Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked psychology department and its Ross School of Business, he is the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. He has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University. This is his first book.
In this episode, Dustin talks with Ethan Kross about his book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.
You'll discover how introspection can be both good and bad, why living in the present runs counter to our biology, and how our inner voice can lead to chatter precisely when we need it most.
Dr. Kross explains how working memory is connected to the inner voice and how powerful and influential our inner voice can be. He invites listeners to consider how our inner voice influences attention and sets us up for analysis paralysis. You'll discover how our inner voice influences gene expression, why it's important to zoom out or add distance, the impact of distanced self-talk and how sharing emotions with other people impacts how we feel over time.
Ethan's book is filled with exciting research and excellent tools to help us harness chatter.
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Dustin Burleson:
Ethan Kross is one of the world's leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor at the University of Michigan's top rank psychology department and it's Ross School of Business. Dr. Cross is the director of the emotion and self control laboratory. He's participated in policy discussions at the White House. He's been interviewed on CBS evening news, Good Morning America and NPRs Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New England Journal of Medicine and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University. This is Ethan's first book titled Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it. Today on the program, Ethan and I will talk about some excellent tools inside the book to help us harness chatter. I'm excited to dig in on another episode of the Burleson Box.
Dustin Burleson:
I'm so honored to have on the program today, Dr. Ethan Kross. Thank you for being here, Ethan. And I want to talk about your new book, Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it. Welcome to the program.
Ethan Kross:
Thanks for having me been looking forward to this conversation.
Dustin Burleson:
Tell us a little bit, bring us up to speed because this book is brilliant, but there are decades of research you've been doing leading up to this. Can you tell us a little bit about your lab and the research you do at the University of Michigan?
Ethan Kross:
Sure. I run a lab here called the emotion and self-control lab. And what we do in the lab is try to address two kinds of issues. One, what are the nuts and bolts that allow a person to control themselves, to exert self-control. And I use that term pretty broadly to refer to an individual's ability to align their thoughts, feelings, or behaviors with their goals. So said more simply, if you want to think a certain way or feel a certain way or behave a certain way, how can you do it? And so we spend a lot of time looking at the brain, looking at behavior to figure out how to make self-control possible.
Ethan Kross:
Then the other thing we do is, once we have a fairly good understanding about how people can exert control over some facet of their lives, we try to look at how we can take that information and translate it to improve people's ability to actually exert self-control outside of the lab in daily life. And trying to address those two issues keeps us really busy.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I was looking at, I mean, the book is so well referenced and researched. It's why we love it. It's not just someone's opinion. It's based on data and I told you leading into this, I couldn't put the book down. That's not a cliche. I literally, I had to use one of your techniques, actually. It was like 11:00 at night, I'm usually in bed by like 9:00 or 9:30, and I'm just tearing through your book. And I had to say like, Dustin, go to bed, put the book down.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. But I think you touched on a really important issue and, and actually it wasn't until the publication of this book that I really realized just how much opinion is out there as opposed to work based on science. And as many of your listeners will know, science itself is imperfect. We're always doing more work, learning more, revising, refining. But I think basing our suggestions on a firm empirical foundation is really the route to figuring things out. And as I touch on in the book, when I talk about a few misconceptions about how to manage the voice in our head, like whether venting is actually useful, sometimes opinions can really lead us astray and, in some cases, with really negative ramifications.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. I really want to get to the broad applicability of it because I know our listeners can take a lot away. It's what I took away from the book is this isn't just something to put on the shelf, but something to put to use in your day to day life. You share some great stories throughout the book. One is about your father growing up and him really encouraging you to use introspection. Can you talk about kind of both sides of that coin?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. From the time I was a young kid around three, my dad used to tell me to quote unquote, "go inside" whenever I experienced a difficulty. A difficulty when I was the age of three, usually meant not getting extra dessert, but as I got older, the difficulties changed and his instruction to introspect really ended up being a very valuable tool for me. So I'd ask a girl out on a date, she'd say, no, I'd go inside, try to figure out why I was feeling the way I did. I'd come up with a solution. I'd move on. I would never get stuck. I'd ask a girl out again. That process, unfortunately repeated several times in high school.
Ethan Kross:
But then I got to college and I took my first psychology class and about halfway through the semester, we got to this topic of introspection that I had spent so much time talking to my dad about growing up and personally benefiting from. And what I learned once we dug into the science during that class was on the one hand, there were lots of people who were benefiting from introspection, just like I had, just like my dad told only I would. But there seemed to be an equal number of individuals who were really victimized by introspecting. So people would experience problems in their lives, problems in their relationships, problems with their health, problems with the world, problems with their kids and they would reflexively turn their attention inward to work through those problems but they wouldn't come up with clear solutions. Instead, they'd start spinning, they'd start ruminating and worrying and catastrophizing, experiencing what I call chatter. And this was a tremendous problem for them. It was an issue that interfered with their ability to think and perform. It was an issue that created problems in their relationships and even damaged their health.
Ethan Kross:
And so for me, this became a giant puzzle. When I took a step back and just thought about this space, I was perplexed as to why it is that we have this remarkable capacity to use our mind to solve problems. I mean, think about what life would be like without our ability to turn our attention inward, to introspect. We wouldn't have skyscrapers. We wouldn't have spaceships that blast us off into Mars. We wouldn't have vaccines to help us deal with pandemics, right? This capacity is central to human innovation and creativity. Yet this very tool often creates an enormous amount of suffering. So why does that happen? Why does this capacity sometimes help us, sometimes hurt us? And when it hurts us, what can we do to regain control over it? That became a real passion that I found myself thinking about when I wasn't in psychology class.
Ethan Kross:
I remember walking around on campus at college. It was a Saturday night. I was walking with my friends and it was like 11:00 at night. We were getting ready to go to the bar. And I was talking to my friends about this and they looked to me, they go, what's wrong with you? Why are you talking about this now? And at some point I realized that if I was spending my Saturday nights thinking about this, when I probably should have been thinking about other things, that might not be a bad way to spend my career, trying to study this issue.
Dustin Burleson:
And you really have come across some pretty amazing findings. I know, one I'd love for you to share that really launched you into the national spotlight, you're on Good Morning America, that was involving people I think in New York City that had recently gone through a breakup.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. One of the one, an interesting early study we did was we're trying to look at what are some of the issues that people experience the most intense chatter about? And just to be clear for listeners, when I use the term chatter, I use that term to refer to getting stuck in a negative thought loop. So if it's a negative thought loop about the future, we tend to call that worry. If it's a negative thought loop about the past, or even the present we call that rumination. Psychologists are great at coming up with lots of different terms to refer to very similar processes. And chatter is really a catchall to get at all that.
Ethan Kross:
When I started to think about what do people experience intense chatter about, getting rejected. Social rejection was a really prime candidate for a kind of experience that elicited intense chatter. And what was interesting about social rejection is you actually hear a lot of people, when they describe how they feel after being dumped or excluded, they interestingly use the language of physical pain to describe how they feel. They don't just say, oh, I'm feeling really bad. They say my feelings are hurt. I'm in pain. I'm hurting right now. And so that got us thinking, does the experience of "social pain" overlap in some interesting way with our experiences of physical pain? Are people just using the language of physical pain as a kind of metaphor to describe how they feel? Or is there some actual link between the two?
Ethan Kross:
And so what we did in brief during this study is we recruited people around New York City who had just been dumped in a serious romantic relationship, we screened them to ensure they still felt deeply rejected every time they thought about that experience. And then we recruited them for a brain imaging study. And what we did in the imaging study was two things. First, we had them look at a picture of the person who rejected them and each time they looked at that picture, we had them think about how they felt during the instant that they were rejected. I suspect you're probably around my, my vintage. So maybe you'll remember looking at a photo album, a physical photo album, not just one on iPhotos. This is true of iPhotos too. When you look at a picture of someone who dumped you and it's still raw, that is a powerful elicitor of the negative feelings. And so we did that while we were scanning brain activity.
Ethan Kross:
And then the other thing we did during the study is we actually led people to experience physical pain. And we did this by attaching little device to participants' forearms that heated up to a hot temperature. Now it didn't burn anyone, just to be clear, I'll say that again. We did not burn anyone. But the sensation that we elicited was akin to holding a hot cup of coffee from Starbucks, as soon as it's poured, but without having that protective sleeve. So it hurts. It's painful, you put it down but it doesn't elicit any lingering scars. And get to the bottom of the study, what we find at the end when we crunch the numbers is that when you look at the neural snapshot of physical pain and social pain, turns out that they overlap in really interesting ways. That when you're experiencing social pain, parts of your brain that are involved in physical pain sensation are also activated.
Ethan Kross:
And so the findings from that study, at the time gave new meaning to the idea that when we use the language of physical pain, say our feelings hurt people may actually be referring to physical sensations in their body.
Dustin Burleson:
It's amazing. I think that the listeners will really enjoy getting into the book because it goes down to the cellular level, right? I mean, this is not just something in our head. This is our entire body.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. You know, it's really interesting. So when you deal with a topic like chatter, I think it's very easy to dismiss this. Ah, you know, you're worried about something else and it's something trivial and just little part of life. But in fact, the research that's out there is really phenomenal. And it does, as you say, it goes incredibly deep. Some of my favorite work that I touch on very briefly talks about how chatter gets under the skin. Not only in terms of explaining how stress reactions predict things like cardiovascular disease and certain forms of cancer. You know, lots of people think that stress kills. And I often joke that that's not actually true because a stress reaction is an incredibly useful biological response. You would not want to live life without the ability to quickly approach or avoid a threat in your environment.
Ethan Kross:
What makes stress toxic is when it's prolonged. And that's what chatter does. Because we experience something in the world and then we keep replaying it over and over in our minds. And that keeps our stress response active, which leads to those negative physical health problems. But some of the more recent work has taken that even further and looked at how the experience of chatter influence how our genes are expressed. So some listeners may have learned, like I did and I'm guessing you did as well in college, that genes and environment are separate influences on who we are and our behavior. But what we've learned more recently is that they interact in really interesting and in profound ways. This is the study of epigenetics, how our experiences in the world influence how our genes are expressed. And what some has shown is that experiencing chatter in the form of prolonged stress, what that does is it turns on certain sets of genes that are involved in generating inflammatory responses. And it turns off certain genes that are involved in producing antiviral reactions.
Ethan Kross:
So you have the situation of your mind is chattering away and that's turning on the inflammation response, and it's turning off the fight viruses response. This is not a good formula for wellbeing and physical health. And it just shows you the depths to which chatter is linked.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. It's brilliantly referenced in the books. I highly encourage everyone to get through that section. And it was very eye opening. I knew some of the physiological like cardiovascular components of it, but down to the DNA was really fascinating for me. I really appreciated that. I want to kind of continue you this chatter. In the future, I think most of us, when I think about chatter, we might be anxious and kind of in this loop on something coming up, maybe if you're in residency listening to this, maybe it's your board exam. Or about the past, maybe something that you regret, that you could have done differently. And so there's a lot of bad advice out there telling people live in the moment, live in the moment. But in the book you talk about how that actually runs counter to our biology. Can you share a little bit more about that?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, happy to. This is one of those myths out that are out there that you should always be in the moment. And I think it's ... Well, let me back up. So we often hear that we should be in the moment and if we find our mind wandering to the future or past, that that's a bad thing. In fact, a fundamental feature of the human mind is that it is of traveling through time. And this is an amazing capacity. It is a capacity that distinguishes us from other animal species. Think about whether, you use the example of the boards and people studying for the boards. I mean, think about what, if that's you listening, think at what your life would be like if you couldn't plan for the future, if you couldn't reflect on your past experiences in the classroom or during training to inform how you answer questions even on that exam.
Ethan Kross:
When I think about traveling in time in my mind, it often provides me with really valuable experiences. A couple weeks ago, I went on my first family vacation since COVID began. We went to the beach. Interestingly enough, when we left for the beach, looked like we were out of this mess, three days later, the world decided to get very sick again. It was a little upsetting. But the experience we had at the beach was wonderful. I find myself savoring it right now. I think back when I'm taking walks around gray and snowy Ann Arbor about going paddle boarding with my daughters. That's an enormous source of gratification.
Ethan Kross:
I'm also thinking about what lies ahead a couple of months from now when I have a few trips planned that I'm really excited about. I'm not just about those trips fantasizing about how fun they're going to be. I'm also planning for the trips. I'm thinking about the audiences I'm going to interact with and how I'm going to engage with them differently from audiences of the past and how I'm going to learn from things that worked versus didn't work in previous presentations to do my next ones even better.
Ethan Kross:
So this capacity to flexibly travel in time in our mind, this is a huge asset. You would not want to give it up. Now, it is accurate that oftentimes this mental time travel machine that we possess, it breaks down. We get stuck fixating on the past or the future. And those are certainly instances in which we want to intervene. And in fact, the bulk of my book talks about how to do that. Now refocusing your attention on the moment, that's one way to intervene, but it is far from the only way. There are close to over two dozen different tools that don't involve doing that that are also very effective. So I would love if we could get to a point where we think about recalibrating our attention on the moment as just one tool amidst a much larger toolbox that we have access to for managing the voice in our head when it goes astray.
Dustin Burleson:
I found that section of the book on this capacity of working memory to go. You think about all the great things that have been invented, right? If you were just living in the moment, what are the odds of the iPhone just falls out of the sky? Like you have to think about-
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. I mean you could take it even further. So think to yourself, in the animal kingdom, who lives in the moment? Well, most animals that don't have a prefrontal cortex. So like being totally in the moment would mean succumbing to the tempt- Okay, you go to a party or someone asks, "Hey, you want to go to a party right now?" "Yes, I'm going to go to a party," even though you've got to study for the test next week. It's just such an overcorrection, which we see happen time and again, when we try to take complicated ideas from science, from philosophy, from religion. If you look back to some of the original sources that this idea of being in the moment emerged from, Eastern philosophical traditions, they're much more nuanced in how they talk about this. But the way this information has been disseminated in Western culture, it's been so oversimplified that it actually becomes, I think, problematic. And one goal I had in writing Chatter was to take what we know from science and present it in a way that is accessible, but also that properly reflects what we know about the human mind. Not oversimplify it to the point that it ceases to become useful.
Dustin Burleson:
That's fantastic. If we have time, in the book you share a really powerful story about the inner voice, I don't know. I'm sure. Curious if we have time to talk a little bit about Dr. Jill Bo Taylor.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, we should. If we don't have time, let's make it. I mean, it's arguably, I think, one of the most important stories in the book. Because I talk to a lot of people about their inner voice and most of the time I talk to them, it's not talking about how their inner voice benefits them. There's a general mantra in psychology and the cognitive science is that bad is stronger than good. Most of the time we devote much more attention to things that are going wrong, not right. And so when many people are stuck in chatter, the thing that they reflexively ask me is how can I get rid of this voice in my head? How can I shut it up? Because I don't like it. It's causing me enormous suffering. And my response is often you don't want to shut the voice down. You want to figure out how to harness it because it has all these positive features, some of which we've hinted at in this conversation.
Ethan Kross:
But one of the most powerful pieces of anecdotal evidence that speaks to this issue is Jill Bo Taylor's story. So Jill Bo Taylor was a Harvard neuro anatomist working at the very peak of her career. And like so many of us, she experienced chatter at times that was deeply unsettling. And she would often think to herself, how can I just shut this voice up? And she had an interesting experience where she got that wish. She was exercising on a treadmill one morning before work and while she was exercising, she suffered a major stroke that was localized in the left hemisphere of her brain. And what the stroke did, is it temporarily disabled her ability to use language. It disabled her ability to use language, not only to talk to other people, but also to talk to herself.
Ethan Kross:
And whenever I think about her story, I find it really perplexing because, if I step back and think to myself, hey, what would it be like to not be able to talk to myself? I don't have ... Sorry for the cheesy phrase here, I don't have words to describe that. You see what I mean? What would happen if you went to the grocery store and couldn't rehearse in your mind what was on your grocery list? It'd be really hard to imagine what life was like. Well, she tells us what life was like. So initially she describes her experience, not being able to talk to herself, not having an inner voice as a strangely euphoric because once the words left her, so did all the worries. So did all the ruminations. But as the hours and days went on that experience transformed because all of the worries had washed away. So did a lot of other very basic capacities.
Ethan Kross:
She lost her ability to activate her working memory system in the way that it's designed to be activated. So what working memory refers to is our ability to keep information active in our heads for short periods of time. So if I were to ask you to repeat a phone number in your head, 209-0501, that involves you using your working memory and the voice in your head. She couldn't do that. She couldn't use her in her voice to plan for the future. Before you give a talk or go on an interview, many people rehearse what they're going to say. She couldn't do that. She couldn't use her inner voice to motivate herself. When I'm exercising, I regularly use my inner voice. All right, 10, nine, eight, I'm in pain, seven, six, five, stop it. That's your inner voice, coaching you along. She couldn't activate her inner voice to do that.
Ethan Kross:
And perhaps most disabling, she couldn't use her in her voice to create stories, to explain what she was going through, which we all do at times. We experienced events in our lives and we ask those, Hey, why did that happen? Why did they say that? What'd they do? And we use that voice in order to create those stories. She couldn't do that. So her experience was really powerful for conveying that.
Ethan Kross:
Look, chatter's a serious problem. I've devoted my career to figure out how to help people manage it. You want to have tools to manage it, but managing your chatter doesn't involve getting rid of your inner voice. It doesn't involve shutting it up or silencing it. It involves harnessing it. It involves figuring out how you can skillfully regain control of your inner voice to allow it to do all the wonderful things that it involves to do.
Dustin Burleson:
I want to get to some of those tools in a minute. I want to keep setting up the stage because it's so powerful. And that story really impacted me because there are times when you think, geez, I just need to go for a walk or I need to do some meditation to just tone down the chatter. But it's so helpful if you learn how to harness it, as you mentioned. Can we talk a little bit about, because I think this will help the listeners, our inner voice and how that plays into attention and the tendency for what we call analysis paralysis. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. I think the easiest way to describe analysis paralysis. Okay. I was thinking about something else. So paralysis by analysis reflects the common experience of overthinking things. And it can become particularly problematic when you're executing a habit, a well worn set of behaviors that has become automated over time. And I think this is, I'm guessing, certainly true of many of the procedures that folks listening, perform. Is that accurate? Fair?
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ethan Kross:
So, lots of things we do, we do them without thinking. When I'm giving a speech, I've given hundreds, thousands of presentations over the course of my career. I'm not thinking really carefully about how to undulate my vocal tone or whether I'm sufficiently pacing on stage or am I moving my hands too much? I'm just doing all of those things in a way that my experiences have put me in a position to do without thinking. When we experience chatter about some of the behaviors we're performing, like let's say I'm experiencing chatter. Oh my God, am I going to give a good speech? What ends up happening is our chatter zooms us in on the thing that we're concerned about. And when we zoom in on it, we start thinking about the individual components. And once we do that, the whole behavior explodes.
Ethan Kross:
A funny aside, I've used my own behavior in public speaking to demonstrate this point, while I'm giving a speech and that doesn't always work so well. But the idea is, let's say you're performing an operation, right? Like what's a common procedure that you perform?
Dustin Burleson:
Could do placement of surgical implants or something involving ... Taking a tooth out, for example.
Ethan Kross:
Okay. So I have experience for both of these.
Dustin Burleson:
I'm sorry.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, I am too. So, are you thinking really carefully? Like is the pressure I'm placing on the scalpel while I'm making an incision here sufficient? Am I squeezing the scalpel too tight? My guess is you're probably not thinking, am I squeezing the scalpel too tight? Is that a fair assumption?
Dustin Burleson:
Yes, absolutely.
Ethan Kross:
But if you start doing that, you lose sight of the bigger picture and that can be really, really damaging. You see this playing out all the time in professional sports. Simone Biles is the most recent powerful example. Just this past summer, Simone Biles dropped out of the Olympics, the pinnacle of her career, for what she called the twisties. The twisties is another name for chatter. It's often called the yips as well. But the reason she dropped out was because she got stuck experiencing this chatter and what it would lead her to do is, as she's performing of these superhuman feats, twisting in the air four times as she somersaults and twists, she'd start thinking about, hey, am I moving enough? And do I have enough momentum and velocity, blah, blah, blah. And that ends up becoming dangerous for her because once you start thinking about the individual pieces of the behavior, the whole behavior unravels, so that's one way that chatter can sink us.
Dustin Burleson:
And then the solution, I'm going to talk about zooming out. I was laughing so hard. I told my fiance, this was years ago. I'm curious to see your reaction. I had been up late, we'd started a new business. We had like no patience. I mean, just high stress, high chatter. And one night before I'm flying to go give a talk somewhere on stage, I obsessing over which side of the computer to put my phone on in my office. And I'm trying to figure out where to drill the hole, because there's no money. So I'm the IT guy. And I just left it. And it was so late at night and I went home and I flew out of Kansas City. I've never flown in this flight path. We flew directly over my office, it was just happenstance. I'm in a windows seat. And I'm looking down at the entire development where my practice is, and it's like a teeny tiny dot on this vast sea of like farmland and cityscape. And I just started laughing. I'm like, where I put that phone does not matter. I physically had the experience of zooming out on an airplane.
Ethan Kross:
I love that example. I think maybe I'll use that, if you don't mind. That's a powerful example. And it demonstrates the point so, I think, powerfully, which is what chatter does is it zooms in on our problems. We focus on them so narrowly that we can't think of anything else. And when we do that, we often lose sight of the bigger picture. And when we zoom out and focus on the bigger picture, what happens is that often helps us put things in perspective and find solutions that actually help us deal with the chatter.
Ethan Kross:
So many people experience exactly what you describe, right? You start flipping out over that one email, which, in the grand scheme of things, probably means nothing or will blow over, but you can't stop thinking about it. And what we've learned is that there are of a variety of tools that people can use to zoom out from their experience. You did it physically, which isn't always possible. I suppose, if you have got a private jet or space shuttle, you could. But what I've really found amazing, remarkable is that how many different tools exist for zooming out. Just to rattle off a few, at one end of the spectrum, you could use your environment to zoom out, as you did in your experience.
Ethan Kross:
And one way to do this is to find opportunities to experience the emotion of awe. Awe is an emotion that we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, like an amazing sunset, or for me, I experience awe. Every time I think about air travel, I experience awe. I travel all the time, or I used to before COVID and it still amazes me that not too long ago, we sat around pieces of wood and stones struggling to start fires. And now we have figured out how to safely blast people off the ground and halfway across the planet and then safely land. I'm like, how did we figure out how to do that? I'm filled with the emotion of awe when I think about that.
Ethan Kross:
What we know from the science is that when you experience awe, that leads to something that we call a shrinking of the self. You feel smaller when you contemplate something vast and indescribable. Here I am worrying about this email that someone sent me yesterday, but people discovered how to fly and transform the planet. Like this is so insignificant. And so when you feel smaller, so does your chatter. So that's one way of broadening your perspective, but there are lots and lots of other ways of doing it too.
Ethan Kross:
And just to go to the totally opposite end of the spectrum, one of the most simplest tools that are out there involves doing something you talked about earlier, when you were trying to put your book down before bed, which is you used your own name to coach yourself through a situation, right? One of the things we know is that it's much easier to give advice to other people than it is to follow our own advice. The reason for that is what's happening to other people, we have distance from their problems. We are effectively zoomed out because it's not happening to us. And what we've learned is that using your name can help shift your perspective. It can help you zoom out because when you use your own name to try to work through your chatter, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? That leads you to start thinking about yourself. Like we think about others and that can be also another useful zoom out tool. But those are just two of probably a dozen that I talk about in the book. And different zoom out tools work for different people.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I love the experience of awe. I went and changed a lot of my computer desktop backgrounds to like really majestic, like Yellowstone National Park type scenes. To me, it gives me a moment of kind of zooming out as opposed to just a blue background that has a logo on it or something.
Ethan Kross:
Yes. Well, that's another thing. So some people ask, well, Hey, I live in an environment that is not awe inspiring or it's really cold like it is where I live right now and I can't get out. There's research, which suggests that you can benefit from awe exactly as you're doing. Change your screensaver, put pictures on the wall that elicit that experience, think about memories of experience. I think about like one of my daughters did her first performance in community theater recently and here's a doting dad but it was amazing. It was awe inspiring to see what she did without any help from her parents. I think about that. And that fills me with awe.
Ethan Kross:
And so a broader theme of the book is that the experience of chatter is really complicated, as we talked about before. It affects us all the way down to how our cells and our genes work. There's been an enormous amount of money and complex science that has gone into figuring out different tools that exist for helping us manage that chatter. But at the end of the day, a lot of the tools that we've unearthed are really simple to execute. And I think the biggest challenge we face is just illuminating those tools for people so that they know what to do when they're experiencing chatter. So they don't have to just aimlessly stumble along, trying to figure out what to do, but the moment they sense the chatter brewing, they've got a three or four or seven step intervention waiting for them to implement in a few minutes. I think that's the real potential that the science gives us. And it's something I will say that I benefit from myself. People often ask, hey, you study chatter, do you ever experience it? And I say, yeah, I'm a human being. I do at times. And I don't like it, but what I'm really good at is the moment I detect the chatter beginning to brew, I instantly have a set of tools that I activate. And most of the time, those tools muffle that reaction before it starts to escalate.
Dustin Burleson:
I can add that since reading the book, a lot of these have helped me as well. And I want to highlight for the listeners that everything Ethan is mentioning is in depth backed up by really fascinating research. I'm thinking of the randomized placement of people in public housing in Chicago and whether or not their windows faced green space or not. It's just, it's amazing how well referenced and backed up all the suggestions are in the book. So I just want to make this isn't just Ethan's opinion.
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, and I'll doubly emphasize that. I'm a card carrying scientist and it was, and still is, extremely important to me that every recommendation I offered is, these are science based tools. These are not just anecdotal observations that I've had while working with patients. I'm actually not a clinically trained psychologist. I'm an experimental psychologist neuroscience. So this is a book about the science behind these tools and how that science plays out in everyday life in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. And in ways that ultimately give folks tools that they can use on their own as well.
Dustin Burleson:
The pandemic has highlighted how social we are as humans and that danger in that loss of connection. And it's been an interesting handful of years now. I want to talk about sharing emotions with other people. In the book you talk about some really smart ways to do that. And I think back to times where I've had friends, or I've been that friend who just allows the chatter to get worse. Can we dig into that a little bit?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. I think this is probably the biggest myth that is out there that I tried to bust in the book. And the myth is that that venting is really good for us. So a lot of people think that when they're experiencing chatter, the thing that they want to do is find someone to express their emotions to. We're actually highly motivated to express our emotions. When we experience decades of research speak to this idea, there are a couple of exceptions. We tend to not want to talk about experiences that we're ashamed of, or certain forms of trauma. But for all the other kinds of negative experiences that we have, we really want to get them out. And messaging in our culture has told us that we should do that. What we've learned though, is it's a lot more complicated than that.
Ethan Kross:
So there have been decades of research on venting. And what we have learned is this venting about how you feel to someone else can be really good for your relationship with that person. It's nice to know that there's someone else out there who cares enough about us, that they're willing to take the time to listen. So venting can strengthen those friendship bonds, and relational bonds that we share with people. But in terms of helping you actually work through and, and get closure surrounding a negative experience, venting doesn't help. In fact, it often does the opposite. It just perpetuates those negative responses, because what you end up doing when you vent to someone else is you just keep on rehashing that negative experience. Oh my God, it was such a pain in the butt. That person said this. And yeah, they're a real jerk. I totally ... And then the other person saying, wow, they seem like a ... You shouldn't deal with them. That they seem terrible. They are terrible. And you leave that conversation. You're just as upset.
Ethan Kross:
There's a formal name for this. It's called co-rumination. And it's a process that has been shown to predict increases in anxiety and depression and anger over time. So, okay. Well, what's the solution then? Is the solution to just not talk about your emotions? Absolutely not. So what we have learned is you want to do two things when you are talking about your emotions to someone else. You do want to spend a little time at the outset, conveying what happened and what you went through. It is important for you get that off your chest, so to speak and for the other person to learn about what you're going through. But ideally what happens during the conversation is at a certain point, the person you're talking to, they start trying to help broaden your perspective, right? They start trying to help you think about that bigger picture, rather than just getting you to rehash your feelings over and over.
Ethan Kross:
So it's about listening and advising and the concrete take homes here, I think, are really twofold. When you think about how to use this information in your life, the first take home is if someone comes to you with a problem, a colleague, a friend, a loved one, remind yourself of this two step process, right? So start off by listening and asking them, empathically just trying to connect, but then at a certain point, try to nudge them to go broad. And when you should actually do that is not clear based on the science. And the reason for that is that it differs for every person and every situation. So sometimes my wife will come to me with something that she's experiencing chatter about and I'll listen. And at a certain point in the conversation, when I think I have an opening, I'll say her, "Totally get it. It sounds awful. Hey, I have an idea. Can I give it to you?" And, and sometimes the response is no. Just keep listening. I don't want to hear it. And then she keeps going. And then I try again. At other points, I'll pose the same question and she'll be like, "Yes, please. That's why I'm talking to you. What do you think?" So there's an art to doing this well. And you want to feel that out.
Ethan Kross:
The flip side is when you are the person seeking support for your chatter, think really carefully about who in your life is skilled at not just being that sounding board to hear you out, but that they also our adept at helping you work through those problems, helping you broaden your perspective. Right? Most of us, I think when we think about the people in our life, can find a few people that help us do this. You don't need a lot. I've got three or four that helps me with personal stuff, personal issues, maybe four or five with work related stuff. These aren't trained clinicians. These are just socially and emotionally intelligent friends and loved ones. And so think really carefully about who your board of advisors is, so to speak, and then activate them when you need them.
Dustin Burleson:
It's really powerful. And I sent part of this chapter to a friend. I was like, this is what you've been doing for so many years, helping me broaden, as opposed to just letting you ruminate in this kind of negative cycle of they were so wrong and you were so right. And you leave those conversations, I think, often feeling worse when you went into the conversation.
Ethan Kross:
Exactly. Exactly. It's a real conundrum. And what's so fascinating about this work is when you talk to people about, it's not just that venting, you should never express your emotions, right? Cause we do have these strong needs. And because that instinct is so powerful people initially recoil at the idea that it could not be good for you. But the thing to remind yourself about is that you don't want to not talk, you want to talk and do something else. And I think that's not necessarily intuitive to lots of folks. It wasn't to me before I stumbled on this work, but it has been really powerful for me personally.
Dustin Burleson:
I want to talk about placebos and rituals. I loved some of these research designs with the karaoke and the impromptu. You're going to give a speech to an audience. I love that. Can we talk about this?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. Those are really fun. Yeah. So let's start by talking about rituals and then we could talk about placebos. So one of the things we know about human beings is that most of us are control freaks. And what I mean by that is we like to know that the world is predictable and that we have control over our circumstances. That's one of the reasons why this pandemic has been so chatter provoking for so many individuals is because we lack control. And there's a high degree of uncertainty out there right now. And that really stokes our chatter. What we've learned is that there are ways of regaining a sense of control indirectly. When we feel that things or circumstances are slipping. And a ritual is one way to do that. So what a ritual is, a ritual is a rigid sequence of behaviors that is infused with meaning.
Ethan Kross:
Every Saturday morning, I wake up, I exercise, I go to the farmer's market and then I come back and make waffles for my kids. I do that, it's exact same sequence every single Saturday. And it's a sequence of behaviors that is meaningful to me. It's a time to bond with my children, to reset from a difficult week. There's nothing magical about those three particular behaviors for helping me achieve my goals. It's just three things that I do the exact same way every single time that has some meaning.
Ethan Kross:
And what we've learned about rituals is that they can help you with your chatter by giving you a sense of control, because that ritual, that's something that is totally under your control. And it makes you feel like you have control over your situation. So this is why you have so many athletes who, during stressful performances, they've got rituals. This is why you have people who spontaneously start organizing and cleaning when they are stressed out, right? They are creating order around them to provide them with a sense of order that they lack in their minds.
Ethan Kross:
There's a fancy phrase we use to describe these kinds of strategies and what's going on. It's called exercising, compensatory control. Essentially, you are compensating for not feeling control in one domain of your life, IE your emotions by exercising control somewhere else. And what knowing about these findings and strategies allow you to do is just to be proactive about these things. So I'm not a particularly organized guy when it comes to my physical surroundings, but throughout my career, I noticed in retrospect that whenever I was getting a little chatter, I would like clean up the house, put my clothing away and wash the dishes. And this science provides a frame for understanding why I do that. And so knowing about this science, what I now do is, I will proactively clean the house if I sense chatter coming on. And that often helps. And it additionally makes me really popular with my wife, who I think now secretly wishes that I promptly experience a low level of chatter. So that's how rituals work.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. I was talking to my kids about this when I was reading that part of the book. And it's fascinating. Even my youngest is 11 and he's like I always use the same pencil to take my test. And halfway through I go sharpen it. Like little rituals that just give you a little sense of control in an area of uncertainty. My middle son said, yeah when playing tennis, I always serve the ball with the Wilson logo up. And I always return the ball with the Pro Staff logo up. I'm like every time? He's like, every time. I can't serve if I don't do it that way.
Ethan Kross:
So, I mean, I love that. And here's what I think is so powerful about knowing about the science and how this works. This is not true for all the tools I talk about in the book, but some of the tools we just stumble on. We sometimes, through trial and error, figure out that doing this thing helps us. We don't know why. I'm guessing your son probably didn't know why, it was your son with the Wilson. Is that right?
Dustin Burleson:
Yes. Right.
Ethan Kross:
He probably didn't know the psychology explaining why having the label facing up makes a difference for him, but it feels right. And so he did it. We've stumbled on lots of tools like that over the course of our lives. Some of the things that we've stumbled on do help us. Some of the things that we think help us actually don't, like venting. That's why the science is so incredibly useful because it allows us to weed out the things that work from those that don't. And it allows us to be more agentic about how we incorporate the tools that work for us into our lives. So don't stop with the Wilson serve, develop a little ritual before you have some jitters before you go out on your first date, right? Or when you have to give your opening remarks at a plenary session, have a ritual, a go-to, that you can instantly connect with to help you in that situation. Knowing about this stuff allows us to be more proactive.
Ethan Kross:
There is one caveat I should give about rituals, which is this, clearly rituals can be taken to an extreme, as we see play out in the form of obsessive compulsive disorder. The way I think about that is this is an instance of an individual taking a strategy that serves some really useful function and is beneficial, but taking it to an extreme. And there's nothing really unique about rituals in that regard, that if taken to an extreme, they can be harmful. I would argue that any tool, if taken to an extreme, if used in the wrong context, or to intensively, can be problematic. Like zooming out, you don't want to zoom out when you are at your kid's tennis match and they're winning the game. You want to immerse yourself, zoom in and savor the delight of watching your kid perform, right? So you want to be strategic in how you use these tools.
Dustin Burleson:
That's great. I could talk to you all day, if we had the time. I want to wrap with an interesting observation I had kind of halfway through the book. I had the same epiphany, your student, you share a story in the book, Ariel had. And I told my fiance, why aren't we teaching this to every sixth grader in America? Well, I had to finish the book because it turns out you're trying to do that. So can you talk a little bit about the toolbox project and maybe how listeners can maybe get involved or promote these concepts in their own school districts?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah, I'm happy to. So it's now been rebranded the Michigan Skills Project, just for some trademark stuff that I never imagined being involved in, but go figure. So basically what we're doing is we're trying to take ... Well, we've taken what we know about the science of self control of how to manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And we've converted it into a curriculum that can be taught in middle and high schools. And what we're about to do in a couple of weeks, we're about to launch the massive clinical trial with about 10,000 students, is we're going to be teaching students this curriculum. Half of the student in a school district in Georgia will be randomly assigned to this curriculum. Another half will be assigned to learn about something else.
Ethan Kross:
And what we want to know is two things. One, can students learn this information in the context of a class course? We have some pretty good pilot data suggesting that the answer to that question is yes. But then the next bigger question is, does learning about this information actually have impact on kids' ability to perform, their relationships, their wellbeing. And so we'll be tracking students over time after they go through the curriculum to see how it affects their lives. And that's something that we're really excited about. I fervently do believe that we should be teaching, the world really, about how this works. Really, because I think knowing about how the human mind works is just an important topic from a pedagogical perspective.
Ethan Kross:
I often joke that for some reason, I often think back to like human biology, which I learned about in junior high school and in high school, like I took multiple classes on this. They were required. And for whatever reason, the topic that stands out to me is the digestive system. I remember learning about peristalsis, for example, is mind blowing. Wow. How does food get from one hole down to the other, like peristalsis. Super cool. Like I'm learning about the body, but ask me how many occasions in my adult life, or even in my adolescent life, how have I had to use that information in my life? There have actually been two instances, both of which involve my kids, not to get into any gory detail. Both of them independently asked me at some point, "Daddy, how can I swallow food upside down?" And, and that was, that was the moment. Yes, peristalsis. There it goes, right?
Ethan Kross:
But now let's think about things like, how do you regulate, how do you manage your anger? How do you make yourself happier? How do you control your anxiety? These are topics that I would argue we grapple with on a daily basis. So why aren't we doing everything we can to teach kids, to teach adults, to teach everyone about how the mind works when it comes to these phenomena, right? We don't have to make judgements here. This is just basic biology. It's basic science. Here are the nuts and bolts that explain it all.
Ethan Kross:
So this project is an attempt to start doing that. The book, Chatter, was a big attempt to do that as well. If folks want to get involved and if they're interested in helping in this plight, the first thing you could do is just learn about this information yourself and share it with other people. I think that's a really easy thing, a really easy way all of us can make a difference in this regard. And if you want to get involved more in learning about some of the work in this Michigan Skills Project, we'll be posting updates as the study progresses on my website. And you could check in there. And if this project is successful, the hope is to make these curricula that we've spent the last five years developing, multimillion dollar effort, we're going to make it just freely available for districts anywhere to download and use. And so hopefully we get to that point soon.
Dustin Burleson:
That's so exciting and we will post the link to Ethan's website in the show notes. And I think that's a great place to wrap up. I want to thank you for writing the book, for the research you're doing, for your contribution to society and the greater good. We should all be appreciative. And I just really enjoyed spending time talking with you.
Ethan Kross:
Likewise, thanks for the opportunity to connect. And I really am grateful for the opportunity to speak to your listeners and it was great fun.
Dustin Burleson:
All right. Thanks, Ethan.
Ethan Kross:
Okay. Take care.
Dustin Burleson:
You've been listening to another episode of the Burleson Box, where we bring you and your team leaders into the conversation with today's best authors and business leaders. If you enjoyed today's program, be sure to share us with a friend or colleague. You can visit the Burlesonbox.com and sign up to receive my monthly reading list, study guides for each of the books and authors we interview, or you can call us at 1-800-891-7520 and discuss how a Burleson Box membership, monthly coaching or annual leadership conference can work for you and your team. Be sure to listen each month for new resources. We can help you and your employees serve your patients with excellence. Until next time, remember the words of Charlie Munger who said, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people over a broad subject matter, who didn't read all the time. None, zero." Go make it a great month and I'll see you right here next time on the Burleson Box.