participants today. so we have quite a treat. i had a chance to have some lunch here with dr. cross and i think this will be terrific so if you haven't read this wonderful book, i just read it the second time the other day chatter is what we're talking about. this is dr. cross first book. he is professor of psychology at the university of michigan. one of the world's leading. we at the university of michigan,

one of the first meetings, we've got some standards, good. we have one of those. and research in multiple areas. how did you develop an interest in this topic? >> first of all let me say thank you for coming. nice to be here together in

person. i have been talking to folks about this book and i am glad that is over so thank you very much for coming here and good morning. feel free to ask questions when we cue you. let me start with where this interest began. i have been studying chatter and the inner voice for 20 years but thinking about it for twice that time since i was a little kid of 3 years old because i grew up in a household with a pretty unconventional dad and what i mean by that is my dad was a 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.

when he wasn't engaging in 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 3 years old he tells me whenever you have any problem or not feeling good he would say go inside, use your mind to get to the colonel, of truth he would tell me, i was thinking of a colonel in a g.i. joe show back then but the idea that he was he sensually trying to instill within me is use introspection to work through your problems and this was a skill that served me well through my childhood and adolescence. i would get into an argument with my mom and move on. i would ask girls out on dates in high school, a lot of them would say no. a lot of the time, they would

say no and i would move on to the next one and i never really - i got -- i got to college and took my first psychology class and what i learned is the capacity we have to use our minds to solve problems is one of our greatest superpowers, the basis of our ability to innovate and create and problem solve just like my dad taught me, however, a lot of the time this ability to be possessed backfires, we experience some adversity in our lives, turn our attention inward and we don't come up with clear solution. we end up spinning instead, overthink things, worry about the future, ruminate about the past, experience what i call chatter. that the term i use to getting stuck in a negative thought loop and it is one of the

biggest problems we face. i won't get into that now but will later. that to me was fascinating that we have this tool and it serves us well a lot of the times but other times it backfires so i decided to go to graduate school to learn the heels of science, psychology and neuroscience to figure out why this happens and identify tools people can use, science-based tools to reroute our inner monologues when we find it misfiring against us. that is the origin story of my interest in chatter. how many by show of hands experienced chatter from time to time? [laughter] >> guest: we are going to have fun today. >> host: you mentioned rumination and worry. can you sort that out for us? we all ruminate and get stuck in negative's cycles and have a lot of worries, there is a distinction.

>> rumination tends to be about the past, thinking about the fact, thinking about something that didn't go well in the past, why did that happen and what does that mean? a tiny bit of rumination a while ago, i went to the bathroom and it went fine. it usually does. it will make sense and i'm walking down the whole festival and a fellow arthur comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder and says we have to say the back of your jacket is tucked into your pants in the back so i ruminated about that, hopefully you didn't see that. rumination is about the past, worry is about the future, nuclear holocaust.

can you hear me now? how about now? okay. we can switch, i will use my professor of voice. can you hear me in the back? how about now? forget the professor voice. rumination is about the past, worry is about the present or the future but we are looping things over in our head. there's a problem we are consumed with and we are narrowly focusing on it in an attempt to work through the problem but not making progress. people call this monkey mind, a lot of terms refer to this tendency to overthink and it gets us in deep trouble because it undermineds us in areas of life we care a lot about. i will mention these quick to set the stage for what is to come. chatter makes it hard for us to think and perform.

how many people here have the following happen to you, you have sat down to read a book, i know you are all readers, 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 you have read. come on, everyone? that is chatter. your mind is somewhere else. is consuming your resources, only so much attention we can focus on any given moment in time but all the attention is on a chatter. it doesn't leave anything over for you to do the things you want to do whether it is reading or focusing on your kids, your partners or your jobs so chatter undermines our ability to think and perform creates friction and relationships with other people as we find people to talk about our chatter and we keep talking about it over and over and over again, push other loved ones

away because we are not censoring our chatter and all and that can create physical health problems in ways that are scary and we need not belabor here so it's one of the problems we face. >> one of the things you mention in your book is venting. we all have the need to vent and it has become exacerbated with social media, so easy to put something out there and you make a point to say often venting is not a good thing. it can have certain negative implications, at what point of the support you are looking for, the initial hearing, it starts in this vicious cycle down or they support that negativity and it is a spiraling downhill cycle, how

do you view the idea of venting at its limitations? >> other people can be an unbelievable asset when it comes to managing our chatter but also a tremendous vulnerability. i spent a chapter trying to break down how to harness your relationships with other people for better rather than for worst. 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 too, just vent and get it out. how many have heard this? thank you. most of you. this is an incredibly common belief that dates back to aristotle who was the first to suggest it and freud ran with it and people magazine has ever since. 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 for strengthening the friendship and relational bond 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, willing to take the time to let me express my emotions. here is the problem with venting. if all you do, talking about what happened and how you felt and they are seo, it is terrible, what did you do next and they said that that leads to rumination, you're ruminating together with one another and it turns out that can be good for relationships, but it doesn't help you work through your chatter because all you have done is rehearse the negativity so you leave the conversation and feeling good about the person you spoke to, you've got my back, but just as

upset if not more upset after you finish talking to them so the scientific formula for getting good chatter support from other people involves doing two things. you do want if you are the support provider, the person who is there to help someone else you want to take a little bit of time to learn what the other person is going through, to hear them out, learn about the circumstances but at a certain point in the conversation you want to start nudging them to look at the big picture and our problems when we experience chatter feel all-consuming, we are focused on the problem at hand. when we look at the bigger picture we can often find solutions to our problems that make us feel better and other people can help us do that and that sounds terrible but have you dealt with this in the past or big picture, this is one event, won't happen again and so forth and so on.

that is the formula for providing good chatter support. there are two take homes and a caveat i want to quickly mention. the take-homes are if you your self find yourself wanting to talk to someone about your chatter think carefully about who you go to for support. i have three or four people that i go to when it comes to personal issues, 5 or 6 professional. that is my advisory board if you will, it is a powerful resource i have at my disposal and i make use of it. i will admit, we are on tv, aren't we? i got to be careful here. there are people, tell me how i do here. i may not be able to go home. there are some people in my life, not my nuclear family and others that i'm very close to. i love them dearly, they love me, dna determined these

kinship bonds if you know what i mean. i never talk to them about my chatter. i know they want to help but their way of trying to help is to stoke the fire further asking me what happened and making me feel worse so i am selective about who i talked to so that is one take-home. the other is when someone comes to you with their problems and their chatter be mindful of these two principles, you have a scientific blueprint for helping them so take some time to listen and try to help them go brought. the final caveat i will throw to you is there is an art to doing this well and what i mean by that is depending on the person and the problem some people need to spend a little more time expressing their emotions before they are ready to start having their perspective broadened so to use my wife as an example, i love

you if you are watching, sometimes my wife will come to me with some chatter she is experiencing and i will be there for her and listen and learn about what she's going through and at a certain point when i see my opening i will say, totally get it, can i offer you, can i give you my advice and she will stop and look at me like just listen. okay. then she keeps going and i try to broaden later. other conversations, the kind of chatter she will come to me and i listen and i see my opening, can i offer my advice, please tell me what to do, that is why i am here, you want to be delicate as you feel that out. that's how to take people and turn them into an asset rather than a liability. >> before we get to the toolbox you go through in some detail, when do you know you have

surpassed the skills of your board of advisors, when do you seek real professional help? that was not covered a lot in the book, that was of some concern, when do you know you are 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, talking about audiences that range from middle school kids to executives and everywhere in between. chatter is a common experience. if there's one thing you leave here with, just know that if you experience chatter at times, congratulations, welcome to the human condition. this is part of life. having said that chatter can morph into more serious problems, psychological disorders and in which you want to get more focused and concentrated forms of help beyond what i talk about in the

book, indications you might want to talk to someone else or if you find your self experiencing chatter for at least two weeks and to a degree that it is in pairing your ability to live the life you want to live on a daily basis that is an indication the run-of-the-mill chatter is morphing into something more disconcerting and if that happens i 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 would like to open the toolbox. as i read through things, three different things, you want to go through that. it is rife with lots of great anecdotes and examples we can relate to and how we deal with controlling our inner voice, go

through that. >> i like to break -- what has science taught us about how to manage this inner voice we have that is usually helpful but can sometimes be harmful? i talk about 26 different tools in the book and you can find these tools falling in 3 categories, things you can do on your own, ways of shifting the way you are thinking that can help you to harness this chatter, then how to harness relationships with other people, then there are environmental tools that exist in the physical world around us, too involved in the physical environment in particular ways. there is no magic tool, the journals often ask what is the

one thing, to manage chatter. what i know is people generally use multiple tools and the challenge we all face is to figure out the combination of healthy tools that works best for helping you manage your chatter. >> i want to go into depth on each of the different boxes of tools if you will, looking at self, what self-control kinds of tools, meditation, ritual, all kinds of tools can help us structure, reorder things in our heads. can you go through some examples? self-help first? >> one kind of tool that is useful for helping people manage chatter is distancing tools and there are a bunch of these i talk about, first thing

to keep in mind about chatter is when we experience it what happens is we zoom in narrowly on the problem at hand at all we can think about, tunnel vision, what we've learned is when you are in that space, the ability to take a step back and think about your experiences from a broader perspective can be really useful. one tool we have studied a lot in my lab and i use this tool myself that's useful toward the end is something we call distant self talk and what it involves doing is using your own name or the second person pronoun you took coach your self through a problem. one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better -- do we have a microphone problem? we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. how many here have been in a situation where a friend or loved one comes to them with a

problem they are experiencing chatter over and don't know what to do, driving them nuts, they present the problem to end it is easy for you to coach them through? welcome to the human condition. we can advise other people much better than we can advise ourselves, what we've learned is you can use language to shift your perspective, to get you to think about your self like you were someone else and it involves using your own name. climb struggling with chatter, all right, ethan, here's what you are going to do and i start problem-solving accordingly. lots of research shows this can be effective. you don't want to do this out loud while walking down the streets of tucson. if you can feel compelled to do it out loud, have earbuds in your ears so it looks like you are talking to someone else but there are people on record using this tool during stressful times, throughout history, dating back to julius caesar, henry adams, lebron james, jennifer lawrence and so

forth, so that is one really simple thing you can do when managing chatter, give yourself advice like you would give advice to your best friend and use your name to help you do it. another easy tool to implement is something we call temporal distancing or mental time travel. this is my 2:00 am chatter strategy. anyone here have 2:00 a.m. :00 am chatter? it kind of stinks. when i have chatter at 2:00 a.m. i don't start meditating for 20 minutes. i can barely think at 2:00 am. i don't have resources to do complicated things. instead what i do is i remind myself that whatever it is i'm worrying about a 2:00 am which often has the form of being a life ending by the way. whatever is at 2:00 a.m. this is it, i am usually like fired or in jail or dead by the time the chatter is done.

i remind myself you are going to feel better about this in the morning because i always do because in the morning when my brain is firing at full force i have the ability to think these true and awake i cannot suffer. this is mental time travel. when you travel in time in your mind and ask how will i feel about this tomorrow or a week from now or 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 is temporary. it will eventually pass. that does something powerful, it gives us hope and hope is a very powerful antidote to an inner voice run amok. at another distancing tool. many others of the source, you asked about rituals. we will switch gears here.

a flavor of the richness of what is out there. how many people here are thinking rituals when they are stressed out? how many partake in religious rituals, spiritual rituals? fair amount. how many people stop to think about what ritual actually is? let me tell you what it is. i talk about rituals as a kind of ancient chatter fighting tool that in many ways our cultures give up when dealing with chatter. if you think for example what happens when we lose someone we love many of our religions give us things to do, precisely when that happens. there are morning rituals which are incredibly common that our cultures give us. what ritual is, you can define a ritual as a rigid sequence of behaviors you perform the same

way each time that are infused with meaning. in judaism for example when someone dies, you dress in black, let your hair grow. >> the other microphone -- >> the microphone is playing. >> the question is, did you hear the last 15 minutes of what i was saying? should i start again? rituals. did anyone hear what i said about rituals? anyway. here is the deal. rituals, chatter fighting tool, here is where they work. when you experience chatter you often feel like you are not in control, your mind is taking over and running away from you. everything feels in disarray like you don't have order. one of the ways rituals work is they provide us with a sense of

order and control because a ritual is something you can do and it leads to what scientists call a state of compensatory control. you are compensating for the lack of order and control you feel when your mind is racing. i think something. this is also why cleaning and organizing can be really good. who here is a stress cleaner? who organizes? a lot of you. i will share a personal anecdote. i'm not a particularly orderly person. i think i am relatively clean but in terms of order i am the kind of person who usually, there's a trail of clothing from the shower to the bedroom closet in the downstairs and yet when i am experiencing chatter, what i do first is neatly stacked all the books and papers in my office, then i go put my clothing away, then go into the kitchen, wash all the dishes, scrub down the

island. i am doing that because it provides me a sense of order and control. one added bonus of engaging in a ritual is it can be good for your relationships with your partner. i sometimes think my wife would like me to experiencing a chronically low level of chatter because she's pleased with how the house looks. i hope she's not watching right now. rituals provide us with a sense of order and control. many rituals we engage in are done in a religious or spiritual context which helps broaden our perspective and provides us with a sense of meaning and a sense that if there is a higher power whether that is a religious power or spiritual force that is going to ensure that your life is in order, what is meant to be is meant to be leaving it to the

universe to decide this prevents us with a sense of order and control because there is that other force that is going to help us out. that is a way religious rituals can help with two pathways. >> self hypnosis and all those tools that 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 thought streaming through our heads that are paralyzing us at times are just mental evens separate from ourselves, one of the things meditation strives to do so meditation is a great tool. my only caveat about meditation is the way meditation is often promoted is -- in popular culture. this is in part a consequence of capitalism is it is promoted

as a 1-size-fits-all cure-all and we know that is not the case. meditation works really well for some people but less so for others so it is one tool amidst the broader toolbox vote we possess of tools a, one of the deck i would like to throw in related to meditation concerns living in the now. how many have heard that you should strive to always be in the moment? we will do some myth busting here. you ready for this? if you think about it, one of the things the distant wishes 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 time travel into the future and that

can be the source of enormous pleasure and innovation. a few weeks ago my family went on a wonderful vacation, the kind we couldn't do for several years because of covid. i regularly find myself savoring that experience. i'm going back in the past and thinking about what i was doing with my wife and kids and how wonderful that felt. that brings me much joy. i'm also transporting myself into the future regularly thinking about the next vacation. i am also planning for the future, i'm thinking, earlier today i thought about what i wanted to say to all of you so i didn't just show up here, i don't know what i am talking about so i am constantly moving in time in my mind, not just in the moment. i think what we want to be teaching people how to do and striving for is to learn how to be better mental time travelers, the mental time travel machine sometimes breaks down and we find ourselves

stuck in the negative past or the worrisome future and when that happens, focusing on the present can be really 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 in our minds. >> i want to comment again on the ritual of playing tennis for 6 years and i love the comment about, tennis players, rafael nadal and his ritual of the thing and the thing and the thing and he says his greatest demon is what is in his head and he does these rituals like we all do, am i going to double fault or put this -- that kind of ritual of calming your mind 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, you could go into some detail about the placebo effect. i would like you to comment about the research you have done with that and how a belief in something helping you can work, whether or not there is an actual physiological mechanism that you are promoting. >> how many people here have a lucky charm they like to clutch? keep doing it because science says it will help you if you think it will. that's the placebo effect in a nutshell. the placebo effect, what it refers to is the power of our belief to actually bring us in the context of chatter some emotional relief and it has been well documented for centuries that if you can dupe someone into believing that

doing something or maintaining some possession will make them feel better often times that is exactly what happens. in the book i tell the story of anton mesmer, the person who was responsible for the term mesmerism which you are probably familiar with. 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 involved 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 feel better. it turns out that the medical treatment was a total fraud, the person who demonstrated this was none other, interestingly enough, than

benjamin franklin who was moonlighting in paris at the time that mesmer was there. we've known about the power of belief to structure our thinking for ages. often times just taking a sugar pill is as powerful for relieving our depression and anxiety as an antidepressant medication. lots of studies attest to this. mild and moderate forms of depression and anxiety a sugar pill works as well as an ssri. that is powerful if you think of the side effects associated with these active active drugs. so for a really long time we have known this, but there is one important element that has prevented folks like yourself from using this knowledge to help people which is you can't lie to people, you can't give them a medicine and say this pill will make you feel better, trust me and give them a sugar

pill, think of the lawsuits, malpractice would go way up. over the past 10 years there has been 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 and convince them that this thing, this bracelet you are wearing, there's nothing special about it but if you believe it will make you feel better it actually will, if you can convince them of that you can still benefit from this placebo effect. we have done this research in my own lab, show them you get reductions in how distressed people feel using narrow measures, this is really powerful because it suggests we can harness the power of

placebos without lying to people. >> we have talked a bit about self-help and interpersonal support and lost on the environmental, the outside control with the rituals. do you want to expand on that? i constantly every few weeks do a to do list, that helps me organize my thoughts about getting stuff done. what other tools do we have? i loved your examples of going back to nature. >> we talked about creating order and some of the tools i talk about in the book are things that you may be already doing but not really deliberately doing, you just stumble on them. one real value is it gives us the opportunity to be

deliberate. you don't just wait to slide into using a tool. the moment you sniff a little chatter brewing you have a plan and you will do these four things and then there are some tools that maybe you never know about or thought were wacky like talking to yourself using your own name lujan terms of environmental tools creating order, participating in rituals are two things you could do. seeking out awe-inspiring experiences is another. for those who live in tucson you are in and in the ideal environment, go out your front door and look around you. my god. it is amazingly beautiful. let me tell you about how this works lose our is an emotion we experience when in the presence of something vast and indescribable, looking out at this mountain range fills me with our. my god, this is so amazingly beautiful, even the cactus forest, is at the appropriate term?

i have never seen anything like it. it is amazing. it is beautiful. you can find this experience a lot in the natural world. amazing sunsets, looking up at the stars, these are common experiences, you can also find this experience in the world of human innovation, looking up at a skyscraper in a city or from the contemplating interplanetary travel which for a long time was the stuff of science fiction but nowadays we are doing it, we recently landed an suv on mars and it projects back imagery about that planet. how did we figure out, how did we go from struggling to start fires to landing spaceships on other planets? i don't have the mental apparatus to make sense of that.

when you experience this emotion and contemplate something vast and indescribable that leads to a shrinking of self. you feel smaller when in the presence of something vast and indescribable and when you feel smaller so does your chatter. experiencing this emotion, this is the ultimate perspective broaden her. lots of cutting-edge research shows this can be helpful for people in their struggle with chatter. one other way, i saw a note, 5 more minutes. once you get me talking about this, i love this stuff. one other thing i want to mention about nature. there' s another way enhancing your exposure to green spaces or in this case brown spaces where i come from michigan is gray and gloom, there's another way this can help us and it has to do with our attention. earlier we talked about the

book anecdote when you're struggling with rumination and chatter you can't focus your attention because chatter is consuming it. 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 to the beautiful surroundings, we call this getting stuck in a type of soft fascination, taking it in, you are not focusing really hard on the geometrical structure of the cactus plants. may be some of you are but most of us aren't, bad example but you are taking it in usually and what that does is allows our attention, all the attention we were devoting to our chatter, allows those reserves to restore so go for a walk in a green space, even

watching a movie of interesting green surroundings can be restorative and that's another way the picture can help us from the outside in. >> next 3 or 4 minutes one other discussion and that is social media and kids and chatter and when you introduce the idea of controlling conscious thoughts with children particularly with the onslaught of terrible news in social media out there, the big topic we could spend an hour on or for a few minutes and line up for questions in a few minutes. >> when to start with your kids, as soon as they start with social media or express an interest in wanting to do so. we've learned a lot about how you interact with social media, ways that are harmful as opposed to helpful and sharing that information is important. there are a couple ways social media can be quite bad for our

chatter. one thing we know social media allows us to do is curate the way we present ourselves to the world so 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 doing this. i assure you it was one shot they were after and they were trying to get the perfect selfy which they will then filter in photoshop and post. what we've learned is this is normal human response, we are always curating the way we present ourselves to others. i wore a jacket here, i don't always wear a jacket on sunday afternoon, we are always curating the way we present ourselves but there are limits to our ability to do so in the physical world that are absent on social media so we put our grammar shops and grammar

tweets out there and what happens is other people i then bathing themselves in the curated lines of others which can lead them to feelings of envy which in turn create chatter and so forth. that is one way social media can get kids and adults in trouble. the other thing social media allows us to do is just vent. we know people like to express their emotions and social media and our smart phones allow us to do it the moment our emotions are active, son of a -- tweet. there is one other important element of a 1-way social media changes the way we express our emotions. in everyday life when communicating with other people, we are awash in a rich source of information that comes from the people we are talking to, facial expressions, giving me all sorts of information, i see people who are engaged in some folks who

aren't, but this provides me with information that modulates how i talk to you. even on the phone we hear people's vocal tone, we can tell if they are engaged or if we are being rude. on social media that information is absent and allows us to say things to other people we would never say to their faces. it allows us to act in some cases ugly which promotes things like cyberbullying and trolling which are significant problems now facing 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 too. looking at the ukraine situation social media has garnered tons of support but it can be an achilles' heel as well. if anyone has questions we invite you to the microphone right up here and please project, we would like to hear your questions, we can repeat them if you can't hear them.

>> i was surprised you said talking about it can be negative and i'm wondering if there's a difference between men and women where men want to get right to the solution and for me talking about it is the way i figure out how to solve it to extend the energy, wonder what your science says about that. >> my working memory, only so much attention at the end of the day. if you talk about it in a way that lets you come to a solution that is fantastic. i don't mean to imply we should not talk about it. we want to talk about it in a way that gets us to a point that you are ending up. seems you are expressing your emotions and working through it at the same time which is what we want. in terms of the gender difference, interestingly enough there is this myth that

women like to talk about things more than men. that has been studied and it does not hold, men have just as strong a need and desire to express their emotions and talk to people about it as women. eyesight this research in the book, it updated my views on that as well. >> women aren't from mars and women from venus? >> they may be from this planet, may be from different continents. >> second question comes from the political realm of reading the cult of trump, the mind control, scientology and the trump uses like, thinking can grow rich and i can't think what his name is, the ones that trump models himself after, the positive language, i was

reading that that is not effective but tony robbins using something much like that. what i am wondering is in terms of chatter the idea of positive chatter versus negative chatter, when does this become into negative mind control and what authoritarian organizations use and when it can be a positive thing that the athlete focuses on so that he succeeds? >> great questions. i sure hope none of these tools are used to help people mind control others. any tool can be miss abused. 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 am a scientist. it is very important me this work is grounded in science, doesn't mean in the future we won't learn new things that update how we think about what is in there at the time of the book was written the best cutting edge in terms of what we know so with respect to some of the other practices i think there may be some interesting elements in their but until we subject that to science we cannot know how much is placebo kind of intervention. so i will leave it at that. >> at some point it gets to be the narcissistic personality, stuart smalley, our franken on snl, people love that thing where he become self inflated and it is self-taught but if it

is not based in reality it can be a negative implication. >> i hope i don't flub this. i will ruminate on it for a long time. >> you are not going to. it is going to be great. >> when my mind gets carried away and i can't think about other things it goes and goes and seems a circuit breaker just stops and i just think about something else, sometimes it could take a day and sometimes an hour and am i crazy or unique or both? >> you really want an answer to that question? you are absolutely not unique. that explains in part -- that explains in part how mental time travel, temporal distancing strategy works because the circuit breaker does switch eventually for you. it turns off and when you think how will i feel about this in a week or a month, you are reminding yourself in that

moment that you will eventually feel better and that often takes the edge off the chatter. there's some interesting stuff that looks at the duration of our chatter and it varies depending on what the source of the chatter is, whether his anger, anxiety or depression, but most of the experiences we have surrounding chatter fade over time. my hope is teaching people about these tools, what it can do is shorten the time you are stuck in chatter. people ask you are an expert, you studied this your whole career, you ever experience chatter? yeah. what i am really good at is the moment i detect the chatter bowling ending -- beginning to proliferate is a set of tools right away shortens the period of time so thanks for that excellent question, you didn't flub it. >> i would like to ask a

question about the impact of social media going back to that, something i am concerned about is the echo chamber affect social media has on a lot of commentary, the inflammatory opinionated comments and it almost at least to me sounds like that aspect of social media could be a breeding ground for the negative kind of venting is that you discussed and i was curious what are your thoughts on that and do you have any thoughts on how we could implement a solution to prevent social media platforms from being this epicenter of negative venting? >> we completely agree. it is a tremendous problem.

we do research on this in my lab. there are two solutions to addressing this issue. we don't have solutions yet. one thing that will make a difference is teaching people about how this all works. social media has been a giant experiment and we have stumbled through it without teaching ourselves or our kids how to navigate the space. think of the analogy between the online world and the off-line world. the moment our kids are little we teach them how to navigate the physical world, don't go here, go here, don't talk this way to this person, talk this way. haven't socialized kids into how to use social media. we have enough science to begin to do that, the culture of cure ration, talk about how social media makes it easy to act in

ugly ways to other people and i'm curious what effect teaching people how this works might have on their actual behavior. another thing we can do that is more challenging, people who are designing programs, my hope is they use this science to change the way these platforms operate to make it more challenging to get stuck in an echo chamber characterized by rumination of a sort that can lead to violence and moral outrage, from the power of social companies to leverage the science, to inform how their product operates and the hope is they begin to do that. a great question. >> my question is about rumination. you described it in a negative context around ruminating on a

negative experience but can we ruminate on a positive experience that can lead to a negative outcome? >> great question. i don't know of any work, ruminating on a positive experience is generally talked about in terms of savoring. i will often actually prescribe savoring to people so i will say, we do a lot of research on distancing and the ability to reason objectively, try to work through them, do that when focusing on something negative, but when it comes to something positive my advice is to immerse yourself in that experience. when i am having fun on the soccer field i don't want to be what are you doing? don't want to be stepping back. i want to be totally engaged in that experience. i'm not aware of any work that

shows that ruminating on positive stuff can get us into significant trouble. >> thank you. >> my therapist says the episodes of chatter that i have are episodic. i am not sure she is right. she is no kind of scientist. >> the heck with her. >> she's really sweet but i am not sure i believe that. if that is true, is there a way to plan for this. or is it cyclic? >> i don't know that there is some regular predictability as to when we are going to fall victim to chatter. it would be great if we knew when it was going to happen

because then we could activate strategies before hand to prevent that from occurring. life is filled with chatter triggers, chatter landmines, sometimes i log into my e-mail and there it goes, someone says something that gets it going. going. the best preparatory work i think you are anyone here could do, is familiar self with different tools that are out there. that can be really powerful because although you can't necessarily predict when you will start experiencing chatter, the moment it activates you have a plan, you know exactly what you can do when the chatter strikes. when you've got that plan and identify tools that work for you, may not be the tools you talk about when you identify substances that work for you that will nip the chatter in the bud much quicker than it would if we just run on its own.

>> one quick question please. >> ruminating on venting, and it is not solvable. victims of survival as a homicide victim. what they were doing can be fixed. >> there is a way of making sense, thank you for that question. there is a way of making sense, making meaning out of virtually any kind of negative experience. it doesn't mean all the problems as to why this happened, putting it in perspective. one of the influences on my thinking was austrian psychiatrist named victor frankel who wrote an amazing

book, man's search for meaning. in that book he talks about what allowed him to live through the holocaust after losing everything. he was a physician before the holocaust, then a slave in the camp, his family was murdered, and he found a way, a purpose to his life. he found a way to make sense of what he was going through that ultimately allowed him to persevere and live a flourishing life after. why that purpose and meaning i think we can find in any circumstance. can often be really difficult to identify when we are immersed in the chatter. >> on that uplifting note, i am reminded as a sailor trying to control the wind, we can't control the wind but we can trim our sails, we can control conscious thoughts and in her

chatter. thank you for coming. >> first ladies in their own words, our twee 8 part series looking at the role of the first lady, their time in the white house and the issues important to them. >> it was a great advantage to know what it was like because education is such an important issue both for governor but also for a person. that was very helpful to me. >> using material from c-span's award-winning biography series 1st ladies. >> i am very much the kind of person that believes you should say what you mean and mean what you say and take the consequences. >> c-span's online video library will feature first ladies lady bird johnson, betty ford, nancy reagan, hillary clinton, laura bush,