How To Quiet Your Thoughts

Ever want to get your thoughts to just shut the f*ck up?! Ever want to escape from the constant stream of negative talk? Now you can! Tune in for the best scientifically-proven tools to quiet your monkey mind and attain greater inner peace and happiness.

A powerful and deep conversation with Dr. Ethan Kross on the inner critic and how to quiet it. Ethan is the author of Chatter: The Voice in our heads, why it matters and how to harness it. He is one of the world’s leading experts on managing the thoughts in your head. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory.

Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, and Anderson Cooper among others. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science.

Topics covered:

What is the internal voice? What is its purpose?

Why is learning distanced self-talk important?

What are some of the benefits of distanced self-talk?

What differences are there between using first person, second person vs. third person pronouns in self-talk?

How does rumination (dwelling on the negative past) enter into the topic of the inner voice?

What are some of the best tools we can learn to quiet the chatter in our own head?

If you’d like to listen to this episode on Podomatic, click here.

If you’d rather read through the transcript, it has been included below for your ongoing growth, education and happiness.

How To Quiet Your Mind w/ Ethan Kross

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. This is Dr. John back with the latest episode of the Evolved Caveman. And I am thrilled to have with me today, Ethan Cross. And I got to tell you, I start a lot of books. There are a few that I finish and Ethan has offered as authored one of the few books that I’ve recently read cover to cover, which is partly why I’m so excited to have him on the show.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And the book is Chatter, the voice in our heads, why it matters and how to harness it. And he is one of the world’s leading experts on managing the conscious mind. He is an award winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked psychology department and it’s Ross School of Business. He is the director of the emotion and self control laboratory.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed On CBS Evening News. Good morning, America and [00:01:00] Anderson Cooper, among others. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine and Science. Welcome, Ethan.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Thanks for having me. I’m delighted. I’m delighted you like chatter. You work so hard on a book for so long, and the hope is always that people do to do derive some meaning from it. So it’s wonderful to hear that it had that effect, and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as well.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Thank 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: you so much. So let’s start off by talking about, or if you would, share that story that you start the book off with, because I thought that was a great intro into chatter, into the voice in our heads. So the story 

Dr. Ethan Kross: was a personal one about One of my one of my potent experiences of chatter and it happened about 10 years ago.

Dr. Ethan Kross: My colleagues and I had just published a paper that ended up getting a lot of media attention. We published a, an fMRI study where we showed that the sting of getting rejected by someone else you love. At the brain [00:02:00] level has some features that resemble physical pain. And so the idea that, it, it hurts right when you’re dumped, so to speak what we suggest in the study that there’s more, that’s more than just a metaphor.

Dr. Ethan Kross: There’s some physiological basis for that idea. And 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: the metaphor 

Dr. Ethan Kross: being sticks and stones, right? That’s right. Like cultures around the world use the language of physical pain to describe how they feel when they’re socially rejected. And so the logic behind this study was that because we are a social species and because our social connections are so vitally important to our survival, we’ve essentially evolved not to use the phrase of this podcast, we evolved in a way where we encode social distress.

Dr. Ethan Kross: As painful in some ways. So obviously getting rejected isn’t the same as getting knocked in the face or punched in the gut, but there does seem to be some overlap in the nature and the pain that accompanies both kinds of experiences. And so we showed some [00:03:00] evidence for that in this study. We didn’t expect it to get a ton of attention, but it did.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It was really exciting. I was teaching an intro class. I remember on the psychology of love and I checked my email halfway through the lecture and there was a like a producer from, I think it was CBS evening news was, can we get you on the show tonight? And, I did that and it was fun.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And about a week later as the kind of attention weighed down and life began to get, come back to normal, I went into my office and I checked my mailbox and in, it was a hand addressed letter, which I usually don’t get. Usually it’s emails, but I took the envelope, I opened it. And then it was a pretty.

Dr. Ethan Kross: ugly threatening letter filled with drawings and slurs and all sorts of unpleasant material. It was really chilling. I showed it to a few other people and they all suggest, all right, you’ve got to, you’ve got to go to the police and see what they have to say. And I did. And they attempted to be comforting in suggesting that this is not something you [00:04:00] really have to worry about.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s very unlikely that something will happen, but just to be safe. I remember them telling me you should drive home a different way from work each day. Which, I they said this to me and I met them at the stair and I said, I live four blocks away from my office. This was at the time, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: I live different place now, but there’s only so many routes you can take home when you live that close. And so for the next couple of days, I was really to use the clinical term, a wreck. I was pacing my house into the early morning hours. I just had my wife and I had her first child.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I’m thinking, Oh my God, what did I do? Why did I get into this mess? Why did I do the interview? What if they do this? All of the kind of hallmark features of getting stuck in a negative thought loop or what I call chatter, right? My mind’s racing over and over again, playing out all the worst case scenarios.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And and I was in that state for a couple of days managed to get out of it. And it ended up being a really important spike on my personal timeline, [00:05:00] because on the one hand, it provided me insight into a phenomenon that I had been studying for over a decade at that point, but never truly experienced myself.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And so in a certain sense, I ended up for those two or three days and nights. Being like a subject in one of the studies we would run. And then it also, the experience gave me insight into a tool that we’ve since done a lot of research on that was really helpful for me in helping me get out of that experience.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And and I continue to use that tool which I’m happy to get into if you like, or we could save it for later, 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: but let’s save it for later. Just, that’s, and I appreciate you sharing that story with me because I think it is universal and I’m glad that you went through that. Not well, I’m not glad you went through it, but I’m glad that you shared the story and the experience because I think every one of us have had that experience where that internal chatter that, negative thought spiral just is like a runaway train and we have a difficult time managing it.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: So [00:06:00] let’s save that tool for the future. For a little bit later because that’s when I really want to dig into because I’ve since shared that with a number of my clients. But let’s back up just a little bit and go over what self talk is or that internal voice is and how do we get it? How does it develop?

Dr. Ethan Kross: So when I use the term self talk I use this term to refer to our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And our ability to do this, I think is a tremendous asset that sets us apart from lots of other species in chatter. I talk about, I describe self talk. As a type of Swiss Army knife of the human mind that allows us to do a number of really remarkable things.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So I’ll give you a couple of the big ones at the most basic level your ability to talk to yourself, your inner voice, if you will that lets you. Keep nuggets of information active in your head. So if you go to the grocery store and want to remind yourself, Hey, what do I have to buy?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Bread, scallions, garlic, I’m projecting, I’m telling you what I’m having for dinner [00:07:00] later. And it’s just actually but when you’re repeating information active in your head, if I asked you to like, repeat your phone number silently in your head that’s self talk, right? You’re using the voice in your head, using language to keep a nugget of information active.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And that’s critical to our ability to navigate this world, that ability. We also use this inner voice or self talk to do lots of other things. So before I give any major presentation, I’ll go for a walk around the neighborhood and I’ll go over the talking points in my head. I’ll simulate word for word often what I’m going to say.

Dr. Ethan Kross: In my head. I’ll then get to the end of the presentation and in my simulations, the end of the presentation is always met by an amazingly obnoxious audience member, and I’ll hear that I’ll hear the question that they’re going to ask me, and then I’ll go over. What I’m going to say. So I’m playing out the worst case scenarios so that I’m prepared for that.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Amazingly important tool. We use self talk to control [00:08:00] ourselves. 10 o’clock at night, you go to the fridge and you shouldn’t eat the ice cream, but you want it and you say, Don’t do it. Don’t take the, don’t do it, Ethan. So that’s another instance of self talk.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And then one of the most interesting ones is we use language to make sense of who we are. So things happen in this world that are unpredictable. They’re unexpected. And People are meaning making machines. We’re constantly trying to create stories that, that, that give us a sense of why something happened and how it affects us and we use language to create those stories and that often happens silently as well.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Okay. So this is just a question for me, for the rest of you, you can just. Ignore this question. How does that meaning making self talk relate to the default network? I know that’s what you were talking with Dr. Parvizzi about but as you’re saying that, I’m like, wait, I thought the default network was part of that meaning making system, but that wouldn’t be conscious self [00:09:00] talk, I don’t believe.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Well, 

Dr. Ethan Kross: so the default network is like most brain networks, it supports a variety of different types of logical processes. And what we know is that when people are reflecting on themselves and their own lives, it tends to activate this default network, which is. For those of you who are interested this group of brain regions that compose a network that’s along the middle of the brain, the cortical midline and that network tends to become more activated when we’re thinking about stuff that is relevant to us and our lives, as opposed to.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Stuff relevant to other people or or when we’re doing things that don’t involve self reflection. So that’s how the default network plays into this. It’s not synonymous with self talk, but it certainly plays a role. 

Dr. Ethan Kross: In that process. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Oh, thank you. That was just, yeah. Out of professional curiosity.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: So what are some of the differences between people’s internal voices? Because I’ve taught, you mentioned self talk as being [00:10:00] verbal internal use of words. I’ve also talked to people who think a lot more in terms of pictures rather than words. Yeah. 

Dr. Ethan Kross: So we could, we, you summed up the two main modalities of our inner lives right there.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So we, we can think in terms of words or in terms of pictures and chatter, the book mainly deals with the province of words and language and the way it manifests. But when we’re experiencing chatter, which often takes a verbal form, it’s not exclusively verbal. Sometimes there are images that accompany it on the other end of the spectrum.

Dr. Ethan Kross: There are cases in which people are getting really revved up about stuff, but based solely on imagery. And a lot of the tools that I talk about in chatter. That are useful for helping people manage their nasty inner voice, if you will, are likewise effective for helping people grapple with painful imagery and disturbing imagery.

Dr. Ethan Kross: But the book is really about the verbal side [00:11:00] of our mental lives. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Okay. And I think that’s when I talk with clients, the vast majority of them are struggling with the internal self talk. Yeah. So the pictures and one of the tools, which I loved in your book was this idea of immersed self talk versus distanced self talk.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: So let’s get into a little bit about how we manage that inner critic or that damning. Self talk. So can you share a bit with us about that? 

Dr. Ethan Kross: Sure. And this is one of my favorite tools. We’ve done a lot of work on it in our lab, a lot of experiments. I also, I use this tool in my own life quite a bit, so I can personally vouch for me too.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yeah, and it’s funny, I think a lot of people do without knowing it, which is also, I find so interesting about it. So what is. Immersed versus distant self talk. So most of the time when we talk to ourselves, when we’re thinking about our lives, we’re thinking about ourselves in the first person.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I, what am I feeling? Oh my God, what am I going to do? What we’ve learned is that people can also shift how they relate to themselves when they’re talking to themselves and they can do [00:12:00] it by using their own name and the second person, you to refer to yourself. So already thin. How are you going to manage the situation?

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s a very simple, very subtle shift. You’re going from I to Ethan, right? But what we see happening is that shifts our perspective and it allows us to start giving ourselves advice. Like we would give advice to another friend. One of the things we’ve learned over the years through lots of research is that we are.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice. You can see this in some of the quote unquote, most wise leaders of all time. Think of King Solomon and many others. And I tell the story of King Solomon, also the story of Abraham Lincoln. These are people who are known for being wise, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Being able to deal with the curve balls that life throws at them yet when it came to their own lives. They were terrible decision makers. They consistently got themselves into trouble, experienced chatter and so forth. And so what we’ve learned is that [00:13:00] language provides us with a really efficient way of getting us to.

Dr. Ethan Kross: to relate to ourselves like we were relating to another person. And that makes it much, much easier for us to see the bigger picture and give ourselves sound advice that often nips, chatter in the bud once it starts activating. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Okay. And thank you for that explanation. I think it’s wonderful.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I’m a, I’m an emotion geek. I think emotions interact. With every thought we have, every word we speak, whether or not we’re aware of it. And, we know that the negative emotions, the uncomfortable emotions tend to narrow our focus and limit how well we can think, or, how much we can think outside of the box, whereas the positive emotions allow us to think more creatively and innovatively.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: When I think about those inner voices in the first person versus third person, I don’t tend to use the second person that much in my head. That first person voice seems to me to be almost if I’m getting emotional and I’m getting aroused, that first person voice seems to [00:14:00] be Often immersed in a negative emotion, so if you’re losing your shit, so to speak in clinical term, it’s, Oh my God, I can’t take it anymore.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I can’t deal with this. And so there’s that frantic NIS or any it’s infused with a negative emotion. Whereas if I go to, Hey, John, relax, you’re okay. We’re going to find a way through this there. It almost feels like this, the functional adult coming out in me and. It’s a calm, it’s got a calm tone of voice to it, which it’s funny because there’s no voice at all.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: It’s just in your head. But do you see any connection like that? 

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yeah, absolutely. Negative emotions tend, I call it, they zoom us in on our problem and that makes good sense from an evolutionary point of view, right? If there’s a problem in front of us, what you want to do is focus on the problem, not avoid it.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Zoom in really closely. The problem is once we zoom in, we narrow our attention. We often get stuck and we lose our ability to then step back to zoom out, see the bigger picture, which often [00:15:00] has solutions for what we’re dealing with. And it often makes it very clear that as awful as what you’re experiencing right now is.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’ll likely get better. There are alternative ways of managing it. And so the real challenge is, so you figure out how can you zoom out? How can you take that bigger picture, broader perspective? And that’s where giving yourself advice can be so helpful because when the problem’s not happening to you.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s much easier to think flexibly about the situation. Now, one of the things that I find really interesting about this tool, this technique is it manifests itself like differently in different people. So some people, when they start using their name to talk to themselves, they give themselves consoling advice.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s going to be okay. You’re, you’re good at this. You’re a good person. So I’m affirming other people when they describe. What’s going through their head when they go from I to using their name that they’re activating their like high school coach, tough coach, and this is true for me most of the time too.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s get your act together. If you don’t [00:16:00] stop wimping around, just you do this, you’ve done it before. And so the voice can take different forms just a coach in your life, like sometimes a coach can be really there are times when the coach’s job is to put their arm around you and support you and give you that boost.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And other times it’s stop messing around, get to it. And we see that people are in, people are ba basically simulating that on their own. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Yeah, it feels to me like the difference in the third person is you could either go self-compassionate. Or you can go no nonsense. That’s right.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Almost kick yourself in the ass kind of voice, like John, pull it together. And that’s right. And different situations 

Dr. Ethan Kross: are going to require different kinds of instruction. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And it’s interesting though, because I think most of the men that I talk to, when I go, when I try to teach them self compassion a lot, Kristen Neff, a lot of them struggle with it.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And I think we’re really used to that. No nonsense. Almost inner critic voice, but it has a harshness to it. And they say that [00:17:00] works for me. It’s okay, great. And here’s another voice that you can use that, research has shown to be more effective often, but I’m not saying you have to eliminate this first voice.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I’m just saying, here’s another gear you can shift into if this first voice isn’t working for you.

Dr. Ethan Kross: That’s right. And I think, we could distinguish in critic coach and Cheerleader, if you will. . Like there, there are different, the coach can be really no nonsense and assertive or very just, encouraging and supporting.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And I think there are likely individual differences in how receptive different people are to those different kinds of voices. But I think there are also. different circumstances that lend themselves to hearing those different voices. For example, there are instances in which just affirming someone’s worth and value isn’t going to ultimately be functional, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: If if there’s a job that needs to get done and you’re not doing it, simply saying it’s okay to not do it. That’s still a good 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: person 

Dr. Ethan Kross: that may make you feel better. But ultimately in terms of the task. [00:18:00] And sometimes it’s really important task that could be the difference between, getting fired and not getting fired, like you’ve got to do it, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: So you need more in those instances, but then there are other situations. I think this is these other ones are where self compassion and in the way that it’s classically defined really does make sense. There are instances in which you’re just beating yourself up for no reason, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Incessantly. And they’re giving yourself licensing yourself to, to, to just. Take a break from that and recognize that you’re a valuable, worthy human being that deserves care, I think can be amazingly helpful. So it’s about figuring out when to activate these different voices. And this actually highlights an important theme of the book.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Chatter. And also of my research, which is what we’ve learned is that there are a variety of tools that exist for managing our mind, managing our inner voice in chatter. I talk about 26 different tools. People often ask me, tell me the tool, the one [00:19:00] tool that I should use all the time. And I dodge the question.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Yeah, 

Dr. Ethan Kross: that’s I just don’t answer it. And the reason is because I can’t give you one tool because I think we’ve evolved to possess different tools for a reason. Different tools work in different situations. You would never expect a a fantastic carpenter to build an entire home with a hammer.

Dr. Ethan Kross: They couldn’t do it. They also need a drill and a screwdriver and lots of other things that I don’t know how to name, right? So we evolve these tools for a reason and life throws lots of different curve balls at us. And I think it’s really remarkable how many tools we, we actually do possess to manage those unruly pitches, so to speak.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Yeah, and I agree with you 100%. I told my clients that my goal is to get as many tools as I can in your tool belt, because there’s going to be some instances where your favorite one, two or three tools don’t work very well for you. So you need to have others that you can rotate into and continue to try so that [00:20:00] you have.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: You feel you’ve got options, which gives you a feeling you can manage this, which can calm you down. And then there’s going to be some situations, I think, where the emotion does overwhelm you, and you’re going to have to just go with it. 

Dr. Ethan Kross: That’s right. I think what we’re really pushing towards in, in the field and science is trying to understand, trying to develop this mechanistic understanding of.

Dr. Ethan Kross: What motion, what emotions are and how they work and how they can be modulated. We’re not there yet. We don’t have every answer to that. So the questions that surround that phenomenon, what we, what I think we’ve got a pretty good knowledge of are the individual tools that people have at their disposal, what they are, how they work.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yeah. We’re identifying new tools, 26 is a pretty good number. What we haven’t yet figured out is how those tools combine. For different people in different situations. So that’s what we scientists are actively doing research on, but research takes time. It’s slow. And until we have those [00:21:00] definitive answers, I think the challenge for your clients, listeners, and anyone else who suffers from chatter is to.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Start doing some of the self experimentation on their own and start to figure out, Hey, what are the tools that really work for me? Make a difference. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And so what are there other benefits of using distance self talk that we missed?

Dr. Ethan Kross: So other, so it helps people regulate their emotions.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And their chatter. So we’ve we’ve done studies which show that when you’re under stress you don’t ruminate as much because you’re giving yourself your reframe. It helps you reframe how you’re thinking about stress, less as a threat, more as a challenge that you can deal with that makes people feel better.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It also helps them actually perform better under stress. So there’ve been a variety of different kinds of studies where we see that people give better Speeches, they like public speeches when they prep for those speeches in the third person versus the first other experiments have looked at the kind of first impression you make.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So like on a date and that could be a stressful circumstance for many and people [00:22:00] who psych themselves up in the third person as opposed to the first to make better first impressions. We’ve also done work connecting distant self talk to wisdom. What is wisdom? Wisdom is a term we use to refer to a person’s ability to successfully navigate the dilemmas of social life, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: So our social lives, our lives in this world with other people are filled with all sorts of uncertainty. And they’re always, there aren’t always clear answers for how to resolve situations. And Wise people tend to be better at navigating those kinds of uncertain situations, and there are certain features that characterize being wise or reasoning wisely.

Dr. Ethan Kross: One of them is what we call intellectual, having intellectual humility, recognizing that there are limits to your own understanding. Hey, guess what? You may know a lot, but you don’t know everything. Adam Grant just wrote an entire book on intellectual humility. Think again. It’s a really important [00:23:00] feature of making good decisions.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Another feature of wise reasoning is recognizing that the world is constantly changing, right? There’s lots of things happening. Circumstances change all the time and being able to recognize that can be really useful in trying to figure out what to do next. And then also perspective taking.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Taking on other people’s perspectives when you’re trying to figure out what to do. And we find that third person self talk when you present people with. life challenges, it makes people reason more wisely about those scenarios. So they’re more likely to recognize the limits of their own knowledge.

Dr. Ethan Kross: They’re more likely to perspective take, they’re more likely to recognize that things may change in the future. So that’s another important outcome associated with that that 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: kind of self talk. Fantastic. Thank you. And what about, are there other ways to to gain distance in your perspective? Can you give us a I remember the fly on the wall.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yeah. So for visual stuff [00:24:00] thinking that a lot of people, when they think about painful memories. Or even anticipate negative future experiences, we tend to have some visual imagery that accompanies those events. So I can think back now to getting that scary, threatening letter. There’s an image I have of my living room and, where I was in it and so forth.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And people’s memories are malleable with respect to how we play them in our heads. So you could play your experiences from different angles. We could think about our experiences. In a, from a first person point of view. So replaying an experience through our own eyes, like reliving the event in that moment.

Dr. Ethan Kross: But we also know you can also see yourself in an event from a third person or fly on the wall perspective. So imagine you’re flying while peering down on the scene, seeing yourself in it. And so another way to distance is when you’re thinking about a really painful memory, which often replays in the first person, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Take that step back in, in your mental imagery. See yourself from a distance. That’s one distance. It’s another kind of distancing tool. [00:25:00] You can distance by doing something called temporal distancing. So if you’re dealing with a really nasty, acute stressor, something that’s bothering you, think about how you’re going to feel a day.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Or a month or a year later, what, what engaging in that mental simulation does, it gives us some it’s manip, it’s changing distance through time, right? So rather than thinking about how I feel now, how am I going to feel in the future? And oftentimes what that does is it makes clear that as awful as what you’re experiencing is right now is.

Dr. Ethan Kross: it’s temporary, it will eventually fade. So most, this is not true of all experiences but most acute experiences do eventually, come down with time in their intensity, time heals. And so engaging in that, Kind of temporal distancing or mental time travel can really bring that idea to the forefront of your mind, which can be alleviating.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And I do this all the time. Like I’ve got a big stressful talk coming up [00:26:00] or or deadline. I think, all right this stinks, but how are you going to feel next weekend when it’s over? And inevitably just knowing that. There’s an end to this. It gives me hope, makes me feel better. So those are a couple of things you could do on your own.

Dr. Ethan Kross: You could also write expressively about your problems. When you write about your problems you become the narrator of an experience. And when you’re narrating the experience you’re telling a story and that story has a character in it. And you become the character that can give you distance.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So those are things you could do on your own. The other very powerful distancing tool I talk about in the book it has to do with our relationships and other people. Other people can often be a really powerful tool for distancing us. And I would, I’d be, I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, because I imagine you do this a lot for your clients in the sense that people come to us.

Dr. Ethan Kross: With issues that they’re grappling with and they’re zoomed in. They’re immersed. I think part of what really good social support [00:27:00] involves is not just Listening empathically and letting the person express their emotions, which is important to do to a certain degree, but also helping them step back, helping them see that broader picture so they could reframe what they’re going through in ways that ultimately let them get through 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: it.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that, listen, listening empathically I think validating what they feel, but there’s a kind of a time frame that I put on that because I don’t want to just sit there and wallow in negative emotion. I want to get past it. I want my clients to get past it. And, I like humor.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And so I like injecting humor into these things. So one of the things I’ll do is I’ll have them overlay music, like big top circus clown music over their traumatic memory. Something like that. Something that makes you chuckle. Yeah. It takes the seriousness out of it. Okay. So I have to 

Dr. Ethan Kross: say Go ahead.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s funny you say that. Sorry, that’s my east coast. This is I’ve discovered in over the years of collaborating with people from all over the country that, that when east coasters get really [00:28:00] excited about stuff, they interrupt, they just want it. And that’s a sign of excitement. So forgive me but humor is so powerful and it’s actually an understudied regulatory tool.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: It’s brilliant. I put a really high value on humor, being easy to smile, easy to laugh. And I think many men have gotten really far away from that, especially adults. There’s research showing that our sense of humor falls off a cliff about the age of 23, which is when we go into the workforce.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: That’s so interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. Got to serious up. But the other one that I like, there’s a couple, one is If you’re having, like this disagreement or you’ve been yelled at by someone and it’s, you’re wallowing in it or you’re replaying that memory, have their voice come out of their rear end.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: That’s a good one. And you can change the voice too, but, I’ve never grown up past the age of 12, so that one really appeals to me. Yeah, I it’s funny 

Dr. Ethan Kross: when you said that, I thought, oh man my, my 11 year old’s gonna love that one , try that on. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: That’s my target audience.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And , the other one that I love, I remember I had a client come in who was really anxious. Really [00:29:00] highly anxious, socially anxious, and I asked him just to describe the anxiety to me, and he said, it’s like. It’s like standing in a hurricane or a tornado and I was like, wow, that’s a hell of a description.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And I said, so here’s what I want you to do. I said, so I understand like everything’s swirling around you. There’s chaos. It’s craziness. You can’t catch your breath. What if you just take a few steps back so you’re in the eye? of the hurricane. So now things are still swirling around you. It’s still crazy, but there’s calm in the eye and you can catch your breath and you can begin to think.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And once we got there, I said, so now I want you to imagine that you’re the weatherman reporting on the hurricane. So you’re a safe distance away from that. And that is 

Dr. Ethan Kross: very much. And if 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: we keep going right now, you’re in the, you’re in the TV station, you’re the news anchor talking to the weatherman, talking, reporting on the hurricane.

Dr. Ethan Kross: That, that is a, that’s a wonderful embodiment of the idea of distancing and what we do in our studies and we find to be really useful. It’s [00:30:00] being able to step out of the storm and maybe that in your case, it involved going even deeper into it, into the eye. Often it involves stepping out entirely.

Dr. Ethan Kross: But I think it’s, I think we’re unique in our capacity. I know we’re unique in our capacity to do this as a species. And this is the corrective mechanism that evolution has provided us with to deal with the emotional system that governs how we experience the world. Like our emotions, the good ones and the bad ones.

Dr. Ethan Kross: They’re all really useful. You would not want to live a life without anxiety or sadness or anger. It would not be a productive life. So I often, I, and I spent some time talking about this in the book that I give an example to, to drive this home of there are.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Children that are born each year, incapable of experiencing physical pain. And what happened through a genetic polymorphism and what happens to them [00:31:00] is they actually end up dying young because pain is, they die young because they get their hands stuck in the fire, but don’t have a cue that says, Hey, pull it away.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Pain is that cue with anxiety, right? Like a little bit blip of anxiety. That’s a cue that tells me, Hey, I got to start preparing something. I got to do something. My attention is needed here. Anger tells me that, Hey, there’s a potential threat in front of me. I fight or flight, right? So these negative emotions, they do a lot of good for us, but their course in the way they operate.

Dr. Ethan Kross: They flood us with these chemicals that that motivate certain kinds of behaviors, but they’re often not fine tuned and this ability to step outside ourselves, get perspective for these different mechanisms. I think of that as a way of fine tuning our emotional responses. And that of course goes beyond just chatter to.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Our emotions period but it’s vital. And and I think the better we are at using those tools the better of the lives we live will [00:32:00] be, 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: It strikes me that there’s a relationship to time in our inner self talk in the sense of I’ll often explain to clients, you’re familiar with past present future and Philip Zimbardo at Stanford added positive and negative to that.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: So you got positive past, positive present, positive future, negative past, negative present, negative future. And, like a lot of depressed clients will spend a lot of time in that negative past where their inner self talk is taking them there over and over. And then I had an entrepreneur, a very successful entrepreneur who spent, he said 90 percent of his time in a positive future, which was very rewarding for him, was a pleasant place for him to be.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And immediately, as soon as he said it, I was like, that’s great. And, What does your wife think about that? Because I knew damn well that she would be annoyed because he’s always going to, even when they’re together, he’s going to be somewhere else mentally. And so I think a big part of this is the metacognitive abilities or that ability to pull back and [00:33:00] think about thinking or be aware of your thinking to say, What is it I want to be doing, or where is, does my, where’s my mind trying to take me, and do I want to be there?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yeah, I think you’ve got it right. We often hear that we should be striving to be in the moment, be in the now. As much as possible, or even all the time, according to some. And I think this is 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Not 

Dr. Ethan Kross: sure we can do it all the time, unless you’re a Buddhist monk or even a Buddhist monk.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I think it’s, the brain wasn’t designed or did not evolve to be always in the moment. And I think we’ve taken a message being in the moment can be very useful in certain contexts, but our ability to travel in time in our head is, it’s a, it’s an asset, our ability to travel into the past, learn from our mistakes, experience nostalgia.

Dr. Ethan Kross: These are wonderful experiences. Likewise, planning and simulating for the future. This is how spaceships are created, right? Being able to imagine future possibilities and so forth. [00:34:00] And so I think the challenge that we all face is not to figure out how can we be more in the moment or be in the moment all the time?

Dr. Ethan Kross: The challenge we face is how to become better mental time travelers. How can we figure out how to travel in time fluidly? Go to the past. Sometimes even the negative past, we need to learn something, but go there without getting stuck. We often get stuck and that’s the big problem we face, right? We’re stuck and we can’t get that mental time travel machine back on track.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And that’s what I think a lot of the tools that I talk about help us do is travel in time more effectively in our heads, allowing us to use this tool that we have, which is our brain. More effectively. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And I think the intermediate step between those two is awareness, because to me, if you’re not aware that you’re stuck in the negative past, for example, you can’t implement a tool to get the hell out of it.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I completely agree. I think a lot of people don’t have a vocabulary for the chatter, right? Because we [00:35:00] don’t give, we don’t talk about these things often, and often until you get to my class or my talk. Colleagues in my psych class in college, or, if things aren’t going as well, maybe they come to your office, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: So we don’t, like I’m trying to think I do talk to my kids about how they’re feeling and things of that sort, but you don’t go to a cocktail party and be like, Hey, what’s streaming through your head? Although interestingly, Facebook asks us. To tell us that when you log in so I think just knowing about what chatter is, what does it mean to ruminate or worry?

Dr. Ethan Kross: Why do we do it? And then what are the tools that exist? Just having that metacognitive understanding is a huge initial victory in the quest to make people happier and more productive. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And that’s why I love your book. I love the movie inside out. Because I think it begins to give the movie begins to give a younger generation vocabulary to describe what is going on internally.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And that’s more, I would say emotion on the emotion side. This is your book is more on the [00:36:00] cognitive side. But I think they’re both necessary pieces. To begin to have the language to even talk about what’s going on, because I remember there was a study some years ago that showed that on the emotion side, that most women on average can name 17 emotions, men, it’s about eight.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And when I read that, I got a little bit annoyed. And that’s what led me to write my book 15 years ago to just lay out some of the basics of emotion and mood to, for me to become less of an emotional idiot. Because I, I had a PhD from Cal in psychology and I still was emotionally at an emotional deficit.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I think you’re probably overstating your state. I don’t know, but but I can ask my ex wife. Touche, but it also speaks to, it speaks to, this phenomenon that we call Solomon’s paradox, which is we are, we’re much better. At doling out the advice and taking it ourselves.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So I bet [00:37:00] even back then, like you were an incredibly skilled clinician slash friend for folks, depending on where you were in your training at that time but may have struggled. With your own self and emotionally in those instances. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And that’s why most of us get into psychology, right?

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: But think, you have colleagues, I imagine that we’re really book smart and really intellectual and could read all about, tools and emotions and psychology, but still. Weren’t that good with people still didn’t have very good emotional self management skills. Can you think of some people like that?

Dr. Ethan Kross: It doesn’t take much time. I think, here’s one way that I like to think about how this works in a very simple way. So I love simple. Me too. We’re talking about emotion regulation or self control by controlling your emotions. And there are really two pieces to doing that.

Dr. Ethan Kross: One is you’ve got to have tools. And we’ve been talking about tools throughout this discussion. And a lot of chatter is about the different tools that are out there, things you could do on your [00:38:00] own tools in our environments, tools in our relationships. But then there’s another piece, which is motivation.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And so you can be, you can know all the tools that exist. If you’re not motivated to use those tools, you’re not going to use them. So you need to have both motivation and access to those tools. The flip side is also true. You can be super motivated, but if you don’t have the tools, you’re not going to take the motivation anywhere to drive the point home.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Let’s just think about someone who’s, who wants to. To get in shape, right? So let’s say you’ve got someone who’s really motivated to get in physical shape, but they don’t know what exercises to do. They don’t know how to eat, their efforts. Aren’t going to be that effective. The flip side is you can have someone who desperately needs to get into shape.

Dr. Ethan Kross: They know exactly what to do. They shouldn’t be eating potato chips and ice cream and they should scallions. Again, projecting refrigerator. You [00:39:00] like scallions. I do like scallions. And if you’re not motivated to do the right things when it comes to your first, you’re not going to do it.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So you really need both of those features. I think when it comes to chatter most people are already highly motivated to manage it because it is such a painful experience. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: The other thing that’s interesting to me is I would add practice to that. And I awareness and practice, but I see, it’s interesting.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Themes in your practice as you go through time. And so there’s some younger clients that I’ve had like teenagers or college students, usually they were dealing with drug and alcohol issues. And so we’ve got to get through that first. We get through that. They go away for a few years, they come back and when they come back, they’re like, okay, I’m serious to do the work this time.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I’m like, I’m really, I want to apply the tools. And so they already know the tools from the first time around, but they didn’t really put them into practice. And now the second time around, it’s okay, if you’re going to do the work, let’s do the work. Like I need you to practice these tools [00:40:00] daily. And then when they start to put them into practice on an Because I think what we’re trying to do is get these tools habitual and unconscious.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: So we do them without even thinking about them. That’s the ideal to me. 

Dr. Ethan Kross: That’s absolutely, that’s the goal, right? Make making them automatic. So when I experienced chatter, I default instantly to. Distance self talk, mental time travel. Those are my go to two steps, right? All right, Ethan, here’s what you’re going to do.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And think about how you’re going to feel a month from now. I can implement those in a matter of seconds, and this is not exaggerating. Like they go pretty 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: quick. No, I understand. And so on that mental time travel, if I can kick in two things, one is one of the questions I have my clients ask themselves is, Will this matter in five years?

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And you can change it. You can say 10 years or the history of the universe or whatever. But the other one I heard, so there was a motivational speaker that was saying, when you talk about this, situation right now that’s causing you so much trauma [00:41:00] when you talk about it five years from now, you’re going to talk about it and describe the whole thing in two sentences with very little emotion.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Yes. Yes. That’s Oh yeah. These are tiny shifts and with big results, exactly which changed The way we are mentally representing these really painful situations. And you just augment how we’re thinking about things. A fancy term for that as a mental representation. I hate using that term.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So it’s natural hazard but those, the nomenclature, yeah. Those tiny shifts can make. A difference. And the temporal distancing stuff, are you going to care about this in five years? That’s not something that I think is immediately intuitive to people to to do that exercise when they are really struggling in the heat of the moment.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I know about it because I’ve read the research, I’ve done some of this. So I it’s at the tip of my tongue, I can do it. But before we, I was aware of it. Why should I start thinking that way? [00:42:00] Educating can make a difference. Sorry, 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I’m getting excited. Let me ask you a question. Was it when you think back, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years when you were first exposed to some of these tools, like the other question I’ll ask, I’ll have people ask themselves is.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: Is this a matter of life and death? Because I think some of those negative emotions, I know negative emotions isn’t, the proper terminology because they’re all valuable, but when you’re getting overwhelmed by a negative emotion, if you ask yourself, is this truly a matter of life or death? And the answer is going to be no, the vast majority of the time, then you can start to relax yourself, your physiology.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: But when you first got exposed to some of these tools, Did you immediately put them into practice repetitively, or did it take a few iterations a few times for you to get exposed to them before you thought maybe I need to use this more. I’ve 

Dr. Ethan Kross: only used. I, when I’ve used these tools is when I’ve had occasion to use them.

Dr. Ethan Kross: And I think earlier on in life, when I was [00:43:00] first exposed to these ideas, when I was in college and graduate school. I had. Fewer needs to use these tools. I’ve never been hugely chatter prone. But I was definitely I’ve experienced more chatter as I’ve gotten older kids, family, that kind of stuff.

Dr. Ethan Kross: There’ve been more opportunities more chatter triggers, work, high stakes kind of stuff early on. It was pretty carefree. And I don’t, and this is a, this is, I think an important point so that. Let’s say you’re just feeling pretty good and you start talking yourself in the third person doing mental time travel, you wouldn’t expect that to necessarily make you feel better in those instances, because there’s nothing negative that you’re trying to get distance from.

Dr. Ethan Kross: So when these tools are useful is when you have occasion to use them to go back to the analogy of a builder. Like you use a hammer when you have a nail to pound, you don’t just use a hammer all the [00:44:00] time. And some tools are harder to use than others. I think, the reason I use distance self talk and mental time travel, those are two out of 26 from the book there.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Those are probably the two of the easiest things to do right away in the moment, finding people to talk to, I spent a lot of time talking about in the book, how to find the right person to talk to about your chatter. Cause some people, a lot of people, even those who love us can make it worse or just not help at all.

Dr. Ethan Kross: But I’ve got a really good group of, I call them chatter advisors, people I can turn to whenever I need them for support. And. They’ll always take my call, right? I don’t have to set up an appointment to talk to them, but not that there’s anything wrong with that. But but that takes more effort.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s harder to do it. Meditation. I learned how to meditate when I was five years old. Wow. I’ve used meditation at times throughout my life. I use it very infrequently though. It’s, there’s a, like a lots of [00:45:00] startup costs, right? I’ve got to find 15 minutes to do it. And I know there are quicker ones, but And then often the 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: chatter increases when you start meditation.

Dr. Ethan Kross: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s a practice that you really have to go at. Meditation is interesting. I think meditation does a lot of different things and it’s fascinating to me that that we’ve, our ancestors, if you will, thousands and thousands of years ago. Stumbled on this tool that can help us with chatter.

Dr. Ethan Kross: I think it does help. There’s science to show that there’s a lot of different things. And I think one of the things we’ve done more recently in the past 20 years and laboratory science and neurosciences figured out the mechanisms that underlie what met what makes meditation work. And once you know the mechanisms that make something work, You can get in there and just tweak those mechanisms in ways that are much more efficient.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Give me an example. Yeah I’ll give you an analogy. One, one example is distancing, right? One of the things that does mindfulness does is it helps you get some distance. You realize through [00:46:00] practice that your thoughts, aren’t you, Hey, you can look at a thought and play with it without identifying with it.

Dr. Ethan Kross: You know that’s what a lot of these distancing tools help us do, right? They give us some space from our, Ethan, what are you dealing with? You shouldn’t be worried about that. You’ve got more space. So it’s another way of activating that mechanism. Another analogy is to think about. Throughout time, we’ve gotten medical treatments from the forest, right?

Dr. Ethan Kross: From plants and, these cocktails that are sometimes quite elaborate tonics that have medicinal features that make us feel better. Once chemistry developed we figured out how to identify the compounds within those. Complicated tonics that, that were the active ingredients and then what happens once you identify those active ingredients, then you go ahead and you make a pill that, is often pink or purple.

Dr. Ethan Kross: It’s very little. You take it and poof, you’ve got the feature. You don’t have to go into the forest and get all the different things and boil them and so forth. And in a [00:47:00] certain sense, I think that’s what modern psychology is. Doing with some of these ancient practices that can help like rituals and meditation and mindfulness practices saying, okay what makes them work?

Dr. Ethan Kross: What’s the fluff. And then what’s the real active juice. And then once we see where the action is. Can we give people that ingredient in a very efficient way? And think we’re learning how to do that. 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: I, Ethan, I thank you so much for your time. I’m aware of our time and that it’s drawn to a close here.

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: And I feel like we could keep talking for hours and I greatly enjoyed this. So thank you very much. And again, for those listeners, check out the book chatter. It’s an incredible book. And one of the reasons I love it is because it is so heavy on tools. So thank you very much for writing the book as well.

Dr. Ethan Kross: Thank you. And this was a blast. I totally lost track of time. So 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: hopefully 

Dr. Ethan Kross: we can 

Dr John Schinnerer, Marriage Therapist: do it again. Sounds great. All right. And that’s it for this episode of the evolved cave man. Tune in next time. Be [00:48:00] sure to like rate and review. Thanks everybody. Bye bye.