The voices in your head with Ethan Kross (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Ethan Kross: I don't have control over those thoughts that bubble up from time to time. What I do have control over is how I engage with those responses.

Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist ,and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. His first book, Chatter, was a bestseller on how we talk to ourselves. He delves into how to harness our inner voice and overcome what's been called monkey mind. You know, jumping from thought to thought like monkeys jumping from one tree branch to another.

Now Ethan's new book, Shift ,is about another vital aspect of our inner life: emotion regulation. And he doesn't shy away from challenging conventional wisdom. 

Ethan Kross: There's research on, on this, which shows that in some cases, avoiding your emotional experiences can actually be a tool that helps you cope.

Adam Grant: Hey, Ethan.

Ethan Kross: Adam, long time coming. 

Adam Grant: I have to start by telling you that for years, people have been telling me about their monkey minds and I have no idea what they're talking about. And I've been trying to make sense of this, and your book Chatter helped me a lot with it. And then one day my wife, Alison, was telling me about hearing the characters in her head when she reads a book, and my mind was blown. I have never heard a sound in my head when reading, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would hear anything when they read, and I posted about it, and at least from my Instagram audience, I'm the outlier. It turns out almost everybody hears the words in their head as they read.

Can you make sense of this for me? I, I cannot even begin to wrap my mind around why you would hear words that are written on a page. 

Ethan Kross: The inner voice is, is a kind of Swiss army knife of a human mind. It is a multipurpose tool that lets you do many things. Some people do benefit from having back and forth inner dialogue with themselves.

Some people don't. But at the other end of the spectrum, we were just talking a little bit about our favorite football team, and there's a slogan, a phrase that attaches to that team. It's like Avengers assemble. But for Michigan football, what is it? Do you wanna repeat it for everyone? 

Adam Grant: Hail to the victors.

Ethan Kross: Hail to the victors. If I asked you to just repeat that phrase silently in your head right now, could you do it? 

Adam Grant: Of course. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. You've just used your inner voice. Your inner voice refers to our ability to silently use language in our minds, and, like, that function that you just activated is a critical function.

Adam Grant: I have an inner voice that I use deliberately sometimes to play out a conversation, sometimes to play back something I wanna remember. The part that's strange to me about it is hearing voices that are not under my control. 

Ethan Kross: Mm. 

Adam Grant: Like the automaticity of having just chatter going in the background. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: My head is silent unless I choose to hear something.

It seems like most people, when they read, they can't, they can't process the word without hearing it and it's just automatically activated in their head. What's the term for this? Is it subvocalization? 

Ethan Kross: Subvocalization, that's right. There are two primary paths to reading. One is you see the word and then you instantly decode its meaning. Like when I see a pencil and the sight of the pencil activates what we'd call my mental representation of a pencil, which is my understanding of what a pencil does.

I don't have to articulate out loud, "pencil." "Writing instrument." I just know it. But sometimes we do sound out words, so we subvocalize them. And interestingly, that doesn't always take the form of us reading the sentence to ourselves. Take the word permit or permit. How do you know the difference between the permit or permit?

We will sound that out to understand where the emphasis lies, and that can aid in reading. Just to go back to hearing other voices, though, we do have the capacity to hear other voices to simulate them, and just because you do doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. I, right now, for example, can hear my mother telling me to clean up my room.

I can simulate that. 

Adam Grant: Definitely.

Ethan Kross: Just, just just heard it right now and it elicited all sorts of emotional experiences associated with it. But I don't hear my mother's voice in my head all too frequently, and importantly, I understand that I just simulated the experience. There's not my mom sitting in my head pulling the strings.

Adam Grant: It seems like there are a lot of people who, like, who hear each character in a different voice when they read a novel, and many of the people who, who commented on my post said they don't understand how to read without subvocalizing. And I just can't wrap my, my mind around this, Ethan. So I'm, I'm wondering if you can help me explain like what, what's natural to me, but, but apparently foreign to a lot of people.

Let's say I'm reading the word cheese. I don't need to hear cheese in my head. I just see it and I know it's cheese.

Ethan Kross: I think most people are actually availing themselves of both of these different routes to comprehension. That is we are seeing words and instantly intuiting their meaning, and sometimes we're sounding them out as well.

There's variability in how much we may lean on one modality versus another, and maybe you are a little bit more extreme on leaning on just the seeing and recognizing and also sounding out. People say, I don't have an inner voice. I've never talked to myself. Well, you may not have talked to yourself having this back and forth exchange, but have you repeated the grocery list in your head or, or silently rehearsed a phrase?

 Most people are then going to indicate that they likely have availed themselves of that function of it. 

Adam Grant: Sure. 

Ethan Kross: So I think this is an invitation for all of us to recognize that the mind is incredibly flexible. There, there aren't always these single tracks to making sense of the world. We sometimes think in words. We also think in terms of images as well, right? So sometimes when I'm imagining the future, I, I'm totally in verbal mode, right? Other times I'm having very vivid images of things, and there is individual variability there too. 

Adam Grant: How would you explain what's happening, like to someone who doesn't know how to read without hearing the sound in their, their inner voice or in any voice at all?

Ethan Kross: You've associated individual words with particular meetings, and those associations are activated automatically, and so you're not devoting any more effort to decoding the meaning. In the same way that when looking at a basketball hoop, I know what it's there for, right? When I look at a phone, I instantly know its utility, and you would hope that all of us have the capacity to link words with meaning automatically like that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to read fluently. This is why children have so much more trouble reading quickly when they start, because they're still not quite sure what words mean. 

Adam Grant: For me, looking at the phrase basketball hoop is the same as seeing a basketball hoop.

I know it just as instantly. 

Ethan Kross: Me too. 

Adam Grant: And you don't have to say to me, "basketball hoop" when I'm looking at it in my backyard. So you also shouldn't have to say it to me when I'm looking at the word or the phrase, but I guess what that makes me wonder is, I guess I have like a hyperactive or sort of heavily relied upon verbal system.

Is that the gist of what you would make of that? 

Ethan Kross: There's individual differences in how much we lean on verbal versus, for example, visual. There's also a richness to the modalities, right? So when you describe your, your wife's experience, hearing different voices as she reads like that, that to me implies a kind of cinematic quality to her reading experience that I'm kind of jealous of. Because I often just decode the meaning until I hit a place where I need to devote a little bit more effort. Or if I really wanna rehearse things, I'll then sound it out. So I go back and forth, but I'm more in your direction. But the notion, the idea of being able to link different voice attributes to different characters, I mean, wow.

That, that, that, that sounds like fun. 

Adam Grant: It does sound like going to a movie. It also, to me, completely ruins the experience of being immersed in a novel, though. I think maybe it feels like more of a flow state to me that it's totally silent. I feel like I'm there and I don't need any of the stimuli to, like to add accent marks to the experience.

Ethan Kross: When do you ever hear yourself sounding something out? Ever? Does it ever happen to you? 

Adam Grant: I've been paying attention to this. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Since this, this, this topic came up as I read, which of course interferes with reading, but I think the only time it ever happens is if there's a word I don't recognize and it's, it's polysyllabic and it's not clear how to pronounce it. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: I might hear it in my head, but even then I mostly would sound it out out loud. 

Ethan Kross: Dan Willingham has a fantastic book that I, I often recommend on the psychology of reading, and there is discussion about when we will lean more on enunciating or sounding things out sub vocally and effort is, is often involved when it's challenging. So that makes sense, and you may be just more in the direction of that kind of fluid decoding of words, instantly pairing them with their meaning. But as long as you don't judge others and don't judge 'em harshly, then I think we're all good. 

Adam Grant: No judgment here. One other question that, that a lot of people asked, actually, the first people to ask it were a couple of friends from childhood who were like, wait, is this why you read faster than I do?

And you know, I, I paused to think about it. I'm like, I cannot even imagine slowing down enough in reading to be able to understand like the word separating in audio. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: I, when I read a book, I, I kind of process a sentence at a time as opposed to a word at a time. And it feels like my reading speed is at least five x to my listening speed.

And even if you could get rid of the chipmunk factor, it would be too hard to parse the sentences. Is sub vocalization a constraint on reading speed, or is learning to read quietly a way to accelerate your reading without losing understanding? 

Ethan Kross: Um, the research that I'm familiar with actually suggests that sub vocalization, um, is not always a detriment to reading speed.

This was certainly an aha when I encountered, um, this work because sub vocalization is different from reading out loud an entire sentence. It is placing the emphasis as you're reading very quickly on particular parts of words. And the research that I've read suggests that it, it does not slow us down.

That is a myth. Which is, which is fascinating. It's the reason why the research is needed, because sometimes our intuitions, um, are not, are not correct. I wanna go back to something that you said though, to start off this conversation. . You'd mentioned that you had heard people talk about monkey mind.

You never quite understood what that meant. And so I'd love to know how you define monkey mind, because my guess is in the way that some people talk about it, you may have some orangutans inside there. So how do you, when you hear that term, what do you think about? 

Adam Grant: Well, I look forward to meeting them then. Uh, I think about the, I mean, I honestly, I, I didn't understand what people were talking about when they, they talked about it often in the context of meditation, that they were trying to quiet their monkey mind. I was like, I'm sorry, what is a monkey mind? I think the most common response I got was, well, my monkey mind is like that voice that's always chattering in the background.

Sometimes people call it the obnoxious roommate in their head. It's kind of like a running monologue of like, things I have to do or things that I'm ruminating about. I don't have any of that. I've never heard it, that I can, that I can remember anyway. So tell me what, what, what's the orangutan that I might be missing?

Ethan Kross: I'm gonna guess though, that you, you do worry about things from time to time or experience anxiety. 

Adam Grant: Sure. Everyone does. 

Ethan Kross: What form does that take? 

Adam Grant: It doesn't have sound, is the first thing.

Ethan Kross: So it's more visual based.

Adam Grant: I, I don't see anything either. I just know it. The same way that I know a word when I'm reading it.

I don't even know how to describe it because it's so obvious. It's like a fish saying it's in water. 

Ethan Kross: It's so obviously uncomfortable. 

Adam Grant: When I was extremely nervous about giving my first TED Talk, I found myself thinking about, like, what are the things that could go wrong? And I'm not seeing or hearing anything. I just am kind of playing out thoughts about scenarios. What if I forget my lines? And then I would write down a plan for what to do. If a joke bombs, okay, I'm gonna deal with that like I did when I was performing as a magician and find the one person who laughed and say like, thanks for the courtesy laugh.

I guess it was anticipating scenarios and then problem solving through them. There's not a monkey like quality to it. Because I'm choosing what I want to focus on and how to respond. And also there's no chatter. Like I don't, I don't hear it or see it, so I don't know how to describe it more than that, but maybe you can help me.

Ethan Kross: Well, I mean, the way you've just described it captures a phenomenon for a lot of people. It's this tendency to engage this remarkable hypothesis generating machine that we all possess, that start going into what ifs. I've heard about a lot of people's what ifs, like, it never ends. You could come up with all sorts of worst case scenarios for things. And, and that's indeed what, what you were doing there. How you became aware of it in terms of your subjective experience, that seems a little bit hard to pin down. It seems like you just were aware of the fact that you were thinking about these What if worst case scenarios. Maybe it wasn't verbally mediated, maybe it wasn't visual. It's just this sense of knowing in a very abstract way. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. 

Ethan Kross: Does that capture it?

Adam Grant: It does.

Ethan Kross: Did you ever start looping that? Those what ifs? Over and over to fuel the anxiety? Or were you very scientific about it? 

Adam Grant: I'm scientific to a fault. Reasoning and logic are, are where I go. Like I, I think the, probably the worst moment of it was sitting backstage and just feeling the, the physiological sensations of anxiety and thinking to myself, okay. I can feel like the shortness of breath. I can feel, you know, my hand shaking, that's anxiety. What am I gonna do about it? 

Ethan Kross: It's funny you describe it that way. I have a way of dealing with that right now that's very effective. I reframe that and I interpret that as that's my body rising to the occasion to prepare me for this really important 

experience.

Adam Grant: I love, I love your idea of that's my body rising to the occasion. Because what that then leads me to is like, I don't need to rise this high . I actually already have plenty of energy, and I've also done the prep. My body's in overdrive here. It's, it's giving me tools that I don't need, and it's gonna lead me to, to talk too fast.

It's gonna lead me to sound way too high energy as opposed to actually talking to my audience and varying my pitch and my inflection. And so I think that's a, that's a great lead in to say like, okay, this is what my body is doing to try to prepare me, but actually I'm already prepared. 

Ethan Kross: Totally. And I think this gets at the real puzzle of our emotional lives, which is we have these responses that we experience often in the appropriate situations, these emotional responses that, that are functional, even the negative ones, the quote unquote negative emotions, like they serve a vital function. Anxiety in the right proportions is actually useful. When I think back to the worst talk I ever gave, it was a talk where I felt nothing before.

Nothing. So nothing, there was no response within me that cued me to pay attention and prepare, and as a function of that I was flat. So emotions in the right proportions are really useful, but they often are not experienced in the right proportions. We experience them too intensely or too long, and that's where the challenge of emotion regulation really comes into play.

And you know, the good news, and I mean this without any exaggeration, is that there are so many tools that we have at our disposal for calibrating those responses. Using the tools that you described, or I did, or countless others, there's a lot of hope for helping us master that, that challenge that sadly, we don't often learn about.

Adam Grant: Well, this goes to the heart of your expertise on emotion regulation and picks up on some of what I thought were the, the big aha moments in Shift. So let's, let's start with the idea that a shocking number of people believe they can't regulate their emotions. Why do people think that emotions are completely beyond their, their capacity to manage?

Ethan Kross: One of the most powerful ways of helping me understand this was a talk I heard by the Princeton neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen, when he described the, the itch reflex. Can't always predict or control when you're gonna experience an itch. Fair to say? 

Adam Grant: Fair. 

Ethan Kross: Right? And you experience that itch. It's a powerful, emotionally tinged response. What you can control, and we are unique among species in our capacity to control, is whether we scratch that itch and how we scratch it. I think that's a great way of making sense of the facets of our emotional lives that we can and can't control. We cannot control the thoughts and feelings that bubble up in our awareness from time to time throughout the day that generate emotions.

I'll often do an exercise with my classes and I'll ask them to just tell me about the, the darkest thought that you've experienced within the past few days. And I have them do it anonymously, but I, I have them tell me what those dark thoughts are. They are some really, really dark stuff I do all the time, and I consider myself a reasonable human being, just to put that out there for those who are listening, and I'll give you an example of, of what I mean, and maybe this will help. When I go to the gym, I will often have the thought bubble up into my head as I'm walking across the gym floor. I'm carrying a, a massively heavy dumbbell. That's a joke. It's not that heavy. But I'm carrying a dumbbell, right?

I'm carrying a dumbbell from one side of the gym to the other, and I see, for example, a person sitting on a yoga mat doing an exercise. I will imagine dropping that dumbbell on the person's face. Now that sounds terrible. What kind of human being have you invited on your podcast? Why am I experiencing this? 

Adam Grant: Exactly what I was wondering right now.

Ethan Kross: Right? There you go. So what's happening here? Well, it's likely my mind simulating a potential worst case scenario. And what does it lead me to do? Well, I switch hands. I hold the dumbbell in the opposite hand. I squeeze it a little bit tighter 'cause I don't wanna harm anyone. Many parents often report experiencing these kinds of dark thoughts of, of dropping their babies, or ill befalling them, not because there's anything wrong with them, but again, likely because the brain is helping you simulate worst case scenarios to prevent them from actually happening. So to go back to your question, why do so many people think you can't control their emotions? I think it depends on what part of the emotion generation timeline you are thinking about. If you ask me, can I control the emotions that just automatically bubble up?

No, it's automatic. I don't have control over that. But I do have control over how I push those emotions around. 

Adam Grant: Great. Okay, so that, that goes then to the question of what do you do once you've identified an emotion that you think is counterproductive or inappropriate for the situation at hand? I know we've both been reading over the years the Brad Bushman research on venting, where, you know, if you hit a pillow or if you scream, that actually makes you madder. It, it raises your emotional temperature as opposed to lowering it. And earlier, actually, a couple months ago, I posted, um, a meta-analysis, um, that I think really clearly documented that effect. And people freaked out. "Stop telling people to suppress their emotions, that's a recipe for denial, and, like, PTSD!" And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not saying suppress your emotions. I'm saying not all emotions need to be expressed. And sometimes letting them out actually amplifies them as opposed to calming them down. And this was, I discovered, a completely foreign idea for a lot of people who don't read psychology for fun.

Ethan Kross: Yes. 

Adam Grant: Can you help me with this? 

Ethan Kross: I'm sorry you had that experience, Adam. You should have called me and learned from the wounds that I've incurred over the years. 

Adam Grant: Have you also, uh, stepped on that landmine? 

Ethan Kross: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Adam Grant: What was your version of it? 

Ethan Kross: Telling people that venting doesn't help them work through emotions.

This is, this is something that feels viscerally wrong to many people because we have such a strong desire to vent our emotions to others. Venting our emotions, so expressing them to other people, for example, this can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people.

It is good to know that there are other people who are willing to take the time to listen to us, to just empathically connect with us. You probably felt good a few seconds ago when I said, I feel your pain. I've been there. Right? Like we, we are connected now. So that's an important part of coping with negative experiences, establishing those kinds of social and emotional connections.

The problem is, if all you do is vent about a problem in a conversation with someone else, you leave the conversation feeling really close and connected to the person you just spewed it all out to, but you haven't done anything to actually work through that experience, to cognitively reframe it, to put it in a, in a different light that just might actually allow you to work through it in ways that muffle it. So, so there's a place in our emotional lives for both of those processes. But you also touched on one other really important topic. I call it a myth in Shift. That we always have to confront our feelings, and that avoiding them is always toxic.

There's research on, on this, which shows that in some cases, avoiding your emotional experiences can actually be a tool that helps you cope. Now, we're not talking about unhealthy forms of avoidance, like drug and alcohol abuse, nor are we talking about adopting a, a coping style that we call chronic avoidance, or where you off the bat just defacto avoid everything. But sometimes I have experiences where I am triggered and I deliberately decide to avoid dealing with it for a certain period of time. I will immerse myself in work or have a conversation with someone else about something engaging, and then when I come back to the problem, I find that I can think about it in a much more constructive way.

If there's one, one message I really hope to get across in Shift, it is this idea that there are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives.

Adam Grant: One of the things that really resonates with me about your perspective on avoidance is you're not locking the experience up and throwing away the key. What you're doing is you're allowing yourself some distance and perspective, which is one of the big ideas that you've put on the map across the, the different bodies of research that you've published, is like self distancing is a vital skill.

And we often struggle to solve our own problems because we're too close to them and we, we can't zoom out. And so if I'm distracting myself or if I'm delaying how I process the experience, I'm probably gonna come at it with some new ideas. One of the things that this, this leads me to is another point that you make in Shift, which is you argue that there is value of not always being in the moment.

Ethan Kross: Yes. 

Adam Grant: And I was so excited to see that. One of the studies I was reading recently was a study of musicians in the early stages of the Covid lockdown. The more mindful they were, the more distressed they felt, whereas the more hopeful they were, the less distress they felt. And I thought, okay, if you're going through an intensely stressful, emotionally difficult time, the attitude that's gonna help you most is not mindfulness.

It's actually hope. Because if you're only living in the present, you're gonna be overwhelmed by the pain of today. Where you find strength and resilience is in thinking about the better circumstances of yesterday and then trying to anticipate a brighter tomorrow, and it sounds like you came to a similar conclusion from different data, and I'd love to hear your take.

Ethan Kross: There's real value that can be had by focusing on the moment and your ongoing physiological sensations, your stomach going in and out, and just using that to ground your experience when you find yourself worrying about the future or ruminating about the past. The problem is, like so many other tools that are beneficial, we tend to just throw the baby out with the bath water and suggest, well, that is the key across situations. There is so much good that can come from mental time travel if you do it in the right way for neutralizing your emotional experiences. I will often time travel into the future and ask myself, how am I gonna feel about this tomorrow, next month, next year? When you engage in that, in that little bit of what we call temporal distancing, what it automatically does is it makes accessible the idea that as bad as what you're going through, it is temporary. Things will get better. Right? Most of the time that is true. This isn't just me as an expert in this area telling you this is true.

You as a human being have experienced that, because you've lived your life. And how many experiences have felt awful, but then have ceased to feel awful as time passed? 

Adam Grant: It's amazing how often yesterday's burdens become lighter today. 

Ethan Kross: Equally valuable for me is time travel into the past, which is a tool that I use to broaden my perspective.

So I start Shift by telling the story of my, um, my grandmother who lived through the Holocaust in, in, in Poland, and essentially was, you know, fleeing the Nazis and their allies for years with nothing. Saw her entire family be massacred. When times get tough for me, and you know, sometimes they feel really tough and suffocating, I will mental time travel into the past and think about my grandmother's life and her experience, and that has a way of broadening my perspective that is really quite useful for allowing me to reframe what I'm going through and turn the volume down. 

Adam Grant: I've gotten in the habit, I guess, of having a very quick sort of zoom out distancing reaction, which is to say, but thousands of innocent people are dying in wars that don't need to be fought, and democracy is in peril worldwide, and 45 million people are starving and the earth is melting and like this is a run on sentence, but in the context of things that matter, this is really trivial.

And guess what? I don't care anymore. The emotions melt away. And when I try to walk other people through that, they're like, yeah, it's one thing to say those things, but it doesn't, it doesn't help me. I'm like, why not? If you have that perspective, the things you're worrying about don't matter. What am I missing?

Ethan Kross: Well, I think what you're missing is the anchors in the future that you are finding to be really beneficial for you and for regulating your responses are not the same anchors that work for other people. When I'm experiencing some anger or anxiety, I will immediately jump into the mental time travel machine in the way we just described.

Like you, I'm really good at automatically using different strategies, but it is not the only tool that I will use. I'll also distance in other ways, like I'll try to give myself advice like I would someone else using my name to do it silently. Not out loud. "Ethan, what are you doing, man?" I find that that's really useful for me.

I have a, an exceptional group of what I call emotional advisors, people in my life who are skilled at both hearing me out, letting me vent a little bit, but then also helping me reframe things and work through it. Those right there, there are three things that's like the go-to. I think it's really important for people to start thinking about multiple tools.

We did these two sets of studies during Covid, this is in, um, a paper in press, where we wanted to see what are people doing to manage their Covid anxiety, and is it making a difference? And what we found was on average, people use between three and four strategies on any given day to manage their Covid anxiety, and there was remarkable variability in terms of the tools that were beneficial.

Adam Grant: I like that a lot. It, it's a good reminder for me not to project my own favorite emotion regulation strategies onto others. 

Ethan Kross: One of the, the lessons I learned early on in my very loving relationship with my wife was to not project my emotion regulation repertoire onto hers. Hers is very, very different than mine, and equally, if not more effective.

She's an incredibly well adjusted individual who deals really well with all sorts of emotional hiccups. What works for her is very different from what works for me, so I think honoring that variability in life is also really useful. 

Adam Grant: You have found that there are some strategies that we probably consistently underestimate the effectiveness of, and the example you gave a minute ago with talking to yourself, inner voice in the second person. 

Ethan Kross: Second or third, you could do either. Yeah. The key seems to be breaking out of that first person point of view and, and, and addressing yourself in ways that others would address you. 

Adam Grant: So if I say, "Come on Adam, you can do this." Or like, "We can do this." That's better than saying, "I can do this." 

Ethan Kross: If the goal is to muffle an emotional response and, and get some distance from the experience, then yes, that is the case.

If you wanna savor something positive, then you wanna stay in that first person. 

Adam Grant: You have some examples of, of people actually doing this consistently as a routine, like, uh, like Novak Djokovich. 

Ethan Kross: Yeah. There's this wonderful anecdote of, of Djokovich where he was getting creamed by a very lowly ranked opponent early in the tournament.

And he takes a bathroom break, goes into the bathroom, and then he comes out like a bat out of hell and demolishes the opponent and and wins the match. And he's asked, Hey, what happened in the bathroom? And he is like, I gave myself a pep talk. But he used "you" the entire time to address himself like he was addressing someone else.

We are so much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking that advice ourselves. What distant self-talk seems to be doing is allowing you to relate to yourself like you were someone else. That is certainly one strategy that I think is, uh, off people's radar, and what I love about it is that it is so easy to use.

The other one that I'd love to slip in there is music. When you ask people, and researchers have done this, why do you listen to music? Close to a hundred percent say they listen to music 'cause they like the way it makes them feel. Emotions. But then if you look at what people do when they're grappling with big emotional experiences, anger, anxiety, sadness, what percentage of them actually use music as a tool to change the trajectory of their emotional response? It's between 10 and 30%. That is a wild discrepancy for me, but now that I'm aware of it, I have playlists on my phone to push me in different directions and no, these are not solving the major existential issues I face, but they are giving me a little nudge at opportune times to right the course.

Adam Grant: I've heard a few psychologists and therapists over the years say they actually named that inner voice to try to create even more distance from it. I, I think one therapist calls her inner critic Regina after Regina George. I heard another who actually calls his inner critic George, and when he has a thought or an emotion he doesn't like, he'll say, "Shut up, George."

Ethan Kross: When I first started talking about this idea with my literary agent, you know, and I mentioned like the inner critic, he said, oh, you mean Marvin? I'm like, oh, this is the beauty of the mind. 

Adam Grant: Well, I'm putting in my vote for you to, to run that experiment. What happens when, first of all, when people name the inner critic and secondly, when they give it a funny name?

Ethan Kross: Yes. I think a funny name is key. 

Adam Grant: You can't talk to Marvin and still, still feel threatened. So, so Marvin is inherently amusing. 

Ethan Kross: We could do this study tomorrow. Like it'd be really fascinating because the naming function here is giving us some space, but then by making it funny, you are invoking another kind of emotional experience that is in contrast to the negative one.

So you might be getting a double whammy there.

Adam Grant: Okay, time for a lightning round. Tell me, Ethan, what is the worst advice people regularly give on either emotion regulation or managing their inner voice? 

Ethan Kross: Just vent your emotions. 

Adam Grant: How about something you've rethought lately? 

Ethan Kross: Really the power of, of strategic avoidance. I was raised to always approach things head on, work through them. There's a time and place for that, but a lot of the time I have found that that is not actually useful. It doesn't lead to productive outcomes compared to when I take some time away. 

Adam Grant: You're like Abraham Lincoln, writing letters to people he was angry with and then putting them in a drawer. 

An unpopular opinion that you're excited to defend?

Ethan Kross: Avoidance isn't always toxic. 

Adam Grant: And what's a question you have for me? 

Ethan Kross: How good do you think you are on a scale of 1 to 10 at managing your emotions? 

Adam Grant: Well, as a, as a diver, I have to, I have to edit to a 0 to 10 scale. 

Ethan Kross: Okay, fair enough. 

Adam Grant: Um, I'm gonna say nine, uh, largely because I seem to be the person that people go to for emotion regulation advice, and sometimes people ask me if I ever emote.

Ethan Kross: And what, what do you attribute to your ability to not emote, which I don't think is true, but to keep your emotions in check? 

Adam Grant: Growing up with family members who had extreme anxiety, uh, I learned really quickly to contrast with that. The more stressful a situation was, the more important it was for me to be a source of steadiness and calm.

And so I think a lot of what I do, we've talked about in terms of distancing and gaining perspective. But the other thing I think about a lot is what is my emotional impact on others? And when I know that my mood affects other people and they're counting on me to stay cool, that becomes really clear motivation.

Ethan Kross: Well, I think that's a perfect message to end on because what your experience demonstrates is that your, your DNA is not your destiny. And I, I genuinely think that that is true for all of us, that we can learn to get better at emotion regulation if we're both motivated to do so, 'cause we believe it's possible. And then if we actually familiarize ourselves with the, with the tools and techniques that are out there to do it. 

Adam Grant: Well, you've, you've given us some valuable techniques and also frameworks for even thinking about how we do that. You're just such a clear communicator. So thank you, Ethan. 

Ethan Kross: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this.

Adam Grant: Thanks for coming.

Ethan makes it clear that emotion regulation is not about controlling what you feel. It's about choosing how you respond. Intense feelings don't always demand immediate reactions. They often benefit from deep reflection.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansica Sunkamaneevongse and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

Ethan Kross: Hail to the victors. 

Adam Grant: Or better yet, [singing] hail to the victors. 

Ethan Kross: You are braver than me.