Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And I'm wearing these red lens wind down Roca glasses because we are recording this late at night which is unusual for us. And bright light in particular, short wavelength bright light in the blue and green part of the spectrum quashes melatonin and makes it hard to sleep.
I don't sleep tonight. These red lens glasses filter out the green and blue short wavelengths that would otherwise disrupt my sleep. My guest today is Dr. Ethan Cross.
Dr. Ethan Cross is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory. He is also the author of the best selling book the Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. Today's discussion is a really special one because we discussed something that each and all of us have, which is a voice in our head.
That is, that is our voice. And that voice can range from encouraging to discouraging. It can be repetitive in ways that can be very intrusive. And it has a profound effect on our emotional state, our confidence, our levels of anxiety, and indeed what we are capable of achieving in life.
Dr. Ethan Cross's laboratory has done groundbreaking research to understand what is the origin of this voice in our heads and can and should we control it. And indeed, the answer is yes. Today's discussion gets into many things that people struggle with and many things that you can do to improve your life, such as how to regulate the shatter in your head, how to overcome ruminations and intrusive thoughts.
And we also discussed what to do with your actual voice. For instance, data pointing to the fact that venting your negative emotions to others is actually bad. It tends to amplify bad emotions. We talk about that research.
We also talk about other forms of outward speech and inward speech, that inner voice that you can partake in in order to improve your emotional state and shift your emotional state. So today's discussion really centers around common questions and common scenarios and common challenges that everybody grapples with. And of course, we all have a voice in our head. Today you're going to learn to listen to it, to regulate it, and indeed you steer it in the direction of mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm also excited to tell you that Dr. Ethan Cross soon has another book coming out entitled Shift Managing youg Emotions so They Don't Manage youe. And I tremendously enjoyed Chatter his first book, and I very much look forward to reading Shift when it comes out. We provide links to the work in Dr.
Ethan Cross's laboratory as well as links to his previous and for coming book in the show. Note Captions before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your Internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data. Now, I'm personally familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough.
Several years ago I had one of my bank accounts hacked and it was a terrible amount of work to try and have that reversed and account secured. So after that happened, I talked to my friends in the tech community and they told me that even though you may think your Internet connection is secure, oftentimes it is not, especially if you're using WI FI networks such as those on planes and hotels and coffee shops and other public areas. In fact, even when you're on the Internet at home, your data may not be as secure as you think. The great thing about ExpressVPN is that I don't even notice that it's running since the connection it provides is so fast.
I have it on my computer and on my phone and I just keep it on whenever I'm connected to the Internet. If you want to start protecting your Internet activity using ExpressVPN, you can go to expressvpn.com huberman and you can get an extra three months free. Again, that's E X P R E S s v p n.com Huberman to get an extra three months free. Today's episode is also brought to us by eight Sleep eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity.
One of the best ways to ensure that you get a great night's sleep every single night is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. 8 Sleep makes it easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle and end of the night.
I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely improved the quality of my sleep. Eight Sleep has now launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and even a snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, go to 8sleep.comhuberman to access their Black Friday offer right now.
With this Black Friday discount, you can save up to $600 off on their Pod 4 Ultra. This is Eight Sleep's biggest sale of the year. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr.
Ethan Cross. Dr. Ethan Cross, welcome. Great to be here right before we went hot mics.
As I say, we're talking about interrupting one another and the fact that you're from New York. I'm going to try not to interrupt you because the audience doesn't like that. However, I am very interested in what you're going to tell us about emotion regulation, but especially this thing that you call chatter, the voice in our heads. And prior to learning about your work, I always thought that chatter and the voice in our heads was, you know, overwhelmingly negative.
That's what we hear. How do you combat the negative voice in one's head? But you have some very interesting ideas about the utility of chatter, like maybe how it even arose and what it's for. So maybe we start there.
Yeah. So I think this is a great question because the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is. Right. And actually sometimes I get out there and speak to people and they often wonder, like, what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads?
And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool of the human mind. So when I use the trainer of voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives. And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things.
So just from the outset, let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations. I Think of chatter as the dark side of the inner voice, and we'll get to that a little bit. But having the ability to silently use language, that is a boon to the human condition. So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves.
What's your favorite sports team? The Harlem Globetrotters, because they're undefeated, as I understand, the best record in any sport. I don't think they've ever lost a game. Did they ever play against other teams?
The Washington Generals. Okay. Sorry for the Washington Generals. So if you were to go to a game and root for them, what would you say?
Go Globetrotters. Go Globetrotters. Okay. Can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now?
Yes. Okay. You've just used your inner voice. So your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system, basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary but totally ordinary.
Also, your verbal working memory system, It's a mouthful. Lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cell phones, how did you memorize phone numbers? Like, what would you do?
Repeat it in your head? Yeah. And it had sort of a song to it. Yeah.
And I can remember my childhood phone number still, even though that number is long since. Long since gone. The whole area code's gone, in fact. Really?
Well, the number is probably still there under a different area code. I know because I tried calling everyone. Interesting. Well, it's funny, when I go through this content, I give talks or workshops.
I often say, 29,05 alone. Repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. Go give it a shot.
Give them a call. So for all I know, that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not my phone number, but that's your verbal working memory system. You go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you're supposed to get.
Most people don't do that out loud. Like, oh, crap, what was I supposed to get? Milk, cheese, eggs. Repeat that silently in your head.
So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do. Keep information active. Verbal information. Your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan.
So before presentations or interviews, a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event. Do you ever, ever do this? Yeah, my mode of preparation for things like solo podcasts and talks is it's not scripted out line by line in advance, but I have a structure in my mind, and it's more like remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and the rest just kind of falls out. Yeah, we have a very similar, similar style.
I will, I will bullet out what the key ideas are. And as long as I can bullet that out, I'm good to go. But I will also rehearse those bullets in my head. A, B, C, D.
So that's you using your inner voice as well. Now, before a big presentation like a live event, I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through. When I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event, may ask about the walk. When I prepare for live events or solo podcasts.
And long before I was involved in either of those activities for lectures of any kind or classroom discussions where I had to stand up in front of class, I would find that walking and listening to a song would maybe simultaneously, maybe separately, would dramatically shape the cadence and energy of the delivery of the talk. Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up songs there. So if you want to take a little detour here. So in my new book, Shift, we talk about, or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation.
Sensory experiences are one powerful and I would argue, often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions. So if you ask people, why do you listen to music? What do you think? Most people say it makes me feel good.
Feel. Right. It's about emotions feel good. So one study, the number was around like 95, 96% of participants who are asset exactly gave the answer that you just gave.
But then if you look at in other studies, hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to push your emotions around? The number of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%. Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions. Actually, an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer.
I lived for these soccer games on the weekend. I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would, you know, go crazy on silence. It was just such joy to just watch these kids play. And typically, my daughter was really excited to go to the game.
But one morning, she was just like, not into it at all. She was bombing like she was bummed out. It was bumming me out. I was, you know, catching her emotions.
We can talk about emotional contagion later. And got into the car and it just so happened that my cell phone was connected and the next song on the playlist happened to be Journeys Don't Stop Believing. So, you know the song, I presume. Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please.
The song comes on and, you know, I start jamming out to it, you know, singing out loud like an embarrassing dad. And then I look in the back seat and I find her bopping her head. And then the chorus comes and get really excited. Then I pull up to the soccer field, and she just bursts out of the car and is, like, invigorated.
That is the power of music to impact us. So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I'm getting ready to, you know, get in that mental frame of mind. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many athletes do this as well. They've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience or our emotional trajectory in the direction we wanted to point.
So it's interesting. I was thinking about music in reference to shifting emotion, as you just gave an example. Feeling like they motivated. And then your daughter's motivated by the.
Yeah, don't stop. Right. I'm not gonna sing it. Keep going.
No, I have a truly terrible singing voice. But I wonder, has the study ever been done or something similar to this where people who are feeling pretty good or very good are exposed to sadder music and vice versa. People feeling sadder to. To sort of ecstatic music or positive lyrics?
Because I've often wondered whether or not humans like or dislike when things or people try and shift their state. You know, I know myself, like, feeling upset about something. I don't want to feel upset. I don't think anyone wants to feel upset.
But if I hear a song, there's, like, that's positive. There's a moment where, like, I feel like I'm pulling on me any sort of. No. Like, I can follow that trajectory.
Probably get out of this. And sometimes one does and sometimes one doesn't, you know, and this gets to, I think, a more fundamental issue, which is why I'm asking, which is are we supposed to feel our emotions as a way to. You sort of dissolve them when we don't want them? Kind of like cathartic approach or would listen to sad music when our sad just amplify the sadness.
These are great questions, and I have a couple of. They touch on a couple of amazing, important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them serially. So number one, has the study been done when you expose people to different Kinds of emotion music, sad versus arousing, you know, happy music.
Do you see that push people's emotions around? Yes. In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments. So we want to induce a particular kind of state.
We can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or negative emotional experiences. So images being another sensory modality, vision. So. So that's number one.
Number two, there's this very interesting phenomenon where when we are in a particular emotional state, let's say we're feeling sad, we often don't reflexively seek out the happy music. We don't go to Journey. Instead we go to Adele, we're going to Chicago. I'm giving you my age bracket here.
Right. Like the music that has sad associations for me. So there's this mood congruency. If I'm feeling a certain way, I'm going to go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me.
Why on earth would we do that? Are we all masochistic? We just want to feel even worse. This gets at, I think, a critically important point that is not always talked about, which is all emotions are functional when they're experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely, not too long.
So sadness, as an example, is an emotion we experience when we've experienced some loss that we can't. We can't rectify right away. Like something has happened and you can't fix that. So you've lost someone.
And so what does this emotion do? Well, well, it hijacks the way we are thinking, feeling. Our bodies are responding. So it motivates us to introspect, to turn our attention inward, to reflect on this situation, to now try to make sense of it.
Right. Something really important in my life has happened. I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life so I can find meaning and move on. My physiology is slowing down so I can engage in that slow introspection.
What's also really interesting about sadness is it's also impacting my facial display, giving a sign to all of the people in my environment to say, hey, maybe we should check up on that person, that guy, because he looks like he's on his own in a corner. Right. So can you detect when someone is sad, do you see, like a sad facial expression? Yes.
When I used to teach these summer courses at Cold Spring harbor in North Shore, Long island, that students would come in from all over the world. And it's a great place. Some camp for sciences, other laboratories year. And Mike eventually was director of course there.
And my co director and I used to have this debrief at the end of the first day or two where we would talk to one another and we would go over the list of names and we'd say. And she was remarkably good at this. Just extraordinary like a superpower at saying, you know, I think everyone's settling in well. But I noticed that so and so was kind of like might not be justice of the jet lag, might not be acclimating so well.
It's a very tight knit group and the course is quite long for a course like that. But it's important that everybody kind of feel engaged early on. Yeah. And people tend to dominate in those intellectually, you know, competitive environments.
And she could just pinpoint who it was that was feeling a little bit outside the group. We knew how to ameliorate that really quickly. And from her I learned a bit of how to recognize the signs. And it was rarely just facial expression, including that and some other cues that she just seemed to have a unconscious or conscious genius around.
So for me, I learned some of that from her. I like to think I got better at it, but I think some people are just extraordinarily good at detection and it enhances social interactions. And so some people are really good at detecting it, others are really good at displaying it. I'm gonna go back to my daughter so, you know, if something happens where she feels sad, she exhibits this exaggerated response like she'll stick out her lower lip.
And even if I'm kind of upset at her, like, it is amazing the power that that has on me. It is so, so beautifully manipulative. Manipulative? You know, no, manipulative.
And it's a testament to the power that these displays can have on us. So I want to go back to one other question you raised in your last comment. And, and we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality you raised the question about being shifted by others, other people and perhaps either just our surroundings, music or spaces. Sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted.
And in fact, when other people try to do that, it can elicit what we call reactance. Like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in a particular direction. I think that's a really important point that we need to be aware of as people living and working in these social environments where we're often well intentioned. But sometimes our well intentioned behaviors can backfire.
And so there's this beautiful research which shows that if you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them, that can blow up in your face. Because what it does is it often communicates to people that you are thinking that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances. And most of us, like we're motivated to think that we're capable of handling ourselves. And so there are still ways you can help people in those circumstances.
It's called providing invisible support, which involves providing support to the person who can genuinely benefit from it, but not shining a spotlight on the fact that that is what you were doing. So how might this transpire? There's some really simple things you could do. So let's say my wife is really overwhelmed with stuff and she hasn't asked me for help, but I know she's at her wits end work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate.
I can, I can proactively do things to lessen her burn. If it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning, the groceries, I'm doing that voluntarily. I'm doing that. And I'm not coming home and saying, hey sweetie, look what I did today.
I did all these things, you know, can I have a pat on my. That's not worth talking about. It's about your group. Your lab is working under a deadline, right, to submit a grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab.
It's those little things that can help. Give you two more examples. Let's say that someone on your team is really struggling with their, their ability to translate their work for, for popular audiences. And that's something they're motivated to do.
Really important skill for scientists to be able to translate what they do for others to consume before you pull them aside. Say, hey, no, I noticed that you're stumbling on a few different issues and here are a couple things I think you can do better before you do that direct intervention. You might have a team meeting where you share out best practices. Hey, what are the two things I've learned that really have benefited my ability to communicate with different audiences?
What you're doing there is you're getting people the resources they can benefit from, but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are directing it to them. So it's kind of a backdoor way of helping or shifting the last tool. I'll Mention brings it back to sensation. One of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is through touch.
Tactile sensation. What's the first thing that you do with a child to soothe them when they are born? Hold them, hold them. Skin to skin contact.
I remember both times my kids were born I was like, you know, I want to get on that. Like because my wife got first first kids with both of our daughters. I want some of that, you know, skin to skin contact that doesn't end after we leave the womb. The comfort that we experience, the release of stress fighting chemicals that occurs when affectionate embraces are registered that continues throughout the lifespan.
So if my daughters, who don't particularly like dad to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays, if I know they're having a bad day, like I'll go over and I'll rub their back in a totally uncreepy way. That is an important caveat we should give to everyone who's listening. What we're talking about here is affectionate but not creepy or unwanted touch. It is touch that is mutually desired.
And there is some research which shows actually that when it is not desired you don't get these benefits and in fact you get the opposite plus usually like lawsuits as well. Yeah, sure. No, I definitely believe that as a primate species, which we are old world primates, I think they call allopathic grooming. You'll see these images of these monkeys and lots of different species of primates just sitting nearby one another where one just has its, even just its hand on the one next to it.
They'll just sit like that for long periods of time. Yeah. And then sometimes they're doing like an active grooming of removing parasites. This is very important in the primate world as we know.
But you know, grooming and you know, picking in these kinds of things. You see it in couples. It actually can be kind of endearing, I suppose that it's extreme, it's kind of gross. But you know, it's rather endearing to see somebody kind of like remove a piece of lint off somebody, you know, their partner's jacket or you know, just, or even just touch that.
It doesn't look like it's geared towards any specific outcome. Yeah, right. It's. And it doesn't necessarily appear romantic or that it's grooming.
So maybe the lynx example isn't the best one, but we just see people there. Like actually on the flight down this morning, I had a flyer. I was sitting on the aisle seat. In the middle was a boy he was probably 14, 15, and his mom was at the window seat.
I went up to his restroom, came back and he falls asleep on his mom's shoulder. And I took a very daring moment. And then we landed. I said, you know, the ability to sleep anywhere is a superpower.
He said, I learned it from my dad. And it was a moment where I just thought it was just a very pleasant thing to see that. And this touch on the plane. He clearly felt comfortable enough to do that.
Remember thinking like, yeah, humans were like a lot of the other primates. Yeah, there's a beauty to it. And you know, it is a tool. It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context.
All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for, I would argue, relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions. I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all. We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure. But you know, self control, emotion regulation, like, let me roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there.
Yes. It can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions and some of the tools that we have are effortful. One example would be expressive writing. It's a wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences.
You sit down, just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day, for one to three days. This is the Pennegake. This is the Pennybaker writing effect. This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect.
Free. You could argue intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you. You have vast amounts of data supporting the practice. Vast amounts of data.
Pennybaker really deserves, in my opinion, if not the psychology equivalent of a Nobel Prize. I don't know what that is, but it deserves real deep praise for developing that method because it's essentially zero cost, takes a little bit of time and there's just hundreds of studies, hundreds of studies showing these 50, 10 to 15 minute cathartic writing, just receptive writing. Usually as I understand with probably better. We did an episode, right?
I talked about this and received a note from, from him and was grateful that we didn't get anything badly wrong. In fact, he was pleased with it. I think that he deserves a lot of credit. Will be a powerful tool.
Real feeling. We actually just restarted a prestigious speaker series at Michigan, the Katz Newcomb speaker series, which is designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kick it off with Jamie Culling to speak about his extraordinary work. Because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity.
And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool. It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effortful, but we also know that we don't like exerting effort.
As a species, we like to conserve our resources as much as possible. So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And these sensory shifters, music, you know, looking at images, right? These are modality, taste, touch.
These are ways of pushing your emotions around pretty effectively for short periods of time. That in a pinch, like when your daughter's not in a great mood or when you want to get pumped up before an important event can be quite useful. And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them. So that's my plug for sensory shifters.
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I've been drinking AG1 since 2012 and I started doing at a time when my budget was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money to purchase one supplement and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1.
The reason for that is even though I strike eat whole foods and unprocessed foods, it's very difficult to get enough vitamins and minerals, micronutrients and adaptogens from diet alone in order to make sure that I'm at my best, meaning I have enough energy for all the activities I participate in from morning until night, sleeping well at night and keeping my immune system strong. When I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, my performance, recovery from exercise, all of those improve. And I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take my AG1 and I certainly felt the difference. I also noticed, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy.
If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim a special offer. For this month only, November 2024, AG1 is giving away a free one month supply of Omega 3 fatty acids for fish oil. In addition to their usual welcome kit of five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. As I've discussed many times before on this podcast, omega 3 fatty acids are critical for brain health, mood, cognition, and more.
Again, go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim this special offer. Today's episode is also brought to us by Joovv. Joovv makes Medical Grade Red Light Therapy Devices now, if there's one thing that I've consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself.
Now, what sets JUV lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy devices is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Juve whole body panel about three or four times a week, and I use the Juve handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Joovv, you can go to Joovv, spelled J-O-O V.com Huberman Joovv is offering Black Friday discounts of up to 1300 now for December 2nd, 2024. Again, that's Joovv J O-OOVB.com Huberman to get up to $1,300 off select Joovv products, let's go back to just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides.
So we talked about two verbal working memory, right? Keeping verbal information active for short periods of time. And we talked about simulating and planning things like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to self control and motivation.
So you exercise because you talk about exercising? I try to exercise six days a week, although some are short workouts, some are longer. You ever talk to yourself when you exercise? Oh, all the time.
So let's hear it. The world wants to know, Andrew, what do you say to yourself and your exercise? Depends on how well rested I am, how motivated I am. I'll give two examples at the opposite poles of the motivational scale.
I was traveling two weeks ago and I was doing some exercise for that. There's a muscle on the back of the shoulder, the rib deltoids. I don't think anyone's favorite muscle to train. That's a Very important one.
That's when you do this one right for shoulder posture and stability and gut training. That was that muscle group. Because otherwise people tend to get this inward rotating, like their thumbs pointing toward belly button and shoulders rolling forward thing. There are a number of reasons why it's sure important.
So you gotta do the rear Delt thing. And I sat down to do the first work set after a couple warm ups. And I remember thinking like, I love training. I love training since I started training when I was 16.
And I thought myself, for some reason, I wanna do this this morning. And then I thought, okay, David Goggins would probably start swearing at himself in his head. So I started that a little bit. That didn't really work for me.
Sorry, David. And then I'm gonna go through every possible inner voice I can think of. I heard Jocko Williams voice and friends of Jocko and her just saying, like, yeah, whatever, you're just weak, you know, or just do it anyway kind of mentality. And I just started cycling through all of them.
And I made a deal with myself that when I ran out of voices to use, that's when I would stop the set. And I probably tripled the number of repetitions I would normally get without weight. It was like one part motivation, one part distraction, one part frustration. And I was just pulling from the catalog of possible voices of kind of coach like voices.
And it worked out pretty well. And then at the other extreme, I can recall many times, because I put effort into it where I'm well rested, I'm hydrated, get appropriate amounts of caffeine in my system, which I love, and sit down and train. I absolutely love to train under those conditions. The sun is shining, music's playing.
And I just remember this was during a set. This was a leg day. It was the hardest day. Set of heavy hack squats and just thinking, I love this.
But I have this inner voice where every time I start a repetition, I go through my brace, my midsection, so I don't work my back. And I always look directly at the ceiling. I think about my bull dog Costello, and I think, I'm gonna do this one for you. I'll do this one for you.
And I know at those moments my inner voice goes to here. He would probably just be singing like, why are you working this hard? Vlogs don't like to work. So I.
I'm not really in a complete sentence generation inner voice kind of thing. You have a very rich inner world, right? You are. You're, you know, verbal working memory.
Stream is filled with. With words when you're working out. Yeah. And I'll tell you this, I was gonna ask you this later in the episode, but maybe it's relevant now.
I think it is. When I was a kid, after my parents would suck me in to go to sleep at night, I used to lie in bed and rehearse voices that I heard throughout the day. And I felt like I could hear them in their tone of voice. And then I'd make them say different things just for my own entertainment so I could have them say whatever I wanted but in a particular voice.
And my friend sometimes tease me that I'll give people voices. Like if someone like Marsh Simpson voice or something, I'll just like, she doesn't sound like that at all. But I'll just create a narrative in my mind. So, yeah, a lot, A lot of chatter in there.
A lot, A lot of voices. Yeah, but not super organized. It's not like I'm constructing a play. It's kind of, you know, it feels like things geyser up.
I, you know, I tore it down maybe, but it's kind of a mishmash. It's not super regimented. These aren't complete sentences. Well, you know, one of the reasons why the Penny Baker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized.
And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self talk. So the chatter. Right. You're an idiot.
Such an idiot. Or you're looping out over a problem without making any progress putting those words in. You know, actually taking that inner stream and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do. Because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences.
There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking up here in our minds. It's a free for all. It can go in all sorts of directions. And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.
I'm so glad you're bringing this up. Our very first guest ever on this podcast was a guy named Carl Biceroth. He's a bioengineer, He's a practicing psychiatrist. He's one of the Lunaries of neuroscience.
He developed these light sensitive channels to be able to manipulate neurons and animal models, but also now in human clinical work as well. And one thing that he shared was that after he puts his kids to sleep, I think now they're grown but in the evening, he'll sit, deliberately sit still, completely bodily still, close his eyes and force himself to think in complete sentences for maybe an hour or so, maybe more. And I thought to myself, wow, that's a very disciplined practice. It also speaks to what you're saying, which is that typically thinking in complete sentences is not the default.
That's my mind. So I don't know what his specific reason for doing that is. He shared a few of them on that podcast episode, but I'm sure there are others as well. But I tried it.
It's very difficult, especially with eyes closed, to not drift into multiple narratives that the stream sort of split into tributaries and then, you know, it's dissolved into sleep or meditation experience. You're in a dream like state where you're, you know, these liminal states. Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality.
So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not. If I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right? Because I would be unable to have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall a chatter provoking experience, think about something negative that's happened to you, and then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it.
So I. E. A Penny Baker writing like condition or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking because there's no guardrails to the way we think that we are taught, I should add, because we're going to give people guardrails later in this episode.
So in addition to using the Pennebaker approach, and by the way, we'll provide a link to some resources for the Pennebaker Journal because there's some free online resources that are really powerful for people to use if they only use as a template for cathartic reasons or just, you know, get one's mind around a problem or something. I'm very familiar with waking up and just feeling like everything is kind of not a storm in there, but a bit too disorganized to get my head right. You know, things get my head right. Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's Writing something, journaling is just a really useful practice.
Overall, it's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people, how are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding Covid. And he gave them a series of tools that they could check off if they use the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things.
Number one, there are no one size fits all solutions for folks. So remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person A versus Person B. Number two, it was seldom the case that people used one tool in June. General, people use on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take home because I am often asked as, for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions.
I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same. So it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's similar to physical exercise. You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day. You would have like funky looking shoulders.
If you did right, you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body. You're doing multiple things. And the multiple things that you do to exercise, I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise. Yet we may well be equally fit.
Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me, but I doubt it. You get the drift. So there's this beautiful variability to how we manage our inner worlds. To bring it back to expressive writing.
We found expressive writing when people used it was really, really useful. It moved the needle on their Covid anxiety. But it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much.
And I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful. Ask another question about movement. That falls on the other end of the spectrum to what we're talking about now, which is structuring one's thoughts in the form of writing in order to parse an idea or work through an emotional state. In 2015, by the way, I use these anecdotes not because I want to focus on me, but it says generalizable anecdotes.
Okay, the specifics here don't matter, but I think probably most people are familiar with having an important decision where they have to weigh, you know, path A versus path B. I was in that place. I was actually Choosing between a job at one institution, another institution, each of which had tremendous advantages. Neither had any, you know, striking disadvantages, but it was a really hard decision.
Those close to me at the time, I'll tell you that it was just brutal. I've been there. Yeah, I made everybody around me suffer tremendously to the point where people just like flip a coin. Now, I'm not an indecisive person.
I think, you know, it's one of these things where big decisions, I think deserve a time and attention. And it was a time consuming thing. So I was pouring over this pro cons list. I was watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out best ways for decision making.
I was trying to actually. Isn't it amazing, by the way, when we're in those situations, I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position. The things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are, are wacky. Like, I'm sure you were googling things that you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees and.
Oh yeah, I mean, they're mathematical models that like there's actually my colleague at nyu, Tony Martian, I forget the name of the model. There's a model about how many towns you should evaluate. It's an old kind of old example of towns you should evaluate in terms of where to start a business. Like, is it two, is it three?
And there's an optimal strategy there. In any event, most of it wasn't helping. And I do believe that at some point you don't want too many committee members because it just gets absolutely confusing. So the two best pieces of information came from the following practices.
One was a colleague said, forget all the superficial pro cons. And I actually think this is proved to be very useful in all domains of life for me. He said, take yourself through a typical weekday in one place versus the other. Wake up.
Where are you gonna go? How are you gonna drop? Take yourself through the practicals of the day, because everything else falls away once you're out of place or you're in a type of relationship. Take yourself through a given day.
Don't think about the relationship or the institution that you're working for, the school you're go to, that's important. But take yourself through the entire day. So I did that and then he said, also do it on a weekend because, you know, well, in our profession tend to work all the time, but occasionally you take a day off. And so that was very useful.
The other thing that was very useful, which was Completely surprising to me was at that time I was training a boxing gym and I was doing some speed bag work and decent at it, you know, getting to a rhythm. And what's so great about speed bag work is that you get into a rhythm where you forget that you're trying to do the movement in a particular way. These central pattern generators, as we call them, neuroscience take over and you just got, you know, turn your hands over and away and like every once in a while you think okay, need to put a little more hip swivel into this or a little more head movement and practice my slips or something. But it's largely unconscious after a certain point and I was doing that and all of a sudden, boom.
A thought just geyser to the surface and I made my decision and that was my final decision. And I never went back from that decision. And so it was in the act of not trying to parse things to words that words sprung up from my whatever unconscious somewhere in my brain, cortical or subcortical, I don't know. And it was like that's it.
And I was overwhelmed by that. And again, I don't share all that because I think it's speed bags or it's the example I gave before that's gonna solve it for everybody. But that these answers to hard problems seem to come from very diametrically opposed approaches. Verbal construction of complete sentences with paper deliberately deisirov does.
And then also like not trying to get an answer at all, boom. The answer shows up. What in the world is that? So it speaks to this idea that first of all there are no one size fits all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and decisions we have to face.
So there are different modalities to self discovery and insight. And yes, you can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people. And then you can also allow your unconscious problem solving machinery to do its thing. We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not infrequent.
Many people report having moments of insight when they are, when they are not otherwise engaged. And you know, one line of thinking is that we are doing problem solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness. So I actually, this may be the wrong use of terms, but I weaponize this process for myself. So before I exercise, before I get on the treadmill or row or do whatever I'm going to do, I will load up the particular Issue that I'm trying to find a solution for.
Sometimes it's how to word a paragraph. It might be, if I'm working on a book, how to find the right kind of story. If it's an interpersonal issue that I've got to smooth over, I load that up and then I just get on the device. It's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing and I just.
I just. I don't really think about it any fixed way. But inevitably the ideas, the potential solutions bubble up into awareness. That is a real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to have success in various areas of my life.
It also identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious. So we didn't get to all the benefits of the. There's more benefit of innovation than I want to get to. But I'm going to take a detour here for a second because I think this is really important.
If we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice, you're basically continuing to loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress. What if this happens? Why did this happen? I'm such a imbecile.
You're just continually going over that negative phenomenon or experience. You're not making any, any headway. One of the things that that does is it consumes our attentional resources. It acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources.
And so what that means is when I get on the treadmill or Rowan machine, and that's typically the time that I spend innovating, coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally. I don't have. My mind's not working to solve those problems. Instead, it is stuck dealing with this other muck where I'm not getting anywhere.
And so we actually see, if you look at the literature, that one of the ways that chatter undermines people is it interferes with their ability to focus and solve problems. And that's that' way undermine people. But that is a huge, huge liability. Is there an association between trauma and elevated levels of internal chatter?
I would say even more than an association. So we often think of chatter as we call this a trans diagnostic mechanism. So it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders. So what that means is chatter refers to a process, a process of looping, turning the same material over and over in your head.
The content of that looping can take many different forms. You can inject some sad cognitions in there. I'm a shit. Such a shit.
Is it okay to say shit? Should I say sure, people. I mean, David Gogins was on this podcast. Okay.
So pretty much anything goes. Typically, we don't swear at each other. I'm pretty thick skin if you need to. You know, I've been called way worse than anything you can box in.
I actually box in high school. I don't recommend people box unless they're, you know, they're professional. And even then, I mean, I must say, it's neuroscience. It's a lot of fun.
Yeah. And on Wednesday nights that spar a little bit, I will say this, it's. There are other sports where you can go level 10 out of 10. Yeah.
More safely. Much more safely for the brain, like Brazilian jitsu and things like that. You definitely don't want to insult the brain. Yeah.
As a neuroscientist, I can't. I would agree. In any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same. Fair enough.
So basically, chatter refers to this, this process of looping over and over. If you inject some sad cognitions in there. I'm an imbecile. How can I, you know, I'm never going to live up to my potential.
I don't belong here. Like, if you take that to an extreme high intensity and you persevered over time, then you're getting towards depression. If you inject anxiety provoking connections, oh my God, what if this happens and what if that happens? You go down that path of uncertainty and fear.
Well, that leads you to more of the anxious route. And if you are filling that loop with traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences, you can get pushed towards trauma too. So it is a, it is a process that cuts across many different really serious conditions that we grapple with in society. But I want, I want to also be clear to folks who are listening that if you experience chatter, that does not mean you have any of those disorders.
If you experience chatter. Welcome to the human condition, my friends. Because most of us do at times, and so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time, which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.
I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in depth program for analyzing blood, urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood.
This was totally surprising me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption because I'd been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing it with NAC and a single cysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and work to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive.
I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their advisory board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, go to functionhealth.com Huberman Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com huberman to get early access to Function. If you had to highlight for now and we'll get back to others in a moment.
The best maybe one or two ways to combat chatter. Yeah. What would those be? Well, that's.
Let me tell you about a couple things that I do personally because like, like as we we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences, different tools work for different people in different situations. There are, you know, upwards of two dozen or more science based tools that I covered when I wrote Chatter, when I got into shift, the broader train of regulating your emotions or even more tools out there. So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are gonna work for everyone. My, my first line of defense when it comes to chatter are two distancing tools.
So what I'm using the term distancing, what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se. We should talk about avoidance later. But what I'm talking about when I say distancing is the Ability to step back and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective. And it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this.
One tactic that I find very powerful is language. So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself. So I often use my name and the second person pronoun you, to try to think about Ethan. How are you going to manage a situation if you think about.
When we use words like you, they're the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. And what. When you use your name in you to work through a problem, it's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you to relate to yourself like you're giving advice to someone else.
It turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves. Have you ever experienced this, Andrew? Gosh, no. Yes, of course.
Absolutely. I mean, our optics are just much clearer when we're in observation than when we're internally. Unless I find that I dedicate some real minutes or hours. Basically a sort of meditation, not unlike the complete sentence construction exploration that we're talking about before just going inward and really saying, let's have a conversation about this and having a conversation with myself in there.
And that always leads to an obvious truth or sometimes a decision node that isn't clear to me yet, but it leads someplace that feels like, forward. Yeah, but you're taking special steps to be able to. To align yourself with the advice that you give to someone else. Like reflexively.
Sometimes we stumble, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, and the number of different ways that we can distract ourselves. This is what I was gonna ask in a few moments, but I'll take the opportunity.
Now, I am wondering, as we're talking about this today, if one of the more powerful hooks of social media is the scroll aspect, that with essentially zero effort, we can pick up a device and scroll through images and movies and it will update us according to. Update the imagery and topics, of course, according to what it senses as our dwell times on certain pages. And all of a sudden we don't have to think about what's in our head. Yeah.
My dad used to refer to surfing the Internet, because at that time it was that and scrolling social media as kind of a cognitive chewing gum. It keeps us busy, but it doesn't provide any real nutrition. Well, you know, it's interesting if you go back to when Facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to. Do you remember what this was?
What is on your mind? So you would be cued to share what is on your mind. And you know, in some ways you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice. It's literally asking me where it did.
What is on your mind right now. So that's in terms of posting, in terms of consuming information, which I think most people on social media seem to be consumers. More than three years. I mean, it's remarkable to me how I can, you know, pick up the phone and I have a specific phone with Instagram and X on it.
And it's. Those apps are not on any other phones. So it's segregated from smart. Somebody sends me a tweet or sends me an Instagram post on.
I'm not gonna open it. I can't open it on those phones. That's helped a lot. We should come back to that because that's also modifying your.
Your spaces, which is another tool that I think is under utilize. So we should talk about that too. We'll definitely touch on that. What I find is, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna take six minutes.
A six minute till the hour takes six minutes. Yeah. And what's incredible is how fast six minutes go by. That's what's so striking.
It's remarkable and not always bad. So we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. There are also some, I argue, redemptive qualities to it.
I'll give you one of my personal ones, which is, you know, sometimes like to unwind before bed. I'm thinking all day I want to just watch some ridiculously funny short reels. Raccoon videos. Yeah.
I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me, she's like, what are you laughing at? And sometimes I show her and she goes, why are you laughing at that? Right. So, but, but you know, the algorithm has learned the specific kinds of funny videos that I like.
I know I'm not going to tell you what they are, and it just lightens the load. And so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction. I want them to be shifted at a certain time. I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives, the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals.
We basically got thrown into social media without any rulebook. We're the experiment and. But if you think about it, it's a new environment. We were born into this physical world and our parents, our caretakers, from the time we were able to understand things and probably before, they're teaching us, they're socializing us how to navigate this space profitably.
They're not just like, Lord of the Flies, throw us into the world and let us. Let us kind of figure it out. Outcomes wouldn't be likely, as good as they are for us, if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive. And we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand, hey, here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways of navigating social media.
Not talking about social media now. Like, it's this unitary environment. Different social media applications, of course, have their own norms and rules of games. You can think of them as like little different countries.
They have their own little microcultures that you want to learn how to navigate. And scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function. But it's tricky. And it's tricky because creators can change how these applications govern by a press of button.