Ethan Kross | How to Deal With The Voice in Your Head

Srini Rao: , Ethan, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative.

Thanks so much for taking the time to join.

Ethan Kross: Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to the conversation all morning.

Srini Rao: Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So you have a book out called Chatter, which I probably read I think almost 15, 20 months ago. And as I was saying to you, what triggered my memory of it was seeing it on somebody else's bookshelf. And I knew that I wanted to talk to you because I think that this voice in our heads is something that all of us deal with.

But given the nature of your work and what you do, I wanted to start by asking you what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on the choices that you ended up making with your life and career?

Ethan Kross: I was a member of a few different social groups in high school. I hung out with athletes. I hung out with theater people and I ho ha hung out with brainiacs and in the Venn diagram of overlapping circles that if you put each of those groups in overlapping circles of a Venn diagram, there wasn't a huge amount of overlap.

I was pretty flexible in, in, in with people who had different kinds of interests. How did that impact my what I, my choices later on in life? Was that the

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: Yeah. I think those early experiences navigating different social groups helped me become comfortable speaking and interacting with people, who came from different walks of life and had different interests.

And I guess that has been kind of feature of my existence ever since. If we went back even further before high school, I actually went to a a religious school growing up, which was interesting because I was not religious at all. And so I had this interesting experience of during day when I go to school, we'd be learning about, about biblical studies and things like that. And then I'd come home and hang out with my buddies who came from all different walks of life. And I think really throughout my life I've been pretty comfortable moving back and forth between different circles.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny because I, in my mind, right when I heard those three groups, I was like, wait a minute. In every one of those three groups, self-talk plays a role in performance for brainiacs, for theater people, and for athletes. But let's come back to that that ability to navigate multiple social groups and be a social chameleon.

I feel like I've seen a handful of people who have that. My sister had it. She was just popular in high school even though she denies it to this day. Excuse me. But I wonder, is that something that is innate or something that can be learned? And if it is something that we can learn, how does a person go about doing it if it is not innate to who they are Naturally.

Ethan Kross: I think that it's Like so many complex psychological skills, if you want to call it. It's, there's probably a little bit of innateness to it. A little bit of learning and a mixture of the two. I think what allows me to navigate different spheres and what I would recommend to others who maybe are trying to do that is to put on your curiosity hat. I am genuinely curious about other people and their lives and their experiences. I want to know them, and this is not a psychologist talking about getting inside your head. I wanna, know your deepest thoughts. Yeah. Sometimes I do wanna know about those things when I'm doing research, but but I generally, I'm just interested in understanding how other people and experience the world and that makes it really easy for me to Participate and get immersed in conversations with other people who are willing to engage with me at that level.

So I think that's, that curiosity is one piece of it. And the other attribute that I think is useful is knowing just enough about those different groups and their interests to, to spark conversation around issues that they care about. And and I, it's not really that hard to do that.

Reading the paper, keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist, things like that. Provide plenty of ammunition to have those kinds of conversations.

Srini Rao: Yeah, so that raises numerous questions about the way we consume information today and how we have almost like the, this sort of, inherent confirmation bias in everything that we consume because of the way the internet has been set up, which almost I think, goes against that whole idea of understanding how other people think, having, conversations and dialogue with people who disagree with you.

And so couple of things I wonder, you mentioned curiosity, and I know that you are an educator, and this is something that I talk to almost every educator about. My dad's a college professor. But the reason this just came up was I had Craig Wright who wrote this book, the Hidden Habits of Genius, and he said something on our conversation that really struck me.

He said, there's no university that has a course on curiosity, even though it's this fundamental skill. Because I think in my mind, at least when I was in college at Berkeley, it was just, choose from the options that are put in front of you and figure out what careers they'll lead to.

And I know University of Michigan is considered the Berkeley if the Midwest. But as an educator, if you were tasked with redesigning the entire education system from the ground up, which I realize is a massive question we could talk about for an hour what would you change and what do you see that is working now and what isn't working?

Ethan Kross: That's such a big question. We could talk about it for, a hundred hours, not just one hour. I guess a few of the things that I would want to emphasize are, A focus learning, cultivating interests, going deep to understand ideas and have the emphasis beyond on that kind of critical thinking more so than wrote memorization. There are certain courses that do require you to memorize about how things, work, so to speak. But I think when you get to my side of the world, and we're talking about psychology and neuroscience a lot of what I try to do in the classroom is really push students to, to find an interest and then go deep.

When new graduate students come into my lab, one I'm actually jealous of them and the opportunity that is right before them, because what I invite them to do is, we start talking about what their big picture interests are, having to do with the human mind emotion and how you can manage the mind and emotion to hopefully make the world a better place and help people live better lives. the moment we find some spark of an interest I invite them to dive into the literature and, read one article and then find another lead in that article and it'll take you somewhere else, which will take you somewhere and follow that, that, that trail of crumbs until you get to a point where you now have this unique understanding. Of this issue. It's a unique understanding that no one else in the world has because you've curated the knowledge on your own and now you're in a position to, to weigh in on the issue that's driving you. I think the more we can do to give students that kind of experience of being an explorer of ideas the better at least again, when it comes to the kind of work that, that I do and I'm interested in and I actually do think that a lot of professors do try to give their students these kinds of experiences in upper level seminars and certainly in graduate school.

Srini Rao: . So what is the challenge with doing that in undergraduate education? Obviously I know Michigan is probably very similar to Berkeley in terms of the fact that you go into an undergraduate classroom, there's 900 people here and I'm a number. I literally, you're a number. You don't even have a name that they associate you with when you take a test that like this is your student ID number.

To the point where I had a cousin who told me the guy was sitting in a final exam. Professor was like, the exams went over for 30 minutes, you gotta turn this thing in. And he was yelling at the guy I walked up to the front of the class, stuffed his blue book in the pile. He is do you even know my name?

And he just left.

Ethan Kross: Yeah. I think when you're dealing with a large university, there are multiple constraints and I think the role of introductory level classes is really to spark interests and excitement. I actually teach a course here called The Teaching Academy, which first year graduate students, all first year graduate students in the psych department.

Take this class and we go over what the goals what your goals should be as an educator when teaching different kinds of courses. And the temptation that a lot of people experience when they start teaching big intro classes is to be really comprehensive. And what I like to remind these incoming graduate students of is the fact that. any topic that you have a day dedicated to that can be exploded into a full semester long course. So there's no you can't possibly cover all of the material for any different topic. So instead, I think what the goal should be for those intro level courses is just give students a taste, wet their appetite, make them a somewhat informed consumer of the material so that they then know where to follow up and where to go next to, to satisfy their appetite for this, these topics further. then once you get them in an upper level class, I think universities can make it easier on professors to do the kinds of things I'm talking about by keeping the classes smaller. I think it is unfortunate that. we, we don't get to have, at least at the large universities, this is different at smaller schools, but oftentimes their wait, most seminars are wait listed and we've got 30 students at a minimum in those seminars.

And the kind of conversation you can have with 30 students is just fundamentally different than the kind of conversation you have with 12 or 15 students. And so I think just actually having smaller classes is, would be one huge, boon to this learning process. I also think doing more to get professors in the class, getting people who are actually producing the knowledge, giving students access to those individuals would be important as well.

This is not to say that, lectures aren't phenomenal at what they do. They are, and I think there's a role for both of them in the classroom.

Srini Rao: Now how do we get from this position of being explorers of ideas, which I feel was common early on in the development of the education system. Correct me if I'm wrong, to this sort of rote learning where we're just like stuffing people with information that they probably won't ever use or have no sort of context to apply it in.

Ethan Kross: how did we get to this point?

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: I think that's a great question. I don't know that I have the the exact answer to it. I think part of it is that there are some, we do need mechanisms for evaluating people and it's, it certainly is easier to grade a multiple choice exam with a Scantron machine.

I haven't given one of those in a while. Do you even know, do Scantron machines still exist? Are they still in vogue or is there something newer?

Srini Rao: I haven't been at a school or a college in so long, that yeah, but I, trust me, I'm all too familiar with Scantrons.

Ethan Kross: Like that's much easier. You can be objective. You can grade 350 exams in a few minutes with a Scantron machine. But if you're talking about evaluating one page, weekly response papers, so gimme your best thoughts, what are you most excited about? What have you learned this past week doing that for 350 students if you're in one of these big courses?

That just becomes really hard

Especially when you have people who are doing multiple things. I think professors aren't just teaching. That's one thing they're doing. And many professors are really passionate about doing that, but they're also doing other things like their research.

They're mentoring the service. And life tugs on people in lots of different ways. And I think sadly, of the things that has given has been the kind of depth of, or depth is the wrong word. I was about to say intimacy. I'm not using that in this context. The kind of one-on-one context that I think can be really useful for a true educational experie.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It sounds to me like what we need to figure out how to do is to scale a Socratic method of learning to the masses.

Ethan Kross: Yeah, that would be great if we could do that. And you do see that happening at smaller institutions and again, you see it happening also at an upper level seminar. We're focusing mostly on, on of improving. But I do think that many of these large institutions, as an example of the University of Michigan, do a pretty good job optimizing based on the hand it is dealt and by hand being dealt.

The size of the undergraduate body and the need to educate

Numbers of students and give them a high quality education. The fact that students can take a large introductory course early on, but then find time with their instructors and professors later on in a more smaller setting. I do think that universities are doing a pretty good job.

Srini Rao: What have you seen change in the approach to learning that students take throughout your career? Particularly, when you're at an elite school like Michigan, which I know is one of the top public schools in the country in the wake of something like a college admission scandal.

Because every time I see that the documentary about Rick Singer and I see those kids who look at this moment in their life as make or break, it pales in comparison to the moment I got my acceptance letter to Berkeley was like, oh, cool, I got the big envelope. Great. I'm not gonna be totally destitute.

But the way these kids react is this is a matter of life or death.

Ethan Kross: Yeah, I think that we, I'm a parent of two daughters who are school aged one is approaching high school and you can al already to sense these kinds of conversations and sentiments about college begin to bubble up in parents' awareness and. I think it is really unfortunate that we put so much emphasis on, on, you've gotta get into this one school. And the truth is there are lots of fantastic schools and if you do well at any of a number of schools, you are in all likelihood gonna do really well later on. And so I think the more we can we can make students aware of that in high school and parents as well, the better for all of the kinds of chatter related phenomena that we see playing out

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: those kids and their parents. And it it is it is really unfortunate the kind of pressure that, that students and parents are placing on themselves. This is not to say that should be no pressure. I think it's very easy nowadays. There's a, there's this common. Cultural movement towards good vibes only.

Is that the phrase is that, am I getting it right?

Srini Rao: something like that.

Ethan Kross: like that, that people have talked about this kind of toxic positivity movement where the goal in life should be to only be experiencing positive emotions at all times. A, that, that is not I don't think that is possible, and I don't think it's possible because we evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. Negative emotions and small doses help us solve all sorts of problems. There's research which shows that experiencing a moderate level of anxiety actually good for you. It enhances performance. and so you don't want to eliminate all of that pressure. I think a little bit can be healthy. let's face it. Life is also filled with various kinds of challenging situations that we need to learn how to effectively grapple with

Giving students opportunities to, practice doing that in a relatively safe space that is high school, if anyone can call that a safe space I think is useful.

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: I, we don't want to get rid of pressure and aspirational goals, I think we want to stop magnifying them to the point where they color everything we do and place huge burdens on us that ultimately detract from our thinking, performance, relationships, and.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I think that makes a perfect segue into talking specifically about chatter. I think negative emotions are really a good way to think about this, because I, Dan Pink said this to me when we were talking about his book, the Power of Regret. He said, we're over-indexed on positive emotions.

And he said, you want to have more positive emotions than negative emotions. He said, the problem is that if you don't have know how to deal with negative emotions, you're gonna have a lot of problems. But what is it that what's been the trajectory that led you to doing research on this and writing this book of all things?

Because this doesn't seem like you know anything that you could end up on by following a linear path.

Ethan Kross: well. My, my trajectory to studying chatter, which you could think of as your introspection run amok, right? So you've got this amazing tool, which is the mind, you could turn your attention in word to try to work through problems. And our ability to do that is, undoubtedly one of the reasons why as a species who've been super successful, figured out how to do things like build spaceships and invent vaccines and solve all sorts of problems, right?

Through this process of introspection, which often relies on language. So we've got this remarkable tool, but we know that this tool. Is pretty unwieldy. So a lot of the time when people experience and hardships in their lives, they reflexively try to engage in this, engage this tool it jams up on them.

They end up ruminating and worrying and raise that can really make their life miserable. Miserable in the sense of undermining their ability to think and perform undermining the quality of their relationships and detracting from their physical mental health. And I've always been interested in this puzzle of introspection and

,

my interest in it actually preceded college or high school.

It actually went back to when I was a little kid and my dad used to constantly tell me, whenever you experience a problem, to use your mind. Go inside. He'd use that phrase, tap into that voice inside you and find the solution and. He was essentially teaching me from a young age to rely on introspection as a tool. And it and that was a lesson that, although I wouldn't admit it when I was a little kid and he was giving me these instructions, I'd roll my eyes. But I listened to what my dad said, and I have, I did rely on introspection to my benefit throughout adolescence. And then I got to college and I started taking psychology classes.

And what I learned in those classes was there'd been a lot of research on this topic. And, what the findings said goes back to the summary I gave earlier on the one hand. introspection benefited a lot of people a lot of the time, but on the other hand, it was the, also the source of enormous misery and suffering. And so why that happened, why that happens, why is this sometimes beneficial but oth other times harmful? That became a giant puzzle to me, and I started doing the kinds of things we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. I started reading articles and following the paper trail.

What did this person saying? What did these people find? I just became enamored with the question. why is introspection sometimes helpful and other times harmful? And most importantly, when we find it running awry, what can we do to bring it back on track? to get rid of introspection, we don't wanna get rid of our invoice, but how can we really master it?

So I ultimately went to graduate school to figure out how to use the tools of psychology and neuroscience to weigh in on those questions. that's what I started doing my research on early on, and I've continued to do it ever since. Fast forward about. years after I started graduate school. I'm teaching a class of graduating seniors at the University of Michigan about these topics.

And it was a class called the Science of Self-Control. it's always a really fun class to teach. Every week we dive into a different facet of people's inner lives and how they are sometimes mismanaged and how we can optimize them. And the way the class was set up each week, give part, I'd assign readings and students would send me their best thoughts and then I'd mice through a discussion amongst them. And on the final day of class, we basically, turn the ties. And so the assignment for students was to come to me with questions that they had, having now become experts in this domain. I had taught this course several times before. And one of the things that happens when you teach a course several times you tend to get the same questions over and over again.

They're often really good questions, and it just so happens that those really good questions bubble up each time. I, I never really got stuck after a while teaching the class, but the last time I taught it, a student named Ariel raised her hand and said to me, why are we learning about this now? And that was a question that I had never gotten.

I actually didn't know what she meant. I asked her to elaborate further, and she went on to say we're learning about all these things we can do to think better, perform better, better relationships, be healthier. Why didn't anyone teach us about this stuff earlier on in life when it could have actually benefited us?

We're now graduating from college. What's

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: and so my response to her was, number one, fear, not you. You're in your early twenties. You will likely have opportunities to manage your emotions and use this information in your life. so that was my quick kind of shorthand unsatisfactory response. And what I did after that was a classic teacher move when you don't know the answer, I deflected. And I said, that's a great question. What do other people think about that? And I deflected because I didn't have a great answer to her question. that didn't leave me with a very nice feeling when I left that class.

And I, I kept thinking about that question over and over for the next few weeks, and it ultimately led me to do several things. One of which was begin doing research on what the implications of teaching younger kids about the tools of introspection and how to harness it are like, would teaching students about this actually benefit them? And it also led me to start working on, on, on the book that that you read

Srini Rao: Now.

Ethan Kross: or so months ago. And that was another way to try to share what we've learned about this topic with folks out there in the world. And, the genuine hope was that sharing this knowledge would actually provide people with useful tools that they can implement to, to live better lives.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny because I laughed when she said, why are we learning this now? Cause I, that was my thought. Exactly. That is often my thought. Exactly. When I have conversations like this damnit, if I knew this when I was in college, God, I would've saved myself so many heartaches.

But I want to, start with a quote in the book, and this is out of order, but I thought this would be a, an interesting place to start. You say our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of ourselves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical, reasonings.

In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives with us as the main character. And it got me thinking about the. external messages that we internalize that become our internal voice. It made me wonder, what role do parents play in shaping that inner voice? Every parent I think in the heat of the moment will say something that, is hurtful to a child.

There are things my mother said I'm not gonna repeat them here because I thought at the time they were so awful. And yet I part of me wonders. So what has been the long term impact of that on this internal voice that is going on in my.

Ethan Kross: Parents do play a profound role in shaping art. Our inner voices. Me say that again. Parents do play a profound role in shaping our inner voices because we often hear the things that our parents say to us. We repeat those messages in our heads and they can become internalized as part of our. Of our internal narrative. Now, one, one message that often gets lost in that discussion is this idea. The idea, even the way you pose a question to me, suggests that the path is one way. our parents influence how we talk to ourselves. They shape the way we think about ourselves. is a, there's a, there is some truth to that, but it is much more complicated than that. Number one, what we say to our parents, a back to influence how they talk to themselves as well. So it, it's a dynamic process and it's recursive. It goes back and forth. we also know that our peers and our, the culture around us also play a role in shaping how we talk to ourselves early on in life.

We're more heavily influenced by the conversations we have with our parents, but as we age, the role that our friends and teachers play in influence in the way we think about ourselves begin to play a more prominent role. Now, the last point that I'd love to emphasize is that, It's easy to think about all of this happening in a very passive sense, right?

Like I, I say these things to my daughter and she, they then get embedded in her psyche and continue to haunt her throughout time. But human beings are h agentic. We don't just mindlessly, passively hear these messages and then receive them as truth. We also have the ability to engage with the things we hear, the information we hear.

We can dispute those ideas, we can elaborate on them in infinite ways. And I think it's really important for. People to understand that, that, these narratives we ultimately construct, we have a powerful role steering those narratives. Sometimes we do it more actively than at other times, but there is an important sense of agency that exists in that self authoring equation.

Srini Rao: I'm so glad you brought up adolescence because I think that in particular is a really challenging time when it comes to this internal narrative. In my mind, for example, I was a Indian kid in a predominantly white town in Texas, and I remember I didn't invite my parents to open house and my dad's like, why?

I was like, cuz your accents are embarrassing, which is silly now, when you are in this sort of position of just profound insecurity as an adolescent or as a teenager, as like joke if there's any phase of life, I would happily never go back to it's being a teenager because you just, you're a giant asshole and your parents are the most awful people in the world.

Suddenly what is going on there in terms of our internal narrative, like what is happening?

Ethan Kross: That's that's a big question, And, I would say that number one, again, there's variability, right? I know some people who think back to high school as the glory days of their life, and they would like nothing else than to go back to that moment in time. And instead they would like to get rid of, the time period of being a parent to little kids, which they associate with being absolutely miserable, sleep deprived and so forth.

I think number one, we've gotta realize that there's huge variability terms of, How people navigate through these different life stages. Having said that, sure. Adolescence is tough. We are still number one, our brains are still developing, growing, including, infrastructure that we use to regulate our emotions. Number two, we haven't actually had the experience. The trial and error process of learning how to manage our emotions effectively. I often so I do a lot of work on self-control and emotion regulation, which you can think about as the scientific study of the tools we possess for managing our emotions for amplifying or diminishing them. And what I've learned, both in formal study, but also talking to folks all over the place, is that a lot of us stumble on tools for managing our emotions throughout our lives. Sometimes our parents teach us things that are helpful or not. Sometimes we just figure out things that work for us through a trial and error process. We're just, I would argue, beginning to do. In the early portion of our life we age, we get a lot more experience, a lot more trials under our belt to, to figure out what works for us and what doesn't. You've probably heard the phrase with age comes wisdom. We also know that with age comes a higher level of emotional stability and happiness.

There's this wonderful finding that shows time and again, as people age and get older, as long as their physical health remains intact, older people are actually happier than younger people, which it, I found that to be very surprising when I first came across research, and one of the reasons why researchers think that is, is because as you get older, you become more skilled at learning how to navigate life's dilemmas. I know now that when I'm challenged with something that feels really awful in the moment, I know that it'll get better in a couple of days or weeks time. I know that because I've been through it before. have those kinds of battle wounds and I've learned from them. so if we go back to adolescence, we're just at the very beginning stage of that learning process. getting bombarded with all sorts. Emotionally provoking issues. We don't necessarily have the hardware that we possess for manage emotions isn't necessarily fully developed. We're being infused with hormones that can play a role in pushing our emotions around in all sorts of unpredictable ways. And as a result we're a lot less predictable, I would argue, than we are later on in life.

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: now that, that paints a pretty negative portrait. But, I know plenty of adolescents who are quite happy and adjusted too. So there are ways of navigating it, but I think also just recognizing. Why adolescents can be so turbulent. That in and of itself I think is really important. if I could add just

Srini Rao: Yeah, please.

Ethan Kross: to this conversation, I think we tremendously under underestimate the power of normalization. One of the reasons I wrote my book was to really normalize the fact that, a, we all have an inner voice that manifests in different ways, and most of us have experienced chatter in the form of these negative thought loops at some point in our life. not everyone is aware of that because we don't always talk about our inner world to other people. But what I've learned is that when people realize that they are not. in, in suffering from an inner voice run amok, that provides 'em with a sense of comfort and understanding. And I think normalization as a tool is something that we could do a lot more to to teach people about.

Srini Rao: Yeah, I guess now that explains why the same things that seemed like the end of the world , when I was 15 are just, a problem that will be gone tomorrow when I'm 44.

Ethan Kross: Exactly. Exactly. Youth and, I would throw it back to you and say like, when did you have the realization that would be the case?

Srini Rao: I think part of it was from building a business. I was thinking about this. Somebody had asked me in an interview once, I, I'm mean, I'm an avid surfer. I was, at least for the past 10 years, I'd been living in Colorado. So I stopped. But they're like, what is it that surfing gave you?

I was like you go out and get your ass handed to you buy a big wave. Suddenly the fact that somebody read to a one star book review just doesn't seem that significant. You're like, ah, I almost drowned today. That's, it puts things in perspective, which you get with age.

Ethan Kross: That's one, one theme that runs through chatter at is the role that being able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture and attain that perspective,

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: That, that plays as a really helpful tool for managing our emotional life. And there are lots of ways to get perspective and so I love the fact that you brought off surfing and even a negative experience there. This is one of the reasons why people that experiencing the emotion of awe can be a powerful antidote to negative emotional experiences when you experience the emotion of awe, which by the way, you can get from experiences in the world like watching an amazing sunset or looking at a mountain beak or negative experience or like negative events too.

People are often awe struck with awe in a negative way when they imagine the vastness of space and it's emptiness. But when you have that experience of what you basically recognize that there's this this vastness to the world, right? Like it is bigger than me. And that's a very powerful way of putting yourself in perspective.

It actually leads to what we call a shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when you feel smaller, so do your worries. and I think that is something we experience, we naturally learn over time. think where the opportunity to help people is earlier on is to give them tools that hasten the pace at which. developed that awareness of zooming out, experiencing awe as a tool to help them manage their inner world.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Let's talk about rumination in particular, because I think that to me is, where this inner voice really just starts to wreak havoc on our lives. At least it did for me. And I think this is a common one for a lot of people. You say that verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distrust, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us.

In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a dual task. The task of doing whatever it is we wanna do in the task of listening to our pain pained in her voice neurologically. That's how chatter divides and births our attention. And I think for me this is the place I saw it was with a.

And some of this just made me laugh where you talk about the fact that people feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences. And we just share this repeatedly, and you say repeatedly sharing our negative inner voice with others produces one of the great ironies of chatter and social life.

We voice the thoughts in our minds, so the sympathetic listeners we know in search of their support, but doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. And I don't know if you've had this experience, it becomes that breakup where your friends like, dude, we're done hearing about this same bullshit over and over again.

I remember it took me six months before I could put an end to the rumination. I would go to my therapist's office and I think somewhere in the middle he's you realize we're having the same conversation every week, right? And my rumination was literally replaying every moment of this breakup in my head and trying to analyze if I had done this differently, would, did the outcome have differed?

And then finally, I don't know what it was, I woke up one day, I was like, wait a minute. No matter how many times I replay this, the outcome is still exactly the same.

Ethan Kross: Yeah, this is the paradox of rumination, right? So you en, you engage in rumination because. you've got a really good mind and you wanna solve a problem, and you're used to using this mind to solve problems that you encounter throughout your life. So it makes sense, right? There's a problem. I have this breakup, I want to fix it, so let me try to work through it. But once you start thinking about this negative experience, you zoom in very narrowly on the features of the experience that actually drive the negative emotions. makes it really hard for you to think objectively about the experience.

So you start instead just spinning over and over again. You said for six months, that's not uncommon, right? When we experience really stressful.

,

Intense experiences that are unresolved. We keep trying to gnaw away in it, even though doing so simply digs us deeper and deeper into the whole of rumination. That and that act has all sorts of negative effects on us. I actually think of this as one of the big problems we face as a species, which I use that not to be hyperbolic, but I use it because I know what rumination is linked to. It undermines your ability to think and perform because you only have so much attention that you can devote to focusing on anything at any given moment in time. If all of your attention is consumed by these ruminations. you can't do the other things that you want to need to do, like your work or being a good partner or parent to someone else,

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: all consumed by the Then let's go to relationships. You're already not listening to the other people talking to you because you're so focused on your own problems. But then we know that when people experience strong negative emotions, they're highly motivated to share them with other people. They wanna share it, not just because they wanna bring other people down. They wanna share it because they want to get support. They want emotional support, but they also want cove support.

They want help. The problem is you're like just spinning in your head, you start talking to someone. and initially they're very friendly and receptive. One would hope if they're a good friend or partner, but the problem is still spinning in your mind. So you keep talking over and over again.

That's how you get to the situation of your therapist telling you, Hey, we're talking about the same thing over and over again. Are you not listening? And that's how you can create friction in relationships that ultimately lead those relationships to degrade. So we've knocked out your ability to think and perform.

We've now knocked out your relationships. Let's take a small, 62nd detour to talk about your health, right? You're thinking about these problems over and over subjectively. that makes you feel bad cuz you're basking in the misery of the situation. what is also happening behind the scenes is you're mobilizing your body to deal with potential problems. and so your physiological infrastructure, if you will is working on overdrive and that's exerting a wear and tear on your body that we know can be physically damaging. That's how stress kills people, right? It's not that you experiencing stress per se is bad. Your ability to experience a stress reaction is useful.

It's when your stress response gets activated and remains chronically activated over time. That's how you get stress predicting things like heart attacks and certain forms of cancer and all sorts of other gobbledy gooks, which is not a technical term, but

Srini Rao: now.

Ethan Kross: and that is the. That's the that's what is at stake here. That is why I think understanding our inner voice is, how it can conspire against us, and most importantly, familiarizing ourself with things we can do to manage it a hugely important task that we all face.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I think the natural follow up question for me was going to be then how the hell do you make it stop? Because I remember thinking to myself, Hey, I'm post the unmistakable creative. I'm talking to people like you for 10 years. I should be able to get through this like a champ. I have all these tools and in the face of, dealing with this problem myself, I remember a mentor Greg said to me, he's like, when it's happening to you, it's the worst problem in the world because that's happening to you.

I felt so paralyzed despite knowing all the things that I do from having conversations that I've had with people like you.

Ethan Kross: I think, then what I would want to do is sit down and figure out what are the tools that you are using to try to manage this? Are they the right tools? And are you actually using those tools in those instances? There are many situations in which people know the tools that are out there, but they're not applying them.

That's one way I think this breaks down. Another place this breaks down is, sometimes we use the wrong tools for us. In my book I cover about 27 different tools. They're all listed in the back. A as you've read the book. It's not a how to book, it's a book about the mind and how it works.

But I distill all the tools in one place in the back. Easy kind of review in case people want a refresher. I would love to have been able to do at the end of the book is basically tell people these are the six things you should do to manage your chatter effectively for the rest of your life.

And if you do these six things, will be much happier until you die. this is the question I often get asked by media. What are the two things you can do to manage your chatter? My response to that as a scientist and as a human being is I can't give you those six things. What science has done a good job at doing is identifying the different tools that are out there profiling how they work with precision.

What we have not yet figured out is combinations of tools, how to prescribe them in the sense that these are the three things that you should do to deal with this kind of problem, and these are the seven things you should do to deal with this other kind of problem. I genuinely believe we will get to that point in our scientific knowledge, but we are not there yet. And so the advice I give to people who are motivated to manage their chatter, which is anyone who's ever experienced it, which is most people familiarize yourself with the. They're not, there's a lot of complexity that went into their identification, but at the end of the day, a lot of the things are pretty straightforward and start doing some self experimentation, right?

Try a few tool, try a tool out. If it works, keep doing it. Layer on another tool. See if you get an additional bang for your buck from that. And in so doing, the hope is that you can identify the cocktails of tools that work best for you. I have personally done this myself, and I can tell you that I have become much, much better at managing chatter as a result of these tools. I now have three or four things I do without fail. When I detect Chatter Bruin, I have, I've done something called, I've developed an implementation intention. This is what we call an if then plan. I've rehearsed ahead of time. If I find myself going down the rabbit hole of rumination, then I'm going to. distance self-talk. I'm gonna use my name to coach myself through the problem, like I give advice to someone else. I'm gonna use temporal distancing. I'm gonna imagine how this is gonna feel a year from now. And I'm gonna think about how I've dealt with similar experiences in the past. I'm gonna go for a walk in a green space to recharge my attention, give me an opportunity to experience awe, which will broaden my perspective. And if those three things don't work, I'm gonna call up someone from my chatter board of advisors, people who are particularly adept at not just being emotionally supportive to me, but being supportive and helping me work through the problems. So I've got these different plans that I activate without even thinking when I find the chatter brewing, and I do find 'em helping. So my advice to you would be to start developing those kinds of implementation intentions and report back. Let's have a part two in which you tell me how they've worked and if they haven't, we can go further, but hopefully they will.

Srini Rao: Yeah. There's one other part of this that I wanna talk about, which actually makes a perfect segue from that because I remember. I, I had Amy Chan, who had wrote a book on the Science of Heartbreak here, and I was talking to her about what happens when we stalk our exes on social media. And she said that's basically like emotional cutting.

You are basically in a relationship with somebody who's no longer in a relationship with you. But you actually say in relation to social media that the human need to self present is powerful. We craft our appearances to influence how people perceive us all the time. This has always been the case, but then social media came along but then along social media came to give us exponentially more control over how we do this.

It allows us to skillfully create the presentations of our lives. The prove real proverbial Photoshop version of life with the low points and less aesthetically pleasing moments left out. Engaging in this self-presentation exercise can make us feel better, satisfying our own need to appear positively in the eyes of others and boo our inner voice.

But then you go on to say, although posting glamor shots, Of ourselves causes us to feel worse. That's because at the same time, we're motivated to present ourselves positively, which may lead us to feel better, but we're also driven to compare ourselves with others and social media switches, the social comparison hardware in our brain into overdrive.

And I can tell you firsthand, this happens to me when I see friends of mine who have bigger podcasts or friends of mine who publish books. I'm like, wow, okay. That guy hit the New York Times Best Auto List. I'm so not like successful at all.

Ethan Kross: Come on, when? When you see that there's an expletive, usually in the inner monologue too. No

Srini Rao: Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's what the fuck is this guy doing that I'm not?

Ethan Kross: That

So B I mean I, in those

Srini Rao: And these are all friends of mine. Keep in mind,

Ethan Kross: course I go Joe Peche when that happens. Completely. This is, we could have a whole other conversation on social media.

I've been researching social media since the late two thousands and what's so interesting about it is you could think about social media as this new ecosystem that was created that we embraced we just jumped into it without really understanding how it was going to impact us and how it, we would engage with it. social comparisons are one piece of that puzzle. we are constantly comparing ourselves with other people That is, We are a social species. It's how we derive all sorts of really useful information. We often talk about social comparisons as a bad thing, but they can be really good for us too, right? They can make us feel better. They could be a source of resilience when we imagine how we are fairing compared to others who may be less fortunate. So that's a way of mo modulating our mood. They can provide us with important pieces of information that tell us how we can possibly do better.

So that person who is excelling and doing better than us, how can I learn from them? So social comparisons aren't toxic, per se. The problem with social media is that. They give us this opportunity to portray ourselves in these incredibly glamorous ways. And then that's really the only thing that we are exposed to when we go on some people's sites.

So it's like we are just put into the vortex of everyone is doing better than me, and that can lead to a sense of inferiority and v and the negative emotions that follow. The flip side is there is some research that shows that viewing your own social media profile can actually be a source of resilience because the flip side is true there, right?

Like you've curated your own highlight reel. So now when you look at that, oh yeah, life isn't too bad, I may not have hit that list, but look at all these other accomplishments I have. When, social media, I think it's right now, It's interesting. If you look at social media over time, at one point we thought it was great.

It was gonna connect the world. Then it became toxic, then it became great again, and now it's, I think in the negative zone. social media is a new environment and it's environments aren't good or bad. It depends on how you engage with it. And I think being aware of how to strategically interact with social media that you're navigating that technology in a way that serves your goals well. I think that's a real challenge. And if you think about, if you draw an analogy between social media and the offline world, we get a lot of and guidance in how to navigate the offline world. From the time you're a little kid, your parent is teaching you, Hey, here's the way you talk to people in this place as opposed to this place.

These are the neighborhoods you should go. You shouldn't go into, these are neighborhoods you should. We don't get that kind of direction when it comes to social media and I think we need it, and I think this is where the science can be really helpful, right? If we could tell people, Hey, look, if you find yourself going to these kinds of sites where social comparisons are gonna be of the envious sort, like maybe stay away from those and use social media to do these other things more. I think that would do a great service to society if we could transmit that kind of inform.

Srini Rao: Yeah. In the interest of the time I have one final question or two last questions around this. So I was driving to my dad's office. He's a tenured professor and he's almost retired, so he's letting me use his office and I was listening to an episode of our podcast and it just got me thinking.

This made me want to ask you about this. As creatives. Obviously this inner voice plays a huge role in the life of any creative person. There's this inner cri critic and this inner supporter, and it got me wondering, when I'm listening, for example, to somebody like you on a podcast like this, or when I'm reading a book, what is happening in the inner voice in terms of facilitating my creative self-expression?

Because I realized 98% of everything I create comes from probably two to three sources much to my mother's dismay. Often conversations with her that have pissed me off conversations that I have with people on this podcast and books that I've read. And so I was wondering what is happening in the inner voice when it comes to creative creativity?

Like how are we translating what we're consuming, using our inner voice into creative self-expression, I guess is the question.

Ethan Kross: The inner voice often gets a bad rap because when it turns into chatter could be so harmful. What I like to remind people of, and I'm thankful to you for asking this question, is that the inner voice is a, an amazing tool of the mind, and it can be heavily when it comes to creating and be cre being creative. So you can divide thinking in a very coarse way into. A kind of verbal versus visual processes. And the inner voice is part of that verbal side of the thinking process. And oftentimes, we are working through ideas, using language, creating new connections and stories and integrating information. We're using our inner voice to simulate possibilities for the future. So when I'm trying to think creatively about how to respond to how to put together a new creative presentation I'm gaming it out and simulating it with my inner voice. When I'm trying to work through a problem that I need to work through in order to get to a creative solution, I'm often relying on my inner voice to create a narrative to help me make sense of what is happening. so your inner voice is involved in that creative process in a variety of different ways because your inner voice is involved in thinking f. And period. So it's a, this is one of the reasons why it's so unfortunate when people get stuck in that ruminative mode because then it, it precludes you from using your inner voice for those creative pursuits because you, that resource that we possess is now being used for the dark side of worry and rumination.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny you say that because I think that I've run across this ver a variation of these exact words in virtually every famous writer's works about writing, whether it's Anne Lamont, whether it's Stephen Presfield whether it's a Danny Shapiro, all who basically say no writer sits down at a blank page and says, yeah, I'm awesome.

I'm gonna kill this today. They almost all start off with this just, profound sense of insecurity. In fact, my favorite quote from Denny Shapiro's book, still writing about this, is that Masters of the Forum quake before the page.

Ethan Kross: Oh I love that. That is great. And there's a, that's, you've norm, you're normalizing this for all writers. Ab absolutely true. The people ask what writing book was like, and you've experienced this many times. it's filled with highs and lows and oh my God our are the words the worst?

Are, is it all crap? Is it great? And it's a huge rollercoaster.

Srini Rao: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: the tools can certainly help.

Srini Rao: Yeah. No doubt. This has been really fascinating. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something uist.

Ethan Kross: What do I think makes someone, something unmistakable? I think it is the combination of. and real passion and conviction coupled with substance in the sense that there is there's really energy behind an idea. But the, I, but there also has to be an actual idea or content there, to be energized about and you can have situations where you just have a person who's full of energy, but there's nothing beyond that energy.

And the flip side is you can have an idea that's really beautiful no one to drive it. I think when you put those two things together, you get something that is unmistakable.

Srini Rao: Beautiful. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your book your research and everything else? You're up to

Ethan Kross: Thanks for having me on for for a truly fun and stimulating conversation. Folks can get more information about me, my research, my book at lots of information there. They could sign up for newsletter, and get some other goodies.

Srini Rao: Awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.