 missing our friends, a lack of social connection. Think about how are we gonna feel about this problem six months from now when our loved ones are vaccinated, when we're close to reaching herd immunity, when we're back to vacationing. That makes it clear to us of what we're going through right now. It's temporary, it will eventually end, and that gives us hope, and hope can be a powerful bomb when it comes to an inner voice run amok. So Ethan, welcome to the show. You have a new book out called Chatter, and it's all about the voices in our head and how it plays a role in our daily lives. Ethan, what made you want to write a book on this specific topic? Well, I've spent my professional career studying this issue, but my interest actually goes even deeper back to childhood. I had an unconventional dad who, from the time I was about three years old, anytime something bad happened, he'd tell me to introspect, go inside, find the solution, whatever's bothering you, move on, carry on. And that doing that really served me well throughout my childhood and adolescence. Then I got to college, and I took a class on psychology, and I realized a lot of people do exactly what my dad told me to do, but it doesn't benefit them. In fact, turning our attention in when we're experiencing problems often makes them worse. We worry, we ruminate, we catastrophize, all the fun stuff, right? We experience what I call chatter, which involves getting stuck in these negative cycles of thinking and feeling, which, for lack of a better term, can make life pretty miserable. And so I got fascinated with, well, why is it that some people can really benefit from introspection and other people don't? And I started doing a lot of research to figure out the answer to that question. So I wanted to tell the story of what I learned in that book. The other relevant thread here, though, is I had been living and breathing this work for a long time with my colleagues and students, and it really wasn't until an experience I had in the classroom at Michigan, which we were just talking about, that I realized that I could keep on talking about all the science with myself and my students and my colleagues, but if it doesn't get out there to the world, then it's not doing much good. And the experience was a student asked me at the end of a senior seminar after I taught about this stuff, why are we learning about this now? Why didn't anyone teach us about this stuff earlier? And I didn't have an answer. And so that led me to work on the book and do some other things. Well, I know for an hour line of work at the Art of Time of all the classes we've been helping people. And one of the aspects of having a great relationship with other people is having that great relationship with yourself. And it's important to get out of some of the negative cycles that deteriorate that relationship. And you've brought a lot of the concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy into this book, which I appreciate. And those are, those of how we think cognitive behavioral therapy and the work that Aaron Beck has done has broken down those processes that not only help people who have been having trouble in their lives, but it also gives you an inner workings of how the mind works and then streamlines your own processes to enhance your own life. And your students are absolutely right in the fact of I can't understand why these things, cognitive behavioral therapy isn't a class that everyone should learn. And at any time that you bring this up, the first thought for regular folks is, well, you know, I don't need help. I don't need any mental help. I don't need to see a psychiatrist. And it's like, well, no, but there's tools here that can benefit you regardless of how you feel about it or not. Your thoughts on that? Yeah. You know, I do a lot of research with schools actually and trying to figure out what are the implications of teaching children about how the mind works. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about this question and it really perplexes me. You know, we teach kids about things that we think are gonna serve, knowledge that we think and hope will serve them well later on in life. So let's take something like biology. AJ, you mentioned that you were a bio major, is that right? Okay, so we all take biology and I wanna pick for a second on the digestive system. For whatever reason, I remember learning about the digestive system. Like the digestive system has really stuck with me, the knowledge of how it works. In particular, like peristalsis, how you get food from one end to the other. Like, I got it. I know the answer to that question. Ask me how many times I've had occasion to use that information in my adult life. Two, and I promise you, I'm not gonna get gory here or, you know, unsavory. Each of my daughters has at one point in their lives asked me, daddy, how do you swallow food upside down? Aha, peristalsis to the rescue, right? I can explain how it works. I spent a lot of time studying biology and the digestive system in school. Let's now think about another topic, the mind. Let's think about emotions. What is an emotion? I don't know that everyone knows actually what an emotion actually is. Can you control your emotions? How can you control anger and anxiety? When would you wanna do it? What if you wanna amplify your happiness or turn it down? What are the skills that exist? How do other people factor in to your ability to manage your emotions? And so forth and so on. I would argue that being able to answer those kinds of questions is relevant on a daily basis. If not, take it a step further, even an hourly basis, right? We are emotional creatures and we're constantly trying to manage ourselves in this world and our emotions. But we don't talk about that. We don't teach about it, even though there is a science that explains how all of this works. And so I'm certainly a proponent of teaching people about this. I don't think this is therapy per se. This is how people work. And the book that I wrote, Chatter was really intended to be, hey, here's a book about the science of how your mind works when it comes to reflecting on problems and how you could do it better and not get stuck in rumination and worry. 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. Whether it's raising children or a teacher in a classroom or even as peers and friends, we're all influencing that self-talk that's going on in other people's minds. And if we don't understand how the mind works and it's influence, we can't possibly steer towards the great outcomes that everyone wants, kids getting into school, becoming amazing, successful in their career. All of these things are influenced by the way we react to events in our life, good and bad. And that voice is always there and ever present. Does it have an evolutionary meaning or purpose that's allowed us to develop our brain in a way that's impactful? Yeah, so let's talk about self-talk and how it's related to chatter. So I want to map out the space for everyone who's listening because I think it's a really important question. When I use the word self-talk and this voice in our head, what we're really talking about is the ability to silently use language. And I would argue that language is a tool. It's a tool that lets us do lots and lots of things. So you could think of self-talk as a type of Swiss army knife of the mind. And let me point out a couple of functions that serve. So let's say I ask you to, well, I'll tell you a funny story or embarrassing story. I was doing an interview a couple of days ago and I was mispronouncing the host's name over and over again. And I kind of cringe when I think about it now. So finally I asked her, well, what's the proper way to pronounce your name? And she said it to me. And so what I did is I then repeated it in my head. You read, you read, you read over and over silently. AJ and Johnny, I'd like you to repeat my name silently in your head right now and just nod when you've finished doing it two or three times. Okay, not really hard challenging task I've asked you to do, congratulations, you've just used your inner voice. So your inner voice at the most basic level allows us to hold nuggets of information, verbal information in our head. Like when we go to repeat a phone number, 2090501, 2090501, that's your inner voice. It's absolutely essential to allowing you to do things in this world. Like remember what you wanna order in a restaurant. But it also does a lot of other amazing things. When I try to re-hurt, when I think in my head and I'm simulating, well, I've got a big talk coming up. What am I gonna say, right? And what are the people gonna ask me? I'll repeat in my head. I'll do the talk in my head silently, go through the motions. I'll then anticipate what Johnny in the audience is gonna ask me. And Johnny is always, I'm sorry Johnny, but Johnny's always a curmudgeon. They're not nice. They ask me mean questions in my head. And I respond with, you know, not nice words. Always in my head. I never respond that way in person. But what I'm doing there is I'm using my inner voice to simulate and plan for the future. Without that tool, I wouldn't be giving good presentations, right? We also use our inner voice for other things to coach ourselves through problems and critically to storify our lives, right? Like things happen. We weave together narratives to explain who we are. Why do we do this? How do we respond? How does that impact our relationships? Our inner voice helps us do all of those things. So AJ, that's why we have this inner voice. It's a critical facet of the mind. Now, the big catch is that oftentimes when we're experiencing negative emotions, we try to use this tool to help us out of the mess that we're in. But we end up getting stuck. It ends up jamming up. So we try to activate our inner voice. Let me try to get to the bottom. Why am I feeling this way after doing this? And rather than coming up with a solution, we end up worrying and ruminating and catastrophizing. That's what chatter is. It's the dark side of the inner voice. And the good news is that there are lots of tools to manage it. Well, I want to pick up on one part of that equation that I think we've been so big about here at The Art of Charm with all of our students. And I think many in the audience may not even recognize or realize. And that's the impact it has on the story we tell ourselves and simply how organic and iterative that is. So we can go through life events and just think about the story once. We could ruminate on them and rewrite the story in really negative ways and get jammed up and creating anxiety. But we also have the power to rewrite the story in more compelling ways and take a new perspective and learn from it and grow from it instead of falling into that trap of rumination. But that writing is essential to us finding meaning and purpose and understanding ourselves. And yet when we talk about journaling, when we talk about thinking through this story and this inner dialogue, so many cringe and say, oh, I don't want to do that or I don't need to do that or why when I think about that. But it's happening whether you write it out or not. This story is constantly being shaped and involved in your head and it's steering you into behaviors that might be good or bad, creating beliefs that might be good or bad. So how can we start to harness the positive side of this? So many in our audience know about the chatter and the negative, but it's that harnessing of the power in a good way that I think is the most impactful and really the biggest benefit of the book. Yeah, so there are no single tools that exist that are gonna work for all people in all situations. And I always hate starting with the negative, but I feel like it is so important to actually emphasize that because there are messages out there that suggest there are these single panaceas doesn't exist. And if someone says that it does, be weary. Here's what does exist. Lots and lots and lots of different tools, science-based tools for pushing around these conversations. In the book, I talk about like 26 different tools and the real challenge for consumers of this work, for listeners, for readers, is to figure out how different tools combine. What are the different cocktails of tools that work well for them in their unique situation? So that's pretty abstract. Let me get a little bit more concrete. In the book, I talk about there being three buckets, three categories of tools, things you could do on your own, ways of harnessing your relationships with others and ways of interacting with your physical spaces. Each one of those categories has a bunch of different tools within them. If we wanna start with things we can do on our own, this probably is the most tools. I talk about the most tools in the book in this category. Let me give you two of my favorites. One involves trying to coach yourself through a situation like you would give advice to someone else and actually using language to help you do this. What I mean by that is the following. Use your own name and the second person pronoun you to coach yourself through a situation. All right, Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation? It might sound silly, but there's science behind it. And what we know is that we as human beings, as a species, we're much better at giving advice to others than we are taking our own advice, right? There's even a name for this. It's called Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon really wise person, people from all over the Middle East came to get his advice. But if you look carefully at his story, he had all these concubines, there was a lot of fighting and temples being built and the whole kingdom imploded. So not smart when it came to his own situation. So this is a truism. And what using your name and the second person pronoun you, we call this distance self-talk, what it does, it's using the language of others. Most of the time that we use names, we use them when we think about and refer to other people. So when you use those parts of speech to refer to yourself, it automatically switches your perspective. It's like now I'm giving myself advice like I'd give my best friend and that makes it a whole lot easier for us to be objective when we're managing thorny, chatter-provoking situations. So that's one tool that people can use. The one disclaimer that I like to give is if you're gonna use that tool, use it silently in your head. You don't wanna be like walking down the streets of New York or LA or anywhere for that matter, talking to yourself out loud with your own name. Everyone does an LA. Everyone does an LA. I will say, having the little AirPods that you guys are wearing does, is a bit of a game changer in this regard. I sometimes wonder how many people are actually on conversations with other people when they're talking out loud. So distance self-talk, that's one thing you could do. Subtle linguistic shift that reroutes the stories we can tell ourselves. Another thing you can do is something called temporal distancing. You might think of this as mental time travel. So take the pandemic now, which so many of us are struggling with. It's so easy to zoom in on the awfulness of the situation. People dying, kids at home struggling, missing our friends, a lack of social connection. Lots and lots of really bad things. In fact, in the book I talk about this as the chatter event of the century. What we're dealing with right now, it's really aversive. We could stay zoomed in on this problem or we could jump in our inner time travel machine and think about how are we gonna feel about this problem six months from now? Six months from now when our loved ones are vaccinated, when we're close to reaching herd immunity, when we're back to vacationing and interacting with our friends and loved ones. What that does, that temporal time distance, that makes it clear to us that what we're going through right now, it's temporary, it will eventually end. And that gives us hope. And hope can be a powerful bomb when it comes to an inner voice run amok when it comes to chatter.