How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking

Mel Robbins (00:00:48):

Wow.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:00:48):

So we've got our work cut out for us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:50):

That's a tall order.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:00:51):

Yeah, we better get started.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:52):

Well, I've read your books so I know you can deliver on that. So Ethan, what exactly is that voice that's in our head that's chattering 4,000 words a minute.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:01:00):

So when scientists like myself use this phrase self-talk or the inner voice, what we're talking about is we've

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:06):

Never heard anybody explain self-talk and that inner voice in a way that I actually get it. What is the solution? Is there a simple way to shut it up in order to just silence all of this negative self-talk, or is this a much more complicated thing that we need to take on?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:01:25):

The most important thing to do is,

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:30):

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so fired up for our conversation today. I'm so excited that you're here. It is always such an honor to spend time together and to be with you. And if you're a new listener, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I'm thrilled that you're here and because you made the time to hit play and listen to this particular episode, it tells me something about you. It tells me that you're the kind of person who wants to take control of your inner voice and you want to learn how to be more encouraging and positive, especially when it comes to yourself. And you know what? I think that's amazing because I want to learn how to do that too. And if you're listening right now or you're watching on YouTube because someone shared this with you, I want to take a minute and point out to you that that means that you've got someone in your life that really cares about you.

 

(00:02:21):

And so thank you for trusting them and thank you for being here. And this is a home run of a podcast episode for you to listen to or watch because Dr. Ethan Cross is in the house. He is a psychologist and a neuroscientist, and he's been a pioneering researcher in the field of self-talk and emotions for 25 years. Ethan Cross is also a professor at the University of Michigan where he is taught for the past 17 years. He's also the founder and the director of the Research Institute at the University of Michigan, the emotion and self-control laboratory. His work has appeared in esteemed journals like Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. He earned his PhD from Columbia University and he is also the author of two bestselling books, chatter, the Voice in Our Head, why It Matters and How to Harness It. And his latest bestselling book is called Shift Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. His books have been translated into over 40 languages and today he's going to unpack the insights so that you can use this research to stop the negative. So please help me welcome Dr. Ethan Cross to the Mel Robbins podcast. Thank you for hopping on a plane and being here in our Boston Studios. I cannot wait to dig into your work in your bestselling book Chatter. And of course, congratulations on your new book shift. It's so exciting to have you here.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:03:44):

Well, it's an absolute honor to be here with you. I've been listening to you for quite some time and the compatibility between a lot of what you talk about and what I write about and do research on couldn't be better. So just an honor to be here.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:00):

Awesome. Well, let's just jump right into it. And here's how I want to start. I would love to have you, do you want me to call you Professor Cross? Ethan, what do you like?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:04:08):

I love Ethan.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:09):

Okay, Ethan, we're going with

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:04:11):

Ethan. Yeah,

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:11):

Ethan, I would love to have you speak directly to the person who's here spending time together with us right now, and tell them exactly what they could expect to have be different about their life if they take everything that you are about to teach us about our self-talk about our emotions to heart, and they put it to use in their life.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:04:32):

Here's what I hope everyone takes away from this. Okay, three things. Number one, you'll be able to take your inner critic and turn it into an inner coach. Number two, if you ever find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of rumination and worry, we're going to give you some lifelines to pull yourself out so you can actually use your mind to solve your problems rather than just get stuck in them. And then number three, more broadly, we're going to give you lots of really pragmatic tactical tools, simple to use tools that you can use to really master your emotions. So if you want to turn the volume on them up or down or shorten or lengthen, how long they last, or even switch from one emotional state to another, we're going to give you some guideposts that steer you in the right direction.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:24):

Wow.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:05:25):

So we've got our work cut out for us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:26):

That's a tall order.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:05:27):

Yeah, we better get started.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:28):

Well, I've read your book so I know you can deliver on that. You have been at the University of Michigan, you are the founding director and have been running this incredible lab, the emotion and self-control lab. What has it taught you? What do you want us to know?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:05:42):

The first thing that I've learned over the past 25 or so years doing research in this space is if you ever find yourself going down that vortex of doom and despair or anxiety or even overcome with other negative emotions that don't really feel good in the moment, welcome to the human condition. We all do at times. And I think that's a really important point for people to take home because I can't tell you how many people I meet who really feel bad about themselves when they find themselves slipping into one of those emotional states. We evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason, and we'll talk more about that today. When they're experiencing the right proportions, they can be useful. So number one, if you experience worry rumination, if you find your inner critic activating at times, there's nothing wrong with you. To the contrary, I would argue there's everything right with you. Number two, there are no one size fits all solutions for managing these states that we want to bring more under our control. We have evolved to possess lots and lots of different tools, and I think the key to managing our emotional lives more effectively involves learning about what all those tools are and then figuring out what are the unique combinations that work for you based on who you are as a unique individual. It's a lot in my mind's physical fitness. Lots of people have the goal to be physically fit, but the way they get there can be radically different compared to other people. And the same is true when it comes to, if we want to call it emotional fitness, you got to learn about all the different machines in the gym and then you got to figure out what are the exercises that work for me based on who I am and what my goals are.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:35):

Well, let's start with going down the rabbit hole because your first bestselling book Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters and how to harness it. When is the last time you went down the rabbit hole?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:07:45):

Oh boy,

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:45):

You seem like a such chill guy. Like super tortured yourself about worry or negative

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:07:50):

Thoughts, probably maybe a couple of months ago, and it was linked with one of my daughters.

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:03):

Are you going to get in trouble for telling this story,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:08:04):

Ethan, out of podcast? I'm actively monitoring it. So now he's

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:08):

Going down the rabbit

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:08:09):

Hole. My

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:10):

Wife is going to

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:08:10):

Kill me. Yes, yes. No, this is something I'm used to experiencing. No, this is fair to say. So my youngest daughter was applying to get into the same school as my oldest daughter,

 

(00:08:25):

And when my oldest daughter was applying to get into a school, there was, okay, if it works out great, and if not, no big deal. But now with the second daughter, there's a social comparison element here, and she has this older sister that she looks up to and admires. And so I'm thinking, well, what would happen if she doesn't get in? And she fortunately did get in and it was a great relief, but I did find myself going down the rabbit hole on occasion playing the What if this happens? And I should say that when I do that, when I go down the rabbit hole of despair, which I can get stuck in every now and again, the best of us, it always amazes me how it exceptionally adept. We are at brainstorming endless worst case scenarios to our problems. I mean, have you experienced this yourself

 

Mel Robbins (00:09:20):

Every day? I mean, you're saying a couple months ago, I'm like, dude, if you asked me that question, I'd be like about an hour ago. But it is true because we are so good at thinking about the negative and imagining the worst case scenarios, but we're not so great at imagining that things would go right.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:09:35):

That's right. Well, there's what we call this negativity bias.

 

(00:09:39):

One of my favorite titles of a paper in psychology is Bad is Stronger Than Good. One of our few Nobel Prize winners won a Nobel Prize for discovering that we're more sensitive to losses than we are gains in our lives. And that all makes sense if you think about it, the bad things in life have the potential to harm us or derail our lives a lot more than the good things. So we should be more sensitive to them. But sometimes that oversensitivity to the bad stuff can really lead us astray, especially because no one ever teaches us about how to rewrite the ship when we find it going in the wrong path.

 

Mel Robbins (00:10:22):

Well, one of the things that you said that I am excited as you said, I'm going to teach you how to turn your inner critic into a coach, and I would love to start with this amazing book Chatter and all your research about the voice in our head. And I want to read a part of your book to you because this was jawdropping to me. So our verbal stream of thoughts are self-talk is so industrious that according to one study, we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking 4,000 words a minute. And to put this into perspective, I crunch the numbers. 4,000 words a minute is the equivalent of reading the first book in the Harry Potter series in less than 20 minutes.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:11:06):

So when we think we are not always thinking in full sentences, we're thinking in these soundbites that have deep meaning. And when you spell out what those soundbites are equivalent to, you get essays in your mind, and I'm sure you've felt this kind of bombardment of information when you find yourself going down that rabbit hole. It's like our mind is pinballing all over the place verbally and we're just inundated, which is in part why when we find ourselves racked with chatter, it can feel so oppressive. This is one of the reasons why writing about our experiences doing something we call expressive writing can be so helpful for folks because it helps us organize our thoughts so that we're not pinballing all around.

 

Mel Robbins (00:11:54):

You're right that the key to beating this negative self-talk and this chatter in our head to stop talking to yourself, the challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively. But before we can get into how to control the voice in our head, we need to answer a more basic question. Why do we have one in the first place? So Ethan, what is self-talk and what exactly is that voice that's in our head that's chattering 4,000 words a minute?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:12:22):

Yeah, so I love this question. So when scientists like myself use this phrase self-talk or the inner voice, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And it turns out that is a remarkable tool that we possess for navigating this crazy world. So let me flag for key functions that this ability to use language silently provides. Number one, we're the same vintage here, age-wise more or less, and

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:59):

Be careful.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:02):

When we were growing up, what would you do when you wanted to remember a phone number or a name?

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:10):

Well, if I didn't have a pen and couldn't write it down, I would repeat it over and over and over again

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:14):

In your head.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:15):

Yes, or I'd come up with rhymes or to try to remember it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:19):

So that's probably the most basic function that your inner voice serves for us. It's part of what we call our verbal working memory system.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:28):

Wait, so that's what the basic of your inner voice is, is to help you remember things.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:35):

That's one function. So you could think of your inner voice as like a Swiss army knife multipurpose tool. It does many different things for you. So one

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:42):

Thing and oftentimes death by a thousand cuts,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:44):

We're going to get there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:45):

Okay,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:13:45):

We're going to get there, don't you worry. So number one, memorizing a phone number, repeating a phone number, repeating a name, going to the grocery store and asking yourself, what was I supposed to buy? Milk, cheese, yogurt. I guess I'm in the dairy aisle. But the whole point here is you're doing that silently, typically not out loud. That's one thing. Your inner voice lets you do another thing. Your inner voice lets you do simulate and plan. So before you do a lot of presentations as part of your job, you ever go over what you're going to say before you go on stage in your head? Always. That's your inner voice. You are silently rehearsing, preparing, simulating for what you need to do.

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:29):

You know what also you said, I just realized when I'm packing for a trip, I'm thinking ahead to where I'm going and what I'm going to need.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:14:36):

There you go. So that's another you're simulating and planning people do this before interviews, before consequential conversations that they are going to have. I am not as good at giving a presentation if I don't do this simulation beforehand. My favorite function, so the name of my lab at University of Michigan is the Michigan Emotion and Self-Control lab. I love the topic of self-control. We use our inner voice to control and motivate ourselves. So alright, so Mel, tell me, what do you do to exercise? Keep going, keep going.

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:12):

I'm okay because of some of the experts we've had on the show. I now lift weights, I walk, I do yoga and Pilates. I have a super active lifestyle outside, but if I'm exercising, I have to drag myself to the gym and then I use an app to motivate myself and that's what I do.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:15:36):

Do you ever talk to yourself when you're exercising?

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:39):

All the time. I did this morning in a class. I'm

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:15:42):

Tell us

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:42):

Taking hate this, why are we on our hands? I don't want to do a pike right now. I feel like I'm in a gym class with a woman who's talking like this and who's screaming at me like screaming and why is she playing a CD at six 30 in the morning? I thought this was a fricking Pilates class. So it was literally like I'm saying that to myself and she would walk closer, I would think, get away from me, go to the other side of the room, or I'm thinking this is too heavy. I'm tired, I want to quit. See, clearly I don't have a lot of willpower and discipline because my chatter is a constant barrage of why I should stop doing

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:16:20):

Yes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:21):

What I'm actually doing.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:16:21):

We have room for intervention here.

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:24):

We

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:16:24):

Have tons of room we are going to make, if you're already doing fine in the gym, we're going to make you do a lot better by the time this episode is over. So that's another thing. If you're listening, you're going to take home with you. So

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:35):

It's possible if you are constantly against yourself,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:16:38):

Absolutely to change, you can change yourself talk. But if we just go back to a second, this is one of my favorite questions to ask people when I'm giving talks on this stuff, I just kind of scan the room for what do you say to yourself when you're exercising? Lots of people talk to themselves and what they say varies tremendously from what you just described to come on, you got this to, I really want a bagel right now, and so on and so forth. And we know that people who are skilled at harnessing this voice to be motivating and encouraging, they actually perform better in those contexts. So knowing this stuff, I'm very strategic about how I harness self-talk. When I'm exercising, I will be motivating. Come on man, you've got this. That's right. I refer to myself in the second and third person. We'll talk more about how that works. I also can become somewhat in my head, aggressive towards the instructor that is telling me to do painful things.

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:44):

Like the woman that I was like,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:17:45):

Yeah, you were just describing. So for me, I find it, well, why don't you try doing that? I don't like the way you're talking to me. I want to do it this way. I don't say that out loud, I smile out loud, but in my head I'm having that kind of conversation. So the point here is another thing your inner voice helps you do is control and motivate yourself. The fourth and final thing I want to flag here, to me I describe this as the most magical feature of our inner voice. Your inner voice helps us make sense of this messy world that we live in. We are bombarded by things all the time that have the potential to lead us astray. We get rejected, we get into arguments, we experience anxiety about what may come and when those different kinds of curve balls get thrown at us, what we do is we often stop and we try to, okay, how do we make sense of this so we could get back on track of living our lives and we make meaning.

 

(00:18:44):

We use our inner voice to try to make sense of our circumstances, to essentially create a story that helps us understand what we're going through and who we are. So your inner voice is actually shaping your sense of self. So if we just pause here and zoom out, your inner voice helps you do things as simple as reminding yourself what's on your grocery list and memorizing a phone number when you repeat it in your head to simulating and planning for the future, to controlling and motivating yourself to making meaning. If I told someone I could give you a tool that does all those things, like these are the things that are really important to us in life. Your inner voice is central to all of those things. It's an invaluable tool that you do not want to live life without. The big question of course, that really got me into this business in the first place was on the one hand, we have this remarkable capability.

 

(00:19:41):

We reach for it when we're struggling, but as I know, as you who are listening knows, oftentimes we don't activate this voice and get clear solutions to how to move on. We just start stumbling. We start looping over our problems in an attempt to work through them, or we start berating ourselves incessantly for mistakes that are endemic to human life. And when that happens, I think that is one of the big problems we face as a species. And as I have said before, I say that not to scare or sensationalized, I say it based on what I know of the data because if you look at what chatter, which I define as the negative manifestation of your inner voice, when it turns into that negative thought, looping that self beratement, that just tanks us, it makes it hard for us to think and perform. It creates friction in our relationships and it undermines our health and wellbeing. These are the things we care about in our lives. And so that's why I think it's just critical to address

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:45):

It. I have never heard anybody explain self-talk and that inner voice so elegantly and in a way that I actually get it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:20:58):

Well, thank you. I mean, it is truly remarkable when you take a 30,000 foot view and think about what does our chatter look like? What does it sound like? I mean, we say things to ourselves that many people not only wouldn't say to a buddy, we often talk about that. Talk to yourself. You would talk to someone else. This is a great tool by the way. We'll talk more about that later. We sometimes say things to ourselves that we are ashamed to even say out loud. Sometimes when I do exercises, workshops with groups or students, I'll sometimes invite people to just write down their chatter on a piece of paper. And it's really remarkable. People are often reluctant to even put in writing what they're thinking, even when I assure them, the shredders right here, there's another garbage bag with lighter fluid, not bag garbage can, right? I'm joking here, but no one is going to look at this,

 

Mel Robbins (00:21:58):

Right?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:21:59):

Just admitting to what is happening up here can be so challenging for folks. And I think that speaks to the gravity of what we're talking about.

 

Mel Robbins (00:22:09):

What are some of the examples of negative self-talk that just show up again and again? I think hearing it from you would really validate it for me and for the person who's with us right now. Because if we are reluctant to even be honest with ourselves and put it on paper, what can you validate based on the fact that this is your area of expertise? It's what you research it you see over and over and over again that are examples of negative self talk.

Mel Robbins (00:23:14):

So it could be like just to give it even a more fine point. It could be that you're really screwed up in a relationship and now you're telling yourself the one got away or you made dumb financial decisions. This was me. And now why did I do that? I should have started with my 401k. My father told me when I graduated from college, dah, just hammering yourself into the ground. How did I let myself go? I should have just now it's too late. I've been drinking all that kind of stuff in the past. And why is this such a predominant form of self-talk for people?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:23:52):

Well, it's a predominant form because I often think that we navigate life in an ideal sense on autopilot. We just kind of want to live the life knowing that the world is orderly, it's safe, it's predictable. And then when we encounter some challenge to that view that the world is safe, that everything's okay, it's like an alarm gets hit in our brains that says, stop, pay attention, fix this. And so then we zoom in really narrowly on what the impediment is. And so maybe it's something from the past and then we keep focusing on it until we can resolve it. Oftentimes though, we don't know how to resolve it, we just keep on playing it over and over in our minds and then the alarm button stays pressed and we just get into this rut of turning it over and over and over. And some of us don't want to let go of that either, because at least if we're focusing on it, that's step one. But in the process of doing that where we're really harming ourselves, we're making it very challenging to think and perform. I mean, have you ever gotten stuck in rumination and then try to have a conversation with someone or read a book only to find that you're physically there or you're reading the information on the page, but nothing is penetrating your mind is somewhere else?

 

Mel Robbins (00:25:13):

Oh, completely. Absolutely. If I get into that loop where I am obsessing over something that I think I did wrong, I can't do anything else.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:25:23):

Exactly. So think that's thinking and performance, right? That is a major, major obstacle to being successful in life. If your ability to really hone your attention now is lost. And the way that works, just if you want to geek out with me for 30 seconds, our ability to focus is limited. We have these limited attentional resources. They're subserve by our prefrontal cortex, the front part of our brains and chatter acts like a sponge that soaks up all of those attentional resources and at leaves very little leftover to do the things that we often want and need to do, whether that be just pay attention to the person we're talking to or read the chapter in the book and absorb the information. That's one of the way it really sinks us. So you ask though, how does chatter manifest rumination about the past? Is one, another one that will be familiar to everyone in the world or most of us is worry. We worry about the future. We think about the what ifs we are. What if machines we can easily, what if this happens? What if that happens? And before you know it, life is over

 

(00:26:38):

And that goes really fast. So worrying is getting stuck in these negative thought loops typically about the present and future

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:47):

Rumination it. So rumination is the past. The first is the past. The second form of self-talk is getting stuck in a negative loop, talking to yourself about the future's and what's the third form?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:26:56):

The third form that is very common to folks is this self beratement. This kind of like, you idiot, how could you do this? You're worthless. So this kind of inner critic is another manifestation of it. It can however take different forms. So chatter really is this process of just looping, looping negative information over and over. If you're being super critical about yourself, that's very common. Sometimes it can be just anxiety, right? You're looping over what if this happens? What if this happens? And so it's really this looping of negative stuff. It's like you keep on getting hit over and over and over. You said it before, I think you said death by a thousand

 

Mel Robbins (00:27:39):

Cuts. Cuts. Yeah. That's what it can feel like when you just start

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:27:42):

Hammering yourself. And then it's just tiring, right? It's exhausting. People often who are experiencing chatter, they report just like being fatigued. Now I want to be clear also,

 

(00:27:52):

We all have this capability of experiencing chatter at times. And just because you do doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Again, this is normative. If it morphs into the extreme state, that is the volume is super high and it's on for long stretches of time, more than two weeks, then we get into the more clinical state. But what we're talking about here today is really, this is just true of human beings and how we operate. And again, a big, big part of what I hope to do in talking to you about this and sharing the science is to convey first and foremost that this is normal. This is just part of this messy world that we live in. We have these tendencies to slip into the states. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. The opportunity though is to learn about what you can do to help yourself when you go down this path if you don't want to stay on it.

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:29:10):

Well, there's not one simple thing that everyone can do.

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:14):

I don't like that answer.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:29:15):

Yes, I'm sure you don't, but I'm going to give

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:18):

You, there goes my negative chatter right out my mouth at

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:29:20):

You. But I'm going to give you, there are lots of simple things you can do is the way to think about

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:27):

It. Oh, I like that.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:29:27):

So yeah, you should. There's a lot of hope. There's a lot. There's a lot. You could, I feel bummed. I think you should feel good when I tell you that there's not one thing you can do to manage your chatter. Because here's what often happens when you give people one solution, they try it, that one thing doesn't work for them, and now they think, what's wrong with me? Why is this working for everyone else but not me? We just published some research not too long ago that looked at how people dealt with their anxiety during the Covid pandemic. So we did these large studies, we track people over time and every day we had them rate their covid anxiety, and we had them indicate which of something like 18 different tools they used. Now, all we wanted to know was, well, what are the tools that are moving the needle? So what was really interesting about that study was there was no individual tool that moved the needle on people's anxiety. It was only like when you used a combination of tools. It's like curling biceps didn't do it on its own. You had to do bicep curls, pushups, and sit ups, right? Except for journaling. Journal journaling was the one tool that alone moved the needle on people's anxiety. However, it was also the most infrequently used tool of all the tools we ask people about How does that make sense?

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:53):

Yeah, why

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:30:54):

It's effortful to sit down for 15 to 20 minutes and actually write, there's also a vulnerability to putting it out there. And so I think teaching people about that is really useful too. That could be a powerful tool for folks.

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:09):

So do you have a favorite journal prompt that's helpful for starting the process of identifying your negative chatter? What is

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:31:16):

It? Yeah. Well, for me it's straight out of the pages of the literature. So I tell people to write about your deepest thoughts and feelings about whatever it is that's bothering you. Really let yourself go. Don't worry about punctuation or grammar. Write continuously for 15 or 20 minutes. Now, what do we learn from the time we're young about stories? They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So what writing does is it gives these guideposts to help you take this jumble of crap in your minds, which are making us nuts

 

(00:31:52):

And we're organizing it. And that's the beauty of what we call expressive writing. So the whole idea here is that we have this remarkable set of tools that we can leverage to help us work through our chatter, but we need to know what those tools are. And what really mystifies me is we don't get a user's guide for where to find these tools and a user's guide that teaches us how to use it. When we are born into this world, we're born into the world with the ability to experience this chatter or this emotion dysregulation. But no one teaches us how to use it or how to manage it

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:32):

Until now.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:32:33):

Yeah. And there is hope. There's absolutely hope. What I find it to know that there are so many different tools that I can bring to bear to deal with the different circumstances that I might encounter. My emotional life is utterly distinct. It's like a fingerprint, right? It's very different from yours and every other human being on this planet. So why would we expect the same single tool to work for every single one of us, given how unique we are? My grandfather was a master carpenter, and I remember distinctly like when he would show up to a job site, he would show up with this remarkable set of tools, this toolkit, no matter what problem he encountered on the job site, no matter what he needed to do, he had a tool, a general, he knew how to use these tools and he could wheel them to solve the problem. If he showed up with just a hammer, he'd be out of business. And that's how I think about tools. You want to give people those basic tools that exist for pushing our emotions around. Once you have them, you've got a great resource.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:46):

I'm looking at 12 tools that you can use personally. There are tools for getting other people to support you. There's tools for receiving support. Lemme start with the first one. Use distanced self-talk one way to create distance when you're experiencing chatter involves language. So what is distance self-talk and how do I use it when I'm going down the rabbit hole?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:34:07):

And I've actually heard you use this on prior podcasts and you weren't even aware of it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:12):

That's right. No, I'm not.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:34:14):

So can you think about times when you might have coached yourself through a problem using your own name and you

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:21):

Oh, you mean like talking, like saying to myself, well, come

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:34:24):

On Mel. Yeah, there you go.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:26):

That's distance. Self-talk.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:34:28):

You just did distance self-talk. So distance self-talk involves using your name and you to typically silently coach yourself through a problem. You could do it out loud, but if you do it out loud, you want to be aware of who's listening because it violates social norms not only to talk to ourselves out loud, but use our own name to do it. We talked before, and you've talked before about how much better we are at giving advice to other people than we are taking that advice ourselves. Little factoid there. There's actually a name for that phenomenon that we've studied this in my lab. It's called Solomon's Paradox.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:06):

Solomon's Paradox,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:35:07):

Named after the Bible's, king Solomon. Here, I'm going to give you another pop quiz. Don't get nervous if you get it wrong. I'm not going

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:13):

To know the

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:35:13):

Answer to this. If you get No, I think you will. I think you will. So what was King Solomon famous for? I have no idea. Being a king, being wise.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:24):

Oh, being wise, he wise,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:35:25):

He was a wise guy. So King Solomon, super wise individual people would travel from all over the world to receive his counsel. But when you look at his own life, he made a slew of decisions. This is true of humanity. Like when I ask audiences, Hey, you're much better at giving advice to others and taking that advice yourself. Every hand in the room goes up weak. When you use distance self-talk, what it's doing is you're using language to automatically shift your perspective to put you into this. I'm talking to someone else. Advice giving mode. Think about the word you. The word you is the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. Most of the time we use the word you we're thinking about or referring to another person.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:15):

So when you use the example of being in the gym and one purpose of your self-talk is motivation, and you say, come on Ethan, you got this.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:36:24):

That's right.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:25):

That's an example of using, that's a perfect example of using positive motivating self-talk, using this distanced

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:36:31):

Language. That's exactly right. You're putting yourself into this coach advice giving mode. And what did we say earlier? We don't say to our friends the things that we say to ourselves when we get stuck in that chatter. So when you use your own name in you to coach yourself through a problem, it's like it's putting guardrails up on your self-talk that prevents you from going down that more negative route.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:58):

Can you give me a couple examples of just generic positive distance language for somebody that hyper focuses on the mistakes they make or saying that I'm never going to be good enough, never be. What are some examples of just things people could start to say to

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:37:16):

Themselves? Ethan, all people make mistakes. You've made mistakes before, you've learned from them and you'll be fine.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:22):

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's a nice thing to say to yourself

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:37:25):

Rather than, I'm such an idiot. I'm such, I mean, I mentioned before we started filming that I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and although you may not hear the accent right now, in my mind when I go into the chatter zone, it's a filthy, sometimes inner beratement. And so I'm not doing that when I'm in distance self-talk mode.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:47):

So give me another positive one.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:37:49):

Yeah, so really what we see happening is you get into this more challenge orientation. I can manage this, I can do it. As opposed to being in what we call threat mode. I can't manage this. I'm going to screw up. So another example would be one of my favorites from a study was someone was thinking about having to plan a huge event for someone. And it was really, really stressful. You can do this, you can manage this retirement party for this person and get a great turnout. People are going to come and they're going to love it. You've got this in my book, actually, I share an artifact from Mr. Rogers. Remember Mr. Rogers?

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:32):

Of course,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:38:33):

He was the,

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:35):

You're sitting in 1, 4, 3 studios, which was his favorite number.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:38:38):

Really?

 

(00:38:39):

Wow. There is some cosmic connection that led me to bring this up. So Mr. Rogers, in my mind is the human equivalent of a warm cup of tea on a rainy afternoon, just kind of soothing. And there was this moment where he had taken some time off from filming his show, and then he was about to come back and he was wracked with chatter, wracked with self-doubt. And he journaled a little bit about it and it's, how can I possibly live up to expectations? I've been gone and I'll never be good enough. And then at a particular moment in that essay, he switches, he starts using distant self-talk. Essentially, you've got this, the hour of come, you're going to do a great job, and so forth and so on. It's in the book. And it's just remarkable because you see the entire tenor of the conversation shift when he goes into this distance self-talk mode.

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:39:48):

Yeah. So rituals and popular culture get a bad rap because we often equate them with certain forms of anxiety. And there are those links that do exist where you have people who are suffering from anxiety conditions become really over reliant on a ritual to a point where it can be harmful. But a ritual in the right proportions can be quite helpful. I often call them ancient chatter fighting tools. So if you think about it, are you religious in any way or

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:19):

Very spiritual person,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:40:20):

Okay, very spiritual person. So I'm sure that there are certain spiritual rituals that of course, that you've been exposed to. Grieving rituals, right? Religions around the world have been, well, let's just stop for a second. Let's pause for a second. Take the loss of someone. This is a real chatter challenge for a lot of people.

 

(00:40:40):

Their worldview is shattered. Now how are they going to go on without this person that they love, that they care about? Religions have identified, Hey, that might be a really hard time that people are dealing with. Let's give them a tool to manage that situation. It's a grieving ritual. So here's what we know about rituals. Rituals are relatively rigid sequences of behaviors that you perform them the same way each time, more or less. They don't necessarily, it's not clear why you do the things that comprise a ritual. Like if you've ever watched an athlete before a game, do a ritual, they do some funky things like tug on their earlobe a few times, pick a wedgie, put their hand through their hair. The key is you're doing the same thing in a sequenced order, in a rigid sequence order the same way. Here's how this can help us.

 

(00:41:38):

Chatter is often triggered when we don't feel like we have order and control. Things are just not under our control. You've written extensively about this, right? A rituals under your control. You can perform that ritual the same way each time. And when you do, it leads to what we call, this is a mouthful, compensatory control. You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside when your chatters taking over by exerting control around you. This is also why people do this. I'm guessing pretty common thing. I'm going to guess you do this. Here's another, I

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:17):

Dunno.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:42:18):

Yeah, I feel like I'm putting you on edge throughout our conversation.

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:21):

Not at all.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:42:21):

Do you ever organize and clean when you're experiencing chatter?

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:25):

Okay, so let's have a conversation about this because not only did I see on page one 70 tools that involve your environment to really get your negative self-talk in control, but the first one is create order in your environment. When we experience chatter, we often feel as if we're losing control. You write our thought, spirals control us rather than the other way around. When this happens, you can boost your sense of control by imposing order on your surroundings. Organizing your environment can take many forms, tidying up your work or home making a list arranging different objects. This is I think my number one way to combat negative, and I never knew that's what I was doing.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:43:16):

So that was true of me as well before I got into this space. And this was a super aha as a technical term for me. So growing up, I've always been, I would describe myself as positively dispositioned, very happy and clean. I've always believed in hygiene. I shower daily sometimes twice,

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:39):

Twice.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:43:40):

Sometimes if I go to the gym, I like to stay fresh, but not terribly organized in the sense of putting my things away. Probably my wife's biggest pet peeve are the trail of clothing that exists from the shower to the closet around the room. And if you go into my office, I assure you, it does not look like this facility that we're taping in right now. Piles of books, that's when times are good. Yet, going back to when I was a kid, whenever I would experience chatter, I would do this. Something deep inside me would beckon myself. It was like, remember field of dreams? Build it and they will come. Yes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:23):

Yes.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:44:24):

For me it was like clean it, clean it, and you'll experience relief. And so I would go and put things away and I do this. I go into the kitchen, do all the dishes, maybe even scrub the counter,

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:40):

Same

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:44:40):

Even, and then even Masochistically and tell me if you do this, sometimes I'd even go in my kids' rooms and put their stuff away,

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:46):

Of course.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:44:47):

And all of a sudden things feel a little bit better.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:51):

I absolutely had no idea. This is a technique that we reach for when our overwhelm and our minds get to be too much.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:45:00):

You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside by trying to exert order and control around you. And now that you know how this works, you can weaponize this

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:12):

And what I need. Okay, well let's talk about that because I can see lots of areas, moments in my life when my husband and I were really, really struggling. The kids would joke that they would come home from school and every other day I would've moved the furniture around dragging it and scraping the floor in the room where the TV was just like, I got to change this around. And even thinking about packing Sunday night to come down, I have this thing about packing

 

(00:45:37):

Where I start to feel very overwhelmed and then I'm mad at myself that I didn't pack before and now I'm beating myself up relentlessly. Why is this so hard for you? Just make a damn list. And why didn't you do this on Saturday morning? And Jesus, you meant to leave two hours ago and I'm hammering myself. And that of course, makes it impossible to leverage what you've already taught us, which is the planning and forecasting aspect of your self-talk. Because I'm so busy berating myself. So literally I come down in the kitchen on Sunday night, I'm two and a half hours late leaving. I'm not even packed yet. Ethan and I have clothes still spinning in the dryer upstairs. And you know what I did? I literally pulled out the junk drawer in the kitchen and

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:46:19):

He started organizing.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:20):

Yes. And my husband comes over and he puts his hand on my shoulders. He's like, you don't need to be doing this right now. And what I wanted to do is scream around me. And I took a deep breath and I was like, right. But what I'm realizing is that was me trying to create order and what felt like a tornado of negativity in my brain.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:46:43):

That's exactly right.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:44):

Is that why we do to-do list too? When we

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:46:46):

Feel overwhelmed, it's a way of organizing. And so these can be useful tools for helping people to constrain their chatter as long as we don't become over reliant on them. And I'm giving you that caveat. That is true, by the way, of all the tools that we're talking about and that I write about.

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:02):

You know what I find interesting too about what you just said?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:47:05):

Tell me,

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:06):

The chaos doesn't bother me when I'm happy.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:47:08):

Yeah,

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:09):

My desk can look like we tipped over an at staples and just crap everywhere. But if I start to feel overwhelmed or stressed at work, I don't do work. I clean my desk.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:47:22):

You described yourself so interesting. You get caught up in this kind of tizzy, so to speak, of ah, ah, that kind of how it feels, right? Let me out. Let me give me freedom. And you're reflexively going to clean. And if that's working great,

Mel Robbins (00:47:58):

What do you mean whoop it up?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:47:59):

Whoop it up. Just like all. Another question here, what comes to mind when I say whoop?

 

Mel Robbins (00:48:06):

Isn't there that song? Whoop, there it is!

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:48:08):

You just redeemed yourself. Now we're back. We're at like 75%. We're getting back. Yeah, whoop, there it is. Right? So people have struggled endlessly. You go from listening to a podcast, reading a book, you learn about information and then the BLE hits the fan. And the question is, you don't do it right? It's the New Year's resolution dilemma. I'm going to lose the weight. I'm going to go to the gym every day. Three days later you stop doing it. And so scientists have spent a ton of time trying to figure out why are we so bad at following through with our intentions and how do we make people better? And you could boil down the decades of research into a simple framework called whoop. Here's what it stands for, the W stat's, step one. That's your wish. So what is your goal? So your goal might be to calm the chatter down, like reduce the noise when you find yourself slipping into that state. That's the goal I want to achieve.

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:11):

Okay? That's the wish.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:49:11):

That's the wish, okay? The first O, that's the outcome. So what's going to happen to you if you achieve that

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:19):

Goal? I'm going to have less stress. I am going to cause less drama for myself and other people. I'm going to feel more at peace and more in control because all of this negative chatter and overwhelm that becomes very paralyzing makes me feel out of control and incapable. So the outcome would be very positive.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:49:47):

So great job.

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:49):

And

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:49:49):

The reason we focus, I

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:50):

Love the affirmations, just hang around all day.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:49:53):

Hey, I'm happy to give them, but it's true. And the reason why we do the outcome next, now you've articulated your goal, we want to energize you. This is a goal worth pursuing. This is worth my time. So now you're in this energized state for pursuing this goal. Now we get to the second O, which are the obstacles, the personal obstacles that are going to stand in the way of you achieving this goal. So what might be an obstacle that might prevent you from turning the volume on your chat or down?

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:27):

I am fluent in negative self-talk.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:50:29):

Okay.

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:30):

I am fantastic at criticizing myself. I can whip myself into a human tornado in a nanosecond, and it can be very effective when I get into a tizzy because other people try to help. So I think those are all lots of obstacles, just being honest about, I don't even know if I can do it. It would be an obstacle.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:50:56):

Yeah. So you mean turn the volume down?

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:59):

Yeah.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:51:00):

Yeah. So you've just gone through your obstacles. So what we would then do, we would focus on one of those obstacles to start and we get to a P, which is our plan,

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:10):

But

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:51:10):

It's not any kind of plan. It's what we call an implementation intention. It's easier to call it a plan. It's basically an if then plan. So if I find myself doom casting and becoming this savant in negative self-talk, then and you plug in what you are going to do, you plug in the tools that you are going to use in that situation. So if I find myself berating myself incessantly, then I'm going to coach myself using distance self-talk. Go,

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:47):

Mel, you can handle this. It's not that big of a deal.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:51:49):

Go for a walk in nature.

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:51):

That's another tool in your book. Go for a walk in nature,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:51:53):

Jump into the mental time travel machine, go forward and back. We'll talk about that in a little bit.

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:58):

Okay,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:51:58):

What I, let's

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:59):

Talk about it right now. What do I do? What is it? I'm not going to remember it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:52:03):

Mental time travel. These are two of the most useful tools that I possess along with distance self-talk. Super simple.

 

(00:52:10):

We talk a lot about the importance of being in the moment, grounding ourselves and our breath. That is useful. But what we forget when we talk about being in the moment is number one, our minds evolved to travel in time. And you can actually use that to your benefit. So number one, how am I going to feel about this issue next week, next month, next year? Most of our emotions follow a time course. They get triggered and as time goes on, they eventually subside. Most of our emotional experience follow that trajectory. But when we are stuck in chatter, we just zoom in on the awfulness, it feels like it's never going to end when you jump into the time travel machine, how am I going to feel about this 10 years from now, 20 years from now? It highlights the fact that what you're going through, as bad as it is, it's not permanent. Things will eventually get better. It gives you hope. And that turns the volume on our chatter down. That's one thing. That's mental time travel to the future.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:11):

I think that could work.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:53:13):

That's powerful for me.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:15):

And then that helps me also access the positive distance talk that you've taught us.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:53:20):

Exactly,

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:21):

Which is if I time travel even a week from now, you've already packed and been on the trip and now you're home. It's not that big of a deal. And then I can start to go, Mel, take a deep breath. You're capable of packing.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:53:34):

You got it. So you are blending these tools, which is also how these things actually operate in daily life. So we go back to the one thing, it's not one. Now we're doing two.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:44):

And you know what else I want to point out because I think it's important to keep highlighting this. You've given us other tools of creating a ritual and playing music and going outside and taking a walk in that moment, playing a song and taking a walk, which just stress me out more.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:54:00):

Don't do it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:01):

But I can see how now you are starting to build this toolkit where I'm not going for a walk right now, but I can time travel to calm myself down and then I can use positive distance talk to say, Mel, you can pack a bag,

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:54:18):

Right? So you can customize the tools based again on who you are and the circumstances you're in. So let's close the loop though on mental time travel, because we just talked about going into the future. You could also go into the past works a little bit differently. For me, this is my, is ace in the hole the right term? I think it's,

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:37):

I don't know. What does it mean?

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:54:39):

It's like my secret superpower.

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:40):

Oh, gotcha. Okay.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:54:41):

Yeah. I think I might've gotten wrong, but that's okay.

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:44):

We'll give it to you.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:54:45):

Yeah. Okay. Now you're giving me the aphorisms. This is reciprocal. It goes very well. So the story I open up my second book with shift is a story of my grandmother in World War ii surviving the Nazis, basically slaughtering our whole family, my grandmother's my ace in the hole. When things feel so big and just how am I possibly going to get through this? I jump into the mental time travel machine. I go back to 1940, whatever. I spent just a little bit of time with my grandmother in my mind. And what that does for me is it zooms me out. It makes it super clear to me that what I'm going through, as difficult as it is, it pales in comparison to what she went through and survived. And I think we all have those personal experiences or experiences in our family or in our culture that you can anchor on to put what we're going through in perspective.

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:52):

Is there something you would add to that though? Because if you're a world class self critic and barer, I could see that strategy being something that only becomes more evidence where you go and you're such a piece of crap that you're sitting here working yourself up about this thing. How, you know what I'm saying? You actually, so how do you take that to give yourself perspective, but then keep yourself lifted in your capacity to coach yourself through it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:56:23):

You want to keep the spotlight on the challenge that they endured compared to what you're dealing with right now and really use it. Reminder source, source of motivation.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:34):

Got it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:56:34):

Exactly. Not to. You don't want to slip back into, well, anything sets you off. That would defeat the purpose of that exercise. And if you find that doing that leads you into that territory, don't use that tool. Use a different one.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:53):

That's great.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:56:53):

And that's a really important take home for these tools. Different tools work for different people in different situations.

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:57:07):

Yeah, it can play a big role in a few different ways. So we already talked about your local environment, how the way you structure your environment, how organized it is, can affect what's happening between your ears. There's also ways of putting things in your environment to trigger positive experiences, like pictures of loved ones, which sounds so silly on the one hand. But we did this research years ago where we had people think about really painful experiences and we had them then look at a picture of a loved one or a picture of someone else's loved one to see what are the implications of looking at your, what we call attachment figure, someone you're really connected to. And what we found is that looking at that person that you care about, this activates a sense that there are people in this world that support you, which sped up how quickly people recovered from distressing experience. So after that research, I went on a shopping spree for picture frames and all of my offices have pictures of my family and friends all around it for that

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:24):

Reason. Yeah, I think that if you think about walking through an office, oftentimes that's the thing that tethers you through the day is the reminder of what's meaningful in your life, especially when you're having a stressful day.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:58:37):

Exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:37):

Sort of like the way that you time traveled backwards to your grandmother

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:58:41):

Helps put things in perspective.

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:42):

Correct.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:58:43):

So that's one thing you can do. Green space exposure. I was a little hesitant to really buy into this when I first started researching this space. I come from a place we talked about before Brooklyn, New York. I like to remind people that one of the most famous books to come out of this borough or about this borough was titled A Tree Grow in Brooklyn. Singular, right? So there was not a lot of green space growing up. And I'm a city guy. I find green space exposure to be quite profound in terms of how it impacts my emotional life. And there's been a lot of research on this. And what happens is when you're stuck in chatter, it consumes your attention. It's the only thing you can think about.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:36):

So true.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (00:59:36):

When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, what happens is your attention is captured by your surroundings, but in a very gentle way, the sights, the sounds, the smells like your attention just drifts on them. And what that does is it gives you this opportunity to rest and restore over the course of that walk. So you finish it, you're feeling more rejuvenated and you actually have more attentional capacity to work through your problems. So that's one way that your environment in particular green space exposure can help you.

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:11):

I just had an experience where last week I got some very, very difficult news and so I had a horrible night's sleep, could not fall asleep, woke up, it was like five 15 in the morning, which is ungodly early for me, and it was pitch dark outside. My husband Chris was gone and I laid there and I could just feel the negative. What if this you're just trying to problem solve through something that's scaring you to death in your life or your work or whatever. And I thought, I need to get the hell out of this bed. So I got up, I got the dogs outside, and then I thought I should go for a walk even though the moon is still out and it is pitch dark because my mind is a horrendous place right now. And the last thing I want to do is look at social media or try to solve it that way or log onto email. And so I put on my coat and I still had my pajamas on and I started walking down the driveway and as I was walking in the pitch dark and I'm seeing the moon start to lower, and I started thinking to myself sort of like you thought about your grandmother, about the fact that in the scale of humanity and the fact that I am, but a speck on this planet hurdling through space, the crap that's keeping me up, I'm again still negative shaming myself if you take notice.

 

(01:01:36):

But as I rounded the corner and the moon is set, it probably took about 13 to 15 minutes of walking, but there was an owl. It was like, ooh. And I'm like, oh, the owl doesn't care. And as I kept walking and my senses were activated, it pulled me into the experience of the walking and then the sun started to come up and slowly but surely I noticed that the beat down was gone. Why does that work? Because I think we've all experienced feeling better and clearing our mind when we either take a walk or if it's available to you, you can get outside in green space.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (01:02:24):

So a couple of things I want to point out. So number one, you said 13 minutes. You said it took about 13 minutes. And the way I interpreted you saying that was like it took a while, but if you think 13 minutes is a while, how much time have you spent in that negative self-talk?

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:41):

56 years.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (01:02:42):

56 years. I think 13 minutes is pretty damn good. 13 minutes is probably quicker than the amount of time it takes for Tylenol to have its effect when you've got a bad headache. That is pretty magical. Magical. So we talked a little bit about how nature can help us restore. That's one way it can help us. Another thing that it does is it gives us the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable. Something that just feels bigger than ourselves, and nature is replete with those awe triggers like the moon. It's so beautiful. And you're in southern Vermont, I've been up there at times. It's gorgeous up there. When we experience this emotion of awe, what it does, it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self.

 

(01:03:35):

You feel smaller when you're contemplating something vast and indescribable. Here you are, Mel, you're worried about this thing. I'm sure it's legit. Doesn't only almost feel legitimate. I'm sure it feels existential in the moment that you're having it. It's over. I'm over. The world is over, right? Yeah. We've all been there. We know what it's like. Well, when you're in nature and you have this opportunity to experience, it makes you and your concerns feel a whole lot smaller. When you're contemplating the vastness of maybe the site you're in, I mean you're probably walking somewhere. Trees are alive for hundreds of years. That makes what you're dealing with just feel a little bit more insignificant. And when we shrink ourselves in that way, our problems shrink too. So I will often weaponize this by going for walks in the local arboretum when I'm really struggling with something and it inevitably helps. It's like I'm worried about this when there are so many more things happening in the universe. Come on, let's get back into gear.

 

Mel Robbins (01:04:44):

And more importantly, I think it helps you access the other tools because the thing is, is that the walk didn't disappear the problem.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (01:04:49):

That's exactly right.

 

Mel Robbins (01:04:50):

It actually lowered the chatter. And so when I got back and into my workday and inevitably other things happen that then bring it back up, whether I started organizing my desk or I'm using the other tools, I can see what you're teaching us, which is you have the ability to catch it.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (01:05:10):

That's right.

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:11):

When it's taking you down.

 

Dr. Ethan Kross (01:05:12):

That's right.

 

Mel Robbins (01:05:13):

And then use these tools to create distance from it.