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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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 cuts.
And then it's just tiring, right? Like it's exhausting. People often who are experiencing chatter, they report just like being fatigued. And I want to be clear also.
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 like the volume is super high and it's on for long stretches of time, like 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,
Well, there's not one simple thing that everyone can do.
Yes, I'm sure you don't, but I'm going to give you- There goes my negative chatter right out my mouth at you. But I'm going to give you, there are lots of simple things you can do is the way to think about it.
So yeah, you should. There's a lot of hope. There's a lot.
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. 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?
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, because that could be a powerful tool for folks. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, for me, it's like 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 our minds, which are making us nuts, 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.
Yeah. And there is hope. There's absolutely hope. What I find it liberating 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. You know, my emotional life is utterly distinct. It's like a 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 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 wield 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. And once you have them, you've got a great resource.
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