I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh path A versus path B. And I was in that place. I was actually choosing between a job at one institution and another institution, each of which had tremendous advantages, neither had any striking disadvantages, but it was a really hard decision.

And those close to me at that time will tell you that it was just brutal. - Been there. - Yeah, I made everybody around me suffer tremendously to the point where people were just like flip a coin. Now I'm not an indecisive person. I think it's one of these things where big decisions I think deserve a lot of time and attention and it was a time constrained thing.

So I was poring over this pro cons list. I was watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out best ways for decision-making. I was trying to, I actually- - Isn't it amazing by the way, when we're in those situations and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position.

The things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are wacky. Like I'm sure you were Googling things that you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees and- - Oh yeah. - I mean, it turns out- - They're mathematical models that like there's the, actually my colleague at NYU, Tony Mavishin, I forget the name of the model, but there's a model about how many towns you should evaluate.

It's an old kind of old example of a towns you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business. Like, is it two, is it three? And there's an optimal strategy there. In any event, most of it wasn't helping. And I do believe that at some point you don't want too many committee members 'cause it just gets confusing.

So the two best pieces of information came from the following practices. One was a colleague said, "Forget all the superficial pro-con stuff." And I actually think this has proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me. He said, "Take yourself through a typical weekday in one place versus the other.

Wake up, where are you going to go? How are you going to travel? Take yourself through the practicals of the day because everything else falls away once you're at a place or you're in a type of relationship. Take yourself through a given day. Don't think about the relationship or the institution that you're going to work for, the school you're going to go to.

That's important, but take yourself through the entire day." So I did that. And then he said, "Also do it on a weekend because in our profession, we tend to work all the time, but occasionally you take a day off." And so that was very useful. The other thing that was very useful, which was completely surprising to me was at that time, I was training in a boxing gym and I was doing some speed bag work and decent at it.

You get into a rhythm. And what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way. These central pattern generators, as we call them in neuroscience, take over. And you're just kind of turning your hands over in a way and like every once in a while you can think, okay, I need to put a little more hip swivel into this or a little more head movement and practice my slips or something.

But it's largely unconscious after a certain point. And I was doing that. And all of a sudden, boom, a thought just geyser to the surface. And I made my decision. And that was my final decision. And I never went back from that decision. And so it was in the act of not trying to parse things to words that words sprung up from my, whatever, unconscious somewhere in my brain, cortical or subcortical, I don't know.

And it was like, that's it. And I was overwhelmed by that. And again, I don't share all that because I think it's speed bags or it's the example I gave before that's gonna solve it for everybody. But that these answers to hard problems seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches, verbal construction of complete sentences with paper or deliberately like Dyseroth does.

And then also like not trying to get an answer at all, boom, the answer shows up. What in the world is that? - So it speaks to this idea that first of all, there are no one size fits all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and decisions we have to face.

So there are different modalities to self-discovery and insight. And yes, you can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people. And then you can also allow your unconscious problem-solving machinery to do its thing. We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not infrequent.

Many people report having moments of insight when they are not otherwise engaged. And one line of thinking is that we are doing problem solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness. So I actually, this may be the wrong usage of terms, but I weaponize this process for myself.

So before I exercise, before I get on the treadmill or row or do whatever I'm gonna do, I will load up the particular issue that I'm trying to find a solution for. Sometimes it's how to word a paragraph. It might be if I'm working on a book, how to find the right kind of story.

If it's an interpersonal issue that I've gotta smooth over, I load that up and then I just get on the device. It's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing. And I don't really think about it in any fixed way, but inevitably the ideas, the potential solutions bubble up into awareness.

That is a real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to have success in various areas of my life. It also identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious. So we didn't get to all the benefits of the, there's one more benefit of the inner voice that I wanna get to, but I'm gonna take a detour here for a second 'cause I think this is really important.

If we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice, you're basically continuing to loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress. What if this happens? Why did this happen? I'm such an imbecile. You're just continually going over that negative phenomenon or experience.

You're not making any headway. One of the things that that does is it consumes our attentional resources. It acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources. And so what that means is when I get on the treadmill or rowing machine and that's typically the time that I spend innovating, right?

Coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally, I don't have, my mind's not working to solve those problems. Instead, it is stuck dealing with this other muck where I'm not getting anywhere. And so we actually see, if you look at the literature, that one of the ways that chatter undermines people is it interferes with their ability to focus and solve problems.

And that's just one way it undermines people, but that is a huge, huge liability. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)