But it sort of seems like it's, I can't control it.

And I think, you know, um, in, in some ways y- y- by saying you never wanna think this again, the first thing is don't make it so hard on yourself.

Like, the fact that you have these negative memories bubbling up from time to time, or even more than from time to time on a daily basis, that's a very, very common experience.

We're constantly searching to come up with stories to explain our lives, and when we have a story to make sense of our experiences, we start thinking about them a lot less.

But if we don't have a really good story or explanation to account for what we've gone through, our mind keeps on trying to get us to that place, and it will, as a result, often bring those experiences to mind.

And so-

Could you give me an example of what you mean by writing the story? Is it, is it like I'm creating an ending to it?

Basically, the instruction would be to, to write about your deepest thoughts and feelings about what happened to you.

Interesante.

Es un descargo de responsabilidad importante.

Siempre internamente.

Pero volviendo a los rituales, en primer lugar, creo que es muy importante reconocer que nuestras culturas nos dan rituales.

Hay cosas que desarrollamos por nuestra cuenta.

Tengo uno antes de ir a dar una presentación.

Repito en mi cabeza lo que me decía mi entrenador de lucha en el instituto y es un ritual que me ayudaba a sentirme mejor.

Es un baile.

[laughs]

You know.

And so what happens is you feel great about your relationship, super tight, but you leave that conversation just as angry or anxious or sad as you were when you started, if not more.

'Cause all you've done is reactivate the negative stuff in your head So the best kinds of conversations when it comes to chatter actually do two things.

First, you do give the other person an opportunity to express what they felt to a certain degree.

It is important to connect emotionally with the other person, and they need to learn what you went through.

But at a certain point in the conversation, they ideally nudge you to think about the experience from a different perspective.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about, speaking of energy, is how your physical environment affects your inner narrative.

Tell us about him, how he regained his purpose and what this means for the concept you've been thinking about a lot, that of perspective shifting.

Well, Vic Stretcher's daughter was diagnosed with a heart condition, a serious heart condition at birth, and it ultimately got the best of her when she was a young adult.

It sent Vic into an absolute tailspin.

You'd imagine it would send any parent, any loving parent into chaos, losing a child.

He grappled with this deeply and was really at his wit's end.

In Shift, I tell the story of one morning he's at his small cabin on Lake Michigan, one of the big lakes near where we live, and he decides to just jump in to a kayak and start paddling.

not knowing when to ever turn back or if he would turn back.

We all have emails like that, the text message, the phone call coming in, and we have to break it down in really hard moments like that.

Could you share a little bit about that?

Yeah, so my, uh, grandmother and grandfather, um, you know, fortunately survived the Holocaust.

But growing up, I remember my parents telling me about their story, and as a, as a little kid, um, you know, it, this was like a bedtime story of a Steven Spielberg heroine and hero surviving the evil forces that were persecuting them.

So what happened to my grandparents has happened to many.

Tragically, uh, they grew up in Eastern Poland during World War II.

Within a very short period of time, their, their life was turned upside down.

Their family was slaughtered.

It's part of the human experience

Yeah.

Most of the people I work with, they understand how to do the equivalent of a mental pushup or sit up.

But you go to a gym, there are 50 pieces of equipment.

There aren't just pieces of equipment, but there are ways of threading those different exercises together, and that's something that folks are, are never, never really taught.

So that's one piece that people benefit a lot from.

Another piece is h- is, you know, goes back to Solomon's paradox, and I'm sure this is something that you've experienced in your own, um, you know, um, practice as well.

Being able to talk to someone who has your best interests in mind, who has knowledge of the terrain you're, you're operating under, as well as an understanding of how these tools come to bear.

[laughs]

Void in Florida.

[upbeat music] Hello, Book Bite listeners.

My name is Ethan Kross.

I'm a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan and the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

I'm also an author.

I just finished my first book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.

I'm excited to share with you five key insights from the book.

You can say, "Ethan, it's not that bad," or, "Dude, bro, whatever, you're good." That you call it distanced self-talk is a very effective way to get through to yourself, in essence.

That's right.

You can use your name, you can use a second person pronoun, you, to try to work through a problem.

And what we see happening when people use language, these linguistic shifts to change the way they ref- to refer to themselves, it alters their perspective.

You're in this kind of coaching stance.

You're much more patient and compassionate than you would be if you're thinking about your circumstances the way we typically do in the first person, I, me, my.

Language is a really interesting window into how we are thinking about ourselves.

Can you say more about that?

Mm-hmm.

good sign.

That means, I mean, you've just used your inner voice.

So we use language often to keep information active in our heads.

We do it when we're memorizing a phone number, when we repeat it in our head, we do it when we repeat what we need from the grocery store and countless other things.

That's one basic function that our inner voice serves, but also lets us do lots of other things like When I'm preparing for a big presentation, I will walk around the neighborhood and I will simulate in my head what I'm going to say.

I'll go through the talking points in my head.

What do you think about that?

Mm.

Right? Touch develops in the womb.

Think about what is the first thing we do with babies that are born into this world screaming their head off.

We engage in skin-to-skin contact to soothe them.

And yet I think we often overlook the potential of the senses to help us manage our emotions when we're struggling.

And I'll may- maybe I'll start with a personal experience, actually.

I've been listening to music my entire life, uh, and it's, has always been a fundamentally emotional experience.

Hmm.

No, and it's something that I struggle a lot with.

You and many others, and we'll get into the difference between what healthy anxiety and unhealthy anxiety are in our conversation today.

But anxiety, like all negative emotions, when it's experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely, and it doesn't last too long, it can be really, really good for us.

When I think back to all the different presentations I've given over the course of my career, I there's one that stands out to me.

It was a total flop.

It was a total flop because I experienced zero butterflies in my stomach the evening before that engagement.

So there was no cue inside me that was effectively saying, hey, maybe you should focus on what you're gonna talk about tomorrow to make sure you're prepared.

I love them both.

[laughing]

One of the things [laughs] one of the things that I've learned during that time is that a key to managing one's emotions effectively involves understanding how to harness this mysterious force called the voices inside our head.

Now I realize some of you may be asking yourself right now, "What is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voices inside our head?" But I want to point out the elephant in the room, that, you know, if you've just asked yourself that question, you are talking to yourself.

And that's totally okay, because the vast majority of us have a voice inside our head.

Here's a scientific fact that I absolutely love.

We spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not focused on the present.

Between one half and one third of the time, our minds, they are drifting away.

[laughs]

And how do we get out of that?

that?So here's the good news, you can get out of it.

More good news, if someone has told you about a tool that worked for them but it didn't work for you, no problem.

Because what we have learned from the science is that different tools work for different people in different situations.

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

I think of managing your chatter a lot like becoming physically fit.

So most of us have goals to be physically fit for different reasons.

I'm curious, why is that such a bad idea? And if it is, what are some communication frameworks or tools you can share with us that we can use to acknowledge others' negative feelings without just saying, "Hey, get over it"? How can we help them process those feelings?

Sometimes we need that distance to better understand what's really going on for us and come back with a clearer head.

What a lot of people fail to recognize because of the way we tend to simplify things, is that you can either approach things or you can avoid things.

And so I'll give you a couple of examples.

Sometimes when I am, I am provoked, maybe it's an email that comes in, maybe it's a really difficult conversation, I have found that taking some time away, a few hours or even a, a few days, immersing myself in work, something that really consumes my attention and is engaging to me, and then when I come back to the problem, one of two things happen.

Number one, there is no problem, right? I've realized that as time has passed, the problem in the grand scheme of things was totally insignificant.

Yes, I was triggered in the moment, but it took the sting out of, out of that problem.

It's no longer a big deal.

Walk me through a WOOP.

Hmm.

Let's plug in some of these shifters.

We'll talk about how you could do that.

But if, if, you know, I think recognizing that sometimes our, our instincts don't serve us well.

I mean, worry is a great example of this, right? So worry was, was the topic of my first book.

A lot of people worry because they think it's going to help them.

There's something that feels really secure about worrying, right? Because I...

Yeah.

(laughs)

You know, like, "I don't like the way you're talking to me.

I, you know, I wanna do it this..." I don't say that out loud.

I smile out loud, but in my head, right, I'm having that kind of conversation.

So, so the point here is another thing your inner voice helps you do is control and motivate yourself.

The fourth and final thing I wanna flag here, to me, I describe this as the most magical feature of our inner voice.

Um, your inner voice helps us make sense of this messy world that we live in.

And why is this such a predominant form of self-talk for people?

Tell me his story.

So this is a story of Jerry Linenger who was working on the Mir Space Station, and he's doing some data entry when all of a sudden he begins to hear the space station alarms begin to siren.

He stops entering the data and goes to investigate, and as he moves down the portal and turns around the, the corner, he begins to see fire and smoke.

His first instinct is to go find a respirator.

So he begins to swim through the air, trying to find a respirator.

And as he's swimming through the air trying to find this respirator, all sorts of random thoughts begin to fire in his mind, some of which are quite irrational.

For example, one thought was, "Open a window." Not something that you either can do or want to do in outer space.

Uh, paint me a picture of what happened that day, Ethan.

Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers, which leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to your understanding of your health, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one. They've got a team of expert physicians that then takes that data, puts it into a simple dashboard, and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. And right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. Yeah, I just want to kind of drill on that point. This is something I've been fascinated by. I think psychotherapy kind of put me on this trajectory, but your entire life's body of work has kind of been an obsession of mine for the last year or so. I think psychotherapy was part of that trajectory. Um, understanding feelings, I, I, I don't think that I was fully connected with the things that I was feeling in life, um, with my emotions, with sort of the felt sense of stuff. I'd be able to explain it rationally, but I don't think I was necessarily actually embodying it and, and tapping into it. And, um, one of the, I guess, s- like, odd quirks of certain people's psychology, one of which is mine, is that if I hear you say you g- you're gonna live longer, and you're going to have happier relationships, and you're gonna have all of the rest of this stuff, like, the sort of, uh, external outcomes, those are compelling to me. But I do think that it's worth lingering just for a moment on the fact that your moment-to-moment experience of your life is almost exclusively determined by the emotions that you're feeling. 90% of the time, you're feeling an emotion, and if that is something which when intensity and duration is too high and something that shouldn't be there or has been there before or isn't serving you, um, th- this isn't a dress rehearsal. Like, this is it, you know? This is the one life that you're going to get. And to be honest, nobody is going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying, "He suffered in silence." No one is going to give you that. This is the one shot that you've got to actually have some fucking fun, find some enjoyment in the biggest and smallest things that you do. And I just think that that point is one that often gets overlooked, because people are so used to negotiating with the world and its difficulties, uh, a- and, and building up resilience and discipline and all of those things. Like, hooray, great, good, good for that. You're gonna be less at the mercy of bad stuff. But, like, you also should be enjoying this, because it's gonna end pretty soon.

Oh, well, hopefully not that soon, but, um, but completely agree with this notion that our emotions are, are what makes life worth living, you know? We are this emotional species, and they are just fundamental to who we are on a moment-to-moment basis. Um, you know, when I think about the most salient experiences in my life, like, they're all emotional experiences. And so, look, I think there are reasons sometimes where we need to learn how to, um, endure difficult things, right, delay immediate gratification in order to achieve bigger long-term goals. But we wanna balance that, right? We don't wanna find ourselves overcome with negativity all the time, too big, too long. This, this, this detracts from the experience of being human, and I think that's what you're getting at here, right? Like, we, we want... If, like, if we find ourselves, um, living emotional lives that we don't wanna be living, then that is a cue to intervene, and I think most of us have that experience at times. So like, I, I just got back from, from talking about this book for, like, two weeks all over the country, and like, probably the most salient take-home point, people are suffering, people are struggling. Like, you name it, whether it's like, wildfires, or infidelity, or par- parental stress or loneliness, like, lots of different curveballs that life is throwing us, you know? It's like this batting machine that keeps on firing away curveballs, and, and it just doesn't stop, and we've gotta figure out how to, how to hit them. Like, we've gotta figure out how to deal with those barrage, that barrage of insults, and there are things that you can do. Like, I get asked all the time, do I ever struggle with my emotions? Yes, I am a human being, like last time I checked. Of course I do. But what I am really good at is the moment I get triggered in some way, anxiety, sadness, rejection, whatever, envy, I have tools that I go to immediately. I don't have to stop and think, "Uh, what should I do?" And at other points in my life, I did stumble through it all, didn't quite know what to do, but now, because I understand how these work, I go right to them. They don't work every single time. 60% of the time, the first plan, the first three tools that I'll automatically implement, they get the job done. What about the other 40%? Well, I go deeper into the toolbox. I go to layer on a few other tools. That, that may nudge me up to 80%. What about the other 20%? You know, well, there's always room for, like, prayer. I'm, you know, I'm kidding (laughs) but-

Mm-hmm.

... that's a cue that this kind of strategic avoidance may not be working and you should approach or do something else. So attention can be an incredibly powerful tool. Um, you know, in the book I tell the story of my grandmother who, um, you know, was my hero growing up. She, she, you know, evaded the Nazis in Eastern Poland for several years and she came over to the, the States with nothing, built a wonderful life. And all I wanted to do growing up was hear her tell me stories about how she did it, like how she managed to survive. And she would never tell me, never talk about it. She didn't want to go there. But she would allow herself to think about these issues, the, the war once a year during a remembrance day ceremony. She lived a really great life, but she avoided thinking about the problem. She would dose it. She's an example of how being strategic with your attention works for some people. But sometimes we don't have the luxury of looking away for a variety of reasons. We gotta stare the problem right in the face, and we can't even, you know, pop our headphones on sometimes when we've gotta look at that problem. And so in comes perspective. Like we could change the way we think about our circumstances when we're looking at it. Now, this can be sometimes a very tricky thing to do. Um, one of my favorite recent experiences with a, um, close friends happened, uh, several years ago. We were driving home from dinner one night and a buddy of mine was like just really struggling with something at work. It was really bringing him down. He was telling us about it in the car and his wife looks over to him and says, "Why don't you just focus on the positive? Just like think about the bright side." And he pauses and he looks at her and goes, "Yeah, easier effing said than done." And it was just, like I smiled, I wrote about it in the book 'cause it was so powerful, which I think captures this experience that all of us have at times. We know, we totally know that yeah, if only we could think about this a little bit more constructively, everything would be better. This is the basis of the intervention that you just went through or that you're going through now, CBT. How to change the way you think, to change the way you feel. But it's not always easy to do that. And so how can you do that? Let's go back to distancing, because this is where getting some psychological distance can often be a difference maker. This capacity to step back and look at our experiences from a, a zoomed out perspective can often be very, very helpful. And the cool thing here is that there are many different tactics that exist for reflecting on ourself and our circumstances from a distance.They don't come with a user's guide. But once you know it, like these are my go-to, I call them my psychological jujitsu moves. So, all right, mental time travel. I'm struggling right now, I'm really feeling whatever, fill in the blanks. How am I gonna feel about this next week? Next month? Next year? All of our experiences follow a n- um, not all, nearly all of our emotional experiences follow a nat- um, the same time course. Temporal trajectory, if you wanna geek out with me. Here's what happens. Something happens, boom! Emotions go up. Then as time goes on, the emotion fades. Depending on the experience, some go way up, some a little bit, some take longer, some recover more quickly. But nearly all of them follow that trajectory. We lose sight of that when we're in the midst of it. When we're in the cauldron, we zoom in on the awfulness. We forget that as time passes, things will settle down a bit. When you jump into the time travel machine, "How am I gonna think about this? How am I gonna feel tomorrow? Next week? Next month? 10 years from now?" It speeds up. You don't have to wait for time to pass because you get to the, "Oh, it's five years from now. What am I gonna think about this argument I just had?" What that does is it highlights the fact that what you're going through is, is temporary, it's unstable.

[laughs] Yep.

Like, we, we are connected now.

So that's an important part of coping with negative experiences, establishing those kinds of social and emotional connections.

The problem is if all you do is vent about a problem in a conversation with someone else, you leave the conversation feeling really close and connected to the person you just spewed it all out to, but you haven't done anything to actually work through that experience, to cognitively reframe it, to put it in a, in a different light that just might actually allow you to work through it in ways that muffle it.

So, so there's a place in our emotional lives for both of those processes.

But you also touched on one other really important topic.

I call it a myth in Shift.That we always have to confront our feelings, and that avoiding them is always toxic.

You have some examples of, of people actually doing this consistently as a routine, like, uh, like Novak Djokovic.

Oh, we're euphoric." But th- and that happened in this weird, strange, you know, possibly unethical now experiment, but this happens all the time when we have an experience that we're kinda not sure how to make sense of and we have to look to other people.

So this reminds me of a story with my, uh, with my oldest daughter, and a couple of years ago she, she transitioned to a new school.

It was a lot more demanding academically than the school she was in before, and I go up into her bedroom one night, and I notice she is, she's physically distressed.

You know, she's really getting worked up.

She seems very, very anxious in a way I've never seen her experience that emotion before.

I go, "Sweetie, what's going on? What's wrong?" And she goes, "I-She's like breathing heavy and like, "I don't know what's happening.

Like, I'm feeling these things in my stomach, and wh- what's going on?" And, and so then that's my opportunity to get in there and help her interpret this uncertainty.

This is not forever

Mm.

Right? Touch develops in the womb.

Think about what is the first thing we do with babies that are born into this world screaming their head off.

We engage in skin-to-skin contact to soothe them.

And yet I think we often overlook the potential of the senses to help us manage our emotions when we're struggling.

And I'll may- maybe I'll start with a personal experience, actually.

I've been listening to music my entire life, uh, and it's, has always been a fundamentally emotional experience.

Hmm.

And that's kind of the focus of, of, of the new book.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the big challenges of the human condition, is the fact that we have this gift, which is this capacity to experience different emotions.

And I'm a proponent of the belief that all of the emotions that we experience in the right proportionsTend to be functional, tend to be useful.

So there's a functionality to anxiety, to anger, to sadness, to envy, to guilt when those emotions are triggered in the right proportions, and we could get into how you figure that out.

But the real conundrum is they're often not triggered in the right proportions.

So rather than just benefiting from the anxiety, oh, okay, I've got a really important presentation coming up.

I'm experiencing some gastric distress.

Mm-hmm

Yeah.

And I'll give you a couple of examples of how that might work. So first of all, sometimes when we get triggered by an emotion, it feels so amazingly big and we just want to dive in, but if we take some time away from it and then you come back to the problem several hours later or even a day later, time has taken the steam out of the emotional response, and this is a well-known finding that as time goes on, the intensity of our emotions fade. That's true of most of our emotional responses. They get triggered, they jack up in their intensity, and then as time goes on, the intensity goes down. So- so if you take some time away by avoiding strategically and then return, you're coming back to the problem and it's not as intense and it's a lot easier to work with as a result. One of my favorite studies that demonstrates how being strategic in this way, being able to both approach and avoid emotions can be useful was done by a psychologist named George Bonanno who was working at, uh, Teachers College at Columbia right around the time that the 9/11 attacks occurred. And what he did is in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, he was really curious about what are the factors that allow people to be resilient in the face of- of a collective tragedy? And so what he did is he brought participants into the lab who were living in New York City, and he had them engage in a task where on some trials, they were explicitly told to express their emotions powerfully, so really immerse yourself in them in a certain sense and just show them to someone else. And on other trials, they were told to suppress their emotions, so really conceal these things, try to push them away to the point that no one else could even see that you're experiencing these things.

So we talked about one internal shifter, right, which is our, our senses. Any other internal shifters that we should keep in mind?

Attention is another one, and this is, what attention refers to is you've got this spotlight in your mind. It's where you're focusing it. Sometimes you wanna focus on the thing that's bugging you because you wanna work through it. Sometimes you wanna point it elsewhere. You wanna get a break, you know, have a distraction, then come back to it. If it's a positive experience, sometimes focusing on the source of positivity can help you amplify that state. So the key is you wanna be flexible in how you wield that attentional spotlight. And then the final internal shifter is what I call a perspective shifter. The idea is sometimes you can't afford to look away from something. You have to stare right at it, and so we can also reframe it. We could think differently about it, and one key to doing that is this ability to step back and look at the bigger picture, get some distance from the problem, and once you get some distance, it's often a lot easier to reframe how we're thinking about things. It can be hard to reframe when you're standing like right in the middle of the fire, so to speak. So there are lots of different ways you could shift your perspective. One, one of my, my favorites, not to say this is for everyone, that would violate what I genuinely believe, no one-size-fits-all solutions, but one tool that works for me is called distanced self-talk. It's, uh, trying to work through a problem but using my own name to try to think it through rather than the first person "I." So all right, Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation? That gives me some mental space. It helps me think about myself like I'm someone else-

And so what am I doing wrong there? 'Cause I'm using music to kinda move my emotions around, but it seems like it's not shifting.

Well, I wouldn't say it- you're doing something wrong unless it's counter to your goals.

And let me unpack that for a second.

So one really important message I hope to convey in this book is that all of our emotions are functional when they are experienced in the right proportions, not too intense or not too long.

What do I mean by that? How could anger or sadness or envy ever be useful? Well, if you look at what those emotions are doing, they're often being triggered in particular situations where the way they are motivating you to think, feel, and behave can actually be adaptive.

So let's take sadness as an example because you brought up the kinda Chicago, Adele genre of songs.

We typically experience sadness when we experience some loss that we cannot regain, so the loss of a loved one, we don't get a job, we can't ever get it.

Um, explain this idea of emotional contagion and why it could be a powerful tool for changing our emotions around.