266. Your Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open: Managing the Voice in Your Head

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Doom loops can be one of the biggest barriers to effective communication, yet we can quiet the chatter and regulate our emotions. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm really excited to speak with Ethan Kross. Ethan is an award-winning professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and he is a director of its emotion and self-control lab. He studies emotion regulation and the conscious mind. Ethan has written two bestselling books, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. And his latest book is Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. Welcome Ethan. I'm really excited for our conversation. 

[00:00:51] Ethan Kross: It's a delight and honor to be here, Matt. I've been looking forward to this for a while now, so glad we can make it happen.

[00:00:56] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:58] Ethan Kross: Yeah, let's do it. 

[00:01:00] Matt Abrahams: So let's start our chat about chatter. Your work on chatter explores our internal self-talk and how it can hijack our performance. Can you explain how this happens? 

[00:01:10] Ethan Kross: Yeah. We should probably start by defining what chatter means. Chatter refers to getting stuck in a negative thought loop, and they're really two kind of telltale signs that you are experiencing it. So one is you've got a legitimate problem that you're facing. Maybe it's a problem at work, maybe it's a problem at home, and you're motivated to work through that problem, to use your glorious, marvelous brain to come up with a solution. The problem is you're not successful, so you keep on trying to work through the problem, but you don't make any progress and you start spinning.

[00:01:43] Sometimes you call this worry, sometimes we call rumination. The common thread, there's a legitimate problem, but you're not progressing. So that's one sign that you're experiencing this state of chatter. Another is you just berate yourself incessantly. I'm an idiot. Such an idiot. How can I have done this? And you just pile on yourself. How does this undermine performance? One way it does so is by consuming your attention. So let me ask you this question, Matt. Have you ever been in a situation where you sit down to read a few pages in a book, and under oath you would swear to a judge that you've read the information on the page except you get to the end and you do not remember a damn thing you've read.

[00:02:20] Matt Abrahams: Ethan, that happens so frequently that it is common.

[00:02:24] Ethan Kross: Well, and it's, in my experience, talking to lots of people about this stuff over the years, this is a universal experience we all have at times. And chatter just promotes this. So how does this work? We have a limited capacity to focus our attention. Our attentional resources are a precious, limited commodity in our brains, and chatter acts like a sponge that consumes that limited capacity. It leaves very little leftover that allows us to do the things that we want or need to do. So that's one way it can undermine our performance. The other thing it can lead to is something that we call analysis paralysis.

[00:03:01] Here, the idea is you start overthinking things that you can normally do without thinking to the point where the entire performance crumbles. If you watch sports, you see this happening all the time to athletes who choke under pressure. All of a sudden the second baseman, who could historically throw the ball to first base with their eyes closed, now can't get anywhere near the vicinity. That is also a function of chatter, and those are two powerful detriments to our ability to excel in performance context.

[00:03:30] Matt Abrahams: So chatter sucks up our cognitive bandwidth and it has us doing things more consciously than we might normally do it, and that's what gets in the way of us performing well. I see this play out all the time in the work I do around helping people feel more comfortable and confident in communicating. Anxiety around speaking gets into this chatter loop very easily. But what are some techniques we can use to break this cycle?

[00:03:55] Ethan Kross: An early experience that I had with analysis paralysis was when I was first public speaking as a grad student. One of the first classes I taught, it went well. I got some feedback though that said that I had forgotten to smile enough, and so in the second time I came back I overcorrected, and like I smiled so widely that it disrupted, I forgot what I wanted to say.

[00:04:16] Matt Abrahams: And that happens a lot. People get caught up on things like they hear themselves saying or they know what they wanted to say in a certain way, and then they get into these doom loops that prevent them from performing well and how do we get out of that?

[00:04:29] Ethan Kross: So here's the good news. You can get out of it. More good news, if someone has told you about a tool that worked for them, but it didn't work for you, no problem. Because what we have learned from the science is that different tools work for different people in different situations. There are no one size fits all solutions. I think of managing your chatter a lot like becoming physically fit. So most of us have goals to be physically fit for different reasons. Some of us want bigger muscles. Some of us wanna be able to run longer. Based on who you are and your goals, you're gonna benefit from doing different kinds of exercises and routines.

[00:05:06] The same is true when it comes to managing your chatter. So what can you do? Well, there are some things you could just do on your own, basic ways of shifting the way you're thinking or behaving that can turn the volume on your chatter down. One category of tools that a lot of people benefit from or call distancing tools. So here the idea is when you find yourself zoomed in very narrowly on a problem and you're ruminating about it, let's find a way to help you step back and look at the circumstance a bit more objectively, almost like you'd be hearing it from a friend. Most of us have had the experience of finding it much easier for us to give great advice to a friend as compared to ourselves.

[00:05:45] There's a name for this phenomenon. We've studied it in my lab. It's called Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon. King Solomon was known for being super wise when it came to other people. When it came to himself, he made terrible decisions. This is true of all of us. So how do you step outside yourself? Lots of ways to do it. One tool that I'm fond of is called distanced self-talk. So what this involves is trying to work through a problem using your own name and you. So if I'm really stressed out before a big presentation, I might think to myself, all right, Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation?

[00:06:20] How have you managed a situation before? Here's why distanced self-talk helps. It leverages language to shift our perspective. Most of the time that we use the word you or a name, we're using those parts of speech when we think about or refer to someone else. So the link in a person's mind between the word you as an example, and another person is about as strong as you can get. So when you use that part of speech to reference yourself, it's essentially turning on the brain machinery for thinking about someone else. Makes it a lot easier for us to work through our problems objectively. So that's one tool you can use. Another tool is something that I call mental time travel into the future.

[00:07:02] Super simple. How am I gonna feel about this presentation three hours from now, three days from now, three years from now? All of our emotions they take place on a timeline. So you're living your life, something happens and emotion gets spiked, and as time goes on, the emotion eventually fades. When we're consumed with chatter, we zoom in on the peak of that experience and the awfulness, oh my God, everyone's staring at me. And what if I forget to say what I need to say? What if to go to the bathroom, and blah, blah, blah. It is amazing, I should add, that how creative we can be in coming up with worst case scenarios in those moments.

[00:07:41] So when you zoom in on the pinnacle of the negative experience, what you lose sight of is something that you know at your core to be true. You know this to be true because you've experienced what I'm about to describe millions of times in your life, which is the emotion has come and has increased, but then as time has gone on, it has faded. So when you jump into the mental time travel vision, you think, hey, how am I gonna feel about this tomorrow? Or next week? It automatically makes accessible this notion that what you're going through, as awful as it is, it's temporary. It will eventually fade. And that does something very powerful to a mind that is racked with chatter. It gives it hope, and that turns the volume down too. So those are just two examples. There are dozens of tools out there.

[00:08:27] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate that, the distanced self-talk, putting yourself as the person you're giving advice to, and then asking yourself what this means in the future. I've heard things like writing things down, just recognizing mindfulness teaches us that this is what I'm experiencing in the moment, all of those give us a little bit of space to be able to manage, so thank you for that. Given that a lot of our interactions are mediated, they're virtual, they're through social media, I'm curious if you've found that there are any differences in our self-talk or how we should approach those interactions?

[00:09:01] Ethan Kross: I think it's really important for us to be mindful of the modality that we are communicating to other people through. Technology has provided us with just enormous opportunities to be more efficient and effective, but there are some trade offs that you get. So here's something I think about often when it comes to chatter and technology. We know from lots of research that when people experience strong emotional reactions of the sort that characterize chatter, they're intensely motivated to share the glory that is streaming through their mind with other people. That is, they wanna talk about it.

[00:09:39] Now, in the real, in the non-social media, non-technology, quote unquote, real world, there are some obstacles that are embedded into life that prevent you from immediately talking about your chatter in the instant that it has spiked and is perhaps most extreme. Number one, you've gotta find someone to talk to and people aren't like always available. And then once you find them, they may not even be able to listen to you, right? So you've gotta wait some time to find someone. And then what often happens as time passes, some scientists describe time as a component of our psychological immune system. That is, time works to reduce the intensity of our emotional responses.

[00:10:22] As time goes on, our emotions fade, right? So you're waiting to talk to someone in the real world. You finally, you know, my wife, I finally reconnect with her five hours later, I'm not as upset as I was before. Social media though, gives us access to a network at all times, and when you couple it with smartphones, you whip it out at the very peak, and then you're sharing. And there's one other thing to keep in mind, which is, on social media, I am sharing my inner thoughts and sometimes frustrations into a text box. When I am face-to-face with someone, I'm in the presence of another human being who is sending me all of this rich information back about how what I'm doing and how I'm behaving is affecting them.

[00:11:06] That is, your face, your body is sending me information about how you are feeling, and that can constrain the way I behave to you. Like sometimes, Matt, I'll be honest, like when I'm pissed off, I mean, it's like a Robert De Niro film in there, right? Like the expletives that are going, if I said some of these things out loud, I would be in big trouble. I would never talk to you that way. I wouldn't talk to any other human being that way. And it's because you are calibrating how I communicate. So I think it's just really important to be mindful of these modality differences, 'cause we do see that people are much more likely to share emotional information in an unfiltered way on social media that can sometimes get them in big trouble.

[00:11:53] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely, and I think it's important to always be thinking about the channel and what that means for how and when, and how specific you can be in your communication. I really like that idea of time being part of the immune system and really helping calm things down. I appreciate that. You've said that a common piece of bad advice is simply get over the negative feelings that people have. I'm curious, why is that such a bad idea, and if it is, what are some communication frameworks or tools you can share with us that we can use to acknowledge others' negative feelings, without just saying, hey, get over it. How can we help them process those feelings?

[00:12:31] Ethan Kross: Yeah, just get over it doesn't really give people a whole lot of tactical information to help them get over it. I think a lot of people, when they're struggling, they're highly motivated to reduce that struggle. They don't wanna stay in that state, for the most part. And so when you just tell people, just get over it, it's not like they're not trying to do so. In my latest book, I tell this anecdote where my wife and I were driving back from dinner in Detroit with another couple, very close friends of ours, and the husband has been experiencing some real stress at work, and it was the source of some chatter, and he was describing it to us in the car.

[00:13:07] And his wife says to him, yeah, why don't you just think differently about it? Effectively like, just get over it. And he turns to her and goes, yeah, easier bleeping said, than done. And he did not say bleeping, I'll let you fill in the blanks. And so the idea is, okay, but how? It's equivalent to like, just get in shape, just lose weight. But I've never taught you the exercises and nutritional regimens you need to accomplish those goals. What is the best way of supporting other people when they're struggling with chatter or big emotions? There's a two-step science-based framework that I'm particularly fond of. I'm fond of it because it's grounded in rigorous science.

[00:13:45] I'm also fond of it because I have personally found enormous value in it. Because before I came in contact with this framework, people would come to me for help and I didn't know what to say. Like, sorry, I feel for you, but now I have a guide. So what is in, what are the steps in this framework? Step one is emotionally connect with the person. Listen to the problem, validate what they're experiencing, show empathy, connect with them, communicate that you are there for them. They have your support. And also learn about the circumstance. You need to wrap your head around it.

[00:14:18] Once you have a sense that those social and emotional connections have been forged, then you wanna shift to starting to work with that person to help broaden their perspective, help give them actual tools that can benefit them, right? So Matt, you come to me with a problem. I listen, I learn, you know that I'm genuinely here for you. I might throw it back to you and be like, hey, so what would you tell me if I was in your circumstance or I was in that situation a couple of years ago. You know what really benefited me? It was actually doing this mental time travel thing where I went into the future. Maybe you try that. And there are lots of different tools you could slip during that part of the conversation.

[00:14:58] But the idea is you lay the groundwork, the emotional groundwork for giving those tools at the beginning part of the conversation, and then you come into problem solving mode at the end. That's the formula for both being a good chatter advisor to someone else. It's also a formula for helping you figure out who are the people that you should put on your chatter advisory board, who are the people who do both of these things for me? Because I'll tell you, when I do audits of people's advisory boards with them, there are lots of people that folks go to talk to about their problems, they don't do both of those things. Sometimes they just co-ruminate with the other person in ways that make the situation even worse. 

[00:15:37] Matt Abrahams: I really like this idea of a chatter advisory board and really think about who are the people that help you, and it might be the same person or it might be different people for different situations, but I really like that proactive idea. And then as somebody who is trying to help others, we talk a lot on this show, and with a lot of people and colleagues that you and I have in common, about how we can connect, we can ask questions, we can paraphrase, we can demonstrate our empathy, to really learn about the circumstance before we begin to provide potential advice and guidance. And the examples you used of advice and guidance, I think, I wanna call everybody's attention to, you didn't say you should do this, you said, in my experience, I have found this helped me, which it changes the dynamic. So the tone and manner in which you give the advice, I think is really important. 

[00:16:25] Ethan Kross: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The you should, you wanna use that very sparingly. 

[00:16:30] Matt Abrahams: I have a friend who says you shouldn't should all over people, right? But saying from your own experience opens up for conversation. 

[00:16:38] Ethan Kross: Yeah. And just to take that a beat further, 'cause I think it's such an incredibly insightful and important point, Matt, is why is it that the kind of softer way in to giving the info is important? It's because all human beings have this fundamental drive towards agency. It's a drive to believe, to use the technical term, that we are capable of handling our own shit. And when you threaten that drive, it elicits a kind of defensive reactance. And so if you could get in there a little bit softer, it makes it all easier.

[00:17:13] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. I love the technical term. Thank you. I'd like to shift our conversation away from chatter to your latest book, Shift. You've already alluded to it, but it's all about emotional regulation, and by the way, it's fantastic. You say in there that a key to managing your inner world is to view our emotions not as problems to be suppressed, but as data to be analyzed. So this is a way of reframing it. What does this shift do for us and how can we train ourselves to use this reframe so we can get some of the benefit? 

[00:17:41] Ethan Kross: I think one of the big problems we have in society right now, at least in Western society, is we often, we give people these aspirational goals to live lives free of negative emotions, striving for happiness all the time. Sometimes this leads to what we call toxic positivity. And here's the problem with that. Number one, you're giving people an impossible goal. There's no way you can achieve this goal of never experiencing negative emotions. Number two, it is an undesirable goal because your negative emotions in the right proportions are helpful. Let me give you a couple of examples.

[00:18:16] Anxiety, when I don't experience any anxiety before an important presentation, the performance I deliver is not as good as when I do experience low anxiety. Why is that? Because the anxiety is information that tells me, hey, dopey, trying to start looking over your slides and making sure it's all top of mind, right? If I don't do that, I just walk in, it doesn't go as well. Anger is what motivates me to intervene when my daughter doesn't put on her helmet when she's riding her bike.

[00:18:48] So we experience anger when our conception of what is right and wrong is transgressed, and there's an opportunity for you to fix the situation, and you approach, you intervene. In the right proportions those are healthy. The big problem, of course, is we often experience negative emotions out of proportion. That's why it's important to understand how to regulate it, but we really need to understand that we should not be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just because negative emotions are harmful some of the time doesn't mean that they don't serve a vital role in our lives.

[00:19:21] Matt Abrahams: Taking that reframe really can help. When I feel my anxiety before giving a speech or my anger with one of my kids because they're driving too fast, when I see that as, hey, this is input for me to then act upon rather than something to bury deep inside or get overwhelmed by, I can really make a difference and I appreciate that. It, again, takes that little bit of distancing to give yourself that space to do that though.

[00:19:44] Before we end, I always ask people three questions. One I make up just for you and the other two I've been asking people as long as the podcast has been around. Are you up for that? 

[00:19:52] Ethan Kross: Yeah. Let's do it. 

[00:19:53] Matt Abrahams: Question number one. You have studied awe. Can you tell us very quickly what awe is and what have you learned about it? 

[00:20:00] Ethan Kross: Yeah. Awe is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable. Something that just feels bigger than ourselves. And what we've learned is that number one, you can experience awe from lots of different sources. So a lot of people find awe in nature. Beautiful sunset, fall foliage. I'm a science guy and I often am filled with awe when I contemplate the fact that we human beings have cracked the puzzle of interplanetary travel. That is, we have figured out how to blast a vehicle off this planet, and safely land it on planet Mars, and my mind is just can't comprehend how we figured out how to do that. When we experience this emotion of awe, it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, so do all of the troubles that are weighing us down. And so it's an important reminder of another resource we possess for managing our emotions.

[00:20:54] Matt Abrahams: Yeah, and awe, I think, also can be experienced internally. You can think about internal things as well, not just external. So again, it's a way of distancing and perspective taking. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:21:07] Ethan Kross: My good friend Angela Duckworth is, I think, just exceptional at clearly talking about science that honors its richness, but still being really impactful. And I think finding that sweet spot between being able to talk with impact, but not diluting the science, is really hard to do. 

[00:21:29] Matt Abrahams: She is an amazing communicator and you and Katy Milkman have both nominated her as a person that is admired, so thank you for that. Our final question, Ethan, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:21:44] Ethan Kross: Clarity, simplifying as much as you can, but not beyond that, and sharing your passion and love of what you're doing and talking about. 

[00:21:54] Matt Abrahams: Clarity, simplicity, and emotion that you feel and experience. Thank you for that recipe and thank you for all the insights you've provided. A lot of us carry around a lot of chatter. It can make it hard for us to regulate our emotions and manage, and you've given us some very specific advice and guidance. The one thing I am certainly taking away as my chatter advisory board, uh, I'm sending out applications to several people to join right away. Thank you, Ethan, for your time. 

[00:22:20] Ethan Kross: Thanks for having me.

[00:22:24] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about how to manage our internal world and negativity, please listen to episode 179 with Laurie Santos. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out our premium offering at fastersmarter.io/premium.