Emotional Fitness: Dr. Ethan Kross On Dealing With Difficult Feelings, Controlling Your Inner Voice & The Science of Emotional Regulation

28:44And there are many different tools that we can reach for to achieve those goals. What I cannot do as an extremely well-intentioned scientist who has been studying this stuff for 25 years is meet someone, learn about their goals and then prescribe to them six tools that they should use for this goal. But then when someone else comes to me with a slightly different goal, say, oh, well, these three tools should work for you. The science has not yet gotten to that point where we are able to essentially personalize the prescription of tools with that level of precision. What I can do is I can offer you access to the tools and then invite you to start self-experimenting to figure out what are the combinations that work best for you, given your unique emotional makeup.

29:42It's not that different from physical fitness in the way that I think about it. When I started off trying to be physically fit, first thing I did when I was younger, I went to the gym and I learned how to use the different machines. And I learned about different exercises and even different approaches to staying fit from weight training to cardiovascular activity, to yoga. And then if I look now at my social network, the top 10 people, my closest friends and loved ones, everyone has fitness goals. Everyone does work out to some degree. We all have distinctive profiles that help us meet our goals.

30:22I think the same is true when it comes to this concept of mental fitness. And it really begins with identifying what these tools are. Now, a lot of people will have come in contact with some of the tools I talk about in the book. Some of them are familiar, some of them are not, and maybe a little bit more surprising. We'll maybe talk about those. But what I think a lot of us do is we stumble on these tools. Like we're struggling and we come across experiences that maybe help us, maybe don't, or someone in our community has shared an approach that has worked for them and encourage us to do it. And I think the real hope of being guided by the science here is to shift us from stumbling on using these tools to allowing us to be a lot more deliberate and strategic.

31:15So when people ask me, do I ever struggle with emotion regulation? Yes, I'm not perfect. But what I am really good at is the moment I detect the need to regulate, I have action plans. I know exactly what my three initial tools are. And then if those tools don't work, 65 % of the time they do, I'm making that number up, but majority of the time they do nip the reaction in the butt, I go deeper into the toolbox. So I'm never really just kind of flailing away. And I'm really grateful for having that capacity. And that's, I think, the hope that we can offer lots of people.

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37:14Well, let's get into the tools themselves. Maybe, you know, top level, give us an idea of what these various shifts are by category and explain what they mean. So let's start with the two big buckets. Internal shifters, which are things you could do on your own. The moment you learn about these things, you could start implementing them. And then there are what I call external shifters, which are tools that exist in our relationships, in our physical environments, and in our cultures that can exert a powerful role on how we relate to our emotions and how we manage our emotional lives. And the whole idea here is to offer people basically a blueprint for finding those shifters and accessing them to help them meet their goals.

38:04So if we started with internal shifters, probably the easiest low effort tool you can use, and this is actually another myth that I try to bust this idea that, God damn it, managing our emotions is hard. It's hard to rein those suckers in. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the tools that we have to use are indeed effortful and they're really good, but it doesn't always have to be hard. And a lot of the tools can actually be quite simple. So sensation is an incredibly powerful tool for temporarily pushing our emotions around in different directions. So what do I mean by sensation? Sight, sound, hearing, touch, smell.

38:49You could think of sensation as we have these satellite dishes mounted all over our body and these satellite dishes are tuned to the world around us. They're constantly taking in information to help us optimally navigate the world. So we don't get into danger. We do it safely. We know where we're going. Part of the way sensation works is as information is coming in, we really need to know whether this is good or bad for us. So sensation is intimately linked with the experience of emotion. We all know this intuitively. yet we don't act on it strategically. I myself was guilty of this earlier on in my life.

39:37Actually earlier is too generous up until relatively recently. I've been listening to music from the time I'm five years old. My first tape, you wanna guess what it was? One guess, 1985. 1985? Yeah. I'll give you one hint. It was a hip hop sensation, very catchy dance. Oh, I'm not a hip hop guy. I was thinking like Steve Miller band or something like that. No, that's on there. That's I have very eclectic tastes. Yeah, Boston. That was in there too. MC Hammer, you can't touch this. Yeah, followed soon after by Madonna's Immaculate Collection. So I'm all over the place, but I've always listened to music.

40:21I mean, why do you listen to music? Why do I listen to music? I mean, for pleasure, enjoyment. Stop right there. For nostalgia, for modulating my emotions. So if you ask people why they listen to music as scientists have done, virtually 100 % of the sample say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. It is a fundamentally emotional enterprises. I recently went to the Taylor Swift concert. This was a major coup in my household. Your girl dad. My two daughters and wife planned this for a year. I almost botched the entire trip. Maybe I'll tell you about that later, how avoidance saved my butt.

41:06But eventually we went to this concert and I'm sitting there in this arena. I'm doing the math on how much money was spent to attend this concert. And I'm thinking to myself, my God, these tens of thousands of people just paid all of this money to have their emotions be regulated by this one enormously talented musician on stage with their guitar. We just paid for an emotion regulation experience. So I've been listening to music my whole life, but I don't really give it second thought. And then I have this experience with my daughter one day before a soccer game, I'm coaching the game, looking forward to this.

41:48She's in a not so positive mood. She's bumming me out. and serendipitously we're driving to the game and one of my favorite songs come on the radio, Journeys Don't Stop Believing. I start jamming out, I'm having fun. I look in the back seat in the rear view mirror. Normally when I do that sort of stuff, my daughter's like cringe with embarrassment, but for some strange reason on that particular morning, my daughter's bopping along with me and she's getting into the music and it lifts her emotions, her positive emotions as it lifts mine. And she goes off to have a great game. That experience was a tipping point for me that actually led me to then start doing some research to look at the links between sensation and emotion.

42:36And what you find when you dig into that science is that this is a really powerful tool for giving us a quick kick in the butt in the direction we want to go into. Now we're often not aware of this. Case in point, you ever go to a hotel that smells really awesome in the lobby? You're like, oh my God, I feel at home. Let me just spend a little bit more money here. Actually, let's say a little bit longer. Hotels are capitalizing on this phenomenon. They are piping in pleasant scenting scents into their ventilation system to arouse a particular positive response. We're not always aware of that. And sometimes we even get this wrong.

43:20Like, have you ever found yourself in a sad mood and you didn't really wanna stay in that mood. If for some strange reason, you found yourself going to your iPad or iPhone or whatever the device is and putting on, you know, depressogenic music, Adele, Chicago, Air Supply, right? This is a well-established phenomenon where when we're in a particular mood state, we seek out experiences that cohere with that state. Now that's fine if the sadness is serving some function and sadness can be functional. But if your goal is to not be sad anymore, don't put on the Adele in that case, put on fill in the blank, whatever your upbeat music is.

44:11So that's just one example, but go down the senses. And I think you will find that this is remarkable, like touch, affectionate touch. This is what we do to soothe babies the moment they are born into this world. When you are struggling and you've talked about your difficulties. I mean, I have to presume that at some point someone came over to you and put their hand on your back in a non-creepy way or gave you a hug. I mean, did that ever happen? Sure. I guess where my head is going at this moment is thinking, like I'm trying to put myself in that state of distress. And I know myself well enough to know that like, when I'm in the midst of like a negative emotional experience, it's more difficult to grasp for the solution.

45:02Like there's something that as uncomfortable as it is, you're resistant to changing it. Like it is doing something for you. Like on some unconscious level, you're choosing it. in an adaptive way, I suppose, that makes me resistant to like reach out for help or to find a way out of it. Like I'm more likely to like indulge it. Well, and if you find that that approach is serving you well, that is - I mean, it's not, but - Well, then I think if that's not serving you well, having the foresight to recognize, actually this intuition I have to lean into this emotion, even further, it is not going to help me.

45:46Rehearsing that ahead of time, and we can go over how to do that because actually the penultimate chapter of my book is all about how you go from knowing to doing, right? How when you find yourself in the midst of the storm, can you be reminded that your default tendencies may not be adaptive? Let's plug in some of these shifters. We'll talk about how you could do that. But if, you know, I think recognizing that Sometimes our instincts don't serve us well. I mean, worry is a great example of this, right? So worry, this was the topic of my first book. A lot of people worry because they think it's going to help them.

46:26There's something that feels really secure about worrying, right? Because I look, this is a really important thing. So let me try to figure out every possible angle on this. Like your brain is an unbelievable supercomputer. Your ability to come up with an infinite number of what if worst case scenarios, this is remarkable. Now at a certain point, like it's useful until it ceases to be useful. Typically, I think the ceases to be useful happens like three minutes into the worry bout rather than three days or three weeks or three months. So recognizing that this temptation you have to lean into this is not serving you well and giving yourself the permission to do a little experiment.

47:17Just give yourself like the next time you find yourself really wanting to indulge in the sadness or the anxiety, let's try something else and see how that works out and try some of those shifters. That is something I would invite you and everyone else listening to do. Yeah. And like, again, myself too. Like I've sometimes had to, like I love approaching problems right when they happen. I'm not dispositionally avoidant. When something happens, I like to deal with it, nip it in the bud, move on. Very tactical. I have learned that sometimes that does not work well. In particular, in an interpersonal context, sometimes if I'm in an argument with someone else, they need some time to recalibrate before we can productively deal with the situation at hand.

48:09I have to force myself. All right, Ethan, you're gonna distract for a while. And I lean into work hard for like several hours or several days even. And that really serves me well. And I'll tell you what, now that I've benefited from that, it has broken the previous automatic response pattern that was not serving me well. Yeah, what's interesting about that predisposition to problem solve, like I would imagine your inner monologue is like, this is a positive quality. Like when I see a problem, I solve it right away. But if you're curious about why that is, perhaps you may find a deep discomfort with uncertainty.

48:50You know, it's like, what's driving that behavior, right? And that uncertainty is so uncomfortable that it has to be eradicated and the best way to eradicate it is to just solve the problem, right? As opposed to what does it feel like to sit in that uncertainty instead? Or you could sit in the uncertainty. That's one thing you can do. You can also productively distract from the uncertainty and let time temper the emotional response linked with whatever is driving the uncertainty and see what that does for you. Or you can talk to someone else you gotta be careful who you talk to to help you reframe the uncertainty.

49:32Or you can lean on your culture for support. And if you believe in a higher power or are spiritual, activate some of those resources. There are lots of things you can do to deal with that experience. And one of those things or two or three may be far more productive than the default, which is to just try to kind of hammer it away with the worries, which isn't serving you well. But I wanna go back for a second because you said something really important. You said that this intuition is coming from a very logical place. So what is that logical place? Well, this brain we possess, usually it's helping you out.

50:15Like what are you taught to do from the time you are a little kid when you have a problem? You taught to run away or you taught to roll up your sleeves, get in there, solve the problem. most of the time in your life, even for those of us who really struggle a lot, you're pretty successful at using this brain to solve your problems. So in terms of like, if we go back and just look at our, I'll give you the technical term, the base rates, right? Like, what does that mean? Let's look at just our history of successes. Most of the time focusing on the problem, like works out for us. We come up with a solution.

50:51When you inject some big emotions and uncertainty into the equation though, it doesn't always work out. And that's where we often get stuck. That's where we get jammed up because we have trouble overriding this history of successes that we've had to say to ourselves in the moment, hey, let's try something else. So one way to reduce the uncertainty is let's just try to dogmatically dive into to work through it. Sometimes we do some other really hazardous things, is scapegoating and like believing in conspiracy theories. Those are other ways that we sometimes try to deal with uncertainty. We will go to great lengths to try to quell the uncertainty because as human beings, we love to know that the world is predictable and under our control.

51:45And the fundamental truth of our existence is that it often is not. And that's where you need to have some tools to navigate that more effectively. Yeah, we're pattern seeking and pattern recognizing animals who identify those patterns and construct stories around them that then inform that inner monologue about who we are, what we're capable of, based upon what happened in the past as a means of casting a prediction about what's gonna happen in the future. And of course, much of that is adaptive, but your work is really around when these things become compulsions. The idea isn't to eradicate negative emotions from your life, it's to recognize them for what they are and to learn when they're leading you astray and when they're serving you.

52:45That's right. So within that, you have this option to either avoid or approach, right? So when a negative, I think there's a cultural sort of idea like, well, we should just be free of all negative emotions. That's right. We've just given, I think, listeners a gift because we've just taken that impossible to achieve goal off the table. And we've communicated that number one, if your goal is to be free of negative emotions, good luck. It's not how we are built. And number two, it's actually not desirable in terms of optimizing your experience on this planet because you take those negative emotions away from people and they're not going to be as successful in reaching their goals.

53:32And the best, most powerful example I can give someone of that is the experience of physical pain. This really resonates with folks like, Rich, I am a giant baby. You should know this about me. I do I do not like physical pain. And yet I appreciate its value. You can look at what would happen to people if they could not experience physical pain. Every year there are kids born into this world, incapable of experiencing physical pain. They die young because their hands get caught in the stove and there's no cue that tells them to retract their hands. That's a negative emotional experience. You would not want to live life without the capacity to experience physical pain.

54:14Most of us don't wanna constantly be in a state of physical pain, but let's appreciate that there's a time and place for all of these negative emotions that we experience. Yeah, they're healthy responses to life stimuli. Like you're supposed to feel grief and sadness when somebody you care about passes away or is having a hard time. Like these aren't things we wanna remove from our lives. we wanna be able to experience the full spectrum of human emotions, but have a healthy relationship with them so that they're not derailing our lives and we're not making up stories about, sort of judging ourselves for having them.

54:53But I think what happens is, in the context of what we would call quote unquote, like negative emotions, there does seem to be an epidemic of anxiety and stress. And it's like, Like there is this very real kind of experience that people, at least in the modern world have of being riddled with anxiety, having a whole sort of series of negative emotions that are overriding their ability to experience their life in a positive way. And either they feel victimized by it, they feel like they don't have agency over it, or when they do kind of like share with a friend, and this is what's going on. The response is something along the lines of like, well, you shouldn't feel that way, or you should just be positive.

55:41Look at how good your life is. Like not very helpful, right? Those aren't shifts that actually work. That's right. To be clear, like I'm not dismissing the fact that there is enormous human suffering that we are experiencing as a society right now. That's the reason I've devoted my life to doing what I do, because these negative emotions that we experience often get triggered too intensely and they last too long. And that's the opportunity zone to get in there and guided by science to not fall victim to the traps that you just articulated, right? Like take other people as an example. We all have, I think many of us have this intuition that you should talk to other people when you're really struggling with things.

56:26But how many of those conversations actually help you out? and sometimes do they actually backfire and either not help you at all or lead you to feel worse? I remember when I was much younger, before I like got into this space, people would come to talk to me about really big things that they were struggling with. Like I wanted to help them. I'm empathic. I care about these people, but like, what the hell do I know? Like no one ever told me how to have a productive conversation with someone else. science tells us like we have a guide that we can follow i now know that there are two steps to being a great emotional advisor to someone else.

57:03Step one, I need to empathically connect with you, to listen to you, to learn about what you're going through, to validate what you're experiencing as a human being, to communicate to you that you are not alone. And once I learn about this, and once you genuinely feel heard, then I can get in there and start working with you to broaden your perspective. And as someone who is not necessarily experiencing what you are undergoing, I'm in a pretty good position to bring that discerning, more objective point of view to helping you work through the problem, which is fundamentally why you're coming to me to talk about it, right?

57:42But I've got to follow those two steps and I've got to do it in the sequence that I just laid out. If I just jump into advice giving mode from the outset, I'm an a-hole, I'm an insensitive, who the hell is this guy, right? Like just telling me what to do. I'm dying inside, right? I'm being, I'm tortured. And you're just saying it's as easy as doing this. That doesn't work. The flip side also doesn't work. If I just get you to vent about what you're going through and express it, I let you do that for a couple of minutes or a couple of hours. You leave our conversation. You feel great about our connection.

58:21Ethan, that guy, he's here for me. I can, without worrying about judgment, just talk to him. But you leave the conversation. feeling good about our relationship, but the problem is still there. So I've got a little compass to steer my conversations with other people. I use it all the time. And I also use it to find the right people to talk to in my network. So I don't talk to everyone in my network about the things I'm struggling with. Some people I love deeply. I respect enormously. I never go to them to talk about my problems because I know they'll like go in one of those two directions. I just described that, take me someplace I don't wanna go.

59:04I've got a wonderful curated board of advisors, three or four for work stuff, five or six for personal. Those are the people I go to. That's the kind of deliberativeness I think we can have to try to channel these useful states that sometimes become really unhelpful. The generations that preceded us had a tendency to kind of compartmentalize or repress sharing the emotions around a difficult life experience, like very stoic, right? And I was raised by parents like that. Many people have been, and now we're in a time where we're like, yeah, that's not the way to do it. Like when you have these experiences, what you need to do is immediately, you know, find somebody to talk to and like process it, you know, every single time and work your way all the way to the other side of it.

1:00:05You have a different thought on this or a more nuanced thought, I should say. Yeah, it's absolutely not true that everyone should immediately process and work through it. We know that there are different strokes for different folks. No one size fits all solutions. There are different pathways to dealing with adversity. Some people, to be clear, benefit quite a bit from doing precisely what you just described. Something happens, let's engage, let's focus on the problem, reframe it so that it ceases to be an ongoing source of distress. But there are studies that have tracked people as they deal with adversity.

1:00:42And they've highlighted that what I've just described, that's one pattern of being successful that really resonates for some people. Other people benefit from not talking about it. and they do other things. So they're really, the evidence here about there not being one size fits all solutions in my mind is quite strong. Sometimes avoidance can even be useful. We tend to think about approach and avoidance as these two different categories of responses. It's almost like you've got to like cast your vote at some point in your life about what team you're on and that's it, that's all you can do. we are a lot more flexible in terms of our ability to use attention, which is fundamentally what we're talking about with approach and avoidance.

1:01:30So, you know, like attention, it's your mental spotlight. What are you pointing it at? If you pointed at the source of distress, the distress is gonna get in the system and you're gonna think about it and probably be distressed or you could point it away. And you get, there are lots of ways you could point it away and keep it away. some more healthy than others. But it's not like you just have to do one or the other. You can also go back and forth. So what do I mean by back and forth? I tell a story in the book that was a pretty pivotal story growing up in my life. And it really made a, it was part of the reason I got into psychology the story of my grandparents who were in their early twenties, living in Eastern Poland.

1:02:13The Nazis came, witnessed their entire community be slaughtered very narrowly escaped that fate themselves. Steven Spielberg movie like experience for three years, come over to this country with zilch, end up classic American story, work hard, make some money and so forth and so on. Growing up, I spent a ton of time with them. Every day after school, while my parents were working, I went to my grandparents' house. And I would ask my grandmother in particular there because my grandfather never really learned English, but I would ask my grandmother to tell me about the war. Like in my mind, she's this heroine and I admire her so much.

1:02:58I just, I'm so thirsty to learn about what she went through. And she consistently would deflect those questions. Now, you know, just focus on your homework or what else do you want to eat? She like was very good at plying me with food. Except the only time I would hear about these experiences was one time a year when she and her fellow survivors in the community she lived in would hold a Remembrance Day event. And they would just let it out at that event. And I would see emotion and hear details that I would never hear in the preceding 364 days. What she was doing there, like my interpretation of that is she was dosing her experiences with this war, right?

1:03:43Which was still painful for her. There was some need for her to deal with it. And she would do it that one day a year. Or if by some chance she would run into a fellow survivor at the grocery store, she would get into it. But on all other days, she would keep it aside. And that was a coping approach, that flexibility, right? Getting some time away and then coming back to it that served her really well. that is a profile that some people can engage it. And you don't have to do it across the board for the big traumas and the little curve balls. Some people may really benefit for the smaller stuff, doing that kind of, let me take some time away from this and then come back.

1:04:25Other people may benefit from the big stuff. This is where the whole need to self experiment with these tools comes into play. Yeah, it's a defense mechanism, an adaptation. If the trauma is so severe, I would suspect that it feels life-threatening to talk about it, like it's a way of protecting yourself. But I would imagine at some point, like it does have to be processed. Like if you just continue to repress and compartmentalize your whole life, there's going to be negative downstream consequences. in terms of like your outward behavior. Without question, chronic avoidance, which is implementing a very simple coping decision rule.

1:05:12I'm just gonna not go there, repress, suppress, deny across the board, not re-engage. That has been definitively linked with negative outcomes. No disagreement there. And I do not encourage folks to chronically avoid or engage in harmful avoidance practices. So, you know, dangerous drugs and behaviors of that sort. I think we've overgeneralized though from that finding because chronic avoidance, because it can be so harmful, we have assumed that all avoidance is harmful when in fact, we can be a lot more skillful in how we weave avoidant tactics into our lives. healthy distractions can be really useful at times.

1:06:02I mean, have you ever had a situation where you were really peeved about something and you were able to really get your mind off of that for a while and you come back to it a few hours or days later and you realize either that this wasn't a big deal to begin with or you can now approach the problem from a new light? Yeah, of course. Of course, right? Of course, that's using avoidance as a tool. Let's go to some of the bigger things in life though, the kind of traumas that we're talking about now. There's data which show that not all people benefit from actively talking about these things. So what the hell might be going on?

1:06:40How are they well adjusted? Well, the important thing to remember is that there's a universe of other tools that they can use, right? So some people may really benefit from getting out in nature, right? Like how might that work? Well, it smells good in nature, is that all it does? No, it's a lot more complex than that. And I'm sure you've talked about this with other guests on your shows, but there's this wonderful research which shows that nature experiences can fill us with awe, an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable. And that can broaden our perspective, really help us see our experiences in a new light.

1:07:21They might interact with nature. They might lean hard on their community, on their culture, on their religion. Like religion, religion, I think is a really useful tool for helping people manage their emotions. And it helps people in lots of different ways. It gives people rituals. Rituals are sequences of behaviors that are under our control, right? We talked before about how people like certainty and control. Oh, hey, I can do a ritual the same way every time. And religions bundle those rituals up with other things like prayer where you're now performing a ritual often with other people. So there's a sense of solidarity and we're connecting with a higher power that is capable of dealing with clearing up the muck of life and the existential distress that surrounds it.

1:08:16my grandparents leaned hard into religion to help them deal with things. So it's not only that we decide between approaching and avoiding, we're making decisions about lots of tools oftentimes that we're bundling together to help us deal with adversity. We did this research on COVID anxiety and how people managed it. And we wanted to know, was there a silver bullet strategy or set of strategies that help people? two large studies, very fine grain. We track people over time. Every day we had them report what they were doing. Which of 18 tools did they use and how did they feel? No silver bullet.

1:08:58First thing we find on average, people use between three and four different tools. Second thing, there is enormous heterogeneity, enormous variety in the combinations of tools that people are using. So that's really the mindset I think we want to start adopting. It's not about doing one thing versus the other. It's about doing one combination things versus others. And the combinations that work for us may not work for someone else. That's the big challenge. Figure out what those combinations are.

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1:11:14I like that. Yeah, this idea that using your grandparents as an example, talk therapy isn't necessarily the be all end all, like they found all these other ways to process those complicated emotions emanating from that trauma and were able to live fulfilling lives. Like they didn't do what we now think is the single only way or best way to manage it. That is - But we'll judge them like, Like, look, they repress, you know, like we'll cast our judgment on them. Like, oh, if they only knew what we knew now. Yeah. And maybe not is what you're saying. Maybe not. I mean, I think here are the evidence about the single only way.

1:11:55I mean, the more we can move away from that mantra, that way of thinking about things, I think the more good will come to our collective emotional health. It makes really good sense that we, and I put myself in this category often default to wanting one size fits all solutions because we like to simplify things. It makes the world easier to navigate if we have one thing that you can do. But it's just so interesting to me because I think I always go back to physical fitness, right? Like, or even nutrition. There's so many different pathways to being physically fit or to being nutritionally sound.

1:12:41and we don't really question that anymore. In fact, we kind of embrace it, right? Like it's fine. And it's kind of cool that, you know I can do my high intensity interval training and yoga and my wife can do her Pilates and resistance. And that's fine. Just don't go on Twitter and make any declarative statements about that. Like you go there, like everyone has very strong opinions about those topics in a very binary tribal way. Well, it's binary. And I think just recognizing that we all have the, like, look, when I get involved in a new exercise regimen, I am the best unpaid marketer for that.

1:13:26I tell everyone, you've gotta try this and this. I, it's so great, it'll change. Like, there's good reason that we do that. But just, I think recognizing that we have these tendencies. Like we wanna share what works for us with other people, but recognize there's just enormous complexity to our emotional lives. Our emotional lives are like fingerprints, unbelievably distinct. And so if we accept that, why is it so hard for us to accept the fact that the solutions to optimizing our emotional life wouldn't also be distinct? Is there not another piece to accepting our negative emotions that relates to accepting responsibility for them?

1:14:15Like there's a lot of talk, you know, about like being triggered, like, oh, I was, you know, it's a way of like obviating responsibility for your reaction. Like, well, I was triggered. So that rationalizes this like negative behavior and this state of negative emotional arousal, right? If only these people would like do what I think they should do, or if this situation would finally change, then I wouldn't have to feel the way that I feel and behave the way that I do. And so it's an extrinsic kind of offloading of responsibility and an obsession with things that you actually don't have control over that are in control of your emotional regulation?

1:15:01Well, I think this is another instance of the either or mentality. And to me, these are not competitive accounts of the difficulties of regulating. It is true that there are things that happen in this world that can trigger certain reactions. And that if those circumstances were different, the triggering would be different too. Like I accept that reality. And I think if we can identify toxic environments, we should strive to change those. But it is also true that once those reactions are triggered, we have agency over how we manage them. That's what this entire conversation is about. There are things we can do within us, ways of interacting with our other people, environments, our cultures that provide us with some agency to manage those reactions.

1:15:58And I don't think we need to choose between those two interpretations to the contrary. I think we should embrace both of those sources of influence on our emotional lives, because that provides a more complete picture of why we're feeling the way we are and what we can do about it. And so I think, yeah, that's where that distinction between like the trigger and the trajectory for me becomes such a valuable heuristic, such a valuable framework for thinking about our emotional lives. The trigger being the emotions that are popping up, right? Like sometimes we put ourselves in situations that cause those emotions to happen.

1:16:42Sometimes we just find that they do happen to us. And then there's what we do once they're triggered, once we become aware of them. That distinction I find really valuable. You mentioned like right now, it really seems like we're really struggling. We are really struggling right now. But I do wanna point out that the topic that we're talking about right now, managing our emotions is a timeless challenge that we have been struggling with. And I'm a history like enthusiast. I love it as a little hobby. I spent a little bit time in the book, just very little, just maybe two pages, right? I indulge this interest I have in going into the history of emotions and emotion regulation.

1:17:31And to use a technical term, Rich, it blew my mind. First surgical technique that, the first thing we think was the first surgical technique was a technique used that in part to help people manage big emotions, trepanation, carving holes in people's heads eight to 10 ,000 years ago. That's what we're doing. Some of the first writing samples ever discovered in ancient Persia describe people dealing with emotional afflictions like sadness and a broken heart, rejection. The best-selling book of all time. One of the most famous stories in that book, the Bible, It's a story of Adam and Eve. It's a story of having difficulty managing our emotions.

1:18:25The Buddha, life is suffering. So I bring this up because on the one hand, yes, times right now don't just seem, but are incredibly turbulent. And we're struggling with these emotions all the time. And we're documenting this in ways that we have never documented them before. But that is kind of like a bleak message to put the spotlight on that set of facts. Where I prefer to put the spotlight is on the fact that the solutions that we now have for providing people with tools for managing these conditions are a heck of a lot better than what we were doing eight to 10 ,000 years ago, right? Like there are things you can do.

1:19:10These are not invasive. These are very easy to implement things. And so that kind of on a mushy note fills me with hope. How do you see your approach as similar or different from a mindfulness approach, which is to say that meditation and mindfulness exercises provide you with that buffer between impulse and response. So something happens, you feel your emotions welling up, you know this is a negative emotional response, but rather than reflexively reacting, you take that moment to have a more mindful response. So it's reaction versus response, which is a little bit different from the way that you're finding your way into this.

1:20:03Well, first of all, I have enormous admiration for mindfulness and meditation as a tool, but I think of it as one tool amongst many others. I should share with you that I've been meditating on and off since I'm five years old. I know, it's crazy. I've heard you say that. Like five years old. How did you start meditating at five? I'll tell you exactly how it's a flash bulb memory, right? You know, flash bulb memories, like take a picture of the scene, five years old. My dad takes me to the, I've got a surprise for you little guy. And he takes me to the transcendental meditation center in New York city.

1:20:39And I walk and I have to go in, I've got like a handkerchief and some fruit, which was part of the whole ritual of getting your mantra. And then I walk in and I see mattresses all over the floor. I'm like, dad, what's with the mattresses? And he's like, it's for yogic flying. So this is a real thing. Like you could Google. Was your dad a hippie? He was this very complex character. Yes, he was part hippie, but he was also, you know chain smoking, New York Yankees, flip you off on the road kind of guy. So complex stew of features. But that was my introduction to meditation. I got my child mantra at that point.

1:21:25And then when he took me back when I was older, insisted before college that I get the adult mantra. You upgraded your mantra. Which was the same one, by the way, didn't change. And I have leaned on meditation and mindfulness practices at various points in my life. you described the philosophy behind response and reaction, whatever the language you used, that's compatible with this idea of the trigger and trajectory for sure. Mindfulness as a exercise to help you recognize what facets of your inner world are outside of your control, as an exercise to help you develop the ability to accept things, that mental events and emotions come and go, to tune you to your senses.

1:22:14These are all gifts to humanity, but they are only one set of tools. And here's what else I know about mindfulness. It doesn't benefit everyone for a variety of reasons. Some people are not committed to the practice. Some people try it and just don't take to it, right? So yet again, we see it's a one size, it's not a one size fits all solution. Number two, I know that there are so many other tools, so many other ways of pushing your emotions around that if you were to limit yourself only to mindfulness, I think you would be doing yourself a disservice because these other tools that are out there, it's not like they are in competition with mindfulness for what you can do.

1:23:01You don't have to make a choice. And I think the problem with mindfulness is often not at all about the philosophy behind it or the practitioners, but it is often how it is promoted as a panacea. And I just don't believe in panaceas because I haven't seen any compelling data to suggest that they actually exist. So let me give you just like one thing we haven't talked about that from a shifter point of view, we haven't talked about it much. But one thing that is really important are perspective shifters. So we talked about sensation, all the different music and taste and touch and smell. We talked about attention and how avoidance isn't always toxic.

1:23:45Well, what about when you just wanna reframe the way you think about something, right? Mindfulness actually gives you, I think, reframes on your experience that are quite powerful. I remember the school bus metaphor, you know the school bus metaphor? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, game changer for me, right? Your thoughts and feelings, imagine them like you're the driver on the bus and then annoying passengers, I'll get on, but you know what? They'll still fire away some spit balls at your neck, but they'll eventually get off and you keep going. That's a powerful reframe for thinking about, for accepting the thoughts.

1:24:21The perspective shift feels like the hardest lift to me because I can get my head around like, okay, I just need to take a beat here, go outside and go on a walk or light incense or some smell that has a sense memory experience that allows me to shift or go for a run. Like these sort of pattern interrupts, all of those feel very like tactile, but the perception shift is more of like, it's a mind game, you know what I mean? I mean, to me, there is something about it. My resistance to it is more like, it feels more like the Stuart Smalley look in the mirror and like, you know, I'm a good person and like, you know, you're worthy and all, you know, all of that.

1:25:05And that like, you know, like gets me agitated. Well, let's see if we can reduce the agitation with some. And I'm saying this because I know you have a response to this. Yeah, well, and let's see if they work for you because again, no one size fits all. What you just described, like, well, this is one of my favorite memories in recent years. I tell this anecdote in the book is it captures this experience I had with friends where we're driving home from dinner, my wife and I and this other couple. And my friend is bemoaning a problem at work. And he's really, it's like bringing him down and he's getting into it.

1:25:46And his wife turns him and says, why don't you just think about it more positively? just reframe it. And he pauses for effect and then says, yeah, easier effing said than done. And I think that captures a reality that you just described that so many of us have experienced, which is we understand at this intellectual level that we can change the way we think to change the way we feel. But it is so damn hard to do that when we're flooded with emotion. And it almost feels like this futile effort, right? Because we can't manage to zoom out. We're so fixed by the emotion. And so what I've benefited from and what we have learned can be useful in those instances is to practice what I affectionately refer to as psychological jujitsu.

1:26:41There are some relatively easy things you can do to shift the way you are thinking about things that can change the trajectory. So the first category of these shifters, and this is, I mentioned earlier, like I've got a couple of things, first line of defense for me. This is part of my first line of defense when I'm struggling with something, mental time travel. So mental time travel directly contradicts the notion that you should always be in the moment and that your default should be to get in the moment and present when you're struggling. That works for some people some of the time for sure.

1:27:19but we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our minds evolved to travel in time. We're doing this all the time and benefiting from it. I don't know much about you, Rich. I'm gonna guess you sometimes look back and learn from your mistakes, correct? Sure. I'm gonna also guess that - Hopefully. Yeah, I suspect you have. I'm gonna suspect that you also sometimes really, really enjoy fantasizing about things that might happen in the future. Yeah, but those are few and far between in comparison to the disaster castings. And the kind of - I like that disaster casting. I haven't heard that one before.

1:28:05Revisionist version of the past that I like to spin where everything was horrible. You know what I mean? And so I think I get what you're saying. like there is this notion that, you know, if we could just be present that all of our problems go away. And what you're saying is, no, like we are unique in the animal kingdom in that we have the ability to time travel and think about the past and the future. The problem is modernity has created a scenario in which we're absolutely captured by past and future and rarely very present. Well, let's go a bit further into this mental time travel because what you described, A, I think captures so many of our experiences.

1:28:47So yes, we have this capacity to time travel in our minds. Yes, we often benefit from it, like when we learn from past mistakes or plan for the future in productive ways or fantasize about good things that might happen. But so often we jump into that time travel machine, we go to the negative past and it breaks down or we go to the negative future, are filled with the what ifs. And it breaks down meaning we just, we're living now in this, what was the word you use? The phrase? For the future or the past? I've heard so many, the doom loop, the rabbit hole. I have so many phrases people have. Disaster casting.

1:29:26Disaster casting, I like that one. That's like, that could be a new media company name, huh? Yeah, I don't know. So yes, that happens, but here is what I love about the research in this space. And these are two tools that I use a lot. You can actually use mental time travel to help you. So one thing you can do when you are struggling is you could time travel into the future. So when we find ourselves disaster casting, we often fixate, we zoom in on the awfulness of what we are thinking about, worrying about right now. You can ask yourself, how am I gonna feel about this next week? next year in five years when I'm 80.

1:30:13Now it sounds so simple. It's almost like we should dismiss this. Yet that very, very simple psychological jujitsu move, it has a technical name, it's called temporal distancing. It does something remarkably profound. You have experienced a lifetime of emotional reactions, most of which follow a particular, what we call temporal trajectory. They follow a particular time course. And this is what it looks like. You're living life. Something happens, your emotion gets triggered. And then as time goes on, it eventually fades. There's a lot of variability there. Different emotions get triggered to different intensities.

1:30:55Some come down right away, some last longer. Some emotions just categorically stick around longer than others. but most of our experiences follow that time course. I don't really have to convince you that that is true because you have lived that probably millions of times. When we are down in the doldrums and disaster casting, we lose sight of that truism that we fundamentally believe. And so jumping into that time travel machine, how am I gonna feel about this next week? It makes accessible this idea as bad as this is, things are good, it's temporary. It's not gonna stick around forever. I cannot tell you how much that brings the volume down on the negative experience.

1:31:45It doesn't make it go away. It's not turning a terrible event into this joyous birthday party occasion, but it's turning the intensity down often enough to be more productive. So that's one version of using mental time travel to your benefit. You can also go back in time and this works differently. The mechanism here is different. My go-to response here, it goes back to my grandparents. I get into the mental time travel machine. I go back to 1943. I spend time with my grandparents in the frozen Polish woods when they're living in a bunker that they can't leave because if they do, they're afraid the Nazis are gonna shoot them, right?

1:32:32I spend a little time with them there. I don't have to spend much time because that moment with them in my mind broadens my perspective. It makes it clear that what I'm going through could be a whole lot worse. It highlights in some ways, it like the insignificance of what I'm dealing with compared to what they endured. And I think we all have, whether it be our own personal experiences, familial experiences, societal, cultural moments that we can use with that tool. So those are two illustrations of how just understanding how mental time travel works. Like those are at the ready for me when I have something I'm dealing with.

1:33:19I can do both, right? I can also repeat my mantra for five minutes too. I do not have to limit myself to any one of those tools. And the research we have done, it suggests that the more healthy tools you use, the more you benefit. So there is this kind of cumulative effect. What I hear and what you just shared is on some level, like an antidote to self-obsession. Like there's an ego piece here, like both of those examples that you gave about past and future are exercises in humility, right? Like the perspective shift is finding a way to really connect with the idea that you're not the center of the universe.

1:34:10Other people have had it worse than you. It's probably not gonna be as bad. And ultimately, like everything is not revolving around you. And I wonder what you can say about the relationship between these compulsive or repetitive negative emotions that continue to creep up that are patterned and disruptive, what the relationship between those are and our ego. Because there does feel like there's some kind of egocentrism to it. Like, the world is against me. Yeah, absolutely. It's all like in your mind, it's like a self obsession. And in recovery, we learn tools to disabuse us of that self-obsession.

1:34:52And one of the primary ones is like service. Like if you're caught up in your own mind, like there's an acronym, like HALT, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Like, well, maybe you're, you know, like there's a couple of simple things you can do to shift. But the real fundamental tool is to like, go help somebody else. Like that is the cure for your self-obsession. And that's another way of getting out of your perspective and inhabiting the perspective of somebody else. Well, I say this in the book, I talk about that tool divorced from the AA world. One of my favorite findings in all of social psychology is the finding that one of the best ways to help you feel better is to help someone else.

1:35:36This has been shown across the board, different cultures, people earning different amounts of money, helping other people doing good for someone else has these reciprocal effects. It helps us too. This point you're making about the ego though is very much relevant. So when we get flustered with emotions, we tend to zoom in. We experience them in a very, what we call egocentric way. And when that happens, this ability to broaden our perspective, to zoom out or gain what we call some distance from the self, right, like taking a step back, that can be really, really helpful for diffusing the intensity of that response, which is in part driven from our intrinsic connection with it.

1:36:25When our ego gets tapped, it's like a direct assault on our sense of who we are. So when we broaden our perspective and zoom out and realize, hey, there may be more to it than just me and this experience, that's directly counteracting the force that is driving this emotion. Now, here is what I find to be so freaking cool about the science in this space. There are multiple ways to get that kind of distance or zooming out. We've talked about several already. You could go into the future. How are you gonna feel next year? You could go into the past. Think of adversity that others have experienced.

1:37:06You can go for a walk in a beautiful setting that elicits the emotion of awe or contemplate something that is awe-inspiring, like the fact that there's an SUV roaming on planet Mars right now. When we experience awe, that's an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. And what researchers have shown happens when you experience awe is it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self. Use your lingo to describe that, right? A reduction of our ego involvement. And once you shrink the self, guess what else shrinks along with it?

1:37:49The significance of your problems. So when I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, looking out at beautiful, you know, Huron River in the Arboretum near my home and these trees that have been there for hundreds of years, or I'm contemplating the fact that we have a vehicle on Mars. I'm realizing that the thing I'm worried about today, it's not just a tiny bit smaller in the vastness of this world and the universe, but it's quite a bit. And there's comfort that often comes from that. Other people can do this for you too. I think the most skilled emotion advisors that I possess, they broaden my perspective when I'm having trouble doing it myself.

1:38:35Like Ethan, do you realize what you're worried about? Many people don't even have the opportunity to worry about this, right? They reframe it for me. So other people can do that for us and our cultures do it for us too. AA did it for you, right? Was it AA or some whatever, yeah. Religion does that for a lot of people. I would argue that we are all authors of the cultures that exist in our homes and to some extent in our organizations too. And we have the opportunity to impress these ideas among those people in those cultures too. So there are lots of different ways that we can help people get less ego involved to broaden out.

1:39:21And just to bring this full circle, mindfulness is one wonderful way to do that. Meditation, thank you dad at five years old, Kind of, it's one way to help you do it, but it's only one. And why should we be limiting ourselves to just one lever when there are 12 others that exist that you can help yourself with? What can you say about the difference between addressing these negative emotions when they arise by dint of these shifts versus the value or the means by which to address the root cause of what's driving them in the first place. So, if you are in a pattern where you're looping negative thoughts, and this is just something you've been doing for a very long time, and it is disrupting your life in ways that you're very aware of, you can engage in these shifts, and it's super helpful, but at some point, do you not need to figure out, like, what's causing this in the first place?

1:40:24Whether it's something that happened in childhood or whatever it is, right? So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's not a either or, it's both, right? I think we wanna give people tools so that they can be proactive and resilient because life is inevitably gonna throw curve balls at us that are not predictable. And we wanna have people prepared for how to deal with those events so they're not flustered and just stumbling. That's those tools right there. and we could give some frameworks for helping make sure that people implement them. But known causes of distress, known triggers, nip those in the bud, let's deal with them for sure.

1:41:05And there are lots of ways you could try to deal with them. There's some research which shows, for example, that positively reframing things can be really useful if you can't do anything to control the situation. But if you can do something to fix a situation, you're better off fixing the situation nipping it in the bud rather than trying to just positively reframe it like that's a lot harder to do if you could get rid of the trigger to begin with much better than giving someone a tool to continually deal with that trigger so we should be acting on both of those levels all the time We should be alert to the circumstances in our life that are repetitively eliciting reactions that undermine us from achieving our goals, which by the way is how I think about what emotion regulation or self-regulation is all about.

1:42:04It's about aligning your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals. So it is an inherently idiosyncratic enterprise. If there are circumstances at work or at home that are triggering you in the wrong way and you can deal with those circumstances, absolutely address them. But we also want you to have tools to deal with everything else. And if your fundamental malfunction is avoidance, it's gonna be tough, you know, cause you're gonna avoid wanting to like go there to do anything about it. Fundamental dysfunction, you just already identified. Malfunction. It's not working for you. If it's not working for you, don't use it.

1:42:45And we also know that the using avoidance as a blunt tool, chronically avoiding across the board tends not to work for people, right? So that is not the approach that you want to implement. It's being more flexible with attention. That's the point I'm really trying to drive home that sometimes approaching things universally doesn't actually work. It gets you stuck in your doomsday thought chamber. I forgot the phrase already. But so it's just about flexibility. What's the relationship between these negative emotional patterns and the inner voice, the inner monologue? Like how do these two things kind of interface with each other?

1:43:30What the inner voice often does is it often prolongs our emotional responses. So something happens and we have this remarkable tool, which is language that we can use inner silent language, that is to solve problems. And we rely on our inner voice all the time to make meaning out of our experiences, to craft our sense of who we are, to motivate and control ourselves. So you reach for that singularly effective tool, but you find that it starts taking you in a wrong direction. So you start elaborating on an experience verbally in ways that just keep it alive. That's when your inner voice, which is a Swiss army knife of the human mind, starts turning into something really toxic and gives rise to the state of chatter where the emotions now are just continually reverberating in your head.

1:44:33And we know that that undermines lots of the goals that people have to perform well at work, to have good relationships and to be healthy. The inner monologue is often an unreliable narrator of our lives and yet we seem to trust it, listen to it to a fault. And you speak a lot about ways to regulate that, to like change what that inner monologue is. And you use this example of Djokovic and he's sort of giving himself a speech. we're all familiar with some version of that, giving ourselves a pep talk. So I'm curious about how you can kind of grab the reins of that inner monologue and find ways to redirect it if it's often like, kind of your worst enemy.

1:45:24Yeah, so here again, there are lots of tools that you can use. One of my favorites that you just gesture towards is something we call distanced self-talk. And what it involves doing is silently and the silent part is pretty important. Coaching yourself through a problem, using your own name and the second person pronoun, you. All right, Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation? The reason why this helps people shift is we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. I take it you've experienced this before. You can be this sage elder when it comes to someone else, but then you find yourself in the same situation.

1:46:06And it's like, I'm the biggest hypocrite on the planet, right? I'm not following what I preach. We have like sayings to track this experience. Like do as I say, not as I do. If you think about it, like when do you use the word you? When you're thinking about and referring to another person. Think about how often you use the word you in your life or a name, we also use names to think about other people. So the links between the word you and thinking about or referencing someone else in your brain, super, super strong. So the idea is that when you're using the word you to refer to yourself, it's automatically putting you into this mode of relating to yourself, like you're relating to someone else.

1:46:53That makes it a lot easier for us to give ourselves wise, objective advice. So this is a kind of distancing tactic, actually. we talked about getting some space from the ego, right? This is akin to stepping back and relating to yourself as someone else, if you will, from a more observer point of view, but you still have full access to what you're experiencing. So that's a simple linguistic shift that can often reroute our inner monologues. And it's interesting, like Rich, I often think about it. I have friends who come to me all the time and they're struggling with stuff and I'm not a clinician, I'm just a friend.

1:47:31And they wanna talk to me about this engagement that they have coming up that they're really worried about or this problem in their relationship. The things that they say to themselves are things that they would never dream of saying to another human being. Sometimes they're even like - Very familiar with that. They don't even want to articulate them out. I've done workshops with people where I've asked them to just write down what those thoughts are. And like, unless I promise to have the shredder there, people don't wanna even do it. There's a resistance to have any evidence of admitting what these thoughts are.

1:48:12That is often what we ourselves subject ourselves to when we get lost in chatter and that inner voice gangs up against us. But then think about it. Have you ever said to someone you care about those things that you say to yourself? No, of course not. I would never, yeah, like you, not in, you know, not in the worst case scenario, would I ever say to someone else what I tell myself. You are such an idiot, you, unbelievable, God. I mean, it's wild. And so this is another one of these jujitsu moves, if you will. I call it a jujitsu move, because jujitsu is like, you're just, you're shifting momentum a little bit.

1:48:51And you're putting people on a totally different plane when you're practicing that martial art. And so by shifting the words we're using to relate to ourself, we're rerouting our perspective. We're getting us to relate to ourselves like we're someone else. And that can be useful for shifting those inner monologues. How is that different or similar to the idea of creating an alter ego? Like there's interesting science coming out about that. You see athletes who do that or refer to themselves in the third person. And then there's this superhero version that they can visualize. And so they can distance themselves from their own weaknesses and insecurities and then habit this other skin for the purposes of elite performance or whatever.

1:49:37Yeah, mechanistically, I think of those as very similar. We've actually done some work with kids where we call this the Batman effect, where we have them assume the role of a superhero. And what would Batman do in this really hard situation? That's a distancing move. you're assuming this other persona and that gives you some distance to help you manage the situation that you find yourselves in. For some people, the inner monologue, the chatter can be utterly debilitating. Like it's just a nonstop gnawing on the soul of negative self-talk. You know, it's never gonna work out. Who do you think you are?

1:50:13Like, oh, that person you think they're gonna do that. It's never gonna have like that. To the point where it's debilitating and the person just thinks like, I just wish it would go away. Like I would be better off without this inner monologue. Every human being has an inner monologue. Make the case for why that might not be a good idea if you could flick the switch. Cause you've had experience with people who have had a brain injury or stroke, right? And that happened. So, so Jill Bolte Taylor, right? It's a powerful example of, she was a neuroanatomist working at Harvard and very top of her game.

1:50:54And like many other high performing individuals, she often experienced the inner monologue ganging up on her. So turning into what I call chatter, getting stuck in the doom loop, if you will. And she would think to herself often, what would happen if I just got rid of this voice? And she did get rid of it. She silenced her inner voice. but she experienced a stroke one day. And so she temporarily lost her ability to use words, not just out loud, but she lost the ability to use words silently, which is a mind blower of an experience for me to contemplate because I use words all the time in my head to reflect on my life.

1:51:35Like, what would it be like Rich to not be able to like, you know, rehearse a phone number or curse yourself out. I mean, like choose. Yeah, it's hard to imagine because you can't, we've never had any experience to relate to that would allow us to understand what that would feel like. Now, what's interesting about her case is she ultimately did regain her linguistic faculties, wrote a book about her experience. She initially describes losing the inner voice as this wonderful experience. She actually says she describes it as it felt like she had gone to la la land. and she elaborates that, well, you know, it was an inconvenience to not be able to use words to communicate with other people or myself, but all those worries and ruminations, poof, they just went away.

1:52:25And initially that felt like a compromise that was worth it. But then she goes on to explain that a little bit of an inconvenience to not have the ability to use language in her life. So I usually give her example, Her case is one example of why the question about silencing the inner voice and getting rid of it, it's probably not the optimal question to ask ourselves because your inner voice is a tool. We haven't talked about what it does for you. In short order, it lets you keep information in your head for short periods of time. So if you go to a cocktail party, you wanna remember someone's name, you repeat it in your head.

1:53:04You ever do that, right? Like your inner voice is part of your verbal working memory system. fundamental system of the mind lets you keep nuggets of verbal information active you go to the grocery store repeat your grocery list in your head that's your working memory system your inner voice helps you simulate and plan you ever go over what you're going to say before an interview sure that's your inner voice imagine if you couldn't do that your inner voice helps control and motivate yourself you have probably had many experiences with this in the endurance in sports and competitions that you've participated and you ever talk to yourself on those engagements?

1:53:39Yeah, it's a constant communication. It's constant. I mean, I think everybody's in constant communication with themselves in that weird detached way. Some people would debate that. So there is variability. So some people will lean on their inner voice more for certain functions than others. Some people report not getting lost in those dialogues with themselves, but yeah, they can repeat a grocery list in your head. But certainly it's a very common experience. And there's one final thing I haven't mentioned, some final function it serves. Your inner voice helps you make meaning out of your life, right?

1:54:17It helps you author your sense of who you are. You mentioned telling a story before and the importance of telling a story. Well, guess what? Helps you tell those stories that define our sense of who we are. It's your inner voice. So imagine I was to go to market with a tool that lets you keep information active in your head, lets you simulate and plan for the future, lets you control and motivate yourself and allows you to make meaning out of your existence. That would be an incredibly valuable tool, right? That is what your inner voice is. But like our emotions, your inner voice doesn't come with a user's manual.

1:54:56So you're seeing the theme in my books, right? Trying to take these fundamental and really important universal human experiences and use science to provide us with an accessible guide for harnessing those tools that are really powerful, but also have the potential to be destructive. It's like nuclear energy, right? Like wonderful gift to humanity in many ways, but can also lead to the greatest calamities of all time. We gotta know how to wield these tools. And that's where I think we have the opportunity to help lots of folks. And what are some of those tools if you're finding yourself indulging in that negative self-talk to shift that to a more positive version?

1:55:46Yeah, so we talked about one with distance self-talk. Another one that can be quite useful is journaling. The journaling is another distancing tool. It's an effortful tool. It's probably one of the most effortful tools in the toolbox because it takes about 15 to 20 minutes a day to benefit from journaling. And what journaling involves doing is just sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and just letting yourself go. Write about your deepest thoughts. Don't worry about grammar. And what's interesting about that act of journaling is that you start off and you're kind of dumping your emotions down.

1:56:23But then as you continue to write, there's a form that the writing imposes on your experience, right? Because what do we learn about? We learn how to tell stories and how to write stories in time we're little. And one of the first things we learned is a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. And it's actually organized in the sense that you don't tend to write just incomprehensible rubbish when you write something down. In our heads though, I mean, when you're in a chatter spell, I'm gonna guess you're pinballing all around, you're thinking a mile a minute. There's no structure. There's no hero's journey happening.

1:57:01There's no hero's journey, right? The act of writing imposes a structure on your cognition and that helps us move it along. And guess what? There's also... a target, a character in that story you're writing about. and that character is you. So you're writing about yourself. So there's a act of writing forces us to kind of reflect on ourself from a more third person point of view. We've actually done research to show this. And that can be really useful for helping people work through their emotions. There are lots of other tools too. I mean, nature can be super powerful as we talked about before.

1:57:45You know, nature is one of those things that I think lots of people think it feels good, but it goes beyond just feeling good. Nature has this restorative effect on our cognition. One of the things that happens when we get lost in chatter is it trains us. Like, do you ever feel just tired from just getting lost? I mean, it's tiring. And what's happening there is you have limited attentional resources in your brain. Like attention is a limited resource. I'm sure you've had guests on the show have talked about this before. Chatter acts like a sponge. It consumes that attention, leaving very little left over to do the things we want and need to do.

1:58:26This is why when you sit down to read a few chapters in a book or a few pages, and if you're worried about something, you read the material, but you don't remember anything you've read. Fair, right? So what nature does, it's so cool. When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, your attention is gently captured by the surroundings, the smells, the sounds, the views to the point where you get to the end of the walk and now you've had this opportunity to rest and restore. So studies show that when you index people's cognitive reserves, if you will, before versus after a walk, they're cognitively replenished by the end of the walk.

1:59:14So that's another way that you can help deal with this kind of chatter. So those are two different, qualitatively different things. The journaling you were talking about using the pronoun you, like all of these create distance between yourself and that dialogue. It's a way of like disabusing you of that self-identification, right? That creates space so that you're not just buying into it. You're not so enmeshed in it that you think it's you. you're creating kind of a boundary. Whereas the nature walks, that's more of a way of quelling the volume and the kind of intensity of the voice, right? Like to create, to like get it to stop chattering at all a little bit.

1:59:58Well, it's doing that plus it's also giving you an injection, if you will, of cognitive resources, which are important because that ability, that neural juice, if you will, that to use that technical term, that is often needed to reframe things and think constructively, which is what is often sapped from the chatter. So nature is like a cocktail. It's working in a few different levels. There are like lots of other ones too. Let me give you another language one and then a totally different one. So another linguistic tool is something that we call the universal you. it's a little bit different from what I told you about before.

2:00:41And so bear with me, give me 60 seconds to explain and then it's gonna really resonate. So we talked before about coaching yourself through a problem like giving yourself advice, like you would a friend and using the word you to communicate with yourself, Ethan, what are you going to do? Like you're giving yourself a pep talk. There's this other very strange thing, seemingly strange thing that people do. You're gonna see this all over the place. once I describe it to you, but I'm gonna guess you might've been blind to it before because I was and lots of people are. When people are trying to make meaning out of their difficult experiences, the kinds of stuff that elicit chatter, they often do this strange thing and they shift from talking about their experiences in the first person to using the word you to refer to like the collective.

2:01:33So when you get rejected from a publisher, what are you gonna do? You just gotta move on. It's a different usage of the word you, right? I'm still using the word you to refer to my experience. It's you as we. It's you as we. And so here's the super cool thing about this linguistic jujitsu move. When I'm doing that, first I'm getting some distance, right? It's no longer I, me, my. it's now a little bit pushed away from me, but it's also about everyone and anyone. And guess what human beings love? To not be alone in how they think about their circumstances. There is comfort that we derive from knowing that we're not alone in our struggles and that other people share them.

2:02:25And so when you use the word you, in this universal sense. This isn't just about me. This is about everyone and anyone. It's doing both of those things. It's giving you a little bit of distance from the problem because there's nothing more immersive than thinking about your circumstances in the first person with I, me, my. It's giving you some space, but it's also tapping into this broader collective. And if that weren't enough, Rich, there's an additional bonus you get from this tool. it brings you into my world because you are part of that universe. So I'm talking about my experience in these universal terms.

2:03:06What are you gonna do when you're rejected? What are you gonna do when you lose someone you love? What do you do when you feel like you just can't go on? It's automatically bringing you into my experience and that's strengthening the rapport between us. It also in research, which we find it enhances the persuasive value of what we say. So that's another little linguistic jujitsu move that you can use. Yeah, that's super interesting. You're inviting people in, there is a kind of a perspective shift, we're in this together. When you do that, you're like, this is my experience, but like, we're together, right?

2:03:45Like I know, and you're trying to be in their mindset. And this is something that we do reflexively unconsciously. And I wonder like, it's that thing you mentioned at the outset, like we find our way to these strategies and tools that are kind of healing and curative. And now that you know it, right? So yes, you're gonna see this, like look at a newspaper article where people are talking about something that they're struggling with, or look at a press conference with athletes following a loss. You'll typically see people making this shift, but it's often completely out of people's awareness. And so now that you know how this works, it empowers you to use this tool more proactively, more strategically.

2:04:33So I know when something happens, I'm starting to think about it now, not I, me, my mode. I'm gonna talk about it in this generic sense. We did this one study that is, I think it's kind of cool just to show the value that this has and sucking you into my world. This was a study we did, it's a big package, but one of them was we looked at books. I think it was an Oprah's book club. And you know how in a Kindle, you can highlight different segments of the books. And so we looked at the highlighted segments of books and we compared it to unhighlighted segments. Because you can see the most highlighted.

2:05:14Correct. Sections. Correct. And what we find is that the highlighted segments have significantly more usage of this generic you, this universal you. It's almost like it's calling you to relate to this material. So, if you think of a highlight as this is calling to me in some way, right? Like the word is having that effect. And we show that through lots of other rigid approaches that using you has that kind of sucking you into my world function. I wonder if that's on the uptick, like if that is a trend that has increased as kind of people have succumbed more and more to their negative emotional states and negative inner monologues.

2:06:02Well, we find that if you give people instructions to try to relive an event versus try to make meaning out of it, you get significantly higher utilization of this generic you when people are trying to make meaning out of their experience versus just relive it. So we actually think that this is a linguistic mechanism that underlies meaning making because what meaning making is often about is being able to think about this experience in a broader sense. And this is a linguistic tool that greases the wheels for allowing you to do it. And so we said, we described this is both providing a window into where people are in the meaning making process, but also a lever or a shifter that can be pulled to hypercharge meaning making.

2:06:54So that's a kind of cool little tool. So one of the tools I'll just mention though, just to bring it full circle, rituals. Like that's another tool. Like, you know, rituals under your control. Chatter often doesn't feel like it's under your control. Like, oh my God, this inner voice getting, it's ganging up on me again and performing a ritual, a rigid sequence of behaviors that you could do the same way every time. It's not surprising to me that so many people clean and organize when they're filled with stress. Like they do it reflexively and they report that it helps them. What that's doing is it is activating what we call compensatory control.

2:07:41You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside by exerting control and creating order around you. So it's another little move you can make. What is the most surprising or counterintuitive finding that you've had, whether it's with respect to these negative emotional states and how we can better emotionally regulate them or the inner monologue, the chatter? Most surprising counterintuitive. So for me, the finding I think about most frequently nowadays, and admittedly this has changed, is really the no one size fits all solution finding. And in some ways it's like, why wasn't that obvious from the first place?

2:08:25But the way science works is, or at least it worked the way I was trained was like you identify one tool and you very carefully study how it works and profile it with different populations. We were talking about this earlier off mic, right? Like you go super deep and narrow to understand all the intricacies. But then we do these studies where we look at like, what are people doing in their lives to move the needle on emotion regulation? And what we find number one is they're not doing one thing. In general, most people are doing lots of different things and they're not doing the same different things.

2:09:07Everyone's doing something really different. And a lot of people are switching things up from one day to the next. That was really surprising to me, really surprising about how we are cobbling together these tools. You know, it's almost like we're just like reaching for stuff to get us through every day. I will say that that observation has rerouted both how I think and talk about emotion regulation. It's also rerouted the work that my lab is doing right now. The work we are doing is focused on understanding the dynamics that exist between people, tools, and situations. what we are trying to do is crack the code that explains if Rich finds himself in situation A, what are the three tools that he benefits from?

2:10:02And how is that different if Rich finds himself in situation B, what are these other tools? And how does Rich in situation A and B and the tools that he benefits in those two, how does that compare to Ethan's response to situation A and B? That I think is a huge puzzle of human psychology in figuring out that kind of triple dynamic. And so that's what we're spending a lot of time doing. And I think it's really important. That code is a very complex algorithm, you know, to your point of no one size fits all, you know, it's for whom and when in what context. And, you know, there's a lot of variables at play here.

2:10:44Like that's a very difficult equation to solve for. Amen. It's a difficult equation. And I think that's part of the reason why we haven't made more progress in trying to address it. There is a sociology that explains how science works and there are realities that exist about needing to produce research and to get a job and keep it. But I don't think we should shy away from this question because I think answering it has the potential to solve what I think is one of the big problems we face. It's a problem that I've devoted my life to trying to address using the tools of science. So if you ask me, yeah, it's an intimidating question, but that's okay.

2:11:33We've got some tools that we can bring to bear to address it and we could break it down. We can make baby steps in terms of how we try to crack that puzzle. Notice I didn't say situations A through Z. I said situations A and B, right? And I think if we could start small and just kind of do that and start understanding that dynamics, then this grows. And technology might help us there too. Let's say you could set aside all budgetary constraints, even ethical considerations and construct the ultimate human trial to answer your most strident question about human behavior. Like what would that study be?

2:12:19Like what is like the, when you drill down to it, what is the one question you're trying to answer that keeps you up at night or gets you excited when you wake up in the morning? So when you say drill down, I think of trepanation. It makes me nervous. Back in time, yeah. And ethical considerations. No, I don't think we have to move outside of the ethical world here. It is doing an incredibly fine grained analysis of that triple dynamic, if you will. It is being able to continually assess people as they live their lives and take in information about the situations they're finding themselves. And by situations, I mean, the psychological situations they're finding themselves in.

2:13:09So you can describe a situation in just descriptive terms, like Ethan is in a podcast in Northern LA right now. Is this Northern LA? Sort of. Not whatever. But go ahead. Or it could be Ethan is in a diagnostic situation where he doesn't have a lot of control. Let's just say that's what it is. So we could try to identify situations in terms of their, what we call their psychological features. Are these situations where you do or don't have control? Are these situations that are filled with certainty or do they not have certainty? Are these situations that are relevant to your goals in life or not relevant?

2:13:54Are they at work? Are they at home? So there are different, there's a taxonomy we can use to profile situations. I want to know what all the situations you're in each day. I also want to know about who you are as an individual. What are some of your predispositions that you are bringing into this equation? What's your knowledge of the shifting tools? How vulnerable are you to experiencing chatter? What is your familial history with regulating emotions? So kind of profile people on all those background dynamics. And then I want to know, what are you doing? in those situations? How are you interpreting them?

2:14:34And what tools are you using? And I also wanna get some geo location data so I can take stock of your surroundings. And I wanna know about the different people you're coming in contact with and how you're communicating with them. And also cultural variations. Absolutely. And the geo data is gonna be able to help me with that as will your commentary, if you will, about the cultures that you're moving through without the day. With that level of data, that data richness that you consent to provide, what that would allow us to do if we do it on enough people. So here's the trick, like the rate limiting step for me as a scientist doing this kind of research is that I need massive samples of data to begin to identify the signal in all of the noise so I can extract those patterns.

2:15:30If I could do that, and I think AI there could be helpful too as a tool, I think that would go a really long way in moving the needle on our understanding of how people can manage their emotional lives. But that study that I just described is a really expensive study. It is really, it's like above my current pay grade. But I will tell you, Rich, like, we have all of these moonshots that we are reaching for and devoting huge amounts of money towards billions of dollars. What is a more important moonshot effort than cracking this puzzle of human wellbeing? I mean, you know? I'm with you. I think that's an amazing ambition and a worthy mission to devote your time and energy and your life to, which you have.

2:16:25And I appreciate the work that you do. And the two main things that I take away from your work, your example, your books are, first of all, that we have agency. In the same way that we have agency over our health and our capacity to sidestep chronic lifestyle illnesses through lifestyle choices, diet, nutrition, exercise, all the like. Similarly, we have that type of agency when it comes to our mental well-being. We do not have to be victimized by our inner monologue any more than we need to be victimized by our negative emotions. We don't need to be imprisoned by them. And secondarily, no one size fits all.

2:17:10No one diet, no one exercise routine, and no one protocol shift strategy or technique for shifting your mental inner dialogue or those negative emotions. And your books go through a wide variety of these tools with an invitation, not a declaration, an invitation to experiment and to play with them and to see what works for you and to combine them and to figure out for yourself. Like that's what I appreciate, the nuance and the respect for the originality and individuality of every human being. And I think that that speaks to like a real maturity in your field that is refreshing. Well, I appreciate that.

2:17:54I wish we could like bottle that for like a book review. That was amazing. Well, it's recorded. So you could do it what you want. Yeah, that was, I mean, you just, you captured it perfectly. One other way that I've been thinking about this lately that also puts in perspective, what is potentially at stake here when it comes to learning about it, how to manage our emotions. If you think about the gains we have made in our health and wellbeing, our physical health and wellbeing. We're living longer than we used to. A lot of that is attributed to innovations in nutrition and physical exercise, right?

2:18:32I mean, fair to say that. I don't think we have made the same gains in terms of using science to guide us when it comes to our emotional fitness. And I think that is one of the tantalizing possibilities at stake here that actually understanding how to strategically harness our emotions in the same way that we now understand how to actually like put things in our bodies that make those bodies function better or move our bodies in ways that make them stronger and more durable. We actually have similar kinds of insights that we can use to make ourselves more emotionally fit. And I think the possibility is that doing that has the potential to have a similar needle moving effect on our overall fitness.

2:19:22And so I think that's just a really exciting possibility. Yeah, I think that's true. I think it also requires effective communication from people like yourself who know how to translate these ideas into practical, actionable solutions. And I think the challenge is that, or the difference between like what you do versus physical health or nutrition health is that it's considered like a soft skill. It's harder to get your head around like how to use these tools, put them into action and then see a result. Very different from go to the gym, lift these weights or restrict your calories or whatever.

2:20:06Like people have an easier time getting their head around that. And so that's the challenge. And that's why I think it's so important, not only the work that you're doing, but the fact that you're out in the world and like sharing these things and helping people to really understand that the extent of their agency. Yeah, because I think most people would agree, like it's a hard skill to master this stuff, but you don't see it. It's not physical. Yeah, it's invisible. And we provide a little bit more visibility now with the tools, right? We get into people's brains, but you're absolutely true. So thank you for the invitation to be here and thank you for helping translate this for the world.

2:20:45Yeah, the honor is all mine. I appreciate you. Thank you for writing these books. They're in service to humanity and come back anytime, my friend. Appreciate it. Nice to have you, Ethan. Cheers. Cheers. Peace.

2:21:05That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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2:22:25Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.

2:23:01No!