What conversations do you have with yourself? And why is that important? That's what we're talking about with today's incredible guest, Ethan Cross. Ethan recently wrote a book called Chatter. It's an excellent book. I've recommended it on the show before. Ethan and I have a chance to discuss Chatter in this and the next episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ethan. And if you enjoy this show, please subscribe in whatever podcasting app you currently use. That will help you not only miss out on the second part, not miss out on the second part of the interview with Ethan, but also you'll get notified, depending on the app that you use, when any new episode of Developer Tea comes out. And we do three a week, so that will be very soon. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Let's get straight into the interview with Ethan Cross. Thank you. We've got to ask someone else if we need help with some of those kinds of problems that often come up. Yeah. So just very quickly, why does your family think you do have those skills? Oh, I mean, you know, because I use computers more than they do. I mean, it's not a very complicated, nuanced set of reasons that lead them to think that. Whenever there's any kind of issue with a program, it's what's wrong with it and, like, how am I supposed to know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ethan, you are the author of a book that just came out. And I'm pretty sure I pre-ordered the book. I read the book already. Both. Both. I have the physical copy. And then I also, I like to start with a physical copy and kind of end with the audio book. I'm not really sure why that works out for me. I guess it's because I like to kind of really devour the primary argument first and then hear some of the stories and expounding on the latter half. But. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do in your day-to-day work? Yeah. So I'm a professor at the University of Michigan. And I have appointments in the psych department and also in the business school in the area of management. And I run a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. And what we do in the lab is we do research to try to understand how we can help people align their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with their goals. We call that self-control. And we try to figure out what makes self-control work versus not work. And then we also try to use the information that we discover in the lab to help people improve their self-control in their daily lives. And the book I wrote, Chatter, is really an attempt to do that. That second goal, that is, to describe a lot of the research that we and other people in the field have done that speak to the question of when we find ourselves. And that's what I call the Chatter. What can we do to bring those internal conversations back on track? How can we help people regain control of their minds to make them work for them rather than against them? And so that's what the book intends to do. And that's a part. That's part of what I do here at Michigan. This is such an excellent book, at least for me at this stage in my life, because it brings forth a lot of certainly very interesting but also very practical research on what you called self-control. And this is such an age-old discussion about having, in philosophy, you might hear, the phrase of having two selves, where you have the one kind of intentional identity self, and then you have this other kind of impulsive self, the angel and the devil on your shoulder, in some ways, could represent these two selves. And the one self kind of defines, you know, the identity self defines the things that you want, you know, in your best version of your life. Right? If you were to write the biography of your life, that that would be the version that the identity self portrays. And then this other impulsive self is just thinking about today or about what it feels in the moment. So how does this kind of old philosophy line up with actual research on self-control? Do you see this clear separation? Of identity and impulse? You know, I think we do see a, I think many people intuitively have the experience, as you're describing, of there being a more reflective component to our lives and a more experiential component where we just live without thinking. And that scaffolds on to work showing that if you look at how often people are, are versus, aren't in the moment, what you find is that between one half and a third of our waking hours, we're not just in pure experience mode. We're drifting away to the fat, to the past, to the future. We're reflecting on our lives. And we actually spent a significant portion of that time drifting away talking to ourselves, which I think is really interesting, obviously, because I just wrote a whole book on that topic. But so we do have this ability to, you know, be able to be in the moment. And so I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's a really useful capacity. And both modes serve a function. You know, one point that I often I've been talking to a lot of people about is the idea that we are always, we should always be in the moment, right? We should always try to be in that kind of experiential mode. The human mind did not evolve to always be in the moment. To the contrary, the human mind evolved. At the evolution of evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution And so I don't think we always want to be in the moment, though certainly being in the moment can be helpful at times. What we also want to avoid, of course, is getting stuck, ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. And I think that often happens to a lot of people. It can have significant negative consequences. And a big part of chatter deals with when that happens, what can people do to get their internal conversations back on track? Since I've read the book, I've actually been using this phrase of mental time traveling just constantly. I find myself thinking about it a lot. And I find it interesting, you're talking about rumination here, which is kind of like a twisted version of time travel. It's like the alternate unlikely universe. Because what we're talking about when you say time traveling, I assume, and you can tell me if you disagree with this, we're talking about kind of playing out, hopefully, statistically likely future scenarios and adjusting variables in our minds and replaying that and continuing to play it out to see which variable do we think we should choose of the ones that we have control over. But rumination, or in the case of the future, thinking with high levels of anxiety or catatonic. Catastrophizing takes those really kind of unlikely statistical events and plays those out over and over and over, like on a repeat playlist. So I'm curious about how, you know, what are some of the techniques that you outline in the book to say, okay, no, hold on, let's rip that playlist out. Let's not do the crazy playlist. Let's go with the good kind of time travel. Yeah, it's, it's, first of all, I'm so happy that you phrased the question in that way. Because oftentimes people think that the answer to not ruminating or worrying is to stop thinking about the future or the past. Like, I just, I just want to silence that inner voice and not have that capacity. When in fact, as you intimated with your question, and as I mentioned before, oftentimes we can derive great benefit from, being able to think about the future in the past. So the question is, how do you do it without getting stuck in these unlikely patterns of thinking where you're catastrophizing, meaning you're, you're going to like the worst case possible scenario from the outset, the, the, the 0.00001%, you know, probability chance of something happening. So what can you do? The good news is that there are lots of different tools that, that scientists have discovered. And I, I like to organize them as falling. Into three buckets. So there are, there are things you could do on your own, uh, ways of shifting the way you're thinking about a situation that can be helpful for breaking you out of that rumination. There are ways of interacting with other people. So other people are often in a, in a prize position for helping us work through our chatter, uh, and, and silencing it. Um, you need to know who to talk to though, and how to talk to them, which I review in the book. And then there's our environment. There's the world around us. And, and one of the really fun parts of that is that we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, the very tools that exist in our physical environment, ways of controlling our conversations, the conversations we have with ourselves from the outside in, uh, which I found fascinating. So, so let me give you a couple of concrete examples though, cause that's all, all really abstract. Although I think it's useful to just have that framework of things you do on your own, things you do in your relationships, ways of interacting with the world. Um, one of the things we've been discussing here, um, is the evolution of evolution. know about chatter is when you're ruminating or worrying, you're really zoomed in very narrowly on the issue that's bothering you. You're thinking about that one comment, that one person, that one interaction very narrowly to the exclusion of really everything else going on. And what that does is it makes it difficult for us to generate alternative ways of thinking about the situation that might make us feel better. And so one of the things that we can do is take a step back right, try to pull back a little bit to focus on the experience more broadly, to broaden our perspective, to bring in other ways of thinking about this circumstance that might improve our mood. To make that more concrete, I'll give you an example of one distancing tool that I've used when it comes to managing worry surrounding the pandemic we're all living through right now. This is, I think, a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a to do then when we reach that milestone. What that does, what engaging in that form of temporal distancing or time distancing, what that does is it makes it clear that as awful as it is, what we're experiencing right now, it's temporary. It will eventually pass. And when we have that set of cognitions, that makes us realize, that gives us a sense of hope, which we know is a powerful bomb when it comes to our inner voice run amok or our chatter. So that's one distancing tool. Another distancing tool you could use is to try to coach yourself through a problem like you would someone else, like you'd offer advice to another person and to use language to help you do that. And by that, I mean, use your own name to coach yourself through a problem. We typically use names when we think about and refer to other people. And I think it's, it's, it's not controversial to say that many listeners have likely had the experience of finding it much easier to coach someone else on their problems, to give someone else advice and to take their own advice. And what we've learned is that engaging what we call distanced self-talk. So again, coaching yourself through a problem, using your name, what that does is it leads you to relate to yourself like you were relating to another person. And that brings up some, brings us some distance, which can, which can make it helpful. And I think that's a really good way to start bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own evolution and bringing your own flexible working. More than ever, remote works is relevant. I've listened to an episode recently about your workspace, what your workspace says about you. There's different styles of maintaining your workspace. If you have ever felt bad about what your workspace looks like in comparison to your coworkers, then I recommend you listen to that episode. 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Remote works is something that I really think the listeners of this show will benefit from. To listen today, search for remote works anywhere you listen to podcasts. We will include a link in the show notes. Thanks to remote works for their support. No, I just want to I want to talk about this self distancing thing. There's two there's two things that spring to mind. The first is this kind of you can observe this in other people, the kind of disparity between you watch. I've watched my wife. I've watched my children. I've watched my children. I've watched my children. I've watched my myself do this, and she's told me about it, so it's fair for us to kind of go back and forth on this, but she can give advice to, let's say, somebody in her family or one of her coworkers, and I can overhear it and think, wow, this is, and then she can turn around and have the same kinds of worries, behaviors, whatever, that she just gave advice about, and it seems that there's this interesting wall between those two things, and I always find that curious, and this is obviously not just in your personal relationships, and this is not a criticism, it's just a factor of humanity that we, it's harder to imagine, you know, it may seem like from the outside looking in that there's an inconsistency there, but actually there's something more going on with, I assume, some kind of ego protection or something that we've evolved. to kind of avoid that conflict, so it is something that I've observed in other people, and once you apply it to yourself, there's these interesting effects, or I can remember, for example, I was experiencing some anxiety about a breakup that I had when I was younger, and I remember kind of seeking, trying to find, like, I had never had anxiety in my life, or I had never really experienced it to this degree. in my life before, to where I felt like I needed to seek out some kind of relief, and I remember finding, just happening on some advice that was essentially distancing, I didn't know it was called that at the time, but the distancing advice here was to imagine the moments that are painful, and this is not advice, you know, I'm not a psychologist, you know, find the qualified help if you're listening to this, but to imagine these moments that are painful, and I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, and then put them into, like, an old CRT television in your mind, and imagine that they're playing on an old VHS tape, and that you have the remote in your hand, and on the remote, there are controls, they can both speed it up, they can rewind it, you can play it backward, you can distort it, you can make it smaller, right, and it creates this objective picture. And so, I think that's a really interesting way to kind of take that picture of the experience that you had, and puts you in control of it, and I just think this is such an interesting version, and it relates to something in your book, where you say, okay, another form of distancing is, imagine that you are sitting on the couch across from you, rather than in your place. Can you kind of explain that form of distancing? This is the one that works well for me, and I'd love to hear you kind of explain it in your own words. Yeah. Well, there's so much, so much really good stuff you just mentioned. I'm happy to explain the fly-on-the-wall technique that you just mentioned, but before we do that, I just want to touch on something else that you said, which is this, you know, putting it in that old TV. What was the technical name for that, CRL? The CRT, I think? CRT. Yeah. I could be wrong. It just shows you my technological naivete. Sometimes I feel like technology and I have just, you know, there's this eternal battle between technology and I. It generalizes to all forms. So what you described is essentially a kind of distancing technique, right? You're creating this separation between your thoughts aren't you. They can be viewed as an object distinct from you. And once you engage in that shift, that can be empowering, right? Because once you realize that you have some separation from your thoughts, then it becomes possible to play with them, to push them around. And change them, which can be useful for alleviating distress. Aaron Beck is widely regarded as the founder of a kind of therapeutic intervention called cognitive therapy, which is one of the most well-supported empirically validated forms of therapy out there. And in the 70s, he wrote an article in which he basically said that one of the key jobs of a therapist working with patients is to have a therapist who is able to help you. To help them gain distance from their thoughts, to help them gain objectivity from them. That is one of the principal jobs of a therapist. What we've learned in the intervening years is that this is not just a principal job of a therapist. This is a principal job for any of us who are hoping to try to manage our own internal world. And what we've also learned is that there are many, many, many different tools that we can use for doing that. So, you know, I described. At Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp your imagination too in visual imagery. So when you think about past experiences, particularly negative ones, with few exceptions, there are a few like trauma events, but putting those trauma events aside, the more intense the negative experience, the more we tend to see those experiences in our minds, the more we have a visual snapshot of those from a first person perspective. So when we recall negative experiences, we often see images accompanying those events. And the more intense they are, the more we see replay those experiences happening through our own eyes. But what we also know is that those visual images, they're malleable. So we can also shift our perspective and adopt a more fly on the wall perspective and see ourself in the scene. And research shows that those kinds of memories are less emotional. And it's also easier for us to work through those difficult kinds of experiences when we take a step back and adopt that fly on the wall. So, so lots of different tools exist for distancing. I think many of us stumble on some of these tools as we live our lives. We start doing these things without really understanding why they work for us. We keep using them. So a lot of people throughout history have reported, for example, using distant self-talk during times of stress. I talk about a lot of these examples in the book, everyone from Julius Caesar to Henry Adams to LeBron James and Jennifer Lawrence. They were these records of, of them just spontaneously doing this. And, and what I've really tried to do in, in chatter, the book is, um, I, I often feel the need to, to give that disclaimer, chatter the book, because chatter is also the phenomenon we're talking about, right? But what I try to do in the book is shine a spotlight on these tools, because I think once you know what they are and how they work, it then becomes a lot easier for us to be more deliberate about these things. Right. Right. Right. how we use them. And I think that can be empowering. Like having a tool chest and saying, okay, I'm going to try this particular one in this scenario the next time it comes up. That's exactly right. Or to use a particular combination of strategies the next time you're dealing with something difficult. One message in the book is that there are no magic pills, no silver bullets. I know we're often looking for them. That doesn't mean, however, that there's not lots of things we can do to help matters and improve our chatter. But it often involves using combinations of tools. So I rely on like a chatter cocktail, if you will, when I'm dealing with a worry. I'll find someone to talk to who's skilled at helping broaden my perspective. I'll use distance self-talk and temporal distancing. I'll also use some environmental tools. I do a couple of different things and find that that combination is really helpful. And the research in this area on combinations of tools isn't that well developed, but I suspect that relying on several different techniques is going to be very useful for lots of people. As we're talking about this, I'm sitting here wondering, you mentioned that people find the things that work well for them. And I couldn't help but think about the different ways that people process their thoughts. And I think that's a good way to do that. I think that's a good way to do that. I think that's a good way to do that. I was specifically thinking about an artist taking what might be an internal conflict and externalizing it in some way. If that could be, I don't know if there's any research on this, to be fair, but if it could be a form of distancing, they're expressing themselves in some way. And I won't use, this is probably too much of a cultural word, but kind of cleansing themselves of whatever that conflict is through that artistic expression. Is there, any basis for that kind of thinking? I think to the degree, it would require us to really understand how the externalization of that idea, how getting it, does getting it out on the canvas actually provide the person with distance? It's certainly a viable hypothesis and one that we could explore. There's certain, there's certainly, I mean, the logic holds. I don't know of data that speaks to it per se, but it's certainly consistent. Thanks so much for listening to my interview with Ethan Cross. This is the first of two episodes that make this interview up. So if you don't want to miss out on the second one, make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using to listen to this episode. And you'll also, as a bonus, get to listen to new episodes of The Podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Once again, if you want to be a part of the Developer Tea Discord community, head over to developertea.com slash discord. You can join. We have open invitation now. Anyone who likes these episodes long enough to stay to the end, you are certainly invited to come and join that network of engineers who are looking to become better in their careers as well. Of course, a huge thank you to today's sponsor, Remote Works. Search for Remote Works anywhere you listen to podcasts. We will include a link in the show notes. Thanks to Remote Works for their support. Thank you so much for listening to this show. And until next time, enjoy your tea.