One Simple Trick To STOP NEGATIVE THOUGHTS & Control Your Mind! Dr. Ethan Kross & Lewis Howes

so what does chatter do like so let's say you go to the opposite of the spectrum you're filled with chatter i think this is one of the big problems we face as a species why because here are the three domains that that chatter targets i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome us we're talking about chatter you're one of the leading experts psychologists in the world talking about controlling the conscious mind and i've always said as an athlete from ohio the great state of ohio that we'll get back to that in a little bit i've always said that uh our thoughts really dictate the outcomes of our life it's the beginning stages of what we manifest what we attract what we create what we alchemize yeah if we think uh more positive more vision based higher level thinking thoughts we usually alchemize that in our real world we manifest it and if we think a lot of negative consuming thoughts darker thoughts we typically attract that type of environment as well now this has been talked about as world positive thinking negative thinking but now you're bringing in some amazing research talking about the voice in our head and why it matters can we talk about is it really possible to control the conscious mind is that even possible or are thoughts always going to be coming in and out without our ability to control them yeah well um it's a great question to to kick us off and um so here's how i break it down we can't always control well we can't control the thoughts that pop up in our head so we don't know why i'm going to be walking down the street and all of a sudden just have a really dark thought about this or you know a positive thought about something else we don't have control over the thoughts that pop but what we do have control over is how we engage with those thoughts once they surface okay and and we have a lot of control there we can choose to immerse ourselves in the thoughts and you know if we immerse ourselves in the positive thoughts that can be great like when i'm you know i'm out here in l.a i'm away from my kids and my family i'm walking down the street i'm thinking about my my youngest daughter who tried to facetime me this morning at 4 30 in the morning yeah and i it it brought happiness to me just thinking about how how cute that was and you know is inappropriate but cute at the same time i immersed in it you know i can also choose to distance myself from my thoughts or or challenge my thoughts so there's a range of things we can do when thoughts pop up so and that's where the control comes in and you know as we were mentioning a little bit earlier we don't get taught in a systematic way how to manage our thoughts in this way and i think that's a problem and that's one of the reasons why i wrote the book if someone if someone is asking themselves you know what i think i am are we our thoughts or our thoughts something that don't define us uh well you know i think this is another important aha that we can we can we can give because thoughts are are mental events they're things that pop up in our head whether they define us or not depends on whether we allow them to define us and what does that look like when we allow it to we can be strategic about that so allowing myself to to think of myself as someone who uh i'm going to give you all the positive features here right so someone who has um is is um is intellectually curious is a good friend has humility i allow those thoughts to define myself i think that they are fairly accurate portrayals of who i am those thoughts are constantly being tested in my life right because i'm getting feedback when i interact with people when i go on different kinds of events and people you know say things like that informs whether that that understanding of who i am is in touch with reality i think we want to have that but other kinds of thoughts like self-defeating ones i'm not good enough you know i this manuscript was rejected or i s i really put my foot in my mind i mean i put my foot in my mouth all the time like it hopefully won't happen during this conversation but you know if i allowed myself to be defined by my by my foot in the mouth faux pas i would be i would not be a happy individual so i'm i'm there's agency there there is a a choice to to attach to some cognition some thoughts and not others so is it about uh attaching an identity to the thought is it saying this is who i am and being and where does identity play into that then is that allowing okay i am this as opposed to this is something i think but it's not who i am yeah so it's about you can you can um internalize or externalize different kinds of experiences happen to us right and so people who tend to be more optimistic as an example they'll internalize the positive but externalize the negative what i mean by that is they'll take responsibility for positive things that are going on but they'll shirk the responsibility for the negative well it's about the situation now you could do that to an extreme right so let's say you know you're at work and and things aren't going well you do need to experience some negativity it's not always someone else's fault like sometimes it is going to be your fault and owning that can be quite useful one thing that i often tell people is that negative emotions aren't something that we should be trying to avoid we evolved the the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason they provide us with really useful information that we use to manage ourselves and one of the best examples of this is um there are children who are born into the world each year with the inability to experience physical pain so it's a genetic feel i punch you in the face you don't feel it you don't feel physically i stab you with a knife you don't feel the pain real it's a genetic polymorphism i promise it's it's in the bone you don't feel it you do not feel the pain right so it's a it's a there it's a mutation it's a quirk of genetics and you can't feel the pain what happens to these children is they die young oh because they're not they're putting hand on the fire they're not ahead over and over again you got it so pain is useful in small doses it's really helpful that if i put my hand on the on the flame i pull it away the the pain the negativity is what makes that such an amazingly adaptive response so let's go away from extreme examples if i've got a big performance coming up a big event thousands of people and a couple of weeks before i i you know that the whispers uh steven spielberg talks about these as whispers in his ear right oh my god thousands of people you've got to get right a little bit of anxiety bubbles up really useful because you know what happens then i start working on the presentation you're prepared and i practice and so negativity negative emotions and small doses elegantly adaptive when the negative emotions become harmful is when they become more chronic and that's what chatter is all about when we experience a negative emotion and then we get stuck in it we get so immersed that we start looping over and over and over again that's not good and and that's you know that's the pain point that i think so many people suffer from and and where i think the science can be really helpful because we know there are things that people can do when that happens yeah to manage it you're one of the leading experts in controlling the conscious mind where's the biggest challenge you face in your personal mindset even though you practice these tools teach these tools what's the chatter that still holds you back well thank you for asking this i don't experience chatter no i'm lying of course i experience chatter i'm a human actually we've done research and what we know is that people in general are much better at advising others than they are following their own advice we actually there's a name for this phenomenon it's called solomon's paradox it's named after the bible's king solomon who was famous for being wise but if you read his story he was not wise when it came to his own life he had concubines and they all got in fights and his whole kingdom unraveled this is a truism that i can tell lots and lots of other people how to manage their chatter and here's what the science says but that doesn't mean i i never struggle with it myself i like to think i'm pretty good at it but i still experience blips of chatter the domains that i experience it uh mostly about the the well-being of my kids um and my family uh you know i can when something happens to them if the world stops and it's easy to start going down that rabbit hole and anxiety stress yeah are they gonna you know are they gonna be sick or are they gonna you know do well in school and blah blah and the moment i catch myself experiencing that chatter i i try to put an end to it by using the tools that are in the book and other you know other tools that are out there so but but certainly i mean i can experience a work-related chatter you know big big thing coming up a big paper that gets rejected from a journal that's the currency and in science like you do these experiments for years and years and years you spend time writing them up and then you you submit them and then people say no not so good yeah that's not fun i mean rejection isn't a great feeling how does someone deal with rejection from from the chatter of rejection or the fear of rejection even before they put something out there yeah say they want to launch a book a speech or whatever it is a paper but they're so afraid to even put it out there because of the rejection that might come versus you put it out there and it's projected yeah how do you manage both of those yeah situations of chatter well um so one idea that i really do believe very strongly in is that there are no single tools that work for all people across all situations we often hear like do this and it's going to rid you of anxiety i've been doing research on this for 20 years i have yet to find it i'd be curious if you have in all the interviews and research that you've done you know magic pills i've yet to find them but what i have found are lots and lots of tools that can often be used in combinations to help people and i think both of those situations lend themselves well to using different chatter tools so take the concern about being rejected if if that were me and it was holding me back from doing something one thing i would do is i would i do something called mental time travel or in technical terms we call that temporal distancing i think to myself about you know how many other situations have been like this and have i been have i actually been rejected in the past yeah like what are the rates like let's do some reality testing and when i do that well you know not too many in fact just just a couple of weeks ago i had um a big presentation and and it was like the prep for this presentation it was virtual it was designed to stress me out because first the the producers said um all right we want you to we want you to script this and and just record it and i never yeah i never memorized talks i just like to speak but i did it and then i sent it to them and well the lighting isn't good so do it again and then and then at the you know the 12th hour they're like just do it live so you know they're pushing all my buttons and i felt a little bit of chatter beginning to brew and then i just i remind you so ethan you've given yourself you've given literally hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of presentations they've never tanked in a in you know in a terrible way and that realization so looking at that broader perspective the bigger picture really useful the other thing i would do is i don't know if you were listening carefully but when i just simulated when i just went over what i did before i used my own name to kind of coach myself through the exact same third person third person distance we call it distant self-talk and and that's another tool that i think is personally really useful i talk about this too there's a lot of data behind this we know that we're better at advising other people than we ourselves right like it's not i don't think a controversial say but you push back if you think it is of course yeah and it's like you know um we stay in relationships far too long or when we know we should get out of them but we tell someone else you need to get out of that thing it doesn't look good we'll we'll do certain things to hurt ourselves over and over we'll eat the food we're not supposed to eat we'll do all these things but we can tell someone else oh you need to stop doing that exactly so here's what i find mind-blowingly fascinating yeah we have we have so this is a big big uh big amp up i better deliver here we've we've learned that there are ways that we could engage with ourselves like we were engaging with someone else and language is one tool we can use to do it and it involves coaching ourselves through a problem using our name and other like second person pronouns words like you if you think about when we when do we use names and second person pronoun you when we think about and refer to others like most of the time i use names it's when i'm addressing other people or thinking about other people so like lara what is she doing right now with my wife you know danny we're not i'm using names names in our in our brains like this is the currency of thinking about others so what happens when you use your own name to think about a problem it's it's like a psychological jiu-jitsu move yeah it's automatically switching your perspective and allowing you to start engaging with yourself advising yourself like someone else what happens when we don't do that when we are just i mean i'm horrible i'm stupid i i can't do this i'm never enough or i gotta get myself out of this when we speak from i as opposed to louis you got this yeah louis you are good enough yeah so what happens when we come from i so i is a signature of being immersed in the experience and and that can lead us down the rabbit hole of of rumination and worry and you know use your favorite descriptor i call it all that's chat ruminations when you're when you're spinning about the past worries spinning about the future in each case you're spinning you're making yourself nuts i mean i chatter is all about being so zoomed in on the problem you can't think about anything else what if you use i am in a powerful sense i am able to get through this i am confident i've put in the work i am loving yeah would that be supportive or is it better to still say louis you are loving louis you are kind louis you got this yeah so i mean you know those the positive affirmations there's there's mixed evidence behind them they could be useful in some cases but less useful but not useful in others um i would i would suggest trying the trying to coach yourself through the problem using your name because what it does it's like a mental time out right it's letting you step back from the situation and it's broadening your perspective when we broaden our perspective we often realize that there's a lot more to the situation yes than what we're now than what's making us looney tunes temporary very technical term by the way crazy you're almost like you're in a a mental tornado that you can't get out of yeah spinning in a loop and you're in a cycle you can't get out of so wait a minute you mentioned positive affirmations that there might be some research that supports it and yeah and contradict it in the world of personal growth and personal development positive affirmations is the thing has been a standard for probably i don't know 50 or 100 years yeah what is the science of positive affirmations saying currently well so self affirmations this idea that i'm a a good human being i'm worthwhile i mean there is some evidence that that can be useful but there are other studies that don't show benefits not that it backfires but there's just some variability right in your in the real world but you're saying i am a person of integrity right you know then there's probably a disconnect if you're saying a positive affirmation but you're not actually being it right well i think that gets to like a very profound issue that that is useful to talk about here which is in a lot of the work that we do on on trying to figure out how can you help people who are spending work through it you're getting them to engage and work through that problem all right ethan how are you going to manage a situation it's a situation what are you going to do we're not making it i like to joke we're not when we have people distance in that way or use other techniques and tools we're not transforming this situation into the the you know culinary equivalent of cupcakes and warm cups of tea and i don't think we should be that that means we're not making this negative thing into a remarkable positive thing we're turning the tr the temperature down allowing people to manage this aversive situation in ways that allow them to then move on it's not always possible to take something that is totally negative and make it an extreme positive and i don't know that we would always want to do that really because you know learning from mistakes can be really really helpful like i value isn't there a way to learn from the mistake and not let it consume your energy and that's exactly what we try to feel exhausted something i learned in the last couple years that i wasn't good at this until about two years ago and the more i practice it i have found this technique maybe there's a term for this tool that you have i found this technique to be extremely life-changing for me yeah you talk about the mental time travel is that what you mentioned yeah like time travel mental time travel looking back to see how you overcome something yeah when i'm going through challenging situations now especially something that happened a few years ago there was a challenging situation and i was like man this sucks this really sucks and it wasn't it wasn't fun for a few months i remember saying to myself the only way that i could get out of it without feeling like pain every day and feeling like taking advantage of and abused and all these things was to say this is happening in my favor in one year two years five years ten years out i'm gonna look back and realize oh this happened so that i could do this in my life so that i could have a better experience in my relationship so that i could be a better leader in my business yeah it's almost like future time traveling totally and just saying telling myself over and over this is happening in my favor this is happening to support a greater mission in the future and when i think that way i'm like okay i can handle this yeah so so what you described um is not notably that's not a positive affirmation right like and in that situation that's the only thing that like sometimes posit it's if we're dealing with true adversity it's almost it feels inauthentic to just say everything's going to be right what you're describing is exactly mental time travel temporal distancing temporal distancing is the is the scientific terminology the dorky term i throw it in there it's a habit sorry i like it you know temporal temporal distancing yeah what does temporal mean temporal time so distancing through time you can either do that in in the past or future or the future so take covet right which has been i think tough for many of us myself included right yeah temporal distancing is one it wouldn't be fun being stuck in michigan you know it'd be tough i was waiting for when the next dig would come but don't you worry about teasing we have more time i will get some digs about it over the end up there actually it's good yep more lakes and beautiful scenery than we do so nice try very good um so you know for for covid one thing one thing and i've done several i use like i have like a cocktail that i a non-alcoholic cocktail i take right with of tools that i use mental tools mental tools right because we've actually done some research on combinations of tools are particularly useful but for kovid i think about the future like five months from now we're gonna be vaccinated we're gonna go on vacation yeah the the the worst part of this will be over when i do that i realize that as awful as what i'm going through right now is it's temporary it's going to fade we will get back that gives me hope hope is a powerful way of alleviating chatter really then i'll go back in time too and i'll think about pandemic of 1918 which was much much worse than what we were going for it's scarier probably much scary we didn't have the medical technology we didn't have zoom we didn't have takeout right like much i mean take out you know i'm joking but it makes a difference yeah so so and we didn't just get we even though it was worse we got through that and we came roaring back like the roaring 20s economic growth true so in each few you know future past i'm broadening my perspective it's getting me away from oh my god i can't get through another day stuck in this yeah it's no way out it's distancing and and it's a very useful tool so you call that temporal distancing yeah men or mental time travel mental time travel it's like it's like we need to have mental floss on a daily basis yeah this is something we were talking about before and how most of us were not taught these tools from our parents from our friends from teachers in school because they weren't training us to teach us these things and this is what i love about your work is as you talk about the preventative mental training the the preventative mental health i don't know what you call it but not waiting until you're anxious and depressed and feeling overwhelmed needing to take a drug to calm your mind but doing these tools on a daily basis what would you say are three to five things that we could do on a daily basis simple strategies to get started to help prevent our mind from taking over okay so we've already talked about two so i don't have to go through those things the distance self-talk and and mental time travel um let's shift to another category the the way that i like to like simplify this whole universe of tools there are three buckets things you could do on your own ways of reframing the situation simple tools that shift how you think that help you reframe that can be useful so both tools we talked about are examples of that then another category are what we might think as people tools ways of interacting with others that can help us okay so let's go into that and then i'll go into the third people tools are really interesting to me because a i'm a social psychologist so i care about how we interact with one another but when it comes to chatter there there are some myths out there so we're gonna have some myth busting right now okay so when people experience chatter they're often intensely motivated to talk about it with other people to share their emotions to get help and support there are a couple of exceptions if the chatter is around things that we experience shame or embarrassment about then we don't want to talk but all the other things we vent we vent we want to find someone let's just let me unload and our is that good or bad unloading on our friends or family well it's complicated and i'll tell you what it doesn't do it doesn't help us work through our chatter and it can even make it worse by venting to someone this happened or whatever or this person did this and complain about it you're saying it could make it worse why they'll say you're right well so let's say you say you and i minus the geographical differences that we share we're friends right so let's say i call you up and hey you know i'm really struggling something i just i need your support let me help you out so you start asking me questions about what happened i start sharing what i felt and we keep going back and forth that makes me feel really good about our friendship i feel really close and connected with you and research shows that when you vent that strengthens friendships right but if all we do is harp on what happened and what you felt in technical terms that's called co-rumination we just ruminate together i leave that conversation and i'm just as upset as when i started like that like it's still i'm just throwing throwing logs on a burning fire you're just keeping me going right so so hey great for our friendship but i still got the problem i'm having like you know gastric distress over this right heart palpitations right so so instead the best kinds of conversations when it comes to managing chatter they actually do two things you do need to connect emotionally with someone else there's value empathize empathize critically important right but a certain point in the conversation the person you're talking to ideally can help you broaden your perspective you might nudge me to hey look at the big picture have you dealt with this and get me to mentally time travel help put this in perspective that's the signature of a great conversation so first empathize and and listen listen deep listening empathize and then would you say okay would you like my feedback or support or some suggestions or some coaching the way that you know so can i offer you like i totally hear you do you want to keep going or can i offer you something and and ask genuinely because so i'm a scientist but but in the in in the chapter when i talk about this i talk about this as being an art and there is an art to this it's a dance right it's a dance because different people may need more time to just vent before they're ready to get into that advice giving and receiving mode right and so some some people are they're ready for it right away others it may take some time it may depend on the situation if it's a really nuclear chatter event right like then you may need to spend some more time just listening and talking before you can go um but but the way you did it is exactly what we'd want to do but it's that that orientation is is very different from hey let me just vent and i think there's a really important take-home lesson here for for people who are listening because if you know that there are these two pieces to getting good chatter support from others that lets us be a lot more deliberate about who we seek out for support right so i was mentioning before like i've got a board of advisors when it comes to chatter and like three people i go to for personal problems and four for if it's professional like work related issues and these are people who i know they're they will empathize and connect but then also really help me try to work through the problem and and what's interesting about the people on those two different boards there are some people who love me a lot and i love them back and i know this for a fact because like dna determines it like close family members right i don't go to them about my chatter because i know it doesn't it doesn't make it better we just get stuck venting and it doesn't help so i'm really careful about curating who i go to for support and then on the flip side because i know the science i like to think that i can be a better chatter advisor to my to others to my friends and colleagues and students when they come to me i actually have like a little playbook that tells me like here's how here's how i can help and it's not complicated right two steps right listen deeply empathize and connect and then start reframing so and you would if you were reframing would you go to the distance self-talk as a coach yourself since you're already distant or would you go to the time travel like look you've already you've overcome this in the past i'm i'm i'm throwing out different options because what we know well from the science point of view so there are 26 different tools i talk about in the book we know how each of those tools operate individually what we don't yet know is how they combine for different people in different situations they integrate how they integrate we're doing science on that now the challenge in the adventure for people who are listening is to start doing some self-experimentation on their own figure out what's the combination that works for you so it's like my daughter if she comes to me with like some chatter at school this girl's being mean and this boy i have a crush on but so does my friend all this stuff that that you asking about chatter triggers for me my daughter's dating that is she that is a chatter trigger she um she's 12. oh yeah well what is going on in the world yes yeah this is this is this is a major potent source of rigor for you yeah it is and my wife helps me look at the big picture but what is the big picture in that scenario well you know we all went through this you dated as well and you know there's it's part of life it's part of life and and you know she has good judgments and and um she's got to make her own mistakes and she by the way is going to love the fact that i'm talking about her dating life and dating is too strong but sure sure sure so crushes her questions we won't mention any names right right okay um if we did i i would then have serious chatter because i wouldn't be allowed back in my house but i'll just say what i would do with my daughter if she came to me with a problem i'd say like what if it triggered you personally and she wanted your advice to support her chatter it's your chatter and her gender then i talk then i i hand off to my wife um i can be pretty regular i can use it so there you'd want to use the tools on yourself and then once you're in the position to help someone else you've got yourself under control then you work with with the other person so i would say so hey what would you tell your sister if she was dealing with this or your friend like you know how would you coach someone else how would you coach thomas that's a distance coach move to make don't give them the answer ask them the question on how they would do it with someone else yeah yeah that's the way to do it let them figure that out the discovery um i think that's a powerful move i i do other things too like um you know the third bucket that we i didn't mention is like the environment like the world around us has there are tools that exist in the world around us and they're just waiting there and and that sounds kind of corny but it's the truth and so i'll give you a couple examples like green spaces yeah there's been a ton of cutting-edge neuroscience research which shows that spending some time in a safe natural setting i always feel the need to stay safe because i where i grew up in brooklyn parks green spaces were synonymous with getting mugged so you know you don't it has to be a place where you can let your guard down and relax and relax in nature it allows it gently draws your attention away from the chatter allowing you to recharge in ways that are really really helpful nature also can give us a sense of of awe which is an underrated emotional experience because it helps us fight chatter so aw this is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something something vast we can't explain you know when a lot of people experience awe it's when ohioans come to the big house in michigan and they sit here in the stadium largest i think it's larger than it's a couple thousand yeah a little bit bigger and they and they they just take it all in they're filled with oh this is amazing that's right and then they're even more awe inspired when they beat michigan yeah all right so you got me but but that that that leads to what we call experiencing awe leads to what we call shrinking of the self so when we experience a moment of beauty ah spectacular sporting event whatever it is a musician that performs something someone doing something great or nature in its element we then what in our mind it leads to we feel smaller and that usually is not a good thing except when you're feeling experiencing chatter our problems shrink because we realize hey you know hey dope you know what are you worried about that thing you said last night at dinner like there's a whole universe out here yeah that that is much bigger than you so it's like the ultimate way of broadening your perspective and and and helping you realize that you know what you're going through while still significant there's more to it there's more to life than this yeah and i know you quoted dan harrison there who's a buddy of mine as well and for me a simple 10 or 15 minute meditation practice in the morning evening afternoon for me i go into a place where in my mind i leave my body i leave the world and i'm in a space where i can see the world from a different perspective that is so small and therefore my problems get smaller that's exactly the phenomenon when i when i when i in my mind imagine myself in the universe floating which is kind of weird i get get it but it allows me to be like oh the earth is so tiny i can see like a speck of sand yeah and then i can get so far away from it where it disappears yeah and i'm like it's there's so much out there yeah and yet i'm worrying about this little problem and making it consuming my mind all day for what that's exactly how is it supportive it's me and it's liberating to have that that orientation and you know i want to come back to meditation because that can be a way of of cultivating these states but what you described there you became a fly on the wall to yourself and what we know is that there are these strategic moves that you can engage in to help you do that meditation is one but there are other things that you could do in the moment simply what else you like like you know well well i mean language that's another ethan what's going on you're becoming an observer to yourself it's not me someone else right or let's say i'm speaking to yourself ethan what's going on yeah silently by the way not out in front of us that's airpods make it easier if you wanted to do that because it you know like talking to yourself i still wouldn't recommend that um you know when you visualize like we often see experiences we think in terms of words but also in terms of images and pictures so i could probably ask you to think about a time in your recent past when you you got angry and asked you have a mental snapshot of that event you could probably see that yeah we can actually talk we can manipulate the imagery and so like i could ask you to replay it happening through your own eyes when you got into that fight or i could ask you to float away and see yourself in that event like interacting and fighting with that other person becoming a fly on the wall to your own experience yes and and that's another way of doing what what you just described which is zooming out i mean like hey there's more to it than this like i love this other person there's a there's this phenomenon that i don't know if it's a phenomenon but when i heard him say it it really made me think differently i i don't know if you know dr joe dispenza if you've seen his work at all and i asked him a question i said you know should we all be focusing on healing the the traumas or the memories of the past he said yes heal the memory of the past but really start to remember the memories of the future and put your memories now of what you could create in the future and start putting your energy towards that as opposed to the pain of the past should we be thinking about the past should we be thinking about the future or just being more present in your mind these are these are deep deep big questions and i'm so glad i'm so glad you asked them actually this is not the school of average this is this is this is we're not here we're not in michigan right now we want to be the school of greatness all right let's go you know okay um so you know let's let's start with being in the moment yeah um because this is this is all the rage and it has been for for quite a few many years right right now being in the moment can be wonderful yes and i love being in the moment sometimes and sometimes when you're stuck in the past or the future bringing your attention back to the moment can be liberating but there's i think a very important piece of information to put out there which is this this brain up here it did not evolve to keep us in the moment in fact we evolved the capacity to travel in time in our minds isn't that crazy it's crazy we spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not in the moment what are we thinking about more the past past future it varies for different people like different people some are more future focused on past we're going back in time and that's not a bad thing i would argue it's an amazing thing because we're learning from our experiences where we're experiencing nostalgia right i'm savoring past victories i'm i'm fantasizing about what i'm dreaming this is this ability to travel on time crazy it's a superpower i mean i i use that word lightly but truly this is what distinguishes us from other species the degree to which we can do this and so sometimes when we travel in time the you know the delorean if you get that reference it gets stuck and that's rumination or worry and and and so i think you know one solution is okay well just stop traveling in time altogether i don't think that's the answer right i think instead we want to figure out how can we help people become better mental time travelers how can we help them go back in time think about the bad stuff if you need to and make sense of it learn from it grow from it without getting stuck there right so i think and that's what a lot of the the tools can help people do i've heard that there's somewhere between i don't know 50 000 or 80 000 thoughts a day that humans have i'm not sure what the actual number is is that accurate well it'd be high i i don't know and it would be it's a it's a hard question to answer because part of it's like well what does it mean to even have a thought is it an image a verb so it's a hard one but it's a lot there's a lot a lot of stuff happening would you say there's tens of thousands of thoughts or connecting points of ideas yeah there's a there's a huge amount of activity occurring in our brains probably much more than most of us would imagine in terms of i mean you know we're constantly making connections i mean all the time subconsciously and then they it bubbles up into awareness and it's sure i've heard also again don't know if this is true that you know if we had 50 to 80 000 thoughts a day most of them i hear are negative and most of them are on repeat you know i heard 80 or something like that is repeating thoughts and most of the time they're negative or worrisome or fear-based or yeah protection thoughts well that i can't comment on okay so um so there there have there have been like lots of different kinds of research one of my favorite studies was um this was uh it was an anthropology study where um a very brave scientist went up to people on the streets of new york gave him a video a tape recorder it was a cut like a decade ago and just asked them to to speak out loud the thoughts streaming through their head as they navigated the streets of new york wow and it's really interesting i tell this i go into this a little bit in the book and you hear people you know one woman starts talking about like she's looking for for a staple store and then she's thinking about her friend's cancer diagnosis and going down that rabbit hole and then she's like oh and someone just cut me off and now i'm going back to this looking for stable so the thoughts are pinging all over but what comes out of that study and many others studies that try to quantify this with really cutting-edge tools is that the bulk of our thoughts are negative so the majority it doesn't mean all of them and there's variability across people but a lot of the thoughts that are bubbling up are in that negative range as to whether it's repeating over and over that's certainly a very common experience um i don't know if that what do you think would happen if let's say that's a fact for most people right most people have reoccurring thoughts and most of the reoccurring thoughts are negative or we see the negative whatever reason because we're designed to be bad is stronger than good have you ever heard that phrase i love that phrase that is stronger than good we are we bad is stronger than good there are lots and lots of studies which show that we are exceptional we are more sensitive to losses than gains and the idea is from a survival point of view it's potentially more threatening to experience bad stuff than it is good stuff and so we care about survival so we want to be vigilant for the bad stuff this is why the news stations continue to show the bad that's exactly right people are they're going to put their attention towards it and we're going to focus our energy on the bad more than the good we try to shift that and and and send out positive information to help people to overcome yes the bad overcome the negative that they're consumed with what um what would it look like if a person had 80 to 90 positive thoughts or powerful thoughts or empowering thoughts on a daily basis and very little negative chatter maybe the chatter came in for a moment and they were able to address it and move back into a positive place what would that person be able to create in their life with more empowering thoughts over negative thoughts that would be to use a technical term very good um well you know let's we could reverse engineer things to answer that question so what does chatter do like so let's say you go to the opposite of the spectrum you're filled with chatter i think this is one of the big problems we face as a species why because here are the three domains that that chatter targets and sinks us in our ability to think and perform so when when your mind's when you're on that hamster wheel right all of your attention is on your problems it doesn't leave a whole lot over to work on what you need to do at your job makes it really hard to perform under stress these habits to unravel because you're you're recall you get stuck in paralysis by analysis right so thinking and performing that goes down you have chatter and you can't get out of it your performance and your ability to think clearly goes down goes down and across domains tons of evidence to support that let's go to another domain of life that we care about something called relationships yes so we know that chatter creates friction in our social relationships and it does in a few different ways when if i want to talk to you about my problems one of the things that often happens with chatter is i talk and i keep talking and keep talking and keep talking and there's a limit to how much someone else even the most well-intentioned loved ones and colleagues can take on can take on without them experiencing their own chatter so so it can create something exhausting uh you know that's right okay you know let me get out of the house so you know friction and relationships the other thing is let's say we're you know you know we're here and i'm i'm thinking about other stuff you're talking to me you're telling me about your day if my mind is somewhere else i'm not listening to you and that's enough you know that can also create problems in relationship so you know if i have chatter at the dinner table and my daughter my youngest daughter wants nothing else then just tell me about what she did at on at recess i asked her like hey so what do you do today she starts talking i go somewhere else 10 minutes later i'm like oh so so what's your detail i just told you how many times can you do that without problems beginning to brew yeah so relationships are an issue and then the last domain is our physical health you know people people often say that stress kills and i think that's actually a little bit misleading because the ability to experience a stress reaction a fight or flight reaction this is this is a feat of evolution like if there's a if there's a threat someone's coming to get me it's really good to know that there is this response that quickly prepares me for how to react yes so stress on its own not bad what makes stress toxic is when the stress reaction goes up and it remains elevated over time and that's what chatter does because we experience the stressful event but then we re-experience it over and over by thinking about it and reliving it on auto auto you know play yeah and so you know chatter's been linked with things like cardiovascular disease and and inflammation and all sorts of so having negative ruminating worrisome anxious thoughts on a consistent basis is linked to diseases diseases poor relationships and poor performance wow i'd argue those are the three domains that many of us care most about and that make life really enriching and so to go back to your question about what does a person look like who's able to harness this chatter and and and get into another state of mind where they are experiencing you know either positive thoughts or an absence of negative ones you're getting the the logic would suggest improvements in each one of those domains health better performance better relationships right what happens if uh someone watching or listening is in a relationship where their partner is in constant their chatter is so loud that every week they're questioning their partner their what are you doing they're you know not trusting them they're maybe she or he is doing something wrong and bad constantly whether it's actually happening or not yeah what happens and how can you manage the chatter of a partner who keeps accusing you of something you're not doing yeah well it's a it's a it's a difficult predicament to be a therapist well you know so there are there are levels to all of this right and chatter i think is a feature of the human condition it's something that many of us experience to varying degrees and for some people trying to use the different tools that are out there may be helpful and so there the the opportunity is so if if it's my partner you know the idea is okay well let's have a conversation to try to help you understand what these tools are normalize this like hey look lots of people experience chatter but you don't have to keep experiencing because there are science-based tools you can use if that doesn't work you know then i think there are other ways of intervening and at the extreme end you know there are therapeutic interventions see a therapist um if if the chatter morphs into you know full-blown states of anxiety and depression clinical manifestations then then i would advise people to find someone who is who you know does a science-based therapy because they'll just be able to help really really quick you know it's a concentrated dosage of health but but that's that's a that's a that's a small minority of folks when it comes to chatter right most of us are experiencing this on a daily basis or semi-regularly how many negative thoughts a day do you think you have like percentage-wise positive thoughts versus negative thoughts are you 50-50 are you 70 positive and have you been training your mind for this so i will say that i definitely do use these tools and i've worked on different combinations and i have like i know the i have my go-to's that i use and they they and i do um use them uh i'm in general pretty you know pretty positive as long as i'm not thinking about you know ohio um uh i'm losing to all yeah exactly uh you know i my i in general i'm positive and in part that's that's because i know the data linked to positivity and actually when we've done presentations i've i've talked to like teachers about some of these tools and when giving the background behind like optimism uh you know the the i tell a story about a friend in college who used to say to me like why are you always so positive ethan and the answer i give is it beats the alternative yeah and if you look at the data there's a striking amount of data that links optimism with with lots of different benefits health relationships performance i mean a lot of the things that we just talked about so the power of positive thinking is scientifically backed there is absolutely being able to be more proactive and positive is is an adaptive outcome to strive for with one little caveat right which is that doesn't mean we should rid ourselves of negative emotions it means look if you experience a negative emotion great you're a human and this is serving you well actually there are studies which show that when you bring people into like really stressful situations you have one group thinking about it as a threat oh my god i'm not gonna be able to deal with it in another situation you say you know what those those feelings you're having your stomach that's a sign that you're rising to the challenge of the situation so you're reframing this negative state as hey this is my body doing what it's supposed to do under threat like i gotta go pee because in the i can't pee when i'm on stage right like your body is mobilizing interesting that's just that's a reframe you're still feeling uncomfortable but it makes it more manageable and people perform better there as well so so i don't think we want to definitely be more positive but ridding ourselves of all negativity it'd be hard to imagine i mean i would i'll throw this back to you you've spoken to countless people i think over a thousand interviews yeah so what in your in your view is the goal is it to always be positive or have it be a majority like a baseline positivity and the ability to deal with the negative when it happens for me it's thinking what serves the vision what serves the mission does anger serve the mission i have for my life in this season of my life i'm speaking for myself does it serve me being angry and holding on to this whatever thing happened someone was out of integrity or this person tried to hurt me or whatever the thing is because it served me to hold on to the anger the frustration the pain and put energy towards that problem as opposed to focusing on the energy towards the mission because that's what i think about i also think about not discounting how i feel not discounting the way something might have hurt me or affected me so it's feeling it in the moment and then quickly getting back to the vision when i'm allowed when i'm able to distance myself and say okay this happened i don't like it this sucks i have different techniques maybe i'll scream in a pillow i'll do a workout i'll do whatever and then i say okay how long do i want to hold on to this pain yeah how long do i want to suffer and focus on one thing as opposed to a bigger positive mission and that's what i try to think about it's not discounting my emotions my pain it's moving through them quickly and focusing back on the mission well that's inc i mean entirely compatible without how i view it too you know you said if you experience the anger you don't want to hold on to it the holding on to it that's the chatter that's what hurts you that's what hurts you but anger in the appropriate amount is it's a tool you know there's a perspective that says emotions both positive they're tools right they help us like if i experience a ping of of envy right like when i see someone else like that gives me some well maybe you need to try harder in this domain like you know why something you care about or maybe it's yeah exactly work on it exactly so we can use this but we don't want to get stuck yes and that's the key so you know overall let's be in a positive state let's not discount the negative or try to never experience it i think it's actually empowering for people to know that hey negative emotions aren't something you need to be afraid of right they're there for a reason what about if someone's feeling impostor syndrome a lot of people been talking about imposter syndrome in the last few years um if that chatter is in their mind what's something they can do to feel like no they are they aren't an imposter they are where they need to be they're ready for this moment whatever that might be their career the book whatever it might be how can they overcome imposter syndrome well you know imposter syndrome it gets back to these these negative thought loops at the end of the day right it's it's an it's not a negative thought loop that's focused on anxiety per se but it's a different set of cognitions like hey i just don't belong here and so the idea is that these different tools you can use if you're looping regardless of what you're looping about try these tools and so so we've talked we've only talked about a few um time travel linguistic distancing nature we've actually talked about some i mean another one that that i love is is do a ritual so i'm a huge fan of rituals so tell me about your rituals like what would be like what's one of your favorites oh man well i mean as an athlete i would do many rituals before the game where i'd walk the field or walk the court and visualize myself not only replaying in my mind the future of what i wanted to create but also preparing my mind for when things might go wrong so it's both okay i'm on offense and defense and allowing myself how will i respond when it doesn't go my way focusing that i want it to all go my way but if it doesn't i'm also prepared for the backup plan yeah that's that's in sports another thing is and every night before i would usually watch highlight film of an individual that i was inspired by someone greater than me in that position in professional leagues when i was in high school or college and i would try to just put myself in that alter ego state consistently which i want to get back to all of you go in a second another thing that i would do i've done many times especially in relationships i've never really ended relationships well intimate relationships and i've always held on to a lot of pain and suffering of what could i have done better or did i do the wrong thing or this person doesn't love me whatever this has been kind of like a challenge in my past i've had so many ceremonies and rituals where i write letters that i don't share with anyone thanking the person talking about the things that um i'm grateful for talk about the things that i didn't like about the situation uh apologizing to them forgiving myself and then letting them go and what i'll do is i'll fold that up and then i'll burn it and i'll put it in the ground wow and i'll bury it huh so this is myself okay no i'm just moving a little bit closer to the door get me out of here but i will create these rituals for myself to help me create closure in relationships to help me be at peace and not ruminate on frustration yeah and from both sides yeah and i think it allows me to like close the chapter as opposed to hold on to pain so i do a lot of weird stuff i don't know no but you but but but here's what i find so cool about this entire space like you describe that as weird i i think of it as beautiful yeah and and what so many of us do in life is we stumble on tools that help sometimes tools that don't help but you know like you i i don't think i mean did your parents tell you that when you break up with someone you should write a letter and burn it i learned this through therapy and different reaching out to experts stumbling on stuff and what i think the opportunity is that to say okay well here's what we know about how all these things work and we can just give people a list of these things so we don't have to wait to just kind of stumble out like lebron james is another example of this stumbling when he was trying to decide whether to leave the dreadful state i'm just joking but he was trying to figure out whether to leave the cat the cavs i was actually i like i really like lebron i rooted for the cavs yes um i'm a knicks fan so it's been some dark days for a long time but when he was first way back before miami when he was trying to decide should he leave the cavs or not during a press interview he was going through his thought process and he said you know the one thing i didn't want to do is make an emotional decision lebron james got to do what is best for lebron james distant self-talk he just did it jennifer lawrence is in a in a new york times interview with a reporter who starts asking her like really hard-hitting questions what does she do she she stops she goes all right jennifer get yourself together this isn't therapy like i don't know i haven't spoken to lebron or jennifer but i don't know that anyone told them to use their name when they get into distress when i see that sometimes and i think people will see that if you'll see a celebrity or an athlete say you know conor mcgregor is the greatest of all time right don't you think they're like okay this person's got an ego and they think they're this big shot this is where the science is useful wow so we did a study where we tracked people how frequently they do this in their lives five times a day we sent them a text message and asked them how much have you talked to yourself have you done it using your name we did this over two weeks we we used we included measures of narcissism how much of a self-inflated sense of zero relationship so it didn't increase our level of ego and narcissism no ego stayed the same and and people who were more narcissistic to begin with weren't more likely to do it so you know we see people do this celebrities in front of the camera one thing to keep in mind is look celebrities are more often in front of the cameras than non-celebrities so there's more opportunity the other thing is this might just be a an example of something that's useful that gives has a social cause that's why i don't tell anyone to do it out loud but let's go back to they do it internally internally always doing so you're not saying ethan cross is the best you know when you're doing interviews i'm like nathan always knows what to do ethan's always you're not saying this out loud i'm already uncomfortable i know i i never you say it internally internally and that's an important disclaimer always internally but to go back to rituals yes so rituals are useful first of all i think it's really important to recognize that our cultures give us rituals like there are things we develop on our own you have one before i go you know before i give a presentation i repeat in my head what my like high school wrestling coach used to tell me like and that's my ritual and it helps me feel better um but but our cultures throughout time like have bestowed rituals upon us so like when someone dies we have grieving rituals when babies are born birthing rituals births like historically but a time of stress joy but also like will the baby make it and so this is a it's a tool it's like a technology that we've discovered that can be very useful and it helps in a few different ways one of the things that people like this the experience of having chatter you can feel like you don't have control like my my like my thoughts are in control it's chaotic in there i don't know what's going on and human beings love love love love being in control of things or if the world is certain and we can control things like we feel really good what we've learned is that by by by doing things that are under our control like engaging in a a specific sequence of behaviors like you do with your rituals or even things like organizing our surroundings like tidying up we that gives us a sense of control we can control our space the environment that's why i make my bed every morning that's why i create so much peace of mind going into the next activity knowing i did a productive activity i have a clean space i don't have a dirty mind that's right a clean environment that's right you're compensating for the lack of control you have in your head right by controlling yourself it's like i'm i'm a pretty easygoing guy and under normal circumstances if you came into like visited my office at home like stacks of books and teacups lined up and but if i've got some chatter like that office is and span and i and i often do it reflexively i just start organizing and cleaning up what does that do for the mind when you organize your space it organizes your thoughts really and so it held so there's data this is not just so like raphael nadal he gave an interview several years ago and and i think there's a journalist who asked him like what's the hardest thing you struggle to do on the court and his answer was the hardest thing i struggled to do is battle the voices inside my head manage the chatter and if you watch nadal you know what he does nadal is famous for engaging in these elaborate rituals he orders his water bottles positions them perfectly on a diagonal with the court before every serve he like flips his hair puts pulls his shorts out of his butt and you know bounces the ball he says like so why do you do these rituals they provide me with the order i seek in my head and the data bears that out there are studies which show that doing these rituals or organizing your spaces can actually have um anxiety reducing features that's why you see a lot of baseball players do the same attempt before we got back you see basketball players at the free-throw line do the same amount of dribbles or what flipped the ball and they the ones that do it consistently don't have to think of another approach you do the same approach every time to get your mind and so so rituals are kind of like they're another one of these cocktails um in the sense that they help us in a few different ways so they help us by giving us the sense of order and control that's useful rituals are also often attentionally demanding in the sense that they're not easy to just do they're they're multiple pieces like what you describe writing a letter right getting to the point where you start to where you actually thank them and apologize thoughts on the paper yeah right that's effort right and then you're also crumpling it up you're burning it you're putting it in an incense machine you're blowing it all over the place you're rubbing under whatever you know i mean like there are steps and so performing those steps takes our attention away from the chatter so it can be useful in that way too as a momentary distraction and then the other thing is rituals not always but are often infused with meaning so there's there's meaning that we often have from engaging in the same ritual the same way like when i like i have a weekend ritual with my kids where like i wake up i exercise i go to the farmer's market i come back i make breakfast for my daughters we do it together there's meaning and that meaning is like you describing you know becoming that fly on the wall like there's more to life than what i'm and so so rituals do all those things absolutely and it's one so so like that's another tool lots of tools that are out there that's why i think it's important to have some type of ritual whether it's five minutes or 50 minutes every morning and every night to help start your thoughts in a more productive and powerful progressive way in the morning and not be in reaction chatter mode yeah start the day that way and finish the day to close the mind down from the chatter i like to just finish with gratitude my girlfriend what are three things you're grateful for i share three things to create perspective okay maybe i was angry about this today or this happened but there's still a lot of good let's focus on that yeah and i well i think you know gratitude is a very useful intervention and so i think it's great that you guys do that and you know you mentioned it it's about perspective and that is that is the antithesis of chatter because chatter is all about getting lost in the moment and being so immersed that we lose that perspective so the question is like what is the tool or what are the tools you need to broaden you is it a crowbar is it a crowbar and a hammer and a screwdriver like and and different people are going to use different tools to help make that happen and so that's you know it lots of for a long time we've studied individual tools and what we're learning is that no single tool no single intervention explains it all right well this is why i think our society has struggled and suffered me included with having addictive personalities finding substances as tools whether it be alcohol smoking or pornography or whatever it is comparison mode uh as tools don't do any of those but right yeah as tools to to numb the chatter yeah to calm the chatter let's find something to bring a a dump of dopamine that will allow me to feel happier in the moment but then we always feel worse after that dump phase and these are more conscious tools not substance or addictive tools in a negative sense that we should start implementing so we don't have to lean towards i have nowhere to cope i want to drink i'm going to smoke i'm going to vape whatever and i think if our societies can learn how to use emotional intelligence psychological tools to support us as opposed to hurting us would be a lot better off i mean i i completely agree um all the tools we're talking about are are free they're free and they're not hurtful they're easy to use now now can any tool be taken to an extreme and be harmful yes right so you want to use the tool appropriately and the analogy i like to give is of a hammer a hammer is a source of amazing you know creations we build houses and all sorts of things but if you use it the wrong way too intensively too much you can get into trouble so so rituals are a great example there p some people think rituals they immediately think about ocd obsessive compulsive disorder and rituals are a feature there but that's an example of taking a tool that is useful to an extreme gotcha and always need to organize everything every moment that's like that's chattering itself exactly that's when the tool becomes chatter exactly so having that recognition i think is is important um what about mantras we talked about positive affirmations what's the difference between a positive affirmation and a mantra and is a mantra a tool we can use to eliminate each other so mantra um you know is prevalent in meditation and meditation i would you know suggest is another kind of tool we can use to manage chatter it's one tool among the many it's not the only tool and i think that you know i've been meditating on and off since i'm five years old my dad um my fifth birthday i wanted a bicycle he got me a mantra and said i was very upset at the moment in retrospect it wasn't a bad thing you went on a you you wanted a bicycle he got you a mantra yes it was very upsetting in my fifth birthday it was a moderate trauma what was the mantra it was it was a tm it was a transcendental monster it's just a sound that that you repeat and the beauty of mantras is and meditation this is another technology that we've developed over time like chatter is an age-old problem we've probably been dealing it with it for as long as we've had language for as long as we've been talking to other people and talking to ourselves we've probably had chatter and we've learned tools over time to help with it and meditation is one of them so when you repeat a mantra over and over again the idea is that that's not easy to do because it's hard to focus on one thing so so what over time what you realize is oh wow i just wasn't focusing on it for for minutes and so you realize how easy it is for your tension to shift and for other thoughts to come into play but over time the idea is that you begin to realize that you're not the same thing as your thoughts and you can let go of thoughts right and just re-bring your attention to something else so it's a way of training your attention and also getting you to understand that you don't have control of the thoughts that pop up in your head but you do have control about what you do once they pop up and i think that awareness is really really important yeah if you are going to when i teach a class on self-control we often have a discussion about this and some students i ask what is self-control like is it is it a failure like what if you have the temptation to you know eat after 10 o'clock but you don't follow through with it is that a self-control failure some students think no you you succeeded like you didn't give in to it other shits are like if you have the thought itself you failed and my response to those students is you are setting a really high bar for success how do you not have yeah having the thought you're going to think i want to eat food but the self-control is but i didn't act on it that's exactly right that's right so i think but but that's you know to go back to the learning about stuff no one teaches us about these things in a formal way like if you take a class in psychology maybe in college you'll get this and i think it's a problem because when you think about like i spend a lot of time talking to educators and we teach children adolescents about information that you know a we think it's culturally significant it's knowledge that we so you want to read charlotte bronte and you know that's questionable but but we think it's important and or we think this information is actually going to serve these students well as they go on and live their life so me learning math is useful like learning how to compute a percentage amazingly useful like every time i go to give a tip i do a percent right like practical knowledge why are we not teaching people about how the mind works and how to manage the mind it's hard for me to think about a more important topic like not a day goes by where i'm not challenged in some way that requires me to manage myself and we're just like throwing the people we care most about into the world without any information about this i feel like the the not everyone but the ones that grow up playing sports coaches usually great coaches have learned some of this some of these tools and techniques for their athletes when they're under stress anxiety when they fail when they lose when they get injured the great ones have learned these tools on teaching them about how to do this when they're in school which is what i felt like was very supportive for me because i would fail tests all the time and i didn't know how to feel like i was stupid or how i wasn't stupid how i wasn't worthy and how i wasn't lovable like i was feeling those things because uh i would fail so much in school but i learned in sports and high school and college like no like here's how you deal with failure and here's how failure can be a tool to support you yeah and failures doesn't mean you are a failure it's information it's feedback to support you in improving and what where your gaps are and how you can take advantage of if you're not failing i mean you're not growing yeah that's goes back to the importance of negativity in small doses you need like if my life is i'm not ready at this point in my life to just be in you know you know existence mode of coasting like you know i i want to grow in ver personally professionally and there's going to be some hurdles you experience yeah there's a there's a meme online i've said this before on the show there's like a meme of uh that says like when a kid is learning to walk they fall something like a thousand times or something like that and none of those times did the kids say maybe this walking thing isn't for me yeah that's a great example i know it's like they're not like i felt a hundred times i hit my head i scratch my elbow i'm crying they don't say i'm sure to crawl the rest of my life yeah and just live in this space because it's painful that's right they figure out they may they use the couch right i'm assuming and um and they figure it out exactly and that's what we need to learn as adults is how do we not fail once at something and think i'm a failure i'm going to never do this again because it hurts so much but how can i learn to manage the chatter in my mind and take the next step that's exactly right and why why do we have to wait for people like you to figure this out why do we have to wait for people to just stumble on the tools now like what you're doing with this podcast that's one attempt to educate and i think we need a lot more i think there's an opportunity here to be systematic in how we give people this information teach people and we don't have to wait until you've got an iphone and you know we could go much earlier and so i think that's that's a really exciting challenge and opportunity that awaits us and i think you know there's more receptivity to that nowadays what about the subconscious mind what's the difference between the conscious mind the subconscious mind and how do we manage the chatter of the subconscious mind well i wish i knew that one um you know the conscious mind is what we're aware of are are our subjective experience of who we are and how we feel and that's a territory that's a space that i feel comfortable right that's what you study i feel comfortable obviously the subconscious mind is a giant mystery we still don't quite know what gives rise to a particular kind of thought like why does a thought bubble up we have some ideas about what the triggers can be but there are so many different computations happening in our brain all the time like the brain is doesn't go off like when you sleep or when you're not always thinking it's always engaging in different operations and you can argue that all of that is subconscious and so it's not until things bubble up into our awareness that we can start modulating things i don't know of of tools that can be useful for managing the subconscious chatter you know freud was a big proponent of that and a lot of those tools haven't stood the test of time so um that's not to say we won't find tools at some point you know we we still have a ton to learn but um but it's not something that i would you know know how to coach someone on yeah i grew up in a religion called christian science or the the founder of the religion's name mary baker eddie yeah and she had a quote that said stan porter at the door of thought and this is something i heard over and over as a child to not allow negative or mortal thoughts enter my mind and take over the mind because those were the things that would hurt me and have me thinking harmful thoughts about myself about others about doing immoral things things like that and that's always stood with me to stand porter porter at the door of thought and when something we don't control what comes to the door like things are going to come to the door of our mind all the time but what you said we control uh like how we respond to those things yes do we open the door and allow it to come and stay there or do we open the door and say hey you can leave well and that describes right there the difference between um so to answer your question i think there's there's a time and a place for engaging with the thought and just letting it float away um many mindful practices mindfulness and acceptance based approaches to dealing with adversity suggest when we observe ourselves experiencing a negative thought we should recognize it accept it and then let it go bye-bye don't engage with it there can be value to that approach for sure like if the negative thought is irrelevant and has no implication for my future it's just this random self-defeating cognition let it go you know off you go one metaphor that i love is think about the mind as a school bus and you know there are different passengers different kids who get you're the driver of the bus right and you've got passengers come on some are really spitballs and others are nice and you know kids come and come on and off the bus and that's how the mind works and so just if one of these obnoxious kids come on just let them go so there's a time and a place for that but there is also a time where we do need to engage with the negative stuff we have to engage with it because we have to learn from it like if you really mess up sometimes like you'd like i know some people who are so skilled at just not attaching to the negative stuff they don't take responsibility or accountability they say that wasn't me it's not my fault i'm not gonna yeah yeah and so and i don't think that's productive either of course so you want to be strategic and nimble this goes back to the there's no one-size-fits-all right we have evolved these different tools for a reason so like you know my my my wishes you know like if you're you've got like a building team come in they've got these amazing toolkits or like batman you know the utility belt with all the different like we want to give people the most sophisticated tool belt that they can have so that they can be adept at using the right one given the right situation and what about um the alter ego mindset is this something is this a tool that you would talk about or you recommend people using like beyonce yeah uses an alter ego yeah she goes on stage yeah i used to use one when i was going on a football field um i'm sure there's a lot of other examples out there of people stepping into a character in their mind yes to disassociate their fears we've done we've done research on this actually and um so did you talk about stepping to being like a superhero in here like being batman yeah the kids we call it the batman effect yes and it's it's all you know it is about an alter ego and we find that in particular with kids where we've done the most research on this it can be useful it's it's another kind of distancing tool right like you're stepping outside of yourself and into this other identity that is skilled in the domain you're in so for kids you know it's like pretend you're wonder woman or dora the explorer or batman and then we put them in stressful tasks well what do we know about superheroes like they don't give up they keep going right right if you're assuming that alter ego you keep doing it now the one caveat to this is if you're going to choose an alter ego choose wisely right you don't want to choose to become the joker right or or you know choose your other villain because and there is some research which suggests that it depends on which alter ego you select because you're going to assume part of their identity and so you don't want to assume the malicious or bad the bad guy but yeah that's another another kind of tool we can use and that's another distancing tool disinstance so it's a it's like if chatter is all about immersion we want to find ways of just broadening that perspective breaking people out getting outside of themselves yourself or whatever it is yeah meditation any tool you can get away from it and then get away but then engage once you're from that different perspective right so we don't want people to avoid we want them to step back and then be able to engage more objectively just like i'm giving you advice like your problem like i could weigh in it's not happening to me i can i can really use every mental resource i have to give you the best possible advice when i'm bathed in emotion not as easy to do it's really hard when we are so emotional and angry or frustrated or fearful to communicate the right way like in a healthy way yes extremely hard i've been there so many times in the past what should we do um when we want to argue with someone we're angry at someone a business colleague relationship whatever should we unload them in that way or should we try to figure out a way to like calm the chatter first and then have a conversation that one yeah why why does it seem like 90 people can't do that well i think i think because number one it's hard to manage chatter we've been struggling with this for for a really long time and and again we don't we don't talk about these tools that are out there so for some of us we're just stumbling on these tools others aren't discovering them at all other people may think like that the things they're doing aren't actually helpful like they're venting or they're taking drugs or doing other things that we know are harmful so so i think there's a lot of there's an opportunity here to to learn about what we can do um and then of course you know there are these impulses we have like when we get angry we're often motivated to engage and so remembering to think about the big picture i think can be really helpful what about language we use she said language is key not just the internal dialogue but the actual words we say how does the words we say affect our thoughts well so so language can can shape how we think um you know we don't only think in words so it's not the same thing as thinking but but certainly the way we use language to explain what we're going through is really powerful i mean um you know the subtitle of my book's a voice in our head our inner voice and um oftentimes when i talk about this material to people the first thing they say is oh how can i silence that voice just shut it up i don't want to ever hear it and what i say to them is no you don't want to do that you want to you want to stop the chatter but words language this is a powerful tool like so i'll give you a couple examples of what language does for us in the most basic sense if i were to i'm going to spell out um uh a word i'm gonna give you some letters i want you to just repeat these letters in your head silently okay okay m-i-c-h-i-g-a-n yeah okay can you can you repeat those letters in your head two or three times ah you don't want to but um so if you were if i give you a phone number yeah right 209 your 2 or 90501 like someone gives you that that doesn't happen anymore it's not just parties but when we were growing up yes it did um you repeat that in your head you're using your your inner voice to do that right that's part of what we call our verbal working memory system this system it's essential to life like you go to a grocery store you want to what do i need from the grocer you know eggs bread and milk your inner voice lets you do that so that's that's a that's an essential way that language helps us but then it gets more complicated it does other things for us before i give a presentation in my head i will go through what i'm going to say on the on the stage i'll go through it word by word in my head and then i'll actually hear what someone's going to ask me and i'll respond so i'm simulating that whole visualizing i'm visualizing i mean i'm doing it with language in my head and i think that helps prepare me i use language to coach myself to control myself all right you know don't eat the cookies when i you know like it's too late you know what the pants are gonna be they're already a little tight from the pandemic we don't right we also use language to i think this is like the most magical feature of it we when bad things happen we try to make sense of those experiences and we use language to do that in ways that shape our understanding of who we are so like when i'm rejected or i experience loss i think about those events i try to come up with a story and narrative that explains it like that's all about words so language it lets us do a lot of amazing things but it can also take us down the rabbit hole if we're using one language and putting ourselves down uh for me this is the type of work that i feel like everyone should be consuming so i'm really grateful you created this work in this book chatter the voice in our head why it matters and how to harness it by ethan cross make sure you guys get a few copies of this book because there are 26 tools in here i was going through a lot of them and i felt like i i used some of them already and others i was like wow that's a powerful thing that i could start applying to my own life so make sure you guys get this book i think it's going to be an incredibly powerful tool that you use for yourself and for other people in your life and coaching other people as well so get the book chatter the voice on our head why it matters um where can we follow you online or is there a place that we can support you online yeah you can um you go to my website www.ethancrosswithak.com and then i'm on instagram and twitter and linkedin okay what's your major what's your main social channel would you like to use the most instagram thank you you know i i i i this is all new to me i've i've begun the professor world yeah yeah you don't do that and i've actually studied social media and well-being so i know it can be a minefield you've got to be careful how you navigate it absolutely and i i must say i really like instagram that's cool okay how about you which are you are you is it just eastern cross on instagram or okay yeah instagram is a big one for me as well youtube we have a big audience and channel on youtube so i'm a big fan of providing this information on all these platforms yeah yeah it's an amazing way to you know social media you know people often ask me because we've been doing research on social media for so long and how it impacts well-being is it good or bad and my answer is it's it's both you know it's a new environment and it like if you think of the offline world you can go if you go to the wrong neighborhoods and in the physical world and talk to the wrong people the wrong way you get in trouble if you go to the right neighborhoods and talk to the right people you could benefit social media is the same way and one of the real benefits is how it can connect us and get information out so that's how i've been trying to to use it and not for the more harmful you got to use the tool appropriately don't abuse the tool otherwise it'll abuse you that's right like the tools in your book that's right you got to learn to use them in the right way really grateful for this i've got a couple final questions uh this question is called the three truths so i'd like you to imagine a hypothetical situation it's your last day on earth many years away from now you live as long as you want to live but eventually you got to turn off the lights you've accomplished everything you want to accomplish you you see everything come to life your dreams all that stuff but you got to take all of your work with you no one has access to your content your words videos nothing you have to take it with you to the next place but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true from your experiences of life the lessons that you would share with the world and this is all we would have to remember you by i call it the three truths your three lessons what would you say are your three truths boy oh boy um that was supposed to come in the memo before we spoke so what are the three truths um uh um it gets better with time because it it it almost always does um we're much better at helping others than we are ourselves because i think that can be as a framework for living a good flourishing life an incredibly powerful understanding um and be a mensch your mensch yeah mensch mensch you know term i grew up with which is you know just be a good decent human being because because it feels good and because it makes other people feel good and because it's rewarding for everyone so so there you have it be a mensch uh big fan of this we'll have to connect maybe i'll come to michigan at the big house someday and if you guys can give me a ticket maybe i'll come up there finally ticket is yours there's so many things you might have to use some tools to regulate yourself before you shoot this way you can um i would acknowledge ethan for for showing up powerfully for the last couple decades doing the research doing this work helping students who need it the most at the university of michigan and uh and now helping the world through this book and the work you're doing and putting yourself out there i feel like these strategies and tools are the things we need the most so i'm really grateful that you're alive i'm really grateful that you're creating this work i'm really grateful that you're showing up in a powerful way to support and serve so many people who need help understanding their mind the noise the anxiety and the stress so i acknowledge you for that i'm really grateful that you're here my final question is what is your definition of greatness um sorry i'm not this is another one i wish i had the memo on this otherwise what is my definition of greatness um my definition of greatness is is leaving leaving another person uh a little bit better off than before they met you and leaving the world i guess if i'm if i'm going to the next domain leaving it just a little bit better than it was before i i came on it that would be a definition of of a great life love it thanks man appreciate it thank you appreciate it man false positivity is one of the greatest contributors to decreases in human well-being right now because what it does is it doesn't allow people the space or even the permission to process normal experience

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, dr. ethan kross, destroy negative thoughts, break the addiction to negative thoughts, unlock your mind, control your mind, manifest abundance

Id: uAkLFFG-6w4

Length: 94min 26sec (5666 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021