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

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And I'm wearing these red lens, wind down roka glasses, because we are recording this late at night, which is unusual for us, and bright light, in particular, short wavelength bright light in the blue and green part of the spectrum, quashes melatonin, and makes it hard to sleep. And I want to sleep tonight. These red lens glasses filter out the green and blue short wavelengths that would otherwise disrupt my sleep.

My guest today is Dr. Ethan Cross. Dr. Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. He is also the author of the best-selling book, Chatter, The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It.

Today's discussion is a really special one because we discuss something that each and all of us have, which is a voice in our head that is our voice, and that voice can range from encouraging to discouraging. It can be repetitive in ways that can be very intrusive, and it has a profound effect on our emotional state, our confidence, our levels of anxiety, and indeed what we are capable of achieving in life.

Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory has done groundbreaking research to understand what is the origin of this voice in our heads and can and should we control it? And indeed, the answer is yes. Today's discussion gets into many things that people struggle with and many things that you can do to improve your life, such as how to regulate the chatter in your head, how to overcome ruminations and intrusive thoughts. And we also discuss what to do with your actual voice.

For instance, data pointing to the fact that venting your negative emotions to others is actually bad. It tends to amplify bad emotions. We talk about that research. We also talk about other forms of outward speech and inward speech, that inner voice that you can partake in in order to improve your emotional state and shift your emotional state. So today's discussion really centers around common questions and common scenarios and common challenges that everybody grapples with.

And of course, we all have a voice in our head. Today, you're going to learn to listen to it, to regulate it, and indeed to steer it in the direction of mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm also excited to tell you that Dr. Ethan Cross soon has another book coming out entitled, Shift.

managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And I tremendously enjoyed Chatter, his first book, and I very much look forward to reading Shift when it comes out. We provide links to the work in Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory, as well as links to his previous and forthcoming book in the show note captions.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Great to be here. Right before we went hot mics, as they say, we were talking about interrupting one another. And the fact that you're from New York, I'm going to try not to interrupt you because the audience doesn't like that. However, I am very interested in what you're going to tell us about emotion regulation, but especially this thing that you call chatter, the voice in our heads.

And prior to learning about your work, I always thought that chatter and the voice in our heads was, you know, overwhelmingly negative. That's what we hear. How do you combat that negative voice in one's head? But you have some very interesting ideas about the utility of chatter, like maybe how it even arose and what it's for. So maybe we start there.

Yeah, so I think this is a great question because the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is, right? And actually, sometimes I get up there and speak to people and

They often wonder what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads. And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool of the human mind. So when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives. And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things. So just from the outset,

Let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations. I think of chatter as a dark side of the inner voice, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But having the ability to silently use language,

That is a boon to the human condition. So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves. What's your favorite sports team? The Harlem Globetrotters, because they're undefeated, as I understand. Oh. Yeah. Best record in any sport. I don't think they've ever lost a game. Do they ever play against other teams? The Washington Generals. Okay. Sorry for the Washington Generals. So if you were to go to a game and root for them, what would you say?

Go Globetrotters. Go Globetrotters. Okay, can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now?

Yes. Okay. You've just used your inner voice. So your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system, basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary but totally ordinary also. Your verbal working memory system, it's a mouthful, lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cell phones,

How did you memorize phone numbers? Like, what would you do? Repeat it in your head? Yeah, and it had sort of a song to it. Yeah. And I can remember my childhood phone number still even though that.

Number is long since gone. Even the whole area code's gone, in fact. Really? Well, the number is probably still there, but under a different area code. I know, because I tried calling it every once. Interesting. Well, it's funny. When I go through this content, I give talks or workshops. I often say, 2090501, repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. I'm like, go give it a shot. Give them a call. So for all I know, that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not my phone number.

But that's your verbal working memory system. You go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you're supposed to get. Most people don't do that out loud like, oh crap, what was I supposed to get? Milk cheese, eggs. Repeat that silently in your head. So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do. Keep information active, verbal information.

Your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan. So before presentations or interviews, a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event. Do you ever ever do this? Yeah, I mean, my mode of preparation for things like solo podcasts and talks is it's not scripted outline by line in advance, but I have a structure in my mind and it's more like

Remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and then the rest just kind of falls out Yeah, we have a very similar similar style I will I will bullet out what the key ideas are and as long as I could bullet that out I am good to go But I will also rehearse those bullets in my head ABCD so

that you're using your inner voice as well. Now, before a big presentation, like a live event, I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through when I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event. Ask about the walk when I prepare for live events.

or solo podcasts, and long before I was involved in either of those activities for lectures of any kind or classroom discussions where I had to stand up in front of the class, I would find that walking and listening to a song would maybe simultaneously, maybe separately, would dramatically shape the kind of cadence and energy

of the delivery of the talk. Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up songs there. So if you want to take a little detour here, so in my new book, Shift, we talk about, or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation, sensory experiences are one powerful, and I would argue often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions. So if you ask people, why do you listen to music?

What do you think most people say? It makes me feel good. Feel, right? It's about emotions. Feel good. So one study, the number was around like 95, 96% of participants who were asked said exactly gave the answer that you just gave. But then if you look at in other studies, hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to push your emotions around?

The number of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%. Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions. I actually, um, uh, an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer. I lived for these

soccer games on the weekend. I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would, you know, go crazy on the sidelines. It was just such joy to just watch these kids play. And typically my daughter was really excited to go to the game. But one morning, she was just like not into it at all. She was bummed. Like she was bummed out. It was bumming me out. I was, you know, catching her emotions. We can talk about emotional contagion later. And, um,

gotten to the car and it just so happened that my cell phone was connected and the next song on the playlist happened to be journeys don't stop believing. So you know the song I presume. Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please.

The song comes on and I start jamming out to it. And I was singing out loud like an embarrassing dad. And then I look in the back seat and I find her bopping her head. And then the chorus comes, we get really excited and then I pull up to the soccer.

field, and she just bursts out of the car and is invigorated. That is the power of music to impact us. So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I'm getting ready to get in that mental frame of mind. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many athletes do this as well. They've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for

pointing our emotional experience, our emotional trajectory, and then direction we wanted to point. It's interesting. I was thinking about music in reference to shifting emotion as you just gave an example of feeling like a motivated and then your daughter's motivated by the don't stop. I'm not going to sing it. Keep going. We'll do it together. We'll not do that. Someone will cut the cloak and they'll run it out. They'll spool it out and then, no, I have a truly terrible singing voice.

I wonder has the study ever been done or something similar to this where people who are feeling pretty good or very good are exposed to sadder music and vice versa? People are feeling sad to sort of ecstatic music or positive lyrics because I've often wondered whether or not humans like or dislike

when things or people try and shift their state. I know in myself, when I'm feeling upset about something, I don't want to feel upset. I don't think anyone wants to feel upset.

If I hear a song that's positive, there's a moment where I'm like, I can feel it kind of pulling on me. And you sort of know, I could follow that trajectory and probably get out of this. And sometimes one does and sometimes one doesn't. And this gets to, I think, a more fundamental issue, which is why I'm asking, which is, are we supposed to feel our emotions as a way to sort of dissolve them when we don't want them, kind of the cathartic approach? Or would listen to sad music when we're sad, just amplify the sadness?

These are great questions, and they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them serially. So number one has the study been done when you expose people to different kinds of music, sad versus

arousing, you know, happy music. Do you see that push people's emotions around? Yes. In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments. So we want to induce a particular kind of state. We can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or

negative emotional experiences. So image is being another sensory modality vision. So that's number one. Number two, there's this very interesting phenomenon where when we are in a particular emotional state, let's say we're feeling sad,

We often don't reflexively seek out the happy music. We don't go to a journey. Instead, we go to a del, right? We're going to Chicago. I'm giving you my age bracket here, right? Like the music that has sad associations for me. So there's this mood congruency.

If I'm feeling a certain way, I'm going to go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me. Why on earth would we do that? Are we all masochistic? Do we just want to feel even worse? This gets at I think a critically important point that is not always talked about, which

is all emotions are functional when they are experiencing the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long. So sadness as an example is an emotion we experience when we've experienced some loss that we can't rectify right away. Something has happened and you can't fix that. So you've lost someone. And so what does this emotion do? Well, it

hijacks the way we are thinking, feeling, and our bodies are responding. So it motivates us to introspect, to turn our attention inward, to reflect on this situation, to now try to make sense of it. Something really important in my life has happened. I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life so I can find meaning and move on.

My physiology is slowing down so I can engage in that slow introspection. But what's also really interesting about sadness is it's also impacting my facial display, giving a sign to all of the people in my environment to say, hey,

Maybe we should check up on that person, that guy, because he looks like he's on his own in a corner. Can you detect when someone is sad if you see a sad facial expression? Yes. When I used to teach the summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor in the North Shore or Long Island, the students would come in from all over the world. I've been there. It's a great place. It's awesome. Summer camp for scientists, all of their laboratories all year.

Mike, I eventually was director of a course there and my co-director and I used to have this debrief at the end of the first day or two where we would talk to one another and we would, you know, go over the list of names and we'd say, and she was remarkably good at this. Just extraordinary, like a superpower at saying, you know, I think everyone's settling in well, but I noticed that so and so was kind of like, might not be adjusted to the jet lag or might not be acclimating so well. It's a very tight knit group and

The course is quite long for a course like that, but it's important that everybody kind of feel engaged early on. And people have a tendency to dominate in those intellectually competitive environments. And she could just pinpoint who it was that was feeling a little bit outside the group. We knew how to ameliorate that really quickly. And from her, I learned a bit of how to recognize the signs. And it was rarely just facial expression included that.

and some other cues that she just seemed to have a unconscious or conscious genius around. So for me, I learned some of that from her. I like to think I got better at it, but I think some people are just extraordinarily good at that detection.

and it enhances social interactions. And so some people are really good at detecting it, others are really good at displaying it. I'm gonna go back to my daughter. So if something happens where she feels sad, she exhibits this exaggerated response.

like she'll stick out her lower lip. And even if I'm kind of upset at her, like it is amazing the power that that has on me. It is so, so beautifully manipulative, you know, manipulative. And it's a testament to the power that these displays can have on us. So I want to go back to one other question you raised in your last comment. And we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality.

You raised the question about being shifted by others, other people, and perhaps either just our surroundings, music or spaces. Sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted.

And in fact, when other people try to do that, it can elicit what we call reactants, like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in the particular direction. I think that's a really important point that we need to be aware of as people living and working in these social environments where we're often well-intentioned, but sometimes our well-intentioned behaviors can backfire. And so there's this beautiful research which shows that

If you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them, that can blow up in your face. Because what it does is it often communicates to people that you are thinking that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances. And most of us, like, we're motivated to think that we're capable of handling ourselves.

And so there are still ways you can help people in those circumstances. It's called providing invisible support, which involves providing support to the person who can genuinely benefit from it, but not shining a spotlight on the fact that that is what you are doing. So how might this transpire? There's some really simple things you could do. So let's say my wife is

really overwhelmed with stuff. And she hasn't asked me for help, but I know she is at her wit's end work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate. I can, I can proactively do things to lessen her burden. If it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning and the groceries, I'm doing that voluntarily. I'm doing that and I'm not coming home and saying, Hey, sweetie, look what I did today. I did all these things. You know, can I have a pat on my back? That's not what we're talking about.

It's about your group, your lab is working under a deadline to submit a grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab. It's those little things that can help. Give you two more examples. Let's say that someone on your team is really struggling with their ability to translate their work for

for popular audiences, and that's something they're motivated to do. Really important skill for scientists to be able to translate what they do for others to consume. Before you pull them aside and say, hey, you know, I noticed that you're stumbling on a few different issues, and here are a couple of things I think you can do better. Before you do that direct intervention, you might have a team meeting where you share out best practices. Hey, what are the two things that I've learned that

really have benefited my ability to communicate with different audiences. What you're doing there is you're getting people the resources they can benefit from, but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are directing it to them. So it's kind of a backdoor way of helping or of shifting. The last tool I'll mention brings it back to sensation.

One of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is through touch, tactile sensation. What's the first thing that you do with a child to sue them when they are born? Hold them, hold them. Skin-to-skin contact. I remember both times my kids were born. I was like, I want to get in on that because my wife got first dibs with both of our daughters. I want some of that skin-to-skin contact.

That doesn't end after we leave the womb, the comfort that we experience, the release of stress-fighting chemicals that occurs when affectionate embraces are registered. That continues throughout the lifespan. So if my daughters who don't particularly like dad to volunteer advice to them on

most things nowadays. If I know they're having a bad day, I'll go over and I'll rub their back in a totally uncreepy way. That is an important caveat we should give to everyone who's listening. What we're talking about here is affectionate but not creepy or unwanted touch.

It is touch that is mutually desired and there is some research which shows actually that when it is not desired you don't get these benefits and in fact you get the opposite plus usually my lawsuit as well.

Um, I definitely believe that as a primate species, which we are, we are old, old world primates. Um, I think they call it allopathic grooming. You'll see these images of these monkeys and lots of different species of, of primates. Um, you know, just sitting nearby one another where one just has its, even just its, um, it's hand. Yeah. It's Paul. It's hand. Yeah. Oh, it's Paul on the, um, the one next to it.

And they'll just sit like that for long periods of time. Yeah. And then sometimes they're doing like an active grooming of removing, you know, Paris. This is very important in the primate world, as we know. But, you know, grooming and, and, you know, picking in these kinds of things, you see it in couples, it's actually can be kind of endearing. I suppose at its extremes, it's kind of gross, but, you know, it's, it's rather endearing to see somebody kind of like remove a piece of,

lint off somebody, you know, their partner's a jacket or, you know, just, or even just touch that is, it's not, it doesn't look like it's geared towards any specific outcome. Yeah. Right. It's, uh, and it doesn't necessarily appear romantic or that it's grooming. So maybe the lint example isn't the best as one, but we just see people that are just like, actually on the flight down this morning, because I had a fly in early, it was, I was sitting on the aisle seat in the middle was, uh,

boy, he was probably 14, 15, and his mom was at the window seat. And I went up to use the restroom, came back, and he had fallen asleep on his mom's shoulder. And I took a look. It was a very endearing moment. And then when we landed, I said, you know, the ability to sleep anywhere is a superpower. And he said, I learned it from my dad. And he said, and it was a moment where I just thought, it was just a very pleasant thing to see them in this

touch on the plane, he clearly felt comfortable enough to do that. Remember thinking humans were a lot like the other primates. Yeah, there's a beauty to it. It is a tool. It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for

I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions. And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work. To the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all, we'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure.

But self-control, emotion regulation, let me roll up my sleeves and really get in there, yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions and some of the tools that we have are effortful.

One example would be expressive writing. It's a wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences. You sit down and just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days. This is the pennebaker. This is the pennebaker writing effect. This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect free. You could argue intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you. You have vast amounts of data supporting the practice. You have vast amounts of data.

deserves, in my opinion, if not a psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize, I don't know what that is, but it deserves real deep praise for developing that method because it's essentially zero cost, it takes a little bit of time, and there's just hundreds of studies. Hundreds of studies showing that these 10 to 15 minute cathartic writing, just free associative writing, usually, as I understand with a, with a, usually it's probably better.

We did an episode where I talked about this and received a note from

from him and was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong. In fact, he was pleased with it. I think that he deserves a lot of credit. Well, we had powerful tool for self-healing. We actually just restarted a prestigious speaker series at Michigan, the Cats Newcom speaker series, which is designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work.

because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity. And the butt, though, here is that it's an effortful tool. It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effortful. But we also know that

We don't like exerting effort as a species. We like to conserve our resources as much as possible. So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And these sensory shifters, music, you know, looking at images, right? These are modality taste, touch. These are ways of pushing your emotions around

pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch, like when your, your daughter's not in a great mood, or when you want to get pumped up before an important event can be quite useful. And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them. So that's my plug for, uh, for since, for sensory shifters.

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verbal working memory, keeping in verbal information active for short periods of time. And we talked about simulating and planning things, like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to

self-control and motivation. So you exercise, you've talked about exercising. I try to exercise six days a week, although some are short workout, some are longer. You ever talk to yourself on your exercise?

Oh, all the time. So let's hear it. The world wants to know, Andrew, what do you say to yourself on your exercise? Depends on how well rested I am, how motivated I am. I'll give two examples at the opposite poles of the motivational scale. I was traveling two weeks ago and I was doing some exercises for that. There's a muscle on the back of the shoulder, the rear deltoid.

And I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train, but it's a very important one. That's when you do this one. You're right. For shoulder posture and stability and got trained. That was that muscle group because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating like, you know, thumbs pointing toward the belly button and shoulders rolling forward thing. And there are a number of reasons why it's important. So yeah, yeah, I do the rear delt thing and I sat down to do the first work set after a couple warmups. And I remember thinking like,

I love training. I love training. I have since I started training when I was 16. And I thought to myself, for some reason, I don't want to do this this morning. And then I thought, okay, David Goggins would probably start swearing at himself in his head. So I started that a little bit.

That didn't really work for me. Sorry, David. And then I thought I'm going to go through every possible inner voice I can think of. So I heard Jocko Willink's voice, some friends with Jocko and her just saying like, yeah, whatever, you're just weak, you know, or just like do it anyway kind of mentality. And I just started cycling through all of them. And I made a deal with myself.

that when I ran out of voices to use, that's when I would stop the set. And I probably tripled the number of repetitions that I would normally get with that weight. So it was like one part motivation, one part distraction, one part frustration. And I was just pulling from the catalog of possible voices of kind of coach like voices and worked out pretty well. And then at the other extreme, I can recall many times because I put effort into it where

I'm well rested, I'm hydrated, get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system, which I love. And I sit down and train and I absolutely love to train under those conditions. The sun is shining, music is playing. And I just remember this was during a set. This was a leg day, always the hardest day, set of heavy hacks squats and just thinking,

I love this, but I have this inner voice where every time I start a repetition, I go through the thing where I brace my midsection so I don't hurt my back and I always look directly at the ceiling and I think about my Bulldog Costello. And I think, I'm gonna do this one for you. I'm gonna do this one for you. And I know at those moments, my inner voice goes to, he would probably just be sitting there like, why are you working this hard? Bulldogs don't like to work.

So I'm not really in a complete sentence, generation, inner voice kind of thing. But you have a very rich inner world, right? You're verbal working memory stream is filled with words when you are working out. Yeah, and I'll tell you this. I was gonna ask you this later in the episode, but maybe it's relevant now. I think it is. When I was a kid, after my parents would tuck me in to go to sleep at night, I used to lie in bed

and rehearse voices that I had heard throughout the day. And I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice. And then I'd make them say different things just for my own entertainment. So I could have them say whatever I wanted, but in a particular voice. And my friend sometimes teased me that I'll give people voices, like I'll give someone like a Marge Simpson voice or something. I'll just, they're like, she doesn't sound like that at all, but I'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind. So yeah, a lot of chatter in there, a lot of voices. Yeah.

Not super organized. It's not like I'm constructing a play. It feels like things guys are up. I toy with them, maybe, and then, but it's kind of a mishmash. It's not super regimented. These aren't complete sentences. Well, one of the reasons why the penny baker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized.

And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self talk, so the chatter, right? You're an idiot, such an idiot or you're looping over a problem without making any progress.

Putting those words in, you know, actually taking that inner-seaman and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences, there's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking. Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all. It can go in all sorts of directions. And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.

So glad you're bringing this up. Our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Carl Diceroff. He's a bioengineer. He's a practicing psychiatrist. He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience. He developed these light-sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neurons and animal models, but also now in human clinical work as well. And one thing that he shared was that

after he puts his kids to sleep, I think now they're grown, but in the evening he'll sit, deliberately sit still, completely bodily still, close his eyes and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so, maybe more. And I thought to myself, wow, that's a very disciplined practice. It also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically

thinking in complete sentences is not the default of the mind. So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is. He shared a few of them on that podcast episode, but I'm sure there are others as well. But I tried it. It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives, kind of the stream sort of split into your tributaries and then you dissolve into sleep or

Meditation experience. And almost dreamlike state where you know, these liminal states. Yeah. Well, that's I think where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality. So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not, if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right? Because I would be unable to

have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall it, a chatter provoking experience. So think about something negative that's happened to you. And then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it. So, I, a penny baker writing like condition or talk about it to someone else.

The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking, because there's no guard rails to the way we think that we are taught, I should add, because we're going to give people guard rails later in this episode. So in addition to using the penny baker approach, and by the way, we'll provide a link to some resources for the penny baker journaling, because there's some free online resources that I think are really powerful for people to use if they want to use as a template.

Um, for cathartic reasons or just, you know, get one's mind around a problem or something I'm very familiar with waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of not a storm in there, but a bit too disorganized to, um, to get my head right, you know, inside need things to get my head right. Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's writing. Sounds like journaling is just a really useful practice overall.

It's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID. And we gave them

a series of tools that they could check off if they use the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things. Number one, there are no one size fits all solutions for folks. So, remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person A versus person B.

Number two, it was seldom the case that people used one tool. In general, people used on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take home because I am often asked as, for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions?

I don't have the favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same. So it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's similar to physical exercise. You're not only going to work

out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day, you would have like funky looking shoulders if you did, right? And you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body. You're doing multiple things and the multiple things that you do to exercise, I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise, yet we may well be equally fit. Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me, but you get the drift. So this is beautiful.

uh, variability to how we manage our in our worlds to bring it back to expressive writing. We found that expressive writing when people used it was really, really useful. It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety, but it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much. And I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.

ask another question about movement that falls on the other end of the spectrum to what we're talking about now, which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing in order to parse an idea or work through an emotional state. In 2015, by the way, I use these anecdotes, not because I want to focus on me, but just as generalizable anecdotes. The specifics here don't matter, but I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh

you know, path A versus path B. And I was in that place. I was actually choosing between a job at one institution and another institution, each of which had tremendous advantages. Neither had any, you know, like striking disadvantages, but it was a really hard decision. And those close to me at that time will tell you that it was just brutal. I've been there. Yeah. I made everybody around me suffer tremendously to the point where people are just like flip a coin. Now, I'm not an indecisive person. I think, um,

You know, it's one of these things where big decisions, I think, deserve a time and attention and it was a time constraint thing. So I was pouring over this pro cons list. I was watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out best ways for decision making. I was trying to... It isn't an 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. I'm sure you were Googling things that you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees. It turns out they're mathematical models.

Actually, my colleague at NYU, Tony Mauschen, I forget the name of the model, but there's a model about how many towns you should evaluate and kind of an old example of it. 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 because it just gets confusing.

that the two best pieces of information came from the following practices. One was a colleague

said, forget all the superficial pro-con stuff. 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, you know, well, in our profession, we tend to work all the time, but occasionally you take a day off.

And so that was very useful. 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 know, you get into a rhythm. And what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way, these central pattern generators, as we call them in neuroscience, take over and you're just kind of, you know, turning your hands over and away and you're,

Like every once in a while, you can think, okay, you 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, I 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 through words that words sprung up from my whatever unconscious somewhere in my brain, cortical or something, cortical, 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 speedbags or it's the example I gave before that's going to 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 Diceroth does. And then also like...

not trying to get an answer at all. Boom, the answer shows it. 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 got to

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 want to get to, but I'm going to take a detour here for a second because 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 attention 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.

Is there an association between trauma and elevated levels of internal chatter? I would say even more than an association. So we often think of chatter as what we call it as a trans-diagnostic mechanism. So it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders. So what that means is chatter refers to a process, a process of looping, turning the same material over and over in your head.

The content of that looping can take many different forms. You could inject some sad cognitions in there. I'm a shit, such a shit.

Is it okay to say shit? Should I say that? Sure, people, I mean, David Goggins was on this podcast. Okay, so, you know, I mean, pretty much anything goes. Typically, we don't swear at each other, but I'm pretty thick-skinned if you need to, you know, I've been called way worse than anything. You've been boxing. I actually boxed in high school. I don't recommend people box unless they're, you know, they're professional and even then, I mean, I must say, as a neuroscientist. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, and on Wednesday nights at Spa a little bit, but I will say this, it's,

There are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10, much more safely for the brain like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and things like that. You definitely don't want to insult the brain. Yeah, as a neuroscientist, I can't encourage people to walk. I would agree. In any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same. Fair enough.

So basically, chatter refers to this process of looping over and over. If you inject some sad cognitions in there, I'm an imbecile. How can I, you know, I'm never going to live up to my potential. I don't belong here. So then you get, if you take that to an extreme, high intensity, and you perseverate over time, then you're getting towards depression.

If you inject anxiety provoking cognitions, oh my God, what if this happens? And what if that happens and you go down that path of uncertainty and fear? Well, that leads you to more of the anxious route. And if you are filling that loop with

traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences, you can get pushed towards trauma too. So it is a process that cuts across many different, really serious conditions that we grapple with in society. But I want to also be clear to folks who are listening that

If you experience chatter that does not mean you have any of those disorders, if you experience chatter, welcome to the human condition, my friends, because most of us do at times. And so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time, which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups.

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If you had to highlight for now, and we'll get back to others in a moment, the best, maybe one or two ways to combat chatter, what would those be? Well, let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally, because as we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences, different tools work for different people in different situations, there are

upwards of two dozen or more science-based tools that I covered when I wrote chatter, when I got into shift, the broader train of regulating your emotions, or even more tools out there. I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone. My first line of defense when it comes to chatter are two distancing tools.

When I'm using the term distancing, what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se. We should talk about avoidance later. But what I'm talking about when I say distancing is the ability to step back and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective. And it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this.

One tactic that I find very powerful is language. So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself. So I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem, Ethan. How are you going to manage this situation? If you think about when we use words like you,

They are the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. And when you use your name and you to work through a problem,

It's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you to relate to yourself like you're giving advice to someone else. And it turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves. Have you ever experienced this, Andrew? Gosh, no. Yes, of course. Absolutely. I mean, our optics are just much clearer when we're

in observation than when we're internally, unless I find that I dedicate some real minutes or hours, basically a sort of meditation, not unlike the complete sentence construction exploration that we're talking about before, just going inward and really saying, okay, let's have a conversation about this, and having a conversation with myself in there. And that always leads to an obvious truth, or sometimes a decision node that

isn't clear to me yet, but it leads someplace that feels like forward. Yeah. But you're taking special steps to be able to align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else, like reflexively, sometimes we stumble, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, and the number of different ways that we can distract ourselves, this is what I was going to ask in a few moments, but I'll take the opportunity now.

And wondering as we're talking about this today, if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the scroll aspect that with essentially zero effort, we can pick up a device and scroll through images and movies and it will update us according to update the

the imagery and topics, of course, according to what it senses as our dwell times on certain pages. And all of a sudden, we don't have to think about what's in our head. My dad used to refer to surfing the internet, because at that time it was that, and scrolling social media as kind of a cognitive chewing gum. It keeps us busy, but it doesn't provide any real nutrition.

Well, it's interesting if you go back to when Facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to. Do you remember what this was? What is on your mind? So you would be cute to share what is on your mind.

And in some ways, you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice. It is literally asking you where it did. What is on your mind right now? So that's in terms of posting. Posting exactly. But in terms of consuming information, which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers more than creators.

I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can, you know, pick up the phone and I have a specific phone with Instagram and X on it. And it's those apps are not on any other phones. So that it's segregated from, yeah, smart. Somebody sends me a tweet or sends me an Instagram post on. I'm not going to, I'm not going to open it. I can't open down those phones. Right. And that's helped a lot. We should come back to that because that's also modifying your

your spaces, which is another tool that I think is underutilized. So you should talk about that too. We'll definitely touch on that. What I find is, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna take six minutes, it's six minutes till the hour, take six minutes. And what's incredible is how fast six minutes seems to go by. That's what's so striking. It's remarkable. And not always bad.

So we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. There are also some, I would argue, redemptive qualities to it. I'll give you one of my personal ones, which is sometimes like to unwind before bed, I'm thinking all day,

I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short reels in a koon videos. Yeah. I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me. She's like, what are you laughing at? And then I sometimes I show her and she goes, why are you laughing at that? Right? So, but, but, you know, the algorithm is learned.

the specific kinds of funny videos that I like and know I'm not going to tell you what they are and it just lightens the load and so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction I want them to be shifted

at a certain time. I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives, the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals. We basically got thrown into social media without any rule book. We're the experiment. We're the experiment. But if you think about it, it's a new environment

We were born into this physical world, and our parents, our caretakers, from the time we were able to understand things, and probably before, they were teaching us, they were socializing us, how to navigate this space profitably. They don't just like, Lord of the Flies throw us into the world and let us kind of figure it out.

Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive. And we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand, hey, here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways.

of navigating social media. And I'm talking about social media now, like it's this unitary environment. Different social media applications, of course, have their own norms and rules of the games. You could think of them as like little different countries. They have their own little microcultures that you want to learn how to navigate. And scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function, but it's tricky. And it's tricky because creators

can change how these applications govern by a press of a button. You could change the way the algorithm works, and then you've got to start over to some extent. I've been told that by people in my life that one of the main reasons they get onto their phone in the middle of the night, if they happen to wake up, is that it allows a very soothing distraction compared to trying to wrestle with the firehose of thoughts in their heads.

Yeah. And that it, yeah, it's kind of like the way you describe these funny videos that you won't disclose to us. That sounds like, you know, they typically involve pranks. Oh, okay. Yeah. We used to hear that people, you know, would have a drink after work to just kind of like, you know, take the edge off or something like that. I feel like social media is doing that for a lot of people. Yeah. The way you describe it fits with that idea. And that I certainly believe that from everything we know about the circadian health literature that

You want to avoid looking at your phone between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Most nights, nobody's perfect. But if you wake up in the middle of the night, one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone and start scrolling social media. But I'm guessing people do it because it feels even worse to just sit there with your thoughts in the dark.

It's a shifter, but this is a perfect segue back to you asking about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter, and I'm telling you about the ones I use. So there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I detect the chatter brewing, and I call it my 2 AM chatter strategy.

And I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy because every kind of seemingly like four to six weeks, I will go to bed, happy and content. And then I'll wake up at 2 a.m. and like it is all going to hell really fast. What time do you typically go to sleep? Usually around 11, 11.30. Interesting. Yeah, but this is a common problem for a lot of people. And there are some tools like long Excel breathing and things that clearly work. I long ago made a decision.

I refuse to believe any thought that occurs between the hours of 2 AM and 5 AM. I just refuse. I don't believe it. It's as if somebody is lying to me in my head. And one could argue, well, maybe that's where the truth is coming out because your forebrain is not so good at suppressing these

you know, unconscious thoughts and sure, all good. But as you point out, they are rarely the kind of thoughts that one can work with, positive or negative. So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing. So at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes, and by the way, you say like, oh, this is common. This is more than common when I present to audiences and

you know, thousands and thousands of people over over the years. And I ask, hey, you ever, you ever get two AM chatter? Maybe two 30 AM? All the hands go up. This is a

I don't want to say universal affliction, but it is an incredibly common problem that people struggle with, like the chatter at night. So what I do is I use something called mental time travel, mental time travel into the future. And what I do is I ask myself, and I typically use my own name to do it, so I'm blending

another distancing tool, distance, self-talk. Ethan, how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning? No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m. To your point, when I wake up the next morning and my brain is fully, fully awake and I've access to my prefrontal cortex and I could think constructively about things, it is never as bad that next morning as it is in the middle of the night.

We, of course, have learned that over time because how many, how many mornings have we woken up in our lives? We could do the math. If I was more sophisticated, I'd do it on the fly. I can't, right? But like many, many mornings we have experienced this, like chatter at 2 a.m. at 7 a.m.

Not so bad. So when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning next week, next year, 10 years from now, what that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through as bad as it may seem.

It is temporary. It will eventually subside. And that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter. It turns the volume down on it, which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed. So the official name for this tool is not mental time travel. It is called temporal distancing.

And it's a flexible tool. You can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem, how you're going to feel about it tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now. And it's another way of broadening your perspective. It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it. So those are the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own.

And that nips a significant chunk of the chatter that I experience in the bud when it happens. And I should add that because I know about what chatter is, and I know about how these tools work, I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing. So people will often ask,

Hey, do you ever experience chatter? Like, yeah, of course, pinch me. I'm a living, breathing human being. I do it at times. But I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing tools in an almost automatic manner. If this happens, if the chatter strikes, then I'm going to coach myself through the problem using my own name in you. And I'm going to jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself, how am I going to feel about this in the future?

If that's not sufficient, then I'll go to the Level 2 response, which consists of if weather permits, I'll go for a walk in a safe, natural setting. I always feel the need to give the caveat about safe and natural because where I grew up in Brooklyn, like the natural setting through the place you got mugged, so they were not safe.

But, you know, a park, I find restorative and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces. But then what I'll also do is I will, I'll dial up the chatter advisory board. So I have a couple of people that

I have carefully thought about what these people do for me when I have a problem. And they importantly, don't just let me vent my emotions or, or cathak to use that term before. Just, I don't just get it out. A lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to vent your emotions. There's research on this. Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people. It's good to know that

You know, we're buddies now. I could call you up. If I'm struggling, you're going to listen to me and empathize with me. That's great for our relationship. But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through and you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve, I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you. But the problem is still there.

So just venting ends up leading to what we call co rumination, which can be pretty harmful. The people on my chatter advisory board, they know to first validate empathize with me, learn about what I'm going through. They've got my back. They communicate that powerfully.

But then once they do that, they start working with me to broaden the perspective, to try to think through that problem, which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really, really loud. And typically when I get to that stage, I'm in pretty good shape. I love your examples of how you deal with chatter. Your example of going to sleep and the reason I asked when you go to sleep at about 11 p.m. and waking up at two or three, and that being a very common issue.

is, as far as I understand, reflective of the fact that early in the night, our sleep is dominated by slow, wave, deep sleep with less rapid eye movement sleep. And then somewhere right about that transition time, it's not necessarily two or three AM per se, but given that you were asleep for about three, four hours. After about three, four hours of sleep, the

proportion of our sleep that is rapid eye movement sleep relative to deep slow wave sleep shifts dramatically the intensity of our dreams shifts dramatically they become more emotionally laden and that whole process of having those rapid eye movement sleep associate dreams.

is strongly associated with the removal of an emotional load in the morning when we wake. We know this because if you selectively deprive people of early numbers late, nicely been so on. The reason I mention this is that one tool that I certainly have found useful is that

Well, two tools really if people just understand that one of the reasons they'll wake up suddenly at two or three a.m. is that they're undergoing this transition from a one kind of one form of sleep to another. It's almost like a different beast altogether. And that.

heart-racing, emotionally-laden thoughts is characteristic of where they're supposed to be in the sleep architecture cycle. So that's number one. The other is that the tool that you provided of getting into this mental time travel, I'd like to just double-click on this notion of time perception. In sleep and dreaming, time is very fluid. You can be in one environment and another. It seems compressed a lot. Happens in a short amount of time.

when we are in chatter in the daytime, to what extent does it alter our perception of time? And I have a very specific reason for asking this because I believe that one of the main unifying features among the tools for dealing with depression, anxiety, et cetera, when I survey the research is almost all of them, journaling, meditation, even some of the medications for that matter, involve taking people into a different sort of time perception mode

And it's kind of an abstract idea, but I think this may resonate with some of the issues related to chatter, that when we're in a mental frame that's not healthy for where we want to be at that moment, awake when we need sleep, anxious when we want to be calm and so forth,

Changing our time perception seems to be the most useful thing that we can do, or at least among the most useful. So what's the relationship between chatter and time perception? Tell me more about what you mean by time perception. How broadly or finally we are bending time. So we know that as autonomic arousal,

Let's call it stress, but wakefulness and autonomic arousal goes up. We're fine slicing time. The pupils get bigger. We actually see depth of field changes. We get a higher resolution image of much less. It makes every bit of evolutionary sense. We can deal with fewer things better, and typically it's the thing that we're fixated or ruminating on. When we're relaxed, think about sitting back on a beach and you're watching the clouds go by.

It's almost like your frame rate is slower. So your, you know, higher frame rate is like slow motion. This is why people who experience trauma often feel like things are, or a car crash, like seed in slow motion, or it's not in slow motion, you're fine slicing time. It's kind of a remarkable thing, right? This is also how athletes learn to

play with their levels of autonomic arousal. Fighters can see punches coming in, and it's almost like slow motion, but they can react with full speed. Likewise, with tennis players, we'll describe it. So what we're talking about is dynamically changing the frame rate of one's experience. It's a very interesting question, and there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with.

these with time perception the way you're describing it. But what does come to mind are experiences of flow, which in many ways you might consider the opposite of chatter. Flow being this state where you're just in the moment and time is effortlessly passing. The demands of the situation completely match the skills that you bring to bear. It almost seems like the antithesis of what you're describing.

When I think about time and chatter, what, what I've becomes most accessible for me is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly on the object of the chatter, on the thing that is causing that distress. And we focus, you know, so narrowly on it, which of course makes a great deal of sense because what are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem?

Think about it, share it. Yeah, there you go. You got it on try number one. Zoom in, focus on the problem, roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it. And so that's that kind of really, you're getting in there and fine grained a tail. And that does work for us a lot of the time, but it turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation, that can get really troubling. And that's where this zooming out, taking this broader view, whether you do that through visual modalities,

Imagination modalities like mental time travel you could time travel into the future like I've just described you can also go back in time Like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life for someone else's life that I I know of when times were even worse and they got through it and oh if I got through that well I

Sure as heck, I can get through this. And so that's expanding our perception of time or looking at that bigger picture to work through something in the present moment. How often do you think people, and I do believe this is related to chatter, but if it's not, we can set this aside for another day, how often do you think people are in kind of

negative or positive fantasy. As they move through their day, I'm sure a study has been done asking people what they're thinking about. How often is it actually tied to what they're doing or they're supposed to be doing? Or are they thinking about what they're going to do this weekend? Or maybe even constructing entire narratives of things that are non-existent, that they would like to exist?

You know, occasionally we'll see this person, I think we've all seen this person kind of mumbling to themselves, and it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things. That's because they've just been rejected by a journal editor, their article, the experience of every scientist. And it's, of course, always reviewer number two's fault. It is. They were carefully enough, of course. And none of us have ever been reviewer number two. I mean, sarcastic, by the way, we've all been reviewer number two. A little academic inside, inside ball humor there.

You'll see somebody mumbling to themselves. And it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things. We don't know what they're saying to themselves. But I'm guessing if we tapped them and said, hey, what were you mumbling? I would guess that more than 50% of the time it was kind of frustration with stuff. You kind of see this like the frustrated person. It's a hard thing to observe, actually.

Yeah, so people have looked at this and my memory of this wonderful paper I think was published in Science. I think the title was A Wandering Mind is an unhappy mind. And basically the take over from the article was that people spend between, well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it, what we can deduce is that people spend between one half and one third of their waking hours

not focused on the present. So between one half and one third of the time, we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things. And this one particular paper linked that process with thinking about things that caused you to feel worse. I think there's huge levels of variability there, though. I think being lost in thought can be a wonderful experience. I love, love, love, love.

Mind wandering. I think it's one of my strengths. It is the source of idea generation for me It is also the source of emotion regulation. I will one of you know my sleeping pill metaphorically speaking is

mental time travel. It's getting away from the present. It is fantasizing about the future. Thinking about the good things that could happen, the potentialities, or going into the past and savoring some of the positive things that happen. I'm thinking about the soccer game where my kids scored goals or something good happened to someone I know or to me.

And that, to me, is a wonderful way of going to bed. That is mental time travel. It is not being in the moment, which actually raises another really important point that I want to get in there. And I'd love to get your take on this because in popular culture, we often hear that

It's really important to be in the moment. This is emerged as a type of cultural maxim, like be in the now. And this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment, we sometimes think there's something wrong with us, like, oh, we've got to train our attention to bring it back to the present.

Being in the present can be very useful in many contexts. And certainly when we experience chatter, we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, refocusing on the present or breath, a mantra, yes, lots of data support the utility of that. But I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time. And lots of amazing things accompany that process. If I can't go into the past,

not only am I not savoring positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life, I'm also not learning from my screw-ups, which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past. And if I'm not going into the future, then I'm not planning. I'm not simulating. I'm not fantasizing. So,

We don't want to shut down mental time travel. I think what we want to learn how to do is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively without that time travel machine breaking down in the past, which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about. So being in the moment can be good, but it is not the end point I think we always want to strive for.

To what extent do you think that texting and smartphones, but namely texting has interfered with sort of time tested, meaning over hundreds of thousands of years, time tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions and our thoughts to arrive at better ways of thinking, feeling, being, you know, nowadays, if you get on a train or a plane or you're in a noober or you're walking to your car and you have a

like a thought about something. Oh, that grant that idea. It's so easy to just get into a mode of texting. Yeah. Passive participation, maybe through social media scrolling. Again, not universally bad, but you can go to passive kind of almost semi-dissociative state. Yeah. Like you're not really in the parking lot anymore. You're half in your phone and half in the parking lot. And texting, polling people around you as opposed to, you know, quote unquote, in the old days where you had to actually grapple through this stuff. As you describe your

the tools that you use to deal with chatter and to process information and to work with your thinking and your emotions, you strike me as somebody who has a rich jungle gym of things to play with in there and a toolkit and an emergency switch if you need it and all that stuff, whereas most people, I think, just, they have their phone. Who you gonna call?

Who are you going to text? What site are you going to Google search to? I mean, it can't be good.

Well, it often isn't, but it can be harnessed. And here's what the way I think about texting and really how social media and the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want, how this has thrown a curveball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions of not just other people, but

groups of people and societies. So when we experience emotions, we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others. There's this wonderful research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Ramey, who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions? And he found over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize it, to get it out. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

relate to other people, get their support, but we also want to usually process it. In the pre-social media era, two things had to happen, typically, to share our emotions. First, you had to find someone.

to share them with. And typically, in the process of looking for someone, either to find someone face to face or via phone, time would pass. Now, what we know about time is that as time proceeds, our emotions in general tend to fade. So there's this wonderful work on the duration of emotional experiences, and our emotional experiences all follow a common trajectory.

So something happens in the world or in our mind. We imagine something that is provoking in some way. Our emotions get triggered. And then as time goes on, they eventually peter out. And depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with, some people may peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly. Some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to subside. But they all follow that basic trajectory over time.

So, let's go back to the pre-social media era, right? So, you got to find someone to talk to. And while you're trying to find someone to talk to, time is passing. That's acting to temper our emotions. Now, once you find someone to talk to, either face to face or via phone, the moment you start talking, you are now awash in all of this feedback.

This emotional feedback, whether it's coming from your face, like you're giving me all sorts of information right now, I would benefit from smiling if you could. There we go. Thank you. I'm just joking for those who are listening, but I'm getting information from you. And if I'm talking to someone on the phone, likewise, I'm getting their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel. That is also working to constrain how we communicate with others. And it's typically keeping our emotions, I would argue, in check and balance and proportion.

We're stripping away time with social media, and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback. This enables us to release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way. And I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text.

or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone. And I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society, so cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context. Now that is not to say that social media

isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress. It can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change. But I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information.

When I think about the different ways to parse a problem, a real or imagined problem, and I think about the role of web searches, it immediately takes me to either social media or to, I don't know, it could be Reddit, it could be some article that was written and posted online in 2019, you know, the lease will resurface, they repurpose these things all the time. I don't know why they do that. I just got emailed this morning about

and interviewed a fact check that I did in 2019. Yeah, no figure. I mean, it's cool that there's, I guess, that there's archival material on the internet that not everything is fleeting. Certainly in the podcast space, you know, we like to think that the information on this podcast will ever be archival and we can update it over time. And that actually brings me to the very specific question, which is about AI.

With AI, web searches are now changing fundamentally. They're no longer being brought to a site that is just a designated site. You're getting information back that's the amalgam of a lot of information, funneled through, presumably, that large language models are changing all the time, but funneled through your search behavior, your preferences, et cetera. So web searches are no longer just site destination journeys.

recipes of information that are filtered and combined and given back to us, which makes me think that maybe AI can provide a kind of pseudo self that is wiser than ourselves in any moment.

or potentially wiser than we are in any moment because they can access information that is not dependent on like bodily state shifts. Like at 2.30 in the morning, 3.30 in the morning, a small problem can seem huge and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming, just crushing us at 7 a.m. It's different when we search on the web now, like how to, you know, how to

get through bankruptcy, let's say somebody's dealing with bankruptcy. They're going to, there's information to go to, but with AI, it can give you the information in the form and in the, and from the sources that are most meaningful to you. And it doesn't, even if it's 2.30 in the morning for you, the AI is fresh. It doesn't need to sleep. Right. That seems to me like a distinct advantage over our own minds. And I know AI is controversial. Is it going to get smarter than us? Is it going to tell us to go do bad things, this kind of thing? Okay. That's a whole different discussion.

But it seems to me that AI could be pretty good, maybe even terrific at helping us resolve problems because it doesn't have these state shifts and it's really tailored to us. Well, it can be. And I think AI, I think of it as a new tool that has amazing potential.

And I actually think it has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourselves fixed. So if I look back at the last 20, 30 years of research on emotion regulation, I'm talking here not just about managing chatter, but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives. What I can do is I can point to several individual tools

that are empirically supported, science-based tools. Scientists have done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work. Mechanistically, they've often gone down to the brain level. They've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between. So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work. But what we are now learning is

individual tools are not the name of the game because we often do multiple things to manage our emotions and the combinations of tools we use

Within people, they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand. And there's variability between people as well. So the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated. So if someone comes to me with a problem, I can go through all the tools in the toolbox. What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and say, hey,

For the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are, here are the four things that you should do, but that person over there, they should do these six things. I think AI has the potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis. And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology. You mentioned you have kids.

Yeah. When my sister, who's three years older than I am, was a kid, my dad tells the story that she had an imaginary friend, Larry. Larry was a girl, lived in a purple house. You know, this imaginary friend, Larry, had all the

the components of a child's mind that was unrestricted by all the barriers of naming and things like that. And my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry in her room for hours, just talking to Larry with her dollhouses and her toys and her things and doing. And then one day my dad, he loves this story. I don't know why he loves the story in particular, but he was standing outside her door and she was playing with Larry, her imaginary friend, talking to Larry.

And then she stopped and turned around and he said, how's Larry? And she said, Larry's dead. And she never talked about Larry again. Like it was this sort of collision between fantasy life and real world. This is how I interpret it. And that was it. Yeah. Larry was done. Yeah. Poor Larry. Poor Larry. Well, maybe it was time. Yeah. I mean, she was maybe going to be seven soon and maybe it served her well. So I've always wanted to ask somebody this question. I think you are the person asked this question.

our imaginary friends, common in children, and our imaginary friends, the primordial form of our internal dialogue with ourself. Just fascinating by and. Yeah. Are there some adults who maintain imaginary friends and I'll set an additional context which will be especially relevant to the listeners of this podcast, which was in the very seat that you're sitting about this time last year. David Goggins was here and he was talking about

you know, how he pushes himself through tremendously hard things. And during that discussion, it became very clear that David has an array of different voices that are all him, but that serve different roles. And it was a remarkable thing to hear him articulate that because

To those of us on the outside, we observe it as like one person, but he's constructed in an elaborate inner world to be able to equip himself to do the things he does. And I just have to wonder whether or not this whole thing of imaginary friends provided it doesn't take us into the realm of psychosis and delusion could actually be useful.

Yeah. It isn't remarkable that this is such a common human experience. And for most people, they never talk about this with anyone else because this is such a private experience. So I often start presentations with a quote from Raphael Nadal, the tennis great, him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with. And he says it's managing the voices plural in my head.

And then I go to the audience and I say, hey, what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says they're struggling with the voices inside their head, right? Like that is typically warning sign, right? That maybe something is awry here and someone needs support.

Yet, this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on. So to answer your question, is it common for kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves? Yes. I believe this is called the study of pretense. According to one famous Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky,

One of the ways self-control is first learned is actually through self-talk. And so what happens is you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things. Andrew, you should do this. Don't do that and sit this way and not that way. And then what children will often do is go off on their own and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves. And so if you've ever been around young kids, you've probably seen them

Talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls, no, Jimmy shouldn't do this. Jimmy should do that. Some kids do it in the form not with an actual toy, but they have an imaginary friend in their mind that they are engaging with these different interactions. And what the kids are doing in those contexts according to this idea is they are practicing self-control.

They are repeating the things, the messages that their caretakers have told to them. They are reinforcing it in those ways. And then as time goes on and your sister demonstrated this, that outer voice becomes our inner voice. And we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives. But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress,

many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud. There's a very little research on this, and a lot of this is anecdotal, but I have, when speaking to a lot of individuals, they say, yes, sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud. I thought something was wrong with me, and it's always when I'm struggling with

uh, like a major stressor. So if we go back to reviewer number two, right, in the academic world, I remember once I wrote this invited article and a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this, in this response. And I remember just walking, I was, I was, it was so offensive. I remember walking around the neighborhood and I was, why don't you say that to my face? You know,

And I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working through it But it almost seems like in real moments of stress

we revert back to this very primordial way of regulating ourselves, that we first exercise when we were kids, which is this self-talk. And so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices, according to you, to manage the challenges that he is facing. I've heard David talk on a number of occasions, and I think there is another important point to bring up here, which is,

I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices, they're not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and sometimes, yes, and sometimes this is important because negative self talk is often equated with harmful outcomes.

negative emotions are functional when they are activated in the right proportions. Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective. So if I go to how, when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where coaches are telling me to do really painful things, like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself. I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me, right? You know, you better like shape up, you know, you can't, you know, wimp out here.

That serves an emotivating function for me there. So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per se. What is bad is if we start looping. That is what we really want to equate with chatter. It's getting stuck in those thought loops. That's when things get harmful. When those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long.

A couple of times we've talked about the relationship between physical activities and mental activities, in particular taking a walk, going into green spaces. And I was delighted to hear when you said that there's a vast literature supporting the use of green spaces.

Yeah. For calming ourselves, is that essentially what the data show? Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming. So yes, there is data linking going for a walk in a beautiful setting with feeling better.

But scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the various mechanisms through which interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us. And so there are two major pathways that I often talk about. One is interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative. So as we talked about earlier, when people get stuck,

experiencing chatter, other kinds of big emotions, our attention often fixates on the problem at hand. We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem, and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources. When you go for a walk in a safe natural setting, you're surrounded by

interesting cues that capture your attention in a very gentle way. So I'm talking about the flowers and the trees, the scents, the sounds. Our attention often drifts onto those features of our environment. Now, most of us are not doing the equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying the geometric structure of the leaves and the flowers, right? We're just kind of taking it in.

But the surroundings are sufficiently intriguing to capture, to grasp our attention. And that gives us this opportunity to restore that precious commodity. So there's work, there's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe natural setting can be cognitively restorative. That's another feature that, or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us.

The other pathway that I just find so, it's so cool from a research point of view. Going for walks in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. So in the arboretum near my house, there are these trees that have been there for hundreds of years, and you look up at these trees and you think, my God,

You've been there way longer than me and my parents and my grandparents, and you probably will be there longer than all of my project. Like, wow, that just broadens my perspective or an amazing sunset. You can also experience this emotion through feats of innovation. So I'm a science geek, I guess you could say. And for me, the two biggest odd triggers are

Number one, the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces, which if you follow this, we some physicists have somehow figured out engineers how to take pictures of what the universe looked like billions of years ago. Somehow, I don't understand the physics. We can see what it looked like.

this vast amounts of time ago. And we also, of course, have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars, sending us back footage of that planet. So when I think of that, we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet,

This vastly expands. Like I am filled with awe. So when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that, this is the ultimate perspective broadener. So it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, guess what else feels smaller?

problems. So this is an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manage your emotions. And so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight. They're waiting to be harnessed.

And if you know where to look, you can often find them. And the nature, by the way, isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist. There are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better. We often develop attachments to places, for example. So have you probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures? So there are these

figures from our childhood that we often, though not always, securely attached to. They are a source of safety and comfort, and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners. If we're in positive relationships, as I am, love you, as to my wife, she is an attachment figure for me.

Well, we also develop these associations with places. And so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort. Going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating. I know one person who discovered that there was infidelity in his relationship.

And what really helped him get a grip on the situation was going back to his child at home and sleeping in his bedroom at home. That was the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life.

That's an example of the power of places to affect us. So how many times do we think about, hey, what are the places that are my emotional oases, if you will, that I can go to when I need it?

We can also structure our environments. You and I are both talking right now across the table from one another. We don't have our cell phones out on the table. Not in the room for me either. If we did and we had it facing up, we would be distracted, but we're not.

We have a question. Even facing down, I think there's some literature on this, right? Still a queue. It's still an emotional queue. There's a cognitive tether, because of the thing signals a particular reward, and a set of behaviors. Just like a pen, there are only a few things that probably many things you do with a pen.

It typically won. This is not John Wick here. This is one thing we're talking about. We're not getting innovative here with these objects. Excuse me, when the phone is present, even if it's face down, it cues the...

the opportunity to make a call received a tax look on social media that's right all the internet and so what's happened and so by leaving our phones outside of the space we are we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way. When laptop screens are open in my seminars i know that i've already lost the battle. Because i know this is the object the stimulus is so tempting.

even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world, which I am not. I aspire to be captivating, but I know that I'm always going to lose compared to the screen, the email. Do you ask them to close them? Yeah, no laptops in my class. Wow, how was that received?

So far so good. You know, I explain to them, I actually explain to them the science behind this. I explain why I'm doing this and I say that, hey, if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes, this is a divided attention task. I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open. And in the courses that I teach, it's more about discussion and thinking through things. So they don't really have a need to, you know, type notes for exams, which I think makes it easier for me.

But modifying our space is really strategically. This is another valuable tool in our toolbox. When we have people over for football watching parties, let's say, it's pretty common where I come from in Ann Arbor. My favorite food in the world is pizza. We have this wonderful New York City-style pizza place in Ann Arbor now.

I will order vast amounts of it much more than we need. And when the game is over, I will insist that everyone take it with them. Because I know if it is in the refrigerator, and I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water, if I see the pizza box, the queue,

it will elicit a emotional response, this desire, this repetitive response to consume the pizza, which is not the goal that I have from either in a fitness or a motion regulatory point of view. So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at meeting my regulatory goals. I'm so glad you brought up pizza and New York pizza and the fact that you're from New York. And here's why.

And again, I give a personal example only as a template for people to think about themselves. Sure. Either where it matches or doesn't match when I'm about to ask. I love being in nature. I love being in Yosemite and rural areas and at the coast. I mean, there's love, love being in nature and the quiet of nature. I find my mind slows and my thoughts and my emotions enter a pace that just is very soothing.

I also love being in New York City. I was first in New York City when I was about five or six years old and I remember telling my dad who's from another big city, Buenos Aires, I remember telling him like, I can't believe this exists. Like when we come back here and I swore that I would go back as many times as I possibly could and I love going to New York City. Despite it having many problems, it's still a wonderful city. When I'm in New York, there's tons of activity, there's tons of stimuli. And I also find that my mind achieves that slowed pace.

Another parallel construction here, and then I'll, I'll wage the specific question. I've worked with professors, my postdoc advisor, for instance, and my graduate advisor worked extremely effectively. These are hyper focused, unfortunately, both of them have passed, but hyper focused, brilliant people, truly brilliant.

and their offices were a complete disaster. And we'd say, Ben, you need to clean your office and you would say, no, don't move anything. Otherwise, I won't know where anything is. And I'm like, how can you know where anything is? It looks like an earthquake hit yesterday.

Don't touch anything. And he could find things in this dizzyingly messy environment. He was the stereotype of the professor sitting hunched over at his keyboard at two in the morning, because at that time I worked really late. You'd go into Ben's office and be like, hey, organize thinking amidst chaos. And the New York example would be the parallel. And at the other extreme, nature also seems to bring this about.

Two specific questions. Is there a continuum of, let's say, daytime, let's forget about middle of the night, of daytime kind of default levels of chatter. I think of this as kind of RPM in a car. Like, how is the car idling? When you turn on the car, you just sit there, like, if the transmission's working well and everything's working well, it's like, hums it a nice. It's not redlining. Yeah. Some people seem to be redlining all the time. Yeah. And they calm down in cluttered environments.

So how much is, do we have a kind of a set point, a chatter set point, assuming everything else equal, well rested, et cetera, et cetera. And then why is it that external environment matching our internal chatter somehow can adjust that internal set point, it seems. I realize this is very abstract, but for me it's very useful to think about

where my mind goes into its most pleasant and effective states. Your example of your advisors resonates so strongly with myself. As your office in this. Well, it entirely depends on my mental state. And prior to really getting involved in this space, I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess. And sometimes it is spic and span unbelievably organized and clean.

And so let me share with you some of the research in this space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking.

A lot of people find that when they are experiencing chatter, they reflexively start organizing their spaces. So I'm a great example of this. My entire life, if we called my mother up right now, please let's not do it. But if we did, she could attest to the fact that there would always be a trail of towels and clothing from the bathroom to my

bedroom and all over the place and my office is similar piles of papers and books and That's when life is good I'm kind of free-flowing. I'm getting in there. I'm being creative I'm generating ideas and I'm not really worried about everything around me in fact I'm really good at Typically like tuning out my surroundings to focus in on the task at hand I could work in a coffee shop I could work almost anywhere and I love it

When I'm experiencing chatter, though, and this is true from the time I was little, I would always start putting things away. I would always start organizing things, making them nice and tidy. My office is always spotless. Sometimes I even take it further presently. When I'm experiencing chatter, I clean up my office, then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy. And if it's really bad, like, I'll clean up my kids' rooms and things like that.

This is a very common experience. When you're experiencing chatter, you don't feel like you are in control. You're not in the driver's seat. The thoughts and feelings are taken over and they're pushing you in directions and to places that you don't want to be. It's an aversive state and it's chronically activated for a lot of people. Human beings

In general, we crave control. We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable. There's some survival value that that communicates to us, right? If we know things are certain and proceeding in a predictable way.

Creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside. It's called compensatory control. And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us

augment our spaces to counteract, in this case, our emotional state. And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question, but it for me highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances.

When I'm not experiencing chatter, it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not. Like no big deal. But when I'm motivated to think, feel and behave in a particular way, then my circumstances are becoming more important. I mean, the military is a very salient example where people have their kit and order in order to essentially be able to proceed with the job.

Right. And people can say what they will about the military, but the structure and the hierarchy of the military has provided structure and in order for people to essentially harness a take, go from a chaotic life to a structured life. That's right. And it's an extreme example. But having everything squared away is one of those things. I got certified as scuba dive a few years ago.

And, you know, it occurred to me early on in the first dives that, you know, if, if your kit isn't squared away and you don't have everything worked out, things can go badly wrong. And the, um, the severity of the, of the potential consequences or the potential severity of the consequences, uh, I suppose is the right way to say it is a good reminder, like to have everything in check. This isn't the kind of thing where you can afford to forget a piece of gear or to not check a valve or

you know, it's potentially life or death. And that serves an adaptive role. It's kind of nice to have an activity, actually, where that's the case. Whereas we get into our cars and we might pull out the driveway and then go down the street. And now you see people texting and driving all the time, or hopefully less as time goes on. And, you know, you see, then you might put on your seatbelt, you know, like a quarter mile down the road. You might put it on first, right? I always put mine on first when, you know, whenever I remember, I'm sure now someone will catch me with my seatbelt off.

I drive with a seatbelt and so on and so on. The physical steps that we take to organize ourselves and the environment and our relationship to the environment really do seem to change our brain into a different brain than where we do not do those things. The way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist.

Some of those shifters are inside us, so there are these sensory shifters we talked about. There are intentional shifters. We haven't gotten into that yet, but we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions, and we can be strategic in how we do that. There are perspective shifters, the way we think about our circumstances, reframing, distancing. Those are all on the inside.

But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships, how other people can push our emotions in different directions. Sometimes other people can be amazing assets, sometimes tremendous liabilities. There are physical shifters, like in our spaces, and we just talked about those. You can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter.

People talk about culture as the air we breathe. We are in different cultures throughout our lives. And sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day. So if you're going to your lab or you're on campus at Stanford, that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and weird practices maybe. That's no offense to Stanford, by the way. That's more academics. Academia has some weird practices.

If you then go to your podcast community, right, the team in the studio that we're sitting here, there are different, there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here. And those cultures that we are a part of, they powerfully shape our emotional lives. They indicate, they influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value. So what kinds of emotional experience are we motivated to have?

They give us practices, rituals, to meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well. So that's another kind of influence that I don't think we often think about, but that is really quite powerful. It brings me back again to the smartphone. The smartphone carries an infinite number of contexts into the different environments with us. So we're on the train, but we could be paying attention to something overseas.

I was on the plane this morning and I just marveled at the number of screens on this frankly very densely packed plane. I was like, try fourth grade when a kid brought in a little mini TV. And I remember thinking, Oh my goodness, that's like a mini TV. It looked kind of like a walkie talkie and the resolution was terrible. And of course it was all black and white. They had colored TVs. By the way, when I was when I was young, it just hadn't made it to the mini TV.

We were basically walking around with little mini TVs all day. Yeah. With near infinite number of channels combined with texting, share. I mean, it's wild. Remarkable. It's science fiction. If we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids, to think about what we have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people, the classes that they are wearing, we probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids. I agree.

I agree. And I'm just struck by the fact that our brains can adapt to this. But I do think that most people probably wonder about, you know, like, what's the optimal way to live? And the word optimal gets people, you know, triggered sometimes, believe it or not. I'm not talking about what puts people into their best performance mode or this or that. I'm not talking about biohacking. I'm referring to

You know, there's an age old question, you know, what, what is a good life? And that's a completely different podcast that we should probably do at some point, but it probably involves being able to pay attention to things and be present, but also let one's mind drift and be socially present and have relationships and on and on.

Do you think that we are, in fact, more challenged nowadays in the default mode of so many contexts arriving with us in our pocket when we arrive in a situation like you said have come to the studio? As long as I'm in my phone's face down or away from me, I'm in the studio. Otherwise, I've brought the whole world with me.

Yeah, this is a question that comes up quite a bit and it's a really hard one to answer because we haven't of course been tracking people's chatter and emotion dysregulation levels over the centuries. I think it's absolutely true that we now have new forms of technology that

are perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome. But they are also providing us with opportunities. So to be clear, I think social media and technology

Canon does do a lot of harm. And I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well. And the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to navigate those digital technological landscapes. And I think we probably jumped into them without a user guide too quickly. And we're only learning now 15 years later, whatever the number is, that that was the case. But

But I don't know that I would, well, I'll speak for myself. I think net positive, there's a lot of good that has come from these technologies. If we think back centuries ago,

It's not clear to me that the world wasn't a challenging place either. We used to get into fights and pull swords and people would invade readily if you go back further. There was the threat of illness and we weren't living nearly as long. I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species.

But, and this is, I think, a really important, but I think about this often. The issues that we are talking about today on this podcast, this question of how we manage our emotional lives, this is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form. Because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies. We've always been challenged by circumstances.

Those circumstances are constantly evolving, providing new threats to us that now we need to learn how to manage. When I was digging deep into the history of motion regulation for shift,

I couldn't believe it that when I look back at the first surgical tool ever developed. You know what that is? Treffoning. Treffoning. So treffination, tell everyone is listening what that involved. Treffoning is where you bore a hole through the skull in order to let out

some volume of fluid, some volume of food or or remove brain or brain or if we go back eight to 10,000 years ago when this technology was first cutting edge, right? Like the new iPhone of the times trepanation for spirits.

for maybe spirits, right? So one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation. So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we used to manage our emotions.