Use this TECHNIQUE To Unlock the POWER of your MIND For SUCCESS | Dr. Ethan Kross | FBLM Podcast

the inner voice it's a tool of the mind it can help us be successful and productive but when used the wrong way it can be enormously destructive for our health for our relationships for our ability to perform so it's about figuring out how do you harness it [Music] our ability to use language to reflect on our lives this is a superpower it helps us innovate problem solve create it helps us author the story of of who we are helps shape our identity so these are amazing qualities that you you want to be able to to use and harness throughout your life but then of course there's the negative side which is the chatter the worry the rumination the catastrophization yeah so we've got this incredible power but actually if we don't harness that power it can take us down the wrong track and so you know ethan as a as a doctor i'm really interested as to how the voice inside our heads can affect our physical health so i guess what i'm looking to understand is can chatter make us ill well i think the answer that question is yes and it um it's interesting because i think many people can easily relate to having the experience of stress but for throughout time stress has been this kind of abstract thing that happens in your head and things that happen in your head have lack the same kind of concreteness we can't feel it the same way that we can uh you know we can feel a wound swell in our body or see like our arteries get filled with with plaque and um other things that you know create lead to heart attacks and things like of that sort so so i think actually the brain imaging that has evolved over the past 20 years has helped a lot with that in the in terms of helping people see how stress can manifest in the brain and how that can in turn have downstream implications for health but the way this works the the snapshot that exists so how does stress actually make us physically ill one of the leading theories is the idea that as human beings we are designed to experience stress right experiencing stress is a really useful adaptive response to a threat in our environment it's a good system to have i wouldn't want my worst enemy to not be able to experience stress because they wouldn't survive well in the world experiencing a stress response isn't harmful per se what makes it harmful is when our stress response is triggered and then remains chronically elevated over time that exerts a wear and tear on the body that we are not designed for and what helps keep our stress responses active over time it's me getting an email last night that i wasn't so happy about and replaying that email in my head hearing the words spoken over and over and over again and replaying that email today and tomorrow thinking how i'm going to respond this may or may not be a hypothetical event by the way but but it is our our minds are capable of of of maintaining our stress responses and when you get people who are ruminating or worrying for long stretches of time that's what the mind is doing it's keeping us in that stress state and that has been shown to predict a host of physical maladies that range from cardiovascular disease to problems of inflammation to various forms of of cancer and so the link to our physical health is there it's strong and i think it's one of the three big reasons to really be concerned about chatter the inner voice is something that many of us struggle with some to greater degrees than others and it may be that various times in our life where we're sort of okay with things and then an event that we're unprepared for comes up and you know starts to trigger us and this actually generally happened to me about four weeks ago i'm pretty much pretty calm person these days you know i certainly didn't used to be i've done a lot of work on this a lot of meditation journaling all kinds of things you know a lot of work on my own inner voice but there was an incident in my family life to do with my son's schooling that you know for a whole five days i realized that my my inner voice had just gone up to not even 10 to 11 and my wife said to me one morning you are making yourself sick with this and i was aware that i was making myself sick but in the moment it was actually really hard to do anything about it so so for people who resonate with that either now and again or you know day to day you know what what is the aim here is the aim to turn it off completely or is it to sort of manipulate it and shape it so that it can work in our favor rather than working against us well before i answer that question i want to i want to thank you for um for divulging that personal story because i think one of the things that can be really powerful is is sharing with folks that really ultra successful people we all struggle with this at times i think this is part of the human condition this this ability to slip in to to chatter um so so thank you for doing that um the question of whether what the goal is the goal in my mind is not to turn the inner voice off the the goal is to harness it so i actually tell the story in the book of a neuroanatomist who desperately wanted her inner voice shut off and she she got her wish so to speak tragically i'm laughing but it's a tragic event she had a stroke and it temporarily took out her language ability her ability to use language not just language as as we use when we communicate with one another but when we communicate with ourselves initially she described the experience of not being able to talk to herself as as liberating gone were the whispers and worries that made life unpleasant but what also left her was the positive side of the inner voice the ability to use language to simulate and plan for the future i don't know what happened with your son but i'm guessing it was some kind of problem and i'm guessing you started thinking about it in an attempt to try to solve that problem in some way to figure out why was this happening what can i do right that's your beautiful brain trying to weigh in on this situation to to muster the resources you have to get to the bottom of it but not working in your situation well we'll talk about why that often backfires later so she lost that capacity to use language to control ourselves to to make sense of her experiences to plan for the future and that was really unproductive so the challenge i think we all face is not to turn the inner voice off it's that when we find ourselves slipping into chatter to nip that response in the bud as quickly as we can to free up our inner voice to do the wonderful things that evolve to do to help us plan to help us simulate help us fantasize and and so forth and so on yeah really powerful example and as you were as you were describing that ethan i i thought back to early on in my career as a gp and i remember some patients who would come to see me they were they had been put on antidepressants and one thing they would commonly say of course not everyone but a lot of people would come back and say dot chastity you know i'm not feeling as low as i used to but i'm not getting the same highs as i used to either i'm i'm just sort of existing somewhere in the middle the entire time and i don't really like it i'd rather actually come off and actually feel the lows but also feel the highs and it's not quite the same thing but i guess the underlying principle is quite similar to what this colleague or this neuroanatomist you're writing about it's the goal isn't to to go to one extreme or the other because it's part of life isn't it that the kind of inner voice we don't want it muted completely we want to use it yeah i mean here's a simple metaphor here so let's say i'm in construction right a hammer is a tool i have a hammer is an invaluable tool i used to build houses i used to take things apart carefully i wouldn't be a successful builder without a hammer now a hammer though in the wrong hands i.e in my hands in real life can be a massive source of destruction right so it's about how you use that tool i would argue that the inner voice is a tool it's a tool of the mind and when we use it the right way it can bring us much happiness it can help us be successful and productive but when used the wrong way which is the manifestation of that is chatter it can be enormously destructive for our health for our relationships for our ability to perform so it's about figuring out how to use that tool that's what i've spent the past 20 years studying and and you know that's what that's what this book is really about how do you harness it so you don't slip down the rabbit hole we're definitely going to get into a lot of the practical solutions that you offer in the book and ethan i just want to say it is such a beautifully written book it is so practical there's so much research in it but i really struggled to think of any person who it wouldn't help no matter who you are in your life so i really think you've done a a wonderful job that i really want to say thank you and acknowledge you for that before we get into some of those practical tools it's interesting for me that you've been studying this for about 20 years so what led you to study this because then you you know you share in the book also this personal experience you had when you'd already been studying this for many years yet in in a sort of similar way the chatter came to you even though you were an expert in chatter you still were afflicted by chatter in a negative way weren't you so yeah i've been studying this uh for 20 years i've been thinking about it for 37 i had a a dad who was somewhat unconventional you know he wasn't a college grad or or he didn't spend his life uh teaching about philosophy but he spent his time reading about in particular eastern philosophy buddhism hindu is um i mean the whole nine yards and he talked to me as a three-year-old starting as a year-old about it and one of the things he impressed upon me at a young age was when problems happened i should go inside introspect find a solution and then move on with my life and that was a lesson that i internalized and it really served me well throughout my childhood adolescence things happened i wasn't happy i introspected found a solution i moved on then i got to college and i took my first psychology class and i learned that hey a lot of people it's not just my dad who taught people to do that a lot of folks somehow learn to do this as well but they're not always successful oftentimes introspecting turning our attention inward to make sense to reflect on our lives and our problems that often makes them worse and it leads to things like depression and anxiety and various other kinds of negative uh conditions and so for me from that point on i was hooked the the challenge for me became well why does introspection sometimes help and sometimes hurt and i went to graduate school to to try to work on that problem and i've spent my career doing it ever since and so then rewind about 10 years into my career we published a paper that got a lot of attention it was really exciting i went on tv my parents were like watching with popcorn great event you know um and and then a couple of days later i got a really hostile threatening letter in the mail the kind of letter that you know you no one wants to receive slurs threats drawings um had to file a go to the police station um they didn't make me file a report but spoke to a police officer about it and for the next couple of nights uh you know i spent i spent those nights pacing the house with a baseball bat i just my wife and i had our first child i'm thinking to myself what have i done yeah i had to go on tv i got everyone in a mess and you know can i leave and it was really deeply disturbing and there is a bit of an irony there because yes i was studying chatter at that time for quite a while but incapable of pulling myself out of it in the moment now one of the things we know about people in general is something called solomon's paradox named after the bible's king solomon we are much better at advising other people than taking our own advice and i was living that experience of solomon's paradox in that moment fortunately i did stumble on something that helped me it's actually a tool that i went on to study and as described in the book i was able to get some distance some mental space from the the experience and realize i wasn't being objective and i did it through um through at the time seemed like a strange quirk of language i actually talked to myself in my head like i was talking to a friend or someone else and actually used my name and i said ethan what are you doing at three in the morning with a baseball bat go to sleep you know and and actually that talking to myself like i was someone else and using language to do it really helped me break myself out of that chatter funk and maybe we'll get into that later on why why that tool works but it was a a really powerful firsthand experience of chatter one that i hadn't really had before in general i've been someone who's good at managing chatter so uh it certainly gave me a new perspective on the topic that that i had spent my career studying and i continue to study now yeah thank you for sharing that you know what i love about the book ethan and your whole approach is that that the tools within the book right really help us understand ourselves better they understand you know we understand the inner voice we understand some of our behaviors we understand some of our adaptations to the world around us and that's why i'm such a big fan because i feel awareness is actually such a key part of long-term transformation you know we can follow people's advice sure i can give a patient advice great they can follow it for a few weeks a few months but but at some point they've got to really start understanding oh i get it in this situation this works really well for me in that situation that works well for me they they start to take ownership off it and i really feel that the tools you outline help the reader find out what works for them because you offer um a whole range of different tools and as i look at the book i see three broad categories i see tools that we can utilize ourselves tools that we can utilize with others and then tools that actually help us with the physical environment around us you know that's how i'm seeing at least three large categories and i thought a way to progress this conversation might be to go through those uh systematically start with the tools that we can use by ourself and you obviously have just touched on one of those that you used when your own chatter was causing problems in your own life yeah you summarized it beautifully and you know one point i might add is that i don't think there are any single tools that are magic pills we've evolved these different tools to help us with our chatter because i think different combinations of tools work for different people in different situations so as you very eloquently describe i think the challenge we all face is to figure out what are the blends of tools what are these different tools that we could bring together to to rein it in i think that's a big challenge so when we experience chatter we often zoom in on our problems so so narrowly we have tunnel vision we're focusing on on that issue that's bugging us to the exclusion of really everything else that's going on in our lives and so one of the things we've learned is that what can be really helpful in that situation is to broaden our perspective to step back or zoom out if you will to focus on the bigger picture which often brings alternative ways of making sense of what we're experiencing that can be quite useful so [Music] you know the the technique since i mentioned already giving yourself advice like you would someone else and actually using language to help you do that we call that distanced self-talk it's a kind of distancing tool and this ability to get some distance or space from our experience can often be quite helpful we call it a distancing tool because if you think about the context in which you use names and and second person pronouns words like you most of the time we use those parts of speech we use them when we think about and refer to other people so the idea here is that when you're using your own name and the word you to refer to yourself it's a kind of automatic perspective switch it's getting you it's it's it's leveraging the power of language to help you relate to yourself like you were relating to another person and interestingly enough we see people falling back on this tool during times of stress throughout history everyone from julius caesar to henry adams to the the actress jennifer lawrence to my favorite you know lebron james during times of stress people seem to do this odd thing they start talking to themselves using their own name all right lebron here's what you got to do jennifer get your act together this is just an interview and and what we find with laboratory studies experiments is that when you ask people who's who are in the midst of chatter to to try to coach themselves through a problem using their own name it really helps them do that rather than thinking about the situation they're facing as a threat something that they can't handle when they're talking to themselves like they're advising someone else they end up giving themselves pep talks they start reframing the experience as a challenge something they can manage ethan you've given a hundred talks before why are you so worried about this one you've never had someone ask you a question that has led you to cry on stage it's gonna be fine and so forth and so on so it's it's this small shift that really breaks you out of this threat mode i can't do it oh my god what's in front of me and really gives you this sense of uh self-efficacy that you can manage this situation which which by the way that's something that i think most people are trying for when they're in the midst of chatter when a person struggling with anxious thoughts or depressive cognition many of those people want to feel better they want to think differently about the situation they just don't they can't do it and and the idea is that stepping back a little can help them follow through with their goal to actually think different to actually feel better so that's one tool i love tools like that because certainly in health and wellness you know my my mission is to try and make it as accessible as possible to as many different people and that's a tool that we can all use now i wonder how much culture plays a role here and the reason i ask this is because you know in the uk my feeling is that if we see someone being interviewed on television let's say lebron james for example as you brought him up and if lebron doesn't say you know i was feeling nervous i was feeling stressed but i got escaped if he says so in that game lebron was feeling nervous and lebron actually knew what he had to do i think the british sentiment is to be a bit mocking if that and go oh man he really sort of has tabs on himself or thinks a lot of himself to talk to himself in that way yeah right i thought it was the same in america or not but but your the book and then the research shows actually no no no he knows exactly what he's doing that is really really powerful at providing that psychological distance so how would you unpick that a little bit for me i'm sorry i'm glad you asked um so first of all you know we're related distantly us uk and our responses are the same so actually lebron james did this during a live special on the espn our sports station he was he was basically trying to decide does he stay with his hometown team the first team he played for in the nba or a lead for a different team the first time he became a free agent and so he's done this prime time special to announce his decision and then on live television he says i didn't want to make an emotional decision lebron james now do what is best for lebron james the internet went crazy bananas about this right he's a narcissist blah blah blah and so so yes um uh the the response is the same couple things to say about it so first of all in all of the research that we've done we study how these silently how these shifts we call them linguistic shifts work when people do them silently in their own head not out loud and i would encourage anyone who wants to try using these techniques to try doing this in their head or in the privacy of their own home where people aren't around until they want to actually audibly do it um you know you just i just did it silently right you just think to yourself using your own name try to coach yourself through the problem uh and the reason for that is when you talk to yourself out loud and use your own name that powerfully violates social norms right it's it and that's not just a uk thing that's social norms in most places and so there could be social ramifications of that that we don't want to have happen even if there's some benefit the person themselves derives from talking out loud so if you're going to use the technique do it silently that's the the first one the second point is what's really fascinating to me about this phenomenon is how many people do it without even realizing they're doing it yeah right it seems as though we've stumbled on this tool we somehow figured out that hey when i'm stressed out using my own name to coach myself through the situation helps me let me give you a another example malala yousafzi right youngest person to ever win the nobel peace prize i think she lives in the uk now yeah she does okay so most listeners are going to be familiar with her story in case they're not just a a simultaneously chilling and inspiring story uh captures captures her her narratives so when she's a young child she becomes she be she starts to become a an advocate for young girls rights to to receive an education and the taliban target her and they they basically plot to assassinate her and she she finds out about this plot they do try to assassinate her they shoot her in the face she recovers she wins the nobel peace prize it's a wonderful story at the end but at the beginning it's about the most horrific kind of experience anyone can possibly imagine right here this well-organized group is coming to get me around the time that she won the nobel she went on the john stewart show in the united states a daily show to talk about her experience and and he asked her about it and she she basically narrated what went through her head and she said she said something to the following effect you know i used to think about what what i would do if the tali would come to get me and then i would say to myself malala if they come to get you you should just take a shoe and hit them but then you would be no different from the tales so you also have to be respectful and you know she just goes on and on and then john stewart asks to adopt her because he loves her so much but what is striking to me is we see this happening again here she starts off she's contemplating the most stressful experience anyone can imagine someone coming to assassinate me she starts off in the first person you know if they what what should i do if they come to get me and then the moment in her mind the moment they arise she switches to coaching herself malala take a shoe and hit him so you know did malala's dad the lebron james's dad did julius caesar's father or mother teach them to do this i don't think so i think we stumbled on the tool and i think where the value of the science comes into play with this tour many of the others i talk about in the book is that it shines a spotlight on these tools which allows us to be much more deliberate about how we use them how we incorporate them in our lives you know there's an analogy here to medicine where many medicines come from plants in the forest right we we then through science identify active ingredients and we put them in a pill form and we make it very easy to to go right for the medicine when we need it and the hope is that this book can help people do that as well when it comes to the inner voice yeah i mean that's a really nice analogy and you know what i love about many things including this technique is that humans have been doing a lot of helpful stuff for thousands of years and i i've said before that i feel that i don't know if every current generation of humans feels this way or not but but i kind of feel there's a bit of a arrogance with it with with us in the world where we think oh yeah we we've got this stuff figured out like with all our technology and our science we we've kind of figured stuff out that nobody before ever knew how to do but whether it's in you know the the circadian body clock that you know ancient doctors have been talking about for years and now sachin panda and the salk institute is showing yeah different organs are active at different times or whether it's the fact that this self-talk um using our own name now can be very useful at providing that psychological distance it's great to have the science to back it up and i find that very humbling actually the more different experts i speak to it it's incredible how many of the tools that we we're getting scientific data behind now actually are tools that the people have used for a long period of time yeah yeah they're ancient i mean some of these are ancient tools and the reason that the science is so helpful because i think our intuitions are often great right but sometimes our intuitions are not great so you know and i'll give you a few examples here and the science of course is the arbiter the science is what we can use to test our intuitions or our hypotheses about whether something is helpful or not or benign um a lot of people so when i give talks on on chatter and self-talk most people when i when i describe what chatter is and i say have you ever experienced this you know a sea of hands goes up when i talk to people about when i ask people hey do you think it's helpful to use your name to work through a problem there's a lot more variability some people say to me oh thank god i thought i was insane but now i understand that this is a useful tool i didn't understand why you ever did that before other people have a different response oh that why would that help would it happen and so i think there the science can be very helpful for folks who don't have the same intuitions but then there are other things that we often think are really helpful and as i talk about in the book there can be value in just believing that something is going to help you even if it has no active ingredient and you know in the medical world we call that the placebo and placebos are in my mind to use the technical term a mind blower they are remarkable their potential to heal but we can also go beyond placebos as well and and and make tools and and medications even more powerful in fact placebos are often what we compare different tools against and so sometimes some of the things we do may not work or may not work for the reasons we think they work um talking to other people being one prime example yeah so i want to just go back to what you said about placebos this is one of my favorite sections in the book actually i've got a lot of underlines in because you know placebo has very much been i think undervalued by medicine it's almost been a little bit looked down upon but yeah there's a lot of science and and you also share this in the book just how powerful the placebo effect is and actually i've often wondered about um different clinicians have different methods with their patients you know they can they can study the same science they can read the same journals and see the same protocols but we can often get quite different results with our patients and i've always wondered why is that why do some patients do what their physician asked them to do why are some unable to do it and now and i it was hard for me to shake the conclusion that it's not just the quality of the information you give that's important it's the way in which you deliver it and i really feel very strongly that as a medical doctor but for any healthcare professional the way we connect with a patient in front of us and therefore how they receive that information if they have confidence in me and i say with confidence i think this is going to really help you i think that's going to have more impact than the same intervention that potentially someone who they don't like their doctor and they kind of feel that they don't listen to them and they're a bit you know a bit frustrated do you know what i mean i think there's something in that isn't there oh totally and you know it it's interesting you asked me at the start of this conversation where i am so i'm with my in-laws and uh my father-in-law is a retired physician and he trained with a a physician by the name of bernard lown who is a really interesting guy he was a a harvard trained cardiologist who not only invented the defibrillator but if that weren't enough won a nobel prize for doctors for peace or something like that so quite an illustrious cv and you know we're talking about the defibrillator right this is a a technical innovation that when it came on the scene was was i mean it changed i would argue medical history right i mean is that going too far i'm not a medical doctor but i would imagine um the names so so fact-checking in case i'm getting anything wrong but but he wrote a book that i read several years ago you'd think this guy who was was so brilliant and so technologically competent would be would be promoting technology and he was by no way by no means a verse to it but his message was compassion and the importance of of of the relationship between the physician and the patient it's not enough to do the test in fact we probably do too much testing make sure put the stethoscope on the on the chest and and leave it there maybe five seconds longer put your hand on the shoulder and tell the patient it's gonna be okay i think what you're describing is very much was his philosophy just passed away very recently this idea that other people can serve in a certain sense as a kind of placebo agent a way of helping other people believe that they're going to feel better and that that that's not going to necessarily make stage 4 cancer go away it's not not not necessarily these are relevant there but it can exert a lot of benefit in helping supercharge the effects of interventions and techniques so i think it is a vital message i think it's relevant to medical doctors i think it's relevant for humanity more generally too when i speak to my students when i talk to my kids i want to give them these beliefs to help them harness the power of their mind to do what it can and is capable of doing which is often we're not harnessing it to that full capacity yeah super super interesting um let's move on now to what we can do with other people how can we when we are experiencing negative chatter that that you know we just can't stop you know we we often want to share that with a friend or our network as a way of giving us support and there's a couple of phases of that of course which you beautifully illustrate in the book which i don't think we consciously think about we think that oh i'm not feeling so good let me call it my buddy and talk about it with them but you're sort of demonstrating how that's not always enough yeah this is one of my favorite topics in the book before i go into the people i want to just say with respect to the tools that you can use on your own we talked about one but i just i mean i realized there are countless other tools that i talk about in the book and that exists and so distance self-talk is just one example of the many things you could do on your own so you want to be able to move back and forth between tools now that i've given you that caveat there how we talk to other people about our chatter i think is a really interesting uh topic because we know from lots of research that when people experience strong negative emotions they are intensely motivated to share them with other people to talk about them there are very few exceptions to this to this uh to this rule we tend not to talk about things that we experience shame about or trauma but all other kinds of negative experiences when they're triggered we often want to share them and our culture and our characters they often give us a message which says hey when something bad is happening vent it get it out it's not good to hold it in and i think that's the the temptation that a lot of us have too we want to find someone to just unload what the research in this area suggests is uh it's not as simple as just venting our feelings and in fact venting our feelings often backfires and makes us feel worse so here's how this works let's say i'm really struggling with a problem and i find you know i call you where buddies now and i tell you about the rejection i just had from my 11 year old daughter it's a frequent experience for me and uh and i'm ruminating about it and i start telling you about what happened and what i felt and you oh man that sounds awful tell me what you took that was so nice of what you tried to do and she said that that's terrible and so you keep on kind of getting more out of me and you're really empathizing with me what that conversation does is it makes you and i feel really close and connected so when you empathically connect with me that validates my experience it makes me know that there's someone else in this world who's willing to listen that feels good in the moment it strengthens our friendship bonds but if that's all we do just talk about what happened and what i felt it doesn't do anything to help me work through the problem doesn't do anything to help me reframe the way i'm thinking about this experience that will ultimately lead me to feel better so the best kinds of conversations when someone approaches you for for help with their chatter are conversations that actually do two things first you do learn about the other person's experience you you need to find out what what they went through what they're feeling and it's important for them to be able to share that with you to a certain degree but then at a certain point in the conversation when the when when the person who's talking about what happened to them is ready for it you want to start trying to nudge them to go broader hey so that sounds awful but but you know you've gotten in lots of little tips with your son before have you dealt with them in the past and have they resolved how have they resolved or you know that happens to me all the time here's what here's what i do in that situation so there are different ways in which i'm trying to now break you out of that tunnel vision where you're just harping on the negativity over and over and over again like throwing logs on a burning flame right that just keeps it burning so i'm trying to connect with you but then also help you go broader and it's doing both of those things that we find in research is useful for not only getting people to connect well but also helping them work through their experiences in ways that nip their chatter in the bud yeah this is also a section that i i really loved reading about because you give all these sort of practical solutions on how we connect with others there's sort of a couple of things there really so from from one perspective it's like okay i'm struggling with my chatter i can phone up one of my buddies and talk to him and we then connect okay that's stage one that's great i feel there's a supported tribe around me i'm not alone in the world you know for social animals like humans that's a a really rewarding feeling to have that we're not alone that there's people around us to to help us and keep us safe but sometimes we're missing that second part which is the solution how can we help that person think about this differently and you said oh you know um you know this has happened to you lots of times before how did you deal with it then that's just one strategy isn't it because you can ask them a question you can maybe provide a solution or that you've got to be very careful when you provide a solution yeah i don't know this is a male thing or not a lot of my male buddies say the same thing it's certainly something i'm still learning in my marriage that if my wife wants to share something with me then you know my job is she has um very eloquently told me on many occasions is not to provide a solution it's to listen and be there her support and hear her and it's something i'm a lot better at now actually but i but i realized in the earlier days of my marriage i perhaps was quite quick to hey i know the solution here hey this is what you've got to do which you know and so i guess from that it's like we've all got these different stages right different people may require different stages of that connection first but then also when you do get to that sort of solution um sort of phase what i really enjoyed also was that you give people options and one of the options was what you just did in your example but another option which i i circled this morning was you can help silently talk me through some of those ideas yes so let me let me break it down and and you've got it just right so first of all there's an art to this uh there's an art to being a good chatter advisor to others and as a scientist you know we're not used to talking about art even though a lot of us scientists love art but what i mean by art is different people may need to be in what you described as stage one longer than others right so some of my friends come to the problem and it's really raw it just happened i'm going to spend a lot more time just learning about what they're feeling and what they're going through before i start to nudge them into thinking about the big picture and i might even ask them hey you want me to can can i offer a suggestion or do you want to just keep talking i mean there's nothing wrong with asking that question to someone else because they'll often tell you no i want to keep going or yeah please god help me like i mean i've had people say that to me like please tell me what to do you know so different people will vary in terms of when they're ready to get from stage one to stage two and we wanna be sensitive to that but everything that we've just talked about with first validating and experience learning and then and then advising that has to do with a situation where a friend is coming to you for help with the problem and they're being explicit about it which i think is often the case like i'll call up someone and say hey i can really use your i need your input on this let me tell you what happened and then we go into it they're going to be lots of situations in people's lives when they see someone who's struggling but that person has not asked for help explicitly they're they're suffering alone and for whatever reason they haven't approached you that's a situation where this other kind of support that you hinted at which i call invisible support becomes really relevant one of the things we've learned is that when we volunteer support for other people when it's not asked for it can often backfire spectacularly this happens to me with my kids all the time and i i tell a few anecdotes about provide anecdotes about this in the book you know i i i you know i teach for a living i do math and science and i see my let's say my oldest daughter maya struggling with her homework hey sweetie let me show you how to do this not not that way let me it's you do it this way and it's like mount edna erupts you know did i ask you for help you think i can't do it mom you know then it always it always ends with mom actually um and then i'm in deep trouble i just go back to my office at home and you know go back to writing books um so what's happened there is i've threatened the other person in this case my daughter her sense of of self-efficacy this idea that hey i can manage this thing on my own that's a really powerful set of cognitions the sense of self-efficacy we know predicts lots of things are you know performance well-being in life feeling that we have control over this situation and we can do it and when we inject ourselves into the equation we can often threaten that so in those situations what can often be really useful is helping without the other person knowing you're helping and you gave a perfect example so when my wife is really she's you know she's a dietitian when she's overwhelmed with work and and clients and covet i'll figure out a way of taking care of dinner and getting the dry cleaning right that eases the burden if that falls on her plate that's one thing lest she has to worry about that's easing her stress load or there are other ways you can help invisibly too let's say there's a student in my lab who's really struggling with uh with their writing you know maybe they can't they can't put it all together in a way that's compelling and um and so maybe there's a workshop on campus a guest is coming to talk about a topic i'll i'll write an announcement to the lab hey this sounds like a great talk for all of us why don't we go together right so that's not a way of getting information to that student who's struggling but without me shining a spotlight and say hey you need to attend this because your writing sticks so there are lots of ways that we can try to help outside of awareness invisibly and i think that's a powerful awareness to have when it comes to our relationships and and again the big picture here is we're talking about really breaking down how to get good support from others and be a poor and and on the other end of the spectrum how to provide good support we're breaking down it into bite-sized steps so as to allow people to be much much more deliberate about how they go about seeking and providing support in their lives i when i'm when i'm struggling i there are like three people i call for help in my personal life and four in my professional life and some of those people i call are not the people who i love most and who love me most because they just get me to vent in ways that is harmful so i'm really careful about it and that's the invitation to others in the book you call it build a board of advisors which i thought was brilliant and you know different people can provide you that support for different things in your life and and again ethan you know the theme that comes to me throughout the entire book is is just this i guess this intentional relationship with life it's like life is no longer happening to you understand you understand even just in terms of what you just said the ability to interact with people whether it's your wife or your colleagues or your children you know relationships frankly are the fabric of life you know the 75 year old harvard study shows that it's the number one factor the quality of your relationships determines how happy you are throughout your life and a lot of these tools actually help us have better relationships less conflicts we're providing more support and it reminds me of um i spent a lot of time teaching doctors with a colleague of mine created a course called prescribing lifestyle medicine we sort of got it accredited by the world college of gp's in london and we probably taught maybe 2 000 plus doctors by now and you know i love doing it and often in the q a at the end this is when it was in person pre-covids they'd often say you know drastic you've been working for nearly 20 years now you know what is one of the key things you've learned i always say the number one thing i've learned in 20 years of seeing patients is this connect first educate second because i've i've strongly felt i've just seen this over and over again that if if i spend time to connect with that individual instead of trying to rush to the solution if i if i spend time if they feel hurt they feel validated they feel seen by me they're then all ears often when i've got some advice for them but if i don't take the time to connect i i feel that the advice is just not received in the same way i feel the same thing on my podcast i always take time to connect i i don't feel it's uh i've said on someone else's podcast recently i said i feel that this podcast is about connection if i can connect any information you get is a side effect of me connecting with my guests rather than it being a pure information delivery service and sorry to go off on a tangent but it's just i really feel what you're what you're teaching people you're giving the kind of the formula in many ways in terms of how to have these connections how to be there for others but also get the right support from others when we need it yeah it's it's far from a tangent and what i love about what you've said is it's a perfect complement to what what i talk about in the book and what we've learned about what you see as being so vitally useful for interacting with your patients connect and then educate that's the same principle that governs how to give good support to other people right connect and then educate validate and then advise it's the same basic idea and i think it speaks to the power of that idea um so i think it's it's it's it's wonderful and i i couldn't agree more and yeah the way that i think about what we're trying to do in the science and the space is provide people with a blueprint right for for how to how to manage this inner life that we all have that often transforms from a wonderful life into inner noise and what's the when that happens what's the blueprint that you can use to bring those conversations back on track i think science has has a lot to say about how to do that with pinpoint precision to be clear many of us have tools that we already use that work for us the latest statistics on coping with with covid and and the stresses it has brought um you know look this has been devastating for the world and and rates of anxiety and depression are triple what they normally are but about 70 at least in the states of people are are not reaching clinical levels of anxiety and depression they actually are managing the stressor reasonably well it's not to say it's not aversive but they're doing it and what that tells me is that they are bringing tools to bear to manage the situation so it's not like we don't have tools but the idea is that with science we can get a lot better at filling out that toolbox and teaching us how to use those tools much more effectively yeah and i think that's what the book and the science does so well and the technique you shared about psychological distance people may already be doing that but now that they know that there is science behind it there's two things first of all they're more likely to use it i think in the future and secondly there's more intention behind using it rather than it just happening and not realizing the impact you can almost add a bit of placebo in there as well because it's like oh i know that's going to help me so just sprinkle a bit on top as well so to supercharge what happens um when we're talking about the mind and we said right at the start what a powerful tool is if we harness its power in the right way i kind of feel the social media is is a we can make a similar argument about social media instead of saying it's all good or bad we go well hold on a minute there's many many benefits but we've got to be careful with how we're utilizing it and so on this subject of sharing um you know you know we're going through some chatter and we want to share that with others now we can do that with our friends and privacy where you know we've got some boundaries we've got some experience many people these days are choosing to do that online and i actually see that there's quite a few prominent influences here in the uk who you can actually see them doing their emotional processing through their posting and it's yeah you know i actually look at them with compassions to go hey man you know i understand what you're doing but i don't know if that's helping you or not i hope it is but my worry is is that you're just feeding that negative voice because you post something agitated and then you'll get all the kind of negative uh comments all the positive ones and you just cause this um cauldron of toxicity whereas i sometimes feel maybe taking a bit of your advice and actually having a board of advisors and going to them first before you share it with the world might be more beneficial so i guess my question is how what role does this play into the way that we deal with chatter because i know you've also done some research on this as well haven't you yeah yeah i've been studying social media for um at this point about 12 or 13 years really from when it first started to take over and and my views on it have evolved um initially we published some work suggesting that it de facto undermines well-being across the board based on the science that has now accumulated and work that we've done as well uh i think it is is not right to say that social media is harmful or helpful period it really depends on how you use it um let's back up a second though why is social media so relevant to chatter there's work which shows that when we experience strong emotions i mentioned this before we often want to talk about them with other people well what social media and the and the advent of technology does ie smartphones in our pocket it gives us a ginormous megaphone for our inner voice right we want to share with others no worries like you know facebook instagram you can do it in the exact moment that a negative emotion is triggered you open your phone and you write in what what's going through your head in fact facebook the prompt is what's on your mind right just share it with others that has some implications um for for what happens next right in the offline world in the physical world when we experience a negative emotion that we want to talk about with others oftentimes we first have to find someone to talk to right and and so finding someone that that could mean in pre-pandemic days like walking down the hallway finding a colleague making sure they're not meeting with someone else or calling someone and you know they may not be available but something often happens when we're searching for someone else to talk to which is time passes and time tends to take the edge off our emotional responses right as time passes we begin to feel better think differently um with social media we're often tweeting and posting at the very peak of our emotional responses before time has had a chance to exert its healing effects right so we're often projecting really raw stuff and the other thing about social media is it strips away many of the empathy cues that exist in in offline interactions that serve as a kind of constraint that governs how we talk so i'm looking at your face right now i could see how you're reacting to me in your voice i hear the response to what i'm saying if i say something that's hurtful or insulting there's going to be feedback that i register instantly that's going to constrain how i subsequently respond oh i'm sorry did i offend you in some way right like those empathy cues help keep society in check they help make sure that we're interacting with one another in civilized ways that promote social harmony we don't have those empathy cues when we're tweeting and posting right we're just doing it into a little text field and so that that has the effect of de-individuating us to use a technical term and then it can make it much easier for us to to say things to other people or share things with other people that we would never say or share to their face and that's how you get things like trolling and cyber bullying which can be really really bad right they can be really quite harmful for society um other dark side of social media when it comes to chatter we know that social media allows us to curate the way we present ourselves right so on our instagram feeds we're talking mostly about our highlights not the low points in our lives and when you get other people who are scrolling through those feeds wow this this ah this this person's really they've done a lot their life looks pretty awesome i didn't know you could travel to all corners of the world during coven and still have a great time i'm suffering at home that can elicit feelings of envy which drive our chatter response further we're ruminating about how ah we're not doing as good or feeling as good as these other people um social media and the last the last thing i'll say about the negative side it can also create a kind of collective co-rumination right like you're and i think we saw this with at least in the states with with our last um election i suspect with brexit times were tumultuous in the uk as well but we're we're we're putting out our negative thoughts and the negative news bites to our networks that are often like-minded and other people are jumping oh that's terrible they're awful oh my god did you see this and it's a kind of collective end session that can also drive people's negative responses and keep their chatter alive on a massive scale and does that just just to jump in there does it does that keep you locked in as i you know that stage one you know you're sort of you're not able to move to solution you sort of you're just stuck in that co-rumination cycle yeah and i think this is where the media we did a massive study on coping with coven in the states this isn't published yet we're working on it now so everything i say take this as unpublished data but hopefully it will be soon and we asked about how much have you read the news each day for for two weeks and it was a longitudinal study we tracked people's anxiety over time and wouldn't you know one of the most potent predictors of anxiety was simply reading the news i think the reason for that is we're just tapping into this what's current and the negativity and that's keeping us in stage one as you're describing it's keeping the negative feelings active oh my god you know the rates are even higher the people are dying or this person is saying this this candidate and it's even worse and so just keeping this chatter it's keeping us away from moving into the solution oriented mode so that's all the bad stuff now there is a positive side though of social media too which is it can provide us with a platform for getting good chatter support from other people from a massive network of other people and also for providing it to others as well and so there are cases in which if your network is properly constructed with folks who are supportive and who are trying to provide you with aid this provides you with a way of doing that so i see someone who's really struggling hey i can just help them really quickly in ways that i'd never do in the offline world because they'd probably never even ask me so and there are lots of examples of this social movements that that bring people together and into groups that are very supportive and helpful and so the take home with social media is we need to know how to navigate this space to make it work for us rather than against us when it comes to chatter and our inner voice if we think about the offline world the physical world from a very young age our culture socializes us into how to navigate the offline world profitably right i learned at a young age hey these are the neighborhoods you go to and these are the neighborhoods you don't go to this is the way to talk to other people uh to avoid getting punched in the face you know this is the way this is the way to do this and that my parents taught me that my school's taught me that my buddies taught me that we haven't had those kinds of lessons being transmitted for social media in part because it's so new ten years ago we had no knowledge base from which to pull we now have an accumulating scientific knowledge base that can tell us here are the things you could do on social media that may get you into trouble like just passively scrolling or doom scrolling not good not good if you don't want to experience chatter but here are the the ways you can navigate social media to your benefit and i think we'd all be better off if we start taking that science listening to it and sharing it with others so we could start socializing the next generation and ourselves into how to using it more productively yeah i love it and again comes down to intentionality don't just passively consume you know curate your feed the way you want it the way that's gonna it's gonna feed what you need it to feed in your life and what you said about the news i you know i really hope that gets published because i have seen this i've experienced this myself you know i went through phases and still do i you know it's almost something that is socially awkward to even admit i rarely watch the news i won't do it you know why i'm happier i'm i'm more present with my kids more present with my wife i'm like you know what if there's something big happening i'll probably see it when i go onto twitter but i'm not going to actively consume it at a set time particularly in the evenings um and it's and it's funny like when i used to travel you know we're still in a in a full uk lockdown as as we have this conversation even um but i remember sometimes you know you're away from home you're in a hotel room at a conference you know in the morning you know what i'm going to put on the breakfast news which is like a novelty because i don't normally watch it and you you start to see oh i'm starting the day with this kind of bit of negativity in my brain which i don't normally get at home because i'm i'm seeing it as a novel thing to do because i'm away in a hotel room but actually becoming more acutely aware of the impacts it's having on me and and this sort of i guess leads to this this third big bucket which is how much the world around us our environment influences our chatter so this final bucket uh for me was was the most fun to research for the book i find it fascinating that the way we've evolved tools exist all around us for managing what's happening inside us and rafael nadal is the perfect way to kick this off so as many listeners will know nadal is one of the greatest tennis players of all time and during an interview several years ago he told a group that the thing he struggles most with on the tennis court are the voices in his head that to me is astounding right so he is he is competing against the best athletes in the world yeah their backhand not a big deal my ability to hang with them for a full full match you know on wimbledon easy peasy no what he struggles hardest with is managing that chatter in his head and so what does he do what's his go-to tool for managing that chatter it's to to engage in these rituals so if you watch nadal you'll see every time he walks onto the tennis court he walks on in a very particular way carrying one racquet in his hand his his his bag of rackets in the in over his shoulder in the other he then sets down his racket in a particular way make sure to turn to the audience bouncing back and forth on his feet always unzipping his jacket aligning his water bottles on a diagonal between between his bench and the court he's very very sequenced tightly controlled in how he arranges things and of course once he starts playing you know the ritualistic behavior doesn't end he picks his wedgie out of his shorts before every serve and then curls his hair may not be the most hygienic to do it in that order he's he's arranging you know his his shirt it's highly structured and what he says is i order the world around me to provide me with the order that i seek in my head he's on to something because what we've learned and there are lots of experiments that support this is what he's doing is something called he's exercising compensatory control he's trying to compensate for the lack of order he feels in his head when we're experiencing chatter it often feels like we don't have control you know when you were when you were struggling with a chatter blip with your with your son like i'm imagining that the thoughts were taken the thoughts were in charge like you're not in charge because you couldn't stop thinking about this thing that was that was bugging you and the idea is that when we're in that state which we all are at times by ordering our world around us by tidying up by organizing or by engaging in a ritual a very structured sequence of behaviors that provides us with a sense of order that helps us feel better we know from from research that when people are stressed they tend to reflexively start organizing and engaging in ritualistic behavior i actually experienced this when i was working on my book i did something very unusual for me i i say unusual because as you in a moment you'll see in general i'm a pretty happy go lucky easy you know go with the flow kind of guy there are stacks of papers and books there might be an occasional pair of jeans and a shirt on the floor in my bedroom or the office like nope no big deal when i was writing the book my house was never as organized as it was then so i go in the kitchen and i'd order it i'd clean all the dishes and put the pots and pans away i joke that at some point i i was beginning to think that my wife wanted me to experience chatter because the the consequence was that the house was looking so so and span maybe she thought you were giving her invisible supports yeah yeah that that's the that's a much healthier way it's a much better way and if she ever listens to this she'll like that um she'll like that one better but but so that was me just you know you see this a lot people are are when they're stressed out they they organize things um this is this is this is one tool this is an environmental tool that we can use to manage our chatter i think it is instructive that throughout time our culture has given us rituals to deal with chatter provoking events if you think about particularly stressful moments in life like when we lose loved ones to death or other stressful moments at the other end of the spectrum the birth of a child we think of the birth of a child as a joyous moment it is it often is but it can often be quite stressful too that's when they're most vulnerable historically and i think that's probably true to this day cultures give us rituals to engage in right right grieving rituals birthing rituals and so we've again stumbled on this tool without knowing how they work so to be super concrete here for listeners when you're stressed out one thing you can do is organize your space like that can be useful for managing our chatter or you can engage in a ritual which i think of as a kind of chatter fighting cocktail in the sense that rituals help us in a few different ways first off they do provide us with a sense of order and control because we often rituals by definition involve doing the same thing the same way each time so they're very ordered but but rituals can also do other other things for us they take our mind off the problem so you see athletes often do rituals before you know high stakes um moments in their games and so so that's providing them with a sense of control you know but it's also taking their mind off what's stressing them out so if you're if you're if you've got the the shot on goal to win the game right rather than oh oh boy don't i shouldn't screw it up don't screw it up if you've got a focus on your ritual of scratching your head three times pulling your earlobe twice and then arranging your shorts that does take a little bit of your attention it draws it away from what's bothering you and then the third element is we often do rituals with others so there's a sense of community and bond and support that can be really um uplifting and like when you pray for example with other people that's a kind of ritual that there's a sense of togetherness which which can also be um chatter fighting in a certain sense yeah i mean the the story with nadal is is super interesting because you know i'm i'm i'm fascinated with sports and you i read a lot of a lot of things about different athletes and you know i've read something similar with michael phelps not i don't think during the meets i mean obviously swim swimming races are a lot shorter i think the ones that phelps competes in but i i've heard that since the age of 16 he has always prepared for a race in the same way again i'm not an expert on michael phelps but it's something like an hour beforehand he will go and do something like 24 lengths you know four of them will be this way four of them will be that way this there's no variety there's no oh what should i do today no it's the same way every time and then he finishes apparently walks to the changing room and i've read also that he'll sit down on the seat he'll find a seat on his left and his right that's empty on one of them he'll put you know maybe his swimming tools like a float um you know a boy whatever he's using on the other one he'll put his stuff and then put his headphones in and listen to the same song and then when it's time to for race time he walks out and does the race and you know it's it's interesting you know phelps you know one of the probably the most successful swimmer of all time i believe tiger woods and golf i i've also read has got you know he will rock up at the range exactly at the same time before t half time maybe two hours before and he'll hit he knows how many drivers he's gonna hit how many putts these things are not left to chance and hearing them or thinking about them in the context of what you've just shared about how we can um you know manipulate our external environment to give us a sense of control it's hard to feel that those guys aren't doing the same thing they are you know i guess it's great example here ethan i since last august all my podcasts have taken place in my podcast studio even the remote ones or the in-person ones and that's being redone at the moment and so yesterday it wasn't quite ready we're like oh man i've got these podcasts scheduled we're now in my living room and i'm going to start the different setup with a different mic and it took me 10 minutes at the start just to really get into it because ah it's not quite right it's not quite what i'm used to doing so i think i think the external environment it's it's massive isn't it in terms of our inner emotions yeah it's massive i think you know one way of describing the athletes behaviors ah this is just superstitious and but but what we know from the science is that they're actually they're on to something again this is an example of stumbling on a tool maybe we haven't even stumbled our cultures are often giving us these tools but but we're not quite sure why these things work but we think they do and so now again we have the opportunity to be much more deliberate about this in our lives and i think that is really empowering so you know i i do rituals too before i give a uh you know a talk to hundreds of people i i say the same thing to myself i could hear like my wrestling coach from high school giving me and you know saying it come on you could do it it's time to do this and do that i repeat that kind of mantra i take a few deep breaths and then i do it and i do it each time and it helps and and we all have our own idiosyncratic rituals i think that's an important point to make you don't just have to do a ritual it doesn't just have to be a culturally subscribed ritual although those existing can be helpful the research shows that you can often just create your own rituals and benefit from them as well so this is just one example of how we could tune our voices from the outside in but let's let's go through some of the other ones too because again i find this to be just fascinating so uh so we talked about two we talked about rituals in order which are related let's talk about awe so the experience of all oz and emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast that we have trouble explaining my last experience with ah was a few weeks ago when we landed the the mars rover on mars uh when i watched that i just my circuits are fried i don't understand how we managed to take an suv to blast it off this planet and safely land it on another planet just using the term like interplanetary travel that that used to be like star trek you know like it's a reality and and i have trouble understanding how we actually figured out how to do that it fills me with awe one of the things we know again through science through experiments rigorous research is that this is the it's in it's the ultimate way of getting distance if you will the ultimate perspective broadener right because when you're contemplating something as vast as interplanetary travel right like oh my god how your own concerns and worries they feel a whole lot smaller by comparison so experiencing awe leads to something called a shrinking of the self we feel smaller when we're contemplating these incredible things a lot of people feel aw when they're in nature and that's one of the way that nature can heal and help us with our chatter when you go through a walk in in in the in a green space provided it's a safe green space where you're not worried about you know getting mugged you know here are trees that have been here for hundreds of years they've weathered all sorts of storms and and and yet they're still standing like how does that work right that fills people often with a sense of art or looking at a great piece of art how how did a painter how did you know the mona lisa get painted this beautifully these are all ways of when we're trying to contemplate that something a monumental of that sort we don't feel like our concerns are are as important or as big as they previously were and then that can help us rein in our chatter so that's another way that we can uh combat chatter from the outside in yeah i mean what you say about or is it's incredible i mean even the language we use it's awe-inspiring you know it all sort of is feeding that that same idea i love that idea of shrinking yourself but we're often so busy and and i guess we're often so caught up in the noise inside our head that we can't stop to take in that so i guess on that then if we are too busy or that or the voice inside ahead is just so loud that we can't stop to take in the ore you know wha what would you say to someone who says oh i want to but i can't um well if you want to but you can't i look a great way to frame it let's go back to formula i love formula so uh when it comes to managing ourselves i think there are two critical pieces there's the there's the want and the ability the motivation and the actual capacity so motivation is you want to feel a particular way the capacity is do you have the tools to actually fulfill that motivation right i can i can want to feel better you know to no end ten point on a five point scale i want one if i don't know how to actually feel better i don't know what tools to bring to bear to make that happen i'm not gonna feel better that's one that's one example let's say you have another person who has they know all the tools that exist for managing their mind but if they're not motivated to use those tools if that you know what no i just want to sit and watch tv or i just want to i don't want to change the way i'm feeling then they're not going to use them so what you need are both pieces the motivation and the ability i think a lot of people when they're experiencing chatter have the motivation to feel better because chatter is an aversive state it feels awful we don't like this experience of being consumed by our thoughts our inner noise what i think we often lack is the ability knowing exactly what tools we could then use in a very precise way to manage that yeah that chatter and that's that's what you know the book hopefully helps people do by by illuminating the science and i guess what you were sort of showing there about or in nature it's a great way of reframing a break from work or even a walk right so typically we talk about them as you know you go walking a brisk walk 30 minutes a day you know your heart will pump more blood around the body it's good for your physical health but we can actually start to reframe that for people say hey look if you're really experiencing chatter and you can't stop yeah there are some tools you can try by yourself you know you share lots of them in the book including that psychological distancing but actually sometimes maybe just go for a 20-minute 30-minute walk in nature if you got it nearby and maybe that will just calm things down enough for you then to engage in those tools that maybe you were struggling with you know what i mean it's part of the armory exactly and just as reframing anything in life is a very powerful thing to do to help our mental health and reduce chatter even reframing exercise in nature i think could be really really powerful yeah i mean and so the way that nature works i mean i completely agree and you've actually described the benefits of nature perfectly when we're consumed with chatter consumed is a great word right like we have a limited ability to focus at any given time period and when all of those attentional resources are devoted towards our chatter it it can be incredibly depleting it's not only depleting it can also have a really negative side effect which is we can't focus on anything else that matters in our life like our work or our families so we're consumed we're depleting our attention when we're stuck in these states it feels people get tired people often feel really tired when they're stressed and worried about things what nature does is it provides a natural recharge to those you know the the attention that is consumed and and the way that works is when you're walking through a safe space a safe naturalness i i always feel like i have to stay safe because i grew up in the city in new york and the parks in new york when i grew up at the time these were this is where you got mugged so you know you've got to find a nice natural setting where you don't have to worry about those kinds of things or it defeats the purpose but when you find that park the greenery naturally captures your attention in a very gentle way you start taking in the flowers and the hedges and the trees and and and you're you're engaged with them but you're not focusing really hard on it like you would if you're trying to solve a problem and what that does is when you have that kind of what we call soft fascination with the world around you it allows your your attention to replenish and that attention can be really helpful to have it to implement these other tools that i talk about in the book and that people will you know have at their disposal so you know nature can heal in a variety of ways it's free as are all of the tools in this book right these are not these don't require years and years of therapy or or or pills which can be effective in some cases but also have side effects the idea here is that we could start using these different tools to very immediately help provide us with some relief yeah just a couple of things i'd love to finally touch on even if we can one of them was the idea that that i never really heard articulated in this way before was that a lot of the tools help us create a better distance between us and the negative thoughts but you sort of contrast that by saying that when you have joyful thoughts or blissful moments you don't want distance you want to fully immerse yourself in that experience and i thought that was really really interesting yeah so chatter is described by being totally immersed in that negative state right in a very tunnel vision-like way which makes it very difficult to think objectively about the situation we're just consumed we're all emotion so when that happens you want to get some state space step back in order to then approach the problem from a more objective standpoint which can be helpful distance self-talk is one thing you can do lots of others when we're experiencing positivity at least for me and this this is somewhat up to the individual but when i'm really having a great time with my kids the last thing i want to do is switch into objectivity mode right i want to embrace that experience i want to bathe in the joy and so i want to immerse myself in it i don't want to get distance and so this is the idea here that you want to be careful the distance is not always good it depends on when you distance you want a distance at the appropriate times distance is really helpful when you're when you don't have perspective but when i'm tickling my kids and and having fun and we're wrestling and having a good time like i don't need perspective it's just joy yeah and and so so i think being aware of that can be useful too yeah it's it's a brilliant way of thinking about it yeah you're wrestling with your kids you're laughing you don't want to reframe that and that sort of segues nicely into the the final topic i wanted to talk to you about which was kids um you have two young kids as do i uh i talk to them a lot about my work or they're always asking me who are you talking to on the podcast i sweep down i said well you know what so this guy called ethan you know i've been reading his book and this is what i've learned what do you think but what you're describing in the book i think will help every single adult who reads it and starts to apply it but then the natural extension for that is why do we need to wait until adulthood to learn some of these incredibly powerful techniques so can we utilize something with our children do you utilize something with your own children and how might we start thinking about that we definitely don't need to wait to adulthood to implement these tools it sounds like you and i have very similar parenting styles um and you know i talk to my kids about this stuff all the time i've taught them about the placebo effects you know there's a way of teaching them about distant self-talk we've done studies with kids on distant self-talk it's given rise to something called the batman effect where we've seen that when kids are struggling with something asking them to imagine that they're a superhero like batman or wonder woman and then telling themselves to actually coach themselves through a problem using their superhero name all right batman here's what you're gonna do or you know wonder woman dora the explorer choose your favorite superhero that research shows that that can help kids persevere under difficult situations and so a lot of these tools i think do generalize to childhood and and i think we can help our children by teaching them about these tools and getting them to try them out and so forth and so on the bigger question here though is given that a science now exists in this space right really and the space is how to manage the mind why aren't we teaching kids about this stuff much earlier in schools um this is a a issue that i never thought about until i was teaching a class at the university here university of michigan and i taught a senior level seminar on this topic it was great we had fun and on the last day of class one of the students asked me this question she was really irritated she said why is no one taught us about this stuff until we're 21 years old and now leaving for the world you know it could have helped us back then it's over now and i said to her number one if you're concerned about not having any more opportunities to experience chatter because you're 21 fear not you will have ample opportunity moving forward but i didn't have a good answer to her question and it it actually had an effect on my research because i started thinking about all the things we teach our kids about in in schools in in in primary middle you know high school i remember learning about like i love biology i do neuroscience i remember learning about the digestive system peristalsis really stuck with me right i love that concept if you ask me how often that information about peristalsis comes in handy in my life right now it's very infrequent like the last time i used that knowledge was when my my younger daughter wanted to know how she can swallow things upside down i had the answer i didn't have to google it right but that's it but net think about the mind right like how often do we have a need to rein in our anger or our anxiety or amplify our emotions i think most of us have these these these needs on a daily basis so why aren't we teaching our kids about how the mind and the brain work like why isn't that in the curriculum and so we're doing work now to actually do that we've designed a curriculum for for middle and high school kids to teach them about the science um and we're evaluating what effect learning about it actually has on their lives uh so does it help them perform better have healthier lives have better relationships um i think it's a huge huge challenge to try to address this issue yeah well i'm delighted you're moving your research into that area it's something i'm super passionate about it's so hard to believe that it wouldn't have not only an effect but a profound effect but let's see what the research actually shows and uh you know if when this is over if you ever are in the uk i'd love to invite you back into the the real studio for a face-to-face conversation to dive into that but you know ethan i really enjoyed my conversation with you today as i've said i think it's a a fantastic book that would benefit anyone i always like to finish off my conversations with actionable tips that people can think about now i know you've mentioned many during this conversation so far but i wonder just to finish off just to leave a few final thoughts in people's heads that they can go out into the world and they can start to make these often quite small changes that i think will have a huge impact on the way that they feel um so first of all thank you for the for the wonderful interview um it was it was a real joy and thank you for the very kind words about about the book as you know as a fellow author you work on a book for so long and it's really just you and the keyboard and so it's it's really wonderful to have a chance to talk to other people about it and see what kind of effect it has so um so thank you in terms of actionable steps uh my advice is to check out the tools that exist read the science behind them and then start thinking deliberately about what are the combinations of tools that work for you right because the specific combinations that work for you may be different for someone else and do a little bit of self-experimentation i'll tell you that when it comes to covid chatter and look i experience it like anyone else there are a couple things i do i'll try to coach myself through the situation using my own name what would i tell a friend i tell myself that i do something we haven't talked about but it's really simple to describe temporal distancing i'll imagine how i'm going to feel about this situation six months from now when we're all hopefully back to life somewhat as normal right that can be really helpful for giving us perspective i'll check in with my chatter board of advisors right there are like three people i'll call to talk about this i'll get that their perspective i go for walks regularly in the arboretum near my home and i may have begun to clean the kitchen more frequently yet again so so those five things work really well for me my wife does does other things that work for her and again i think the challenge here is not to find the single magic bullet right i've been doing research in the space for a really long time i don't think any single magic bullets exist but there do exist combinations of tools that can really be helpful and i think the challenge is to find what those tools are for you i think it's a wonderfully empowering message to finish our conversation on experiment and find what works for you not for your friends they can experiment they can figure it out you figure out what works for you ethan it's been a joy talking to you i hope we get the chance to meet in person one day thank you so much for coming on the podcast really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell and why not check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 18,000

Rating: 4.8830895 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast

Id: f6mw-TyftTs

Length: 89min 48sec (5388 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021