Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you experience chatter, welcome to the human condition, my friends, because most of us do at times. And so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time, which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups.
Well, let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally. Because as we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences, different tools work for different people in different situations. There are...
upwards of two dozen or more science-based tools that I covered when I wrote Chatter, when I got into Shift, the broader train of regulating your emotions, there are even more tools out there. So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone. My first line of defense when it comes to Chatter are two distancing tools. So
When I'm using the term distancing, what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se. We should talk about avoidance later. But what I'm talking about when I say distancing is the ability to step back and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective. And it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this. One tactic that I find very powerful is language.
So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself. So I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem. Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation? If you think about when we use words like you, they are the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. And when you use your name and you to work through a problem,
it's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you to relate to yourself, like you're giving advice to someone else. And it turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves. Have you ever experienced this, Andrew? Gosh, no.
Yeah.
But you're taking special steps to be able to align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else. Like reflexively, sometimes we stumble, right?
Well, it's interesting. If you go back to when Facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to, do you remember what this was? What is on your mind? So you would be cued to share what is on your mind.
And, you know, in some ways you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice. It is literally asking you, or it did, what is on your mind right now?
We should come back to that because that's also modifying your your spaces, which is another tool that I think is underutilized. So we should talk about that too.
It's remarkable and not always bad. So we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. There are also some, I would argue, redemptive qualities to it. I'll give you one of my personal ones, which is sometimes like to unwind before bed, I'm thinking all day.
I wanna just watch some ridiculously funny short reels. Yeah, raccoon videos. Yeah, I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me and she's like, what are you laughing at? And then I sometimes I show her and she goes, why are you laughing at that, right? So, but, you know, the algorithm has learned the specific kinds of funny videos that I like. And no, I'm not gonna tell you what they are.
And it just lightens the load. And so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction I want them to be shifted
At a certain time, I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives, the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals. We basically got thrown into social media without any rule book.
We're the experiment. But if you think about it, it's a new environment. We were born into this physical world and our parents, our caretakers, from the time we were able to understand things and probably before, they were teaching us, they were socializing us how to navigate this space profitably. They don't just like Lord of the Flies throw us into the world and let us kind of figure it out.
Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive. And we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand, hey, here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways of of navigating social media. And I'm talking about social media now, like it's this unitary environment.
Different social media applications, of course, have their own norms and rules of the games. You could think of them as like little different countries. They have their own little microcultures that you wanna learn how to navigate. And scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function, but it's tricky. And it's tricky because creators
can change how these applications govern by a press of a button, right? You could change the way the algorithm works and then you've got to start over to some extent.
It's a shifter, but this is a perfect segue back to, you know, you asked me about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter and I'm telling you about the ones I use. So there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I detect the chatter brewing and I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy. And I call it my 2 a.m.
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