 Consistently people often ask me how do I quiet the voice? If there's time for it to chat, inevitably it goes to chatter, not the positive thing. And I think the real challenge is not to figure out how to silence this voice. It's how to harness it. Guys, we put out great content every week and we want to make sure that you're notified when those videos drop. So smash that subscribe button, hit that notification bell, and make sure you like and share our videos that helps other people find us. You know, many of us think our genes and our environment influence our health. And that's a great starting point. But our inner dialogue influences our health in meaningful ways at the genetic level. It can cause inflammation and chronic stress to ruminate to the degree that many of us in modern society are choosing to behave. Our choosing to co-ruminate, our choosing our friends and the influences on social media and their impacting not only our mental health, but our physical health, our heart health, because we're not processing these things properly. So seeking out that ruminating board of advisors who can help you get out of that chatter, can create that perspective, whether it's a coach or a friend or someone else who's achieved what you're looking to achieve is exactly what we should be looking for in relationships. Instead of falling into this trap that I just need to find someone who can deal with my venting. As the book points out, that actually repels people over time. If you are over venting and constantly ruminating, you're less likable. People actually want to spend less time with you. But it's counterintuitive because we feel so good in that moment of like a sense of relief, like they get me, they understand me and it feels good to share that emotional connection. While meantime, we're shoving aside people who should be in our life and doing ourselves physical harm. Well, I also want to get your perspective on this as well, Ethan, where as human beings, I think there's a flaw in our biology that if we're not focused on building or have something that we could put our focus towards to produce, to get involved to without that, we begin to put our focus on ourselves and our relationships. And we just start ruminating and picking on them. And I think this is why to go what AJ was saying, when older people retire, they don't have that focus of a job anymore to put their attention towards. And perhaps without a project without picking up a new hobby, that ruminating, that attention goes to pulling sweater threads that should be pulling, which will have a direct impact on their declining health without those projects. Well, you know, a restless mind, like an unquiet mind is a great book, an old book on an unquiet mind. So this is an interesting topic, right? Because when I was researching the book, I spoke to a lot of people from a lot of different areas of life. And consistently, people often ask me, how do I quiet the voice? Right? Because if there's time for it to chat, inevitably, it goes to chatter, not the positive thing. And I think the real challenge is not to figure out how to silence this voice. It's how to harness it. And we have, you know, we have the ability like, when you have a mind that is free, you don't have something to occupy your attention. If we think about what are the possibilities now, where you could definitely try to focus on every flaw and fix it and anticipate every worst case scenario, I would argue that that is not a happy mind to be in. If that's what you're spending most of your time doing, look, we've all been there at times, right? Not pleasant. But there's a whole universe of possibilities for ways of you to use that mind more constructively that might bring you more happiness and satisfaction, fantasizing like about your best case scenarios in the future, experiencing nostalgia, savoring the past. So in a certain sense, I think for a long time now, in popular, in current culture, the zeitgeist has been, when we float away, we could go to bad places. So let's figure out how to remain present focused, focused on what is happening in the moment and really experience it. There can be great joy that comes from being in the moment. When I am at the soccer field and what feels like a former life with my kids, I just want to be in the moment, watching them play, enjoying when I'm on a date with my wife. I just want to be present with her, not thinking about other things. But in a lot of my other spare time, I want to be going into the past and future and navigating that mental time in constructive ways. And we all have the ability to do that. The question is, can we use science to help us time travel more effectively without getting stuck in the past, i.e. rumination or stuck in the future, i.e. worry. That I think is the big challenge we face. And I don't think the solution is to just always refocus on the now. That's one solution. But there are many, many others. The point that you make in the book around social media and the now and just how detrimental it is because we are wiring ourselves to get that instant response, that instant feedback, that instant comment. I have this feeling. I have this emotion. I feel it strongly. I need some sort of response. When actuality time is what heals a lot of these concerns and this rumination. Sitting with it, not immediately sharing it with someone, revisiting it later in the day, sleeping on it and allowing your dreams to process that inner voice as well. And we could talk about the science there. Creates that opportunity for growth versus the immediacy of going online, finding someone else who feels the exact same emotion strongly, so that you're validated. And many of us are falling into this pattern of seeking these outlets, whereas we're removing the in-person experience. Now, obviously, the pandemic has also taken its toll on that. But Johnny and I are really concerned as we come out of this, how many people are going to choose to stay in this digital, artificial world and not utilize the tools that science shows of real person in conversation, communication, presence creates the space for our mind to handle the chatter. Yeah. Social media is a really interesting space to think about chatter. Because in a certain sense, I think social media provides us with this giant megaphone for our inner voice. And that can have good or bad consequences for us, depending on how you use that megaphone. And I don't know that all of us are being really deliberate about how we use social media. I think increasingly we are. But if you rewind the clock 10 years ago, we just got on Facebook. We just got on Twitter. We didn't really think twice about how to use it. So here are two things to consider when it comes to social media and your inner voice that I think are important. One is we are intensely motivated to share our chatter, to talk about it with others. There are lots of studies that show that. And social media provides us with the ability to instantly do that, right? Because we have smartphones in our pockets or watches with us all times. Whenever we want, like if we experience an emotion, we can share it with someone else at its very peak. And as you described, AJ, that's interesting because in the offline world, the physical world, right, we're also motivated to share our feelings, but we've got to find someone to share them with. And time usually passes when we're finding someone to talk to. And time does take the edge off our emotions. There's also something else that once we're in the offline world and once we find someone to talk to, we usually have a face that we're communicating with. Or from a phone, we can hear their voice and faces and voices are filled with information that provides us feedback with how our communications are affecting others. So if I say something that insults the two of you, I'm registering that on your face. And that in turn is constraining how I subsequently speak back to you. Social media, our emotions are triggered, we can share and we're just typing it into a field. There's no other human being on the other side of that communication that we're looking at to know what effect is this message going to have. As a result, you get things like cyberbullying and trolling, saying things you'd regret, that I think we have a large record now of instances of that coming back to haunt us. So that's the dark side of social media when it comes to chatter and our emotional lives. The positive side is social media does give us opportunity to get support from large networks of people and establish connections and also provide support to others. So you want to be smart with how you use it. What I like to tell people is in the offline world, if you go into the wrong neighborhoods and you speak to the wrong people, guess what? You're going to get into big trouble. If you go into the right neighborhoods and you conduct yourself the right way, you're going to benefit. The same is true on social media. There are smart and not smart ways of interacting with it. And remember guys, if you've learned something from this video and I hope you did, make sure you hit the subscribe button, hit that notification bell. That way you'll always know when we put up a new video. And if you have any questions, make sure you put them in the comments below. A piece of advice my dad always gave me around chatter was sleep on it. And sleep forced time to pass. The emotional response in my body waned. But dreams also play a role in this. And I found that bit of the science behind dreams and chatter in our head and the interplay to be so fascinating. So what does a research show sleep does to our chatter and how can we utilize it? I know many of us are struggling with sleepless nights because of chatter and probably not optimizing for sleep. But those dreams and sleep play a big role in our ability to work through the chatter that's holding us back. So dreams are a fascinating area of research and we are really just beginning to scratch the surface. It's pretty remarkable given how prevalent a role dreams play in our lives, how little that we still understand them. That said, there is some work that I find fascinating that suggests that part of what we do in our dreams is simulate threats. It's called the threat simulation hypothesis. And the idea is that we're having these wacky dreams being naked at school or other manifestations of that that many of us have had. The idea is we're in our sleep anticipating bad things that may happen in the future and trying to problem solve and work them out. And so there is a level of actual processing working through that is occurring while we sleep. It's a hypothesis. There is some evidence behind it. And I think it is quite useful. Now the big question with dreams of course is how do I not have chatter when I sleep because it often makes sleeping very difficult, which in turn makes life very difficult. The best advice I can give is try to work on the chatter during the day. If you nip it in the bud during the day, the likelihood that it's going to impact you while you're sleeping is going to be much lower. You're already somewhat behind the eight ball if it's 11 o'clock at night and chatter is brewing. It becomes more challenging because the resources the mental resources we have to combat it are already depleted. But you want to practice good sleep hygiene. I don't know if you've talked about this on the show before but you know simple things right like not checking your email or social media before bed, not reading things that are going to get your mind going and cause you to think about work and problems. You really want to go to that happy place if you will several hours before you're ready to go to bed to really volitionally try to put yourself in a position to have an uninterrupted night of rest. Well I know some of the more counterintuitive advice many of us feel like we need to just distance ourselves from that chatter. If I could just distract myself, if I could just find something else to focus on it'll be handled. But that's actually not the truth either. So this idea that we need to chase video games or chase something else is an escape. Again it's not the healthiest way to deal with this chatter that's going on. Yeah absolutely not. So what you want to do is take a step back in order to then approach the problem. So in a lot of the studies and the research I talk about in the book you're giving them a little bit of distance. What is Ethan feeling? How can Ethan deal with the situation? Let me think about this situation. How am I going to feel six months from now? So we're letting people step back but then we're asking them to try to work through the experience to approach it. What you don't want to do is ask people to avoid thinking about the experience, to distract, to suppress. Consistently research shows that this backfires and the reason is really straightforward. You've got a problem. If you don't deal with that problem it's going to persist. So if you try to go to the movies to get your mind off the problem, if it's a really good movie then yeah maybe you'll get two hours of relief. But once you get out of the movie and you're reminded of the problem all the negative feelings come back. So what you really want to do is reframe how you're thinking about this issue. Once you reframe it and you reduce its negative qualities it becomes a lot easier to move on with your life. Now as a father I'm sure there are times where you'd like to quiet your children's chatter. We've talked a little bit about how we can manage it ourselves. We've talked a little bit about how we can manage it in others. But are there specific strategies that you employ as a parent in dealing with developing minds that might be different than approaching two adults in a relationship in their chatter? Absolutely. So I do do the temple distancing. I ask my girls to think about how they're going to feel a week from now. Remind yourself the last time it happened. How did you feel a week later? I use something called the Batman Effect. I leverage that which involves, you can think of that as like a super superhero version of distant self-talk. I'll ask my kids to imagine they're a superhero. Dora the Explorer, Wonder Woman. Pretend you're Wonder Woman. How would Wonder Woman deal with this really, really annoying task that you have to do? Call yourself Wonder Woman. Coach yourself through it. All right, Wonder Woman would do this. Superheroes don't give up, right? They persist. So I'll use that tool. I'll try to be a chatter advisor to them in the ways that we've talked about. I'll also do something called, I provide them with invisible support. So one thing we haven't talked about which is important I think for relationships is this idea. So there will be moments in all of our lives when we see our friends, our loved ones, our colleagues struggling but they don't ask us for help. We see that they could benefit from it but they're not asking us. If we volunteer support in those instances, there's a risk. It may blow up in our face. Like when I volunteer support to my daughter when she's working on her homework and hasn't asked me. What? You don't think I can do this myself? Think I'm an idiot? You know, mom, you know, and then it's all over. And then I'm in my office by myself feeling bad chatter on my own. What I've done there by volunteering support is without it being asked for, I've threatened my daughter's sense of autonomy, agency, self-worth. And those are really important qualities that we all strive to have like we can do something on our own. So you want to tread carefully in those instances and the good news is there's still ways to help other people who are struggling when they don't ask. You're just, you're helping outside of awareness. So simple things you could do. If my wife's, you know, experiencing chatter, she's worked, kids, lots of stuff, I could do things like take care of dinner, pick up the dry cleaning, like make her life easier in a few different ways. I take the edge off. That can help. If someone in my lab is struggling with, with their writing and it's just not working, you know, I can write an announcement to the entire group and say, Hey, here's a book that I just benefited from on writing. I think we should all check it out and have a discussion about it. Or there's a guest speaker coming. Why don't we all go, go listen to them, right? I'm not shining a spotlight on them and instead, but I'm still getting the information that they can benefit from. So I do that with my daughter's invisible support. I, I, I touch them affectionately and that means not creepy, but I'll give them hugs and we'll play and, and, you know, touch affection to touch when it is wanted. Huge disclaimer has to be wanted, right? Powerful regulatory tool touches the way we are first is the most primitive emotion regulation tool. A baby is born into the world crying. What do we do? We hold them, we caress them. We do this to our children throughout their lives. We do it to our partners. Lots of research showing that when you engage in that kind of affectionate embrace that can help release stress-fighting chemicals that, that help manage chatter. So I do that with my kids. I'll also do things like take them for walks in the park. We know there's lots of great data showing that exposure to green spaces can help replenish our, our mental reserves, which chatter depletes. So, so those are the, the kinds of things I tend to do with my kids. I love those and I could definitely see their benefit in those moments and we've all been there, whether kids or adults, where that chatter is overwhelming. One last question before you go. We, we appreciate the time. We love asking all of our guests what their X factor is that's allowed them to reach great success. It could be a skill set or a mindset or a combination of both that sets you apart. I'm a, I'm a huge optimist and I, I'm incorrigible in my optimism. And so that doesn't mean I don't get upset at things, but I am constantly reframing them positively. I'm realistic, but a friend who is less of an optimist once asked me, why are they so positive Ethan? You know, like, and my answer was simple. It beats the alternative. And I think there's a lot of science behind that. And so, so that's what keeps me going. You know, I just, I want to add just the stack on that. I know so many people who use that idea of they like to call a realism, but it's, it's pessimism and it's hurting their lives, but they, they find such great pleasure in it and they wear it as a badge of honor. And it's, it's like you're in your own way. And until you drop this, you're not going to make any progress. It certainly doesn't, it doesn't work for me. And, you know, I think the odds are often stacked so far against us in so many different ways that look, it's demotivating. Thank you for joining us. Go Blue. Go Blue. This was a ton of fun guys. Thanks for having me. I hope, I hope you got what you needed, but it was certainly fun from, from my end. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you.