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

26:54And I took a look at it. It was a very endearing moment. And then when we landed, I said, you know, the ability to sleep anywhere is a superpower. And he said, I learned it from my dad. And he said, and it was a moment where I just thought it was just a very pleasant thing to see them in this touch on the plane. He clearly felt comfortable enough to do that. I remember thinking like, yeah, humans were a lot like a lot like the other primates. Yeah, there's a beauty to it. And you know, it is, it is a tool. It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions.

27:31And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work. To the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all. We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure. But, but at all, you know, self control emotion regulation like let me roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there. Yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions and some of the tools that we have are effortful. One example would be expressive writing. It's wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences. You sit down just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days.

28:12This is the penny baker. This is the penny baker writing effect. This is just remarkably wonderful side effect free. You could argue intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you. You have vast amounts of data supporting the practice. You have vast amounts of data. Any baker really deserves in my opinion if not a psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize. I don't know what that is. But it deserves real deep praise for developing that method because it's essentially zero cost takes a little bit of time. And there's just hundreds of studies showing you these 15 to 15 minute cathartic writing just free associate writing.

28:54I understand with a right to say it's probably better. We did an episode where I talked about this and received a note from him and was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong. In fact, he was pleased with it. I think that he deserves a lot of credit. We have powerful tool for self healing. We actually just re restarted a prestigious speaker series at Michigan the cats newcomes speaker series which is designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work. Because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity.

29:39And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool. It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effortful. But we also know that we don't like exerting effort as a species. We like to conserve our resources as much as possible. So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And the sensory shifters music. Looking at images, these are modality taste touch. These are ways of pushing your emotions around pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch, like when your your daughter is not in a great mood or when you want to get pumped up before an important event, can be quite useful.

30:29And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them. So that's my plug for for sensory shifters. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I've been drinking AG1 since 2012 and I started doing it at a time when my budget was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money to purchase one supplement and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat whole foods and unprocessed foods, it's very difficult to get enough vitamins and minerals, micronutrients and adaptogens from diet alone in order to make sure that I'm at my best, meaning have enough energy for all the activities I participate in from morning until night, sleeping well at night and keeping my immune system strong.

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32:02As I've discussed many times before on this podcast, omega -3 fatty acids are critical for brain health, mood, cognition, and more. Again, go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim this special offer. Today's episode is also brought to us by Juve. Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I've consistently emphasized on this podcast, is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself.

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33:27Let's go back to just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides. We talked about two verbal working memory, keeping verbal information active for short periods of time, and we talked about simulating and planning things, like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to self -control and motivation. You exercise, you've talked about exercising. I try to exercise six days a week, although some are short workouts, some are longer. You ever talked to yourself on your exercise? All the time. Let's hear it. The world wants to know Andrew, what do you say to yourself on your exercise?

34:17It depends on how well rested I am, how motivated I am. I'll give two examples at the opposite poles of the motivational scale. I was traveling two weeks ago and I was doing some exercise for the muscle on the back of the shoulder, the rear deltoid. I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train, but it's a very important one for this one. That's when you do this one. You're right, for shoulder, posture, instability, and got trained, that muscle group, because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating. You know, thumbs pointing toward the belly button and shoulders rolling forward thing.

34:52There are a number of reasons why it's important. I do the rear delt thing and I sat down to do the first work set after a couple warm -ups. I love training. I have since I started training when I was 16. I thought to myself, for some reason, I don't want to do this this morning. Then I thought, David Goggins would probably start swearing at himself in his head. So I started that a little bit. That didn't really work for me. Sorry, David. Then I thought, I'm going to go through every possible inner voice I can think of. So I heard Jocco will link voice, some friends with Jocco, and her just saying, yeah, whatever, you're just weak, you know, or just do it anyway, kind of mentality.

35:31I just started cycling through all of them, and I made a deal with myself that when I ran out of voices to use, that's when I would stop the set. I probably tripled the number of repetitions that I would normally get with that weight. So it was like one part motivation, one part distraction, one part frustration, and I was just pulling from the catalog of possible voices of kind of coach -like voices. And worked out pretty well. And then at the other extreme, I can recall many times because I put effort into it where I'm well -rested, I'm hydrated, get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system, which I love.

36:12And I sit down and train, and I absolutely love to train under those conditions. The sun is shining, music's playing. And I just remember this was during a set. This was a leg day. Always the hardest day. Set of heavy hack squats and just thinking, I love this. But I have this inner voice where every time I start a repetition, I go through thing where I brace my midsection, so I don't hurt my back. And I always look directly at the ceiling, and I think about my bulldog Costello. And I think, I'm going to do this one for you. I'm going to do this one for you. And I know at those moments my inner voice goes to, he would probably just be seeing there like, why are you working this hard?

36:45Bulldogs don't like to work. So I'm not really in a complete sentence generation inner voice kind of thing. But you have very rich inner world. You are, you're, you're, you know, verbal working memory stream is filled 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 would tuck me in to go to sleep at night, I used to lie in bed and rehearse voices that I had heard throughout the day. And I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice. And then I'd make them say different things just for my own entertainment.

37:26So I could have them say whatever I wanted, but in a particular voice. And my friend sometimes teased me that I'll give people voices like I'll give someone like a Marj Simpson voice or something. I'll just, like, she doesn't sound like that at all, but I'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of chatter in there, a lot of, a lot of voices. Yeah, but not super organized. It's not like I'm constructing a play. It's kind of, you know, it feels like things guys are up. I, you know, I toy with them, maybe, and then, but it's kind of a mishmash. It's not super regimented.

37:58These aren't complete sentences. Well, you know, one of the reasons why the penny baker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized. And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self talk, so the chatter, right? You're an idiot, such an idiot or you're looping on over a problem without making any progress. Putting those words in, you know, actually taking that inner shemen and making a story out of it is essentially what the penny baker writing cues you to do because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences.

38:42There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking up here in our minds. It's a free for all it can go in all sorts of directions and that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive. So glad you're bringing this up our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Carl Diceroth. Bioengineer, he's a practicing psychiatrist. He's one of the luminaries of neuroscience. He developed these light sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neurons and animal models, but also now in human clinical work as well. And one thing that he shared was that after he puts his kids to sleep, I think now they're grown, but in the evening he'll sit deliberately sit still, completely bodily still, closes eyes and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so, maybe more.

39:36And I thought to myself, wow, like that that's a very disciplined practice. It also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default. That's right. So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is he shared a few of them on that podcast episode, but I'm sure there are others as well. But I tried it. It's very difficult to, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives, kind of the stream sort of split into your tributaries and then you know it sort of you dissolve into sleep or meditation experience. Yeah, almost dream like state where you know these liminal states.

40:15Yes. Well, that's I think where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking talking is it has a similar modality. So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me. And you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right, because I would be unable to have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of to recall a chatter provoking experience, so think about something negative that's happened to you.

40:53And then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it. So I a penny baker writing like condition or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking because there's no guard rails to the way we think that we are taught I should add because we're going to give people guard rails later in this episode. So in addition to using the penny baker approach and by the way will provide a link to some resources for the penny baker journaling because there's some free online resources that I think are really powerful for people to use if they want to use as a template.

41:35But for cathartic reasons or just get one's mind around a problem or something I'm very familiar with waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of not a storm in there, but a bit too disorganized to get my head right inside me things to get my head right sometimes it's music sometimes it's writing sounds like journaling is just a really useful practice overall. It's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice so we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID and we gave them a series of tools that they could check off if they use the tools that day.

42:18And we learned a couple of really interesting things number one there are no one size fits all solutions for folks so remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person a versus person B number two it was seldom the case that people used one tool in general people used on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take home because I am often asked as for a guy. So for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions? I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same so it's it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's it's similar to physical exercise you you're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day you would have like funky looking shoulders if you did right and you'd probably be pretty weak and lots of other parts of your body.

43:18You're doing multiple things and the multiple things that you do to exercise I'm guessing are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise yet me we may well be equally fit well you may be a little bit more fit than me but you get you get the drift so this is beautiful very ability to how we manage our worlds to bring it back to expressive writing we found that expressive writing when people used it was really really useful it moved the needle on their covid anxiety but it was an under utilized tool people didn't do it very much and I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.

44:00Ask another question about movement that falls on the other end of the spectrum to what we're talking about now which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing in order to parse an idea or work through an emotional state in 2015 by the way I use these anecdotes not because I want to focus on me but just as generalizable anecdotes okay the specifics here don't matter but I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh. You know path a versus path B and I was in that place I was actually choosing between a job at once one institution and other institution each of which had tremendous advantages neither had any you know like striking disadvantages but it was a really hard decision and those close to me at that time will tell you that it was just brutal I been there yeah I made everybody around me suffered tremendously to the point where people is like flip a coin now I'm not an indecisive person I think.

44:58You know it's one of these things where big decisions I think deserve a time and attention and it was a time constraint thing so I was pouring over this pro cons list I was watching YouTube videos trying to figure out best ways for decision making I was trying to actually isn't an amazing by the way when we're in those situations and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position the things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are wacky like I'm sure you're a Google. In the following things that you had no business googling these kinds of decision trees and I mean whether they're mathematical models that like there's that the the actually my colleague at NYU Tony Mauschen I forget the name of the model but there's a mile about how many towns you should evaluates an old kind of old example of a town you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business like is it two is it three and there's an optimal strategy there and an event most of it wasn't helping.

45:56And I do believe that at some point you don't want too many committee members because it just gets absolutely So the two best pieces of information came from the following practices one was a colleague Said forget all the superficial pro -con stuff And I actually think this is proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me He said take yourself through a typical weekday In one place versus the other wake up where you're gonna go how you're gonna travel like take yourself through the practicals of the day Because everything else falls away once you're out of place or you're in a type of relationship take yourself through a given day Don't think about the relationship or the institution that you're gonna work for the school you're gonna go to that's important But take yourself through the entire day.

46:41So I did that and then he said also do it on a weekend because you know Mm -hmm our profession I 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 at it, you know, you get into a rhythm and and what's so great about speed bag work is that You get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way these Central pattern generators as we call them and neuroscience take over and you're just gonna you know Turning your hands over and away and you're like every once in a while you can think okay Need to put a little more hips to a little into this or a little more head movement and practice my slips or something but It's largely unconscious after a certain point and I was doing that and all of a sudden boom a thought just Geyser to the surface and I made my decision and that was my final decision Yeah, and I never went back from that decision and so it was in the act of not trying to parse things Words that words sprung up from my whatever unconscious somewhere in my brain Cortical or some cortical I don't know and it was like that's it and And I I was overwhelmed by that and again, I don't share all that because I I think it's speed bags or it's The example I gave before that's gonna solve it for everybody But that that these answers to hard problems seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches verbal construction of complete sentences with paper or deliberately like Diceroth does and then also like Not trying to get an answer at all boom the answer shows what in the world is that so it speaks to this idea that first of all There are no one size fits all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and Decisions we have to face so there are different modalities to Self -discovery and insight and yes You can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people and then you can also Allow your unconscious problem solving machinery to to do its thing We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not infrequent many people report having moments of insight When they are when they are not otherwise engaged and you know one line of thinking is that We are doing problem 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 weaponized this process for myself so Before I exercise before I get on the treadmill or Row or do whatever I'm gonna do I will load up the particular issue that I am trying to find a solution for sometimes it's how to word a paragraph It might be if I'm working on a book how to find the right kind of story if it's a an interpersonal issue that I've got a Smooth over I load that up and then I just get on the Device it's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing and I just I just I don't really heart think about it in a fixed way But inevitably the ideas the potential solutions bubble up into awareness that is a Real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to have to have success in various areas of my life It also Identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious So we didn't get to all the benefits of the there's one more benefit of the inner voice that I want to get to But I'm gonna take a detour here for a second because I think this is really important If we think of chatter is the dark side of your inner voice You're basically continuing to loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress What if this happens?

50:42Why did this happen? I'm such an imbecile. You're just continually going over that negative Phenomenon or experience you're not making 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 treadmill or rowing machine And that's typically the time that I spend Innovating right coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally I don't have my mind's not working to solve those problems instead it is stuck Dealing with this other muck Where I'm not getting anywhere and and so we actually see if you could look at the literature that one of the ways that chatter undermines people Is it interferes with the ability to to focus and solve problems and that's a that's just one way it undermines people But that is a huge huge liability Is there an association between trauma and elevated levels of internal chatter?

51:49Uh, I would say even more than an association so We often think of chatter as what we call it as a trans diagnostic mechanism So it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders So what that means is chatter refers to a process a process of looping Turning the same material over and over in your head The content of that looping can take many different forms You could inject some sad cognitions in there I'm a shit such a shit Is it okay to say shit should I say the sure people? I mean David Goggins was on this podcast Okay, so yeah, you know, I mean pretty much anything goes typically we don't swear at each other Okay, well, I should hope now I'm pretty thick -skinned if you need to you know I've been called way worse than anything you've been boxing I actually boxed in high school.

52:38I don't recommend people box unless they're you know they're Professional and even then I mean I Must say as a neuroscientist a lot of fun Yeah, and on Wednesday nights at spar a little bit, but I will say this it's um There are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10 yeah More safely much more safely for the brain like Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu and it's like that you know We don't want to insult the brain Yeah, I as a neuroscientist I can't encourage people to box but I I would agree In any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same Fair enough deal So basically chatter refers to this this process of looping over and over if you inject some sad cognitions in there I'm an imbecile.

53:24I'm I'm how can I you know? I'm never gonna live up to To my potential. I don't belong here like so then you get If you take that to an extreme high intensity and you perseverate over time then you're getting towards depression if you inject anxiety -provoking cognitions Oh my god, what if this happens and what if that happens and you go down that path of uncertainty and in fear Well, that leads you to more of the anxious route 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 grapple with in society But I was I want to also be clear to folks who are listening that If you experience chatter that does not mean you have any of those disorders if you experience chatter Welcome to the human condition my friends because most of us do at times and so we often don't experience it as intensely Or for long stretches of time which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing While I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in -depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva To get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function My vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function Not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers key to physical and mental health But it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results For example in one of my first tests with function I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood.

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56:35Yeah What would those be? Well, that's Let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally because like As we we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences Different tools work for different people in different situations. There are You know upwards of two dozen or more science -based tools that I that I covered when I Wrote chatter when I got into shift the broader train of regulating your emotions or even more tools out there So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone My my first line of defense when it comes to chatter are two distancing tools so When I'm using the term distancing when I'm talking about is not avoidance per se 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 slightly more objective perspective and it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this One tactic that I find very powerful is is language So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself So I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem Ethan How are you going to manage a situation?

57:54If 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 this Andrew? Gosh, no, yes of course Absolutely, I mean our optics are just much clearer when we're in observation than when we're Internally unless I find That I dedicate some real minutes or hours basically a sort of meditation Not unlike the complete sentence construction Exploration that we're talking about before just going inward and Really saying okay, let's let's have a conversation about this Yeah, and having a conversation with myself in there and that always leads to an obvious truth.

59:02Yeah or Sometimes a decision node that Isn't clear to me yet, but it leads someplace that feels like forward. Yeah But you're taking special steps To be able to to Align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else like Reflexively sometimes we stumble right? Oh absolutely. I mean I and the number of different ways that we can distract ourselves This is what I was going to ask in a few moments, but I'll take the opportunity now I Amwondering as we're talking about this today if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the scroll aspect that with essentially zero effort we can Pick up a device and scroll through Images and movies and it will update us according to update the The imagery and topics of course according to what it senses as there are dwell times on certain pages And all of a sudden we don't have to think about what's in our head.

1:00:03Yeah My dad used to refer to surfing the internet because at that time it was that and scrolling social media as kind of a Cognitive chewing gum. Yeah, he keeps us busy, but it doesn't provide any real nutrition Well, you know, it's interesting if you go back to When Facebook first came on the scene one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute Textual information to do you remember what this was? What is on your mind? So you would be queued to share what is on your mind and you know In in some ways you could think of Various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone For their inner voice is literally asking you where it did what is on your mind right now?

1:00:51So that's in terms of posting What's exactly in terms of consuming information? Which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers more than Foculars I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can you know pick up the phone and I have a specific phone with Instagram and X on it and it's those apps are not on any other phones so that it's segregated from yeah smart somebody sends me a Tweet or sends me an Instagram post on I'm not gonna not gonna open it. I can't open it on those phones, right? And that's helped a lot we should come back to that because that's also modifying your your spaces Which is another tool that I think is Underutilized so you should talk about that too.

1:01:31We'll definitely touch on that what I find is I'll say okay. I'm gonna take six minutes at six minutes till the hour take six minutes Yeah, and what's incredible is how fast six minutes seem to go by 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 de facto harm to society There are negative features of social media that are well documented There are also some I would argue redemptive qualities to it I'll give you one of my my personal ones which is you know sometimes like to unwind before bed I'm thinking all day I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short reels.

1:02:16Yeah, and a coon videos. Yeah I mean, you know my wife looks over at me. It's like what are you laughing at and then I sometimes I show her and she goes Why are you laughing at that right? So but but you know the algorithm has learned The specific kinds of funny videos that I like and no, I'm not gonna tell you what they are and It it it it just lightens the load and so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically To shift my emotions in a direction. I want them to be shifted at a certain time I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives the real challenge we face is how to Learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals we we we basically got thrown into social media without any rulebook Yeah, we're the experiment we're the experiment and but if you think about it's an it's a new environment We were born into this physical world and our our parents our caretakers from the time we're able to understand things and probably before They're teaching us.

1:03:25They're socializing us how to navigate this space profitably They don't just like Lord of the flies throw us into the world and let us let us kind of figure it out Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us If we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive and we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand Hey, here the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways of Of navigating social media and I'm talking about social media now like it's this Unitary environment different social media Applications of course have their own norms and rules of the games you could think of them as like little different countries They have their own little 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 a press of a button right you could change the way the algorithm works and then you've got to start over to some extent I've been told that by people in my life that One of the main reasons they get onto their phone in the middle of the night if they happen to wake up is that it allows a very soothing distraction compared to Trying to wrestle with the you know Firehose of thoughts in their head.

1:04:49Yeah, and that it yeah It's kind of like the way you describe these funny Videos that you won't disclose to us That sounds like um, you know, they typically involve wheat pranks. Oh, okay. Yeah, we used to hear That people you know would have a drink after work to just kind of like you know take the edge off or something like that I feel like social media is doing that for a lot of people Yeah, the way you describe it fits with that idea and that I certainly believe that from everything we know about the circadian health literature that you want to avoid looking at your phone Between the hours of 11 p .m.

1:05:24And 4 a .m. Most nights. I don't know what he's perfect But that if you wake up in the middle of the night one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone and start scrolling social media But I'm guessing people do it because it feels even worse to just sit there with your thoughts in the dark It's a shifter, but this is a perfect Segway back to you know, you asked me about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter and I'm telling you about the ones I use So there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I I detect the chatter brewing and I call it my 2 a .m. Chatter strategy and I call it my 2 a .m.

1:05:57Chatter strategy because every I just seemingly like 4 to 6 weeks. I will go to bed Happy and content and then I'll wake up at 2 a .m. And like it is all going to hell really fast. What times you typically go to sleep? Usually around 11 11 30 Interesting. Yeah, this is a common problem for a lot of people and there are some tools like long exhale 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 2 a .m. And 5 a .m. I just refuse. I don't believe it. It's as if somebody is lying to me in my head And one could argue well, maybe that's where the truth is coming out because your forebrain is not so good at suppressing these you know unconscious thoughts and sure all good, but as you point out they are rarely the kind of thoughts That one can work with positive or negative.

1:06:51So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing So at 2 a .m. when the chatter strikes and by the way you say like this is common This is more than common when I present to audiences and you know thousands and thousands of people over over the years And I ask hey, you ever you ever get 2 a .m. chatter? Maybe 2 30 a .m. All the hands go up. This is uh I don't want to say universal affection, but it is an incredibly common Problem that people struggle with like the chatter at night So what I do is I use something called mental time travel mental time travel into the future and what I do is I ask myself and I typically use my own name to do it.

1:07:35So I'm blending Another distancing tool distance self -talk as a Ethan. How are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning? No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a .m. to your point when I wake up the next morning and my brain is fully fully awake and I have access to my my prefrontal cortex and I could think constructively about things It is never as bad that next morning as it is in the middle of the night We of course have learned that over time because how many How many mornings have we Woken up in our lives we could do the math if I was more sophisticated. I do it on the fly I can't right but like many many mornings we have experienced this like chatter at 2 a .m at 7 a .m.

1:08:23Not so bad So when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning next week next year 10 years from now What that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through as bad as it may seem It is temporary. It will eventually subside and that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter It turns the volume down on it which for me is often all I have to do To get back to bed. So the official name for this tool is not mental time travel. It is called temporal distancing And it's a flexible tool you can you can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem How you're going to feel about it tomorrow next week 10 years from now And it's another way of of broadening your perspective It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it.

1:09:14So 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 experience in the bud when it happens And I should add that because I know about what chatter is and I know about how these tools work I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing so people will often ask Hey, do you ever um you ever experience chatter like yeah, of course pinch me. I'm a living breathing human being I do at times But I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing tools and an almost automatic manner If this happens if the chatter strikes Then I'm going to coach myself through the problem using my own name in you And I'm going to jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself how am I going to feel about this in the future If that's not sufficient then I'll go to like the level two response Which consists of if weather permits.

1:10:13I'll go for a walk in a in a safe natural setting I always feel like the the need to give the caveat about safe and natural because righ grew up In Brooklyn like the the natural settings for the place you got mugged so they were not safe But you know a park I I find restorative and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces But then what I'll also do is I will um I'll I'll dial up the the chatter advisory board. So I have a couple of people that I have carefully thought about What these people do for me when I have a problem and they importantly don't just let me vent my emotions or or Kathak to use that term before just I don't just get it out a lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to venture emotions There's research on this Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people.

1:11:10It's good to know that You know where buddies now I could call you up if I'm struggling you're gonna listen to me and empathize with me That's great for our relationship But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through And you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you, but the problem is still there So just venting ends up leading to what we call co -rumination which can be pretty harmful The people on my chatter advisory board they know to first Validate empathize with me learn about what I'm going through.

1:11:48They've got my back. They communicate that powerfully But then once they do that they start working with me to broaden the perspective To try to think through that problem, which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really really loud And 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 and the reason I asked when you go to sleep at about 11 p .m. and waking up at two or three and that being a very common issue is As far as I understand reflective of the fact that early in the night our sleep is dominated by slow wave deep sleep Less rapid eye movement sleep and then somewhere right about That transition time.

1:12:34It's not necessarily two or three a .m. per se but Given that you were asleep for about three four hours after about three four hours of sleep The proportion of our sleep that is rapid eye movement sleep relative to deep slow wave sleep shifts dramatically the intensity of our dreams shifts dramatically they become more emotionally laden and that whole process of having those rapid eye movement sleep associated dreams is strongly associated with the removal of an emotional load in the morning when we wake We know this because if you selectively deprive people of early members of late nights they've been so on the reason I mentioned this is that One tool that I certainly have found useful is that Well two tools really if people just understand that one of the reasons they'll wake up suddenly at two or three a .m.

1:13:21Is that they're undergoing this transition from a one kind of one form of sleep to another It's almost like a different beast altogether and that Heart racing emotionally laden thoughts is Characteristic of where they're supposed to be in the sleep architecture cycle and so for me so that's that's number one the other is that The tool that you provided of getting into this mental time travel I'd like to just double click on this notion of time perception in sleep and dreaming. I mean time is very fluid You can be one environment than another it seems compressed a lot happens in a short amount of time When we are in chatter in the daytime To what extent does it alter our perception of time And I have a very specific reason for asking this because I believe that one of the main You got of unifying features among the tools for dealing with depression anxiety etc when I survey the research is almost all of them journaling meditation even some of the medications for that matter involve taking people into a different sort of time perception mode and it's a kind of an abstract idea, but I think This this may resonate with some of the issues related to chatter that when we're in a mental frame that's not Healthy for where we want to be at that moment awake when we need sleep, you know anxious when we want to be calm and so forth that Changing our time perception seems to be the most useful thing that we can do or at least among the most useful So what's the relationship between chatter and time perception and tell tell me more about what you mean by time perception How broadly or finally we are bending time So we know that as autonomic arousal let's call it stress, but wakefulness and autonomic arousal goes up We're fine slicing time.

1:15:05I try to pupils get bigger. We actually see you know depth of field changes We get higher resolution image of much less. This is it makes every bit of evolutionary sense You know we can deal with fewer things better Yeah, and typically it's the thing that we're fixated or ruminating on yeah when we're relaxed Think about like sitting back on a beach and you're watching the clouds go by it's almost like your frame rate Yeah is slower so you're you know higher frame rate is like slow motion This is why people who experience trauma often feel like things are or a car crash Like see it in slow motion or it's not in slow motion.

1:15:37You're fine slicing time. Yeah, it's kind of a remarkable thing right This is also how athletes learn to play with their levels of autonomic arousal Fighters can see punches coming in at it's almost like slow motion But they can react with full speed like why's a tennis player is will describe it so we're talking about is dynamically changing the frame rate of ones experience It's a very interesting question and there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with these With time perception the way you're describing it, but what does come to mind are our experiences of flow Which in many ways you might you might consider the opposite of chatter flow being this state where you know You're just in the moment and and time is effortlessly passing you're the demands of the situation completely match the skills 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 this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly On the object of the chatter on the thing that is causing that distress and we focus You know so narrowly on it which of course makes a great deal of sense because What are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem Think about it.

1:16:57Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you got it on try number one zoom in focus on the problem Roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it And so that's that kind of really you're getting in there and fine green detail and 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 and that's where this zooming out Taking this broader view whether you do that through visual modalities Imagination modalities like mental time travel you could time travel into the future like I've just described You can also go back in time like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life for someone else's life that I I know of when times were even worse and they got through it and oh if I got through that well sure as heck I can get through this and so that's Expanding our perception of time are are looking at that bigger picture to work through Something in the present moment.

1:18:01How often do you think people And I do believe this is related to chatter, but if it's not we can set this aside for another day How often do you think people are in kind of negative or positive Fantasy like as they move through their day I'm sure a study's been done asking people what they're thinking about I mean how often is it actually tied to what they're doing or they're supposed to be doing or are they thinking about like what they're gonna do this weekend or maybe even Constructing entire narratives of things that are like non -existent that they would like to exist or You know occasionally we'll see this person.

1:18:35I think we've all seen this person kind of mumbling to themselves And it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things. Yeah, that's because they've just been rejected by a journal And they're they're article the experience of every scientist And it's of course always reviewer number two's fault and read the paper carefully enough of course and none of us have ever been reviewer number two Yeah, sarcastic by the way we've all been reviewer number two Well academic inside inside ball humor there You know, you'll see somebody mumbling to themselves and it doesn't know it doesn't look like they're mumbling pleasant things Yeah, we don't know what they're saying to themselves But I'm guessing if we tapped them said hey, what were you meant mumbling?

1:19:12I would guess that more than 50 % of the time it was Kind of frustration with stuff you kind of see this like the frustrated person It's a hard thing to observe actually Yeah, so People have looked at this and my memory of this wonderful paper. I think it was published in science I think I think the title was a wandering mind is an unhappy mind and Basically the take home from the article was that people spend between Well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it What what we can deduce is that people spend between one half and one third of their waking hours Not focused on the present So between one half and one third of the time we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things and this one particular paper Link that process with Thinking about things that cause you to feel worse.

1:20:00I think there's huge levels of variability there though um, I think a like being lost and thought can be a wonderful experience. I love love love love Mind wandering. I think it's one of my strengths. It is the source of idea generation for me It is also the source of emotion regulation. I will one of you know my sleeping pill metaphorically speaking is Mental time travel it's getting away from the present it is fantasizing about the future right thinking about the good things that could happen the potentialities or going into the past and savoring some of the positive things that happen. I'm thinking about you know the the the the soccer game where my kids scored goals or Something good happened to someone I know were to me 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 I really important point that I want to get in there and I'd love to get your take on this because In poppy the culture we often hear that It's really important to be in the moment This is emerged as a type of cultural maximum like be in the now In and this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment We sometimes think there's something wrong with us like oh, we got to train our attention to bring it back to the present Being in the present can be very useful In many contexts and certainly when we experience chatter we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past Refocusing on the present our breath a mantra Yes, lots of data support the utility of that but I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time and lots of amazing things Accompany that process if I can't go into the past Not only am I not savoring Positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life I'm also not learning from my scrupps which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis And I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past And if I'm not going into the future That I'm not I'm not planning.

1:22:15I'm not simulating. I'm not fantasizing. So We want to be we don't want to shut down mental time travel I think what we want to learn how to do Is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively Without that time travel machine breaking down in the past Which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about So 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 Smartphones but Namely texting has interfered with sort of Time -tested meaning over hundreds of thousands of years Time -tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions and our thoughts to arrive at better ways of thinking feeling being um You know nowadays if you get on a train or a plane or you're in a newbie or you're walking to your car and you have a Like a thought about something.

1:23:21Oh, I that grant that idea. It's so easy to just Get into a mode of texting. Yeah passive passive participation maybe through social media scrolling Again, not universally bad, but you can go to passive kind of travel semi -dissociative state Like yeah, they're not really in the parking lot anymore. You're half in your phone and half in the parking lot um and texting Polling people around you as opposed to you know Quote in the old days where you had to actually grapple through this stuff as you describe your um the tools that you use to deal with chatter and to process Information and to you know work with your thinking and your emotions You strike me as somebody who um has a rich jungle gym of things to play with in there Yeah, and a toolkit and uh an emergency switch if you need it and all that stuff Resume most people I think Just they have their phone.

1:24:12Yeah, who are you gonna call? Well who you gonna text what what cider you're gonna google the google search to um I mean, well it can't be good Well, um it often isn't but it it can be harnessed and and here's what the way I think about texting and really how social media And the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want How this has thrown a curveball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions of not just other people but groups of people and societies So when we experience emotions we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others There's this wonderful Research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Ramei who Spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions and he found over Many decades of work that you're motivated to Verbalize it to get it out and there are a couple of reasons for that we want to Relate to other people get their support, but we also want to usually process it both in the pre -social media era Two things had to happen typically to share our emotions first you had to find someone to Share them with Uh, 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 all follow a common trajectory So something happens in the world or in our mind we imagine something that is provoking in some way Our emotions get triggered and then as time goes on they eventually Peter out and depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with You know some people may peek more intensely than others and fade more quickly Some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to some side, but they all follow that basic trajectory over time So let's go back to the pre -social media era, right?

1:26:27So You got to find someone to talk to and while you're trying to find someone to talk to time is passing That's acting to temper our emotions now once you find someone to talk to either face -to -face or via phone The moment you start talking You are now awash in all of this feedback this emotional feedback whether it's coming from your face Like you're giving me all sorts of information right now. I would benefit from smiling if you could there we go Thank you. I'm just joking for those who are listening But I'm getting information from you and if I'm talking to someone on the phone likewise I'm getting their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel that is also working to constrain How we communicate with others and it's typically keeping our emotions.

1:27:13I would argue in check and balance and proportion We're stripping away time With social media and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback This enables us to Release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way and I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text Or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone and I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society so cyberbullying and You know the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that Might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context now that is not to say that social media Isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress It can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change But I think we do need to be conscious of How interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information When I think about the different ways to parse a problem Real or imagined problem And I think about the role of web searches It immediately takes me to either social media or to I could be red it could be some article that was written and posted online in 2019 You know the least will resurface they repurpose these things all the time it's got I don't know why they do that I just got emailed this morning about An interview to fact check that I did in 2019 Yeah, no figure I mean it's cool that there's um like it's That there's archival material on the internet that not everything is fleeting Certainly in the podcast space So you know, we like to think that the information on this podcast will ever bring archival And we can update it over time and and that actually brings me to the The very specific question which is about AI It you know with AI web searches are now Changing fundamentally there you no longer being brought to a site that is just a designated site You're getting information back that's the you know the the amalgam of a lot of information funneled through presumably the large language models are changing all the time But funneled through Kind of your search behavior your preferences etc So web searches are no longer just site destination journeys they are you know recipes of information that are filtered and combined and given back to us which makes me think that maybe AI can provide a kind of pseudo self that is wiser than ourselves in any moment or Potentially wiser than we are in any moment because it can access information that is not dependent on like bodily state shifts like Like at 2 .30 in the morning 3 .30 in the morning a small problem can seem huge and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming Just crushing us At 7 a .m It's different when we search on the web now like how to you know how to get through bankruptcy Let's say somebody stealing with bankruptcy.

1:30:31They're gonna there's information to go to but with AI It can give you the information in the form and in the and from the sources that are most meaningful to you And it doesn't even know it's 2 .30 in the morning for you The AI is fresh. It doesn't need to sleep right that seems to me like a distinct advantage Over our own minds and I know what AI is controversial Is it gonna get smarter than us as again tell us to go do bad things this kind of thing? Okay, that's a whole different discussion But seems to me the AI could be pretty good maybe even terrific at helping us resolve problems because it doesn't have these state shifts And it's really tailored to us Well, it can be and I think you know AI I think of it as a as a new tool that is Has you know amazing potential um, and I actually think it has the potential to help us Advance on a problem where psychologists like myself Currently find ourselves fixed So if I if I look back at the last 20 30 years of research on emotion regulation I'm talking here not just about managing chatter but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives What I can do is I can point to several individual tools That are empirically supported science -based tools and scientists have done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically they've often gone down to the to the brain level They've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work But what we are now learning is Individual tools are not the name of the game Because we're often doing multiple things to manage our emotions And the combinations of tools we use Within people they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand And there's variability between people as well So the the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us Remain to be illuminated So if someone comes to me with a problem I can go through all the tools in the toolbox What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and say hey For the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are Here are the four things that you should do But that person over there they should do these six things I think AI has the potential with the right inputs To help us learn about those patterns That explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis And that is a remarkably Tantalizing possibility for that technology You mentioned you have kids When my sister who's three years older than I am Was a kid my dad tells the story that She had an imaginary friend Larry Larry was a girl lived in a purple house, you know that this imaginary friend Larry had all the the components of a Child's mind that was unrestricted by all the barriers of naming and things like that, you know um And my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry in her room for hours Just talking to Larry and like you know with her doll houses and her toys and her things into it And then one day my dad He loves this story.

1:33:47I don't know why he loves this story in particular, but he He was standing outside her door and she was playing with Larry her imaginary friend talking to Larry And then she stopped and turned around and he said How's Larry and she said Larry's dead And he she never talked about Larry again Like it was this sort of collision between fantasy life and real world This is how I interpret it and that was it yeah Larry was done. Yeah poor Larry poor Larry well Maybe it was time, you know, I mean she was maybe gonna be seven soon and maybe it served her well So I've always wanted to ask somebody this question.

1:34:21I think you are the person to ask this question our imaginary friends common in children and our imaginary friends the primordial form of our internal dialogue with our self That just fascinating by and yeah, there's some adults who maintain imaginary friends and the read though And I'll set an additional context which which will be especially relevant to the listeners of this podcast which was In the very seat that you're sitting about this time last year david goggins was here and he was talking about You know how he pushes himself through tremendously hard things and during that discussion it became very clear that David has a An array of different voices that are all him but that serve different roles.

1:35:02Yeah And it was a remarkable thing to hear him articulate that because To those of us on the outside we observe is like one person But he's constructed in an elaborate inner world to be able to equip himself to do the things he does And I just have to wonder whether or not this whole thing of imaginary friends provided it doesn't take us into the realm of psychosis and delusion Could actually be useful. Yeah 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 Raphael Nadal the tennis great 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 then I and I go to the audience and I say hey What do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says they're struggling with the voices inside their head?

1:35:56Right like That is typically warning sign right that maybe something is a rye here and someone needs support Yet this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on so to answer your question is a common to For kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves. Yes I believe this is called the study of pretense um According to one famous Soviet psychologist named Lev the godsky one of the way self -control is first learned is actually through self -talk And so what happens is You as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things Andrew you should do this or don't do that and sit this way and not that way And then what children will often do is go off on their own And they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves And so if you've ever been around young kids you've probably seen them Talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls and no Jimmy shouldn't do this Jimmy should 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 contexts according to this idea is They are they're practicing self -control They are they are repeating the things the messages that their caretakers have told to them Right they are reinforcing it in those ways and then as time goes on and your sister demonstrated this That outer voice Becomes our inner voice and we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress Many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud Right and there's the very little research on this and a lot of this is anecdotal But I have um when speaking to a lot of individuals they say yeah Sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud I thought something was wrong with me.

1:37:58It's always when I'm struggling with Uh like a major stressor So if we go back to reviewer number two right in the academic world I remember once I wrote this invited article and um I reviewer did not say very nice things to me In this in this response and I remember just walking I was I was it was so offensive I remember walking around the neighborhood and I said why don't you say that to my face? You know And I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working through it But it almost seems like in real moments of stress We revert back to this very primordial way Of regulating ourselves that we first exercise when we were kids Which is this self -talk and so so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices According to you to manage the challenges that he is facing Uh, I've heard David talk on a number of occasions and uh, I think there's another important point to To bring up here, which is I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices They're not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and Sometimes sometimes yes and sometimes this is important because Negative self -talk is often equated with harmful outcomes Negative emotions are functional When they are activated in the right proportions Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective So if I go to how when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where Coaches are telling me to do really painful things like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me, right?

1:39:50You know you you you better like shape up, you know, you can't you know, wimp out here That serves an emotivating function for me there. So if we're recruiting some negative voices That isn't bad per se What is bad is if we start looping that is the what we really want to equate with chatter It's getting stuck in those thought loops that's when things get get harmful when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely Or for too long A couple of times we've talked about the relationship between physical activities and mental activities In particular taking a walk going into green spaces and I was a delight to hear When you said that there's a vast literature supporting the use of green spaces.

1:40:36Yeah for calming ourselves as that essentially what the data show Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming. So yes, there is data linking Going for a walk in a in a beautiful setting with feeling better But but but scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the the various mechanisms through which Interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us and so there are two major pathways that I often talk about one is Interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative. So as we talked about earlier when people get stuck Experiencing chatter other kinds of big emotions Our attention often fixates on on the problem at hand We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem And that can drain us of our precious attentional resources Well 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 the trees The sense the sounds our attention often drifts onto those Features of our environment now most of us are not doing the equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying the the geometrical structure of the leaves and the flowers right We're just kind of taking it in but the surroundings are are sufficiently intriguing to capture to grasp our attention And that gives us this opportunity To restore that precious commodity.

1:42:14So there's work. There's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe natural setting Can be cognitively restorative That's another feature that or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us The other pathway that I just find so it's so so cool from a research point of view Going for walks in in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe 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 In the arboretum near my house there are these trees that have been there for hundreds of years and you look up at these trees And you think my god 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 projects Wow, that just broadens my perspective or an amazing sunset You can also experience this emotion through feats of of innovation.

1:43:14So I'm a I'm a science Geek I guess you could say and for me the the the two biggest alt triggers are Number one the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces which if you follow this we some physicists of some time Somehow figured out engineers how to take pictures of what The universe look like billions of years ago somehow I don't understand the physics we can see what it look like This you know vast amounts of time ago And we also of course have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars sending us back footage of that planet. So when I think of that like We've actually landed a vehicle on another planet This vastly expands like I am filled with awe so when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that This is the ultimate perspective broader 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 feel smaller problems our problem.

1:44:25So this is a an easy way of utilizing the world around you to Powerfully manage your emotions and so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight They're waiting to be harnessed and if you know where to look you can often find them And the nature by the way isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist There are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better We often develop attachments to places for example So Have you probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures?

1:45:04So there are these figures from our childhood that We often though not always securely attached to they are a source of Safety and comfort and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners if we're in positive relationships as I am love you As to my wife She is an attachment figure for me Well, we also develop these associations with places and so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort Going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating um, I know I know one person who um discovered that Uh, you know his there was infidelity in his relationship and what really helped him Get a grip on the situation was going back to his childhood home and sleeping in his bedroom at home That was the the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life um, that's an example of of the power of places to affect us so So how many times do we think about hey, 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 No, not for me not even in the room not in the room for me either If we did and we had it facing up we would be distracted, but we not Without question even facing down.

1:46:43I think there's some literature on this right still a cue It's still an emotional cue is a cognitive tether like we're sort of I mean because the thing signals um A particular reward a particular reward and a and a particular set of behaviors I just like a pen only a few things you get I mean that probably many things you do with a pen But typically one this is not John Wick here There's one thing we're talking about we're not we're not getting We're not getting innovative here with with these objects, but right when the pen it excuse me when the phone is present even if it's face down it cues the uh The opportunity to make a call received to a text look on social media.

1:47:21That's right the internet and so what's happened And so by leaving our phones outside of the space we are we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way When laptop screens are open in my seminars I know that I've already lost the battle Because I know this this the the object the stimulus is so tempting Even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world which I am not I aspire to be captivating But I know that I'm always going to lose compared to The screen you ask them to close. Yeah, no laptops in my in my class. Wow. How is that received So far so good um, you know, I explained to them.

1:48:02I actually explained to them the science behind this I explain why I'm doing this and I say that Hey, if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes This is a divided attention task. I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open And in the courses that I teach it's more about discussion and thinking through things So they don't really have a need to you know type notes for exams, which I think makes it easier for me um, but but modifying our space is really strategically like this is another valuable tool in um in our toolbox like when we have people over for football watching parties let's say it's pretty common where I come from an anarbor and uh, My favorite food in the world is is pizza and we have this wonderful New York City City style pizza place in anarbor now I will order vast amounts of it much more than we need and When the the game is over I will insist that everyone take it with them Because I know if it is in the refrigerator And I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water If I see the pizza box the cue It will elicit a emotional response this desire.

1:49:14There's a pettit response to consume the pizza Which is not the goal that I have from Either in a fitness or emotion regulatory regulatory point of view So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time To give me the best chance of being successful at meeting my regulatory goals I'm so glad you brought up pizza and New York pizza and the fact that you're from New York And here's why um And again, I give a personal example only as uh a template for people to think about themselves Sure either where it matches or doesn't match what I'm about to ask I love being in nature. I love being up in your sanity and rural areas and at the coast I mean there's love love being in nature and the quiet of nature I find my my mind slows And my thoughts um and my emotions enter a pace that just is very soothing I also love being in New York City I was first in New York City when I was about five or six years old And I remember telling my dad who's from another big city Buenos Aires I remember telling him like I can't I can't believe this exists like when we come back here And I swore that I would go back as many times as I possibly couldn't I I love going to New York City Despite it having many problems.

1:50:27It's 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 and then I'll I'll wage the specific question I've worked with professors my postdoc advisor for instance and my graduate advisor worked extremely effectively These are hyper focused unfortunately both of them have passed but hyper focused Brilliant people truly brilliant And their offices were a complete disaster and we'd say Ben you need to clean your office and you'd say no don't move anything like Otherwise, I won't know where anything is and like how can you know where anything is like this this it look it looks like an earthquake hit yesterday You know don't touch anything and he and he could find things in this Like dizzyingly messy environment.

1:51:22Yeah, as some you know He was the the stereotype of the professor sitting hunched over at his keyboard at two in the morning Because at that time I worked really late you'd go into bends off to my hey, you know and he Organized thinking amidst 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 let's say daytime. Let's forget about middle of the night of daytime kind of default Levels of chatter. I think of this as kind of RPM in a car like like how is the car idling? I mean turn on the car.

1:51:57You just sit there like if the transmission's working well and everything's working well It's like yeah hums it a nice. It's not redlining. Yeah Some people seem to be redlining all the time. Yeah, and they calm down in ten in cluttered environments So how much is do we have a kind of a set point a chatter set point Assuming everything else equal well rested et cetera, et cetera And then why is it that external environment matching our internal chatter somehow like Can Adjust that internal set point it seems. I realize this is very abstract But for me it's very useful to think about where my mind goes into its most pleasant and effective states.

1:52:38Yeah Your example of your advisors resonates so strongly with myself is your office on this Well, it 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 Spick and span unbelievably organized and clean And so let me share with you some of the research in the space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking A lot of people find that when they are Experiencing chatter they reflexively start Organizing their spaces So I'm a great example of this. I my entire life if we call my mother up right now.

1:53:24Please 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 at Typically like tuning out my surroundings To focus in on the task at hand. I could work in a coffee shop. I could work almost anywhere and I love it When I'm experiencing chatter though and this is true from the time I was little I would always start putting things away I would always start organizing things making them nice and tidy um My office is always spotless Sometimes I even take it further presently when I'm experiencing chatter I clean up my office then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy And if it's really bad like I'll clean up my kids rooms and things like that This is a very common experience when you're experiencing chatter.

1:54:34You don't feel like you are in control You're not in the driver's seat The thoughts and feelings are taken over and they're pushing you in directions and to places That you don't want to be it's an aversive state and it's chronically activated for a lot of people human beings In general we crave control We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable There's of survival value that that communicates to us right if we know Things are certain and though and you know proceeding in a in a predictable way Creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside.

1:55:15It's called compensatory control And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us augment our spaces to counteract in this case our emotional state And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question But it for me highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances When I'm not experiencing chatter it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not like no big deal But when I'm motivated to think, feel and behave in a particular way Then my circumstances are becoming more important I mean the the military is a very salient example where people have their their their kit and order yeah 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 and the hierarchy of the military is provided Structure and in order for people to essentially harness a Take go from a chaotic life to a structured life.

1:56:29That's right. You know and It's an extreme example But having everything squared away is is one of those things I got certified a scuba dive a few years ago and you know it it occurred to me early on and the first dives that you know if if your Kit isn't squared away and you don't have everything worked out things can go badly wrong and the The severity of the the potential consequences or the potential severity of the consequences I suppose is the right way say it Is a good reminder like to have everything in check you this isn't the kind of thing where you can afford to forget a Piece of gear or to not check a valve or you know It's potentially life or death and that serves an adaptive role It's it's kind of nice to have an activity actually where where that's that's the case Whereas we get into our cars and we might pull out the driveway and then go down the street And now you see people texting and driving all the time.

1:57:26Hopefully less this time goes on and you know You see then they you might put on your seatbelt You know like a quarter mile down the road. Yeah, I put on first right? I always put mine on first when you know Whenever remember I'm sure now someone will catch me with my seatbelt off but I drive with a seatbelt and so on and so on The physical steps that we take to organize ourselves and the environment and our relationship to the environment Really do seem to change our brain into a different brain than where we do not do those things The way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist Some of those shifters are inside us.

1:58:05So they're these sensory shifters we talked about There are intentional shifters. We haven't gotten 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 reframing distancing Those are all on the inside But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships How other people can push our emotions in different directions Sometimes other people can be amazing assets sometimes tremendous liabilities There are physical shifters like in our spaces and we just talked about those You can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter People talk about culture as the air we breathe 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 you're on campus at Stanford That's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and and and and weird practices maybe That's no offense to Stanford by the way.

1:59:17That's more academics academia some weird practices If you then go to your podcast community right the the team in the studio that we're sitting here There are different there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here and those cultures that we are a part of They powerfully shape our emotional lives. They indicate they they the influence What kinds of emotional experiences we value? So what kinds of emotional experience are remotivated to have They give us practices rituals To meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well. So that's another kind of Influence that I don't think we often think about but that is really quite powerful It brings me back again to the the smartphone You know the smartphone carries an infinite number of contexts Into the different environments with us So we're on the train, but we could be paying attention to something overseas and I was on the plane this morning and I I just Marveled at the number of screens on this Frankly very densely packed plane it's like Probably fourth grade when a kid brought in a little mini TV I remember thinking oh my goodness.

2:00:34That's like a mini TV. It looked kind of like a Walkie -talkie and the resolution was terrible and of course it was all black and white They had colored TVs by the way when I was when I was young it just hadn't made it to the mini TV We were basically walking around with a little mini TV's all day. Yeah with near infinite number of channels Combined with texting share. I mean it's wild remarkable. It's science fiction if we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids To think about What we have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people the classes that they are wearing We probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids I agree I agree and I I'm just struck by the fact that our brains can adapt to this, but I do think that most people Probably wonder about you know like what's the optimal way to live?

2:01:25And in the word optimal gets people a little you know We'll triggered sometimes believe it or not I'm not talking about what puts people into their best performance mode or this or that I'm not talking about biohacking. I'm referring to You know that is an age old question, you know What what is a good life and that's a completely different podcast that we should probably do at some point But it probably involves being able to pay attention to things and be present But also let ones mind drift and be socially present and have relationships and on and on Do you think that we are in fact more challenged now it is in the default mode of so many Context arriving with us in our pocket when we arrive in a situation like you said have come to the studio.

2:02:08I'm As long as I'm in my phone space 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 dysregulation levels over the centuries. I think it's absolutely true that we now have new forms of technology that are Perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome but they are also providing us with opportunities so To be clear, I think social media and technology uh Canon does do a lot of harm and I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well and the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to Navigate those those digital technological landscapes and I think we probably jumped into them Without a user guy too quickly and we're only learning now 15 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 know that well.

2:03:25I'll speak for myself. I think net positive There's a lot of good that has come from these technologies if we think back centuries ago um It's not clear to me that the world wasn't a challenging place either. I mean, you know we used to Get into fights and pull swords and uh, there is huge you know people would invade readily if you go back further and We there was the threat of illness and you know, we weren't living nearly as long and so I think it's easy to also Forget just how far we have come as a species But and this is I think a really important but I think about this often The issues that we are talking about today on this podcast this question of how we Manage our emotional lives This is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form Because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies We've always been challenged by circumstances and those circumstances are constantly involved evolving providing new new threats to 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 for for for shift um I couldn't believe it that when I when I When I looked back at the first surgical tool ever developed, you know what that is Treffoning Treffoning so treffination Tell everyone is listening what that involved treffoning is where you bore a hole through the skull in order to let out Some volume of fluid some volume of food or or remove brain or brain or If we go back eight to ten thousand years ago when this technology was First cutting edge right like the new iPhone of the times treffination For spirits from maybe spirits right?

2:05:26So one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to Allow the evil spirits to escape that are made maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we used to manage our emotions Then let's let's jump into the mental time travel mr Just the time travel machine and go to the late 1940s Where there was another major spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline You know where I'm going on this and I'm guessing you're talking about the lobotomy. That's right frontal lobotomy about Portuguese physician Develops the lobotomy. I think it was initially called a lucotomy Essentially making some holes in your frontal cortex through going up through the orbit of the eye through the eyes sweeping it back and forth.

2:06:12This was in and not just an outpatient surgery, but a mobile surgery. That's right arrived to people's homes. I think I could be wrong, but I think a Nobel Prize was given for the lobotomy. Oh, there you go That's the lead anxiety Unfortunately, it relieves a lot of the many other things as well. Really people's interest in pursuing lots of it cause major major major dysfunction 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 that's a prefrontal cortical damage is a common feature of people with getting hit over and over or even I don't know if this is true.

2:06:51Someone needs to check, but I I do hear that some Sadly, some soccer players who head the ball a lot deal with some frontal You know frontal cortical I laid a dementia type stuff. I'm guessing that's probably Related to some genetics susceptibility because at least to me the soccer ball is not very hard. It's not like they're you know, it's but And then again, there are of course people who play a whole career of football. Yeah Or box less seldom boxing people get hit a lot 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 lobotomy what's amazing to me is like that was perceived to be such an advance that it won the Nobel prize Like the Nobel Prize because calm people down calm people down right and and we so so I raised these Issues to just point that like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage our motions effectively for a really long time And now fast forward to the present We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet But I would argue that we have made major advances in identifying non -invasive science -based tools that can be leveraged To help people lead more productive emotional lives and so um You know you raised this question earlier about what is a productive life?

2:08:15What is a good life and I think Answering that question is in part relevant to How I think about how do you 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 that exist these different shifters for pushing our emotions or chatter 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 the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered if I'm not motivated to manage my emotions I'm not going to use those 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 not going to be that effective and I may in fact Do some bad things right?

2:09:20I may I may you know use unhealthy tools Substances that really can very powerfully map, you know substance abuse I'm talking about that can modulate my emotions But has some negative consequences so it's about what are my goals for me for my emotional life And do I possess the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals? I think that is a formula for the good life. Hey, here are the goals that I have And if these are healthy productive goals and I have the means to achieve them That should bring me a sense of satisfaction Sometimes our goals of course aren't optimal and we're used that maybe controversial word but 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 Yeah, in keeping with this historical arc of the tools that humans have used to try and regulate emotion You mentioned treffoning Frontal lobotomy think about a barbaric appearing Procedure, but one that actually is pretty effective in the right hands And that is still commonly used today at electric shock therapy Which at a mechanistic level You know, we don't understand but it seems to lead to a kind of massive dump of a bunch of neuromodulators Dopamine serotonin but like you know almost willing to like just like that And then nowadays there's a lot of at least interest if not enthusiasm more work is needed on The various psychedelics.

2:10:52Yeah, in particular psilocybin and MDMA for depression and PTSD more specifically and while those are more in the serotonergic pathway That my read of the data is that you know they they're creating you know more Brain -wide connectivity at resting state. I mean, they're still fairly crude tools. Yeah in terms of you You're massively changing the levels of given neuromodulators You people are undergoing variable experiences. It's not like like directed in any anyway Nolan Williams at Stanford is combining those things with Transcranial magnate stimulation to try and essentially highlight the activity of particular circuits during the psychedelic 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 pharmacologic or surgical tools For emotion now there's terrific neurosurgery going on mind you um But when it comes to behavioral tools for emotion regulation I feel like the psychologists you all you and your colleagues have done a tremendous job as have the people from You know for lack of a better name the sort of ancient traditions and from the Wellness community, you know things like long exhale breathing physiological size meditation when he says ukees lab at NYU showing you 13 minutes a day of meditation improves focus emotion ring emotional state So it seems to me that the behavioral tools are getting way out ahead of The surgical and even pharmacologic tools in terms of their specificity their safety and maybe even their potency Would you care to reflect on on what you see as the most valuable tools for emotion regulation We've touched on some of them today, but already but I mean taking a walk green spaces time, you know Mental time travel fantasy.

2:12:46I listed a few more of these off. I mean these might seem kind of More modal, you know, you know top level contour things, but they work right? I mean the data say they work traveling Yeah, I mean and they're they're mechanistically We you know we understand the mechanisms that that are underlying the benefits of these tools They are easy to implement and in not always but for a lot of them they're easy and I think that's In part where their power resides We are still trying to understand how the brain functions as you will know you've contributed to this I've worked on this a little bit myself too The brain isn't remarkably complicated organ and and we still have a lot to learn um I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomena like emotion play out at different levels of analysis At the psychological level of thinking and feeling but also at the biological level in terms of Patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on and so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually down the road Try to help people manage your emotions through multiple different sources of intervention Through the pharmacological level through the behavioral level through the interpersonal level But it's a messy messy space right now and I think one of the big problems is and this is in parcates to bigger questions about science and how science is done It can be hard to cross levels of analysis and there are multiple practical constraints that become active here so having the you know 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 they're a lot harder to do they take a ton more money a ton more time and effort and oftentimes scientists are on Timelines and they're incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do but big picture down the road I think the 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 is watching or listening who's motivated to manage their emotions right now There are many things you can do to start and it begins step one Learning about what these tools are And then starting this process of experimenting with the tools I don't use that word experimenting lightly.

2:15:27I 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've received over the years is on YouTube in particular is how to stop intrusive voices And occasionally when people ask these questions they'll highlight That some parent Or an ex or something will kind of a judge voice in there and they don't know if it's their voice or the other person's voice But it's in their head and it's very unpleasant um Presumably 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 pot patterns maybe even those you like thought patterns um So a couple of responses to that.

2:16:38So 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 informative for for people who are curious about these inner worlds like I can hear I'm not referring to auditory hallucinations. Yeah, okay. I'm referring to you know The language of somebody maybe not in their that person's voice, but they're hearing like maybe not you're a bad person, but Like you're you're never good.

2:17:17You're not good enough like it's not enough or or just feeling like so you know They can't enjoy what the good things in life because of these intrusive negative voices Here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating as I have found liberating from just knowing the science So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in in shift um They are incredibly normative and so there's research which looks sad like how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought over the past week or a month or two months The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally high I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is in my book and it is like Near ceiling.

2:17:59I will do an exercise with my my classes my undergraduate classes where I will ask them to anonymously Describe the whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week Almost all of them are capable of generating them and some of these these thoughts are really really dark I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym You're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now. No, not concern. I'm just fast Yeah, so you know, I have ideas about what why this may be, but I'm just yeah, I'm just fascinating 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 heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it on the face of another person on a mat Oh my goodness.

2:18:54It's terribly dark. It's a terrible terrible terrible thought So why am I experiencing that it is most likely The brains simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing of course. I don't want to drop a dumbbell on someone I never have and so that's one explanation for why this is so normative It's it's your brain's way of constantly where there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen and most of these simulations the probability that I'm coming to fruition are exceptionally low infinite testimony small But on occasion some of the wacky ones do escape into awareness And that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal and a pretty aggressive you know a gregious way or in my case drop in the dumbbell 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 any way My brain's going to sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts I'm not going to act on them and as long as I'm not acting on them It's all good It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety Before they know what is happening that can often be an incredibly distressing experience like all of a sudden Your stomach is churning 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 you face All of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame and now This is I'm a Lamborghini, right?

2:20:51I am arising to the occasion my body is doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the Frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks So step one is just recognizing if you experience intrusive 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're curtailing chatter you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating the reason why we often Perseverate on on problems we're experiencing as we are we're highly motivated To make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives And our brain this wonderful problem solving organ that we possess It just keeps churning until we've solved that problem and that's 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 too I have um two Two points both of which are essentially questions um I think it's relatively common for people when they go to a bridge or a dam or something that very uh Like something very high with the potential for you know Essentially a fatal fall where they to jump off to to have the thought you know what keeps me from jumping off Yeah, when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off and it seems like it's another example of like It's registering the danger and the severity of the consequences It also i realize helps us understand the level of risk that's right You know i think Alex Honol who you know famously free free free so did free solow to elcap Remarkable movie by the way just along the lines of what we're talking about you the way the movie is Constructed and i think jimmy chin and and colleagues who made that movie just such an incredible job Not just with the cinematography, but you know he survives yeah from the very beginning of the movie and yet It's terrifying to watch the whole thing and it's kind of a hour 45 minute Expedition of exactly what we're talking about But in that movie as i recall Alex spells out the The assessment of risk and consequence right, you know You know level of risk level of consequence and and how that's it those are key parameters to evaluate and and he's obviously done that for himself And he succeeded and i hope he never does it Again only because he seems like a really delightful person would be nice to keep him around And he's doing other important work now But a point being that i think it's a it's a very Natural thing to evaluate risk and consequence in a way that Quote feels dark.

2:23:31Yeah, but it's actually highly adaptive through the lens that we're talking about it Um, so that's one point Well, just just to that point if i can interject so Just to to normalize this further for folks so My family is very special to me as it is to most people When my first daughter was born we used to live in this house that had this on the second floor There was a i don't know if you described as an overpass, but it 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 her diaper or whatever I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then dropping her over into the you know and splat like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the 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'm morally corrupt or Incredibly dark person.

2:24:37It's it's how my brain is operating. So yeah, you're assessing risk and consequence in an adaptive way um Yeah, it's uh it's uh it's fascinating to think about the second comment slash question um that love your thoughts on is You know I had this bulldog i talk about more the time this bulldog mastiff and and he had One default behavior that if he couldn't engage in it Would create anxiety in him and that was he liked to chew Like he liked a non things as a puppy He actually would teeth on bricks in the backyard. Oh, come on goodness It looks so painful to me. Sometimes you're biting his teeth right through a lip You know that the bulldog part of their phenotype is that a lot of the pain receptors have been bred out of their face And so they and i just think oh my goodness.

2:25:24I go out there and i you know i was like Distraught at how much pain he must be causing himself is obviously less than i i perceived but nonetheless This annoying behavior was what was so you could just see it it gave him such pleasure Right you give him something to chew on it just you could just see the anxiety like dissolve out of him I've known a number of people that are fairly high intensity in terms of they speak fast They you high density of thought information etc at least outwardly who claim that they have got it sort of a high rpm internally and I vary and depending on time of day and time of year on this but i'd place myself more or less into that category engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention Perhaps we could call it flow but nonetheless engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention Feels to me so unbelievably satisfying yeah So unbelievably satisfying i think it's for two reasons one is the the benefits of doing those activities studying learning podcasting or 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's a positive feature and then there's the also the removal of a negative like that Those rpm are not humming in the background Yeah, and i think for a lot of people you know like ultra runners and um You know i know a lot of former addicts that start running marathons and get 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 Relives this inner voice it kind of like lets the tension out the same way that i observe costello letting the tension out through knowing on these bricks or Roll hides or whatever whatever it was and so my question is um Is is there as i'm Assuming a relationship between the physical and the mental do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us?

2:27:24And 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 know bring our social relationships more closely together Well, uh, it certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing But it also as you alluded to plays out in cognitive contexts 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 And 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 as the wrong word for getting immersed 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 as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests I would hope and imagine and that's always the aspiration right that must feel Really good.

2:28:32I mean you talk for a long time with people Does it feel like a long time when you're having those conversations? No 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 longest ever yet is 11 hours You know edited down, but those can be Anywhere from you know 90 minutes to four hours and or a live event And I couldn't tell you it just seems like time just just time time dissolves away And when you know that is because you are so absorbed 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 chatter to percolate in in the background And so you know one often you might think like an ultra marathon or what's the correct terms?

2:29:28Ultra called an ultra. I think we have some triathletes here in the room our producer Rob Moore Sitting to my left We've never done this before but how long is it an ultra anything longer than a marathon? Is that right? He's giving a nod. He's 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? And you might think that might just be grounds For experiencing chatter But it's also a particularly challenging kind of physical feat that you have to do it 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 Runners hide a boot some like chemical boost to enhance your mood and all of a sudden now you have people running You know 130 miles.

2:30:17I'm exaggerating. How long is it? Oh people? I mean people have done 200 miles 150 miles. Trace people we have a friend You know again my producer Rob Moore and I have a friend Ken ride out who Does these sorts of races in the goby desert? He did it without any prior training in the desert than one I mean there But you know these Ken in particular. I'm thinking about right now He's a very high energy guy. I would be concerned about Ken and his family not their safety But their sanity if Ken didn't run that much because he's just He needs to burn it off. He just has that much energy and the whole concept of energy is something that I'm getting more and more interested Yeah, you know as we age we tend to have less energy.

2:30:58What is that is it might have conjure density and function probably But what we're talking about here is a sort of cognitive velocity You know, it's not an official term, but it's one that I'm using more and more nowadays Yeah, that's a good one. You know that this Um, people should try this. I'm curious have you ever done this you sit down to read a page of a book Trying to remember the information. Maybe it's technical. Maybe it's not And then you flip the page and you try and read a page of the very same book a little bit faster than you're comfortable while trying to retain the information And I find that there's this like sweet spot for reading where kind of like there's a sweet spot for running where going a little faster sometimes Actually feels Like it requires less effort.

2:31:36Yeah, well, it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently so um You know, I'm constantly reading for My job right if I'm not reading journal articles on reading books for you know research I'm 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 Often goes 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 audiobook when I'm moving at that speed and so it's it's it's not what I would do on vacation when I'm trying to consume Uh a book or information for fun uh, you know there.

2:32:28I just want to kind of just gently Go let the let the power graph, you know kind of pass my gaze and and take it in slow and almost even saver Saver the words on the page, but but in other contexts I do channel up the velocity and it can be incredibly engaging. It can also be depleting. So When you have conversations that really you find immensely rewarding and you know cognitive philosophy and I love that term is is is you know 10 out of 10 when you're done do you ever find it a little tiring Not immediately But my personal challenge in life is I don't transition states very well Yeah, so it takes me a little while to drop into a state, but then I stay there So I'll come out of here still thinking about and talking about this to myself or with others for for a fair amount of time Maybe maybe on the order of you know half an hour or two hours.

2:33:23Yeah Um 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 areas of life I've learned ways to transition yeah faster, but um Then I will notice if I do you know record a solo and in a guest episode and some intros and stuff in the same week That yeah on on Saturday. I'm 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 where I'm just kind of like veg and you're more tired probably on those days Yeah, just let myself reset it was actually in my list of questions to ask you about resetting going into kind of a state of wordlessness and just letting things just spool out Um for an hour like no, I'm trying to control anything not trying to control anything in the universe except you know basic functions right Cook cooking shows prank wheels Um, these are these are these are mine and um like I am You know, we often take for granted to that the the TV 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 shifted in the direction that is contrary to my goals right before I 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 politicking 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 vegetation and It puts me in a wonderfully serene state to then slide into bed jump into that mental time travel machine like do the fantasizing or Saving 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.

2:35:36I will often when I teach like sometimes I'll teach for like three hours So it's you know equivalent to what we're doing right now. It is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding and like this is why I got into this business You are you know, you're having great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things getting them Um to discover interest all that good stuff Couple hours later when I come home First of all, I need a little refractory period to switch out of work life into home life Which can often be challenging on the personal front because like my kids are just waiting there Well my youngest kid is waiting there my oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing But they want to play right away and I need some time just to decompress But then once I do I've got to lean further into that state and so that's That is shifting An understanding how to shift that's a different kind of shift But it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand How to do that well And I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here Yeah, it's such an important aspect of life And I do think that everyone would do well to Evaluate for themselves how Quickly well not well, you know, we're not trying to place a grade on it But how quickly or slowly one transitions into and out of stance?

2:36:58How much your how much of your life Your thoughts and emotions and Experience you're carrying forward from one context to the next I think about that a lot And it's something that I try and work with a lot especially, you know arriving home and there's people home and you You don't engage 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 mentioned the military earlier And there's a A wonderful carlary and it's I have an experience is too often in in my life where I see some Thing in science that Scaffolds on to and 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?

2:37:45What are their emotion regulation goals? What are the shifting goals? And how do you Go from having those goals to bringing them to fruition? And so So in the military like special forces before they have complex complicated operations They will often first think about okay. What's our goal? What's the outcome we hope to achieve? Then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal? And they'll go around the room and you know the the person in charge will like cold call Socratic style on folks like what is 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 whoop have you ever ever heard of this?

2:38:42Okay, so it's whoops an acronym and I promised you I wouldn't use any acronyms But this is a useful one to room. It's a mnemonic to remember something so How do you go from knowing to doing? Whoop is designed to help you do that because what it is explicitly designed to do is target each of the the places Where goal pursuit often breaks down step one what's your wish? What's the thing you hope to accomplish? Let's be really clear about what that goal is we often don't stop to even think about what our specific concrete goals are Okay, now that we have that that goal. Let's let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize What is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that goal?

2:39:31And 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 get let's get realistic What are the obstacles? What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those goals? Right, so that's a man 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 better Father a better husband to have a richer social life in those regards Now one of the obstacles. Okay internal obstacles. I got plenty Right like the temptation to check my email and get the inbox zero before the night is 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 plan if I'm tempted to check my email after Seven or eight then I'm going to remind myself about how important it is to To be a dad.

2:40:42So I'll do a little reframing If if someone calls after 9 p .m. And I'm engaging in activity with with my kids Then I'm going to 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 try to make emotion regulation automatic Because they identify a specific trigger If that's the if if this happens and then they pair that trigger with a response If then if then you rehearse that and this way when the trigger occurs boom you don't have to stop and think what should I do how should I behave you've got the plan and you implement it I've got if then plans for chatter If the chatter strikes then I do distance self -talk and mental time travel If the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work then I go to nature and I go to my chatter advisors And so I have these if then plans that are linked up with my goals And that's an important technology that I think we can we can invite people to Try to exercise in their own lives to make it more likely that they will achieve their regulatory goals I love it.

2:41:56So whoop spelled W -O -O -P the W if I have this correct 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 .A motivation. That's right. What's the outcome you hope to achieve? Yep. Great Okay, even better because of what you said was shorter the the first O is what's the outcome you hope to achieve The second O what are the obstacles you can anticipate That's right and in the research space. It's mostly been personal obstacles But you can generalize out as you know The Navy seals do as an example. That's the branch of the military.

2:42:37I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to Now you have me self -conscious about using the word optimize To optimize the way they respond to missions and challenges This is what they so they're not only dealing with internal obstacles obviously But also ones from the world around them. Don't worry about using the word optimize You did it optimally and we'll soon squalch any Prejorative around optimize during this episode and then the pee in whoop is the plan and if then plan That's right. So it's not a vague plan. It's a very specific plan So that you know exactly which strategies and steps to implement should a occur be a cursey occur That's right and so it's a general General framework, which is in part is I think why it has so so much value and there's research behind this showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals Now there of course will be many situations that you have not developed whoops for And that's okay because you're going to have all these other tools in your toolbox 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 whoop and then you could become more strategic automatic and effortless With how you engage them down the road Earlier you mentioned attentional spotlights and I'm fascinated by this I know that most people here that we can't multitask but primates again of which we are old world primates in particular can do covert attention If I were not completely focused on you I could focus an attentional spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you But I could also monitor components of the room.

2:44:22Yeah, I can merge those spotlights Mm -hmm I can divorce those spotlights. That's right. But it's very hard to generate three kind of compatible attentional spotlights it wants it seems like we kind of have two Yeah, maybe some people can manage three But I'm betting most people can't manage more than three. Well, I think it becomes especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing uh 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 sophisticated attention to play deployment system on the planet right?

2:45:03We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention So we can we can willfully place it on the things we want or yank it away from the things we don't want or we can go We can saccad our attention back and forth When it comes to emotion though We're often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention But I think in sometimes be problematic because they fall into the 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 you're anxious about or fearful You should not avoid the problem. You should focus on it and There's been a lot of research on this and what we've learned is on the one hand chronically avoiding things Is not good.

2:45:56It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical lives too our health But oftentimes the the signature for adaptably coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand Deploy your attention elsewhere take a break and then come back to it So this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently my grandmother was a very interesting woman who grew up in in Poland during World War II had our entire family slaughter during the war one of these kind of devastating experiences lived in the forest For years back and forth all this terrible stuff family masquerade and so forth and growing up she made it out of the war Move to the States.

2:46:45I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what she experienced and How she was able to overcome it and whenever I would ask her questions about this she would also she would always say You know don't ask me why or what happened why is a crooked letter? That was a phrase she would use which was really interesting because she didn't speak English very well at all heavily accented language But she'd mastered this curious idiom like why is a crooked letter in other words nothing good 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.

2:47:25So she's 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 she experienced except one day a year There would be this this remembrance day and we'd all pile in to a A synagogue and we'd talk about or I would listen to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would would come come out So she would dose her exposure to To the emotional information turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention She was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her But at other times when it didn't serve her well She occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences and a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that this capacity To 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 avoid it They aren't always true and that often the the magic That surrounds emotion regulation.

2:48:45I mean the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surrounding it Is in being really fast -silent how we can deploy our attention Really appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the sayings That were fed Like you know absence makes the heart grow fonder. Oh, yeah, well, I also heard out of sight out of mind So which one is it that's right, you know, and that's why eventually I became a scientist That's right because you know, it's both right and you know And you can see this in the fields of nutrition and exercise I mean there are certain court truths and I think the goal is always to get to those court truths And then there's some flexibility around those truths.

2:49:27There's margins of error I love what she shared. You know why is it is a crooked letter? It reminds me of the Bob Dylan. I don't look back Yeah, I mean it's an it these are profound questions. Yeah, right like how much of our 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 yet we don't want elements from the past to kind of you know fair it into our psyche and then show up in ways that are destructive So it's a it's a complicated dance. Oh, I mean our emotional eyes are anything But straight forward, but we we do have Guideposts to steer us in how we deploy our attention and so So a couple of common Heuristics that I that I I like to use and describe to folks is so let's say something bad happens And you divert your attention away you distract with a positive distraction not a harmful distraction And then the problem doesn't resurface Keep going like you don't have to go back in time.

2:50:32There's actually I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad Around in this issue so my parents were divorced and You know I dealt with the 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 it happened. I love both of my parents I've moved on. I'm well adjusted But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak and he you know will often bring it up And when he does my well, we don't have to talk about I'm actually totally fine This isn't a source of ongoing distress Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives and when that happens You know, that's our our cognitive machinery Operating really really well.

2:51:20We 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 is then a cue. Okay. Well, let's focus in on it And then once you focus in on it, of course there are multiple ways you can Engage with that experience Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation So getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance and we have Wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things we can look at it from different perspectives We can focus on the silver lining we can contextualize it So you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus But you don't always need to refocus on the problem So you want to be flexible Flexibility and how you deploy your attention is really The mantra that that I personally live by based on what I know of how all this works There are a couple of caveats.

2:52:32I want to throw out there When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding I'm talking about healthy distractions healthy avoidance There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that We know definitively are are not productive like substance abuse We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding Not good. So you want to be balanced Could we add to the list of um tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy And this isn't one that I default to but I know someone that told me that um she's to default into Um overconsumption of story Like of of Audio books not that audiobooks are bad But you know of fiction audiobooks and just kind of when when there was a problem rather than dealing with the problem You know overindulgence in in narratives that would just kind of consume the mind I guess any behavior where we're not Um dealing with the kind of itch that we probably need to scratch 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 cue you need to engage and deal with it But are 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 it 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 narratives 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 and frankly participate in is This notion of emotional contagion.

2:54:39Yeah both positive and negative I think of like us you mentioned football football's being in Michigan, right? Oh, yeah I remember from the movie The Big Chill they like actually go out and play for it like that was I think there were all of of University of Michigan. It's a religion and in the city that I live in that's right Is it right? Okay And how many people go to one of these games? So we actually it's called the big house actually the largest football stadium in in the country So close to 110 ,000 Yeah, it's a lot of people and we sing in unison and It's actually I never really was into football before moving to Ann Arbor and now I embrace it It helps when you're the national championships, which we're Champions which we were last year Congratulations.

2:55:24We're working we're working on it this year. Um cool. Maybe sometime I'll go to a game I'm not a I don't dislike football. I like football. I don't think I've ever been to a professional football game You should we should definitely have you out there. It is a load of fun. Okay. I'll skip one game of the Globe Trotter season to go to Michigan Michigan game Um Emotional contagion occurs in football stadiums it occurs in digesting news. We just had an election So a lot of emotional contagion and essentially opposite directions post -election um And on and on Who what do we know about emotional contagion?

2:56:02It makes sense to me why would we would be so prone to it but where are the the sort of rumble strips um so to speak and the ditch On emotional contagion. Yeah, that's a driving analogy the rumble strips are the go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go that when you start to drift towards the ditch Yeah, uh You know obviously the ditch is losing control in the negative direction maladaptive direction But like how can we start to identify the the rumble strips in in emotional contagion. Yeah, so emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon uh emotions can spread within seconds um they tend to We tend to catch emotions more quickly when we're not sure of How we should be thinking or feeling in a particular situation.

2:56:48So we often are referencing Other people in those instances as a source of information The people around us, of course are a rich source of information This is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently right? We're trying to learn something about how to respond And we know it can have these cascading effects both in everyday life in both a positive and the negative direction but also um You know in and 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 mood 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 context 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 a Just a member of this team that is committed to it You want to keep that tone at the most productive level because if it dips below or above that can sabotage How um how well 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 and from certainly the podcast Which is a small team of seven of us I'm familiar with what you just described and Also from being a camp counselor.

2:58:34Mm -hmm. That's not probably where I learned it being a summer camp counselor when I was in college Yeah, that if you get um Two or three kids that are like really pissed off about what you have to do over the next couple of hours It can send everything South If they nip that in the bud right away. Yeah, they repair that yeah, and I'm 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 a more of a tendency for students to raise their hands and say like let's spark an issue And I'll just preface this by saying a guy that I worked for as an undergraduate um 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 thermogenesis physiology his area of expertise And someone would just stand up and say what about the war in Vietnam?

2:59:37And I remember him telling me that story 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 Mm -hmm 1960s now very relevant again. So Do we let people emote or You know as a summer camp counselor someone Hold me aside and said you know these kids have a lot of energy my only advice is be a channel not a damn Yeah, something that I never forgot.

3:00:17Yeah, it's very useful in other areas of life to be a channel not a damn. Yeah So How do you be a channel not a damn when people are having um really having the need to externalize Negative stuff and it holds the potential for for emotional contagion Well, you know, I have an experience firsthand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom But obviously a lot of my colleagues have and we see this playing out on lots of universities. These are very turbulent times turbulence activates emotion and we know going back to An earlier part of our conversation when people experience strong emotions are often motivated to share those emotions with other people That often takes the form of vocalizing them and that can elicit contagion throughout and so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are are making their way through people groups and societies um What should you do in those circumstances?

3:01:16Well, I think it depends a lot on on the context and and what the nature of the emotional response is and are there you know is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful and you know, there are differing views about when you should intervene and how to do it. I think in general though you bring the um the playbook of always wanting to kind of validate like Your emotional experience is a genuine response that you were having to the situation in in most cases Yes, we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicitous way, but I think in a lot of cases The kinds of phenomenon we're talking about like These are just honest emotional reactions these are really difficult times and I think um Trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really great first step I mentioned to you before we started talking that I had a this 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 she is found to be be very successful in her career as a mediator is To ask folks to train them Not to enter conversations to try to change each other's minds, but to enter those conversations with A state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest and 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 so wisdom is This concept of it indexes how well you are able to deal with Social situations involving uncertainty like we don't know how the social situations are gonna play out and wise individuals are skillful In navigating those circumstances.

3:03:36How do you define wisdom? What are its features? Well a few of its core features are humility Recognizing that I don't know everything a commitment to perspective taking putting myself in the other person's shoes Dialecticism recognizing that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing and we need to be Aware of that and then also a general orientation towards the social good like doing good in the world and It strikes me that entering these difficult situations with that kind of mindset is potentially productive for For bridging divides I love that and um What an appropriate area for us to round up in I think that right now clearly things are tense, but What you've talked about today and at least from what I understand of how the human mind works and 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.

3:04:42They are implementable Uh Chunks of knowledge and in some cases such as what you've discussed today real gems so For that reason and for taking the time out of your research schedule I mean your your researcher your teacher your dad your husband you do many things you make it to football games Somehow also into the gym where you don't drop dumbbells on people's faces intentionally Because you realize the dire consequences you you're just doing a ton of amazing work in the world I'd heard about and read 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 pun intended been on and in their minds.

3:05:21Yeah, yeah And I'm sure there are others in your field But I want to specifically thank you on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching for paying So much careful research attention and public education attention to this thing that we call chatter And the inner voice and emotion regulation because this is really what makes up our lives It's as important in my mind certainly as cardiovascular health or any other aspect of mental or physical health 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 2025 Do you want to tell us the title of the book?

3:06:06That's right. It's called shift managing your emotions so they don't manage you great And it presumably it's available for presale now or see yeah, yeah, it's it's available and it is It is essentially design it is written to To kind of 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 You know my hope is that it addresses This big problem that I think we've been facing for a while Just had to wrangle these emotions that sometimes get the best of us Great. Well, I am personally going to order a copy by presale.

3:06:44I insist on that. I don't take free copies I buy books because I'm a believer in books So thank you for writing shift and come back and talk to us again Well, thanks for having me. It was an incredible conversation. So I appreciate it. I don't feel the same way. Thank you so much Thank you Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ethan Cross I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did To learn more about Dr. Cross's work and to find links to his previous book chatter as well as his fourth coming book shift managing your emotions so they do not manage you Please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast Please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

3:07:22That's a terrific zero -cost way to support us Please also click the follow button for the Hubertman Lab podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple You can leave us up to a five -star review Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode That's the best way to support this podcast And if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or you have topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Hubertman Lab podcast Please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments And if you're not already following me on social media I am Hubertman Lab on all social media platforms So that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and threads and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the Hubertman Lab podcast But much of which is distinct from the content on the Hubertman Lab podcast Again, that's Hubertman Lab on all social media platforms And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter The neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries To protocols in the form of brief one to three -page PDFs So these are protocols that describe the essential steps to take for instance to optimize your sleep To improve your dopamine regulation for deliberate cold exposure deliberate heat exposure All of which is available completely zero cost you simply go to Hubertman Lab calm Go to the menu tab in the corner scroll down to newsletter and provide your email And I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.

3:08:51Ethan Cross And last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science