:14.900 | that are causing emotions.

01:58:17.500 | And we can be strategic in how we do that.

01:58:20.380 | There are perspective shifters,

01:58:22.380 | the way we think about our circumstances,

01:58:24.260 | reframing, distancing, those are all on the inside.

01:58:27.740 | But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us

01:58:30.900 | in our relationships,

01:58:32.500 | how other people can push our emotions

01:58:34.700 | in different directions.

01:58:36.220 | Sometimes other people can be amazing assets,

01:58:38.700 | sometimes tremendous liabilities.

01:58:42.220 | There are physical shifters like in our spaces.

01:58:45.700 | And we just talked about those.

01:58:47.420 | You can then go a layer out even further

01:58:50.020 | and talk about culture as a shifter.

01:58:53.580 | People talk about culture as the air we breathe, right?

01:58:56.540 | We are in different cultures throughout our lives.

01:58:59.800 | And sometimes we move from one culture to another

01:59:02.820 | within the day.

01:59:03.660 | So, if you're going to your lab

01:59:06.140 | or you're on campus at Stanford,

01:59:07.780 | that's one very specific culture with certain values

01:59:11.220 | and norms and weird practices maybe.

01:59:15.540 | That's no offense to Stanford, by the way,

01:59:16.940 | that's more academics, academia has some weird practices.

01:59:20.420 | If you then go to your podcast community, right?

01:59:25.620 | The team in the studio that we're sitting here,

01:59:27.340 | there's a different culture that characterizes

01:59:30.900 | the way you function here.

01:59:32.300 | And those cultures that we are a part of,

01:59:35.580 | they powerfully shape our emotional lives.

01:59:39.180 | They influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value.

01:59:44.180 | So, what kinds of emotional experience

01:59:46.460 | are we motivated to have?

01:59:48.560 | They give us practices, rituals

01:59:51.620 | to meet those emotion regulatory goals

01:59:53.900 | that we have as well.

01:59:54.740 | So, that's another kind of influence

01:59:57.700 | that I don't think we often think about,

02:00:00.180 | but that is really quite powerful.

02:00:02.860 | - It brings me back again to the smartphone.

02:00:06.980 | The smartphone carries an infinite number of contexts

02:00:10.620 | into the different environments with us.

02:00:13.940 | So, we're on the train,

02:00:15.220 | but we could be paying attention to something overseas.

02:00:17.580 | And I was on the plane this morning

02:00:19.380 | and I just marveled at the number of screens

02:00:23.980 | on this, frankly, very densely packed plane.

02:00:28.060 | It was like, probably fourth grade

02:00:30.300 | when a kid brought in a little mini TV.

02:00:32.780 | And I remember thinking, oh my goodness,

02:00:33.940 | that's like a mini TV.

02:00:34.940 | It looked kind of like a walkie-talkie

02:00:37.180 | and the resolution was terrible.

02:00:38.620 | And of course it was all black and white.

02:00:39.980 | They had color TVs, by the way, when I was young,

02:00:42.240 | it just hadn't made it to the mini TV.

02:00:44.700 | And we were basically walking around

02:00:45.980 | with little mini TVs all day

02:00:47.780 | with near infinite number of channels

02:00:50.740 | combined with texting, sharing.

02:00:52.100 | I mean, it's wild.

02:00:54.020 | - Remarkable.

02:00:54.860 | It's science fiction.

02:00:56.180 | If we were to turn back the clock

02:00:57.660 | to when we were kids,

02:00:59.420 | to think about what we have in our pockets right now

02:01:03.060 | or on our wrists or some people,

02:01:05.340 | the glasses that they are wearing,

02:01:07.620 | we probably wouldn't have believed

02:01:09.220 | that this was possible when we were kids.

02:01:11.800 | - I agree.

02:01:13.760 | I agree.

02:01:14.600 | And I'm just struck by the fact

02:01:16.220 | that our brains can adapt to this.

02:01:17.900 | But I do think that most people probably wonder about,

02:01:22.620 | you know, like what's the optimal way to live?

02:01:25.920 | And the word optimal gets people a little, you know,

02:01:28.740 | a little triggered sometimes, believe it or not.

02:01:30.940 | I'm not talking about what puts people

02:01:32.380 | into their best performance mode or this or that.

02:01:34.940 | I'm not talking about biohacking.

02:01:36.620 | I'm referring to, you know, there's an age old question,

02:01:39.780 | you know, what is a good life?

02:01:41.340 | And that's a completely different podcast

02:01:42.820 | that we should probably do at some point.

02:01:44.380 | But it probably involves being able

02:01:46.460 | to pay attention to things and be present,

02:01:48.620 | but also let one's mind drift and be socially present

02:01:51.520 | and have relationships and on and on.

02:01:55.000 | Do you think that we are in fact more challenged nowadays

02:01:58.220 | in the default mode of so many contexts arriving with us

02:02:03.220 | in our pocket when we arrive in a situation,

02:02:06.780 | like you said, come to the studio.

02:02:08.380 | As long as my phone's face down or away from me,

02:02:11.620 | I'm in the studio.

02:02:12.460 | Otherwise, I brought the whole world with me.

02:02:15.460 | - Yeah, this is a question that comes up quite a bit.

02:02:17.900 | And it's a really hard one to answer

02:02:19.900 | because we haven't of course been tracking people's chatter

02:02:24.780 | and emotion dysregulation levels over the centuries.

02:02:28.640 | I think it's absolutely true

02:02:29.880 | that we now have new forms of technology

02:02:34.360 | that are perennially now presenting us with challenges

02:02:38.480 | that we need to figure out how to overcome,

02:02:41.220 | but they are also providing us with opportunities.

02:02:44.400 | So to be clear, I think social media and technology

02:02:49.080 | can and does do a lot of harm.

02:02:53.560 | And I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well.

02:02:58.460 | And the real challenge we face right now

02:03:01.580 | is figuring out how to navigate

02:03:05.620 | those digital technological landscapes.

02:03:08.880 | And I think we probably jumped into them

02:03:10.860 | without a user guide too quickly.

02:03:13.780 | And we're only learning now, 15 years later,

02:03:16.340 | or whatever the number is, that that was the case.

02:03:19.760 | But I don't know that I would,

02:03:24.360 | I don't know that, well, I'll speak for myself.

02:03:26.580 | I think net positive,

02:03:28.160 | there's a lot of good that has come from these technologies.

02:03:31.700 | If we think back centuries ago,

02:03:34.040 | it's not clear to me

02:03:36.800 | that the world wasn't a challenging place either.

02:03:40.120 | I mean, we used to get into fights and pull swords

02:03:45.120 | and there was huge, people would invade readily

02:03:49.640 | if you go back further.

02:03:50.900 | And there was the threat of illness

02:03:53.700 | and we weren't living nearly as long.

02:03:55.800 | And so I think it's easy to also forget

02:03:59.880 | just how far we have come as a species.

02:04:04.080 | But, and this is, I think, a really important,

02:04:06.160 | but I think about this often.

02:04:08.160 | The issues that we are talking about today on this podcast,

02:04:11.580 | this question of how we manage our emotional lives,

02:04:15.840 | this is a question that we have been struggling with,

02:04:18.580 | likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet

02:04:22.000 | in our current form.

02:04:23.160 | - Because humans have constantly

02:04:24.640 | been evolving new technologies.

02:04:26.400 | - We've always been challenged by circumstances.

02:04:29.800 | And those circumstances are constantly evolving,

02:04:33.600 | providing new threats to us

02:04:35.860 | that now we need to learn how to manage.

02:04:38.340 | When I was digging deep

02:04:40.960 | into the history of emotion regulation for shift,

02:04:44.440 | I couldn't believe it,

02:04:46.960 | that when I look back

02:04:50.440 | at the first surgical tool ever developed,

02:04:53.840 | you know what that is?

02:04:55.000 | - Trephining.

02:04:55.840 | - Trephining.

02:04:56.660 | So trephination,

02:04:57.880 | tell everyone who's listening what that involved.

02:04:59.800 | - Trephining is where you bore a hole through the skull

02:05:04.800 | in order to let out some volume of fluid.

02:05:09.360 | - Some volume of fluid, or-

02:05:11.220 | - Or remove brain.

02:05:12.400 | - Or brain, or if we go back eight to 10,000 years ago

02:05:16.460 | when this technology was first cutting edge, right?

02:05:20.520 | Like the new iPhone of the times,

02:05:22.560 | trephination for spirits, for maybe spirits, right?

02:05:26.360 | So one of the reasons it was believed to be used

02:05:28.360 | was to allow the evil spirits to escape

02:05:32.120 | that are maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation.

02:05:36.880 | So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time

02:05:39.800 | that we use to manage our emotions.

02:05:42.320 | Then let's jump into the mental time travel machine,

02:05:44.680 | or just the time travel machine

02:05:45.880 | and go to the late 1940s,

02:05:48.200 | where there was another major spike

02:05:50.680 | on the emotion regulation innovation timeline.

02:05:53.960 | You know where I'm going with this?

02:05:54.800 | - I'm guessing you're talking about the lobotomy.

02:05:57.800 | - That's right.

02:05:58.920 | - The frontal lobotomy.

02:05:59.760 | - A Portuguese physician develops the lobotomy,

02:06:03.160 | I think it was initially called the leucotomy,

02:06:05.960 | essentially making some holes in your frontal cortex.

02:06:09.400 | - Going up through the orbit of the eye.

02:06:10.960 | - Through the eye.

02:06:11.800 | - Sweeping it back and forth.

02:06:12.800 | This was not just an outpatient surgery,

02:06:15.560 | but a mobile surgery that would arrive to people's homes.

02:06:18.400 | I think, I could be wrong,

02:06:20.800 | but I think a Nobel prize was given for the lobotomy.

02:06:23.640 | - Well, there you go.

02:06:24.480 | That's the-

02:06:25.320 | - Relieved anxiety.

02:06:26.160 | Unfortunately, it relieved a lot of other things too.

02:06:27.600 | - Relieved many other things as well.

02:06:29.000 | - Relieved people's interest in pursuing lots of-

02:06:31.560 | - It caused major, major, major dysfunction.

02:06:35.200 | And to be clear,

02:06:36.960 | this is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention.

02:06:40.760 | It hasn't been for a while.

02:06:42.480 | - Well, that's why I said don't box.

02:06:44.440 | Prefrontal cortical damage is a common feature of people

02:06:47.080 | with a box. - Getting hit over and over.

02:06:49.120 | - Or even, I don't know if this is true,

02:06:51.160 | someone needs to check,

02:06:52.120 | but I do hear that some, sadly,

02:06:54.760 | some soccer players who head the ball a lot

02:06:57.480 | deal with some frontal cortical related dementia type stuff.

02:07:02.480 | I'm guessing that's probably related

02:07:06.440 | to some genetic susceptibility,

02:07:08.160 | because at least to me, the soccer ball is not very hard.

02:07:11.440 | It's not like they're, you know,

02:07:13.040 | but, and then again, there are, of course,

02:07:16.520 | people who play a whole career of football or box,

02:07:20.480 | less seldom boxing.

02:07:21.720 | People who get hit a lot in the head often have problems.

02:07:24.880 | They develop problems.

02:07:25.880 | - Yeah, generally not a good thing.

02:07:27.720 | But, you know, just to go back to the lobotomy,

02:07:29.760 | what's amazing to me is like,

02:07:32.040 | that was perceived to be such an advance

02:07:36.000 | that it won the Nobel Prize.

02:07:38.400 | Like the Nobel Prize.

02:07:39.840 | - Because it calmed people down.

02:07:40.840 | - Calmed people down, right?

02:07:42.440 | And so I raise these issues to just point that,

02:07:46.360 | like we've been struggling to identify tools

02:07:48.800 | to manage our emotions effectively for a really long time.

02:07:52.080 | And now fast forward to the present,

02:07:54.080 | we have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet,

02:07:57.160 | but I would argue that we have made major advances

02:07:59.800 | in identifying non-invasive science-based tools

02:08:03.680 | that can be leveraged to help people lead

02:08:06.640 | more productive emotional lives.

02:08:09.320 | And so, you know, you raised this question earlier

02:08:13.120 | about what is a productive life?

02:08:15.400 | What is a good life?

02:08:16.480 | And I think answering that question is in part relevant

02:08:21.480 | to how I think about,

02:08:24.560 | how do you like define self-control in many ways

02:08:28.440 | or emotion regulation?

02:08:30.360 | Or let me, not just how you define it,

02:08:32.720 | but what are the component parts?

02:08:35.360 | So we've been talking about tools

02:08:38.320 | throughout this conversation.

02:08:40.000 | All like these different tools that exist,

02:08:41.560 | these different shifters for pushing our emotions

02:08:43.280 | or chatter around.

02:08:44.440 | That's one core part of regulating effectively.

02:08:48.280 | But another core part is our motivation or our goals.

02:08:53.280 | And you need both motivation and tools.

02:08:57.160 | So I can know about all the tools on the planet

02:09:02.160 | that scientists have discovered.

02:09:04.080 | If I'm not motivated to manage my emotions,

02:09:06.760 | I'm not gonna use those tools.

02:09:09.000 | If on the other hand,

02:09:10.200 | I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions,

02:09:13.320 | but I don't know what the tools are,

02:09:15.120 | I'm not gonna be that effective.

02:09:16.400 | And I may in fact do some bad things, right?

02:09:20.000 | I may, you know, use unhealthy tools,

02:09:23.440 | substances that really can very powerfully map,

02:09:26.040 | you know, substance abuse I'm talking about.

02:09:28.080 | That can modulate my emotions,

02:09:29.480 | but has some negative consequences.

02:09:31.000 | So it's about what are my goals for me,

02:09:34.040 | for my emotional life?

02:09:36.160 | And do I possess the tools

02:09:37.680 | that allow me to accomplish those goals?

02:09:41.640 | I think that is a formula for the good life.

02:09:45.160 | Hey, here are the goals that I have.

02:09:47.640 | And if these are healthy, productive goals,

02:09:49.940 | and I have the means to achieve them,

02:09:52.080 | that should bring me a sense of satisfaction.

02:09:54.560 | Sometimes our goals of course, aren't optimal,

02:09:56.480 | and we use that maybe controversial word,

02:09:59.280 | but we do change our goals throughout our life.

02:10:02.440 | But it's about finding the right set of goals

02:10:05.480 | for us as individuals,

02:10:06.920 | and then identifying the tools that we can use

02:10:09.440 | to bring those goals to fruition.

02:10:11.680 | - Yeah, in keeping with this historical arc

02:10:13.440 | of the tools that humans have used

02:10:14.960 | to try and regulate emotion,

02:10:16.320 | you mentioned trephining, frontal lobotomy,

02:10:19.040 | think about a barbaric appearing procedure,

02:10:22.800 | but one that actually is pretty effective

02:10:25.160 | in the right hands,

02:10:26.600 | and that is still commonly used today,

02:10:28.840 | electric shock therapy,

02:10:30.960 | which at a mechanistic level, you know, we-

02:10:34.120 | - Don't understand.

02:10:34.960 | - We don't really understand,

02:10:35.820 | but it seems to lead to a kind of massive dump

02:10:38.000 | of a bunch of neuromodulators, dopamine, serotonin,

02:10:40.480 | but like, you know, almost willy nilly, like just-

02:10:42.920 | - Yeah, it's like a-

02:10:44.040 | - And then nowadays, there's a lot of,

02:10:46.040 | at least interest, if not enthusiasm,

02:10:48.800 | more work is needed on the various psychedelics,

02:10:52.400 | in particular psilocybin and MDMA,

02:10:55.700 | for depression and PTSD more specifically.

02:11:00.400 | And while those are more in the serotonergic pathway,

02:11:03.840 | that my read of the data is that, you know,

02:11:07.040 | they're creating, you know,

02:11:08.200 | more brain-wide connectivity at resting state.

02:11:11.060 | I mean, there's still fairly crude tools

02:11:13.480 | in terms of you're massively changing the levels

02:11:15.840 | of given neuromodulators,

02:11:17.760 | people are undergoing variable experiences.

02:11:20.520 | It's not like directed in any way.

02:11:23.340 | Nolan Williams at Stanford is combining those things

02:11:25.720 | with transcranial magnetic stimulation

02:11:27.720 | to try and essentially highlight the activity

02:11:30.140 | of particular circuits during the psychedelic journeys

02:11:32.840 | and after, things of that sort.

02:11:35.000 | So it's getting more specific,

02:11:37.060 | but I would say even today,

02:11:38.280 | we don't really have great pharmacologic

02:11:40.960 | or surgical tools for emotion.

02:11:44.160 | Now, there's terrific neurosurgery going on, mind you,

02:11:47.680 | but when it comes to behavioral tools

02:11:51.480 | for emotion regulation,

02:11:53.040 | I feel like the psychologists, you all,

02:11:55.560 | you and your colleagues have done a tremendous job,

02:11:58.600 | as have the people from, you know,

02:12:01.480 | for lack of a better name,

02:12:02.600 | the sort of ancient traditions

02:12:04.840 | and from the wellness community, you know,

02:12:08.780 | things like long exhale breathing,

02:12:10.280 | physiological size, meditation.

02:12:12.080 | Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU

02:12:14.320 | showing you 13 minutes a day of meditation

02:12:16.280 | improves focus, emotion, emotional state.

02:12:19.240 | So it seems to me that the behavioral tools

02:12:22.360 | are getting way out ahead of the surgical

02:12:26.040 | and even pharmacologic tools

02:12:27.440 | in terms of their specificity, their safety,

02:12:29.540 | and maybe even their potency.

02:12:31.640 | Would you care to reflect on what you see

02:12:33.800 | as the most valuable tools for emotion regulation?

02:12:37.280 | Well, you've touched on some of them today, but already,

02:12:40.220 | but I mean, taking a walk, green spaces,

02:12:43.960 | time, you know, mental time travel, fantasy,

02:12:46.600 | I listed a few more of these off.

02:12:48.360 | I mean, these might seem kind of more modal,

02:12:52.880 | you know, top-level contour things,

02:12:54.840 | but they work, right?

02:12:56.280 | I mean, the data say they work, journaling.

02:12:58.080 | Yeah, I mean, they're mechanistically,

02:13:01.220 | you know, we understand the mechanisms

02:13:03.420 | that are underlying the benefits of these tools.

02:13:08.280 | They are easy to implement, and not always,

02:13:12.520 | but for a lot of them, they're easy,

02:13:13.600 | and I think that's in part where their power resides.

02:13:17.380 | We are still trying to understand how the brain functions.

02:13:21.340 | As you well know, you've contributed to this.

02:13:23.540 | I've worked on this a little bit myself, too.

02:13:26.020 | The brain is a remarkably complicated organ,

02:13:28.380 | and we still have a lot to learn.

02:13:30.520 | I'm a big fan of trying to understand

02:13:34.140 | how phenomena like emotion play out

02:13:37.140 | at different levels of analysis,

02:13:39.580 | at the psychological level of thinking and feeling,

02:13:42.500 | but also at the biological level

02:13:44.700 | in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones

02:13:48.380 | and so forth and so on,

02:13:49.580 | and so I think there's great hope

02:13:51.580 | that we will be able to eventually, down the road,

02:13:55.900 | try to help people manage their emotions

02:13:59.300 | through multiple different sources of intervention,

02:14:02.500 | through the pharmacological level,

02:14:04.420 | through the behavioral level,

02:14:06.100 | through the interpersonal level,

02:14:08.180 | but it's a messy, messy space right now,

02:14:10.420 | and I think one of the big problems is,

02:14:12.460 | and this is in part gets to bigger questions about science

02:14:16.500 | and how science is done,

02:14:20.020 | it can be hard to cross levels of analysis,

02:14:22.560 | and there are multiple practical constraints

02:14:25.700 | that become active here,

02:14:27.320 | so having the large enough samples

02:14:29.900 | and the right collaborators to look at

02:14:32.300 | how different kinds of interventions

02:14:35.080 | interact with one another,

02:14:36.860 | work in different populations,

02:14:38.380 | and so we tend not to do those more complicated designs

02:14:43.380 | because they're a lot harder to do.

02:14:45.960 | They take a ton more money, a ton more time and effort,

02:14:49.460 | and oftentimes, scientists are on timelines

02:14:53.060 | and there are incentive structures

02:14:54.580 | that guide the kind of work that they do,

02:14:57.060 | but big picture, down the road,

02:15:00.460 | I think the big questions are about

02:15:03.200 | how do these different kinds of interventions

02:15:05.900 | interact with one another?

02:15:07.840 | The good news is, though,

02:15:09.020 | that for any person who is watching or listening

02:15:11.500 | who's motivated to manage their emotions right now,

02:15:14.700 | there are many things you can do to start,

02:15:17.220 | and it begins, step one,

02:15:19.900 | learning about what these tools are,

02:15:22.500 | and then starting this process

02:15:23.820 | of experimenting with the tools.

02:15:25.700 | I don't use that word experimenting lightly.

02:15:27.420 | I wouldn't advocate experimenting with agents

02:15:30.820 | that have serious side effects of the sort

02:15:32.980 | that some of the biological interventions

02:15:34.760 | you articulated earlier do.

02:15:36.720 | Those kinds of tools, I think,

02:15:37.860 | should be used in the context of medical supervision,

02:15:41.820 | but a lot of these other tools that we're talking about,

02:15:44.140 | small changes in how you think and behave

02:15:46.660 | and interact with your environments,

02:15:49.220 | those are things people can start doing right now.

02:15:52.220 | - One of the most common questions I've received

02:15:54.260 | over the years is, on YouTube in particular,

02:15:57.660 | is how to stop intrusive voices,

02:16:01.380 | and occasionally when people ask these questions,

02:16:04.340 | they'll highlight that some parent

02:16:09.140 | or an ex or something will kind of a judge voice in there,

02:16:14.140 | and they don't know if it's their voice

02:16:16.220 | or the other person's voice,

02:16:17.140 | but it's in their head and it's very unpleasant.

02:16:19.540 | Presumably this circles back to childhood traumas

02:16:23.420 | or other forms of traumas,

02:16:24.440 | but irrespective of the origins,

02:16:27.860 | are there any tools specifically to deal

02:16:30.660 | with intrusive thoughts and thought patterns,

02:16:33.980 | maybe even OCD-like thought patterns?

02:16:36.100 | - So a couple of responses to that.

02:16:38.720 | So first of all, I think step one is recognizing

02:16:42.740 | that if you are hearing another voice,

02:16:45.680 | like if you can hear your dad's voice in your head,

02:16:49.220 | it's not your dad who is in your head,

02:16:51.260 | that is a simulation that you are engaging in

02:16:53.620 | that your brain is capable of producing.

02:16:57.100 | And so that I think can be informative

02:17:00.420 | for people who are curious about these inner worlds.

02:17:02.660 | Like I could hear-

02:17:03.500 | - I'm not referring to auditory hallucinations.

02:17:05.540 | I'm referring to the language of somebody,

02:17:09.500 | maybe not in that person's voice,

02:17:12.140 | but they're hearing like, maybe not you're a bad person,

02:17:14.920 | but like you're never good, you're not good enough.

02:17:17.980 | Like it's not enough or just feeling like,

02:17:20.540 | so they can't enjoy the good things in life

02:17:23.780 | because of these intrusive negative voices.

02:17:25.940 | - Here's something that I hope listeners

02:17:28.700 | and viewers will find exceptionally liberating

02:17:31.980 | as I have found liberating from just knowing the science.

02:17:34.780 | So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in "Shift."

02:17:38.260 | They are incredibly normative.

02:17:42.220 | And so there's research which looks at like,

02:17:43.780 | how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought

02:17:46.360 | over the past week or month or two months?

02:17:48.600 | The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts

02:17:51.800 | is exceptionally high.

02:17:54.520 | I don't remember the exact percentage,

02:17:56.420 | but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling.

02:18:00.240 | I will do an exercise with my classes,

02:18:02.840 | my undergraduate classes,

02:18:04.320 | where I will ask them to anonymously describe

02:18:08.920 | whether they've experienced like a dark thought

02:18:10.840 | over the past week.

02:18:11.920 | Almost all of them are capable of generating them.

02:18:15.020 | And some of these thoughts are really, really dark.

02:18:18.900 | I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought

02:18:23.340 | when I'm exercising at the gym.

02:18:25.380 | You're looking at me with curiosity

02:18:26.860 | and a bit of concern right now.

02:18:28.060 | - No, I'm not concerned, I'm just fascinated.

02:18:30.580 | You know, I have ideas about why this may be,

02:18:32.340 | but I'm just fascinated.

02:18:33.840 | I don't know that I've had dark thoughts in the gym,

02:18:35.980 | but it's interesting.

02:18:37.340 | - Here's my dark thought.

02:18:38.260 | Watch out if you see me in the gym from here on.

02:18:41.000 | So if I'm carrying like a heavy dumbbell

02:18:45.280 | from a bench to a rack,

02:18:47.520 | I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it

02:18:50.600 | on the face of another person on a mat.

02:18:54.200 | - Oh my goodness.

02:18:55.040 | - It's terribly dark.

02:18:56.440 | It's a terrible, terrible thought.

02:18:58.240 | So why am I experiencing that?

02:19:00.580 | It is most likely the brain's simulating worst case scenarios

02:19:05.580 | to prevent me from doing it.

02:19:06.960 | Of course, I don't wanna drop a dumbbell

02:19:09.200 | on someone I never have.

02:19:10.640 | And so that's one explanation for why this is so normative.

02:19:14.400 | It's your brain's way of constantly,

02:19:17.760 | there's a theory that we're constantly simulating

02:19:20.920 | all sorts of possibilities for what could happen.

02:19:24.120 | And most of these simulations,

02:19:25.840 | the probability of them coming to fruition

02:19:27.680 | are exceptionally low, infinitesimally small.

02:19:31.280 | But on occasion, some of the wacky ones

02:19:33.040 | do escape into awareness.

02:19:34.880 | And that's when we get the dark thought

02:19:36.960 | about harming someone or doing something illegal

02:19:40.480 | in a pretty egregious way,

02:19:42.360 | or in my case, dropping the dumbbell

02:19:44.560 | on the person stretching on their face.

02:19:47.880 | And so here's what I find liberating.

02:19:50.820 | Me understanding that this is just how my brain works.

02:19:55.820 | Well, that doesn't mean now

02:19:59.480 | that I'm something wrong with me as a human being, right?

02:20:03.000 | That I'm morally corrupt in any way.

02:20:05.920 | My brain's gonna sometimes produce

02:20:07.320 | these kinds of dark thoughts.

02:20:08.920 | I'm not gonna act on them.

02:20:10.520 | And as long as I'm not acting on them, it's all good.

02:20:13.920 | It's almost like when people learn

02:20:16.040 | about the physiological response to anxiety,

02:20:20.280 | before they know what is happening,

02:20:23.560 | that can often be an incredibly distressing experience.

02:20:26.320 | Like all of a sudden, your stomach is churning,

02:20:28.840 | your palms are sweating.

02:20:31.000 | But in research, which shows like if you communicate

02:20:35.060 | to people, hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves

02:20:39.780 | to adaptively respond

02:20:41.780 | to this uncertain circumstance you face.

02:20:44.920 | All of a sudden, you are totally flipping the frame.

02:20:47.560 | And now this is, I'm a Lamborghini, right?

02:20:51.840 | I am rising to the occasion.

02:20:53.280 | My body's doing what it should be doing

02:20:55.600 | to allow me to excel here.

02:20:57.620 | That's the kind of flip that I think

02:20:59.720 | understanding the frequency and origins

02:21:03.080 | of intrusive thoughts can have for folks.

02:21:05.160 | So step one is just recognizing

02:21:07.160 | if you experience intrusive thoughts at times.

02:21:08.960 | Again, welcome to the human condition.

02:21:10.960 | It's a little blip in how our brain operates.

02:21:14.560 | But a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful

02:21:17.200 | for nipping repetitive thinking in the bud.

02:21:21.040 | So when you're curtailing chatter,

02:21:24.080 | you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating.

02:21:28.200 | The reason why we often perseverate

02:21:30.840 | on problems we're experiencing is we are,

02:21:33.680 | we're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstances

02:21:37.720 | so we can move on with our lives.

02:21:39.400 | And our brain, this wonderful problem-solving organ

02:21:41.760 | that we possess, it just keeps churning

02:21:43.680 | until we've solved that problem.

02:21:45.160 | And that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts

02:21:48.480 | here and there until you get there.

02:21:50.320 | And so when you solve the problem,

02:21:52.520 | those thoughts tend to subside too.

02:21:55.120 | - I have two points,

02:21:57.920 | both of which are essentially questions.

02:21:59.920 | I think it's relatively common for people

02:22:04.240 | when they go to a bridge or a dam

02:22:06.080 | or something very high with the potential

02:22:09.680 | for essentially a fatal fall,

02:22:12.320 | were they to jump off, to have the thought,

02:22:15.080 | what keeps me from jumping off

02:22:16.880 | when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off?

02:22:19.240 | And it seems like it's another example of like,

02:22:21.320 | it's registering the danger

02:22:22.760 | and the severity of the consequences.

02:22:24.680 | It also, I realize, helps us understand the level of risk.

02:22:28.040 | - That's right.

02:22:28.880 | - You know, I think Alex Honnold,

02:22:30.480 | who famously did "Free Solo" to El Cap,

02:22:34.960 | a remarkable movie, by the way,

02:22:36.280 | just along the lines of what we're talking about,

02:22:39.320 | the way the movie is constructed,

02:22:41.280 | and I think Jimmy Chin and colleagues who made that movie

02:22:43.920 | did such an incredible job,

02:22:45.360 | not just with the cinematography,

02:22:46.560 | but you know he survives

02:22:48.280 | from the very beginning of the movie,

02:22:49.640 | and yet it's terrifying to watch the whole thing.

02:22:51.840 | And it's kind of a hour, 45 minute expedition

02:22:56.640 | of exactly what we're talking about.

02:22:59.200 | In that movie, as I recall,

02:23:00.280 | Alex spells out the assessment of risk and consequence,

02:23:04.640 | right, you know, level of risk, level of consequence,

02:23:07.800 | and how those are key parameters to evaluate,

02:23:10.640 | and he's obviously done that for himself and he succeeded.

02:23:13.160 | And I hope he never does it again,

02:23:15.480 | only because he seems like a really delightful person

02:23:18.640 | when it'd be nice to keep him around.

02:23:20.480 | And he's doing other important work now.

02:23:22.440 | But the point being that I think it's a very natural thing

02:23:26.720 | to evaluate risk and consequence

02:23:29.240 | in a way that "feels dark,"

02:23:32.080 | but it's actually highly adaptive

02:23:34.260 | through the lens that we're talking about it.

02:23:36.820 | So that's one point.

02:23:38.340 | - Well, just to that point, if I can interject,

02:23:40.540 | so just to normalize this further for folks,

02:23:44.080 | so my family is very special to me as it is to most people.

02:23:50.080 | When my first daughter was born,

02:23:52.320 | we used to live in this house that had this,

02:23:54.480 | on the second floor, there was a,

02:23:56.520 | I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass,

02:23:58.400 | but it was open to the floor beneath.

02:24:00.720 | And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of,

02:24:03.440 | at night when we'd have to bring my daughter

02:24:05.320 | into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper,

02:24:07.560 | whatever, I would have these thoughts of carrying her

02:24:10.800 | and then dropping her over into the, you know,

02:24:15.000 | and splat, like not pleasant thoughts to experience

02:24:18.780 | in the middle of the night.

02:24:20.160 | It speaks to this point that you are raising

02:24:22.720 | that was likely my mind's way of homing in

02:24:26.280 | on a really, really important issue in my life

02:24:29.120 | that I want to make sure never, ever, ever happens.

02:24:32.320 | It is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt

02:24:35.360 | or incredibly dark person.

02:24:37.640 | It's how my brain is operating, so.

02:24:40.320 | - Yeah, you're assessing risk and consequence

02:24:42.520 | in an adaptive way.

02:24:45.800 | - Yeah, it's fascinating to think about.

02:24:49.100 | The second comment/question that I'd love your thoughts on

02:24:53.620 | is, you know, I had this bulldog,

02:24:57.180 | I talk about him all the time, this bulldog Mastiff,

02:24:59.380 | and he had one default behavior

02:25:02.620 | that if he couldn't engage in it,

02:25:05.220 | would create anxiety in him.

02:25:06.500 | And that was he liked to chew.

02:25:08.500 | Like he liked to gnaw on things.

02:25:09.860 | As a puppy, he actually would teeth on bricks

02:25:12.100 | in the backyard.

02:25:13.100 | I was like, oh my goodness, it looks so painful to me.

02:25:15.460 | Sometimes he'd bite through a lip.

02:25:17.740 | You know, the bulldog part of their phenotype

02:25:19.780 | is that a lot of the pain receptors

02:25:21.040 | have been bred out of their face.

02:25:22.720 | And I just think, oh my goodness,

02:25:23.880 | I go out there and I was like distraught

02:25:26.040 | at how much pain he must be causing himself.

02:25:27.560 | It was obviously less than I perceived.

02:25:30.040 | But nonetheless, this gnawing behavior was,

02:25:34.000 | you could just see it.

02:25:34.840 | It gave him such pleasure, right?

02:25:36.680 | You give him something to chew on,

02:25:37.520 | and you could just see the anxiety like dissolve out of him.

02:25:41.460 | I've known a number of people

02:25:44.360 | that are fairly high intensity

02:25:45.760 | in terms of they speak fast,

02:25:47.520 | high density of thought, information, et cetera,

02:25:49.760 | at least outwardly,

02:25:50.880 | who claim that they have got sort of a high RPM internally.

02:25:54.400 | And I vary, and depending on time of day

02:25:57.840 | and time of year on this,

02:25:59.160 | but I place myself more or less into that category.

02:26:02.440 | Engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention,

02:26:06.020 | perhaps we could call it flow,

02:26:08.960 | but nonetheless engaging in an activity

02:26:11.480 | that harnesses my full attention,

02:26:14.120 | feels to me so unbelievably satisfying.

02:26:18.200 | - Yeah.

02:26:19.440 | - So unbelievably satisfying.

02:26:20.920 | I think it's for two reasons.

02:26:22.000 | One is the benefits of doing those activities,

02:26:24.480 | studying, learning, podcasting, doing research,

02:26:27.600 | connecting with someone in a really directed way,

02:26:29.440 | like getting into that tunnel with them,

02:26:31.960 | as we're doing now.

02:26:33.800 | There's a positive feature,

02:26:35.400 | and then there's also the removal of a negative,

02:26:37.440 | like that those RPM are not humming in the background.

02:26:41.280 | And I think for a lot of people,

02:26:43.280 | like ultra runners, and I know a lot of former addicts

02:26:48.280 | that start running marathons and get sober and stay sober.

02:26:51.320 | - Yeah.

02:26:52.680 | - It's remarkable how physical activity

02:26:55.200 | or cognitive activity can kind of take us

02:26:57.680 | into that plane of focus that both makes us productive,

02:27:01.600 | makes us fitter, but also relieves this inner voice.

02:27:04.680 | It kind of like lets the tension out the same way

02:27:06.640 | that I observed Costello letting the tension out

02:27:09.040 | through gnawing on these bricks or rawhides

02:27:11.240 | or whatever it was.

02:27:13.120 | And so my question is,

02:27:14.640 | is there, as I'm assuming,

02:27:18.480 | a relationship between the physical and the mental?

02:27:21.280 | Do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us,

02:27:24.280 | and it varies between people,

02:27:25.520 | and we need to harness and/or adjust that level of energy

02:27:29.520 | and to do that in ways that hopefully make us a living

02:27:32.040 | or bring our social relationships more closely together?

02:27:35.080 | - Well, it certainly plays out in physical context

02:27:38.040 | as you're describing,

02:27:38.880 | but it also, as you alluded to,

02:27:40.520 | plays out in cognitive contexts.

02:27:42.780 | When there is this match,

02:27:44.800 | this sweet spot between the demands,

02:27:48.720 | like you're in a situation that is actually challenging,

02:27:52.640 | either physically or cognitively,

02:27:55.240 | and the resources that you bring to that situation

02:27:59.280 | perfectly match the demands.

02:28:02.320 | So it's a taxing situation,

02:28:03.880 | but you are able to engage with it completely.

02:28:07.340 | That is the formula for getting,

02:28:10.260 | stuck is the wrong word,

02:28:11.440 | for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states,

02:28:14.540 | which are, for many people,

02:28:16.400 | the goal that they have in their lives,

02:28:19.300 | both recreationally and professionally.

02:28:21.440 | And so you, as someone who is ideally

02:28:24.120 | getting into these flow states with your guests,

02:28:26.760 | I would hope and imagine,

02:28:27.860 | and that's always the aspiration,

02:28:30.080 | that must feel really good.

02:28:32.200 | I mean, you talk for a long time with people.

02:28:35.840 | Does it feel like a long time

02:28:37.080 | when you're having those conversations?

02:28:38.360 | - No, time perception completely changes.

02:28:40.580 | And when I do this for two or three hours a week,

02:28:42.220 | and then when we do a solo episode,

02:28:43.740 | sometimes the recording's longest ever yet

02:28:45.820 | is 11 hours edited down.

02:28:48.400 | But those can be anywhere from 90 minutes to four hours,

02:28:53.400 | or a live event.

02:28:56.420 | And I couldn't tell you,

02:28:58.620 | it just seems like time just passes.

02:29:00.380 | Time dissolves away.

02:29:01.540 | - And when, that is because you are so absorbed in the moment

02:29:06.060 | and meeting the challenges of that situation,

02:29:09.380 | that all of your attention is commanded

02:29:11.860 | to that point in time, that moment.

02:29:16.460 | And that doesn't leave a whole lot of room

02:29:18.560 | for all of the chatter to percolate in the background.

02:29:22.860 | And so, you know, one often,

02:29:24.660 | you might think like an ultra marathon,

02:29:27.140 | or what's the correct term?

02:29:28.320 | Is that it?

02:29:29.160 | - Oh, it's called an ultra.

02:29:29.980 | I think we have some triathletes here in the room,

02:29:32.780 | our producer, Rob Moore, sitting to my left.

02:29:36.140 | We've never done this before,

02:29:37.940 | but how long is an ultra?

02:29:39.260 | Anything longer than a marathon, is that right?

02:29:41.340 | He's giving a nod.

02:29:42.180 | He is gonna remain silent.

02:29:44.180 | Anything longer than a marathon is considered an ultra.

02:29:47.020 | - And so that's a lot of time on the one hand

02:29:49.780 | to be alone with your thoughts, right?

02:29:52.580 | And you might think that might just be grounds

02:29:55.320 | for experiencing chatter,

02:29:57.260 | but it's also a particularly challenging

02:29:59.340 | kind of physical feat

02:30:01.140 | that you have to devote a lot of resources

02:30:02.880 | to meeting those physical demands.

02:30:05.340 | And right, so that can propel you into a state of flow.

02:30:07.800 | And then you get some runners high to boot,

02:30:10.580 | some like chemical boost to enhance your mood.

02:30:13.300 | And all of a sudden now you have people running,

02:30:16.180 | you know, 130 miles.

02:30:17.440 | I'm exaggerating.

02:30:18.280 | How long is it?

02:30:19.100 | - Oh, people, I mean,

02:30:19.940 | people have done 200 mile ultras, 150 mile ultras.

02:30:22.700 | People, we have a friend, you know,

02:30:24.980 | again, my producer, Rob Moore,

02:30:25.820 | and I have a friend, Ken Rideout,

02:30:27.300 | who does these sorts of races in the Gobi desert.

02:30:31.980 | He did it without any prior training in the desert,

02:30:34.060 | then won.

02:30:34.980 | I mean, but you know, these,

02:30:37.660 | Ken in particular, I'm thinking about right now,

02:30:39.780 | he's a very high energy guy.

02:30:41.660 | I would be concerned about Ken and his family,

02:30:44.640 | not their safety, but their sanity,

02:30:46.900 | if Ken didn't run that much.

02:30:49.180 | Because he's just, he's-

02:30:50.940 | - He needs to burn it off.

02:30:51.860 | - He just has that much energy.

02:30:53.500 | And the whole concept of energy

02:30:54.700 | is something that I'm getting more and more interested in,

02:30:56.860 | you know, as we age, we tend to have less energy.

02:30:58.660 | What is that?

02:30:59.500 | Is it mitochondrial density and function?

02:31:00.940 | Probably.

02:31:01.860 | But what we're talking about here

02:31:03.060 | is a sort of cognitive velocity.

02:31:05.540 | You know, it's not an official term,

02:31:06.940 | but it's one that I'm using more and more nowadays.

02:31:08.580 | - Yeah, that's a good one.

02:31:09.540 | - You know, people should try this.

02:31:12.120 | I'm curious, have you ever done this?

02:31:13.620 | You sit down to read a page of a book,

02:31:16.060 | trying to remember the information.

02:31:17.420 | Maybe it's technical, maybe it's not.

02:31:19.340 | And then you flip the page

02:31:21.240 | and you try and read a page of the very same book

02:31:23.420 | a little bit faster than you're comfortable

02:31:25.260 | while trying to retain the information.

02:31:26.980 | And I find that there's this like sweet spot for reading

02:31:29.200 | where kind of like there's a sweet spot for running

02:31:31.180 | where going a little faster sometimes

02:31:33.360 | actually feels like it requires less effort.

02:31:36.860 | - Yeah, well, it's interesting that you say that

02:31:39.420 | because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently.

02:31:43.220 | So, you know, I'm constantly reading for my job, right?

02:31:48.220 | If I'm not reading journal articles, I'm reading books

02:31:51.300 | for, you know, research that I'm doing, writing books.

02:31:53.780 | And the way I do it is often through an audio form

02:31:58.300 | and I will put the speed rate up to two X.

02:32:02.380 | I'll often go as high as I can go on the app.

02:32:04.860 | And I can retain a huge amount of information

02:32:07.940 | going that fast, but it does require

02:32:10.700 | that I'm very vigilant.

02:32:12.420 | I'm really carefully attending to that audio book

02:32:16.180 | when I'm moving at that speed.

02:32:18.380 | And so it's not what I would do on vacation

02:32:22.220 | when I'm trying to consume a book or information for fun.

02:32:26.540 | You know, there, I just wanna kind of just gently go,

02:32:31.220 | let the paragraph, you know, kind of pass my gaze

02:32:34.460 | and take it in slowly and almost even savor,

02:32:37.780 | savor the words on the page.

02:32:39.380 | But in other contexts, I do channel up the velocity

02:32:43.140 | and it can be incredibly engaging.

02:32:45.140 | It can also be depleting.

02:32:46.920 | So when you have conversations that really

02:32:50.540 | you find immensely rewarding and, you know,

02:32:53.580 | cognitive philosophy, and I love that term

02:32:55.500 | is, you know, a 10 out of 10.

02:32:59.580 | When you're done, do you ever find it a little tiring?

02:33:02.900 | - Not immediately, but my personal challenge in life

02:33:06.340 | is I don't transition states very well.

02:33:09.420 | So it takes me a little while to drop into a state,

02:33:11.780 | but then I stay there.

02:33:12.660 | So I'll come out of here still thinking about

02:33:14.740 | and talking about this to myself or with others

02:33:17.340 | for a fair amount of time, maybe on the order of,

02:33:21.500 | you know, half an hour to hours.

02:33:23.620 | I've learned this about myself over the years.

02:33:26.860 | It's very effective for science and for certain things,

02:33:28.820 | less effective for other areas of life.

02:33:30.620 | I've learned ways to transition faster,

02:33:33.140 | but then I will notice if I do, you know,

02:33:37.620 | record a solo and a guest episode and some intros

02:33:40.920 | and stuff in the same week that, yeah, on Saturday,

02:33:43.780 | I'm kind of like my mind feels like it's like white noise.

02:33:47.140 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:33:48.260 | - And I've long thought that having,

02:33:51.900 | I used to call them low cortisol days, you know,

02:33:54.660 | just a day where I'm just kind of like veg.

02:33:57.340 | - And you're more tired probably on those days, huh?

02:33:59.260 | - Yeah, I just let myself reset.

02:34:01.140 | It was actually in my list of questions

02:34:02.740 | to ask you about resetting,

02:34:04.260 | going into kind of a state of wordlessness

02:34:06.420 | and just letting things just spool out for an hour,

02:34:10.860 | like not trying to control anything,

02:34:13.940 | not trying to control anything in the universe except,

02:34:16.540 | you know, basic functions, right?

02:34:18.700 | - Cook cooking shows, prank reels.

02:34:23.280 | - These are yours.

02:34:24.180 | - These are mine.

02:34:25.020 | And like I am, you know, we often take for granted too,

02:34:29.380 | that the TV in front of us

02:34:31.260 | is another emotion regulation device, right?

02:34:34.020 | And actually people who are creating programs

02:34:36.300 | are deliberately trying to push your emotions

02:34:39.420 | in particular directions from the score that accompanies

02:34:42.540 | movies and the news.

02:34:45.420 | So I don't want my emotions being shifted in a direction

02:34:50.140 | that is contrary to my goals right before I go to bed.

02:34:52.700 | I am at a typically high velocity level throughout the day,

02:34:56.500 | starting with physical stuff and exercise

02:34:59.020 | to the cognitive stuff and the politicking

02:35:02.300 | and the science talks and all that stuff.

02:35:05.220 | When I'm finally done going through my email at night,

02:35:08.740 | I want like a good hour of just total mindless vegetation.

02:35:13.740 | And it puts me in a wonderfully serene state

02:35:17.820 | to then slide into bed,

02:35:19.660 | jump into that mental time travel machine,

02:35:21.500 | like do the fantasizing or savoring,

02:35:23.940 | and then puts me to sleep.

02:35:25.080 | And so, you know, I really value technology there

02:35:28.180 | for helping me do that.

02:35:29.440 | And I think that is the counterpoint

02:35:32.900 | to having this high velocity kind of experience.

02:35:37.300 | I will often, when I teach,

02:35:39.100 | like sometimes I'll teach for like three hours.

02:35:41.780 | So it's, you know, equivalent to what we're doing right now.

02:35:44.180 | It is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding.

02:35:46.820 | And like, this is why I got into this business.

02:35:48.740 | You are, you're, you know, you're having great conversations

02:35:51.620 | and you're hopefully like changing the way people think

02:35:53.540 | about things, getting them to discover interests,

02:35:56.740 | all that good stuff.

02:35:57.780 | Couple hours later when I come home,

02:36:00.900 | first of all, I need a little refractory period

02:36:03.160 | to switch out of work life into home life,

02:36:06.340 | which can often be challenging on the personal front.

02:36:09.180 | Cause like my kids are just waiting there.

02:36:11.180 | Well, my youngest kid is waiting there.

02:36:12.620 | My oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing,

02:36:15.500 | but they want to play right away.

02:36:17.140 | And I need some time just to decompress.

02:36:20.560 | But then once I do, I've got to lean further into that state.

02:36:23.900 | And so that's, that is shifting

02:36:26.860 | and understanding how to shift.

02:36:28.640 | That's a different kind of shift,

02:36:30.780 | but it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals

02:36:34.860 | and trying to understand how to do that well.

02:36:38.980 | And I think that is the subtext to everything

02:36:40.900 | that we are talking about here.

02:36:42.560 | - Yeah, it's such an important aspect of life.

02:36:45.700 | And I do think that everyone would do well

02:36:47.740 | to evaluate for themselves how quickly, well, not well,

02:36:52.740 | you know, we're not trying to place a grade on it,

02:36:54.700 | but how quickly or slowly one transitions

02:36:57.500 | into and out of states.

02:36:59.020 | How much of your thoughts and emotions

02:37:01.500 | and experience you're carrying forward from one context

02:37:05.260 | to the next, I think about that a lot.

02:37:08.140 | And it's something that I try and work with a lot,

02:37:10.940 | especially, you know, arriving home and there's people home

02:37:13.300 | and you want to engage in a particular way.

02:37:15.740 | - And there's actually a framework to help people do this

02:37:18.860 | that I really like.

02:37:20.040 | And it's interesting

02:37:20.880 | because you mentioned the military earlier,

02:37:23.440 | and there's a wonderful corollary.

02:37:26.260 | And it's, I haven't experienced this too often in my life

02:37:29.700 | where I see something in science that scaffolds on

02:37:32.700 | to a practice that another organization, in this case,

02:37:36.260 | the military implements to help people, number one,

02:37:40.600 | identify what are their,

02:37:43.660 | in the context of what we're talking about,

02:37:45.300 | what are their emotion regulation goals?

02:37:47.060 | What are their shifting goals?

02:37:48.420 | And how do you go from having those goals

02:37:53.020 | to bringing them to fruition?

02:37:55.380 | And so in the military, like special forces,

02:37:59.020 | before they have complex, complicated operations,

02:38:02.220 | they will often first think about, okay, what's our goal?

02:38:05.620 | What's the outcome we hope to achieve?

02:38:08.900 | Then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate

02:38:11.180 | that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal?

02:38:14.240 | And they'll go around the room and, you know,

02:38:16.300 | the person in charge will like cold call

02:38:19.140 | Socratic style on folks,

02:38:21.140 | like what is the potential obstacle?

02:38:24.740 | And then for every obstacle that they identify,

02:38:27.880 | they come up with a very specific,

02:38:30.380 | if this happens, then we will do this.

02:38:33.260 | And they have multiple if then plans

02:38:35.820 | for each of those different obstacles.

02:38:37.980 | So if we go back to the research landscape,

02:38:40.060 | there's a technique called WOOP.

02:38:41.540 | Have you ever heard of this?

02:38:42.980 | Okay, so it's, WOOP is an acronym,

02:38:45.480 | and I promise you I wouldn't use any acronyms,

02:38:47.880 | but this is a useful one to,

02:38:50.060 | it's a mnemonic to remember something.

02:38:51.820 | So how do you go from knowing to doing?

02:38:56.980 | WOOP is designed to help you do that,

02:39:00.640 | because what it is explicitly designed to do

02:39:03.400 | is target each of the places

02:39:06.840 | where goal pursuit often breaks down.

02:39:10.140 | Step one, what's your wish?

02:39:12.400 | What's the thing you hope to accomplish?

02:39:13.680 | Let's be really clear about what that goal is.

02:39:16.720 | We often don't stop to even think about

02:39:18.280 | what our specific concrete goals are.

02:39:20.920 | Okay, now that we have that goal,

02:39:23.480 | let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize.

02:39:26.600 | What is the outcome we hope to achieve

02:39:29.120 | if we fulfill that goal?

02:39:30.960 | And what that's doing is giving us this motivation now,

02:39:33.320 | really energizing us to pursue it even further.

02:39:37.840 | Okay, we've got the outcome, but now let's get realistic.

02:39:41.760 | What are the obstacles?

02:39:42.600 | What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me

02:39:45.520 | from achieving those goals?

02:39:47.480 | Right, so let's say my wish is to be more present

02:39:49.960 | with my family after work.

02:39:51.900 | The outcome that I hope to achieve

02:39:53.640 | is to be a better father, a better husband,

02:39:58.640 | to have a richer social life in those regards.

02:40:02.280 | Now, what are the obstacles?

02:40:03.320 | Okay, internal obstacles, I got plenty, right?

02:40:05.920 | Like the temptation to check my email

02:40:08.860 | and get to inbox zero before the night is done.

02:40:11.400 | Or I love my science

02:40:13.320 | and I also wanna do some of that work.

02:40:15.360 | Or maybe I'm gonna get distracted by friends who call.

02:40:19.200 | All of those things are obstacles

02:40:20.700 | that might get in the way of me achieving the goal

02:40:24.120 | of being more present with my family.

02:40:25.960 | Now, the final step, let me come up with an if-then plan.

02:40:30.800 | If I'm tempted to check my email after seven or eight,

02:40:35.800 | then I'm gonna remind myself about how important it is

02:40:40.760 | to be a dad, so I'll do a little reframing.

02:40:44.000 | If someone calls after 9 p.m.

02:40:47.000 | and I'm engaging in activity with my kids,

02:40:50.640 | then I'm gonna politely decline.

02:40:52.400 | And you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans

02:40:54.760 | for different levels of sophistication.

02:40:57.000 | What those if-then plans do

02:40:59.600 | is they try to make emotion regulation automatic

02:41:04.440 | because they identify a specific trigger,

02:41:07.920 | if, that's the if, if this happens,

02:41:09.920 | and then they pair that trigger with a response.

02:41:13.520 | If-then, if-then, you rehearse that.

02:41:15.880 | And this way, when the trigger occurs, boom.

02:41:18.820 | You don't have to stop and think, what should I do?

02:41:20.520 | How should I behave?

02:41:21.680 | You've got the plan and you implement it.

02:41:23.840 | I've got if-then plans for chatter.

02:41:26.760 | If the chatter strikes,

02:41:28.280 | then I do distant self-talk and mental time travel.

02:41:31.760 | If the chatter is too overwhelming

02:41:34.320 | and those two tools don't work,

02:41:35.800 | then I go to nature and I go to my chatter advisors.

02:41:38.200 | And so I have these if-then plans

02:41:40.840 | that are linked up with my goals.

02:41:42.920 | And that's an important technology

02:41:45.220 | that I think we can invite people

02:41:48.640 | to try to exercise in their own lives

02:41:51.500 | to make it more likely

02:41:53.100 | that they will achieve their regulatory goals.

02:41:55.640 | - I love it.

02:41:56.480 | So WOOP, spelled W-O-O-P.

02:41:59.360 | The W, if I have this correct, is what's the goal?

02:42:03.280 | - What's your wish?

02:42:04.240 | - What's your wish?

02:42:06.040 | The first O is the opportunity to energize yourself

02:42:10.000 | around achieving that wish, AKA motivation.

02:42:13.920 | - That's right, what's the outcome you hope to achieve?

02:42:15.560 | Yep. - Great.

02:42:16.960 | Okay, even better 'cause of what you said was shorter.

02:42:19.920 | The first O is what's the outcome you hope to achieve?

02:42:23.180 | The second O, what are the obstacles you can anticipate?

02:42:26.520 | - That's right.

02:42:27.360 | And in the research space,

02:42:28.180 | it's mostly been personal obstacles,

02:42:30.560 | but you can generalize out as the Navy SEALs do.

02:42:35.120 | As an example, that's the branch of the military

02:42:37.040 | I was referring to that essentially uses

02:42:40.400 | a similar kind of framework to,

02:42:42.640 | now you have me self-conscious

02:42:45.480 | about using the word optimize,

02:42:47.520 | to optimize the way they respond to missions and challenges.

02:42:52.520 | This is what they,

02:42:53.880 | so they're not only dealing with internal obstacles,

02:42:56.320 | obviously, but also ones from the world around them.

02:42:58.840 | - Don't worry about using the word optimize.

02:43:01.060 | You did it optimally,

02:43:02.320 | and we'll soon squelch any pejorative

02:43:04.840 | around optimize during this episode.

02:43:07.280 | And then the P in WOOP is the plan, an if-then plan.

02:43:11.360 | - That's right.

02:43:12.200 | - So it's not a vague plan, it's a very specific plan

02:43:15.040 | so that you know exactly which strategies

02:43:17.520 | and steps to implement should A occur, B occur, C occur.

02:43:20.920 | - That's right.

02:43:21.760 | And so it's a general framework,

02:43:24.280 | which in part is, I think, why it has so much value.

02:43:27.200 | And there's research behind this

02:43:28.480 | showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals.

02:43:31.880 | Now, there, of course, will be many situations

02:43:34.760 | that you have not developed WOOPs for.

02:43:37.840 | And that's okay because you're gonna have

02:43:39.960 | all of these other tools in your toolbox

02:43:42.240 | to manage those situations on the fly when they occur.

02:43:46.640 | But then once you encounter new situations

02:43:48.720 | and you discover what tools are effective,

02:43:52.000 | then you learn, you create your WOOP,

02:43:53.720 | and then you could become more strategic,

02:43:55.360 | automatic, and effortless

02:43:57.100 | with how you engage them down the road.

02:43:59.560 | - Earlier, you mentioned attentional spotlights,

02:44:02.800 | and I'm fascinated by this.

02:44:05.080 | I know that most people hear that we can't multitask,

02:44:07.480 | but primates, again, of which we are,

02:44:10.480 | old world primates in particular can do covert attention.

02:44:14.760 | If I were not completely focused on you,

02:44:17.400 | I could focus an attentional spotlight on you

02:44:19.440 | and your voice and pay attention to you,

02:44:20.860 | but I could also monitor components of the room.

02:44:23.200 | I can merge those spotlights.

02:44:25.720 | I can divorce those spotlights.

02:44:27.760 | But it's very hard to generate three

02:44:30.840 | kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once.

02:44:34.200 | It seems like we kind of have two.

02:44:36.320 | Maybe some people can manage three,

02:44:38.480 | but I'm betting most people can't manage more than three.

02:44:41.360 | - Well, and I think it becomes especially difficult

02:44:44.120 | to manage even one when you're experiencing

02:44:46.860 | an emotional episode

02:44:49.280 | that is essentially hijacking your attention.

02:44:53.240 | And attention's really important

02:44:55.000 | to talk about for a few reasons.

02:44:56.460 | So number one, as a species,

02:44:59.040 | we have the most sophisticated

02:45:00.360 | attention deployment system on the planet, right?

02:45:03.600 | We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention.

02:45:08.440 | So we can willfully place it on the things we want

02:45:12.120 | or yank it away from the things we don't want,

02:45:14.280 | or we can saccade our attention back and forth.

02:45:18.600 | When it comes to emotion, though,

02:45:20.340 | we are often taught certain maxims

02:45:22.640 | about how to deploy our attention

02:45:24.920 | that I think can sometimes be problematic

02:45:27.360 | because they fall into the category

02:45:31.080 | of prescriptive advice about magic pills.

02:45:36.080 | So often we hear, for example,

02:45:37.860 | that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions,

02:45:42.260 | things that you're anxious about or fearful,

02:45:44.880 | you should not avoid the problem.

02:45:47.160 | You should focus on it.

02:45:49.520 | And there's been a lot of research on this.

02:45:52.040 | And what we have learned is on the one hand,

02:45:53.540 | chronically avoiding things is not good.

02:45:56.900 | It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes

02:45:59.040 | for our emotional lives

02:46:00.160 | and beyond our physical lives too, our health.

02:46:03.620 | But oftentimes the signature for adaptively coping

02:46:08.620 | with emotional curve balls

02:46:10.860 | is being able to focus on the problem at hand,

02:46:14.340 | deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break,

02:46:17.020 | and then come back to it.

02:46:17.860 | And so this was a question actually I learned

02:46:19.940 | from my grandmother inadvertently.

02:46:22.200 | My grandmother was this very interesting woman

02:46:24.300 | who grew up in Poland during World War II,

02:46:29.300 | had her entire family slaughtered during the war.

02:46:32.260 | One of these kind of devastating experiences,

02:46:34.720 | lived in the forest for years, back and forth,

02:46:38.680 | all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth.

02:46:41.400 | And growing up, she made it out of the war,

02:46:44.360 | moved to the States.

02:46:45.640 | I remember being just so exceptionally curious

02:46:48.120 | about what she experienced

02:46:50.960 | and how she was able to overcome it.

02:46:53.120 | And whenever I would ask her questions about this,

02:46:55.880 | she would always say, don't ask me why or what happened,

02:47:00.480 | why is a crooked letter?

02:47:02.220 | That was a phrase she would use,

02:47:03.560 | which was really interesting

02:47:04.480 | 'cause she didn't speak English very well at all,

02:47:07.080 | heavily accented language,

02:47:08.520 | but she'd mastered this curious idiom,

02:47:11.840 | like why is a crooked letter?

02:47:13.280 | In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up

02:47:17.720 | the past or really trying to understand things.

02:47:20.520 | Your life is awesome, you're in a safe place,

02:47:23.160 | you have a loving family, just enjoy life.

02:47:25.080 | So she's trying to shelter me.

02:47:26.940 | So she, for most of the time that I would know her

02:47:30.840 | during the year,

02:47:31.680 | she would never focus on this horrific event

02:47:36.340 | that she experienced.

02:47:37.180 | Except one day a year,

02:47:39.020 | there would be this remembrance day

02:47:42.100 | and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about,

02:47:46.100 | or I would listen to them talk about their experiences

02:47:48.820 | and the emotions would come out.

02:47:52.740 | So she would dose her exposure to the emotional information.

02:47:57.740 | Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic

02:48:00.560 | in how she deployed her attention.

02:48:03.220 | She was focusing on the emotional issue at times

02:48:06.220 | when it was productive for her,

02:48:07.580 | but at other times when it didn't serve her well,

02:48:10.520 | she occupied her attention

02:48:12.020 | with other kinds of thoughts and experiences.

02:48:15.700 | And a large literature is now beginning to emerge,

02:48:19.000 | which shows that this capacity to be flexible

02:48:23.000 | in how we wield our attention

02:48:24.520 | when it comes to sources of emotional struggles

02:48:27.640 | can be a really, really useful asset.

02:48:30.040 | And so I think it's important to remind folks

02:48:32.920 | that these blunt prescriptions

02:48:35.840 | to like always approach a thing, a problem,

02:48:38.520 | or always avoid it, they aren't always true.

02:48:41.320 | And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation,

02:48:45.680 | I mean the magic, not supernaturally,

02:48:47.720 | but the beauty surrounding it is in being really facile

02:48:51.360 | in how we can deploy our attention.

02:48:53.160 | - Really appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote.

02:48:57.240 | I've long struggled with the fact

02:48:59.960 | that so many of the sayings that were fed,

02:49:03.500 | like absence makes the heart grow fonder.

02:49:07.720 | Oh yeah, well, I also heard out of sight, out of mind.

02:49:10.040 | So which one is it?

02:49:10.880 | - That's right.

02:49:11.720 | - And that's why eventually I became a scientist.

02:49:13.760 | - That's right.

02:49:14.680 | - Because it's both, right?

02:49:16.600 | And you can see this in the fields

02:49:19.440 | of nutrition and exercise.

02:49:21.080 | I mean, there are certain core truths

02:49:23.000 | and I think the goal is always to get to those core truths.

02:49:25.000 | And then there's some flexibility around those truths,

02:49:27.360 | there's margins of error.

02:49:28.580 | I love what she shared, why is it a crooked letter?

02:49:32.440 | It reminds me of the Bob Dylan, like don't look back.

02:49:35.360 | - Yeah.

02:49:36.200 | - I mean, these are profound questions, right?

02:49:39.200 | Like how much of our consciousness should we use

02:49:42.480 | to enforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past

02:49:46.000 | and therefore miss out on the present

02:49:47.640 | and creating a best possible future.

02:49:49.600 | And yet we don't want elements from the past

02:49:52.680 | to kind of ferret into our psyche

02:49:55.200 | and then show up in ways that are destructive.

02:49:56.920 | So it's a complicated dance.

02:49:59.600 | - Oh, I mean, our emotional lives

02:50:01.240 | are anything but straightforward,

02:50:03.000 | but we do have guideposts to steer us

02:50:07.520 | in how we deploy our attention.

02:50:09.520 | And so a couple of common heuristics

02:50:13.920 | that I like to use and describe to folks is,

02:50:17.740 | so let's say something bad happens

02:50:20.480 | and you divert your attention away,

02:50:23.520 | you distract with a positive distraction,

02:50:25.600 | not a harmful distraction.

02:50:27.240 | And then the problem doesn't resurface, keep going.

02:50:31.360 | Like you don't have to go back in time.

02:50:32.920 | There's actually, I experienced some friction

02:50:35.280 | sometimes with my dad around this issue.

02:50:37.720 | So my parents were divorced and I dealt with the baggage

02:50:42.720 | surrounding that experience earlier in my life.

02:50:45.800 | And when I think about it now, I don't get upset.

02:50:48.520 | Like I understand why it happened.

02:50:50.620 | I love both of my parents.

02:50:52.560 | I've moved on, I'm well-adjusted.

02:50:54.720 | But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak

02:50:58.480 | and he will often bring it up.

02:51:00.680 | And when he does, I'm like,

02:51:02.040 | well, we don't have to talk about it.

02:51:03.680 | I'm actually totally fine.

02:51:05.200 | This isn't a source of ongoing distress.

02:51:08.120 | Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us

02:51:12.200 | and move on with our lives.

02:51:13.280 | And when that happens,

02:51:14.480 | that's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well.

02:51:20.600 | We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing.

02:51:24.120 | If on the other hand,

02:51:25.640 | we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting,

02:51:28.600 | and we find thoughts about these experiences

02:51:31.600 | continually intruding into our awareness

02:51:33.960 | and being distracting, that is then a cue.

02:51:36.400 | Okay, well, let's focus in on it.

02:51:38.520 | And then once you focus in on it,

02:51:40.160 | of course there are multiple ways

02:51:41.840 | you can engage with that experience.

02:51:45.200 | Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain

02:51:48.280 | can be useful for facilitating a kind of

02:51:51.640 | what we would call habituation.

02:51:53.280 | So getting used to the discomfort

02:51:55.200 | and realizing it's not so bad

02:51:57.260 | to be in the presence of those negative thoughts.

02:51:59.780 | Maybe you wanna reframe how you think about the circumstance

02:52:02.640 | and we have wonderful cognitive apparatus

02:52:05.280 | to help us reframe things.

02:52:06.640 | We can look at it from different perspectives.

02:52:08.280 | We can focus on the silver lining.

02:52:10.340 | We can contextualize it.

02:52:12.040 | So you have lots of tools to engage with things

02:52:14.380 | once you refocus,

02:52:16.120 | but you don't always need to refocus on the problem.

02:52:20.080 | So you wanna be flexible.

02:52:22.160 | Flexibility and how you deploy your attention

02:52:24.620 | is really the mantra that I personally live by

02:52:28.540 | based on what I know of how all of this works.

02:52:31.340 | There are a couple of caveats I wanna throw out there.

02:52:34.760 | When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding,

02:52:37.460 | I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance.

02:52:41.000 | There are unhealthier forms of avoidance

02:52:44.940 | that we know definitively are not productive,

02:52:49.060 | like substance abuse.

02:52:50.380 | We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule

02:52:53.320 | of always just chronically avoiding, not good.

02:52:57.300 | So you wanna be balanced.

02:52:58.620 | - Could we add to the list of tools for avoidance

02:53:03.820 | that tend to be unhealthy?

02:53:04.920 | And this isn't one that I default to,

02:53:06.740 | but I know someone that told me

02:53:08.340 | that she used to default into over-consumption of story,

02:53:13.340 | like of audio books, not that audio books are bad,

02:53:17.980 | but of fiction audio books,

02:53:19.540 | and just kind of when there was a problem

02:53:21.380 | rather than dealing with the problem,

02:53:23.420 | overindulgence in narratives

02:53:25.180 | that would just kind of consume the mind.

02:53:26.660 | I guess any behavior where we're not dealing

02:53:29.820 | with the kind of itch that we probably need to scratch,

02:53:33.180 | at least for a short while,

02:53:34.740 | is probably gonna be maladaptive in the long run.

02:53:38.100 | - Yeah, I mean, if the problem keeps,

02:53:40.180 | like you wanna listen to what your mind

02:53:44.260 | and body are telling you.

02:53:45.780 | And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing,

02:53:48.260 | that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it.

02:53:51.400 | But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis,

02:53:54.740 | which may not be positive, negative experiences,

02:53:58.420 | as time moves on, sometimes that's all we need

02:54:01.300 | to keep going with our lives.

02:54:03.420 | And we do see in the literature

02:54:05.620 | that when you impose a particular view on folks,

02:54:09.600 | like you have to do it this way,

02:54:12.220 | that tends not to work out very well.

02:54:14.420 | - Most of what we've been discussing today

02:54:17.300 | is one's emotional life and experience

02:54:20.500 | and chatter and inner narratives with oneself

02:54:24.220 | and their environment, technology, nature,

02:54:28.580 | and to some extent, relationships.

02:54:30.340 | But one powerful aspect of emotions

02:54:33.700 | that I think a lot of people wonder about

02:54:35.660 | and frankly participate in

02:54:37.320 | is this notion of emotional contagion,

02:54:39.980 | both positive and negative.

02:54:42.260 | I think of like, you mentioned football.

02:54:44.500 | Football's big in Michigan, right?

02:54:46.020 | - Oh yeah.

02:54:46.860 | - I remember from the movie "The Big Chill,"

02:54:47.740 | they actually go out and play football.

02:54:49.620 | I think they were all alum of University of Michigan.

02:54:52.100 | - It's a religion in the city that I live in.

02:54:54.460 | That's right. - Is it, right?

02:54:55.300 | - Yeah. - Okay.

02:54:56.860 | And how many people go to one of these games?

02:54:59.340 | - So we actually, it's called the Big House,

02:55:00.860 | actually the largest football stadium in the country.

02:55:04.440 | So close to 110,000.

02:55:06.460 | - Whoa, that's a lot of people.

02:55:08.380 | - It's a lot of people and we sing in unison.

02:55:11.060 | And it's actually, I never really was into football

02:55:14.180 | before moving to Ann Arbor and now I embrace it.

02:55:17.160 | It helps when you're the national championships,

02:55:20.260 | which we were champions, which we were last year.

02:55:23.660 | - Congratulations.

02:55:24.760 | - We're working on it this year.

02:55:26.980 | - Cool, maybe sometime I'll go to a game.

02:55:28.380 | I don't dislike football, I like football.

02:55:32.020 | I don't think I've ever been

02:55:33.300 | to a professional football game.

02:55:35.140 | - We should definitely have you out there.

02:55:36.740 | It is a load of fun.

02:55:38.100 | - Okay, I'll skip one game of the Globe Trotter season

02:55:41.300 | to go to a Michigan game.

02:55:44.120 | Emotional contagion occurs in football stadiums.

02:55:48.300 | It occurs in digesting news.

02:55:50.500 | We just had an election.

02:55:51.500 | So a lot of emotional contagion

02:55:53.340 | in essentially opposite directions, post-election.

02:55:56.180 | And on and on.

02:55:59.140 | What do we know about emotional contagion?

02:56:02.700 | It makes sense to me why we would be so prone to it,

02:56:05.900 | but where are the sort of rumble strips,

02:56:10.600 | so to speak, and the ditch on emotional contagion?

02:56:16.860 | That's a driving analogy.

02:56:17.980 | The rumble strips are the goo-goo-goo-goo-goo

02:56:19.740 | that when you start to drift towards the ditch.

02:56:22.040 | Obviously the ditch is losing control

02:56:24.980 | in the negative direction, maladaptive direction.

02:56:26.780 | But how can we start to identify the rumble strips

02:56:30.260 | in emotional contagion?

02:56:31.660 | - Yeah, so emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon.

02:56:34.660 | Emotions can spread within seconds.

02:56:38.880 | We tend to catch emotions more quickly

02:56:43.260 | when we're not sure of how we should be thinking

02:56:46.940 | or feeling in a particular situation.

02:56:48.900 | So we often are referencing other people

02:56:51.940 | in those instances as a source of information.

02:56:55.500 | The people around us, of course,

02:56:57.180 | are a rich source of information.

02:56:59.140 | This is also why we compare ourselves

02:57:00.740 | to other people so frequently.

02:57:02.540 | We're trying to learn something about how to respond.

02:57:05.820 | And we know it can have these cascading effects,

02:57:08.300 | both in everyday life, in both the positive

02:57:11.220 | and the negative direction.

02:57:13.220 | But also, in the digital world,

02:57:18.220 | we see these emotions that can spread really fast too.

02:57:21.500 | So it's a very powerful phenomenon.

02:57:23.860 | It's what I'm often very attentive to

02:57:26.980 | when I come into the classroom.

02:57:29.180 | Like you're trying to, you tend to not wanna have

02:57:32.900 | a negative mood spread through an audience

02:57:35.080 | when you are teaching to them.

02:57:36.260 | And so you're sensitive to that kind of,

02:57:39.160 | certain kinds of displays or tones

02:57:41.060 | that might convey that kind of emotional response.

02:57:44.620 | And I think it's something that we need

02:57:47.340 | to be increasingly aware of,

02:57:49.100 | especially when we're working in any kind of group context.

02:57:53.140 | Like when you're working in a team,

02:57:55.300 | it is really important to keep the team

02:57:58.420 | at the level of emotional tone that you feel

02:58:02.820 | if you're the leader or even just a member of this team

02:58:06.420 | that is committed to it.

02:58:07.700 | You wanna keep that tone at the most productive level

02:58:10.980 | because if it dips below or above,

02:58:13.940 | that can sabotage how well you perform.

02:58:18.940 | And there's a lot of research on that.

02:58:20.780 | - Both from directing my laboratory

02:58:23.300 | for a good number of years and from teaching

02:58:25.660 | and from certainly the podcast,

02:58:26.940 | which is a small team of seven of us,

02:58:29.140 | I'm familiar with what you just described.

02:58:31.500 | And also from being a camp counselor.

02:58:34.460 | That's probably where I learned it,

02:58:35.620 | being a summer camp counselor when I was in college.

02:58:38.100 | That if you get two or three kids

02:58:42.220 | that are like really pissed off about what you have to do

02:58:44.500 | over the next couple of hours,

02:58:46.180 | it can send everything south.

02:58:49.180 | - You have to nip that in the bud right away.

02:58:50.820 | You have to repair that.

02:58:52.500 | And I'm very, very attentive to this

02:58:55.620 | when I am in group context,

02:58:57.780 | especially when I'm leading those groups,

02:58:59.860 | those teams, those labs.

02:59:01.060 | Like really making sure that that kind of negative mojo

02:59:04.260 | does not spread.

02:59:06.820 | - Do you think nowadays on university campuses,

02:59:09.860 | there's more of a tendency for students to raise their hands

02:59:14.020 | and say, "Let's spark an issue."

02:59:16.340 | And I'll just preface this by saying,

02:59:18.900 | a guy that I worked for as an undergraduate,

02:59:21.460 | a physiologist, he told me that when he was teaching

02:59:26.580 | during the Vietnam War era,

02:59:28.020 | he would be in the middle of a lecture

02:59:29.500 | about cold thermogenesis physiology, his area of expertise.

02:59:33.420 | And someone would just stand up and say,

02:59:35.540 | "What about the war in Vietnam?"

02:59:37.620 | And I remember him telling me that story.

02:59:39.140 | I thought, "That's outrageous."

02:59:40.020 | Like, "Really?"

02:59:40.660 | And he said, "Oh yeah, all the time."

02:59:42.340 | And you would have to stop and have to acknowledge it

02:59:44.820 | and let them have their expression.

02:59:46.180 | I thought, "Well, that's wild."

02:59:47.700 | Now we're living in times when that's not all that unusual

02:59:52.100 | in the university classroom and on campuses and online.

02:59:56.660 | So it was interesting that that previous example

02:59:59.220 | from the 1960s and '70s is now very relevant again.

03:00:03.700 | So do we let people emote?

03:00:06.820 | Or as a summer camp counselor, someone pulled me aside

03:00:11.780 | and said, "These kids have a lot of energy.

03:00:13.780 | My only advice is be a channel, not a dam."

03:00:16.180 | - Yeah. - Something that I never forgot.

03:00:17.540 | - Yeah. - It's very useful

03:00:18.420 | in other areas of life to be a channel, not a dam.

03:00:21.060 | - Yeah. - So how do you be a channel,

03:00:23.860 | not a dam when people are having really,

03:00:26.740 | having the need to externalize negative stuff

03:00:31.620 | and it holds the potential for emotional contagion?

03:00:34.180 | - Well, I haven't experienced firsthand the phenomenon

03:00:38.420 | that you're describing in the classroom,

03:00:39.860 | but obviously a lot of my colleagues have,

03:00:41.700 | and we see this playing out on lots of universities.

03:00:43.860 | These are very turbulent times.

03:00:45.860 | Turbulence activates emotion.

03:00:48.660 | And we know going back to an earlier part

03:00:51.620 | of our conversation when people experience strong emotions

03:00:54.500 | are often motivated to share those emotions

03:00:56.740 | with other people.

03:00:57.940 | That often takes the form of vocalizing them.

03:01:00.660 | And that can elicit contagion throughout.

03:01:02.740 | And so now we're beginning to actually understand

03:01:04.980 | how the emotional processes are making their way

03:01:08.500 | through people, groups, and societies.

03:01:11.780 | What should you do in those circumstances?

03:01:16.340 | Well, I think it depends a lot on the context

03:01:19.540 | and what the nature of the emotional response is.

03:01:22.980 | And are there, is the emotion becoming really

03:01:28.500 | counterproductive or harmful?

03:01:30.820 | And there are differing views about

03:01:32.980 | when you should intervene and how to do it.

03:01:36.020 | I think in general though, you bring the playbook

03:01:40.580 | of always wanting to kind of validate

03:01:44.660 | like your emotional experience is a genuine response

03:01:48.420 | that you are having to the situation.

03:01:51.060 | In most cases, yes, we can try to purposefully experience

03:01:55.460 | an emotion in a duplicitous way.

03:01:57.220 | But I think in a lot of cases,

03:01:59.220 | the kinds of phenomenon we're talking about,

03:02:00.820 | like these are just honest emotional reactions.

03:02:03.940 | These are really difficult times.

03:02:05.540 | And I think trying to understand

03:02:09.380 | where those emotions are coming from

03:02:11.460 | is often a really great first step.

03:02:13.860 | I mentioned to you before we started talking

03:02:15.940 | that I had this wonderful conflict mediator

03:02:20.100 | come to one of my classes recently to talk about

03:02:22.900 | how do you not just engage with emotional groups,

03:02:26.820 | but how do you engage with emotional groups

03:02:29.860 | at the same time that are having emotions

03:02:32.260 | because of one another?

03:02:33.940 | And the approach that she has found

03:02:36.100 | to be very successful in her career as a mediator

03:02:40.020 | is to ask folks, to train them,

03:02:42.900 | not to enter conversations

03:02:45.140 | to try to change each other's minds,

03:02:47.140 | but to enter those conversations

03:02:50.020 | with a state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest

03:02:54.820 | and in first and foremost, trying to just understand

03:02:57.540 | the other group's position.

03:02:59.460 | I haven't done that myself,

03:03:00.660 | but it strikes me as a pretty viable approach

03:03:05.220 | to a first step to having conversations

03:03:09.300 | about difficult issues.

03:03:10.260 | And it makes me think about how in the lab,

03:03:14.340 | we often define wisdom.

03:03:17.620 | So wisdom is this concept of,

03:03:22.260 | it indexes how well you are able to deal with

03:03:25.140 | social situations involving uncertainty.

03:03:28.660 | Like we don't know how these social situations

03:03:30.660 | are gonna play out

03:03:31.700 | and wise individuals are skillful

03:03:34.180 | in navigating those circumstances.

03:03:36.500 | How do you define wisdom?

03:03:37.780 | What are its features?

03:03:39.140 | Well, a few of its core features are humility,

03:03:42.100 | recognizing that I don't know everything,

03:03:44.500 | a commitment to perspective taking,

03:03:46.740 | putting myself in the other person's shoes,

03:03:50.020 | dialecticism, recognizing that the world

03:03:52.420 | is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing

03:03:55.540 | and we need to be aware of that.

03:03:58.500 | And then also a general orientation

03:04:00.740 | towards the social good,

03:04:02.980 | like doing good in the world.

03:04:04.420 | And it strikes me that entering these difficult situations

03:04:08.020 | with that kind of mindset

03:04:10.020 | is potentially productive for bridging divides.

03:04:14.500 | - I love that.

03:04:16.500 | And what an appropriate area for us to round up in.

03:04:21.460 | I think that right now, clearly things are tense,

03:04:24.020 | but what you've talked about today,

03:04:27.140 | and at least from what I understand

03:04:29.060 | of how the human mind works in and around emotions,

03:04:31.460 | our own and observing others and potentially contagion

03:04:35.860 | is that these tools can really help us do better.

03:04:39.380 | That they're not just research papers,

03:04:42.420 | they are implementable chunks of knowledge.

03:04:47.060 | And in some cases, such as what you've discussed today,

03:04:49.540 | real gems.

03:04:50.260 | So for that reason,

03:04:53.140 | and for taking the time out of your research schedule,

03:04:55.140 | I mean, you're a researcher, teacher,

03:04:56.660 | you're a dad, you're a husband,

03:04:57.620 | you do many things.

03:04:58.740 | You make it to football games somehow,

03:05:00.100 | also into the gym where you don't drop dumbbells

03:05:02.660 | on people's faces intentionally

03:05:04.580 | because you realize the dire consequences.

03:05:06.580 | You're just doing a ton of amazing work in the world.

03:05:09.380 | I'd heard about Enred Chatter some time ago,

03:05:12.420 | and I just think it's incredible

03:05:15.140 | what you've brought to people's attention

03:05:16.580 | that has always, no pun intended,

03:05:19.380 | been on and in their minds.

03:05:20.900 | - Yeah.

03:05:21.220 | - And I'm sure there are others in your field,

03:05:24.100 | but I want to specifically thank you

03:05:27.460 | on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching

03:05:30.020 | for paying so much careful research attention

03:05:33.540 | and public education attention

03:05:35.700 | to this thing that we call chatter

03:05:38.340 | and the inner voice and emotion regulation,

03:05:40.500 | because this is really what makes up our lives.

03:05:43.220 | It's as important in my mind,

03:05:45.620 | certainly as cardiovascular health

03:05:47.540 | or any other aspect of mental or physical health.

03:05:50.500 | So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching,

03:05:54.660 | thank you so much.

03:05:55.540 | Please come back again

03:05:57.060 | because your research is evolving.

03:05:58.340 | We'd love to hear about the next steps.

03:06:00.420 | We'll definitely provide links to your work

03:06:02.340 | and to the upcoming book,

03:06:03.460 | which comes out in February of 2025.

03:06:05.300 | Do you want to tell us the title of the book?

03:06:06.740 | - That's right.

03:06:07.380 | It's called "Shift Managing Your Emotions

03:06:09.620 | So They Don't Manage You."

03:06:10.740 | - Great.

03:06:11.300 | And presumably it's available for presale now or soon?

03:06:14.660 | - Yeah, it's available.

03:06:16.260 | And it is essentially designed,

03:06:20.740 | it is written to kind of just open the book

03:06:25.700 | on what emotions are,

03:06:26.900 | what we often get wrong about them,

03:06:28.580 | and what are the tools that we have to reign them in.

03:06:30.740 | And my hope is that it addresses this big problem

03:06:35.300 | that I think we've been facing for a while,

03:06:37.780 | which is how to wrangle these emotions

03:06:39.220 | that sometimes get the best of us.

03:06:40.580 | - Great.

03:06:41.220 | Well, I am personally going to order a copy by presale.

03:06:44.420 | I insist on that.

03:06:45.380 | I don't take free copies.

03:06:46.580 | I buy books because I'm a believer in books.

03:06:49.540 | So thank you for writing "Shift"

03:06:50.980 | and come back and talk to us again.

03:06:52.900 | - Well, thanks for having me.

03:06:53.860 | It was an incredible conversation.

03:06:55.540 | So I appreciate it.

03:06:56.260 | - I feel the same way.

03:06:57.380 | Thank you so much.

03:06:58.020 | - Thank you.

03:06:58.420 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

03:07:00.980 | with Dr. Ethan Cross.

03:07:02.580 | I hope you found it to be as informative

03:07:04.500 | and as actionable as I did.

03:07:06.740 | To learn more about Dr. Cross's work

03:07:08.660 | and to find links to his previous book, "Chatter,"

03:07:11.060 | as well as his forthcoming book, "Shift,"

03:07:13.540 | "Managing Your Emotions So They Do Not Manage You,"

03:07:16.580 | please see the show note captions.

03:07:18.420 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

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03:08:22.740 | to protocols in the form of brief one to three-page PDFs.

03:08:26.180 | So these are protocols that describe

03:08:28.020 | the essential steps to take, for instance,

03:08:30.180 | to optimize your sleep,

03:08:32.100 | to improve your dopamine regulation,

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03:08:48.500 | Thank you once again for joining me

03:08:49.940 | for today's discussion with Dr. Ethan Cross.

03:08:52.820 | And last, but certainly not least,

03:08:54.900 | thank you for your interest in science.

03:08:57.300 | (upbeat music)

03:08:59.880 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience

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