gates . >> presidential recordings, find it on the c-span mobile app or whereveryou get your podcasts . >> not available, c-span's 2022 congressional director. go there to order a copy of the congressional directory this spiral-bound book is your guide to the federal government with contact information for every member of congress including bios and committee assignments . contact information and the cabinet. order your copy today at c-span shop.org or scan with your smartphone. >> we have quite a treat. i had a chance to have some lunch with doctor ethan kross and i think this will be terrific. so if you haven't read this wonderful book , i did it a second time the other day.

chatter is what we're talking about, this is doctor kross's first book, professor of psychology at the university of michigan . [applause] >> go blue. >> one of the leading researchers and experts in the area of controlling the conscious mind. so we all have one of those. director of emotion and self-control laboratory, he's done pioneering research and has presented in multiple venues. journals as well as popular media. with our friends anderson cooper, good morning america and new york times, wall street etc. with that as a basic introduction, i'm going to turn to ethan. can i call you ethan?tell us about chatter and our inner voice. could you go through and definewhat it is and maybe how you developed an interest in this topic .

>> maybe i'll start with look, first of all let me say thank you for coming. it is so nice to be here with readers together in person. i've been talking to folks through zoom the past year about this book and i like a lot glad that is over. thank you very much for coming here. [applause] the more interactive we can make it the better so feel free to be ask questions. let me start by where this interest began to set up your question well.i think formally studying chatter and the inner voice for 20 years but i've been thinking about it for about twice that time since the botime i was a little kid. three years old because i grew up in a household with a pretty unconventional dad and what i mean by that is my dad was this very colorful character. didn't graduate from college. but had a voracious appetite for three things. new york yankees, cigarette smoking and eastern

philosophy. go figure. and t when he wasn't engaging in any of those activities he was talking to me about two of the three. and in particular with respect to eastern philosophy from the time i'm three years old he starts telling me whatever problems, he would say go inside. try to use your mind to get, he had all these thphrases. find the current truth. i was a colonel in a g.i. joe show back then but the idea that he was essentially trying to instill within the is use introspection to work through your problems. this was a skill that served me well throughout my childhood. i got into an argumentwith my mom, i go inside and figure out why i'm feeling this way .

i would ask girls out on dates in high school, a lot of them they would say no. a lot of the time. but they say no, i go moveon, and i never really stopped and then i got to college and i took my first psychology class and what i learned in class was this capacity that we have to use our minds to solve problems is one of our greatest superpowers. it is the basis atof our ability to innovate and create and problem solve like my dad taught me. however, a lot of the time this ability to possess backfires. we experience diversity in ourlives, turn our attention inward and we don't end up coming up with a clear solution . we end upspending instead . we overthink things . we ruminate about the past. we experience what i call chatter. chatter is a term used to

refer to getting stuck in a negative thought movement but it's one of the bigger problems we face as a species. i will get into that now. that to me was fascinating that we have this tool and it serves us well a lot of the time but other times it backfires duso i decided to go to graduate school to learn how to use the tools of science, psychology and neuroscience to figure out why this happens and most importantly identified tools people can use. science-based tools to remount t our inner monologues that are conspiring against us so that the origin story of my interest in chatter. how many people by show of hands experience chatter from time to time west and mark all right. we're going tohave a lot of ofun today . you mentioned two things. you said rumination andwords, can you sort that out for us

? we all ruminate and get stuck in these negative cycles. we also have a lot of worry. >> rumination tends to be about the past, that's how scientists define rumination when we're thinking about something that didn't go well in the past and all my god, what does that mean ? i used a tiny bit of rumination just a little while ago. i went to the bathroom and it went fine. usually does. but it'll make sense when i tell you this. i'm walking around and then a fellow author comes up to me about 20 minutes ago, tapped me on the shoulder and he said the back of your jacket is tucked into your pants in the back so i ruminated about that. so hopefully he didn't see that.

so rumination is aboutthe past, worries about the future and the present . >>. [inaudible] how about now? >> i'll use my professor voice, can you hear me in the back ? how about now? forget the professor voice. r rumination is about the past. worrying tends to be about the present or future. but the key idea here is that we are moving things over in our ohead. there's a problem we are consumed with and we are narrowly focusing on it in an attempt to work through the problem but we're notmaking any progress . sometimes people call this monkey mindlots of terms to refer to this tendency to overthink . and it gets us in really deep trouble because it undermines us in three domains of life that i think all of us care a

lotabout . i'll mention these really quick to set the stage for what isto come . chatter makes it hard for us to think and perform. how many people have the following happened? you sat down to read a book i know you're all readers here. you read a chapter or half a chapter . under oath you would swear that the words have passed your field of site and yet you get to the end and you don't remember a damn thing. come on everyone. that's chatter because your mind is somewhere else. it's consuming your resources, your attention and resources. you have only so much attention n. all the attention is on the chatter it doesn't leave anything over to do the things you want to do whether that be reading or focusing on your kids, yourpartners or your jobs . so chatter undermines our ability to think and perform. it can create friction in our relationships if we find

people want to talk about and we keep talking about it over and over and over again . push other loved ones away because we're not censoring our chatter at all and it can also create physical problems in ways that are scary and we may not really belabor here so i think it's one of the bigproblems we face . >> one thing you mention in your book is cement venting and we all have the need to vent and it's become exacerbated with social media . so we can get out there and put something out there. and you make a point to say often venting is not necessarily a good thing and it can have certain negative implications and i wonder at what point the support you're looking for and you've got initial hearings for what you're venting and then it starts, you start ain this vicious cycle down or they support that negativity and

it becomes a spiraling downhill cycle. how do you view that, the idea of venting and its limitations? >> other people can be an unbelievable asset when it comes to managing our chatter but they can also be a tremendous vulnerability. i spent a chapter in the book trying to break down how you can harness your relationships with other people for better rather than for worse. a lot of people think and have learned through culture and socialization that when you are struggling with a problem, the thing you want to do is find someone to express your emotions to. just, just get it out. how many of us have heardthis ? thank you. most of you here.this is an incredibly common sbelief and it dates back to aristotle who was the first one to suggest it and freud ran with it and people magazine has eversince .

there's been a lot of research on venting and the technical term catharsis and here's what we know. venting about your problems to other people can be really good trfor strengthening the friendship and relational bond that we share. it feels good to know there are folks in my life i can turn to who will just listen to me, get it out there. they're there for me and they're willing to take the time to just let me express my emotions. here's itthe problem with venting. if all you do is vent in a conversation with other people , so you're talking about what happened and they're saying i would have felt the same way, what did you do next t? oh my god. that leads to something i will call rumination. you're ruminating with one another and it turns out that can be good for relationships , but it doesn't help you actually work through your chatter. because all you've done is

rehearse the negativity. you leave those conversations, you feel good about the person you spoke to. you've got my back but you're just as upset if not more upset after you finish talking to them. the formula, the scientific formula forgetting good chatter support from other people involved doing two things . you do want to, if you're the support provider , if you're the person who's there to help someone else you want to take a little bit of time to learn about what the other person is going through. to learn about the circumstances. but at a certain point in the conversation , you want to start nudging them to look at the big g picture and often times our problems when we're experiencing chatter they feel all-consuming. where tunnel vision focused on the problem at hand and when we look at the bigger picture we can find solutions to our problems that make us feel better and other people can help us do that.

you might say to them that sounds terrible but how have we dealt with this in the past but big picture, this is not going to happen again and so forth and so on. that is a formula for providing good chatter support. there are to take homes here and caveat, i want to quickly mention. the take homes are if you yourself yngfind yourself wanting to talkto someone about your chatter , think carefully about who you go to for support. i have three or four people i go to when it comes to personal issues, five or six professional. that is my advisory board if you will. it is a powerful resource that i have at my disposal and i make use of it . i will admit, we're on tv now, aren't we?i've got to be a littlecareful here . there are people and let's see, you tell me how i do. i may not be able to go home. there's some people in my life, not my nuclear family

but others that i'm very close to. i love them dearly, they love me. dna determines these kinship bonds if you know what i mean. i never talk about my chatter because i know and want to help but there way of trying to help is to just stoke the fire further. asking me about what happened and making me feel worse so i'm really selective about who i talked to. that's one take-home. the other take-home is when somebody comes to you with their problems and with their chatter be mindful of these two principles. you now have ascientific blueprint for helping them . so taking time to listen and then try to help them. the final caveat and i'll throw it back to you is there is an art to doing this well. what i mean by that is only one person and problem, some people need to spend more time expressing their emotions before they're ready to start having their perspective be broadened.

so to use my wife as an example here, i love you if you're watching. sometimes my wife will come to me with some chatter that she's experiencing and i'll be there for her and i listen and i learn about what she's going through and at a certain point when i see my opening i'll say totally gay, can i offer you, i thought. she'll stop and look at me. just listen. okay, then it's going and i tried to run later. other conversations, other kinds of chatter shall come to me and i listen, i see my opening, cannot offer my advice? you just want to be as you feel that. but that's how to take other people and turn theminto an asset . >> before we get into detail

about the toolbox which you ve go through in some detail, when do you know that you surpassed the skills of your board of advisors? what do you need to seek professional help? that was not covered, that was of some concern. what do you know you're in trouble ? >> the book focuses on the run-of-the-mill chatter that is part and parcel of the human condition . i have yet to speak to an audience and when i talk about, i'm talking about audiences that range from middle school kids to executives and everywhere in between. chatter is an incredibly common experience . if there's one thing you leave here with just know if you experience chatter times, congratulations, welcome to the human condition . thisis part of life . having said that chatter can more into more serious kinds of problems, psychological disorders and in which you

would want to get more focused and concentrated forms of help beyond the tools i talk about in the book the indications you might want to talk to someone else are if you find yourself experiencing chatter for at least 2 weeks and to a degree that it is inheriting your ability to live the life you want to live on a daily basis . that's an indication of the run-of-the-mill chatter is more turning into something more disconcerting and if that happens i'd encourage you to find someone who practices an empirically supported form of therapy. there are many out there but that would be my go to advice. >> i really would like to open the toolbox. in the toolbox as i read through things, three different things. you want to go through that,

it's rife with lots of great anecdotes and examples we all can relate to in how we deal with chatter to help control. i want you to go through that alittle bit . >> so what has science taught us about how to manage this inner voice that we have that is usually helpful can sometimes be harmful? i thought about 26 different tools in the book and you can find these tools as following three different categories. things you can do on your own . ways of shifting the way you're thinking that can help you harness this chatter. then there are what we might call relationship tools which we just talked about. how to harness your relationships with other people and then there are environments and tools which are tools that exist in the physical world around us. ways of changing the way we talk to ourselves by engaging with our physical environment in particular ways. and there's no magic tool.

people often ask me, there are journalists who ask what's your favorite tool, what's the one tool you should use to manage your chatter? i don't have a favorite tool. what i know is people generally use multiple tools and what the challenge i think that we all face is to figure out what is the combination of healthy tools that works best for you for helping you manage your chatter? >> i want to go in-depth on each of the different boxes of tools if you will. looking itself, what self-control kinds of tools, meditation. you have faith. you have rituals, all kinds of tools that can help us structure, reorder things i. can you go through some examples of self-help first?

>> one kind of tool that is useful for helping people manage chatter on their own n are what we call distancing tools and there are a bunch of these i talk about in the book . first thing to keep in mind is when we experience it what hi happens is we zoom innarrowly on the problem at hand . tunnel vision, what we've learned is when you're in that state the ability to take a step back and think about your experiences from a broader perspective can be useful. one tool that we've studied a lot in my lab and i use this tool myself that is useful is something we call distance self talk and what it involves doing is using your own name or the second person pronoun you to coach yourself through a problem. one of the things we know about, we humanbeings is we are much better .

we're much better at giving advice to other people and we are giving advice to ourselves. how many people i show up and have been in a situation where a friend or loved one comes to them witha problem ? it's driving them not and they present the problem and is relativelyeasy to coach them through it . again, welcome to the human condition. we can advise other people much better than we can advise ourselves. but we've learned is you can use language to shift your perspective. to get youto think about yourself like you were someone else . that involves using your own name. if i'm struggling with chatter i might think here's ol what you're going to do and i sh start problem-solving accordingly . lots of research shows this can be effective. there's a caveat, you don't want to do this out loud while walking down the street so tucson, if you feel compelled to do it out loud, have theropods in your ears so it looks like you're talking to someone else but there are people on record using this tool during

stressful times throughout history datingback to julius caesar, henry adams, lebron james, jennifer lawrence . all these are in the book. that's one really simple thing you can do when you're managing chatter. give yourself advice like you would give advice to yourbest friend . another very easy tool to implement on your own is something we call temporal distancing or mental time travel . this is my 2 am chatter strategy. anyone ever have to a.m. chatter? it's kind of stinks. when i have chatter 2 am, i don't start meditating for 20 minutes . i can barely think 2 am. i don't have the resources to do complicated things. instead, what i do is i remind myself that whatever it is that i'm worrying about 2 am which often has the form of being life ending by the way.

whatever it is at 2 am it's like this is it. i'm usually fired or in jail or dead by the time that chatter is done. i remind myself you're going to feel better about this in the morning. because i always do. in the morning when my brain is firing at like horse i have the ability to think these things through and always i suffer, i cannot do, none of us can do to the same extent in the middle of the night when our brain is partially sleeping so this is mental time travel. when you travel in time in your mind and ask yourself how am i going to feel about this tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now or a year from now, what that does is it highlights however awful what you're going through is right now, it's temporary. it will eseventually pass and that does something powerful for us. it gives us hope. hope is a very powerful antidote to an inner voice.

that's another distancing tool. many others of this sort, you asked about rituals 'so let me tell you about rituals. just giving you a flavor of what the richness of what's out there. howmany people here partake in rituals when they are stressed out ? how many people here partake in religious rituals, spiritual rituals ? fair amount. how many people have stopped ea to think about what ritual actually is? let me tell you what that is. i talk about rituals as a kind of agents chatter fighting tool that in many ways our cultures give us when we are dealing with chatter. if you think about what happens when we lose someone we love. many of our religions give us things to do precisely when thathappens . there are morning rituals which are incredibly common that our cultures give us. but what ritual is is you can

define a ritual as a rigid sequence of behaviors that you perform the same wayeach time that are used with meaning . so in judaism for example when someone dies you dressed in black, you let your hair grow. >>. [inaudible] ... test, test. >> the question is did you hear the last 15 minutes of what i was saying ? should i start again? is did anyone hear what i said about rituals? here's the deal. rituals are chatter fighting tools, here's how they work. when you're experiencing chatter you often feel like you are not in control. your mind is taking over, it's running away from and everything feels kind of in

disarray like you don't have order. one of the ways that rituals work is they provide us with a sense of order and control so rituals are something you can do so leads to what scientists call a state of compensatory control. you're compensating for the lack of order and control you feelwhen your mind is racing by doing something . this is also why cleaning and organizing can be good way if people are stressed out. who here is a stress cleaner? a lot of you. i'll share a personal and active here. i'm not a particularly orderly person. i think i'm relatively clean but in terms of order i'm the kind of person who ousually, there's a trail of clothing from the shower to the bedroom closet to the downstairs. and yet when i am experiencing chatter what i do first is i neatly stacked all the books and papers in

my office and then i go put my clothing way and i go into the kitchen. wash all the dishes, scrub out the islands. been doing that because it provides me with a sense of order and control which makes me feel good. one added bonus of engaging in a ritual can be good for your relationships with your partner. i sometimes think my wife secretly with like me to be experiencing a chronically low level of chatter cause she is so pleased with how the house looks. i hopeshe's not watching right now . rituals provide us with a sense of order and control. many of the rituals we engage in are done in a religious for spiritual context which also helps broaden our perspective. it provides us with a sense of meaning and if there's a higher power whether that be a religious power or spiritual force that is going to ensure that your life is

in order, that what's meant to be is what's meant to be, leaving it to the universe to decide this also presents us with a sense of order and control because there's that other force that's going to help us out so that a way that religious rituals also can help, it's two different pathways. >> what about meditation, self hypnosis can be accessed as well? >> meditation is great. one of the ways meditation works is by helping give us a sense of distance, allowing us to recognize for example that the thoughts that are streamed through our heads that are paralyzing us at times are separate from ourselves. one of the things, meditation is a great tool.my only caveat about meditation is i think the way meditation isis often promoted in popular culture, this is in part a consequence of capitalism is

that it is promoted as a one-size-fits-all cure-all . and we know that's not the case. meditation works really well for some people but less so others. so it's one tool amidst the broader toolbox that we possess of tools. one other point i'd like to throw in as related to meditation concerns living in the now. how many people have heard that you should strive to w always be in the moment ? we're going to do some myth busting here. if you think about it, one of the things that really distinguishes us from all other animal species is our ability to not live in the moment. we developed this marvelous thing called a frontal cortex , this beautiful giant brain

that allows us to do things like reflect on the past and my time travel into the future and that can be the source of inenormous pleasure andinnovation . a few weeks ago my family went on a wonderful vacation, the kind which we could do for several years because of covid and i regularly find myself savoring that experience, thinking about what i was doing with my wife and kids and howwonderful that felt . i'm also transporting myself into the future regularly, thinking about the next he vacation, not soon enough but i'm also planning for the future. i'm thinking about earlier today i thought aboutwhat i wanted to say to all of you . i didn't just show up here so i'm constantly moving in time in my mind. i'm not just in the moment. i think what we want to be teaching people how to do and what we want to strive for is to learn how to be better

mental time travelers. yes, the mental time travel machine sometimes breaks down and we find ourselves stuck in the negative past four the future and when that happens we focusing on the present can be useful but so can engaging in several other tools so we don't only want to be in the moment. we want to learn how to time travel effectively. >> i wanted to comment on ritual, playing tennis for six years or whatever and i loved the comment about you have any tennis observers, rafael nadal and his ritual of the thing and the thing. he says his greatest demon is what's in his head. and he does these rituals like we all do. that kind of ritual of calling your mind, it helps to calm your mind and get you through that moment of dismay

if you will so turning to help with others, as a healthcare person, we have used the placebo effect for many years and to go into some detail about the placebo effect, i'd like you to comment about some research you've done owwith that and how belief in something helping you can work whether or not there is an actual physiologic mechanism that you're promoting. >> how many people here have a lucky charm that they like to clutch? keep doing it because science says it will help you keep thinking well. that's the placebo effect in a nutshell. the placebo effect, what it refers to as the power of our belief to actually bring us in the context of chatter ensome emotional release and

it's been well documented for centuries that if you can do someone into believing that doing something or maintaining some possession will make them feel better, often times that's exactly what happens. in the book i tell a story of anton mesmer who is the person responsible for the term mesmerism. anton mesmer was a physician living in europe in the 1700s who took europe by storm by developing this really sham medical ritual, this technique that involves using magnets to make people feel better. and what he was really skilled at doing was convincing people that if they partook in his medical treatment which had no active ingredients that they would actually yield better.

it turns out the medical treatment was a total fraud. the person who demonstrated this was none enother interestingly enough nbenjamin franklin who was moonlighting in paris at the time when mesmer was there so we've known about the power of belief or ages. ftoften times just taking a sugar pill is as powerful for these, for relieving our depression and anxiety as an antidepressant medication. lots and lots of studies tested this from mild and moderate forms of depression and anxiety, a sugar pill works as well. that's powerful. if you think about some of the side effects associated with these drugs. so for a really long time we've known this. there's one important element that has prevented. yourself from using this knowledge to help people which is you can't lie to

people. you can get a medicine and e say this is a build is going to make you feel better, trust me and give them a sugar. think about thelawsuits . malpractice would go way up. over the past 10 years and a real amazing growth in our understanding of how to harness this capacity. what scientists have shown is that if you can teach people about how placebos work by talking to them about the science as we are doing today and as i do in the book and actually convince them that they, this thing, this bracelet that you're wearing, there's nothing special about it but if you believe it's going to make you feel better it actually will. and if you can convince them of that you can still benefit from this placebo effect. we call these nondestructive placebos. i've done some of this research and we shown that you get reductions and how the stress people feel using

measures and this is really powerful because it suggests that we can actually harness the power of placebos without lying to people. so is really a frontier of new work. >> we talked about self-help, we talked about interpersonal support, venting, etc. we lost on the environmental, the outside control with some of the rituals. you want to expound on that? for me, i constantly have a to do list. it just helps me organize my hospital getting stuffdone. what other tools we have ? >> we talked about creating order from the outside and let me say some of the tools i talk about in the book are things that you may be already intuiting but are not

really there and deliberately. you start some along the them and one value of surrounding the science is it gives us the opportunity to be a. you don't have to waste the slide into use these tools . the moment you set a little chatter growing you've got a plan. and then of course there's some tools that maybe you never knew about but were racking like using your own name. in terms of environmental tools , creating order, participating in our rituals are two thingswe do . seeking out awe-inspiring experiences is another. and for those of you here who live in tucson you are in an ideal environment. you just go out your front door and lookaround you . it's amazingly beautiful. but be tell you how this works. all is an emotion we experience in the present with something tfast and indescribable.

looking out for this method fills me with all. this is so amazingly beautiful. even the cactus forest, is that the appropriate term i've never seen anything like it . you get all, you can find this experience alive in the natural world. amazing sunsets, looking at the stars. these are complex experiences. you can also find this experience in the world of human innovation. like looking up at a skyscraper in the city or for me, contemplating interplanetary travel which you know, for a long time was ctthe stuff of science fiction but nowadays you're actually doing it. we've recently landed an suv on mars and its projects back imagery about that planet. like, dithis fills me with all. how did we go from struggling to start fires to landing etspaceships on other planets? i don't have the mental

apparatus to make sense of that . when you experience ethis demotion of all, when soyou contemplate something vastly indescribable, that leads to something wecall a shrinking of the self . you feel smaller when you're in the presence of something fast and indescribable and el when you feel smaller, so does your chatter. so experiencing this demotion is the ultimate perspective broader and there's lots of cutting edge research which shows us it can be helpful for people struggling with chatter. one other way and i saw the note there and i'll wrap up soon for questions. five more minutes, okay. once you get to talk about this i love this stuff. one other thing i want to mention aboutnature . there's another way that enhancing your exposure to green spaces or in this case brown spaces. i don't know i mean that in a nice way. g

where i come from michigan is already . you've got it much better than us. there's another waythis can help us and it has to do with our intention . earlier we talked about the book anecdotes, when you're struggling with rumination and chatter you can't focus attention. one of the things scientists have shown is when you go for a walk in a safe natural setting one of the things that happens is that natural setting very gently grabs our attention. our attention drifts onto the beautiful surroundings . we call this getting stuck in a type of soft fascination. just taking it in. you're not ofocusing really hard on the geometrical structure of the cactus plants. maybe phsome of you are. most of us probably are. bad example. but you're just taking it in usually and what that does is it allows our attention, all the attention we were

previously devoting to our chatter, it allows us potential reserves to restore. going for a walk in the green space and even watching a movie of interesting green surroundings can be restorative and that's another way that nature helps us from the outside in. >> that is social media and kids in chatter and when you introduce hethe idea of controlling the conscious thoughts with children particularly with the onslaught of all the terrible news in social media out there. the topic, you can spend an hour on it for a few minutes and will line up for questions. >> went to start with your kids, i think may start with socialmedia were expressing interest in wanting to do so . we've learned a lot about how you interact with social media, ways that are harmful

versus helpful and i've been sharing that information with kids is really important . there are a couple of ways social media can really be quite bad for our chatter. one thing we know social media allows us to do is to raise the way we present ourselves to the world . i was out to dinner last week with my wife and some friends and i noticed there was a person sitting at the other table and they were doing this. [laughter] i assure you it was one shot they were after. they were trying to get the perfect selfie which they will no doubt alter and photoshop and then post and what we learned is this is a normal human response. we're always curating the way we present ourselves toothers . i wear a jacket here, i don't always wear ajacket on sunday . we're e always curating the way we present ourselves but there are limits to our ability to do so. the physical world that are

absent on social media. so we put our glamour shots and glamour treats up there and what happens is other people are then bathing themselves in the curated glorified lives of others which can lead them to feel feelings of envy which in turn create chatter and so forth. that's one way social media can get not just kids but adults in trouble. theother thing social media allows us to do is event .ia we know people like to express their emotions and social media and are smart phones allow us to do it the moment our emotions are active . now, there's one other important element, one way social media changes the way we express emotions. everyday life communicating with other people we are all

lost in a rich source of information thatcomes from the people we're talking to. your facial expressions, right now you'regiving me all search of information . and for the use . i can see some peoplewho are engaged, uncle to mark. just joking . this provides me with information that modulates i talk to you. you on the phone we hear people's vocaltones and can tell if they're engaged, where being rude . on social media and information is absent and it allows us to say things to other people we would never say their faces . it allows us to act in some cases ugly which promotes things like cyber bullying and trolling which are significant problems that we now face as a society so we see chatter manifesting in social media in ways that can be quite toxic at times. not to say social media can't be useful to. looking at the ukraine o situation, social media has garnered tons of support can be an achilles heel as well.

>> if anyone has questions we invite you to the microphone and please project as best you can because welike to hear your questions .we can read them if we can't hear them. >> i have to questions. i was surprised you said you were talking about it, it can be kind of negative you mentioned the example of your life and i wonder if there's a difference between men and women where men wantto get to the solution and for me talking about it ishow to solve it , to the extent that energy . i'm wondering what you say about that? >> my working memory allows me only so much attention left w. if you're talking about in a way that lets you to come to a solution and you want to keep doing that, i by no means mean to imply we should not talk about it. we want to talk about it in a away that ultimately gets us to the point you areending up . so it seems to me like you're expressing your emotions and

working through it at the same time which is what we want. sin terms of the gender difference, interestingly enough, there's this myth that women like to talk about things more than men. that's been studied and it does not hold up. men have just as strong 80 and desire to express their emotions and talk to other people about it as we do. i cite this research in the book. it certainly updated my views on that method as well. >> so men are from mars and women are from vegas? >> they're both from this planet, maybe different continents . >> my other question is leading the polls of trump and he talked about the mind control that calls like the munis and ecologists that uses. i've read books and then there's, i can't remember his name but it's the one from

models himselfafter . the positive language osand the moralistic programming. saying is not effective but then tony robbins seems to be doing well, using something much like that. i guess what i'm wondering is in terms of chatter, the idea of positive chatter versus negative chatter and when does it become into negative mind control and what authoritarian organizations use and when can it be a positive thing like the athlete focuses on so he succeeds. >> great questions. i sure hope that none of these tools are used to help people mindcontrol others . any tool can be mis-abuse and with respect to neurolinguistic processing

and a lot of these other approaches to helping people, a lot of them just haven't been held up to scientific scrutiny. every single thing in this book is science-based. i'm a scientist, that's my day job. is important to methat this work is grounded in science . >> .. >> some interesting elements in theirno but with the science, we just cannot know how much of that is placebo cut of intervention. i believe it that. >> i wonder at some point, you get to be that narcissistic personality and i think of stuart smalley, you know, on the s&l you know, people left me in

the kind of thing were really becomes self inflated, discrete have the self talk but it if it is not based in reality, can be negative implications and yes. >> i haven't plugged this up,. >> you're not going to and is going to be great. [laughter] >> okay when my mind gets oecarried away and i cannot thik about other things, hee goes and goes and goes and it seems like i get a circuit breaker just tops and i just about something else and sometimes it can take a day and sometimes they can take an hour and my crazy are unique are both. [laughter] >> do you really want an answer to that question. [laughter] >> you are absolutely not and that explains in part. [laughter] , exclusive heart that temporal disparaging how it works because the circuit breaker does turn

off and whenn you think to yourself, new how you can feel about this in a week or month, which are reminding yourself is that you will eventually will fill better that often takes cement off of chatter and we have some duration ofdi our chatter, and it depends upon the sources what chatter is in this range of emotions and anxieties but most of the experiences that we have with the chatter they do eventually fade over time but my hope is that teaching people about these tools, can do is shorten the amount of time that you get stuck in chatter and people under peoplee often ask becoming an expert and you studied this your whole career never looking to you in every experience chatter and i say yes, i told you about the episode about what i i am really good at, is the moment that i detect the chatter that proliferation i give and have a set of tools that i implement right away and it shortens the

period of time which i'm stuck so thank you for that excellent question you did not flub it. >> i would like to ask a question but t the impact of social media and going back to that and something that i am personally concerned about is the echo chamber affect the social media fact house on a lot of commentary and a lot of very inflammatory opinionated comments and it almost at least to me, his sounds like that aspect of social media could be a breeding ground for this negative kind of even think that you discussed i'm just curious, what are your thoughts about that and do you have any thoughts on how we could preventt a solution to social media platforms from being this epicenter of you know, a negative negative

venting. >> we completely agree that i think it is a tremendous problem we do research onmy this topic n my lab. to addressinge this issues that we don't have solutions yet. one thing think that will make a difference is teaching people about how this all works in social media is a giant experiment and we have kind of stumbled through it without really teaching ourselves or our kids how to navigate the space and if youlo think about an analogy between the online world, and the off-line world. from the moment our kids are little, we teach them how to navigate the physical world, don't go here, go here and you don't talk this way to this person, you talk this way we not socialized gives into how to use social media. i think we t now have enough sie that we can begin to do that and

we c can bend and begin to be slain the culture of about how social media makes it easy for us to act in ways to other people' i'm really curious what effect the teaching people about this and how allne it works might hae on the actual behavior so that is one thing we can do and the other thing we can do know little bit more challenging but when is that we come i mean people that are designing social media algorithms and programs, my hope is that they use this science to change the way these forms operate, to make it more challenging for people to get stuck in an echo chamber that's characterizedad by a sort of violence and moralge outrage. that is definitely within the power of social media companies to leverage the science and to inform how the product operates. the hope is they begin to do that. there's a great question. >> thank you.

>> my question is about rumination, so you described it in more ofd a negative context from ruminating on negative experiments but can we ruminate a positive experiencee that can lead to at negative outcome. >> great question, i don't know of any work so ruminating on the positive experiences generally talked about in terms of savoring. i will often actually prescribed savoring two people, so i will say, we do a lot of research my lab on distancing and the ability to step back and try to reason objectively about your problems and to try to work through them you want to do that when you're focusing on something negative prayed when he comes to something positive my advice is to immerse yourseln that experience is much as possible so when i am going on with my kids, and i'm having fun on the soccer field them i don't

want to be stepping back, i want to be totally engaged in that experience and so i'm not aware of any work that shows there ruminating are on the positive stuff can't get us into significant trouble. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> my therapist said that episodes of chatter that i have are episodic. i'm not sure she is right, she's not a scientist. [laughter] >> will ahead with her. >> yeah s well she is really swt about. [laughter] i'm not sure i believe it so if that is true, is there a way to plan for this and because you know what your cycle is or is it actually cyclic. >> i don't know that there are some regular predictability as to when we're going to engage in one way to fall victim to

chatter. it would be great if we knew exactly what is going happen because then we can activate strategies before hand to try to prevent that from occurring but life is filled with chatter and triggers and landmines and sometimes a lot into my e-mail and there it goes, somebody said something and he gets it all going. so the best preparatory work that i think that you or anyone here can do, is to familiarize yourself with the different tools that are out there. and they can be really powerful because although you cannot necessarily predict when you're going to start experiencing chatter, the moment it activates, you've implanted you know exactly what you can do when that chatter strikes. the ideas that when you have a plan, and you've identify the tools that work for you, enemy not be all of the tools and talk about that when you identify the substance that works for you, that's going to get that chatter

new pet in the bud much quicker than it would if it were just left to just rot on its own tonight one quick question please. >> as i been listening to this illumination of - to paraphrase and listenof and then the evolvg and what if there not solvable because i was the victim of survivor of a homicide victim. but he can't be fixed. >> will there is a way of making sense and think for the question i think there is a way of making sense and making meaning out of virtually any kind of experience and it does not mean that you are going to solve the problem as to why this actually happened about a way of putting it into perspective and actually one of the influences on my thinking

was a austrian psychiatrist named victor frankel who wrote an amazing book, man's search for meaning, and in the book he talks about what allowed him to live through the holocaust after losing everything. it was a physician before the holocaust and he is now a slave essentially in the camp and his family was murdered and he found a way, a purpose to his life and he found a way to make sense of what he was going through that ultimately allowed him to persevere in native forcing life after and it is that why, that purposes meaning that i think we can find in any circumstance that can often be difficult to identify when we are immersed in the chapter. >> a then uplifting note, i'm reminded as a sailor, trying to

control the windows, we cannot control the wind of it we can trim our sales and so we can control our conscious thoughts and inner chatter and so thank you ethan for a lovely session. [applause] [applause] >> thank you for coming. >> first ladies, in their own words, eight part series looking at the rope on the first lady, and the time the white house and the issues important to them. >> what it was a great advantage to know what it was like to work in schools because education it is such an important issue and therefore, i governor but also for a president pretty so that was very helpful. >> using materials from cspan's award-winning biography series, first lady,. >> i am very much the kind of person who believes that you should say which you may end mean would you say and take the consequences. >> cspan's online video library, the features the first ladies river johnson, betty ford,

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