Ethan Kross | Chatter | Talks at Google

Please give a big round of applause as we bring onto stage Dr. Ethan Kross. So, the first most important question to ask any New Yorker, how does it feel to be back?

It's always great to be back in the city, and I see a little clock down— countdown there.

We ignore the timer.

No, no, I'm looking at it because that's a countdown until I get my slice of pizza. Bang!

We'll take it, we'll take it. So real quick, for the audience in the room right now, how many of you have already had a chance to read the book? Raise your hands. It's okay if not. Okay, very few people.

Great. Let's start off. This is actually the preferred mode because everything will be new.

Exactly, exactly. So to start us off, can you walk a little bit through your background, right? How did you get over to the lab now? Walk us through the PhD, the postdoc, and all that.

All right, I'll give you the medium-length story, so get ready. It'll be at least 25 minutes.

Awesome. Good. I wanted to buy some time.

So, uh, it actually— the story starts, um, not too far from here in Brooklyn. Any Brooklynites here in the room?

Okay.

Anyone, like, born in Brooklyn though?

Yeah.

All right.

Where are you from?

Flatbush. All right. I went to school in Flatbush, came from Canarsie, grew up in New York, had what I call an unconventional dad. Talk a little bit about him in the book.

Yeah. I'd love to.

Yeah. Um, uh, what I mean by unconventional, on the one hand, Dad fit the stereotype of a gruff New Yorker, Y'all familiar with gruff New Yorkers? Like Yankees cap, usually like frayed around the rim of the hat, big bushy mustache, loved watching the Yankees, loved driving, was not a subway guy, and had unbelievable dexterity with the usage of his middle digit on the road. You guys know what that is like too, right? Mortifying to be in the car with him.

Yeah.

So there was that side of him, just kind of brash and outspoken, But then there was this other side— never graduated from college, was in sales, but loved reading Eastern philosophy.

Yeah.

And loved reading about Eastern philosophy— Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Buddhist texts— and talking to his 3-year-old kid about what he was reading, which at the time was terribly insufferable, but, but it penetrated, had an effect. And so one of the first things he taught me was, hey, whenever you get into a bind, I want you to go inside. He'd actually use that phrase. Tap into that voice inside you and listen to it. Leave me alone. You're so annoying. You're so embarrassing. Just go away. That's what I would say to him, but the message stuck with me.

Yeah.

Got older, would get into arguments, mom, dad, got rejected a lot in high school, I would always do this. I would turn inward, I would introspect, and, and this served me well. Then I got to college, took my first psych class. Halfway through the semester, got to the topic of introspection. I think, like, I got this.

Yeah.

Like, I've been, I've been doing this, you know, for a while. First thing I learned in that class is that this ability to turn inward, to use language to reflect on our lives, this is one of our superpowers. This is a source of innovation. This is how you build an organization like this. But what I also learned is that this very same capacity is a source of massive human suffering. That to me was just fascinating and lit a spark and led me to get really interested in how can you use the tools of science to figure out why does this happen? Why do we have this resource? Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Most importantly, find ways of helping people harness it. Went to Columbia to learn about how to use the tools of psychology, neuroscience to weigh in on that. And that's what I've been doing ever since at the University of Michigan.

So with the University of Michigan, now you founded their Emotion and Self-Control Lab.

That's right.

Talk a little bit through that.

So in the Emotion Self-Control Lab, we get to ask what I think are really interesting questions about how people work when it comes to their emotional lives, the, the way we determine which kinds of questions to pursue is, if we are successful— and we usually are not as successful— but if we are, do we have the potential to substantially advance our understanding of some aspect of human psychology, and/or does our work have the potential to appreciably help people in everyday life? If a question meets one or both of those criteria, we pursue it. And it's allowed us to go into lots of really interesting spaces, a lot of which I talk about in the book. But I have a question though. Do we have any Wolverines in the audience? All right. We'll let him get you to do better than that. But one other question. Do we have any Buckeyes here? All right. This is a safe space for us. Very good.

I love that. In order to make it a little bit more tangible for the audience as well as the work that you guys do at the lab, I know the marshmallow experiment wasn't you, right?

No, that was my advisor.

Yes, but you did do the one where you brought in people who were heartbroken from New York City.

That's right.

You brought them in, right?

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about it so people can get a little bit of an idea of what the day-to-day can sometimes look like, or what does it mean to research this?

Sure. So this was a study I actually— I started in graduate school, and then the aftermath opens up chatter. Let me ask folks here, has anyone ever been dumped here, rejected? In a romantic relationship?

Come on, guys, we could be brave in this one. Come on, y'all.

Okay, have you ever, ever done this kind of weird thing, which is described how you felt after being dumped by using the language of physical pain? In other words, you said, oh, my feelings are hurt. Anyone ever use a phrase like that? Yeah, I see a lot of nodding heads, right?

It's like she tore my heart out, stomped on it a few times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go.

Of course, yeah, yeah, so I'll never heal.

Yeah, yeah, we do this funky thing, we use physical pain to describe this emotional experience. And so myself and some of my collaborators, we had this question, this curiosity: why do we do that? Does the experience of social pain, social rejection, does it actually share some unique similarity with the experience of physical pain? One way we decided to look at this was to— this was way back, I'm going to date myself. So we posted flyers around subway stations in New York City and in parks, and we recruited people who have just been dumped in a serious romantic relationship. If you have, participate in—

What do you put on a flyer like that?

Well, just wait. So, have you been dumped? If so, participate in a study on emotional and physical pain. We paid people quite a bit of money to participate here. At the time, it was hundreds of dollars. And we brought people into the lab. This is an fMRI lab up at Columbia. And we scanned their brains while we did 2 things. So I want to preface what I'm about to tell you. Everything we do in the lab is in the service of trying to figure out how to help people. Sometimes we have to put them in pain in order to figure out how to help them well. So you know what I'm about to say is about to be pretty bad if I just gave you that disclaimer. One of the things we do while they're in the scanner is we induce them to experience social pain. So how might you do that, right? They've already been dumped. We want to have them relive that experience. And the way we do it is we ask them to give us a picture of the person who dumped them. I know you're judging me. Please, it gets better.

It's in the name of science.

I'm trying to help people. We show them the picture and then beneath the picture is a little cue phrase that is designed to focus their attention specifically on the moment that they were dumped. So like, rejected at dinner, and you look at the picture. And if you've ever been dumped, this is a very, very powerful way of instantly inducing an emotional response. The senses, vision, right, like very, very powerful. So we have them do that over and over to Induce this feeling. The other thing we do is we want to get a neural snapshot of what it looks like to experience social pain, but we want to then compare that to a neural snapshot of what it's like to experience physical pain. So to do that, we use a device called the thermode, and what the thermode involves doing is you put a little metal plate on people's forearms, and this metal plate heats up. to a hot temperature. Now, we're not burning anyone. We take great care to ensure that we don't. This is like going to your barista, grabbing a cup of coffee without the protective sleeve. It hurts, right? There's a reason there's that protective sleeve, but there's no lasting mark that is left. And so we do that over and over, and, and lo and behold, what we found in this study was actually there was a privileged shared overlap that this experience of social pain has with physical pain. So when you're experiencing social rejection, it is recruiting this physical pain system. We are a social species. Being connected to loved ones is so incredibly important that this physical pain alarm system activates when the link is severed. So that was one early study I did. The connection back to chatter is This study, maybe it's karma, it really came back to haunt me in a pretty powerful way in my life because after we published— after we finished that study, I moved to Ann Arbor, set up the lab, and we published this study in a pretty high-impact journal. One morning I'm teaching undergrads intro social psych, check my email halftime. I think it was ABC or CBS Evening News, can you get to the studio in the next 2 hours for a—

Oh, no.

a recording for the special that night, and all of a sudden, like, the floodgates of media attention opened, and it was really exciting. And then about a week later, I received a really ugly letter in the mail. This was back when we used to receive mail.

Yeah.

And there was a drawing of me, racial slurs, all sorts of threatening things written in there. And that kind of sent me into my first real chatter tailspin where I was just kind of looping over and over. And it also helped me identify one tool that we've gone on to study.

Well, I'm glad that you brought it in this way. So based off the research, we can tell that when we are panicked or when things get overwhelming, it's not only an emotional or mental response, it's a physical one as well, right?

Oh yeah. I mean, here's a shocker, folks. Your feelings, they have an organic substrate. They are grounded in how the way your brain and bodies operate. They are all tightly linked. When you get stuck in a spell of chatter— have you ever experienced some chatter?

Actually, that was the question I was gonna raise to you, right? So you gave us 2 examples. One is you having threatening letter, the other is people experiencing a breakup again, right?

Yeah.

What part of that is the chatter? Like, when you're talking about chatter for the audience, is it the mental thoughts? Is it everything combined all at once? What are we trying to tackle here?

All right, well, let's do like a 60-second primer here on chatter in the inner voice. So when I use the phrase inner voice, and when scientists like myself use that phrase, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on some feature of our lives. So I'm gonna give you a phrase, and I want you to repeat that phrase 3 times silently in your head. You ready? Go Blue.

Go Blue.

Anyone not able to repeat that phrase? That's how I suss out enemies in the audience. So if you've repeated that phrase, congratulations, you've just activated your inner voice. It turns out this inner voice is an unbelievable tool we possess. It lets you keep information active in your head. It's central to how your working memory operates, and we could talk a little bit about that. Anyone here ever find themselves doing this weird thing where you, before an important presentation, or meeting, you go over what you're gonna say in your head? Anyone ever do this? Okay.

Yeah.

That's your inner voice. How good would you be at those performance or interactive contexts if you couldn't do those mental simulations? Who here talks to themselves when they exercise? Anyone willing to share what they say to themselves? I love voyeuristically learning about this. Yeah. So you're simulating, you're gaming it out in advance. Okay, others? Who else does this something different? Yeah, in the back.

Come on, just 60 more seconds.

Just 60 more seconds. 29 more minutes till the slice of pizza. Yourself, do you want to? Mine's the same. Come on, anyone else? Anything else different here? Is anyone like really tough on themselves in a way you might not even be willing to Articulate out loud, maybe call yourself certain things that you won't would might get you fired here at Google. Yeah. Why am I here?

What's what's this? This looks so much easier on TikTok.

That's right. Pick it up, you bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep. That's mine. So there's research on this, right? People who are skilled at harnessing their inner voice in a motivating and encouraging way tend to outperform those who don't. We also, of course, use this inner voice to. Venture into a territory that you opened up our talk with. We use our inner voice to weave the stories of our lives, stories that we use to understand who we are. That's all great stuff. Here's the big problem. The problem is this tool is so incredibly valuable to us— working memory, simulations, motivation, self-control, meaning-making. Right? This is an incredible tool. We reach for it when we're struggling. When you get news that you don't like, why did this happen? What does this mean? When you're thinking about the future, what if this happens? What if that happens? And oftentimes we don't ask ourselves those questions and come out with clear narratives. Instead, we just find ourselves starting to spin over and over and over again. We call this rumination. We call it worry, perseveration. It's chatter. That's what chatter is, and I've been studying it for a long time. I genuinely think it's one of the big problems we face as a species.

Yeah.

So it tanks us in several domains of life.

And so then take us into the moment of action, right? These participants that are there for the test thinking about their exes, this— you thinking about the sort of the threatening letter. There's a story you open your book up with as well as like your hand sitting there with the bat in hand. paranoid about what's going to happen for the next few days, right? At some point—

Well, paranoia, you think that's what you take away from that?

Not paranoia, but you're thinking, it is consumed every day.

It is. So here's the setup, right? So I get this threatening letter in the mail. I make the terrible mistake of Googling. I did Google. Googling the return address, and it's like not far from where I live in Ann Arbor, right? Then I show it to someone else. I want some verification that I'm not making too much of this. I show it to someone in the department and they turn white.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, you need to go to the police. I go to the police. They look at it, you know, like, just like that. Well, not much we can do. This happens every couple of years. Drive home a different way from work each day, just in case. Like, literally say this to me. I lived 7 blocks from school. Right? So how many permutations, right, can you take going home? And so at that point, I did slip into some chatter. My oldest daughter was just born. She was a newborn at the time.

Yeah.

I'm thinking to myself, like, why did I do the goddamn interview? Like, why? No one had to draw this attention to us, and now I've put, like, the family, I've made us vulnerable. And so in that moment, I regressed to my Brooklyn instincts growing up.

Yeah.

And I still have my Little League baseball bat. And all right, it's, it's watch time. And I just paced the house for a couple of days up until the early morning hours. And I was on watch. And I was— and at one point, you know, I— it was like 3:00 in the morning, the caffeine had worn off, and And I had this delusional idea, right? Anyone here ever like, you think things that just don't make much sense? Right? You don't wanna tell people. Well, I decided maybe I'll tell Google this. I sat down in the Google search field and I started to Google bodyguards for academics. This is irrational, right? And before I actually hit enter—

Yeah.

I had the awareness I probably shouldn't do that. And I said to myself, Ethan, what are you doing?

Yeah.

Right? And in that moment, it like broke me out of it, and that was it. But it was this weird, weird kind of verbal strategy I engaged in. I actually referred to myself using my own name, and I was directing myself like I would a friend who is just kind of getting out of line. Has anyone ever done this, by the way? Ever referred to yourself using your own name or you? At any moment. Like, why do you do that? Turns out we know the answer to that now. So we've studied it, as have others. We call this distant self-talk. We know that people spontaneously do it when they're in self-control contexts, when they are trying to manage or control themselves. You see this happening a lot when people are working on, like, difficult puzzles that they're trying to solve. They— you need to go here, and then you need to go there. It helps people manage their emotions. It helps curtail rumination, as many studies show. And the reason why it works, one of the key reasons is— well, let me ask you one more question. How many people here are infinitely better at giving advice to others than taking that advice yourself?

1,000%.

You want to put your hands up? Let's see the hypocrites. Don't worry, leadership isn't screening for this, right? This is a truism of the human condition. We can give great advice to others, but when, when emotions bubble up, it can be harder for us to muster and act on that knowledge ourselves.

Yeah.

What distant self-talk does, it's like a verbal jiu-jitsu move for switching your perspective, right? It's when do we use names and words like you and you, and we use those words when we think about and refer to others. So when you refer to yourself with your name or you, it's now I'm in this role where I'm advising someone else. Much easier to work through a problem. And so that's an example of one chatter tool that is very low effort and high return.

So I'm glad that you mentioned it as a tool. So throughout the entire book, what you'll find is one of the things that I enjoyed about it was it was all these stories of people that he has worked with or people that he has studied, and then it goes into, okay, here's the studies or the research behind it, but then at the end of the book you've also included all of the studies. So it's this amazing rabbit hole that you can go down, and each one of them obviously come with their own insights of tools you can use. So if you mention this idea of distance turning from I to you, there's also this other tool of rumination, but being very— or co-rumination, sorry— and what it means to— when you reach out to people for help or support from our friends, it can actually be hurting us to do that.

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about that tool, how to do it correctly?

Yeah, I, I, I, I, I, well, I'm gonna just keep on throwing questions back. He warned you. How many people here think that other people are an amazing asset when it comes to your emotional lives? Talking to other people. Okay, many of you. Put the hands down. One more question. How many of you think that other people can be an enormous liability when it comes to your emotional lives?

Yeah.

So, so what's the story? Why does it go both ways? I was never taught how to distinguish between the productive and unproductive conversations. I was never taught what to do if someone comes to me and wants to talk about an emotional issue. Like, this is the, the essence that connects us with those we care about, these kinds of conversations. Science provides us with a guide. And, and what science has taught is that sometimes our intuitions often aren't correct. So many people think, for example, that the key to giving good support, being a good chatter advisor to someone else, is just let them express their emotion, just let them get it out and vent. There's this very strong assumption in our culture that you shouldn't keep emotions bottled up inside, you should get them out. There's been a lot of research on this. What we've learned is that Venting doesn't help people work through their chatter. I'm gonna repeat that because it's a really important take-home. Venting does not help people work through their chatter. Venting can be really useful for strengthening the relational bonds between people. It's good to know, like, we connected.

The more context we have of one another.

Yeah, you're there for me. Yeah, you, you're gonna empathize with me when I'm struggling. Like, that does matter, but it's not sufficient. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition. The key to a productive conversation about chatter is you want to talk to someone who does 2 things for you. Number one, first they do let you verbalize what you're going through. It is important for them to learn what you're going through, for you to feel the sense like you're not alone, I can normalize this experience. But after you've had the chance to get it out, then it's vitally important we take the next step. For me to help you work through this experience? How do I help you make sense of this? That doesn't mean I'm gonna tell you, well, here's exactly what you should do. It means I'm a guide to help you. So you had a really obnoxious guest you interviewed a couple of months ago. It's not just right now.

No, no, no.

Like, what did you do with that one? How did you solve that? Right, like you giving me the answer, or, or what would you tell me if I was in your position?

Mm-hmm.

So it's, it's listen and empathize and then work with the person to help broaden their perspective. That's the scientific cheat sheet here. And like, I so deeply value knowing that science because before I did, people would call me— friends, loved ones— hey, someone just died. I'm so sorry. Oh, what's— how do you feel? What are you gonna do?

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I didn't know what to— I just keep repeating it, whereas now I have a guide. What this also allows me to do is be really deliberate about who I go to for support. There are lots of people who love me dearly. I don't go to them for support because I know they're just gonna get me to vent in ways that make it worse.

I'm selective about who I approach So it's almost building that board of advisors in a way, right? They know that it's not just about helping you process through it or advising you on what's going on, but also helping you just figure out, hey, how would you approach this, right? What would you do, right? Or what did you do that last time this happened, right?

Yeah, it's a guide. It's starting in that emotional zone and then transitioning into our cognitive zone. And if you want to geek out for 30 seconds with me, my favorite thing to do, the reason this works is it's scaffolds onto 2 fundamental needs that human beings have. When we are struggling, we have social and emotional needs. We're a social species. We don't want to feel like we're isolated from the herd. We want to connect and feel like the group has our back. That's the first part. Let me share with you what I've gone through. Please tell me I'm not crazy or the only person who's ever experienced this.

Yeah.

But then we also have these things called cognitive needs. We need to be able to make sense of our experiences, we need to be able to file them away so we can get on with the next thing in our lives. Both those are 2 core needs that you want to address in a conversation.

Got it. So for starters, learning to go not I but you, and then the other is stop calling my best friend. Got it.

That's right, or maybe a family member.

There we go instead. But so you talk a lot about the science behind things, but also interestingly, your book mentions magic a little bit as well, right? You talk about the idea of placebos, the ideas of talismans, or Symbols that we carry around or even rituals that we've created. Talk to me a little bit about the magic behind—

how do you get into the habit? There are some, you know, quote-unquote magical phenomena out there that are actually grounded in science, like placebos. Lots of research shows you give people a sugar pill, it's a pill that has no active ingredients, and you tell people, take this pill, this is gonna really help you feel better. your anxiety is gonna plummet.

Yeah.

Trust me, I know what I'm doing. Um, it turns out, like, um, anxiety plummets consistently over and over and over again. What, what a placebo is, it is a vehicle for harnessing people's beliefs. Your beliefs about yourself and the world, they harness cognition as well as how you feel. And so If I can actually get you to truly believe something, that has some really, really powerful implications for your emotional life. That's one example of what I would call mind magic.

Could we, for a moment, then placebo— we've always heard of placebo being done to someone, right? Is it possible to placebo effect yourself into something?

Well, if you can get yourself to believe something, that's the same mechanism. That's a shift in our Expectations, and my goodness, those can be powerful. I mean, I'll give you another example of a reframe that works on belief. It has to do with how we approach stressful social situations. So when you drop a person in a potentially stressful social situation, which are most of the stressors we experience, people reflexively ask themselves 2 kinds of questions. What's required of me? Like, what do I have to do? I have to give a presentation. I have to have a conversation with you in front of an illustrious audience, right? And then do I have the resources to do it? Can I do it? If you ask yourself those 2 questions and you come out of it saying, nope, can't do that, that elicits what we call a threat response, which has a characteristic psychobiological signature. Your kind of attention narrows on the threat at hand. Your vasculature constricts, you get kind of wound up, and your performance suffers. If you ask yourself those same questions and you determine, yeah, you know, I could do that, then it elicits a different signature we call a challenge response. Tension widens, blood flow effortlessly flows throughout the periphery, and you perform better. Now what's cool about this work is you can shift. This happens all the time in studies. You can shift people's way of appraising a situation. You could have them go from threat mode to challenge mode. And, you know, I would encourage you all to try that shift. If you find yourself reflexively in this, I can't do that, right, like start mustering counterexamples to push you in that other direction. That is the power of belief.

I remember— I'm reminded of a story. Don't quote me on the study here. It was this idea of Olympic athletes where every time they were interviewed, instead of saying they were nervous, they would often say, I'm excited, right? And someone had sort of checked to see like the EKG results, the brain scans. And then what they saw was they were experiencing for the most part the same emotions many of us experience when we're nervous, like sweaty palms, butterflies in our stomach, this heightened sort of sense of urgency. But to them, over time, they had trained themselves to go, that must mean I'm excited.

I am going to quote you on that because I talk about this. I know that study very well. Oh, OK. Sorry, sorry. Okay. Anyone here like feeling anxious ever?

Well, let's— That one guy said, it's the only way I get work done, right?

Anxiety, as long as it's not too intense or doesn't last too long, you should be grateful for having that anxious experience, because what it does, that is an emotional response that is alerting, hey, wake up. focus, something important is ahead of us. When I think back to the worst presentation I've ever given, specific, I know exactly which one it is, I'm not telling you. I had no—

Thank God it's not this one.

No butterflies in my stomach beforehand, the night before. As a result, I didn't look at my slides, I just kind of rolled in, and I wasn't, I wasn't on my game as a result. So when people experience anxiety, they reflexively often interpret that as a threat. Oh my God, this is awful. What am I gonna do? I can't do it. You're having butterflies in your stomach? Well, you're— this is like a Lamborghini revving you up, preparing you for action. Let's go. Small mental shift putting you on a totally different trajectory.

I love that. And so now there's a little bit about the studies that you talk through, and of course in the book, which everyone, you can get your own copy, I believe, over there, right? As you're heading out, but the book itself goes through a bunch of the stories as well as the research, and then you decide to come out with a workbook, but then you also had a second book as well.

Yeah.

Why expand the universe, and why create a workbook?

Well, the evolution was— so, so chatter was really the question that got me interested in this space in college, freshman year. Why do our attempts to work through experiences sometimes succeed and other times fail? And so it was a distillation of what we've learned from our lab and lots of others attempting to provide you with this kind of roadmap for understanding that— how to answer that question. Then I went on a book tour, and what was interesting, I'd have conversations like this, and in the Q&A, people would ask me a little bit about chatter, but then they'd have all these other questions about emotions more generally, like, what is an emotion? How many of you here would feel comfortable coming up here right now and defining for the group what an emotion is? Like, isn't that astounding? Because all of you have been experiencing emotions since before you were born, while you were in the womb. This is an incredibly common experience, and we don't actually even know how to define this in a way that we'd be confident sharing with others. It would be easier for you to define gravity than an emotion.

Yeah.

You don't talk about gravity with your friends, do you? You talk about your— anyway, so Shift, the second book— you just get me going.

That was going flat earth very quickly. That's where we were going right now.

Yeah, I detected it. So Shift is— it's welcome to your emotional life. Like, what are emotions? Why do we have them? And when your emotions are running off course, What can we do to rein them back in? A lot of fun to work on that. But alongside that book, working on it, there was just a lot of demand for, all right, we like the science and we find that really interesting, but give us tools. We are struggling. And so the way I've always approached writing books is to not be prescriptive, but rather descriptive. Yeah. So here's how something works, and this— if you know something about how rumination works and how to stop it, you can't help but try to take that information and apply it to your lives. What the workbook does is it pulls out all of the different tools I mention in that book and just presents it to people in a very, very interactive and user-friendly way so that you don't have to, like, thumb through the chapters to extract the insight when you find yourself, like, when that inner critic is activating before a date or presentation. It's like, okay, page 67 to 74, I'm gonna work through these exercises.

Well, one of the interesting things is the workbook came for me before the actual book itself did. So I started playing around with the workbook, and it was fun to be able to almost fill it out once without sort of going through the book, and then to go through the book and be like, oh, okay, cool, I'm here, I'm gonna change some of my answers. But also in the workbook, you actually ask people at one point to come back 3 days later. So what you're expecting is for us to pick up the book, consume all the content information here, and then also take the time out to actually do something in here. Workbooks are famously very fancy bookstands. How do we build this habit? Are you finding anything? Because obviously many of us, if you're in this room, clearly do want to be better. How do we actually force ourselves to do this?

Well, Well, you can take a page out of the workbook and create an implementation intention with mental contrasting. I don't actually use that phrase, but that is the technical phrase for a WOOP, which is— a WOOP is— it's a framework to help you go from knowing to doing. So a lot of us, I think, attend talks like this, we read books, We have these grand plans for how we're gonna improve ourselves using different tools, but you leave, you go back to work, and you just kind of forget about what you want to do. Scientists have studied, like, why that happens, why we're terrible at following through with our New Year's resolutions, and created frameworks to help us get better. And so, you know, what is your goal? What if you were successful? What is that gonna look like? Like, think about that. Think about the obstacles that might prevent you from picking up this workbook and using these tools when you're struggling. Write those down and then come up with a specific if-then plan. If this happens, then I'm gonna do this. Research shows that rehearsing those plans in those ways are incredibly effective at helping people follow through with their goals. And this works for kids as young as age 5, Navy SEALs use a version of this protocol to help them follow through with their goals when they're on missions. But the real goal with this workbook is to provide you with a resource that you know when the chatter activates, and it will for all of us at times, you know exactly where you can look to find a set of tools that will provide you with some salvation. I do want to just get one more bit in there about the workbook and the tools.

Oh, please.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I get asked, hey, what's the 2 things people should do to squash their chatter? I can't answer that question, and no scientist can, because we know that different tools work for different people in different situations. The best I can do is welcome you into what I call the mental fitness gym. I can take you to the gym and show you how all the different pieces of equipment work. What are the different exercises that are out there for managing your mental muscles, for managing your chatter? It's then up to you to figure out how to cobble together those exercises to help you meet your emotion regulatory goals. It's a lot like physical fitness in that way. If we went around the room, we'd see lots of different ways of approaching that kind of goal. What we are learning state-of-the-art in this area of the sciences, is that the same is true when it comes to your emotional life.

For wrapping up today, I think one of the biggest takeaways I pull from this is— and we were talking about this earlier in the green room as well— is unfortunately, when you start to look at these exercises or a lot of the tools that he's given, right, you often look at this and go, oh, this is simple, like, this is intuitive, I know this, right? But the difference between someone who's able to use these versus just view them is whether or not they've actually used them, right, tried and practiced them. And then you start to realize Wait, this is actually a lot more complex than I realized. Even something as simple as doing the workbook, it's easy to say, I'll do it at night. And then the night comes around, and it's like, oh, well, where's that pen? Where am I going to do it? When am I going to fit it into my night routine? By the time I've started, I've run out of time already. So before the crisis, before that moment where the chatter gets louder, taking the time to do these exercises, to rewrite that narrative you're telling yourselves so that in the moment of panic, it becomes muscle memory, it seems. In that case then, you've done amazing work in the past already. Of course, with the lab, a lot of new things coming out soon. Anything interesting? Let's leave on a high positive note. Are you torturing people about breakups still?

My students are.

I love how he's passed it on.

I've retired from that, but we are really excited. We just launched the Institute for Mental Fitness at the University of Michigan. Where what we are doing is working with both academics but folks outside of academia to figure out ways of tackling some of the biggest questions that we currently face from this mental fitness, emotional adjustment space, one of which, for example, is AI. A disproportionate number of people are going to AI every single day to deal with the curveballs that life throws at them. them, and we have very little idea about how that is actually operating. How do we really make progress on some of these kinds of really big issues to propel the field forward, but also how do we take this substantial body of knowledge that science has generated and get it out there into the world— schools, organizations, teams, etc.? Check back soon at the University of Michigan. There'll be a lot of news about this.

Thank you.

Coming soon to you and everyone else. I love that.

Ladies and gentlemen, please, a round of applause for Dr. Ethan Kuhn.