welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine and I'm wearing these red lens wind down Roa glasses because we are recording this late at night which is unusual for us and bright light in particular short wavelength bright light in the blue and green part of the spectrum quashes melatonin and it makes it hard to sleep and I want to sleep tonight these red lens glasses filter out the green and blue short
wavelengths that would otherwise disrupt my sleep my guest today is Dr Ethan cross Dr Ethan cross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the director of the emotion and self-control laboratory he is also the author of the bestselling book chatter the voice in our head and how to harness it today's discussion is a really special one because we discuss something that each and all of us have which is a voice in our head that is our voice and that voice can range from encouraging to discouraging it can be repetitive in ways
that can be very intrusive and it has a profound effect on our emotional state our confidence our levels of anxiety and indeed what we are capable of achieving in life Dr Ethan cross's laboratory has done groundbreaking research to understand what is the origin of this voice in our heads and can and should we control it and indeed the answer is yes today's discussion gets into many things that people struggle with and many things that you can do to improve your life such as how to regulate the chatter in your head how to overcome ruminations and
intrusive thoughts and we also discuss what to do with your actual voice for instance data pointing to the fact that venting your negative emotions to others is actually bad it tends to amplify bad emotions we talk about that research we also talk about other forms of outward speech and inward speech that inner voice that you can partake in in order to improve your emotional state and shift your emotional state so today's discussion really centers around common questions and common scenarios and common challenges that everybody grapples with and of course we all have a voice in
our head today you're going to learn to listen to it to regulate it and indeed to steer it in the direction of mental health physical health and performance I'm also excited to tell you that Dr Ethan cross soon has another book coming out entitled shift managing your emotions so they don't manage you and I tremendously enjoyed chatter his first book and I very much look forward to reading shift when it comes out we provide links to the work in Dr Ethan cross's laboratory as well as links to his previous and forthcoming book in the show
note captions before you begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is expressvpn expressvpn is a virtual private Network that keeps your data secure and private it does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see
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say uh we were talking about interrupting one another um and the fact that you're from New York I'm going to try not to interrupt you because the audience doesn't like that however I am very interested in what um you're going to tell us about emotion regulation but especially this thing that you call chatter the voice in our heads and prior to learning about your work I always thought that chatter and the voice in our heads was you know overwhelmingly negative that's what we hear how do you combat that negative voice in one's head but you
have some very interesting ideas about the utility of chatter like maybe how it even arose and what it's for so maybe we start there yeah so I think this is a a great question because um the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever go but we don't tend to learn what it is right and actually sometimes I I get up there and speak to people and um they often wonder like what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads and it turns out that
this is a remarkable tool of the human mind so when I use the term inner voice when I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives and it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess it lets us do many different things so just from the outset let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations I think of chatter as a dark side of the inner voice and we'll get to that in a little bit but having the ability to silently use language that
is a boon to The Human Condition so I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves what's your favorite sport sports team um the Harlem Globe Trotters because they're undefeated as I understand oh yeah best record in in any sport I don't think they've ever lost a game did they ever play against other teams the the Washington generals okay sorry for the Washington generals um so if you were to go to a uh game and root for them what would you say um go Globe Trotters go Globe TRS okay can you repeat that phrase
silently three times in your head right now yes okay you you've just used your inner voice so your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary but totally ordinary also your verbal working memory system it's a mouthful lets you keep information active for short periods of time so before we had cell phones how did you memorize phone numbers like what would you do repeated in your head yeah and it had sort of a song
to it yeah right I can remember my childhood phone number still even though that number is long since long since gone I mean the whole area codee's gone in fact really well it the number is probably still there but under a different area code I know because I try calling it every once interesting well it's funny when I when I uh go through this content I give talks or workshops I often say 20951 repeat that in your head three times that's my childhood phone number I'm like go give it a shot give them a call
so for all I know that person may be getting lots of phone calls it's not it's not my phone number um but that's your verbal working memory system you go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you supposed to get most people don't do that out loud like oh crap what was I supposed to get milk cheese eggs repeat that silently in your head so that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do keep information active verbal information your inner voice also helps you Sim and plan so before presentations or interviews
a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event do you ever ever do this yeah I mean my mode of preparation for things like solo podcasts and talks is um it's not scripted out line by line in advance but I have a structure in my mind and it's more like remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and then the rest just kind of falls out yeah we have a very similar similar style I will I will bullet out what the key ideas are and as long as
I could bullet that out I am good to go but I will also rehearse those bullets in my head AB BC D so uh that's you using your inner voice as well now before a big presentation like a live event I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through when I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event may I ask about the walk um when I prepare for Live Events or solo podcasts and long before I was involved in either of those activities um for lectures
of any kind or classroom discussions where I had to stand up in front of the class I would find that walking and listening to a song would maybe simultaneously maybe separately would dramatically shape the kind of cadence and energy of the delivery of the the talk yeah I love the fact that you brought up songs there so if you want to take a little detour here um so in in in my new book shift we talk about or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation sensory experiences
are one powerful and I would argue often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions so if you ask people why do you listen to music what do you think most people say it makes me feel good feel right it's about emotions feel good so one study the the number was around like 95 96% of participants who were asked said exactly gave the answer that you just gave but then if you look at in other studies hey the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad what did you do to push your emotions around the number
of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30% music is a a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions I actually um uh an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer I lived for these soccer games on the weekend I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would you know go crazy on the sidelines it was just such joy to just watch these these kids play and typically my daughter was was really excited to go to
the game but one morning she was just like not into it at all she was bum like she was bummed out it was bumming me out I was you know catching her emotions we can talk about emotional contagion later and um got into the car and it just so happened that my my cell phone was connected and the next song on the playlist happened to be Journeys Don't Stop Believing so you know the song I presume uh don't judge me for having this on my playlist please the song comes on and you know I start
jamming out to it you know singing out loud like an embarrassing dad and then I look in the back seat and I find her bopping her head and then the chorus comes we get really excited and then I pull up to the soccer field and she just bursts out of the car and is like invigorated that is the power of music to impact us so I will often also have songs on prior to Big talks that I'm I'm getting ready to you know get in that mental frame of mind and I don't think it's a
coincidence that many athletes do this as well they've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience or our emotional trajectory in the direction we wanted to to point so it's interesting I I was thinking about music in reference to um shifting emotion as you just gave an example of you know feeling like a motivated and then your daughter's motivated by the yeah don't stop right yeah okay I'm not going to sing it going we'll do it together we not do that someone will cut the clip and they'll run it out
they'll spool it out and then no I have a truly terrible singing voice but um I Wonder has the study ever been done or something similar to this where um people who are feeling pretty good or very good are exposed to sadder music and vice versa people are feeling sad exposed to um to sort of um ecstatic music or or positive lyrics um because I've often wondered whether or not humans like or dislike when things or people try and shift their state you I know in myself when you know I'm like feeling upset about something
I don't want to feel upset I don't think anyone wants to feel upset but if I hear a song there's like that's positive there's there's a moment where I'm like I can feel it kind of pulling on me and you sort of know like I could follow that trajectory and probably get out of this and sometimes one does and sometimes one doesn't you know we're and this gets to I think a more fundamental issue which is why I'm asking uh which is are we supposed to feel our emotions as a way to you know sort
of dissolve them when we don't want them kind of the cathartic approach or with listening to sad music when we're sad just amplify the sadness these are great questions and um I have a couple of they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into so let's just do them serially so number one has the the study been done where you expose people to different kinds of emot um music sad versus arousing you know happy music do you see that push people's emotions around yes in fact sensory tools like music
or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our Arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments so we want to induce a particular kind of state we can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or um negative emotional experiences so images being another sensory modality Vision so so that's number one number two there's this very interesting phenomenon where when we are in a particular emotional state let's say we're feeling sad we often don't reflex L seek out the happy
music we don't go to Journey instead we go to Adele right we're going to Chicago I'm giving you my age bracket here right like the music that has sad associations for me so there's this mood congruency if I'm feeling a certain way I'm going to go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me why on Earth would we do that are we all masochistic do we just want to feel even worse this gets at I think a critically important point that is not always talked about which is all emotions are functional when they're
experiencing the right proportions not too intensely and not too long so sadness as an example is an emotion we experience when we've experienced some loss that we can't we can't Rectify right away like something has happened and you can't fix that so you've lost someone and so what does this emotion do well it it it hijacks the way we are thinking feeling and our bodies are responding so it motivates us to introspect to turn our attention inward to reflect on this situation to now try to make sense of it right something really important in my
life has happen I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life so I can find meaning and move on my physiology is slowing down so I can engage in that slow introspection but what's also really interesting about sadness is it's also impacting my facial display giving a sign to all of the people in my environment to say hey maybe we should check up on that person that guy cuz he looks like he's on his own in a corner right so can you detect when someone is sad if you see like a sad
facial expression yes um when I used to teach these summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor in Northshore of Long Island that students would come in from all over the world and I've been there it's a great Sumer camp for scientist Al Laboratories all year and um my I eventually was director of a course there and my co-director and I used to have this um debrief at the end of the first day or two where we would talk to one another and we would you know go over the list of names and we'd say um and
she was remarkably good at this just uh extraordinary like a superpower at saying you know I think everyone's settling in well but I noticed that so and so was kind of like might not be adjusted to the lag or might not be acclimating so well it's a very tight-knit group and the course is quite long for a course like that but it's important that everybody kind of feel engaged early on yeah um and people have a tendency to dominate in those intellectually you know competitive environments and and she could just pinpoint who it was that
was feeling a little bit outside the group we knew how to amarate that really quickly and from her I learned a bit of how to recognize the signs and it was rarely um just facial expression included that and some other cues that she just seemed to have a unconscious or conscious genius around um so uh for me I learned some of that from her I like to think I got better at it but I think some people are are just extraordinarily good at that detection and it enhances social interactions and so some people are really
good at detecting it others are really good at displaying it I'm going to go back to my my my daughter so you know if something happens where she feels sad she exhibits this exaggerated response like she'll stick out her lower lip and even if I'm kind of upset at her like it is amazing the power that that has on me I have over it is so so beautifully manipulative manipulative you know no man manipulative and um it it's it's a testament to the power that these displays can have on us so I want to go
back to one other um question you raised in your last comment and we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality um you raised the question about being shifted by others other people and perhaps either just our surroundings music or spaces sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted and in fact when other people try to do that it can elicit what we call reactants like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in the particular direction I think that's a really important point that we need to be aware of
as people living and working in these social environments where we're often well-intentioned but sometimes our well-intentioned behaviors can backfire and so there's this this beautiful research which shows that if you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them that can blow up in your face because that what a does is it often communicates to people that you are thinking that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances and most of us like we're motivated to think that we're capable of handling ourselves and so there are still
ways you can help people in those circumstances it's called providing invisible support which involves providing support to the person who can genuinely benefit from it but not shining a spotlight on the fact that that is what you are doing so how might this transpire there's some really simple things you could do so let's say my wife is um really overwhelmed with stuff and she hasn't asked me for help but I know she is at her Wits End work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate I can I can proactively do
things to lessen her burden if it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning and the groceries I'm doing that voluntarily I'm I'm doing that and I'm not coming home and saying hey sweetie look what I did today I did all these things you know can I have a pad on my back that's not what we're talking about it's about your group your your your lab is working under a deadline right to submit a Grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab it's those little things
that can help give you two more examples let's say that um someone on your team is really struggling with their their ability to translate their work for for popular audiences and that's something they're motivated to do really important skill for scientist to be able to translate what they do for others to consume before you pull them aside and say Hey you know I notice that you're stumbling on a few different issues and here are a couple of things I think you can do better before you do that direct intervention you might have a team meeting
where you share out best practices hey what are the two things that I've learned that really have benefited my ability to communicate with different audiences what you're doing there is you're getting people the the resources they can benefit from but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are directing it to them so it's kind of a back doorway of of helping or of Shifting the last uh the last tool I'll mention brings it back to sensation one of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is is through touch tactile sensation
um you know what's the first thing that you do with a child to suo them when they are born hold them hold them skin- to- skinin contact I remember uh both times my my kids were born it was like you know I want to get in on that like you know cuz my wife got first first dibs with with both of our daughters like I want some of that you know skin- to- skinin contact uh that doesn't end after we leave the womb the the comfort that we experience the release of stress fighting chemicals that
occurs when affectionate Embraces are registered uh that continues throughout the lifespan so if my daughters who don't particularly like Dad to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays uh if I know they're having a bad day like I'll go over and you know I'll rub their back in a totally UNC creepy way that is an important caveat we should give to everyone who's listening what we're talking about here is affectionate but not creepy or unwanted touch it is touch that is mutually desired and there is some research which shows actually that when it is
not desired you don't get these benefits and in fact you get the opposite Plus usually like lawsuits as well yeah sure no I I um I definitely believe that as a primate species which we are we are old Old World primates um I think they call it allopathic grooming like you'll see these images of these monkeys and lots of different species of of primates um you know just sitting nearby one another where one just has its even just its um I said its hand yes it's PAW it's hand it's PAW on the on the one
next to it and they'll just sit like that for long periods of time yeah and then sometimes they're doing like an active grooming of of removing you know parasite this is very important in in uh primate world uh as we know but you know grooming and and and you know picking and these kinds of things you see it in couples it's actually can be kind of endearing I suppose at its extremes it's kind of gross but you know it's it's rather endearing to see um somebody kind like remove a piece of lint off somebody somebody
you know their partner's uh jacket or you know just or even just touch that is it's not doesn't look like it's geared towards any specific outcome yeah right it's uh and it doesn't necessarily appear romantic or that it's grooming so maybe the lint example isn't the best one but where you just see people that are just like actually on the flight down this morning cuz I had to fly in early it was I was sitting on the aisle seat in the middle was a a boy he was probably 14 15 and his mom was at
the window seat and I went up to uh to use the restroom came back and he had fallen asleep on his mom's shoulder and I I took a look it was a very endearing moment and then when we landed I said you know the ability to sleep anywhere as a superpower and he said I I learned it from my dad he said and it was a moment where I just thought it was just a very pleasant thing to see them in this touch on on the plane he clearly felt comfortable enough to do that remember
thinking like yeah humans were a lot like the we're a lot like the other primates yeah there's there's a beauty to it and you know it is it is a tool it is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context all of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions and I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all we'll talk about that in
a little bit too I'm sure but but it all you know self-control emotion regulation like let me like roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there yes it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions and some of the tools that we have are effortful one example would be expressive writing this wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences you sit down just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for 1 to 3 days this is the penny Baker this is the penny Baker writing effect this is this
is a a just a remarkably wonderful um side effect free You could argue intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you you vast amounts of data supporting the practice you vast amounts of data Benny Baker really deserves in my opinion uh if not a the psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize I don't know what that is but um it deserves real deep praise for um developing that method because it's essentially zero cost takes a little bit of time and there's just what hundreds of studies hundreds of studies showing that these 15
10 to 15 minute cathartic writing just free associate writing usually with as I understand with a with a writing better um we did an episode where I I talked about this and and received a note from um from him and um was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong in fact he was pleased with it I think that um he deserves a lot of credit we a powerful tool for selfhealing we actually just re um restarted a a prestigious speaker series at Michigan the cats newcome speaker series which is um designed to honor luminaries
in the field and we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work um because this is really a gift I think not just to the field but humanity and the butt though here is that it's an effortful tool it takes 15 minutes to use there is nothing wrong with that lots of things that we do in life are effortful but we also know that we don't like exerting effort as a species we like to conserve our resour sources as much as possible so if there are easy things you could do
as well it's good to know about what those are and these sensory shifters music um you know looking at images right these are modality taste touch these are ways of pushing your emotions around pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch like when your your daughter's not in a great mood or when you want to get pumped up before an important event can be useful and we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them so that's my plug for uh for s for sensory shifters I'd like
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get up to $1,300 off select ju products let's go back to um just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides so we talked about two verbal working memory right keeping in verbal information active for short periods of time and we talked about simulating and planning things like going over what you're going to say before an interview or um an important presentation let's turn to self-control and motivation so you exercise can you've talked about exercising no I I try to exercise um six days a week although some are short workout
some are longer yeah you ever talk to yourself when you exercise oh all the time so let's hear it the world wants to know Andrew what do you say to yourself on your exercise depends on how well rested I am how motivated I am um I'll give two examples at the opposite poles of uh the motivational scale I was traveling two weeks ago and I um was doing some exercises for that there's a muscle on the back of the shoulder the rear deltoid it's um I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train but it's a
very important one that's when you do this one you're right for shoulder posture and stability and got to train those uh that muscle group because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating like you know thumbs pointing toward belly button and shoulders rolling forward thing and there are a number of reasons why it's important so you got to do the rear delt thing and I sat down to do the first work set after a couple warm-ups and I remember thinking like I love training I love training I have since I started training when I was
16 and I thought to myself for some reason I don't want to do this this morning and then I thought okay David gogins would probably start swearing at himself in his head so I started that a little bit and that didn't really work for me sorry David um and then I thought I'm going to go through every possible inner voice I can think of so I heard Joo willing voice I'm friends with Joo and her just saying like yeah whatever you're just weak you know or just uh like do it anyway kind of mentality and
I just started cycling through all all of them and I made a deal with myself that when I ran out of voices to use that's when I would stop the set and I probably tripled the number of repetitions that I would normally get with that weight so it was it was like one part motivation one part distraction one part frustration and I was just pulling from the um catalog of possible voices of um kind of Coach like voices and uh it worked out pretty well yeah and then then at the Other Extreme I can recall
many times because I put effort into it where I'm well rested I'm hydrated get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system which I love and sit down to train and I absolutely love to train under those conditions the sun is shining music's playing and I just remember this was during a set this was a leg day always the hardest day set of heavy hack squats and just thinking I love this but I have this inner voice where every time I I start a repetition I go through thing where I brace my midsection so I don't
hurt my back and I always look directly at the ceiling and I think about my Bulldog Costello and I think I'm gonna do this one for you I'm gonna do this one for you and I know at those moments my inner voice goes to he would probably just be sitting there like why are you working this hard Bulldogs don't like to work um so I I'm not really in a complete sentence generation inner voice kind of thing um but you have a very rich inner world right you are you're you know um verbal working memory
stream is filled with with words when you are working out yeah and I'll tell you this I was going to ask you this later in the episode but um maybe it's relevant now I think it is when I was a kid after my parents would tuck me in to go to sleep at night I used to lie in bed and rehearse voices that I had heard throughout the day and I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice and then I'd make them say different things just for my own entertainment so could
have them say whatever I wanted but in a particular voice and um my friend sometimes teas me that I'll give people voices like I'll give someone like a Marge Simpson Voice or something I'll just they're like she doesn't sound like that at all but I'll just sort of create a narrative in my mind so yeah lot of lot of um chatter in there a lot of lot of voices yeah but not super organized it's not like I'm constructing a play it's just kind of you know it feels like things geys are up I you know
I toour with them maybe and then but it's kind of a mish mash it's not super regimented these aren't complete sentences well you know one of the reasons why the penny Baker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head which is often times not organized and when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative Direction so negative selft talk so the chatter right you're an idiot such an idiot or you're looping over a problem without making any progress putting those words in
you know actually taking that inner stream and and making a story out of it is essentially what the penny Baker writing cues you to do because we are taught when we write we write in sentences there's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking up here in our minds it's a free-for-all it can go in all sorts of directions and that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive so glad you're bringing this up our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Carl dth bioengineer he's a
practicing psychiatrist he's one of The Luminaries of Neuroscience he developed these um light sensitive uh channels to be able to manipulate neurons in animal models but also now in human clinical work as well and one thing that he shared was that after he puts his kids to sleep I think now they're grown but um in the evening he'll sit deliberately sit still completely bodily still close his eyes and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so maybe more and I thought to myself wow like that that's a very disciplined practice
it also speaks to what you're saying which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default the mind so I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is he shared a few of them on that uh podcast episode but I'm sure there are others as well uh but I tried it it's very difficult to especially with eyes closed to not drift into multiple narratives kind of that the stream sort of split into your tributaries and then you know it sort of you dissolve into sleep or meditation experience almost dream likee state
where you're you know these Lial States well that's I think where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking talking is is a has a similar modality so when we talk to people there is a structure to the way way we converse where we're not if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind right because I would be unable to have a a meaningful conversation with you so there's some research which shows
that if you get people to think of um to recall a chatter provoking experience so think about something negative that's happened to you and then you randomly assign them to just think about it work it through in their mind versus write about it so I.E a penny Baker writing like condition or talk about it to someone else the talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking because there's no guard rails to the way we think that we are taught I should add
because we're going to give people guard rails later in this episode so in addition to using the penny Baker approach and by the way we'll provide link to some um resources for the penny Baker journaling because there's some free online resources that I think are really powerful for people to use if they want to use that as a template um for cathartic reasons or just you know get one's mind around a problem or something I'm very familiar with waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of not a storm in there but a a
bit too disorganized to um to get my head right you know and so I need things to get my head right sometimes it's music sometimes it's writing I sounds like journaling is just a really useful prce practice overall um it's a it's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice so we did um two pretty large studies during Co to look at how people how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding Co and we gave them a series of tools that they could check off if they use
the tools that day and we learned a couple of really interesting things uh number one there are no one size fits-all solutions for folks so remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person a versus person B uh number two it was seldom the case that people used one tool in general people used on average three or four tools each day which I think is another really important take-home because I am often asked as for example what is my favorite tool for managing emotions I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools
and most people are doing exactly the same so it's it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's it's similar to physical exercise you you're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day you would have like funky looking shoulders if you did right and you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body you're doing multiple things and the multiple things that you do to exercise I'm guessing are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise yet we
we may well be equally fit well you may be a little bit more fit than me but I doubt it you get you get the drift so there's this beautiful uh variability to how we manage our inner worlds to bring it back to expressive writing we found that expressive writing when people used it was really really useful it moved the needle on their Co anxiety but it was an underutilized tool people didn't do it very much and I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful I want to ask another question about movement that
falls on the other end of the spectrum to what we're talking about now which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing in order to parse an idea or work through an emotional state in 2015 I by the way I use these anecdotes not because um I want to focus on me but just as generalizable anecdotes okay the specifics here don't matter but I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh um you know path a versus path B and I was in that place I was
I was actually choosing between a job at one one institution another institution Each of which had tremendous advantages neither had any you know like striking disadvantages but it was a really hard decision and those close to me at that time will tell you that it was just brutal been there yeah I made everybody around me suffer tremendously to the point where people are just like flip a coin now I'm not an indecisive person I think um you know it's one of these things where big decisions I think deserve a time and attention and and it
was a time constraint thing so I was pouring over this procons list I was watching YouTube videos trying to figure out best ways for decision making I was trying to I actually um isn't isn't it amazing by the way when we're in those situations and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position the things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are are wacky like I'm sure you were Googling things that you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees and I
mean it turns out they mathematical models that um like there's the the the um actually my colleague at uh NYU Tony mavin I forget the name of the model but there's a model about how many um towns you should evaluate it's an old kind of old example of towns you should um evaluate in terms of where to start a business like is it two is it three and and there's an optimal strategy there in any event most of it wasn't helping I do believe that at some point you don't want too many committee members because
it just gets confusing so the the two best pieces of of information came from the following practices one was a colleague said forget all the superficial proon stuff and I actually think this is proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me he said take yourself through a typical weekday in one place versus the other wake up where you going to go how are you going to travel take yourself through the practicals of the day because because everything else Falls away once you're at a place or you're in a type of relationship
take yourself through a given day don't think about the relationship or the institution that you're going to work for the school you're going to go to that's important but take yourself through the entire day so I did that and then he said also do it on a weekend because you know well in our profession uh we tend to work all the time but occasionally you take a day off and so that was very useful the other thing that was very useful which was completely surprising to me was at that time um I was training in
a boxing gym and I was doing some speed bag work and decent at it you know you get into a rhythm and and what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way these um Central pattern generators as we call them in Neuroscience take over and you're just kind of you know turning your hands over and away and you're like every once a while you can think okay you need to put a little more hip swivel into this
or a little more head movement and practice my slips or something but it's largely unconscious after a certain point and I was doing that and all of a sudden boom a thought just geyser to the surface and I made my decision and that was my final decision yeah and I never went back from that decision and so it was in the act of not trying to parse things through words that words sprung up from my whatever unconscious somewhere in my brain cortical or something cortical I don't know and it was like that's it and and
I I I was overwhelmed by that and again I don't share all that because I I think it's speed bags or it's the example I gave before that's going to solve it for everybody but that that these answers to hard problems seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches verbal construction of complete sentences with paper or deliberately like daero does and then also like not trying to get an answer at all Boom the answer shows up what in the world is that so it speaks to this idea that first of all there are no one
fits all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and decisions we have to face so there are different modalities to self-discovery and insight and yes you can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people and then you can also allow your unconscious problem solving Machinery to to do its thing we don't understand completely how this works but we do know that your experience is not infrequent many people report having moments of insight when they are when they are not otherwise engaged and and you
know one line of thinking is that we are doing problem solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of and the and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness so I actually this may be the wrong usage of terms but I weaponize this process for myself so uh before I exercise before I get on the treadmill or or row or do whatever I'm going to do I will load up the particular issue that I'm trying to find a solution for sometimes it's how to word a a paragraph it might be if I'm working on a
book how to find the right kind of story if it's a uh an interpersonal issue that I've got to smooth over I load that up and then I just get on the device it's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing and I just I just I don't really hard think about it in any fixed way but inevitably the ideas the potential Solutions bubble up into awareness that is a real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to to have success in various areas of my life it also identifies one of the reasons
why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious so we didn't get to all the benefits of the there's one more benefit of the inner voice that I want to get to but I'm going to take a detour here for a second CU I think this is really important if we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice you're basically continuing to Loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress what if this happens why did this happen I'm such a imbecile you're just continually going over that negative phenomenon or experience
you're not making any any Headway one of the things that that does is it consumes our our attentional resources it acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources and so what that means is when I get on the treadmill or rowing machine and that's typically the time that I spend innovating right coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally I don't have my mind's not working to solve those problems instead it is stuck dealing with this other muck where I'm not getting it anywhere and and so we actually see
if you look at the literature that one of the ways that chatter undermines people is it interferes with their ability to to focus and solve problems and that's a that's just one way it undermines people but that is a huge huge liability is there an association between trauma and elevated levels of internal chatter uh I would say even more than an association so we often think of chatter as uh what we called is a a trans diagnostic mechanism so it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders so what that means is Chatter refers
to a process a process of looping turning the same material over and over in your head the content of that looping can take many different forms you could inject some sad cognitions in there I'm a such a is it okay to say should I say sure people I mean David Goggins was on this podcast yeah I mean pretty much anything goes typically we don't swear at each other but I'm pretty thick skinned if you need to you know I've been called way worse than anything youve been boxing I I actually boxed in high school I
don't recommend people box unless they're you know they're professional and even then I mean I must say as a neuroscientist it's a lot of fun yeah and on W Wednesday nights I'd Spar a little bit but I will say this it's um there are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10 yeah more safely much more safely for the brain like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and things like that you know where you techically don't want to insult the brain yeah I I as a neuroscientist I can't encourage people to Bo I I I I
would agree um in any case uh I promise not to LEAP across the table if you do the same fair enough deal Fair Deal um so basically chatter refers to this this process of looping over and over if you inject some sad cognitions in there I'm an imbecile how can I you know I'm never going to live up to to my potential I don't belong here like so then you get if you take that to an extreme high intensity and you perseverate over time then you're getting towards depression if you inject anxiety provoking cognitions oh
my God what if this happens and what if that happens and you go down that path of uncertainty and and fear well that leads you to more of the anxious route and if you are are filling that loop with traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences you can get pushed towards trauma too so it is a it is a process that cuts across many different really serious conditions that we grapple with in society but I want I want to also be clear to to folks who are listening that if you experience chatter that does
not mean you have any of those disorders If you experience chatter Welcome to The Human Condition my friends because most of us do at times and so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing
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we'll get back to others in a moment the best maybe one or two ways to combat chatter yeah what would those be well that's um let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally because like so like as we we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences different tools work for different people and different situations there are you know upwards of two dozen or more science-based tools that that I that I covered when I wrote chatter when I got into shift the broader train of regulating your emotions there are even
more tools out there so I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone uh my my first line of defense when it comes to chatter are two distancing tools so when I'm using the term distancing what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se we should talk about avoidance later but what I'm talking about when I say dist ing is the ability to step back and view myself from a uh a slightly more objective perspective and it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for
doing this one tactic that I find very powerful is is language so I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself so I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem Ethan how are you going to manage this situation if you think about when use words like you they are the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else and what when you use your name and you to work through a problem it's automatically switching your perspective it's getting you to relate to yourself
like like you're giving advice to someone else and it turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves have you ever experienced this Andrew gosh no yes of course absolutely I mean our our Optics are just much clearer when we're um in observation than when we're internally unless I find um that I dedicate some real minutes or hours basically a sort of meditation not unlike the complete sentence construction exploration that we
were talking about before just going Inward and really saying okay let's let's have a conversation about this true and having a conversation with myself in there and that always leads to an obvious truth yeah or sometimes a decision node that isn't clear to me yet but it leads some place that feels like forward yeah um but you're taking Special Steps to be able to to to align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else like reflexively sometimes we stumble right oh absolutely I mean I and and the number of different ways that
we can distract ourselves this is what I was going to ask in a few moments but I'll take the opportunity now I I am wondering as we're talking about this today if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the scroll aspect that with essentially zero effort we can pick up a device and scroll through images and movies and it it will update us according to update the uh the imag and topics of course according to what it senses as our dwell times on certain pages and all of a sudden we don't have
to think about what's in our head yeah uh my dad used to refer to um surfing the internet because at that time it was that and scrolling social media as kind of a a cognitive chewing gum it keeps us busy but it doesn't provide any real nutrition well you know it's interesting if you go back to um when Facebook first came on the scene one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to do you remember what this was what is on your mind so you would be cued
to share what is on your mind and you know it in in some ways you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice right is literally asking you or it did what is on your mind right now so that's in terms of posting like what's on your mind but in terms of consuming information which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers more than creators um I mean it's remarkable to me how I can you know pick up the phone and I
have a specific phone with Instagram and x on it and it's those apps are not on any other phones so that it's segregated from yeah if somebody sends me a tweet or sends me an Instagram post on I'm not going to I'm not going to open it I can't open it on those phones right and that's helped a lot we should come back to that because that's also modifying your your spaces which is another tool that I think is underutilized so we should talk about that too we'll definitely um touch on that what I find
is I'll say okay I'm going to take six minutes at six minutes till the hour take six minutes this and what's incredible is how fast six minutes seems to go by that's what's so striking it's it's remarkable and not always bad so we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society there are negative features of social media that are well documented uh there are also some I would argue Redemptive qualities to it uh I'll give you one of my my personal ones which is you know sometimes like to unwind
before bed I'm thinking all day I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short reels yeah raccoon videos yeah I mean you know my wife looks over at me she's like what are you laughing at and then I sometimes I show her and she goes why are you laughing at that right so but but you know the algorithm has learned the specific kinds of funny videos that I like and know I'm not going to tell you what they are and it it it it just lightens the load and so that's a way that I'm using
social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a Direction I want them to be shifted at a certain time I think when we talk about social media and our our emotional lives the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals we we we basically got thrown into social media without any rule book yeah we're the experiment we're the experiment and but if you think about it's a it's a new environment we were born into
this physical world and our our parents our caretakers from the time we are able to understand things and probably before they are teaching us they're social I izing us how to navigate this space profitably they don't just like Lord of the Flies throw us into the world and let us let us kind of figure it out outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive and we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand hey here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign
ways of navigating social media and I'm talking about social media now like it's this unitary environment different social media applications of course have their own norms and rules of the games you could think of them as like little different countries they have their own little micr cultures that you want to learn how to navigate and scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function But It's Tricky and It's tricky because creators can change how these applications govern by a press of a button right you could change the way the algorithm works and then you've
got to start over to some extent I've been told that by people in my life that one of the main reasons they get onto their phone in the middle of the night if they happen to wake up is that it allows a very um soothing distraction compared to trying to wrestle with the you know fire hose of thoughts in their head yeah and that yeah it's kind of like the way you describe these funny videos that you won't disclose to us that sounds like um you know they typically involve pranks oh okay noted um we
used to hear um that people um you know would have a drink after work to just kind of like you know take the edge off or something like that I feel like social media is doing that for a lot of people yeah the way you describe it fits with that idea and that I I certainly believe that from everything we know about the Circadian Health literature that you want to avoid looking at your phone um between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. most nights nobody's perect but that if you wake up in the
middle of the night one of the worst things you can do is get on your phone and start scrolling social media but I'm guessing people do it because it feels even worse to just sit there with your thoughts in the dark it's a shifter but this is a perfect um segue back to you know you asked me about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter and I'm telling you about the ones I use so there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I I detect the chatter brewing and I call it my
2 a. chatter strategy and I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy because every I seemingly like four to 6 weeks I will go to bed happy and content and then I'll wake up at 2: a.m. and like it is all going to hell really fast what time do you typically go to sleep uh usually around 11 11:30 interesting yeah this is a common problem for a lot of people and there are some tools like long exhale breathing and things that that clearly work I I long ago made a ision I refuse to believe any
thought that occurs between the hours of 2: a.m. and 5: a.m. I just refuse I don't believe it it's it's as if somebody's lying to me in my head yeah and one could argue well maybe that's where the truth is coming out because your forebrain is not so good at suppressing these you know unconscious uh thoughts and sure all good but as you point out they are rarely the kind of thoughts that one can work with positive or negative so the tool that I use actually um implicitly activates an idea like the one you are
describing so at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes and by the way you say like this is common this is more than common when I present to audiences and you know thousands and thousands of people over over the years and I ask hey you ever you ever get 2 a.m. chatter maybe 2:30 a.m. all the hands go up this is a I don't want to say Universal Affliction but it is an incredibly common problem that people struggle with like the chatter at night so what I do is I use something called mental time travel mental
time travel into the future and what I do is I I ask myself and I typically use my own name to do it so I'm blending another distancing tool distance selft talk I said Ethan how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning no matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m. to your point when I wake up the next morning and my my brain is fully fully awake and I have access to my my prefrontal C text and I could think constructively about things it is never as bad that next morning
as it is in the middle of the night we of course have learned that over time because how many how many mornings have we woken up in our lives we could do the math if I was more sophisticated I'd do it on the flight I can't right but like many many mornings we have experienc this like chatter at 2: a.m. at 7:00 a.m. not so bad so when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning next week next year 10 years from
now what that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through as bad as it may seem it is temporary it will eventually subside and that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter it turns the volume down on it which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed so the official name for this tool is not mental time travel it is called called temporal distancing and it's a flexible tool you can you can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem how
you're going to feel about it tomorrow next week 10 years from now and it's another way of of broadening your perspective it's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it so those are the those are two the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own and that nips a significant chunk of the chatter that I experien in the bud when it happens and I should add that because I know about what chatter is and I know about how these tools work I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those
tools the moment I detect the chatter Brewing so people will often ask hey do you ever um do you ever experienced chatter like yeah of course pinch me I'm a living breathing human being I do at times but I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing Tools in an almost automatic manner if this happen s if the chatter strikes then I'm going to coach myself through the problem using my own am andu and I'm going to jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself how am I going to feel about this in
the future if that's not sufficient then I'll go to like the level two response which consists of if weather permits I'll go for a walk in a in a safe natural setting I always feel the the the need to give the caveat about safe and natural because where I grow grew up in Brooklyn like the the natural settings were the place you you got mugged so they were not safe but you know a park I I find restorative and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces but then what I'll also
do is I will um I'll I'll I'll dial up the the chatter Advisory board so I have a couple of people that I have carefully thought about what these people do for me when I have a problem and they importantly don't just let me vent my emotions or or cathect to use that term before just I don't just get it out a lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to venture emotions there's research on this venting is good for strengthening bonds between people it's good to know that you know we're buddies
now I could call you up if I'm struggling you're going to listen to me and empathize with me that's great for our relationship but if all you do is just validate what I'm going through and you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you but the problem is still there so just venting ends up leading to what we call co- rumination which can be pretty harmful the people on my chatter Advisory Board they know to
First validate empathize with me learn about what I'm going through they've got my back they communicate that powerfully but then once they do that they start working with me to broaden the perspective to try to think through that problem which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really really loud and you know typically when I get to that stage um I'm in pretty good shape I love your examples of how you deal with chatter your example of going to sleep and the reason I asked when you go to sleep at about 11: p.m.
and waking up at 2:00 or 3: and that being a very common issue is as far as I understand reflective of the fact that early in the night our sleep is dominated by slow wave deep sleep with less rapid eye movement sleep and then somewhere right about that transition time it's not necessarily 2 or 3 a.m. per se but given that you asleep for about 3 4 hours after about 3 4 hours of sleep the proportion of our sleep that is rapid eye movement sleep relative to deep slow wave sleep shifts dramatically the intensity of
our dreams shifts dramatically they become more emotionally Laden and that whole process of having those rapid eye movement um sleep Associated dreams is strongly associated with the removal of an emotional load in the morning when we wake we know this because if you selectively deprive people of early night versus late night sleep and so on the reason I mentioned this is that um one tool that I certainly have found useful is that well two tools really if people just understand that one of the reasons they'll wake up Suddenly at 2 or 3: a.m. is that
they're undergoing this transition from a one kind of one form of sleep to another it's almost like a different Beast altogether and that heart racing emotionally lateen thoughts is characteristic of where they're supposed to be in the Sleep architecture cycle and so for me so that's that's um number one the other is that um the tool that you provided of of getting into this mental time travel I I'd like to just double click on this um notion of time perception in sleep and dreaming I mean time is very fluid you can be one environment than
another it seems compressed a lot happens in a short amount of time when we are in chatter in the daytime to what extent does it alter our perception of time um and I have a very specific reason for asking this because I believe that one of the main uh got of unifying features among the tools for dealing with depression anxiety Etc When I Survey the research is almost all of them journaling meditation even some of the medications for that matter involve taking people into a different sort of um time perception mode and it's a kind
of an abstract idea but I I think um this this may resonate with some of the issues related to chatter that when we're in a mental frame That's not healthy for where we want to be at that moment awake when we need to sleep you know anxious when we want to be calm and so forth that changing our time perception seems to be the most useful thing that we can do or at least among the most useful so what's the relationship between chatter and time perception and tell tell me more about what you mean by
time per ception uh uh how broadly or finely we are binning time so we know that as autonomic arousal let's call it stress but wakefulness and autonomic arousal goes up we're F slicing time in fact the pupils get bigger we actually see you know depth of field changes we get higher resolution image of much less this is it makes every bit of evolutionary sense you know we can deal with fewer things better yeah and typically it's the thing that we're fixated or ruminating on when we're relaxed think about like sitting back on a beach and
you're watching the clouds go by it's almost like you're rate yeah is slower so your you know higher frame rate is like slow motion this is why people who experience trauma often feel like things are or a car crash like see it in slow motion it's not in slow motion you're fine slicing time yeah it's kind of a remarkable thing right this is also how athletes learn to play with their levels of autonomic arousal Fighters can see punches coming in at it's almost like slow motion but they can react with full speed likewise with tennis
players will describe this so what we're talking about is dynamically changing the frame rate of one's experience yeah it's a very interesting question and there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with these um with time perception and the way you're describing it but what does come to mind are are experiences of flow which in many ways you might you might consider the opposite of chatter flow being this state where um you know you're just in the moment and and and time is effortlessly passing your the demands of the situation completely match
the skills that you bring to bear it almost seems like the antithesis of what you're describing when I think about time in chatter what what I becomes most accessible for me is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly on the object of the chatter on the thing that is causing that distress and we focus you know so narrowly on it which of course makes a great deal of sense because what are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem think about it share it yeah
there you go you got it on try number one zoom in focus on the problem roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it and so that's that kind of really you're getting in there in fine grain detail and um you know some that does work for us a lot of the time but turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation that can get really troubling and that's where this zooming out taking this broader view whether you do that through Visual modalities IM ination modalities like mental time travel you
could time travel into the future like I've just described you can also go back in time like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life or someone else's life that I I know of when times were even worse and they got through it and oh if I got through that well sure as heck I can get through this and so that's expanding our perception of time are are are looking at that bigger picture to work through
something in the present moment how often do you think people and I do believe this is related to chatter but if it's not we can set this aside uh for another day uh how often do you think people are in kind of negative or positive fantasy like as they move through their day I'm sure a study has been done asking people what they're thinking about I me how often is it actually tied to what they're doing or they're supposed to be doing or are they think about like what they're going to do this weekend or
maybe even constructing entire narratives of things that are like non-existent that they would like to exist or you know occasionally we'll see this person I think we've all seen this person kind of mumbling to themselves and it doesn't look like they're mumbling Pleasant things that's because they've just been rejected by a journal editor their article the experience of every scientist um and it's of course always reviewer number two's fault they didn't read the paper carefully enough of course and none of us have ever been reviewer number two by the way we've all been review number
too um little academic inside inside ball humor there um you know you'll see somebody mumbling to themselves and it and it doesn't it doesn't look like they're mumbling Pleasant things yeah we don't know what they're saying to themselves but I'm guessing if we tap them and said hey what were you m mumbling I I would guess that more than 50% of the time it was um kind of frustration with stuff you kind of see this like the frustrated person it's it's a hard thing to observe actually yeah so so um people have looked at this
and my memory of this wonderful paper I think was published in science I think I think the title was a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind and um basically the Takeover from the article was that people spend between well if you look at this paper and lots of others like it what what we can deduce is that people spend between 1/ half and onethird of their waking hours not focused on the present so between 1 half and one/ third of the time we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things and this one particular paper
link that process with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse I think there's huge levels of variability there though um I think a like being lost in thought can be a wonderful experience I love love love love mind wandering I think it's one of my strengths it is the source of idea generation for me it is also the source of emotion regulation I will one of you know my sleeping pill metaphorically speaking is is mental time travel it's getting away from the present it is fantasizing about the future right thinking about the good
things that could happen the potentialities or going into the past and savoring some of the the positive things that happen I'm thinking about you know the the the soccer game where my kids scored goals or something good happened to someone I know or to me and and and that to me is a wonderful way of going to bed that is mental time time travel it is not being in the moment which actually raises another really important point that I want to get in there and I'd love to get your take on this because in popular
culture we often hear that it's really important to be in the moment this has emerged as a type of cultural Maxim like be in the now and and this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment we sometimes think there's something wrong with us like oh we got to train attention to bring it back to the present being in the present can be very useful in many contexts and certainly when we experience chatter we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past refocusing on the present our breath a
mantra yes lots of data support the utility of that but I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time and lots of amazing things accompany that process if I can't go into the past not only am I not savoring positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life I'm also not learning from my screw-ups which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis right I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past and if I'm not going into the future then I'm not I'm not
planning I'm not simulating I'm not fantasizing so we want to be we don't want to shut down mental time travel I think what we want to learn how to do is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively without that time travel machine breaking down in the past which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about so um so being in the moment can be good but it is not the end point I think we always
want to strive for to what extent do you think that texting and smartphones but namely texting has interfered with sort of time tested meaning over hundreds of thousands of years uh time- tested mechanisms for us to process our emotions and our thoughts to arrive at better ways of thinking feeling being um you know nowadays if you get on a train or a plane or you're in an Uber or you're walk into your car and you have a like a thought about something oh that grant that idea it's so easy to just get into a mode
of texting passive passive participation maybe through social media scrolling again not universally bad but you can go to passive kind of almost semi- dissociative State like you're not you're not really in the parking lot anymore you're half in your phone and half in the parking lot um and texting polling people around you as opposed to you know quote unquote in the old days where you had to actually grapple through this stuff as you describe your um the tools that you use to deal with chatter and to process information and to you know work with your
thinking and your emotions you strike me as somebody who um has a rich Jungle Gym of things to play with in there yeah and a toolkit and uh an emergency switch if you need it and all that stuff whereas most people I think um just they have their phone who you going to call who you going to text what what site are you going to Google Google search to um I mean it can't be good well um it often isn't but it it it can be harnessed and and here's what the way I think about
texting and really how social media and the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want how this has thrown a curveball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertedly affect the emotions of not just other people but groups of people and societies so when we experience emotions we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others there's this wonderful research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard R who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions and and he found
over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize it to get it out and there are a couple of reasons for that we want to relate to other people get their support but we also want to usually process it in the pre-social media era um two things had to happen typically to share our emotions first you had to find someone to share them with uh and typically in the process of looking for someone either to find someone face to face or or via phone time would pass now what we know about time is that
as time proceedes our emotions in general tend to fade so there's this wonderful work on the duration of emotional experiences and our emotional experiences all follow a common trajectory so something happens in the world or in our mind we imagine something that is provoking in some way our emotions get triggered and then as time goes on they eventually Peter out and depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with you know some people may Peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly some maybe have shallower Peaks and take longer to subside but
they all follow that basic trajectory over time so let's go back to the pre-social media era right so you got to find someone to talk to and while you're trying to find someone to talk to time is passing that's acting to temper our emotions now once you find someone to talk to either face to face or via phone the moment you start talking you are now a wash in all of this feedback this emotional feedback whether it's coming from your face like you're giving me all sorts of information right now I would benefit from smiling
if you could there we go thank you I'm just joking for those who are listening but I'm getting information from you and if I'm talking to someone on the phone likewise I'm getting their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel that is also working to constrain how we communicate with others and it's typically keeping our emotions I would argue in check in balance in proportion we're stripping away time with social media and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback this enables us to release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way
and I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone and I think this is one of the factors that can promote some uh pretty negative forces in society so cyber bullying and um you know the spread of moral out AG surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context now that is not to say that social media isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of of messages
that require attention and are deserving of collective distress it can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change but I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information when I think about the different ways to parse a a problem a real or imagined problem um and I think about the role of web searches um it immediately takes me to either social media or to it could be Reddit could be some article that was written and posted online in 2019
you know these will resurface they repurpose these things all the time it's I don't why they do that I just got emailed this morning about an interview to fact check that I did in 2019 go figure I mean it's cool that there's um I guess that there's um archival material on the internet that not everything is fleeting um certainly in the podcast space you know we like to think that the information on this podcast will archival um and we can update it over time and and that actually brings me to the the the very specific
question which is about AI you know with AI web searches are now changing fundamentally they're you're no longer being brought to a site that is just a designated site you're getting information back that's the you know the the amalgam of a lot of information funneled through presumably the large language models are changing all the time but funneled through U kind of your search Behavior your preferences Etc so web searches are no longer just um site destination uh Journeys they are you know uh recipes of information that are filtered and combined and given back to us
which makes me think that maybe AI can provide a kind of pseudo self that is wiser than ourselves in any moment or potentially wiser than we are in any moment because they can access information that is not dependent on like bodily State shifts like like at 2:30 in the morning 3:30 in the morning a a small problem can seem huge and a huge problem can seem absolutely overwhelming just crushing us mhm at 7:00 A.M it's different when we search on the web now like how to you know how to get through bankruptcy let's say somebody's
dealing with bankruptcy they're going to there's information to go to but with AI it can give you the information in the form and in the and from the sources that are most meaningful to you and it doesn't even if it's 2:30 in the morning for you the AI is fresh it doesn't need to sleep right that seems to me like a distinct advantage over our own minds and I know AI is controversial is it going to get smarter than us is it going to tell us to go do bad things kind of thing okay that's
a whole different discussion but seems to me the AI could be pretty good maybe even terrific at helping us resolve problems because it doesn't have these State shifts and it's really tailored to us well it it can be and I think you know AI I think of it as a as a new tool that is has you know amazing potential um and I actually think it has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourself fixed so if I if I look back at the last 20 30 years
of research on emotion regulation I'm talking here not just about managing chatter but managing the whole Suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives what I can do is I can point to several individual tools that are empirically supported science-based tools and scientists have do done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically they've often gone down to the to the brain level they've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between so we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work but what we are
now learning is individual tools are not the name of the game because we are often doing multiple things to manage our emotions and the combinations of tools we use within people they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand and there's variability between people as well so the the Blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated so if someone comes to me with a problem I can go through all the tools in the toolbx what I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and
say hey for the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are here are the four things that you should do but that person over there they should do these six things I think AI has the potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis and that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology you mentioned you have kids yeah um when my sister who's three years older than I am uh was a kid my dad
tells the story that um she had an imaginary friend Larry Larry was a girl lived in a purple house you know this imaginary friend Larry had all the the um the components of a a child's mind that is unrestricted by all the barriers of naming and things like that you know um and my dad said that my sister used to play with Larry in her room for hours just talking to Larry and like you know with her doll houses and her toys and her things and doing and then one day my dad uh he loves
this story I don't know why he loves the story in particular but he he was standing outside her door and she was playing with Larry her imaginary friend talking to Larry and then she stopped and turned around and he said um how's Larry and she said Larry's dead and he she never talked about Larry again like it was this sort of collision between Fantasy Life and real world this is how I interpret it and that was it yeah Larry was done yeah poor Larry poor Larry well maybe it was time you know I mean she
was maybe going to be seven soon and maybe maybe it served her well so I've always wanted to ask somebody this question I think you are the person to ask this question are Imaginary Friends common in children and are Imaginary Friends the primordial form of our internal dialogue with our self just fascinated by and are there some adults who maintain imaginary friends and the re and I'll set an additional context which which will be especially relevant to the listeners of this podcast which was in the very seat that you're sitting about this time last year
David Goggins was here and he was talking about you know how he pushes himself through tremendously hard things and during that discussion it became very clear that David has a an array of different voices that are all him but that serve different roles yeah and it was a remarkable thing to hear him articulate that because to to those of us on the outside we observe as like one person but he's constructed in an elaborate inner world to be able to equip himself to do the things he does and I just have to wonder whether or
not this whole thing of imaginary friends provided it doesn't take us into the realm of psychosis and delusion could actually be useful yeah isn't it remarkable that this is um this is such a common human experience and for most people they never talk about this with anyone else because this is such a private experience so I often start start presentations with a quote from rapael Nadal the tennis great uh him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with and he says it's it's managing the voices plural in my head and I
and I go to the audience and I say hey what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says Uh there's struggling with the voices inside their head right like that is typically warning sign right that maybe something is aai here and someone needs support yet this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on so to answer your question is a common to for kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves yes um uh I believe this is called the study
of pretense um according to one famous Soviet Psych ol ologist named Lev votsi one of the ways self-control is first learned is actually through selft talk and so what happens is you you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things Andrew you should do this or don't do that and sit this way and not that way and then what children will often do is go off on their own and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves and so if you've ever been around young kids you've probably seen
them talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls and no Jimmy shouldn't do this Jimmy should do that some kids do it in the form not of with an actual toy but they have an imaginary friend in their mind that they are engaging with these different interactions and what the kids are doing in those contexts according to this idea is they are they're practicing self-control they are they are repeating the things the messages that their caretakers have told to them right they are rein forcing it in those ways and then as time goes on
and your sister demonstrated this that outer voice becomes our inner voice and we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives but it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud right and there's very little research on this and a lot of this is um anecdotal but I have um when speaking to a lot of individuals say yeah sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud and I thought something was wrong with me and it's always when I'm struggling
with uh like a major stressor so if we go back to reviewer number two right in the academic world I remember once I wrote this invited article and um a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this in this response and I remember just walking I was I was it was so offensive I remember walking around the neighborhood and I why don't you say that to my face you know and I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working
through it but it almost seems like in real moments of stress we revert back to this very primordial way of regulating ourselves that we first exercised when we were kids which is this selft talk and so so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices according to you to manage the challenges that he is facing uh I've heard David talk on a number of occasions and uh I think there is another important point to to bring up here which is I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices they're not always a very
gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and be kind to sometimes yes and sometimes this is important because negative selft talk is often equated with harmful outcomes negative emotions are functional when they're activate in the right proportions sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective so if I go to when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where coaches are telling me to do really painful things like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me right you know you you you
you better like shape up you know you can't you know wimp out here that serves an a motivating function for me there so if we're recruiting some negative voices that isn't bad per se what is bad is if we start looping that is the what we really want to equate with chatter it's getting stuck in those thought Loops that's when things get get harmful when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long a couple of times we've talked about the relationship between pH physical activities and mental activities um in particular taking a
walk going into green spaces and I was delighted to hear when you said that there's a vast literature supporting the use of green spaces yeah for calming ourselves is that essentially what the data show well it goes a little bit um Beyond even just calming so yes there is data linking uh going for a walk in a in a beautiful setting with uh feeling better uh but but but scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the the various mechanisms through which interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us and so
there are two major Pathways that I often talk about one is interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative so as we talked about earlier when people get stuck experiencing chatter or other kinds of big emotions uh our attention often fixates on on the problem at hand we focus really hard in trying to work through the problem and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources well when you go for a a walk in a safe natural setting you're surrounded by interesting cues that capture your attention in a very gentle way so I'm
talking about the flowers and the the the the the trees the scents The Sounds our attention often drifts onto those features of our environment now most of us are not doing the uh equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying this the geometrical structure of the leaves and the flowers right we're just kind of taking it in but the surroundings are are sufficiently intriguing to capture to grasp our attention and that gives us this opportunity to restore that precious commodity so there's work there's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a
safe natural setting um can be cognitively restorative that's another feature nature that or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us the other pathway that I just find so it's this is so so cool from a research point of view going for walks in in in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of of something vast and Indescribable something that just feels bigger than ourselves so in um in the arborium near my house there are these trees that have been there for hundreds
of years and you look up at these trees and you think my God like you've been there way longer than me and my parents and my grandparents and you probably will be there longer than all of my progeny like wow that just broadens my perspective or an amazing Sunset you can also experience this emotion through Feats of of innovation so I'm a I'm a science geek I guess you could say and for me the the the two biggest awe triggers are uh number one the images of the Galaxy that the latest telescope produces which if
you follow this we sum physicists have sometime somehow figured out Engineers how to take pictures of what the the universe looked like billions of years ago somehow I don't understand the physics we can see what it looked like this you know vast amounts of time ago and we also of course have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars sending us back footage of that planet so when I think of that like we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet this vastly expands like I am filled with awe so when we are experiencing something
vast and Indescribable like that this is the ultimate perspective Roder so it leads to what we call shrinking of the self we feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and Indescribable and when we feel smaller guess what else feels smaller problems are problems so this is a an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manage your emotions and so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight they're waiting to be harnessed and if you know where to look you
can often find them and the nature by the way isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist there are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better we often develop attachments to places for example so um have you you're probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures so there are these uh figures from our childhood that um we often though not always securely attach to they are a source of safety and comfort and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners if we're
in positive relationships as I am love you um as to my wife she is an attachment figure for me well we also develop these associations with places and so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating um I know I know one person who um discovered that uh you know his there was infidelity in his relationship and what really helped him get a grip on the situation was going back to his childh at home and sleeping in his bedroom at home
that was the the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life um that's an example of of the power of places to affect us so so how many times do we think about hey what are the places that are my emotional oases if you will that I can go to when I need it we can also structure our environments like you and I are both talking right now across the table from one another we don't have our cell phones out on the table no not for me not even in the
room not in the room for me either if we did and we had it facing up we would be distracted Would we not without question even facing down I think there's some literature on this right still a queue it's still an emo there's a cognitive tether like we're sort of I mean because the thing signals um a particular a particular reward and a and a particular set of behaviors right just like a pen only a few things you can I mean probably many things you do with a pen but typically one this is not John
Wick here this one thing that we're talking about we're not we're not getting uh we're not getting Innovative here with with these objects but right when the pen excuse me when the phone is present even if it's face down it cues the uh the opportunity to make a call receive a text look on social media scroll the internet find out what's happened to and so by leaving our phones outside of the space we are we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way when laptop screens are open in my seminars I know
that I've already lost the battle because I know this this the the object the stimulus is so tempting even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world which I am not I aspire to be captivating but I know that I'm always going to lose compared to the screen the email them to close I as them to yeah no laptops in my in my class wow how is that received so far so good um you know I I explain to them I actually explain to them the science behind this I explain why I'm doing this
and I say that hey if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes I this is a divided attention task I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open and in the courses that I teach it's more about discussion and thinking through things so they don't really have a need to you know type notes for exams which I think makes it easier for me um but but modifying our space is really strategically like this is another valuable tool in um in our toolbox like when we have people over
for football watching parties let's say it's pretty common where I come from in an arbor and uh I my favorite food in the world is is pizza and we have this wonderful New York City city style pizza place in ant Arbor now I will order vast amounts of it much more than we need and when the the game is over I will insist that everyone take it with them because I know if if it is in the refrigerator and I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water if I see the pizza
box the queue it will elicit a emotional response this desire this repetitive response to consume the pizza which is not the goal that I have from either a fitness or a motion regul regulatory point of view so I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at at meeting my regulatory goals I'm so glad you brought up pizza and New York Pizza and the fact that you're from New York here's why um and again I give a personal example only as uh a template for people to
think about themselves sure either where it matches or doesn't match what I'm about to ask I love being in nature I love being up in Yos and rural areas and at the coast I was love love being in nature and the quiet of nature I find my my mind slows and my thoughts um and my emotions enter a a pace that just is very soothing I also love being in New York City I was first in New York City when I was about five or six years old and I remember telling my dad who's from
another big city Bor Osiris I remember telling him like I can't I can't believe this exists like can we come back here and I I swore that I would go back as many times as I possibly could and I I love going to New York City despite it having many problems it's still a wonderful City when I'm in New York there's tons of activity there's tons of stimuli yeah and I also find that my mind achieves that slowed Pace another parallel construction here and then I'll I'll wage the the specific question I've worked with professors
U my postt adviser for instance and my graduate adviser worked extremely effectively these are hyperfocused unfortunately both of them have passed but hyperfocused brilliant people truly brilliant and their offices were a complete disaster and we'd say Ben you need to clean your office and he would say no no no don't move anything like otherwise I won't know where anything is and I'm like how can you know where anything is like this this it look it looks like an earthquake hit yesterday and he was don't touch anything and he and he could find things in this
like dizzyingly messy environment as some you know he was the The Stereotype of the professor sitting hunched over at his keyboard at 2: in the morning cuz at that time I worked really late you'd go into Ben's office you hey you know and it organized thinking amidst chaos yeah and the New York example would be the parallel and at The Other Extreme nature also seems to bring this about so two specific questions is there a Continuum of let's say daytime let's forget about middle of the night of daytime kind of default of chatter I think
of this as kind of RPM in a car like like how is the car idling like when you turn on the car you just sit there like if the transmission's working well and everything's working well it's like hums it a nice it's not redlining yeah some people seem to be redlining all the time yeah and they calm down in t in cluttered environments so how much is do we have a kind of a set point a chatter set point assuming everything else equal well rested etc etc and then why is it that external environment matching
our internal chatter somehow like can adjust that internal set point it seems I realize this is very abstract but for me it's very useful to think about where my mind goes into its most Pleasant and effective States yeah um your example of your advisers resonates so strongly with myself is your office a mess well it it entirely depends on my mental state and prior to really getting involved in the space I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess and sometimes it is in Span unbelievably organized and clean uh and so
let me share with you some of the research in the space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking a lot of people find that when they are experiencing chatter they reflexively start organizing their spaces so I'm a great example of this I my entire life if we called my mother up right now please let's not do it but if we did uh she could attest to the fact that there would always be a trail of of towels and clothing from the bathroom to my bedroom and all over the place and my office
is similar um piles of papers and books and that's when life is good I'm kind of free flowing I'm getting in there I'm being creative I'm generating ideas and I'm not really worried about everything around me in fact I'm really good at typically like tuning out my surroundings to to focus in on the task at hand I could work in a coffee shop I could work almost anywhere and I I love it when I'm experiencing chatter though and this is true from the time I was little I would always start putting things away I would
always start organizing things making them nice and tidy um my office is always spotless sometimes I even take it further presently when I'm experiencing chatter I clean up my office then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy and if it's really bad like I'll clean up my kids rooms and things like that this is a very common experience when you're experiencing chatter you don't feel like you are in control you're not in the driver's seat the thoughts and feelings are taking over and they're pushing you in directions and to
places that you don't want to be it's an aversive State and it's chronically activated for a lot of people human beings in general We crave control we like to know that the world is orderly and predictable there's s survival value that that communicates to us right if we know things are certain and and you know proceeding in a in a predictable way creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside it's called compensatory control and this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us augment
our spaces to counteract in this case our emotional state and so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question but it it for me highlights the way that we are tightly Tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances when I'm not experiencing chatter it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not like no big deal but when I move motivated to think feel and behave in a particular way then my circumstances are becoming more important I mean the the military is a very Salient example where people have have their their um
their kit in order yeah um uh in order to essentially be able to proceed with the job right and and people can say what they will about the military but the the structure and the hierarchy of the military has provided a structure and an order for people to um essentially um harness a a take go from a chaotic life to a structured life that's right you know and um it's an extreme example um but having everything squared away is is one of those things I I got certified a scuba dive a few years ago and
you know it occurred to me early on in the first Dives that you know if if your kit isn't squared away and you don't have everything worked out things can go badly wrong and the um severity of the of the potential consequences or the potential severity of the consequences uh I suppose it's the right way I say it is a good reminder like to have everything in check this isn't the kind of thing where you can afford to forget a piece of gear or to not check a valve or you know uh it it's potentially
life or death and that serves a an Adaptive role it's it's kind of nice to have a an activity actually where where that's that's the case whereas we get into our cars and we might pull out the driveway and then go down the street and now you see people texting and driving all the time hopefully less as time goes on and you know you see then you might put on your seat belt you know like a you know a quarter mile down the road you might put on first right I always put mine on first
when you know when I remember I'm sure now someone will catch me with my seat belt off but um I drive with a seat belt and so on and so on the physical steps that we take to organize ourselves and the environment and our relationship to the environment really do seem to to change our brain into a different brain than were we to not do those things the way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist some of those shifters are inside us so there are these sensory shifters we
talked about there are tensional shifters we haven't gotten into that yet but you know we can shine our mental Spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions and we can be strategic in how we do that there are perspective shifters way we the way we think about our circumstances reframing distancing those are all on the inside but then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships how other people can push our emotions in different directions sometimes other people can be amazing assets sometimes tremendous liabilities there are physical shifters like
in our spaces and we just talked about those you can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter people talk about culture as the air we breathe right we are we are in different cultures throughout our lives and sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day so you know if you're going to your your lab or you're on campus at Stanford that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and and and weird practices maybe um that's no offense to Stanford by the way that's more
academics Academia has some weird practices if you then go to your podcast Community right the the team in the studio that we're sitting here there are different there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here and those cultures that we are a part of they powerfully shape our emotional lives they indicate they they they influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value so what kinds of emotional experience are we motivated to have they give us practices rituals to meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well so that's another kind of influence
that I don't think we often think about but that is really quite powerful it brings me back again to the the smartphone you know the smartphone carries an infinite number of contexts into the different environments with us um so we're on the train but we could be paying attention to something overseas and I was on the plane this morning and I I just marveled at the number of screens MH on this um frankly very densely packed plane was like probably fourth grade when a kid brought in a little mini TV and I remember thinking oh
my goodness that's like a mini TV it looked kind of like a walkie-talkie and the resolution was terrible and of course it was all black and white they had color TVs by the way when I was when I was young it just hadn't made it to the mini TV and we were basically walking around with little mini TVs all day yeah with near infinite number of channels combined with texting I mean it's wild remarkable science it's science fiction if we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids to think about what we
have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people the glasses that they are wearing we probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids I agree I agree and I I'm just struck by the fact that our brains can adapt to this but I do think that most people probably wonder about about you know like what's the optimal way to live and and the word optimal gets people a little you know little triggered sometimes believe it or not I'm not talking about what puts people into their best performance
mode or this or that I'm not talking about biohacking I'm referring to you know there's age-old question you know what what is a good life and and that's a completely different podcast that we should probably do at some point but it probably involves being able to pay attention to things and be present but also let one's mind drift and be socially present and have relationships and on and on do you think that we are in fact more challenged nowadays in the default mode of so many contexts arriving with us in our pocket When we arrive
in a situation like you said come to the studio I'm as long as my phone's face down or away from me I'm in the studio otherwise I brought the whole world with me yeah this is a question that comes up quite a bit and it's a really hard one to answer because we haven't of course been tracking people's chatter and emotion disregulation levels over the centuries I think it's absolutely true that we now have um new forms of technology that are perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome
but they are also providing us with opportunities so um to be clear I think social media and Technology uh can and does do a lot of harm and I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well and the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to navigate those those digital technological Landscapes and I think we probably jumped into them um without a user guide too quickly and we're only learning now 15 years later or whatever the number is that that was the case but um but I
don't know that I would I don't know that well I'll speak for myself I think net positive there's a lot of good that has come from these Technologies if we think back centuries ago um it's not clear to me that the world wasn't a a challenging Place either I mean you know um we used to to get into fights and pull swords and uh there is huge you know people would invade readily if you go back further and we there was the threat of illness and you know we weren't living nearly as long and so
I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species but and this is I think a really important but and I think about this often the issues that we are talking about today on this podcast this question of how we manage our emotional lives this is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies we've always been challenged by circumstances and those circumstances are constantly invol evolving providing new
new threats to us that now we need to learn how to manage um when you know when I was digging deep into the history of emotion regulation for for for for shift um I couldn't believe it that when I when I um when I looked back at the first surgical tool ever developed you know what that is trening trening so tonation tell everyone who's listening what that involved trening is where you bore a hole through the skull in order to let out some volume of fluid some volume of fluid or or remove brain or brain
or if we go back 8 to 10,000 years ago when this technology was first Cutting Edge right like the new iPhone of the times tonation for Spirits for maybe Spirits right so one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are may maybe causing tremendous emotion disregulation so that was a Cutting Edge tool at one moment in time that we use to manage our emotions then let's let's jump into the mental time travel ma or just the time travel machine and go to the late 1940s
where there was another major spike on the emotion regulation Innovation timeline you know where I'm going with this intended I'm guessing you're talking about the labotomy that's right the frontal labotomy Portuguese physician develops the labotomy I think it was initially called The Lucy um essentially making some holes in your frontal cortex through going up through the orbit of the eye through the eye sweeping it back and forth this was an an not just an outpatient surgery but a mobile surgery they would arrive to people's homes I think I could be wrong but I think a
Nobel prize was given for the labotomy well there you go that's the relieved anxiety unfortunately it relieved a lot of other many other things relieved people's interest in pursuing lots of things it caused major major major um dysfunction and to be clear this is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention it hasn't been for a while well that's why I said don't box you know prefrontal cortical damage is is a common feature of people with or even I don't know if this is true someone needs to check but I I do hear that some sadly some
soccer players who head the ball a lot deal with some front uh uh you know frontal cortical related dementia type stuff I'm guessing that's probably related to some genetic susceptability because at least to me the soccer ball is not very hard it's not like they're you know it's but um and then again there of course people who play a whole career of football yeah um or box less seldom boxing people get hit a lot in the head often have problems yeah they they develop problems yeah generally not a good thing but but you know just
to go back to the labotomy what's amazing to me is like that was perceived to be such an advance that it won the Nobel Prize like the Nobel Prize because it calm people down calm people down right and and we so so I rais these issues to to just point that like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage our emotions effectively for a really long time and now fast forward to the present we have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet but I would argue that we have made major advances in identifying non-invasive
science-based tools that can be leveraged to help people lead more productive emotional lives and so um you know you raised this question earlier about what is a productive life uh what is a good life and uh I think answering that question is in part relev to how I think about how do you like Define self-control in many ways or emotion regulation or or let me not not just how you define it but what are the component parts so we've been talking about tools throughout this conversation all like these different tools that exist these different shifters
for pushing our emotions or chatter around that's one core part of regulating effectively but another core part is our motivation or our goals and you need both motivation and tools so I can know about all the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered if I'm not motivated to manage my emotions I'm not going to use those tools if on the other hand I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions but I don't know what the tools are I'm not going to be that effective and I may in fact do some bad things right I
may I may you know use unhealthy tools substances that really can very powerfully M you know substance abuse I'm talking about that can modulate my emotions but has some negative consequences so it's about what are my goals for me for my emotional life and do I possess the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals I think that is a formula for the good life hey here are the goals that I have and if these are healthy productive goals and I have the means to achieve them that should bring me a sense of satisfaction sometimes
our goals of course aren't optimal and use that maybe controversial world word but um we do change our goals throughout our life but it's about finding the right set of goals for us as individuals and then identifying the tools that we can use to bring those goals to fruition yeah in keeping with this historical Arc of the tools that humans have used to try and regulate emotion you mentioned trening uh frontal lobotomy think about um a barbaric appearing uh procedure but one that actually is pretty effective in the right hands um and that is still
commonly used today electric shock therapy um which at a mechanistic level you know we don't understand we don't really understand but it seems to lead to kind of massive dump of a bunch of neuromodulators dopamine serotonin but like you know almost willy-nilly like just um and then nowadays there's a lot of at least interest if not enthusiasm more work is needed on um the very psychedelics in particular psilocybin and MDMA uh for depression and PTSD um more specifically and while those are more in the serotonergic pathway the my read of the data is that you
know they they're creating you know more brainwide connectivity at resting state I mean there's still fairly crude tools yeah in terms of you're massively changing the levels of given neurom modulators you people are undergoing variable experiences it's not directed in any any any way Nolan Williams at Stanford is combining those things with transcranial Magnetic stimulations to try and essentially highlight the activity of particular circuits during the Psychedelic Journeys and and after um things of that sort so it's getting more specific but I would say even today we we don't really have great pharmacologic or surgical
tools for emotion now there's terrific neurosurgery going on mind you um but when it comes to behavioral tools tools for emotion regulation I feel like the psychologists you all you and your colleagues have done a tremendous job as have the people from you know for lack of a better name the sort of ancient traditions and from the uh Wellness Community you know things like long exhale breathing physiological size meditation Wendy Suzuki's Lab at at NYU showing you 13 minutes a day of meditation improves Focus emotion reg emotional state so it seems to me that the
behavioral tools are getting way out ahead of the surgical and even pharmacologic Tools in terms of their specificity their safety and maybe even their potency would you care to reflect on on what you see as the most valuable tools for emotion regulation uh you've touched on some of them today but already but I mean taking a walk green spaces time you know mental time travel fantasy I listed a few more of these off I mean these might seem kind of uh more modal you know you know top level Contour things but they work right I
mean the data say they work journaling yeah they I mean and they're they're mechanistically we you know we understand the mechanisms that that are underlying the benefits of these tools um they are easy to implement and in not always but for a lot of them they're easy and I think that's in part where their power resides um we are still trying to understand how the brain functions as you will know you've contributed to this I've worked on this a little bit myself too the brain is a remarkably complicated organ and and we still have a
lot to learn um I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomena like emotion play out at different levels of analysis at the psychological level of thinking and feeling but also at the biological level in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on and so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually down the road try to help people manage their emotions through multiple different sources of intervention through the pharmacological level through the behavioral level through the interpersonal level but it's a messy messy space
right now and I think one of the big problems is and this is in part gets to bigger questions about science and how science is done it can be hard to cross levels of analysis and there are multiple practical constraints that become active here so having the you know large enough samples and the right collaborators to look at how different kinds of interventions interact with one another working different populations and so we tend not to do those more complicated designs because they're a lot harder to do they take a ton more money a ton more
time and effort and often times scientists are on timelines and their incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do but big picture down the road I think the the the big questions are about how do these different kinds of interventions interact with one another the good news is though that for any person who is watching or listening who's motivated to manage their emotions right now there are many things you can do to start and it begins step one learning about what these tools are and then starting this process of experimenting with the
tools I don't use that word experimenting lightly I wouldn't Advocate experimenting with with agents that have serious side effects of the sort that some of the biological interventions you articulated earlier do those kinds of tools I think should be used in the context of of medical supervision but a lot of these other tools that we're talking about small changes and how you think and behave and interact with your environments those are things people can start doing right now one of the most common questions I've received over the years is on YouTube in particular is how
to stop intrusive voices and occasionally when people ask these questions they'll highlight that some parent or an ex or something will kind of a judge voice in there and they don't know if it's their voice or the other person's voice but it's in their head and it's very unpleasant um presuming this uh circles back to Childhood traumas or other forms of traumas but irrespective of the origins are there any tools specifically to deal with intrusive thoughts and and thought patterns maybe even OCD like thought patterns um so a couple of of responses to that so
uh first of all I think Step One is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice uh like if you can hear your your dad's voice in your head it's not your dad who is in your head that is a simulation that you are engaging in that your brain is capable of producing and so that I think can be informative for for people who are curious about these inner worlds like I can I'm not referring to auditory hallucinations I'm referring to you know the language of somebody maybe not in their that person's voice but they're
hearing like maybe not you're a bad person but like you're you're never good you're not good enough like it's not enough or or or just feeling like so you know they can't enjoy what the the good things in life because of these intrusive negative voices here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating as I have found liberating from just knowing the science so actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in in shift um they are incredibly normative and so there's research which looks at like how frequently have you experienced an intrusive
thought over the past week or month or two months the proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally High uh I don't remember the exact percentage but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling I will do an exercise with my my classes my undergraduate classes where I will ask them to anonymously uh describe the whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week almost all of them are capable of Genera and some of this these thoughts are really really dark I uh I will often experience a very
dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym you're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now no not concern I'm just fascinated you know I have ideas about why this may be but I'm just I'm just fascinated I don't know that I've had dark thoughts in the gym but I it's interesting here's my dark thought watch out if you see me in the gym from here on so if I'm carrying like a a a heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it
on on the face of another person on a mad oh my goodness it's terribly dark terrible ter a terrible terrible thought so why why am I experiencing that is most likely um the brain's simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing it of course I don't want to drop a dumble on someone I never have and so that's one explanation for why this is so normative it's it's your brain's way of constantly we're there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen and most of these simulations the probability
of them coming to fruition are exceptionally low infinitesimally small but on occasion some of the wacky ones do Escape into awareness and that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal in a pretty aggress you know egregious way or in my case dropping the dumbbell on you know the person stretching on their face and so here's what I find liberating me understanding that this is just how my brain works well that doesn't mean now that I'm I'm something wrong with me as a human being right that I'm morally corrupt in
any way my brain's going to sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts I'm not going to act on them and as long as I'm not acting on them it's all good it's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety before they know what is happening that can often be an incredibly distressing experience like all of a sudden your stomach is churning your your palms are sweating but in research which shows like if you if you communicate to people hey this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance
you face all of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame and now this is I'm a l Lamborghini right I am rising to the occasion my body is doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here that's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks so step one is just recognizing If you experience intrusive thoughts at times again welcome to The Human Condition it's it's a little blip in how our brain operates uh but a lot of these tools have also
been shown to be useful for nipping repetitive thinking in the body so when you're Cur you're curtailing chatter you are also um curtailing the likelihood of perseverating the reason why we often perseverate on on problems we're experiencing is we are we're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives and our brain this wonderful problemsolving organ that we possess it just keeps churning until we solve that problem and that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you until you get there and so you solve the
problem those thoughts tend to subside too I have um two uh two points both of which are essentially questions um I think it's relatively common for people when they go to a bridge or a dam or something very like something very high with the potential for you know essentially a fatal fall where they to jump off to to have the thought you know what keeps me from jumping off when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off and it seems like it's another examp example like it's registering the danger and the severity of the
the consequences it also I realize helps us understand the level of risk that's right you know I think Alex honold who you know famously did free solo to lcap um a remarkable movie by the way just along the lines of what we're talking about you the way the movie is constructed and I think Jimmy chin and and colleagues who made that movie just such an incredible job not just with the cinematography but you know he survives from the very beginning of the movie and yet it's terrify to watch the whole thing and it's kind of
a a hour 45 minute um expedition of exactly what we're talking about uh in that movie as I recall Alex spells out the um the assessment of risk and consequence right you know um you level of risk level of consequence and and how that's a those are key parameters to evaluate and and he's obviously done that for himself and he succeeded and I hope he never does it again only because uh he seems like a really uh delightful person would it would be nice to keep him around um and he's doing other important work now
but the point being that I think it's a it's a very natural thing to evaluate risk and consequence in a way that quote unquote feels dark yeah but it's actually highly adaptive through the lens that we're talking about it um so that's one point well just just to that point if I can interject so um just to to normalize this further for folks so uh my family is very special to me as it is to most people when my first daughter was born we used to live in this house that had this on the second
floor there was a I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass but it was open to the floor beneath and I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper whatever I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then dropping her over into the you know and splat like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the night it's speaks to this point that you are raising that was likely my mind's way of homing in on
a really really important issue in my life that I want to make sure never ever ever happens it is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt or incredibly dark person it's it's how my brain is operating so yeah you're assessing risk and consequence in an Adaptive way um yeah it's it's uh it's fascinating to think about the second comment slash question um I'd love your thoughts on is you know I had this Bulldog I talk about him all the time this Bulldog Mastiff and and he had one default behavior that if he couldn't engage in
it would create anxiety in him and that was he liked to chew right he he liked to gnaw things as a puppy he actually would teethe on bricks in the backyard I was like oh my goodness it looks so painful to me sometimes bite through a lip you know the the Bulldog part of their phenotype is that a lot of the pain receptors have been bred out of their face and so they and I just think oh my goodness I go out there and I you know I was like distraught at how much pain he
must be causing himself it was obviously less than I I perceived but nonetheless this gnawing Behavior was what was so you could just see it it gave him such pleasure right you give him something a CH and just you could just see the anxiety like dissolve out of him I've known a number of people that are fairly high intensity in terms of they speak fast you high density of thought information Etc at least outward who claim that they have got sort of a high RPM internally and I I vary and depending on time of day
and time of year on this but I place myself more or less into that category engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention perhaps we could call it flow but nonetheless engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention feels to me so unbelievably satisfying yeah so unbelievably satisfying I think it's for two reasons one is the the benefits of doing those activities studying learning podcasting doing research you know connecting with someone in a really directed way like getting into that tunnel with them as we're doing now there's a positive feature and then there's
the also the removal of a negative like that those RPM are not humming in the back in the background and I think for a lot of people you know like Ultra Runners and um you know I I know a lot of former addicts that start running marathons and get so and stay sober yeah it's remarkable how physical activity or cognitive activity can kind of take us into that plane of focus that both makes us productive makes us fitter but also relieves this inner voice it kind of like lets the tension out the same way that
I observed Costello letting the tension out through gnawing on these bricks or rawh hides or whatever whatever it was and so my question is um is is there as I'm assuming a relationship between the physical and the mental do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us and it varies between people and we need to harness Andor adjust that level of energy and to do that in ways that hopefully make us a living or you know bring our social relationships more closely together well uh it's certainly plays out in physical context as you're
describing but it also as you alluded to plays out in cognitive contexts when there is this match this sweet spot between the the the demands like you're in a situation that is is actually challenging either physically or cognitively and the the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands so it's a taxing situation but you are able to engage with it completely that is the formula for getting stuck is the wrong word for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states which are for many people the the goal that they have in
their lives both recreational and professionally and so you as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests I would hope and imagine and that's always the aspiration like that must feel really good I mean you talk for a long time with people does it feel like a long time when you're having those conversations no time perception completely changes I I do this for two or three hours a week and then when we do a solo episode sometimes the recordings longest ever yet is 11 hours you know edited down but those can
be anywhere from you know 90 minutes to 4 hours and or a live event um and I couldn't tell you it just seems like time just time dissolves away and when you know that is because you are so absorbed in the moment and meeting the the challenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that that point in time that moment and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the uh the chatter to percolate in in the background and so you know one often you might think like an
ultra marathon or what's the correct term is that it it's called an ultra I think uh we have some uh triathletes here in the room our producer Rob Moore um sitting to my left um we've never done this before but how long is an ultra anything longer than a marathon is that right he's giving a nod he's going to remain silent um anything longer than a marathon is considered an ultra and so that's a lot of time on the one hand to to be alone with your thoughts right and you might think that might just
be grounds for experiencing chatter but it's also a particularly challenging kind of physical feat that you have to devote a lot of resources to meeting those physical demands and right so that can Propel you into a state of flow and then you get some um Runners High to boot some like chemical boost to enhance your mood and all of a sudden now you have people running you know 130 miles I'm exaggerating how long is it oh people I mean people have done 200 mile ultas 150 M Ultras people we have a friend uh you know
again my producer Rob Mo and I have a friend Ken Ry out who um does these sorts of races in the um Gobi Desert um he did it without any prior training in the desert then one I mean there but you know these Ken in particular I'm thinking about right now he's a very high energy guy I would be concerned about Ken and his family not their safety but their sanity if Ken didn't run that much because he's just he's he needs to burn it off he just has that much energy and the whole concept
of energy is something that I'm getting more and more interested in you know as we age we tend to have less energy what is that is it mitochondrial density and function probably but what we're talking about here is a sort of cognitive velocity you know it's not an official term but it's one that I'm using more and more nowadays because I like you know that this um people should try this I'm curious have you've ever done this you sit down to read a page of a book trying to remember the information maybe it's technical maybe
it's not and then you flip the page and you try and read a page of the very same book a little bit faster than you're comfortable while trying to retain the information and I find that there's this like sweet spot for reading where kind of like there's a sweet spot for running where going a little faster sometimes actually feels like it requires less effort you know well it's it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently so um you know I'm constantly reading for my job right if I'm not
reading J articles I'm reading books for you know research and I'm doing writing books and the way I do it is often through an audio form and I will put the speed rate up to 2x I'll often go as high as I can go on the app and I can retain a huge amount of information going that fast but it does require that I'm very Vigilant I'm really carefully attending to that audiobook when I'm moving at that speed and so it's it's a it's not I would do on vacation when I'm trying to consume uh
a book or information for fun uh you know there I just want to kind of just gently go let the let the paragraphs you know kind of pass my gaze and and take it in slowly and almost even Savor Savor the words on the page but but in other context I do Channel up the velocity and it can be incredibly engaging it can also be depleting so when you have conversations that really you find immensely rewarding and you know cognitive philosophy and I love that term is is is you know a 10 out of 10
when you're done do you ever find it a little tiring not immediately um but my personal challenge in life is um I don't transition States very well so it takes me a little while to drop into a state but then I stay there so I'll come out of here still thinking about it and talking about this to myself or with others for for a fair amount of time maybe on the order of you know half an hour to hours yeah um I've learned this about myself over the years it's it's very effective for Science and
for certain things less effective for other areas of life I've learned ways to transition faster but um then I will notice if I do you know record a solo and a guest episode and some intros and stuff in the same week that yeah on on Saturday I'm I'm kind of like my mind feels like it's like white noise and I I've long thought that having I used to call them low cortisol days you know just a day where I'm just kind of like veg and you're more tired probably on those days huh yeah just let
myself reset it was actually in my list of questions to ask you about resetting going into kind of a state of wordlessness and just letting things just spool out um for an hour like not trying to control anything not trying to control anything in the universe except you know basic functions right cooking shows prank reals um these are yours these are these are mine and um like I am you know we often take for granted too that the the TV in front of us is a is another emotion regulation device right and actually people who
are creating programs are deliberately trying to push your emotions in particular directions from the score that accompanies movies and news and the news so I don't want my emotions being shifted in a Direction that is contrary to my goals right before I go to bed I am at a typically High Velocity level throughout the day starting with physical stuff and exercise to the cognitive stuff and the the politicking and the science talks and all that stuff when I'm finally done going through my email at night I want like a good hour of just total mindless
vegetation and it puts me in a wonderfully Serene state to then slide into bed jump into that mental time travel machine like do the fantasizing or saering and then puts me to sleep and so um you know I really value technology there for for helping me do that and I think that is the Counterpoint to having this High Velocity kind of experience I will often when I teach like sometimes I'll teach for like 3 hours so it's you know equivalent to what we're doing right now it is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding and like this
is why I got into this business you are you're you know you're having great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things getting them um to discover interest all that good stuff couple hours later when I come home first of all I need a little refractory period to switch out of work life into home life which can often be challenging on the personal front cuz like my kids are just waiting there well my youngest kid is waiting there my oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing but they
want to play right away and I I need some time just to de impress but then once I do I've got to lean further into that state and so that's that is Shifting and understanding how to shift that's a different kind of shift but it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand how to do that well and I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here yeah it's such an important aspect of life and I do think that everyone would do well to evaluate
fors eles how quickly well not well you know not trying to place a grade on it but how quickly or slowly one transitions into and out of States how much your how much of your thoughts and emotions and um experience you're carrying forward from one context to the next uh I think about that a lot and and I it's something that I I try and work with a lot especially you know arriving home and there's people at home and you you want to engage in a particular way yeah and there there's actually a framework to
help people do this that that I really like and it's interesting because you mentioned the military earlier and there's a a wonderful Cory and it's um I have an experien this too often in in my life where I see something in science that scaffolds on to an a a practice that another organization in this case the military implements to help people number one identify what are there in the context of what we're talking about what are their emotion regulation goals what are their shifting goals and how do you go from having those goals to bringing
them to fruition and so um so in the military like Special Forces before they have complex complicated operations they will often first think about okay what what's our goal what's the outcome we hope to achieve then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal and they'll go around the room and you know the the person in charge will like cold call IC Style on folks like what is the the um potential obstacle and then for every obstacle that they identify they come up with a very specific
if this happens then we will do this and they have multiple if then plans for each of those different obstacles so if we go back to the research landscape there's a technique called whoop have you ever ever heard of this okay so it's whoops an acronym and I promise you I wouldn't use any acronyms but this is a useful one to it's a nemonic to remember something so um how do you go from knowing to doing whoop is designed to help you do that because what it is explicitly designed to do is Target each of
the the places where goal Pursuit often breaks down step one what's your wish what's the thing you hope to accomplish let's be really clear about what that goal is we often don't stop to even think about what our specific concrete goals are okay now that we have that that goal let's let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize what is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that goal and what that's doing is like giving us this motivation now really energizing us to pursue it even further okay we've got the outcome but now let's
get let's get realistic what are the obstacles what are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those goals right so that's why my wish is to to to be present with my family after work the outcome that I hope to achieve is to is to be uh a better father a better husband to have a a a richer social life in those regards now what are the obstacles okay internal obstacles I got plenty right like the temptation to check my email and get to inbox zero before the night is done or I love
my science and I also want to do some of that work or maybe I'm going to get distracted by friends who call all of those things are obstacles that might get in the way of me achieving the goal being more present with my family now the final step let me come up with an if then plan if I'm tempted to check my email after 7 or 8 then I'm going to remind myself about how important it is to to be a dad so I'll do a low reframing if if someone calls after 9:00 p.m. and
I'm engaging in an activity with with my kids then I'm going to politely Decline and you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans for different levels of sophistication what those if then plans do is they they they try to make emotion regulation automatic because they identify a specific trigger if that's the if if this happens and then they pair that trigger with a response if then if then you rehearse that and this way when the trigger occurs boom you don't have to stop and think what should I do how should I behave you've
got the plan and you implement it I've got if then plans for chatter if the chatter strikes then I do distant selft talk and mental time travel if the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work then I go to Nature and I go to my chatter advisers and so I have these if then plans that are linked up with my goals and that's a an important technology that I think we can we can invite people to try to exercise in their own lives to make it more likely that they will achieve their
regulatory goals I love it so whoop spelled w o p the W if I have this correct is uh what's the goal what's your wish what's your wish the first o is the opportunity to energize yourself around achieving that wish AKA motivation that's right what's the outcome you hope to achieve yep great uh okay even better because what you said was shorter the the first o is what's the outcome you hope to achieve um the second o what are the obstacles you can anticipate that's right and in the research space it's mostly been personal obstacles
but you can generalize out as you know uh the Navy Seals do as an example that's the branch of the military I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to now you have me self-conscious about using the word optimize to optimize the way they respond on to um missions and challenges uh this is what they so they're not only dealing with internal obstacles obviously but also ones from the world around them don't worry about using the word optimize um you did it optimally and we'll soon Squatch any um pejorative around optimize
during this episode and then the p in whoop is the plan an if then plan that's right so it's not a vague plan it's a very specific plan so that you know exactly which strategies and steps to implement should a occur B occur C occur that's right and so it's a general General framework which in part is I think why it has so so much value and there's research behind this showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals now there of course will be many situations that you have not developed whoops for and
that's okay because you're going to have all of these other tools in your toolbox to manage those situations on the fly when they occur but then once you encounter new situations and you discover what tools are effective then you learn you create your whoop and then you can become more strategic automatic and effortless with how you engage them down the road earlier you mentioned attentional spotlights and I'm fascinated by this I know that most people hear that we can't multitask but primates again of which we are old Old World primates in particular can do covert
attention if I were not completely focused on you I could focus an attentional spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you but I could also monitor components of the room I can merge those spotlights mhm I can divorce those spotlights that's right but it's very hard to generate three kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once it seems like we kind of have two yeah maybe some people can manage three but I'm betting most people can't manage more than three well I think it becomes um especially difficult to manage even one when you're
experiencing uh an emotional episode mod that is essentially hijacking your attention and attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons so number one as a species we have the most sophisticated attention deploy deployment system on the planet right we have the ability to strategically deploy our attention so we can we can willfully place it on the things we want or yank it away from the things we don't want or we can go we can sacot our attention back and forth when it comes to emotion though we are often taught certain maxims about
how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic because they fall into the uh category of prescriptive advice about magic pills so often we hear for example that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions things that you're anxious about or fearful you should not avoid the problem you should focus on it and there's been a lot of research on this and what we have learned is on the one hand chronically avoiding things is not good it's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical
lives too our health but often times the the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand deploy your attention elsewhere take a break and then come back to it and so this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently my grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in um in Poland uh during World War II had her entire family slaughtered during the war one of these kind of devastating experiences lived in the forest uh for years back and forth all this terrible stuff
family massacred and so forth and growing up she made it out of the war moved to the states I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it and whenever I would ask her questions about this she would ALS she would always say you know don't ask me why or what happened why is a crooked letter that was a phrase she would use which was really interesting because she didn't speak English very well at all heavily accented language but she' mastered this curious ID idiom like why
is a crooked letter in other words nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things your life is awesome you're in a safe place you have a loving family just enjoy life so she's trying to shelter me so she for most of the the time that I would know her during the year she would never focus on this horrific event that she experienced except one day a year there would be this this um Remembrance Day and we'd all pile into a a synagogue and we'd talk about or I would listen
to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would would come come out so she would dose her exposure to to the emotional information turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention she was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her but at other times when it didn't serve her well she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences and a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that this capacity to be flexible in how we wield our
attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really really useful asset and so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing a problem or always avoid it they aren't always true and that often the the magic that surrounds emotion regulation I mean the magic not supernaturally but the beauty surrounds get is in being really fasile in how we can deploy our attention really appreciate you sharing that um personal anecdote um I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the sayings that
were fed um like you know absence makes the heart grow fonder oh yeah well I also heard out ofsight out of mind so which one is it that's right you know and that's why eventually I became a scientist that's right um because you know it's both right and uh you know and you can see this in the fields of nutrition and exercise I mean there are certain core truths and I think the goal is always to get to those core truths and then there's some flexibility around those truths there's margins of error I I love
what she shared you know why is a is a is a crooked letter um it reminds me of the the Bob Dylan Like Don't Look Back you I mean it's an these are profound questions yeah right like how much of our um Consciousness should we use to inforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past and and therefore miss out on the present and creating a a possible future and yet we don't want elements from the past to kind of you know fet into our psyche and then show up in ways that are destructive
so it's it's a it's a complicated dance oh it's I mean our emotional eyes are anything but straightforward but we we do have guide posts to steer Us in how we deploy our attention and so so a couple of common her istics uh that I that I I like to use and describe to folks is so let's say say something bad happens and you divert your attention away you distract with a positive distraction not a harmful distraction and then the problem doesn't resurface keep going like you don't have to go back in time there's actually
I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue so my parents were divorced and um you know I dealt with the the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life and when I think about it now I don't get upset like I understand why it happened I love both of my parents I've moved on I'm well adjusted but my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak and he you know we'll often bring it up and when he does I'm like well we don't have to talk about I'm actually totally
fine this isn't a source of ongoing distress sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives and when that happens you know that's our our our cognitive machinery operating really really well we don't have to go back and revisit every single thing if on the other hand we are trying to get a mental break we're distracting and we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting that is then a cue okay well let's focus in on it and then once you focus
in on it of course there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation so getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance and we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things we can look at it from different perspectives we can focus on the silver lining we can contextualize it so you
have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus but you don't always need to refocus focus on the problem so you want to be flexible flexibility in how you deploy your attention is really the Mantra that that I personally live by based on what I know of how all of this works there are a couple of caveats I want to throw out there when I'm talking about distraction and and avoiding I'm talking about healthy distractions healthy avoidance there are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are are are not productive like substance
abuse we also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding not good so you want to be balanced could we add to the list of um tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy and this isn't one that I default to but I know someone that told me that um she us to default into um overc consumption of of story like of of of audio books not that audiobooks are bad but you know fiction audio books and just kind of when when there was a problem rather than dealing with the
problem you know overindulgence in in narratives that would just kind of consume the mind I guess any Behavior where we're not um dealing with the the kind of uh itch that we probably need to scratch at least for a short while yeah it's probably going to be maladaptive in the long run yeah I mean if the problem keeps like you want to be you want to listen to what your mind and body are are telling you and so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing that's a q you need to engage and deal with
it but a lot of the the experiences we have on a daily basis which may not be positive negative experiences as time moves on sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives and we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks like you have to do it this way that tends not to work out very well most of what we've been discussing today is one's emotional life and experience and chatter and inner narratives with oneself and their environment um technology nature and to some extent relationships but
one powerful aspect of emotions that I think a lot of people wonder about and frankly participate in is this notion of emotional contagion yeah both positive and negative uh I think of like us you mentioned football football's being in Michigan right oh yeah I remember from the movie The Big Chill they like actually go play for that was I think they were all Alum of of University of Michigan it's it's a religion in in the city that I live in that's right is it right okay um and how many people go to one of these
games so we actually it's called the big house actually the largest football stadium in in the country um so close to 110,000 waa that's a lot of people it's a lot of people and we sing in unison and um it's actually I I never really was into football before moving to an arbor and now I embrace it um it helps when you're the national championships which we were Champions which we were last year congratulations we're working we're working on it this year um cool maybe sometime I'll go to a game I'm I'm not a I
don't dislike football I like football I don't think I've ever been to a to a professional football game oh you should we should definitely have you out there it is a load of fun okay I'll I'll Skip One game of the globe troter season to to go to uh Michigan a Michigan game um emotional contagion occurs in football stadiums occurs in digesting news we just had an election so a lot of emotional contagion in essentially opposite directions post elction um and on and on what do we know about emotional contagion it makes sense to me
why we we would be so prone to it but where are the the the sort of rumble strips um so to speak and the ditch on emotional contagion yeah that's a driving analogy the rumble strips are the that when you start to drift towards the ditch yeah uh you know obviously the ditch is losing control in the negative Direction Mal adaptive Direction but like how can we start to identify the the rumble strips in in emotional contagion yeah so emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon um uh emotions can spread within seconds um they tend
to uh we tend to catch emotions more quickly when we're not sure of how we should be thinking or feeling in a particular situation so we often are referencing other people in those instances as a source of information the people around us of course are a rich source of information this is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently right we're trying to learn something about how to respond and we know it can have these cascading effects both in everyday life in both the positive and the negative Direction but also um you know
in in in the digital world we see these emotions that can spread really fast too so it's a it's a very powerful phenomenon it's one I'm often very attentive to when I come into the classroom like you're trying to you tend to not want to have a negative mood spread through an audience when you are teaching to them and so you're sensitive to that kind of certain kinds of displays or tones that might convey that kind of emotional response um and I think it's something that we need to be incre increasingly aware of especially when
we're working in in any kind of group context like when you're working on a team it is really important to keep the team at the level of emotional tone that you feel if you're the leader or even a just a member of this team that is committed to it you want to keep that tone at the most productive level because if it dips below or above that can sabotage how um how well you perform and there's a lot of research on that both from directing my laboratory for a good number of years and from teaching
and from certainly the podcast which is a small team of seven of us um I'm familiar with what you just described and um also for being a camp counselor that's probably where I learned it being a summer camp counselor when I was in college yeah that if you get um two or three kids that are like really pissed off about what you have to do over the next couple of hours it can send everything and you have to nip that in the bud right away you have to repair that and I'm I'm very very attentive
to this when I am in group context especially when I'm leading those groups those teams those labs like really making sure that that kind of negative Mojo does not does not spread do you think nowadays um on University campuses there's a more of a tendency for students to raise their hands and say like let's spark an issue um and I'll just preface this by saying a a guy that I worked for as an undergraduate um a physiologist he told me that when he was teaching during the Vietnam War era he would be in the middle
of a lecture about cold thermogenesis physiology his area of expertise and someone would just stand up and say what about the war in Vietnam and I remember him telling me that story I thought that's outrageous like really he said oh yeah all the time and you would have to stop and have to acknowledge it and let them have their expression I thought well that's wild now we we're living in times when um that's not all that unusual uh in the University classroom and on campuses so and online so you know it's interesting that that previous
example from the 1960s now very relevant again so um do we let people emote or you know as a summer camp counselor someone pulled me aside and said you these kids have a lot of energy my only advice is be a channel not a dam something I never forgot yeah it's very useful in other areas of life too be a channel not a dam yeah um so how do you be a channel not a dam when people are having um really have the need to uh externalize negative stuff and it holds the potential for for
emotional contagion well you know I haven't experienced firsthand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom but obviously a lot of my colleagues have and we see this playing out on lots of universities these are very turbulent times turbulence activates and we know going back to an earlier part of our conversation when people experience strong emotions are often motivated to share those emotions with other people that often takes the form of vocalizing them and that can elicit contagion throughout and so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are are making their way
through people groups and societies um what should you do in those circumstances well I think it depends a lot on on the context and and what the nature of the emotional response is and are there you know is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful and you know there are differing views about when you should intervene and how to do it I think in general though you bring the um the Playbook of always wanting to kind of validate like your emotional experience is a genuine response that you are having to the situation in in most
cases yes we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicitous way but I think in a lot of cases the kinds of phenomena we're talking about like these are just honest emotional reactions these are really difficult times and I think um trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really great first step I mentioned to you before we started talking that I I had a this wonderful um conflict mediator come to one of my classes recently to talk about how do you not just engage with emotional groups but how
do you engage with emotional groups at the same time that are having emotions because of one another and the approach that she has found to be be very successful in her career as a mediator is to ask folks to train them not to enter conversations to try to change each other's minds but to enter those conversations with a a state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest and in first and foremost trying to just understand the other group's position I haven't done that myself but it it it strikes me as a as a pretty viable
approach to a first step to having conversations about difficult issues and you know it it makes me think about how in the lab we often define wisdom so wisdom is this concept of it indexes how well you are able to deal with social situations involving uncertainty like we don't know how these social situations are going to play out and wise individuals are skillful in navigating those circumstances how do you define wisdom what are its features well a few of its core features are humility recognizing that I don't know everything a commitment to perspective taking putting
myself in the other person's shoes um dialecticism recognizing that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing and we need to be aware of that and then also a general orientation towards the social good like doing good in the world and it strikes me that entering these difficult situations with that kind of mindset is potentially productive for um for bridging divides I love that and um what an appropriate area for us to round up in I think that right now clearly things are are tense but um what you've talked about today and uh
at least from what I understand of how the human mind works in and around emotions our own and observing others and potentially contagion is that these tools can really help us do better uh that they're not just research papers they are uh implementable uh chunks of knowledge and in some cases such as what you've discussed today real gems uh so for that reason and for taking the time out of your research schedule I mean your researcher teacher your dad your husband you do many things you make it to football game somehow also into the gym
uh where you don't drop dumbbells on people's faces intentionally um because you realize the dire consequences you you're just doing a ton of amazing work in the world I'd heard about and read chatter some time ago and yeah I just think it's it's incredible what you've brought to people's attention that has always no pun intended been on and in their minds yeah you know and I'm sure there are others in your field um but I want to specifically thank you on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching for paying so much careful research attention
and public education attention to this thing that we call chatter and the inner voice and emotion regulation because this is really what makes up our lives it's as important in my mind certainly as cardiovascular health or any other aspect of mental or physical health so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching thank you so much please come back again because your research is evolving we'd love to hear about the next steps we'll definitely provide links to your work and to the upcoming book which comes out in February of 2025 do you want to
tell us the title of the book that's right it's called shift managing your emotions so they don't manage you great and presumably it's available for pre-sale now or soon yeah it's it's available and um it is uh it is essentially designed it is written to um to kind of just open the open the book on what emotions are what we often get wrong about them and what are the tools that we have to re them in and uh you know my hope is that IT addresses this big problem that I think we've been facing for
a while just how to Wrangle these emotions that sometimes get the best of us great well uh I am personally going to order a copy by pre-sale I insist on that I don't take free copies I I I bu books cuz I'm a Believer in books so thank you for writing shift and come back and talk to us again well thanks for having me it was an incredible conversation so I appreciate it feel the same way thank you so much thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Ethan cross I hope
you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did to learn more about Dr cross's work and to find links to his previous book chatter as well as his forthcoming book shift managing your emotions so they do not manage you please see the show show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us please also click the follow button for the huberman Lab podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can
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