Dr. Ethan Kross: How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. And i'm wearing these red lens wine down roca glasses because we are recording this late at night, which is unusual for us.

And bright light in particular, short, wavily bright light in the blue and Green part of the spectrum, squashes military onan and IT, makes IT hard to sleep. And I want to sleep tonight. These red lines glasses filter out the Green and blue short wave lanes that would otherwise disrupt my sleep.

My guess today is doctor Ethan cross. Doctor 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. Doctor eaon crosses laboratory has done ground breaking 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 part taken in order to improve your emotional state and shift your emotional state.

So today's discussion really centres 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 gona 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 doctor eat and 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 for d to reading shift. When IT comes out.

We provide links to the work in doctor eating across his laboratory, as well as links to his previous forthcoming book in the shown te captions. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize that this poddar ast is separate from my teaching researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired 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. Our first sponsor is express VPN. Express VPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure, and private IT does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encysted IT so that no one can see or sell your data.

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If you want to start protecting your activity using express V P N, you can go to express V P N dot com slash huberman, and you can get an extra three months free again. That E X P R E S S V P N dot com slash huberman to get an extra three months free. Today's episode is also brought to us by eight sleep. Eight sleep make smart mattress covers with cooling, heeding and sleep tracking capacity, one of the best ways to ensure that you get a great night sleep every single night is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment, and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply a sleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees in. In order to wake up feeling refreshed and energize, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.

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Eight sleep currently ships to the U. S. A, canada, the U.

K. So that countries in the eu. In australia, again, that eight sleep dotcom slash huberman. And now for my discussion with doctor even cross, doctor Ethan cross, welcome.

Great to be here.

Before we went hot, mike says, I say we were talking about interrupting one another in the fact that you're from new york, i'm going to tried not to interpret 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 would even rose and what it's force. So maybe we start there.

yeah. So I think is a great question because um your voice is something that we Carry with us wherever we go. But we don't tend to learn what is IT is right.

And actually sometimes I I get up there and speak to people and they often wonder like what is a purported serious scientists doing talking about a squshy 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 in her voice, when i'm talking about, is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives.

And IT turns out that a type of swiss army kif that we posses, IT, lets us do many different things. So just from the outset, let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice Operations. I think if chatteris the dark side of the inner voice, and i'll get to that 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 your favourite words seem.

the harm global traders, because they're undefeated. As I understand, you have the best record in any sport. I don't think theyve ever lost.

Do they ever play against other teams?

The washington generals OK sorry .

for the washington generals. Um so if you were to go to A A game and root for them to say .

go global, go globe shottery okay.

can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now?

Yes, okay.

you you've just use 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 let us do something that I think is both extraordinary but totally ordinary. Also your verbal working memory system is an awful lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cellphones, how did you memorize phone numbers? Like what would you do repeat in your head?

Yeah, that has sort of a song to IT. Yeah, I can remember my childhood phone number. Still, even though that number is long since.

long since gone.

even the whole area codes gone, in fact, really well that the number is probably still there. But under a different area code.

I know because I try calling IT everyone interesting. Well, it's funny. I go through this content. I give talks and workshops.

I often say two o nine o five o one, repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. And I go give a shot, give them a call.

So for I know that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not 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 you supposed to get.

Most people don't do that out loud like, oh, crap. I supposed to get milk, cheese, eggs, repeats 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 my motor preparation for things like solo, podcast and talks is it's not script IT out line 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 falls out. Yeah.

we have a very similar, similar style. I will, I will build IT out what the key ideas are. And as long as I could bullet that out, I am good to go. But I will also refuse those bullets in my head, A, B, C, D, 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 .

may ask about the walk when I prepare for live events or solo podcast in long before I was involved in either of those activities um for lectures of any time or classroom discussions where I had to stand up and from the class, I would find that walking and listening to a song would maybe cy multi evensen maybe separately, would dramatically shape the kind of cats and energy of the delivery .

of the the talk yeah I love the fact that you brought up songs there so we want to take a little detour here um so in in my new book shift, we talk about, or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around in sensation. Sentry 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 that makes me feel good, feel right? It's about emotions, feel good. So one study that the number was around, like ninety five, ninety six percent 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, tend to thirty percent. Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions.

I actually an unintentional parenting Victory for me was when my Youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer. I lived for these soccer games on the weekend. I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who know go crazy on the silence, and I was just such joy to just watch these, 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. He was bombing, like SHE was bombed out.

He was bombing me out. I was catching her emotions. We can talk about emotional contagion later. And um gotten to the car and is just so happen that my 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 players, please. The song comes on and you know, I start gen out to IT was singing out law like an embarrassing dad and then I look in the back seat and I find her bop in her head. And then the course comes to get really excited.

And then I pull up to the soccer field and he just burst out of the car and is like invigorated. That is the power of music to impact us. So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I am getting ready to, you know, getting that mental frame of finding.

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 are our emotional trajectory in the direction we wanted to to point. So it's .

interesting I would think about music and reference to um shifting emotions as you just gave an example. Yeah feeling like a motivated and then your daughter is motivated .

by yeah don't they'll .

pull IT out and then .

no i've a truly .

terrible singing voice but um 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 sad music advice for so people are feeling sad is to to sort of academy music or or positive lyrics because i've often wondered whether not humans like or dislike, when things or people try to shift their state yeah I know in myself when something like feeling upset about something, I don't want to feel upset. I don't think anyone wants to feel upset.

But if I hear .

a song that's positive, there's there's a moment where i'm like, I can feel like kind of pulling on me. You and you sort of know like I could follow that trajectories and probably get out of this and sometimes one does and sometimes one dozen. no. And this gets to, I think, a more fundamental issue which is why i'm asking um which is I response to feel our emotions as a way to you sort of dissolve them when we don't want them kind of the catholic approach or would listen this sad music when we're sad, just amplify the sadness.

These are great questions and have a couple of they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them cereal. So number one, has the the study been done where you expose people to different kinds of a most music? Sad verses are sing you 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 illicit positive or negative emotional experiences. So images being another sensory modality vision.

So, so that's number one. Number two, there is a very interesting phenomenon on 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 dell, right? We're going to chicago and giving you my age bracket here, right?

Like the music that has said associations for me. So there's this mood concurrency. If i'm feeling a certain way, i'm gonna go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me.

Why on earth would we do that? Are we all master chist? C, do we just want to feel even worse? This gets that, 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, not too long.

So sadness, as an example, as an emotion we experience when we've experience some loss that we can, we can't rectify right away, right? Something has happened, and you can fix that. So you've lost someone.

And so what is this emotion? Do well IT IT IT. Hi jack away. We are thinking, feeling in our bodies are responding.

So IT motivates us to introspect, to turn our attention in word, to reflect on this situation, to now try to make sense of IT. right? Something really important.

My life has happened. I don't 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 it's also really interesting about sadness.

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, right? So can you detect when someone is sad? You see like a sad facial .

expression? yes. And when I used to teach the summer courses at cut spring harbor, nor shore alone island, that students will come in from all over the world, and i've been, there is a great place somewhere, came for scientists, all of their laboratories all year. And my eventually was director of a course there.

And my code director, and I used to have this deeper ef at the end of the first day, to where we would talk to one another, and we would know over the list of names, and we to say, and he was remarkably good at this, just extraordinary like a superpower at saying, you know, I think everyone settling in well, but I noticed that so and so was kind like might not be adJusting to the jet lag or might not be a accusing so well in a very technical group and the course is quite long for a course like that. But it's important that everybody and I feel engaged early on. Yeah um and people are the tendency to dominate in those intellectual in competitive environments.

And and SHE could just pin point who IT was that was feeling a little bit outside the group. We knew how to eliminate that really quickly. And from her, I learned a bit of how to recognize the science.

And IT was rarely just facial expression that and some other accused that he just seemed to have a unconsciously 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 are just extraordinary ily good at that detection .

and IT enhances social interactions. And so some people are really good at detecting IT. Others are really good at just playing IT. I'm going to go back to my, my, my daughter.

So you know, if something happens where he feels d SHE exhibits this exaggeration ated response, I shall stick out her lower up. And even if i'm kind of upset at at her like IT is amazing. The power that that has I I over IT IT is so so beautifully manipulative, manipulative and no manipulative.

And IT is a testament the power that these displaced 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. Um you raise the question about being shifted by others, other people and perhaps either just are surroundings, music or spaces.

Sometimes you don't want to have your motions be shifted. And in fact, when other people try to do that, I can olic IT, what we call reactors like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in a 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 were often well intentioned, but sometimes our well intention behaviors can back fire.

And so there's this, 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 that what IT does is that 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 were doing. So how might this transparent? E, there are 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 he is at her wetland work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate.

I can, I can proactively do things to lessen herbert if it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning in the groceries. I'm doing that voluntarily. I'm doing that.

And i'm not coming home and saying, hey sweety, look good. I did today. I did all these things. You know, can I have a pad of my back that's not all talking about. It's about your group. Your your your lab is working under a deadline, right, to submit a grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab. It's those little things that can help give you two more examples.

Let's say that um someone on your team is really struggling with their their ability translate their work for for popular audiences and that's something they're motivated to do really important skill for scientists be able to translate what they do for others to consume before you pull them assign, say, hey, no, I notice that you're stumbling on a few different issues. And here 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 our best practices.

Hey, one of the two things i've learned that really have benefit my ability to communicate with different audiences. What you're doing there is you're getting people the the resources they can benefit from, but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are not directing IT to them. So it's kind of a back door way of of helping or shifting the last the last tool or mention brings IT back to sensation.

One of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is is through tactile sensation. Um you know what's the first thing that you do with the child to shoot them when they are born? All them, all them, skin to skin contact. I remember both times my my kids were born, I was like, I want to get on that. Like because my wife got first first tips with with both of our doors.

Like I want some of that skin to skin contact, uh, that doesn't end after we leave the whom the the comfort that we experience the release of stress fighting chemicals that occurs when affection IT embraces are registered, uh, that continues throughout the lifespan. So if my daughters, who don't particularly like dad to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays ah, if I know they're having a bad day, like i'll go over and i'll rubb there back in a totally on creepy way that is an important coffee we should give to everyone is listening. What we're talking about here is affection IT, 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.

Yeah sure no I A I definitely believe that as a primate species, which we are the world primate um I think they call alope thic grooming. You'll see these images of these monkeys and lots of different species of of primate. You are just sitting nearby one another where one just has its even just it's and yes, it's and yeah part on the one next to IT and just sit like that for a long periods of time.

Yeah and then sometimes they're doing like an active glooming of of removing you know paris that this is a very important in primate world, a as we know, but you know grooming ing and and you know picking in these kinds of things, you see IT in couples. It's actually can be kind of enduring, I suppose that it's extremes, it's kind of go, but it's it's rather enduring to see somebody like remove a piece of lint off some somebody you know their partners jacket or you know just or even just touch that is IT doesn't look like it's gear towards any specific outcome. Yeah right.

It's a and IT doesn't necessarily appear romantic or that it's grooming ing. So maybe the little example is in the best one, but we are just see people that are just like that. Actually, on the flight down this morning that I have flying there is I was sitting on the ill seat.

In the middle was A A boy. He was probably fourteen, fifteen, and his mom was at the window seat. I went up to to use restaurant, came back and he had fAllen asleep on his mom shoulder, and I took a IT was very daring moment.

And then when we landed, I said, you know, the ability to sleep anywhere as a superpower and I learned IT from my dad, he said, and IT was a moment when I just thought, is just a very pleasant thing to see them yeah. And this touched on on the plane. He clearly felt comfortable enough to do that. Remember thinking like, yeah, humans were a lot like, a lot like .

the other primates. Yeah, there's a beauty to IT and IT. IT is a tool. IT is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sense 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 regulator our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all.

We will talk about that little bit too, i'm sure, but I know self control, emotion regulation, like, let me that rolled up my sleeves and really kind again in there. Yes, IT can at times be extraordinary ily difficult to manage emotions. And some of the tools that we have, our effort, for one example, would be expressive writing, this wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences.

You sit down, just let yourself go for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three days. This is the pending, this is the penny Baker writing effect. This is this is a uh just a remarkably wonderful um side effect free, you could argue, intervention for helping you deal with curve balls that .

life throws vast amounts data. Supporting the practice best among of Baker really deserves, in my opinion, if not a the psychology equivalent of a noble prize. I don't know what that is but deserves real deep praise for um developing that method because its centuries your cost takes a little bit of time and there's just hundreds of studies .

hundreds of studies .

showing like this fifteen fifteen minute cather's writing, just free association writing. I understand with probably Better um we did an episode where I talked about this and and received a note from um from him and was grateful that I would didn't get anything badly wrong. In fact, he was pleased with IT.

I think that he deserves a lot of credit. We powerful too. Real feeling .

we actually just um restarted a precious speaker series at michigan, the cats newcomes speaker series which is um designed to honour luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked IT off with Jimmy coming to speak about his extraordinary work because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity. And the but though here is that it's an effort for tool.

IT takes fifteen minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effort foot.

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 the sensory shifters, music um you know looking at images, right? These are modal, 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 is 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 a for for sensory shifters.

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Let's go back to um just close the loop on the inner voice in the benefits that IT provides. So we talked about to verbal working memory by 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 um an important presentation. Let's turn to self control and motivation so you exercise can you've talked about exercise.

I try try to exert six days a week, although summer short workout for longer ever .

talk to yourself and all the .

time so let's .

hear that 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 polls of the motivational scale. I was traveling two weeks ago, and I was doing some exercise for that. There's a muscle that back at the short of the rear delt, it's I don't think anyone's favorite muscle, the train.

But it's a very important one, one you write for sure, their posture instability and got trained those that muscle group because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating like thin burton and the rolling forward thing. And there are no reasons why important. So here I do the real dealt thing, and I SAT down to do the first work, said after a couple warm ups.

And I remember things like, I love training. I love training. I have since I started training when I was sixteen, and I thought to myself for something I want to do this this morning and then I thought, okay, David organs would probably start swearing at himself in his head.

So I started that a little bit. And 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 joko will links with some friends of jaco 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, all of them.

And I made a deal with myself that when I ran out of voices to use that, when I would stop the set, and I probably triple the number of repetitions that I would Normally get with that way. So IT was, IT was like one part motivation, one part distraction, one part frustration. And I was just pulling from the catalogue of possible voices, of kind of coach like voices, and worked out pretty well.

yeah. And then at the other extreme, I can recall many times, because I put effort into IT, where i'm well arrested, i'm hydrated, get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system, which I love, and sit down to train, and I absolutely love to train under those conditions. The sun is shining, music playing.

And I just remember this was during a set. This was the leg day, always the hardest day, set of heavy hack squats. And just thinking, I love this, but I have this inner voice for every time I I start a repetition, I go through my brace, my midd section, so I don't heard my back.

And I always look directly the ilan. I think about my bulldog, costolo, and I think, do this one for you. I do this one for. And I know at those moments my inner voice goes to, he would probably just be seeing there, like, why you working this heart? But I was not like to work so I am not really in a complete sentence generation in a voice kind of thing um .

but you have very rich in a world right you are you you know um verbal working memory stream is filled with with words when you are working out.

Yeah and i'll tell you this, I was going to 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 were took 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 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 um my friend sometimes tears me that i'll give people voices.

I will give someone like a marge simpson voice or something I just like SHE doesn't sound like that at all but yeah i'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind so yeah A A lot a lot of chatter and there a lot, lot of voices yeah but not super organized is not like i'm constructing a play kind of, you know, he feels like things guys are up by, you know tell them maybe and then but it's kind of a mission. Mh, it's not super regimented. These are in complete sentences.

You know, one of the reasons why the penny Baker effect is believed to be so useful is because IT impose the structure on the stream going through ahead, which is often times 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 idea such a mediate or you're lopa over a problem without making any progress.

Putting those words in actually taking that inner shipment and making a story out of IT is essentially what the penny Baker writing cuse 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. I can go on all sorts of directions. And that chaos is in part what can make chatter. So aversive so .

glad you're bring in this up. Our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guin coral diff by engineer. He is a practicing psychiatrist in the illuminates of neusatz. He developed these light sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neons 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 set deliberately, still completely bodily, still closed his eyes and force themselves. Have to think in complete sentences for mayan hour or so, maybe more. And I thought myself how like that's a very discipline practice.

IT also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default. That's my mind. So I don't know what this specific reason for doing that is he shared a few of them on that podcast, but i'm sure there are others as well. But I tried IT. It's very difficult to, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives, the stream sort of split into the tributaries and then it's all you dissolved in to .

sleep or committing .

almost dream like state know those liminal. yes.

Well, that I think where the riding provides a tool to structure thinking, talking is is 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 really 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 A meaningful conversation with you.

So there is some research which shows that if you get people to think of um to recall a chatter provoking experience, I think about something negative that happened to you and then you randomly assign them to just think about IT and worked through in their mind versus right about IT. So I A penny bigger writing like condition or talk about IT to someone else. The talking and the riding 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 onna give people guard roles later in this episode.

So in an addition to using the penny Baker approach and by the way, will provide a link to some resources for the penny Baker journal because there are some free online resources that really powerful for people to use if they want to use. As as a temper um for cathartic reasons, or just you 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 to get my head right. Yeah, I inside things to get my head right. Sometimes it's some music, sometimes it's writing. I. Something journal is just a really useful practice overall.

Um it's it's a useful practice and it's an under utilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during covet to look at how people how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding cover. 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. Uh, number one, there are no one size with all solutions for folks. So remarkable variability characterised the tools that worked for person a versus person b. Uh, number two, IT was said in the case that people used one, two.

In general, people use 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 favourite tool for managing emotions? I don't have a favourite tool because i'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same. So it's it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's it's similar of physical exercise.

You you're not only going to work out your real deltoids with the same exercise everyday, you would have like funky looking shoulders if you did right, you probably be pretty weaken lots of other parts of your body. You're doing multiple things and the multiple things that you do exercise, i'm guessing, are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise yet mean we may well be equally fit. Well, you may be a little bit more fit you, you get the drift.

So this is a beautiful variability to how we manager in our world to bring you back to expressive writing. We found that expressive writing when people used IT was really, really useful. IT moves the needle on their coffee 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 ever for .

IT asked 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 parsons idea work through an emotional state in twenty fifteen. I, by the way, I use these anette not because I want to focus on me, but just says it's generalizable anecdotes.

Okay, the specifics here you 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 vers path b. And I was in that place, I was I was actually choosing betwen a job at one institution and another institution, each of which had tremendous 的 advantages。 Neither had any like striking disadvantages.

But IT was a really hard decision. And those close to me at that time, we'll tell you that I was just brutal. Been there.

yeah. I made everybody around me suffer. Easy to the point where people, just like flip coin.

Now i'm not an indecisive person. I think, you know, it's one. These things were big decisions.

I think this over time, and attention and and IT was a time constraint thing. So I was pouring over this procs list. I was watching youtube videos trying figure best ways for decision making. I was trying to I actually isn't amazing.

by the way, when we're in those situations and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure is and exactly the same position. The things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are are wicky like i'm sure you are googling things that you have no business google in these kinds of decision trees.

And yeah I mean IT turns their mathematical models that like there's the um actually my colleague uh in Y U tony motian, I forget the name of the model but there's a about how many um towns you should evaluate an old old kind of old example of the towns you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business like as IT two is IT three and and there's an optimist ratee there in event most of IT wasn't helping.

And I do believe at some point you don't want too many committee members because IT just gets absolute using so that the two best pieces of of information came from the following practices. One was a colleague said, forget all the superficial, profound stuff. And I actually think this is proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me.

He said, take yourself through a typical week day in one place versus the other. Wake up. Where are you going to go? How you get in traffic to take yourself through the practical 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 with the institution that you're going to work for, the school you're going to go to that important, but take yourself through the entire day. So I did that and then he said, also do IT on the weekend because you, well, in our profession, we tend to work all the time, but occasionally 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 out, you know, you get into rhythm. And what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in particular way. These central pattern generators, as we call them in newer science, take over and you're just kind, you know turning your hands over in a way and like everyone.

So while you can think okay, you need to put a little more hip table 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 the sudden, boom, I thought, just guide red to the surface. And I made my decision, and that was my final decision. yeah. And I never went back from that decision.

And so I was in the act of not trying to pass things, words, that words sprung up from my, whatever, unconscious somewhere in my brain, coral or cortical, I don't know. And IT was like that IT. And and I I was overwhelmed by that.

And again, I don't share all that because I think it's speed bags or it's the example I gave before that's onna solve IT for everybody. But that that these answers to hard problem seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches, verbal construction of complete sentences with paper or deliberately like dysart's as and then also like not trying to get the answer at all. boom. The answer shows that what in the world is that?

So IT speaks to this idea that, first of all, there are no one size with 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 right about, and have conversations with other people.

And then you could also allow your unconscious problems solving machinery to do its thing. We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not in frequent. Many people report having moments of insight when they are when they are not otherwise engage.

And you know, one line of thinking is that we are doing problems solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of, and the and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness. So I actually, this may be the wrong usage of terms, but I read ized this process for myself. So before I exercise, before I get on the tread mill or roll, 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 A paragraph IT might be if i'm working on a book, how to find the right kind of story, if it's a an interpersonal issue that i've got a smooth over, I load that up and then I just get on the device is usually in a robic exercise. And i'm doing, and I just, I just I don't really hard think about in any fix way, but inevitably, the ideas, the potential solutions, bubbled up into awareness that is a real valuable tool that I possessed that I think allows me to to have success in various areas of my life. IT also identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious ous.

So we didn't get to all the benefits of the there's more, more benefit of the inner voice. And I want to get to, but i'm going to take a detour here for a second. I think this is really important.

We think of chat is the dark side of your invoice. 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 a in buzz. You're just continually going over that negative phenomenon experience. You're not make any, 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 treatment or own machine, and that's typically the time that I spent innovating, right, coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally. I don't have my minds not working to solve those problems. Instead, IT is stuck dealing with this other muck where i'm not getting anywhere.

And and so we actually see if you could look at the literature that one of the ways that chat or undermines people is IT interviews with the ability to to focus and solve problems. And that's that's just one weight undermines people. But that is a huge, huge liability .

is there in association between trauma and elivated levels of internal chatter.

Um I would say even more than an association. So we often think of chatter as uh, what we call this a trans diagnostic mechanism. So it's awful ful 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. Okay, they should say.

sure people. I mean, David, organs was on this point OK. So yeah, no.

I mean, pretty much chain that goes. Typically we don't swear at each other. Hope i'm pretty thick if you need. No, i've been called away worse than anything.

you get boxing. I actually .

boxed in high school and people box unless they know they're professional. And even then, I mean, I must say as a nea scientists, a lot of fun yeah and on wednesday and nights, spare a little bit. But I will say this, it's there are other sports where you can go level ten out of ten.

Yes, more safely, much more safely for the brain. Like brazil. you. I I I don't want .

to insult yeah I.

I as a neuroscientist, I can encourage people .

to I I would agree, in any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same feel. So basically, chatter refers to this this process of looping over, over if you inject some sad cognitions, and there I an ember. How can I know i'm never going to live up to to my potential.

I don't belong here like that. You get if you take that to an extreme high intensity and you perseverate overtime, then you're getting towards depression. If you inject anxiety provoking cognition ans all, my god, what if this happens? And what if that happens when you go down that path of uncertainty and in fear? Well, that leads you tomorrow, the anxious out.

And if you are, are filling that loop with traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences, you can get pushed towards trauma too. So IT is a IT is a process that cuts across many different really serious conditions that we grab with in society. But I I want to also be clear to to focus on 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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Yeah.

what would those be?

Well, that let me tell about a couple of things that I do personally, because like so like as we 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 space tools that that I that I covered when I chatter, when I gotten to shift the broader train regulating emotions are even more tools out there.

So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me, you're going to work for everyone um my my first line of defense when I comes to chatter are two distancing tools. So when i'm using the term distancing when i'm talking about is not avoidance per sai, we should talk about avoidance later. But when i'm talking about when I say distancing is the ability to step back and view myself from A A A slightly more objective perspective, and IT turns out there are many different tactics that exists for doing this.

One tactic that I find very powerful is this language, so I can manipulate the words I used to refer to myself, so I will often use my name and the second person pro out you to try to think through a problem, even how are you going image 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 what 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 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 Andrew?

Gosh, no, yes, of course absolutely. I think our our optics are just much clear when we're in observation, then when we're internally, unless I find um 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 in word, really seeing IT, let's let have a conversation about this yeah and having a conversation with myself in there that always leads to an obvious truth yeah or sometimes a decision note that isn't clear to me yet, but IT leads some place .

that feels like forward yeah, but you're taking special steps to be able to to alive yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else. Like reflexively, sometimes we stumble, right? Oh.

absolutely. I mean that and in the number of different ways that we can distract ourselves, this is what I was going to ask in few moments, but i'll take the opportunity.

Now I am wondering is we're talking about this today if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the score aspect, that with essentially zero effort, we can pick up a device and scroll through images and movies and IT IT will update us according to update the uh the imagery and topics, of course, according to what IT senses as are dwell times, certain pages and all the sudden we don't have to think about what's in our head. Yeah, my dad used to refer to surfer's the internet at that time. I was that and scrolling social media as kind of A A cognitive chewing gum. Yeah, he keeps us busy. But IT doesn't provide any real nutrition.

Well, you know it's interesting if you go back to um when facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that you would use to get people to contribute textual information to do remember what this was what is on your mind so you would be cute to share what is on your mind and you know in in some ways you could think of various forms of social media providing people with a giant mega one for their inner voice he is literally asking you or did what is on your mind right .

now so that in terms of posting posting mine, but in terms of consuming information, which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers more than I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can pick up the phone and I have a specific phone with instruction and ex on IT and it's those apps are not on any other phones. So that is segregated from yeah somebody sends me tweet or sends me in your post on not going to open and I can't open on those ones, right? That helped.

We should come back to that because that's also modifying your your spaces, which is another tool that I think is under utilize. So you should talk about that too.

I'll definitely touch on that. What I find is i'll say, okay, i'm going to take six minutes at six months till the r take six minutes yeah that's and what's incredible is how fast six minutes seems that's .

what's so striking. It's it's remarkable and not always bad. So we often talk about social media like IT is a harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. Uh, there are also some, I would argue, redemptive qualities to IT ah i'll give you one of my my personal ones which is no sometimes like on wind before bed i'm thinking all day I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short real yes.

when I cool .

videos yeah I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me is like, what are you laughing and then I sometimes I shower and he goes, why are you laughing at that? right? So but but you know, the algorithm learned the specific kinds of funny videos that I like.

And no, i'm not going to tell you what they are and IT IT IT just lightens the load. And so that's a way that I am using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in the 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 learn, how do I navigate this new digital experiments in ways that serve us, rather than serve against us and undermine our goals. We we basically got thrown into social media without any rule book experiment. And but if you think about IT, the new environment, we were born into this physical world, and our our parents are caretakers from the time we are able to understand things, and probably before they are teaching us, they're socializing us how to navigate this space profitably.

They know just like lord of the flies, throw us into the world and let us let us kind of figure that out. Outcomes won'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, he hear, the healthy versus harmful versus beneath 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 game. You could think of them as like little different countries there.

There are own little micro cultures 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 governed by oppressive a button, right? You could change where the algorithm ks, and then you've got ta 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 suthing distraction compared to trying to rustle with the firehose of thoughts in their head. Yeah and that is it's kind of like the way you describe these funny videos s that you want to close to us that sounds like .

you they typically ah okay .

yeah did we used to hear um that people would have a drink after work to just kind like, you know take the edge off with 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 um between the hours of eleven P M and four and most night, nobody y's perfect. But that if you wake up in the milk the night, one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone and starts growing 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 set way back. You know, you asking about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter? I'm talking 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 two A M chat strategy. And I call my two A M chat strategy because every I seemingly like four to six weeks, I will go to bed happy and content. And then I wake up at two A M and like, IT is all go on a hell really fast.

What time do you typically go to sleep .

ah usually around the eleven and eleven thirty.

Interesting yeah, but this is a common problem for a lot of people. And there are some tools like long except breathing and things that that clearly work. I long ago made a decision. I refuse to believe any thought that occurs between the hours of two m and five A M. I just refuse. I don't believe IT as if somebody he's lying to me in my head yeah and one could argue maybe that's where the truth is coming out because your forebrain is not so good at suppressing these you know unconscious thoughts and share all good. But as you point out, they are rarely the kind of thoughts that one can work with.

positive or negative. The tool that I use actually um implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing. So at two A M when the chatter strikes, and by the way, you say like this is common, this is more than common when I present to audiences and thousands and thousands of people over over the years.

And I ask, hey, you ever you ever get two A M chatter? Maybe two thirty A M. All the hands go up. This is A, I don't want to say, universal affection, but IT is an incredibly common problem that people struggle 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 I asked myself, and I typically use my own name to do its on blending another distancing tool, distance of talk is Ethan, how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning, no matter how bad the chatter ever is at two A M, to your point, when I wake up the next morning and my my brain is fully, fully awake and i've access to my I prefrontal cortex, I could think constructively about things. IT is never as bad that next morning as IT is in the middle of night. We, of course, have learned that over time, because how many, how many mornings have we woke him up in our lives? We could do them up if I was more sophisticate.

I do the fight. I can't right. Like many, many mornings, we have experienced this like chatter to A M at seven am, 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, ten years from now?

What that does is IT activates this understanding that what you are going through, as bad as this may seem, IT is temporary, will eventually subsided. And that does something very powerful for a mine that is consumed with chat, returns the volume down, which for me, is often all I have to do to get back to bed. So the official name for this tools, not mental time travelled, is called temporal distancing.

And it's a flexible tool. You can you can ask yourself, if you're struggling with a problem, how you going to feel about IT tomorrow, next week, ten years from now. And it's another way of of broaden your perspective.

It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind IT. So those are the, those are two, the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own. And that NIPS a significant chunk of the chatter that I experiences in the bud when that 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 and utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing. So people will often ask, hey, you ever, ever experience chatter? My yeah, of course, pinch me.

I'm a living, breathing human being. I do at times. But i'm really good at detecting IT and then implementing tools and an almost automatic manner. If this happens, if the chat strikes, then i'm a coach myself through the problem, use my own name in you, and I jump in to the medal time travel machine and ask myself hammer to feel about this in the future.

If that's not sufficient, then i'll go to like the level two response, which consists of, if weather permits, i'll go for a walk in a in a safe, natural setting. I always feel the need to give the coffee out about safe and natural because I grow up, grow up in reglan like the the natural settle through the place you got mugged so they were not safe. But you know a park I I find restoration and there's a ton of work highlighting the restoration features of Green spaces.

But then we'll also do yes, I will um all dial up the the chatter driver 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 catheter use that term before I don't just get IT out.

A lot of people think that the key of feeling Better is to have venture emotions, that is, 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 empathy with me.

That's great for a relationship, but 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 problems of 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 column, which can be pretty harmful. The people on my chat advisory board, they know to first validate, emphasize 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 broad and the perspective to try to think through that problem, which I am having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really, really loud. And you know, 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 in the reason I asked when you go to sleep at about eleven pm 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 I movement sleep.

And then somewhere right about that transition time, it's not necessarily two or three a persue. But given that you are sleep for about three four hours, after about three four hours of sleep, the proportion of our sleep that is rapid ID movement sleep relative to deep slow wave sleep shift dramatically, the intensity of our dreams shift dramatically to become more emotionally laden. And that whole process of having those rapid I movement sleep associated dreams is strongly associated with the removal of an emotional load in the morning when we wake.

We know this because of you selectively to private people of early members. Late have been. So the reason I mention this is that one tool that I certainly found useful is that while 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 one kind of one form of sleep to another.

It's almost like a different beast altogether and that heart racing emotionally late in thoughts is characteristic of where they're exposed to be in the sleep architecture cycle. And so for me, so that's that's um number one. The other is that um the tool that you provided of of getting into this mental time travel like to just a double click on this notion of time perception in sleep and dreaming.

I mean, time is very fluid. You can be one environment than another. IT seems compressed. A lot happens in short amount of time when we are in chatter in the daytime. To what extent does IT alter our perception of time um and I have a very specific reason for asking this because I believe that one of the main um you unifying features among the tools for dealing with depression, anxiety, he said her when I survey the research is almost all of them journal meditation. Even some of the medications for that matter involve taking people into a different of time perception mode and it's a kind of an abstract idea.

But I I think this this may resonate with some of the issues relate 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, you know, anise, when we want to become self worth, that changing our time perception seems to be the most useful thing that we can do, at least among the most useful. So what's the relationship between chatter and time present and tell? Tell me more about what you mean by time perception, how broadly? Or finally, we are winning time.

So we know that as automated ic sel, let's call IT stress, but wakefulness and autonomic also goes up. We're fine sicking time, like the pupils get bigger. We actually see depth of field changes. We get higher olustee mage of much less. This is IT makes every bit of evolutionary sense.

You know, we can deal with fewer things Better yeah and typically the thing that we're fixated or ruminating on yeah when we're relaxed thing about like sitting on the beach, you watching the clouds go back, it's almost like you your frame rate now is slower. So you know higher frame rate is like slow motion. This is why people who experience trauma often feel like things, or a car crash, like ceeon in slow motion, or that in slow motion you're spicing time.

Yeah, it's kind of remarkable thing, right? This is also how athletes learn to play with their levels of autonomic. Slow fighters can see punches coming in, and it's almost like slow motion, but they can react with full speed. Likewise, tennis players will described. So 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 the linking chatter with this um with time perception, the way you're describing IT. But what does come to mind our our experiences of flow, which in many ways you might you might consider the opposite of chatter flow being the state where um you know you're just in the moment and and time is effortlessly passing your the demands of the situation completely matched 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 becomes most successful for me is a tendency that we have to really sume in very narrow ly 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 talk to do from the time where little kids, when we have a problem.

think about IT yeah go you got IT on.

Try number one, zoom in, focus on the problem, roll up, recedes and get to the bottom of IT. And so that's that kind of really you're getting in there and fine grain detail and um you know something that does work for us a lot of the time.

But turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation that can get really troubling events where this zoom ing out, taking this broader of you, whether you do that through visual modalities, imagination modalities like mental time travel, you can 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 are even worse.

And they got through IT. And oh, if I got through that, well, sure, hacket, I can get through this. And so that's expanding our perception of time or or are 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 chat, but if it's not, we can set this aside for another day. How often do you think people are in kind of negative or positive fantasy like as they move through their day? I'm sure studies been done asking people what they're thinking about.

I mean, how often is IT actually tied to what they're doing or they are supposed to be doing? Or are they thinking about like what you do this weekend? Or maybe even constructing higher ratio of things that are like nonexisting that they would like to exist or you know occasionally will see this person think we've all seen this person kind of mumbling to themselves and IT doesn't look like their rumbling ling pleasant .

things yeah because you've just been rejected by a journal and their article.

the experience of every scientist and is of course always reviewed number two, fall the paper carefully enough, of course. And none of us have ever been review a number two, sarcastic, by the way, we've all been reviewing number two, little academic and inside ball humors know you'll see somebody mumblings to themselves and he doesn't IT doesn't look like the mumblings.

Pleasant things yeah we don't know what the saying of himself, yes, but I am guessing if we tap themselves hey, what you mumbling I would guess that more than fifty percent the time IT was kind of frustration with stuff. You going to see this like a frustrated person. It's it's a hard thing to observe actually.

Yeah so so people have looked at this, and my memory of this wonderful paper, I think was published in science. I think I think the title was a wandering mind is an unhappy mind and um basically the taker from the article was that people spend between well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like IT, what 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 or the other time, we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things. And this one particular paper linked to that process with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse. I think there's huge levels of variability there though um I think like being lost and thought can be a wonderful exchange.

I love, love, love, love my modern. I think it's one of my strength. IT is the source of idea generation for me.

IT is also the source of emotion regulation. I will, one of you, my sleeping pill, metaphorically speaking, is mental time travel. It's getting away from the present IT is fantasising about the future, right? Thinking about the good things that could happen in the potentialities all going into the past and savings, some of the the positive things that happened.

I'm thinking about the socket game where my kids score goals or something good happened to someone I know where to me and and 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.

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 emerge as a type of cultural maximum like be in the now. And this ideas 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 bringing IT back to the present. Being in the present can be very useful in many contacts, and certainly when we experience chatter, start worrying about the future, ruminating about the past, refocusing on the president, our breath of monta.

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. A company that process, if I can go into the past, not only i'm not saverin positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life, i'm also not learning from my screws, which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis, but i'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past.

And if i'm not going into the future, then i'm not i'm not planning, i'm not simulating, i'm not fansites ing. So we anna be we don't anna shut down mental time travel. I think what we want to learn how to do, it's had 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 fixing on something that we're anxious about. So um 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 smart phones, but namely texting has interfered red with? so. Time tested, meaning over hundreds of thousands of years, time tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions in our thoughts, to arrive at Better ways of thinking, feeling, being. Um you know nowadays you get on a train or a plane or you're in a uber or you're walking your car and you have a like I thought about something only that grant that I did.

It's so easy to just get into a mode of texting yeah that's passive participation may be through social media scrolling again, not univerSally bad, but you can go to passive kind of almost semi associative state like yeah they are not really in the parking lot more you're half in your phone and half in the parking lot. Um in testing polling people around you is supposed to you know in the old days where you had to actually grapple through this stuff as you described, your um the tools that you use to deal with chatter into process information and to you know work with your thinking, your emotions. You strike me as somebody who um has a rich jungle gym of things to play within there yeah and a tool kit and an emergency switch if you needed and all that stuff where as most people I think um just they have their phone, but we going to call what we going text what sider you onna google the google search to what I mean I can't be good well um IT often .

isn't but IT IT IT can be harness and and here's what the way I think about testing and really how social media and the opportunities that gives us to communicate with others whenever we want. How this has thrown a curve ball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions, are 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. This is wonderful research program by a belgium psychologist, but never of bernards remain who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions and any found over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize to get that out. And a couple of reasons for that we want to relate to other people, get their support, but we also wanted usually processed.

But in a free social media era um two things had to happen. Typically to share our emotions first you have to find someone to share them with and typically in the process of looking for someone either to find someone face to face or 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 is all follow a common trajectory. So something happens in the world.

In our mind, we are magine something that is provoking in some way. Our motions 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, you know, some people may peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly. Some maybe have slower peaks and take a longer to subside, but they all follow that basic trajectory over time. So let's go back to the free social media era, right? So you gotto find someone to talk to.

And while you're trying to find someone to talk to, time is passing that's acting to temper or emotions. Now once you find someone to talk to either face to face or via phone, the moment you start talking, you are now a wash in all of this feed back this emotional feedback where there is coming from your face. Like you're giving me all sorts of information right now.

I would benefit from smiling if you could there 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 fold and I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society of cyber er bullying and um you know the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructed 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 of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress. IT can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about need to change. But I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate motion information.

When I think about the different ways to parse A A problem, a real or imagined problem, and I think about the role of web searches, um IT immediately takes me to either social media or two IT could be read IT could be some article that was written and posted online in twenty and fifty, you know, at least will return ACE. They reproposing things.

I just got this morning and interviewed a fact track that I didn't two thousand and nineteen yeah .

figure I mean, it's cool that there's um 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 come archival and we can update IT over time. And and that actually brings me to the the the very specific question, which is about AI know with A I web searches are now changing fundamentally there.

You no longer being brought to a site that is just a designed side. You're getting information back at the, you know the the album of a lot of information fund through presumably the large language models are changing all the time. But fund through kind of your search behavior, your preferences is set up. So web searches are no longer just site destination journeys.

They are you know a recipes of information that are filter in, combine and given back to us, which makes me think that maybe A I can provide a kind of suda 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, like two thirty in the morning, three thirty the morning of a small problem can seem huge, and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming, is crushing us. Seven am different when we search on the web now, like how you know how to get through bankrupcy. Let's say somebody dealing with bankrupcy, they're going to there's information to go to, but with A I 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 it's two thirty 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 A I is controversial, is going to get smarter than us as again tells to go do bad things, this kind of thing. Okay, that's a whole different discussion. But seems to me that A I could be pretty good, maybe even terrific, helping us resolve problems because IT doesn't have these state .

shifts and it's really tailor to us well, IT IT can be. And I think you know A I I think if IT is as a new tool that is has an amazing potential, and I actually think IT has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourself fixed.

So if I if I look back at the last twenty thirty years of research on emotion regulation, i'm talking here not just about managing chatter, but managing the whole sweet of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter our lives. What I can do is I can point to several individual tools that are empirically supported. Science, space tools and scientists, have you done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work? mechanistically? They've often gone down to the to the brain level.

We'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 are often do multiple things to manager 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 that the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated. So someone comes me with a problem. I can go through all the tools and the toolbox.

What I can do is I can prescribe combinations of tools and say, hey, for the kinds of problems that you are, experiences 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 A, I has a potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation, an individual basis. And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology.

You mentioned you have kids. When my sister, who three years older than I am, was a kid, my dad tells the story that um SHE had imaginary friend Larry Larry was a girl, lived in a purple house this imaginary friend Larry had all the the the components of a child's mind that was unrestricted by all the barriers of naming and things like that um and my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry in her room for hours just talking a Larry and I know with those houses and toys and things and then one day my dad, he loves the story I don't know why he loves the story in particular but he he was standing outside her door.

SHE was playing with Larry, her imaginary friend talking to Larry and then SHE stopped and turned around and he said, how is Larry and he said, Larry's debt and he he never talked about Larry again like he was this sort of collision between fantasy life in real world is how I interpret IT. And I was IT. Yeah, Larry was done.

yeah. Poor Larry. Poor Larry. Well, maybe time. yeah.

no. I mean, he was. Maybe gonna be seven soon. And maybe IT served well. So I always want to ask somebody this question. I think you are the person asked this question are imaginary friends, common and children and imaginary friends, the primordial form of.

Our internal dialogue with our self just fascinated by and are there some to who maintain imaginary friends and i'll stead in additional context, which which will be especially relevant to the listeners of this podcast, which in the very seat that you're sitting about this time last year, David organs was here and he was talking about you know how he pushes himself through tremendous ly hard things and during that discussion that became very clear that David has a an array of different voices that are all him but that serve different roles yeah and IT was a remarkable thing to hear. Articulate that because to those of us on the outside we observe is like one person. But he's constructed in in in a laborat inner world to be able to equip himself to do the things he does. And I just have to wonder whether not this all thing of imaginary friends, provided IT doesn't take us into the room of psychosis and delusion, could actually be useful.

Yeah there isn't a remarkable that this is um 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 start presentations with a quote from ropy on adult tennis great um him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with and he says it's it's managing the voices plural in my head and and I go to the audience, I say, hey, what do you do if someone comes up to 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 a right here and someone needs support yet this is a very common future of the human experience that we just never really touch on.

So they answer your question is a comment for kids to have imaginary friends and may be talked to themselves yes um I believe this is called the study of pretense um according to one famous soviet psychologist named leave the god ski. One of the way self control is first learn is actually through self talk. And so what happens is you you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things.

Andrew, you should do this or don't do that, and sit this way and not that way. 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, are playing with dogs.

And no, jimmie shouldn't do this. Jimmy shall do that. Some kids do IT in the form not of 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 context, according to this idea, is they are at their practicing self control. They are, they are repeating the things, the messages that their, their takers have told to them, right? They are reinforcing IT in those ways.

And then as time goes on and your sister demonstrated this, the outer voice becomes our inner voice, and we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice and throughout our lives. But IT is interesting that during moments of extreme stress, many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud, right? There is a very little research on as a lot of this is um aneugh.

But I have um when speaking to a lot of individuals, they say, yes, sometimes I will actually just start talk to myself out. I thought something was wrong with me is 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 um a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this in this response and I remember just walking.

I was I was, I was so offensive. I remember walking around the neighborhood. And why did you say that to my face, you know? And I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing.

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, so David has become exceptionally skilled at harney.

Different voices according to you to manage chAllenges that he is facing. I've heard David talk on a number of vacations and I think there is another important point to to bring up here, which is i'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices, they are not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take IT easy and be kind to answer. So 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 help when I am exercising and i'm doing classes, sometimes where coaches are told me to do really painful things, like sometimes i'm pretty tough myself.

I'm channeling my high school reston coach who is really hard on me, right? You know you Better like shape up, you know you can you know wipe out here. That serves an a motivating function for me there.

So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per say. What is bad as if we start looping, that is the what we really wanna quit with chatter. It's getting stuck in those thought loop that when things get get harmful, when those negative emotions are tweet too intensely, refer too long.

a couple of times we've talked about the relationship between physical activities and mental activities in particularly taking a walk, going into Green spaces. And I was a delighted to hear when you said that there is a vast literature supporting the use of Green spaces. Yeah for calming ourselves as that essentially what the data show .

well goes a little bit um beyond even just coming. So yes, there is data linking, uh, going for a walk in in a beautiful setting with a feeling Better. But but, but scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the various mechanisms through rich 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 restorable. So as we talked about earlier, when people get stuck experiencing china other kinds of big emotions, our attention often fix its on on the problem at hand.

We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem, and I can join us of our precious attentional resources when when you go for A 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 the the trees, the sense the sounds are tension often drifts onto those features of our environment. Now most of us are are not doing the a equivalent of Carrying a magnifying glass and studying the the genetic o structure of the leaves in the flowers, right?

We're just kind of taking IT in, but the surroundings are are sufficiently intriguing to capture to grasp attention, and that gives us an opportunity to restore that precious commodity. So this work is a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be cogniac, vely, restorable. That's another feature that or another mechanism through rich nature exposure can help us the other pathway that I just find.

So it's so, so cool. From a research point of view, going for walks in, in, in natural settings often illicit the emotion of all, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. So in and you are breeding m 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, like 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 process. Like, wow, that just Brown my perspective or an amazing sunset. You can also experience this emotion through feet of innovation. So I ma i'm a science uh, geek.

I guess you could say and for me that the the two biggest all triggers are a number one, the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces, which if you follow this with some physicists of some time, some have figured out engineers how to take pictures of what the the universe look like billions of years ago. Somehow I don't understand the physics. We can see what I look like this, you know, vast amounts of time ago.

And we also, of course, have the equivalent of an S U. V, currently rome on mars, sending us back footage of that planet. So when I think of that, like we've actually landed vehicle on another planet, this vastly expands, like I am filled with out.

So when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that, this is the ultimate perspective runner. 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 fails?

Smaller problems .

are problems. So this is a an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manager emotions. And so what I love about that work is IT highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plane site.

They're waiting to be hardest. 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 um if you probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures, so there are these figures from our child that um we often, though not always securely attached to their source of safety and comfort and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners. If for an positive relationships, as I am, love you. As to my wife, he 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. Um I know one person who um discovered that you is 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 the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life. That's an example of of the power of places to affect. So so how many times do we think about here? What are the places that are my emotional.

Oasis, if you will, that I can go to when I need IT. We can also structure our environments like you and I are both talking right now across the table from one another. We don't have our cell phones .

out on the table and not in .

the room for me either. If we did and we had IT facing up, we would be distracted.

We not without a question.

facing down. I think there's some .

literature gather like reserve, I mean because of the thing signals um a particular reward a particular reward and and a particular set of behaviors I just like a pen only few things you I mean that pride many things you do with .

the pen but that typically one this is not .

john wick here thing. We're not getting innovative here with with these objects but right when the pit, excuse me, when the phone is present, even if it's face down, accused the, the opportunity to maccall received attacks， look on social media, all the internet and so 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, the the object, the stimulus is so tempting, even if I am the most captivating pressure in the world, which I am not, I aspire to be captivating. But I know that i'm always going to lose compared to the screen, the email I ask them to. Yet no laptops in .

my in my class received .

so far so good. Um 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, I 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. Um but but modifying our space is really strategically like this is another valuable tool in um in our tour box like when we have people over for football watching parties. Let's say it's pretty common where I come from an an arbor and I my favorite food in the world is is pizza.

I have this wonderful new york city style pizza in an urban now I will order vast amounts of IT, much more than we need. And when the the the game is over, I will insist that everyone take IT with them, because I know if if IT is in the refrigerator and I opened the frigging or later that night to just get some water, if I see the pizzo x the q IT will illicit a emotional response, this desire, this a pet of response, to consume the pizza, which is not the goal that I have from either in a fitness or emotion, regular, a point of view. So I am structuring my spaces strategic all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at at meeting my regular or goals.

I'm so glad you brought up pizza in new york pizza and the fact that you're from new york, here's why. And again, I give a personal example only as a template for the people to think about themselves. Sure, either were IT matches or doesn't match what i'm about to ask.

I love being in nature. I love being up a useful in rural areas and at the coast. I just love, love being in nature and the quiet of nature.

I find my, my mind slows, and my thoughts and my emotions enter a pace that this is very good thing. I also love being in new york city. I was first in new ork city when I was about five or six years old.

And I remember telling my dad, who from another big city won A S. I remember tell him, like I I can't believe this exist. I can.

We come back here and I saw that I go back as many times as I possibly could. I love gone in new york city despite IT having many problems, is still a wonderful city. When i'm in new york, there's tons of activity.

There's tons of stimuli. yeah. And I also find that my mind achieves that slowed pace. Another parallel construction here. Then i'll wage the specific question.

I've worked with professors, my post dog advisor, for instance, and my graduate advisor worked extremely effectively. These are hyper focused, unfortunate of them of past, but hyper focused, brilliant people, truly brilliant. And their offices were a complete disaster.

And we say, ban, you need to clean your office. And you would say, no, don't move anything like others SE, I won't know where anything is. And like, how can you know where anything is? Like this? This IT IT looks like an earthquake hit yesterday and don't touch anything.

And he and he could find things in this, like this singly, messy environ. Yeah, I know he was the steroid pe of the professor, sitting hunched, veit his keyboard at two in the morning, because at that time I were truly late. You d go to bends off my eyes.

You know, any organized thinking amid chaos? yeah. And the new york example would be the parallel. And at the other extreme, nature also seems to bring this about.

So two specific questions, is there a continuum of what's the late daytime? Let's forget about the night of date time, kind of default levels of chatter. I think this is kind of rpm in a car.

Like like how is the car idling when we return on the courage? Sit there like if the transmissions working well and everything working well. Like, yeah, how is that a nice? It's not red lining.

Yeah, some people seem to be red lining all the time. Yeah, and they calm down. Intent in clutter environments.

So how much is do we have a kind of a set point, a chater set point, assuming everything else you will well rested at setter? And then why is IT that external environment matching our internal chatter? Somehow I can adjust that internal set point IT seems I realize this a very abstract but for me it's very useful to think about where my mind goes into its .

most pleasant and effective states yeah um your example of your advisors resonate so strongly with myself a IT entirely depends on my mental state. And prior to really getting involved in the space, I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess and sometimes IT is speaking span unbelievably organized and clean and so let me share with you some of the research in the space that I think at all.

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. I my entire life, if we call 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 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 and typically like tuning out my surroundings to to focus in on the task at hand. I can work in a coffee. I can work almost anywhere.

And I 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 will always start organizing things, making them nice entity. Um my office is always spotless. Sometimes I even take IT further. Presently, when i'm experiencing chatter, I clean up my office and 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 seems like that this is a very common experience. When you're experiencing chatter, you don't feel like you are in control. They're on the driver seat.

The thoughts and feelings are taking over and they are pushing you directions in to places that you don't want to be is 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, unpredictable there of survival value that that communicates to us, right?

If we know things are certain and the, you know, proceeding in a in a predictable way, creating order around us, compensates for the lack of ordering control we feel inside. It's called compensating control. And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us argument are spaces to counteract, in this case, are emotional state. And so I don't know that perfectly answers your question, but IT IT, for me highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings. In some circumstances, when i'm not experiencing chater really doesn't matter if the places nice and tidy versus not like no big deal, but when I motivated to think film behaving a particular way, then my circumstances are becoming more important.

Mean, the military is a very silent example where people to have their their their kit in order, uh in order to essentially be able to proceed with the job right and and people can say what they will about the military, but the the structure in the hierarchy, the military is provided structure. And in order for people to essentially harness that take go from a chaotically life to a structured life. That's right.

And um it's an extreme example but having everything squared away is is one of those things. I got sartin ed a school badia a few years ago and you know IT occurred me early on in the first lives that know if you're kit isn't squared away and you don't have everything worked out, things can go badly wrong. And the the severity of of the potential consequences for the potential severity, the consequences, I suppose, is the right way.

Say IT is good reminder, like to have everything in check IT this isn't the kind of thing where you can afford to forget IT a piece of gear or and not check of valve or you know it's potentially life for death and that serves an adaptive role. It's kind nice to have a an activity actually where that's that's the case where as we can do our cars and we might pull the driveway and go down the street now you see people texting and driving all the time, hopefully less this time goes on. And you see then you might put on your seat bell, like at a quarter mile on the road you might put on first, right? I always put my on first one when I remember.

I'm sure now so will catch me with my sea bell off, but um I drive with the sea belt and so on and so on. The physical steps that we take to organize ourselves in the environment, in our relationship to the environment. Really do seem to change our brain into A 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 shifts are inside us. So there are the sensory shifters we talked about.

There are attentional shifters. We've got ten into that yet. But you know, we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions, and we can be strategic.

And how we do that, there are perspective shifters, way we the way we think about our circumstances is 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 up 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, right? We are, we are in different cultures throughout our lives, and sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day. So you know, if you're going to your your lab or your own campus stand for that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and and and weird practices, maybe that's no offense.

Stanford, by the way, that's more academics, academic somewhere practices. If you then go to your podcast community, right? The team in the study that we're sitting here, there are different.

There's a different culture that characterized is the way you function here. And those cultures that we are a part of, they powerfully shape our emotional lives. They indicate they, they, they influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value.

So what kinds of social experience are you motivated to have? They give us practices, rituals to meet those emotion regulation goals that we have as well. 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 the smart phone. The smartphone Carries an infinite number of context into the different environments with us. Um so were on the train, but we could be paying attention something overseas.

And I was on the plane this morning and I just marvelled at the number of screens on this Frankly very densely packed plain is like five fourth grade when a kid brought in a little mini TV and I remember thing oh my says like a mini T, V. IT. Look kind of like a Walker turkey.

And the resolution was terrible. And of course, I was all black and White. They had color TV, by the way, I was Young, just had made IT to the mini T.

V. We were basically walking around with lum many tvs all day yeah, with near infinite number of channels combined with texting. sure. I mean, it's wild.

remarkable signs, 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 went to believe that this was possible when you are kids.

Agree, I agree, and I am 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 in or not. I'm not talking about what puts people into their best performance mode or so that i'm not talking about biohacking.

I'm referring to you know there's an age old question, you know what is a good life and and that's a completely different podcast that we should probably ly do at some point. But IT probably involves being able to pay attention to things and be present, but also that once 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 de of so many context, arriving with us in our pocket when we arrive in a situation like you said, come to the studio as long time my phones face down or away from me, i'm in the studio. Otherwise I 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 deregulation levels over the centuries. I think it's absolutely true that we now have um 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 um to be clear, I think social media technology ah can and does do a lot of harm, and I think I 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 those digital technological landscapes. And I think we probably jumped into them um without a user guide too quickly.

And we're only learning now fifteen years later or whatever the number is that that was the case. But um but I don't know that I would I don't make that my I 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, um it's not clear to me that the world wasn't a chAllenging place either. I mean, you know um we used to get into fights and pull sorts and there is huge you know people would invade readily if you go back further and we there is the threat of illness and you know we weren't living nearly as long. And so I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species. But and this is, I think, a really important but and I think about this often, the issues that we are talking about today on this podcast, this question of how we manage our emotional lives. This is a question that we have been struggling with, likely first 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 and those circumstances are constantly in the evolving, providing new new threats us that now we need to learn how to manage. Um when you know when I was digging deep into the history of motion regulation for shift, um I couldn't believe that that when I when I when I look back at the first surgical tool ever developed, you know that is trading training. So tell everyone is destined what that involved.

Traveling is where you born a hole through the skull in order to let out some volume of fluid.

some volume of fluid, or or .

remove brain or brain.

Or we go back eight, ten thousand years ago when this technology was first cutting edge, right? Like the new iphone of the times, refining for .

spirits.

for maybe spirits, right? So one of the reasons was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are may, may be causing tremendous emotion, this regulation. So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we use to manage emotions. Then let's let's jump into the mental time travel is or just the time travel machine and go to the late nineteen forties, where there was another major Spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline. You are going guessing .

you're talking about the lobotomy.

That's right.

The front of the physician .

develops the lobotomy. I think IT was initially called the luca I um essentially making some holes in your frontal cortex through going up .

through the orbit of the eye, through the ice sweet ping IT back and forth. This was and not just an outpatient surgery, but a mobile surgery that was right, arrived to people's homes. I think I could be wrong, but I think that nobel prize was given for the lab.

Amy, there go.

That's the believed anxiety, unfortunately.

relieve a lot of of many other things.

And the people's interest in pursuing lots .

of IT caused major, major, major um this function. And to be clear, this is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention IT hasn't been for a while.

Well, that's why I said don't box. Preventing critical damage is a common feature of .

people with giving .

box or even I don't know this is true, someone needs to check but I I do hear that some sadly, some soccer players who head the ball a lot deal with some front of yeah related adventure type stuff. I'm guessing that's probably related to some genetic acceptability because least to me, this oker ball is not very hard. It's only you it's but but and then again, there of course people play a whole career of football yeah um or box less sell dom boxing. People get hill out in the head, often have problems yeah they develop problems .

yeah generally not a good thing. But but, you know, just to go back to the abroad, me, what's amazing to me is like, that was perceived to be such an advance that I won the nobel Price.

like the nobel prize, because IT calm people down.

calm people down, right? And we so so I raise these issues to to just point that like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage emotions effectively for a really long time forward to the present. We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet. But I would argue that we have made major advances identifying non invasive science space tools that can be leverage to help people lead more productive emotional lives.

And so um you know you raise this question earlier about what is a productive life, what is a good life and ah I think answered that question is impart relevant to how I think about how do you d like define self control in many ways or emotion regulation or or let me not not just how you define IT, but what are the component parts. So we've been talking about tools throughout this conversation. All like these different tools exist.

Different shifts are pushing our emotions or chat around. That's one core part of regulating effectively. But another core part is our motivation or our goals.

And you need both motivation and tools. So I can know about all, all the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered. If i'm not motivated to manage my emotions, i'm not going to use the tools. If, on the other hand, I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions, but I don't know what the tools are, i'm gonna be that effective.

And I may, in fact, do some bad things, right? I may, I may, you know, use unhealthy tools, substances that really can very powerfully map, you know, substance abuse and talking about that can modulate my emotions, but has the negative. It's about what are my goals for me, for my emotional life.

And do I possessed the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals? I think that is a formula for the good life. He hear the goals that I have.

And if these are healthy, productive goals, and I have the means to achieve them, that should bring a sense of satisfaction. Sometimes our goals, of course, aren't optimal and use that maybe controversial world word. But um we do change our goals throughout our life. But it's about finding the right set of goals for us as individuals and then identifying the tools that we can use to bring those goals to fruition.

Yet in keeping with the historical art of the tools that humans have used to try and regulate emotion, mention training, frontal lobotomy. Think about um a Barbara appearing procedure, but one that actually is pretty effective in the right hands um and that is still commonly used today electric shock therapy um which at a mechanistic level we don't don't really understand but that seems to lead to going a massive dump of bunch neuromodulators don't permeating tonia but like almost Willy nearly like just yeah um and then nowaday there's a lot of at least interest, if not enthusiasm.

More work is needed on um the various psychiatric yeah in particular Sullivan and m dma um for depression and P T S D more specifically. And while those are more in the criteria c pathway that my read of the data that you know they're creating, you know more brain wide connectivity at resting state, I mean, they're still fairly crude tools yeah in terms you're massively changing the levels of given their modulators, your people are undergoing variable experiences. It's not like directed in any anyway, no one Williams is standing is combining those things with transcription mag stimulation to essentially highlights activity of particular circuits during the psychology journeys and after things of that sort.

So it's getting more specific. But I would say even today, we we don't really have great phonologic or surgical tools for emotion. Now there is terrific na surgery going on, mind you.

But when IT comes to behavioral tools for emotion regulation, I feel like the psychologist, you all you and your colleagues have done a tremendous job, as have the people from you, for lack of a Better name, the server ancient traditions, and from the wellness community. You know, things like long excel breathing, physiological size, meditation. When he said zuko lab, at why you join your the men, a day of meditation improves focus, emotion and emotional state.

So IT seems to me that the behavioral tools are getting way out ahead of the surgical and even pharma logic tools in terms of their specificity, their safety and maybe be in their potency. Would you care to reflect on on what you see is the most valuable tools for emotion regulation? You touch on some of them today, but already. But I mean, taking a walk, Green spaces, time you mental time travel fantasy at a listed, a few more of these off. I mean, these might seem kind of more model, you know, top level control things, but they work right of the data say they .

were generally, yeah, I mean they are mechanistically. We understand the mechanisms that that are underlying the benefits of these tools. Um they are easy to implement and not always but for a lot than the reason I think that in part with their power resides um we are still trying to understand how the brain functions.

As you will know, you've contributed to this. I worked on this a little bit myself. The brain isn't remarkably complicated working, and we still have a lot to learn. I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomenon like emotion play out at different levels of analysis, at the psychological level of thinking and feeling, but also at the biological level in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on.

And so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually, down the road, try to help people manage emotions through most different sources of intervention, through the psychological level, through the behavioral level, through the interpersonal level. But it's a messy, messy space right now. I think one of the big problems is, and this is in markets to bigger questions about science and how science is done.

IT can be hard across levels of analysis, and there are multiple practical constraints that become active here. So having the large enough samples and the right collaborators to look at how different kinds of interventions interact with one another, working different populations. And so we tend not to do those more complicated designs because are a lot harder to do.

They take a ton more money, a ton more time and effort and often time scientists on time lines and their incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do. But big picture down the road. I think that that the big questions are about how do these different kinds of interventions interact with one another.

The good news is, though, that for any person who was watching or listening, who's motivated to manage emotions right now, there are many things you can do to start and IT begins. Step one, learning about what these tools are, and then starting this process of experimenting with the tools. I don't use that word, experimenting lightly.

I wouldn't advocate experimenting with with agents that have serious side effects of the sort. Some of the biological interventions you articulated earlier do those kinds of tools, I think, should be used in the context of of medical supervision. But a lot of these other tools that we're talking about, small changes in how you think and behave and interact with your environments. Those are things people can start doing right now.

One of the most common questions I received over the years is on a youtube in particular, is how to stop intrusive Prices. And occasionally when people asked these questions, they'll highlight that some parent or an x or something kind of a judge there and they don't know if it's their voice or the other person's voice, but in their head and it's very unpleasant um presumable this uh circles back to childhood traumas or other forms of traumas. But irrespective of the origins, are there any tools specifically to deal with intrusive thoughts and and thought patterns, maybe even those like thought patterns.

So a couple of of responses to that. So uh, first of all, I think step one is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice, like if you can hear your your dad's voice in your head, it's not your dad who is in your head that is a simulation that you are engaging in that your brain is capable of producing. And so that I think can be four minute for people who are curious about these in the words .

like are not referring to auditory who loosen OK i'm referring to you know the language of somebody maybe not in there that person's voice but they're hearing like maybe not you're a bad person but like you you never good you're not good enough, like it's not enough or or just feeling like so know like they can enjoy with the the good things in life because of these intrusive, negative voices.

something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating, as I have found liberating from just knowing the science. Actually, I talk about these, in truth, of thoughts in shift. They are incredibly Normative.

And so there's research which looks like like how frequently have you experienced intrusive thought over the past week or a month or two months? The proportion of people who experience these dark thought is exceptionally high. I don't remember the exact percentage, but IT is in my book and IT is like near ceiling.

I will do an exercise with my my classes, my undergraduate classes, where I will ask them to anonymous ly describe the weather. We've experiences like a dark thought over the past week. Almost all of them are capable of generation.

And some of these these thoughts are really, really dark. I I will often experience a very dark. In truth, I thought when i'm exercising at the gym, you're looking at me .

with curiosity and a cern, right? No, no, I don't know that I ve had dark thoughts in the gym, but it's interesting.

Here's my dark thought. Watch out if you see me in the gym from here on. So if i'm Carrying like A A, A heavy dumbbell from a bench to iraq, I will sometimes have a thought of dropping IT on the face of another person on a mad.

It's terribly dar. It's a terrible, terrible fun. So why why am I that is most likely um the brains simulating worst case scenario to prevent me from doing of course I don't want to drop a dumble on someone I never have and so that's one explanation for why this is so Normal tive.

It's it's your brains way of constantly work. There's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen. And most of these simulations, the probability them coming to ferient, are exceptionally low, infinite testily, small.

But on occasion some of the wicky ones do escape into awareness, and that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal and a pretty aggression. You know, a greece way, or in my case, drop in the dumb ll on, you know, the person stretching on their face. And so here's what I find liberating me understanding that this is just how my brain works.

Well, that doesn't mean now that i'm i'm something wrong with me as a human being, right that i'm morally corrupt in anyway, my brain is gonna times produce these kinds of dark thoughts i'm not going act on them. And as long as I am not acting on them, it's all good. It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety before they know what is happening.

That can often be an incredibly distressing experience. Like all the sudden your stomach is turning, your your palms are sweating but in research which shows, like if you, if you communicate to people, hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance SE you face, all of the sudden you are totally flipping the frame. And now this is, i'm a lambrini, right? I am rising to the occasion, my body's doing what they should be doing to allow me the excel here.

That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks. So step one is just recognizing a few experiences and truth of thoughts at times. Again, welcome to the human condition.

It's it's a little blip in how our brain Operates, but a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful for nipping repetitive thinking in the bud. So when you you're curtAiling chatter, you are also um curtAiling the likelihood of persevering. The reason why we often perseverate on on problems were experiencing as we are. We're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstance ces, so we can move on with our lives and our brain, this wonderful problem solving organ that we possessed IT just keeps turning until we've solved that problem and that surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you until you get there. And so when you solve the problem, those thoughts tend to subside to .

have um to two point, both of which are essentially questions. I think it's relatively common for people when they go to a bridge or a damn or something very is like a something very high with the potential for you know essentially a fatal fall where they to jump off to to have the thought what keeps me from jumping on yeah when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off. And and IT seems like it's another example, like it's registering the danger in the severity of the the consequences and also realized helps us understand the level of risk. That's right.

You know I think Alice hornell, who you know famously did free solo ed l cap um remarkable movie, by the way, just a along lines what we're talking about you, the way the movie is constructed and I think to my chin and and colleagues who made that just such an incredible job, not just with the cinema together y but you know, he arrives from the very beginning of the movie and yet it's terrifying to watch your thing and it's kind of A A hour forty five minute production of exactly what we're talking about but in that movie, as alex spells out, the the assessment of risk in consequence, right, the level of risk, level of consequence and and how that those are key parameters to evaluate and and he's obviously done that for himself, and he succeeded. And I hope he never IT again, only because he seems like a really delightful person when would be nice to keep him around and he's doing other important work now. But the point being that I think it's it's a very natural thing to evaluate risk consequence in a way that of what feels dark. Yeah, but it's actually highly adaptive through the ends that we're talking about IT. Um so that's one point.

Well, just just to that point, if I can interject. So um just to Normalize this further for folk. So a my family is very special to me as IT is most people when my first daughter was born, used to live in this house that had this on the second floor. There was A, I know if you described as an overpass, but was open to the floor beneath.

And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night, when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change your diet, whatever I would have these thoughts of Carrying her and then dropping her over into the and spat like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle night. IT speaks to this point that you are raising that was likely my mind's way of homing in on a really, really important issue in my life that I want to make sure never, ever, ever happens. IT is not an indication that I morally corrupt or incredibly dark person. It's it's how my brain is Operating. So yeah.

you're messing risking concept in an adaptive way um yet it's it's fascinating to think about the second comments flash question that love your thoughts on is, you know I had this bulldog I talk about all the time, this bulldog master and he had one default behavior that if he couldn't engage in IT would create anxiety him. And that was, he liked to chew. He like to none things as a puppy.

He actually would teethe on bricks in the backyard. IT looks so painful to me. Sometimes you buy through a lip, know the bulldog. Part of their final type is that a lot of the pain receptors have been bread out of their face and and I just think, oh my god, as I go out there and know I was like, destroy IT how much pain I must be causing himself, he was obviously less than I perceived.

But none the less this knowing behavior was was you could just see IT IT gave him such pleasure, right? You give something a china, just you go to see the like dissolve out of him. I've known a number of people that are fairly high intensity in terms of they speak fast identity of thought information and said, at least outward, who claimed that we've got to show a high rpm internally.

And I vary depending on time of day and time of year on this. But i'd place myself more lesson to that category, engaging in an activity that harness is my full attention. Perhaps we could call IT flow, but none.

There's engaging the activity that harnesses my full attention feels to me so unbelievable, satisfying. Yeah, so unbelievable. Says fine. I think it's for two reasons.

One is the the benefits of doing those activities, studying, learning podcasting, doing research, you know connecting with someone in a really directed way, like getting into that tunnel with them. As we're doing now, there is a positive feature. And then there's also the removal of a negative like that. There is rpm or not humming in the book in the background. And I think for a lot of people you like ultra runners and um I know a lot of former addicts that start running marathon's and yet sober and stay sober yeah it's remarkable how physical activity or cognitive activity can kind of take us into that plane of focus that both makes us productive, makes us fitter, but also relieves this inner voice. I can like let's attention out the same way that I observed costolo letting the tension out through knowing on these bricks or raw hides or whatever whatever IT was. And so my question is um is is there as I assuming a relationship between the physical in the mental, do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us and IT varies between people and we need to harness and or adjust that level of energy and to do that in ways that hopefully make us a living, or you bring our social relationships more closely together.

Well, um IT certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing, but IT also as you eluted to place out in cognitive context, when there is this match the sweet spot between the the the demands like you're in a situation that is actually chAllenging either physically or cognitively. The the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands.

So it's a taxing situation, but you are able to engage with IT completely that is the formula for getting stuck is wrong word for getting emerged in these kinds of flow states, which are for many people, the the goal that they have in their lives, both recreationally and professionally. And so you is someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests, I would hope and imagine. And that's always the aspiration, right? That must feel really good. I mean, you talk for a long time with people does IT feel like a long time when you're having those conversations.

Now time perception completely changes. And I do this for two or three hours a week. And then when we do a solo episode, sometimes the recordings, long as ever yet is eleven hours now edited down. But those can be anywhere from the ninety minutes to four hours and or a live event. And I can tell IT just seems like dissolves.

And when know that is because you are so absorb in the moment and meeting the the chAllenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that that point in time, that moment and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the the chat to percuss ate in in the background. And so you know one often you might think like an ultra marathon on or what's the correct terms?

I IT ultra called an ultra. I think we have some um trail letes here in the room are producer rob more sitting to my left. We've never done this before.

But how long is an alter? Anything longer than a marathon? Is that right? He's giving a nod. He is gonna remain silent. Anything longer than a marathon is considered an ultra.

And so that's a lot of time on the one hand, to be alone with your thoughts, right? You might think that might just be crowned for experiencing chatter, but it's also a particularly chAllenging kind of physical feet that you have to do with a lot of resources to meeting those physical demands. And right, so that can propel you into a state of flow.

And then you get some runner hide to boost on my chemical boost to enhance your moon and all the side. Now you have people running one hundred and thirty miles. I'm exactly how long is IT?

Oh, people, i've mean people done two hundred miles, three hundred and fifty miles ultras people. We have a friend, again, my producer of, and I have a friend, can write out out who does these sorts of races in the goby desert. We did IT without any prior training in the desert than one, I mean there. But you know these can in particular everything about right now he's a very high energy guy. I would be concerned about can in his family, not their safety, but there's sanity if can didn't run that much because he's just he .

needs to burn at all.

He just has that much energy and no concept of energy is something that i'm getting more, more interested yeah you know as we age, we tend have less energy. What is that is in my country, density and function probably. But were talking about here is a sort of cognitive velocity.

You know it's not an efficient term, but it's good. You know this um people should try this. I'm curious, have you've ever done this is to down to read a page of a book trying to remember the information.

Maybe it's technical, maybe it's not. And then you fall the page and you try to read a page of the very same book a little bit faster than you're comfortable while trying to retain the information. And I find that there's this like sweet spot for reading. Where can like there's a sweet spot for running where going a little faster sometimes actually feels like IT requires a less effort.

You well, it's it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage that exercise quite frequently. So um you know i'm constantly reading for my job right if i'm not reading doing reading books for in a research on doing writing books and the way I do IT is often through an audio form and I will put the speed rate up to two X. I often as high as I can go on the APP and I can retain a huge amount of information going that fast.

But IT does require that i'm very vigilant. I'm really carefully attending to that audio book when i'm moving at that speed. And so it's not what I would do on vacation when i'm trying to consume um a book or information for fun.

Um you know there I just want to kind of just gently go let the let the paragraph you know kind of pass my gaze and and take IT in so and almost even saver safer the words on the page but but another context I do channel up the velocity and can be incredibly engaging IT can also be depleted. So when you have conversations that really you find a mensem rewarding and you know cognitive ilo, sophy, I love that term is is is you know a ten and a ten when you. And do you ever find IT a little tiring .

not immediately um but my personal chAllenge in life is um I don't transition states very well yeah so IT takes me a little while to drop and do a step and I stay there so i'll come out here still thinking about and talking about this to myself with others for for A A fair amount of time maybe on the order of you half an hour, two hours yeah i've learned this about myself over the years.

It's it's very effective for science and for certain things less effective for other years of life. I've learned ways to transition faster. But then I will notice if I do record a solo and guest episode and some intrudes and stuff in the same week that you on saturday, I kind of like my mind feels like it's like White noise yeah yeah and I i've long thought that having I used to call them low court as all days, you know, just a day I have just kind of like that and you're .

more tired probably on those days. Yes.

just myself said actually in my list of questions to ask you about resetting going into kind of a stay of word listener and just letting things just spoke out um for an hour. Like not trying to control anything, not trying to control anything in the universe except you know basic .

functions right cooking shows, prank real.

these these .

are mine. And um like I am, we often take for granted to that the T, V in front of us is is another emotion regulation device, right? And actually people are creating programs, are deliberately trying to push your emotions in particular directions from the score that accompanies movies and news and the news.

So I don't want my emotions being shift in the direction that is country to my goals. I prefer go to bed. I am at a typically high velocity level throughout the day, starting with physical stuff and exercise to the cognitive stuff, and the the political and the science talks and all that stuff.

When i'm finally done going through my email at night, I want like a good hour of just total mindless veg. And IT puts me a wonderfully serene state to then slide into bed, jump into that mental time travel machine, like do the fantasizing or safer ing, and then puts me to sleep. And so um you know I really value technology there for for helping me do that.

And I think that is the counterpoint to having this high velocity kind of experience. I will often when I teach like sometimes i'll teach for like three hours as so equivalent to what we're doing right now. IT is so unbelievably engaging in rewarding and like this is why I got into this business.

You are know you have great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things and um to discover interests, all that good stuff. Couple hours later when I come home. First of all, I need a little refractory period to switch out of worklife into homelife, which can often be chAllenging on the personal front is like my kids are just waiting there.

Well, my Youngest kid is waiting and my old kid is now in her room doing her own thing. But they wanna play right away. And I need some time just to decompress.

But then once I do, i've got ta lean further into that state. And so that's that is shifting and understanding how to shift. That's a different kind of shift, but it's all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand how to do that well. And I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here.

yet such an important aspect of life. And I do think that everyone would do well to evaluate for themselves how quickly. Well, not, well, not trying to place a great on about how quickly or slowly one transitions into and out of how much you how much of your thoughts and emotions and experience you're caring forward from one context to the next. I think about that a lot. And and I is something that I I try to work with a lot, especially you know arriving home and there's people home and engaged in a particular way.

and there's actually a framework to help people do this that that I really like.

And it's interesting because you mention the military earlier and there's A A wonderful corilla and it's um I have an experience is too often in in my life I see something in science that scaffolds onto an a practice that another organization, in this case the military implements to help people, number one, identify what are there in the context of what we're talking about, what are the emotion regulation goals, where are the shifting goals and how do you go from having those goals to bringing them to a fruition? And so um so in the military, like special forces, before they have complicated Operations, they will often first think about, okay, what what's our goal, what's the outcome we hope to achieve? Then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermined ability achieve that goal and not go around the room and you know that the person in charge will like cold call, secure tic style on folks like what is the the um potential obstacle.

And then for every obstacle that they identify, they come up with a very specific, if this happens, then we will do this. And they have multiple, if then, plans for each of those different obstacles. So if we go back to the research landscape, there's a technique called woop.

Have ever, ever heard of this? okay? So it's webs and acronym and I promise I wouldn't use any acronyms, but this is a useful one to its in the month to remember something.

So um how do you go from knowing to doing? Loop is designed to help you do that because what is explicitly designed to do is target each of the the places where goal pursuit often breaks down. Step one, what's your wish? What's the thing you hope to accomplish? It's be really clear about what that goal is.

We often don't start even think about what our specific concrete goals are. Okay, now that we have that, that goal, let's let's give ourselves some opportunity energies. What is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that all? And what that's doing is like giving us this motivation now, really energizing us to pursue IT even further.

Okay, we've got the outcome, but now let's let's get realistic. What are the obstacles? What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those schools? I thought to my wishes to to to be more present with my family after work.

The outcome that I hope to achieve is to, is to be A A Better father, a Better husband, to have a social life in those regards. Now, one of the opposite. Acs, okay, in turning obstacles, I got plenty right, like the temptation, check my email and get inbox zero before that I has done.

Or I love my science, and I also want to do some of that work. Or maybe i'm going to get distracted by friends who call. All of those things are obstacles that might get in the way of me achieving the goal, being more present with my family.

Now the final step, let me come up with an if then panne. If i'm tempted to check my email after seven or eight, then i'm going to remind myself about how point IT is to to be adapt. I'll do a reframing if if someone calls after nine P M.

And i'm engaging an activity with with my kids, then i'm gna politely decline. And you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans for different levels of sophistication. What those if then plans do is they, they, they try to make emotion regulation automatic because they identify a specific trigger, if that's, if, if this happens.

And then they pair that trigger with a response. If then, if then, you will hear that in this way, when the trigger occurs, boom, you don't have to stop and think, what should I do? How should I behave? You've got the plan and you implemented.

I've got if then, plans for chatter. If the chatter strikes, then I do distance, self talking, mental time travel. If the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work, then I go to nature and I go to my chat advisers. And so I have these, if then plans that are linked up with my goals. And that's a an important technology that I think we can we can invite people to try to exercise in their own lives to make IT more likely that they will hieu their regulatory goals.

I love IT, so woop spell W O O P. The w if I have the tract is what's the goal? What's your wish? What's your wish? The first o is the opportunity to energize yourself around achieving that wish A K motivation.

that's right. What's the outcome you hope to achieve?

Up great. Uh, okay, even Better because of what you said was shorter at the the first one is what's the outcome you hope to achieve? The second of what are the obstacles you can anticipate?

That's right. And in the research bases, mostly been personal obstacles. But you can generalize out, as you know, the navy seals to as an example that's the branch of the military I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to now you have myself conscious about using what optimise to optimize the way they respond to um missions and chAllenges. Uh, this is what they, so they're not only dealing with internal objects, obviously, but also ones from the world around them to .

worry about using the door demise. You did IT optimates and will soon support any predicate of around optimize during this episode. And then the pee in woop is the plan.

And if then plan, that's right. So it's not a vega plan. It's a very specific plan so that you know exactly which strategies and steps to implement should a occur be a curse OCR.

That's right. And so it's a general, general framework, which is in part as I think, why is so much value and this research behind the shown that can help people achieve various kinds of goals. Now there, of course, will be many situations that you have not developed woos for. And that's okay because you're gonna have all these other tools in your tools x to manage those situations on the fly when they occur. But then once you encounter new situations and you discover what tools are effective, then you learn, you create your woo, and then you could become more strategic, automatic and effort with how you engage them down the road.

Earlier you mention attentional spotlights, and i'm fascinated by this. I know that most people here that we can't multi task, but primates, again of which we are old, old world primates in particular, can do cover to attention. If I were not completely focused on you, I could focus on attentional spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you.

But I can also monitor components of the room. Yeah, I can emerge those spotlights. I can divorce those spotlights.

But it's very hard to generate three. Kind of compatible attentional spotlight IT wanted IT seems like we can have two. Yeah, maybe some people can manage three, but i'm bedding most people can't manage .

more than three. Well, I think IT becomes especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing an emotional episode that is essentially hijacking your attention. And attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons.

So number one, as a species, we have the most the attention to deployment system on the planet, right? We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention so we can we can wilfully place IT on the things we want or yanked away from the things we don't want. Or we can go.

We can scut our attention back in fourth. When IT comes to emotion, though, we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy attention, but I think can sometimes be problem at IT, because they fall into the a category of prescriptive advice about magic pills. So often we hear, for example, that when IT comes to chatter or really big emotions, things that are anxious about or fearful, you should not avoid the problem.

You should focus on IT. And there's been a lot of researching on this. And what we've learned is, on the one hand, chronically avoiding things is not good.

It's associated all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional life, beyond our physical lives, to our health. But often times the the signature for adaptation, coping with emotional curbs, is being able to focus on the problem at hand. The play attention else will take a break and then come back to. And so this was a question, actually, I learned from my grandmother inadvertently.

My grandmother was a very interesting woman who grew up in um in poland um during world war two, had her entire family slaughter during the war one of these kind of devastating experiences lived in the forest for years back in four of all this terrible stuff family mastered and so far then growing up SHE made IT out of the war, moved to the states. I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what SHE experienced and how he was able to overcome IT and whenever I would ask her questions about this, he would he would always say, you know, don't ask me why or what happened. Why is a cricket letter?

I was afraid he would use, which was really interesting, because he didn't speak english very well at all, heavily accented language. But she'd master this curious idio. Like, why is a cricket letter? In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things.

Your life is awesome. You're in a safe place. You have a loving family. Just enjoy life. Just trying to shelter me. So SHE for most of the the time that I would know her during the year, SHE would never focus on this horrific event that experiences, except one day a year.

There would be this this remembrance day, and we'd all piling into A A synagogue we talk about, or I would listen to them talk about their experiences, and the emotions would would come come out. So he would dose her exposure to to the emotional information. Turns out what he was doing as he was being strategic, and how SHE deployed her attention.

SHE was focusing on the emotional issue at times when I was productive for her, but at other times when IT didn't serve her well, SHE occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences. And a large literature is now beginning to emerge, which shows that this capacity be flexible and how we wield our attention when IT comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really, really useful asset. And so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing, a problem or always avoided, they aren't always true. And that often the the magic that surrounds a motion regulation, I mean, the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surround get is in being really fine and how we can deploy our attention.

Really appreciate you sharing that personal anette. I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the saying that were fed like, you know, absence makes the heart growth honer. Yeah well, I also heard out of side, out of minds.

So which one is IT? That's right, you know, and that's why I eventually became a scientist. That's right because know it's both right.

And you know, and you can see this in the fields of nutrition and exercise. I mean, there are certain court truth, and I think the goal is always to get to those core truth. And then there are some flexibility around those truth.

There are games of A, I love what I shared. You know, why is a cricket letter? Remind to me, move the bob delon. I don't look back.

Yeah I mean, it's these are profound questions now, right like how much of our um consciousness should we use to enforce that? We don't spend time thinking about the past and and therefore miss out on the present and creating a best possible future. And we don't want elements from the past to kind of inferred entire psyche and then shop in ways that are destructive. So it's a it's a complicated dance.

Oh, I mean, our emotionalized anything but straight forward. But we we do have guide posts to steer us and how we deploy our attention. And so so a couple of common hurry tics that I, that I I like to use and describe the foxes.

So let's say something bad happens and you divert your attention away. You distract with a positive distraction on a harmful distraction. And then the problem doesn't reserve this keep going like you don't have to go back in time.

There's actually I experience some friction sometimes with my dad around in this issue with my parents were divorced and um you know I dealt with the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life. And when I think about IT now, I don't get upset like I understand why had happened. I love both of my parents.

I've moved on and well adjusted, but my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak. And you know, i'll often bring that up. And when he does like, well, we don't have to talk about i'm actually totally fine.

This isn't a source of ongoing the stress. Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives. And when that happens, you know that's our our a cordial machinery Operating really, really well.

We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing. If, on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting. And we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting.

That isn't A Q okay. Well, let's focus in on IT. And then once you focus in on IT, of course, are multiple ways you can engage with that experience.

Sometimes just breathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we call habituation. So getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts. Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance.

And we have wonderful cognitive aratus to help us reframe things. We can look at IT from different perspectives. We can focus on the so are lining.

We can contextualize IT to have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus, but you don't always need to refocus on the problem. So you want to be flexible, flexibility. How you deploy your attention is really the mantra that that I personally live by based on what I know, how all of this works.

There are a couple of coffee that I want to throw out there when i'm talking about distraction and and avoiding. I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance. There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are, are, are not productive, like substance abuse. We also know that if you adopt the blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding, not good, so you wanted be baLanced.

Could we add to the list of tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy? And this isn't one that I default, but I know someone that told me that um she's to default into um overconsumption of a story like of of audio books. Not that audio books are bad, but you know of fiction audio books just kind of win when there was a problem rather than dealing with the problem over indulgence and in narratives that would just to consume the mind. I guess any behavior where we not dealing with the kind of each that we probably need to scatter, at least for a short while, yeah, it's probably going to be maladaptive in the long run.

yeah. I mean, if the problem keeps like you want to be, you want to listen to what your mind and body are, are telling you. And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a queue.

You need to engage and deal with IT. But a lot of the the experiences we have on a daily basis, which may not be positive, negative experiences as time moves on sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives. And we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks like you have to do is this way that tends not to work out very well.

Most of what we've been discussing today is one's emotional life and experience and chatter and internal ratification with oneself and their environment, technology, nature and to some extent, relationships. But one powerful aspect of emotions that I think a lot of people wonder about in, Frankly, participating is this notion of emotional condition, positive and negative.

I think like us, you mentioned football, football ingin michigan, right? Yeah member from the movie the big jail. They like actually go out and place that.

I think it's it's a religion in the city that I live in that .

um and how many people go to one of these games so we .

actually is called the big house, actually the largest football stadium in in the country. So close to one hundred and ten thousand yeah a lot it's a lot of people and we sing in unison and it's actually I never really was into football before moving ten arba. Now I embrace IT.

IT helps when you're the national championships, which we were champions, which we were last year. congrats. Are we're working on IT this year?

cool. Maybe sometimes i'll go to a game. I am not I don't just like football. football. I don't think i've ever been to to a professional football game.

Now you we should definitely have out there.

That is a lot of fun OK. I'll skip one game of the globe other season when they go to michigan, a michigan game. Emotional content occurs in foot, all stadiums that occurs in digesting news. We just had an election so a lot of emotional can and essentially opposite directions for direction um and on and on.

What do we know about .

emotional contagion? IT makes sense me. Why would we would be so prone to IT? But where the the the sort of rumble strips a sort of speak and the ditch.

On emotional contagion ah that's driving analysis. The rumble strips start that good when he started drift towards to the ditch yeah and obviously the ditch is losing control in the negative direction maladaptive direction. But like how can we start to the identify the rumble strips in in emotional content?

Yeah so emotional content is very powerful phenomenon. Um um emotions can spread within seconds. Um they tend to uh we tend to catch emotions more quickly when we are not sure of how we should be thinking you're feeling in a particular situation. So we often are referencing other people in those instances as a source of information.

The people around us, of course, are a resource of information, is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently, right? We're trying to learn something about how to respond, and we know we can have these cases ating effects both in everyday life in both a positive and the negative direction but also um you know in in in the digital world, we see these emotions that can spread really fast too. So it's a it's a very powerful phenomenon.

It's what i'm often very attentive to when I come into the classroom. Like you're trying to you tend to not want to have a negative moods spread through an audience when you are teaching to them. And so you're sensitive to that kind of certain kinds of displays or tones that might convey that kind of emotional response.

Um and I think it's something that we need to be increasingly aware of, especially when we're working in in any kind of group contacts, like when you're working on a team. IT is really important to keep the team at the level of emotional tone that you feel if you're the leader or even just a member of the team that is committed to IT. You want to keep that tone at the most productive level because if IT dips below above, that can sabotage how um how will you perform and there's a lot of research on that.

Both from directing my laboratory for a good number of years and from teaching in from certainly the podcast, which is a small team of seven of us. I'm familiar with what you just described in also from being a camp councillor. It's probably where I learned IT being a some counselor college, that if you get two or three kids that are like, really pissed off about what you have to do over the next couple of hours, you can send everything self if they nipped .

that in the bud right away, if they repair that. And i'm very, very attentive to this when I am in group context, especially when i'm leading those groups, those teams, those labs, like really making sure that that kind of negative mojo does not does not spread.

Do you think nowadays on university campuses, there's more of a tendency for students to raise their hands and say, like, let's Spark an issue and i'll just preference this spicing.

A guy that I worked for as an undergraduate, a physiologist, he told me that when he was teaching during the vietnam war era, he would be in the middle of a lecture about cold thermo genesis is physiology, his area of expertise? And someone would just stand up and say, what about the war in vietnam? And I remember him telling me that strain that that's outrageous, like, really, he said, oh yeah, all the time. And you would have to stop and have to acknowledge IT and let them have their expression. I thought that's wild now we're we're living in times well um that's not all that unusual in the university classroom and on campuses so IT end online yeah so you know is interesting that that previous example, nineteen, six, seven, now very relevant again so um do we let people emote or you know as a summer camp cancer, someone hoping, as I and said, if these kids have a lot of energy, my only advice be a channel, not a damn something I never forgot yeah very useful another area of life to be a channel not a damn yeah um so how do you be a channel not a damn when people are having um really having the need to externalized negative stuff and IT holds the potential for emotional contention. Well, you know.

I have an experienced first hand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom. But obviously a lot of my colleagues have, and we see this place, a lots of universities. These are very turbulent times. Turbulence activates a motion.

And we know going back to an earlier part of our conversation on people experience strong emotions, are often motivated to share those emotions with other people that often takes the form of vocalizing and that analysis contagion throughout. And so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are are making their way through people, groups and societies. What should you do in those circumstances? Well, I think IT depends a lot on on the context and and what the nature of the emotional response is.

And are there you is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful? And you know, they're differ views about when you should intervene and how to do IT. I think in general though, you bring the the playbook of always wanting to kind validate like your emotional experience is a genuine response that you are having to the situation in.

In most cases, yes, we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicate this way. And I think in a lot of cases, the kinds of phenomenon we're talking about like these are just honest emotional reactions. These are really difficult times and I think um trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really grateful step.

I mentioned to you before we started talking that I I had a as wonderful um conflict mediator come to one of my classes recently to talk about how do you not just engage with emotional groups but how do you engage with emotional groups at the same time that are having emotions because of one another. And the approach that he is found to be be very successful in her career. Immediate, or is to ask folks to train them not to enter conversations to try to change each other, other's minds, but to enter those conversations with A A state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest in, first and foremost, trying to just understand the other groups position.

I haven't done that myself, but IT IT strikes me as a as a pretty viable approach to a first step to having conversations about difficult issues. And you know, IT IT makes me think about how in the lab we often define wisdom. The wisdom is this concept of index is how well you are able to deal with social situations involving uncertainty. We don't know how the social situations are going to play out, and wise individuals are skillful in navigating those circumstances. How do you define wisdom? Moderates features or a few of its core features are humility, recognizing that I don't know everything, a commitment to perspective, taking putting myself in the other person shoes um dialectic ism, recognizing that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing and we need to be aware of that and then also a general orientation towards the social good, like doing good in the world and that strikes me that entering these difficult situations with that kind of mindset is potentially productive for um for bridging divides.

I love that. And what an appropriate area for us to round up in. I think that right now, clearly things are are tense. But what you've talked about today and at least from what I understand of how the human mind works in around emotions, our own and observing others and potentially contagion, is that these tools can really help us do Better, that they're not just research papers, they are implementable chunks of knowledge. And in some cases, such as what you discuss today, real gems.

So for that reason and for taking the time out of your research schedule, mean you researched your teacher, your dad, you're husband, you do many things. You make the foobar gams how also into the gym where you don't drop, dump ls on people's faces intentionally because you realized the direct consequences. You're just doing a tone of amazing work in the world i'd heard about and red chatter some time ago.

And yeah, I just think it's it's incredible what you brought to people's attention that has always no one intended been on and in their minds yeah yeah and I sure the others in your field. But I want to specifically thank you half of myself and everyone listings in watching for paying so much careful research attention and public education attention to this thing that we call chatter and the inner voice and emotion regulation because this is really what makes up our lives, is as important in my mind, certainly as cardiovascular health or any other aspect of mental or physical health. So behalf of myself and everyone, listening, watching, thank you so much. Please come back again because your research is evolving. We'd love to hear about the next steps will definitely provide links to your work and to the upcoming book, which comes out in february of twenty twenty five, if you want to tell us the title of the book.

That's why it's called shift managing your emotions so they don't manage you.

right? And IT presumed ly available for presale.

Now yes yeah it's it's available and IT is IT is essentially design IT is written to um to can just open the open the book on what emotions are, what we often get wrong about them and what are the tools that we have to rain them in. And now my hope is that IT addresses this big problem that I think we've been facing for a while, had a rangle, these emotions that sometimes you get .

the best of us. great. Well, I am personally, in order copy by presser, I insist on that.

I don't take free copies. I buy books. I'm a believer in books. So thank you for writing shift and come back and talk to us again.

Well, thanks to have me is in the incredible conversation.

So appreciate that the thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with doctor eat in cross.

I hope you found IT to be as informative and as actionable as I did to learn more about doctor across his work and to find links to his previous book chatter as well as his forthcoming book shift managing your emotions so they do not manage you. Please see the shown note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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