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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
chatter strategy because every seemingly like four to six weeks, I will go to bed happy and content. And then I'll wake up at 2 a.m. and like it is all going to hell really fast. What time do you typically go to sleep? Usually around 11, 1130.
So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing. So at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes, and by the way, you say like, oh, this is common. This is more than common. When I present to audiences and you know, thousands and thousands of people over the years. And I ask, hey, you ever get 2 a.m. chatter? Maybe 2.30 a.m.? All the hands go up. This is a...
I don't want to say universal affliction, but it is an incredibly common problem that people struggle with, like the chatter at night. So what I do is I use something called mental time travel, mental time travel into the future. And what I do is I ask myself, and I typically use my own name to do it, so I'm blending Another distancing tool, distance self-talk.
I said, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning? No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m., to your point, when I wake up the next morning and my brain is fully awake and I have access to my prefrontal cortex and I can think constructively about things, it is never as bad that next morning as it is in the middle of the night.
We, of course, have learned that over time because how many mornings have we woken up in our lives? We could do the math. If I was more sophisticated, I'd do it on the fly. I can't, right? But like many, many mornings we've experienced this, like chatter at 2 a.m., at 7 a.m., Not so bad.
So when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning, next week, next year, 10 years from now? What that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through, as bad as it may seem, It is temporary. It will eventually subside. And that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter.
It turns the volume down on it, which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed. So the official name for this tool is not mental time travel. It is called temporal distancing. And it's a flexible tool. You can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem, how are you going to feel about it tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now. And it's another way of broadening your perspective.
It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it. So those are the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own. And And that nips a significant chunk of the chatter that I experience in the bud when it happens.
And I should add that because I know about what chatter is and I know about how these tools work, I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing. So people will often ask, Hey, do you ever experience chatter? Like, yeah, of course. Pinch me. I'm a living, breathing human being. I do at times.
But I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing tools in an almost automatic manner. If this happens, if the chatter strikes, then I'm going to coach myself through the problem using my own name and you, and I'm going to jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself, how am I going to feel about this in the future? Yeah.
If that's not sufficient, then I'll go to like the level two response, which consists of if weather permits, I'll go for a walk in a safe natural setting. I always feel the need to give the caveat about safe and natural because where I grew up in Brooklyn, like the natural settings were the place you got mugged. So they were not safe.
But, you know, a park I find restorative, and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces. But then what I'll also do is I'll dial up the chatter advisory board. So I have a couple of people that... I have carefully thought about what these people do for me when I have a problem.
And they importantly don't just let me vent my emotions or cathect, to use that term before. I don't just get it out. A lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to vent your emotions. There's research on this. Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people. It's good to know that We're buddies now. I could call you up if I'm struggling.
You're going to listen to me and empathize with me. That's great for our relationship. But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through and you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve, I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you, but the problem is still there.
So, just venting ends up leading to what we call co-rumination, which can be pretty harmful. The people on my chatter advisory board, they know to first validate, empathize with me, learn about what I'm going through. They've got my back. They communicate that powerfully.
But then once they do that, they start working with me to broaden the perspective, to try to think through that problem, which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really, really loud. And typically when I get to that stage, I'm in pretty good shape.
Yeah. It's a very interesting question. And there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with with time perception the way you're describing it. But what does come to mind are our experiences of flow, which in many ways you might consider the opposite of chatter. Flow being this state where you're just in the moment and time is effortlessly passing.
The demands of the situation completely match the skills that you bring to bear. It almost seems like the antithesis of what you're describing. When I think about time and chatter, what becomes most accessible for me is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly on the object of the chatter, on the thing that is causing that distress.
And we focus so narrowly on it, which of course makes a great deal of sense because what are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem? think about it, share it.
You got it on try number one, zoom in, focus on the problem, roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it. And so that's that kind of really, you're getting in there in fine grain detail. And that does work for us a lot of the time, but it turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation, that can get really troubling.
Showing 741–760 of 968 · page 38 of 49
← Previous
Next →