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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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, you know, tug on their earlobe a few times, pick a wedgie, put their hand through their hair. Right.
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. 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 ritual is 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 chatter is 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.
Yeah. I feel like I'm putting you on edge throughout our conversation.
Do you ever organize and clean when you're experiencing chatter?
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 disposition, very happy, clean. I've always believed in hygiene. I shower daily, sometimes twice. Twice? 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 like 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 to, it was like, remember Field of Dreams, like build it and they will come? For me, it was like, And you will 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.
Same, even. And then even masochistically, and tell me if you do this, sometimes I even go in my kids' rooms and put their stuff away. Of course. And all of a sudden, things feel a little bit better.
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.
That's exactly right.
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.
Tell me.
Yeah.
you described yourself so interesting. You get caught up in this kind of tizzy, so to speak, of, ah, right? That's kind of how it feels, right? Like, let me out. Give me freedom. And you're reflexively going to clean. And if that's working, great. But we can also get even more sophisticated about
And beforehand thinking about what are the two or three things that we want to do when we find ourself in that state? And then basically ahead of time coming up with a plan. What do we do? So here's what we whoop it up. What do you mean whoop it up? Whoop it up. Just like, all right, another question here. What comes to mind when I say whoop?
You just redeemed yourself. Now we're back. We're at like 75%. We're getting back. Yeah. Whoop. There it is. Right. So, so, um, so people have struggled endlessly. You go from listening to a podcast, reading a book, you learn about information and then the bleep 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, that'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.
That's the wish. Okay. The first O, that's the outcome. So what's going to happen to you if you achieve that goal?
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