Dr. Ethan Cross
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Okay. So my last question, then I'll give you the punchline is when you go to lift weights, do you do more than just exercise your biceps with curls? Of course. Okay. Of course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
That's the kind of response I hope this book and conversations like the one we're having can help push people towards that awareness, that of course response when it comes to thinking about the tools we use to manage our emotional lives. The question should not be, what's the one thing you do to manage your emotions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The question should be, as far as I'm concerned, what are the tools you use to manage your emotions? Depending on the goals that I have at any given point in my life, when I go to the gym, I'm doing a range of exercises. I may be doing some cardio, high interval training, calisthenics. I'm blending in different things because there are different components to physical health.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
What we have learned is that the same is true when it comes to managing our emotional lives. Our emotional worlds are incredibly nuanced and the goals we have are not always the same when it comes to emotion management. So why on earth would there be one tool that all of us can benefit from? It just doesn't make sense and the science don't support it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So that was another insight I got from Bubby and Papa. So they ended up being a, quite influential in my life and I wish they were here for me to tell them about it directly now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Absolutely. And I think the fires are a great and tragic example of how important it is to be able to manage our emotions effectively for our own well-being and survival. You know, I was actually just in LA last week, and I had to evacuate on Wednesday evening. When I arrived, the fires weren't really raging at all, and they just took off. And I was able to see some of that devastation firsthand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And It was tragic, and it was an inherently deeply emotional experience that required a lot of empathy, people banding together to support one another, but also the ability to manage some pretty potent emotional responses, sadness, fear, anxiety, in order to take action to protect oneself and one's loved ones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Sadly, as I think this tragedy stretches out, we're going to need more help managing our emotions just given the amazing devastation that is occurring. It is a parallel to what we're talking about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So Matt is just such an interesting character. He was a Michigan alum who, after graduating, became a SEAL, deployed, was a hero, came back, became a SEAL instructor, and then actually went to Harvard to get his leadership degree and was selected by the president of the United States to carry the nuclear codes or selected by whoever selects such an individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And so he has this just unbelievable personality. record of achievement. And for me, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about him before I interviewed him and became friendly with him was this guy must be a robot, right? Like emotions just don't enter the equation. given the kinds of extraordinary things that he has had to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And in our very first meeting, he swiftly dispelled me of that notion. And when a Navy SEAL of his level of accomplishment and physical prowess dispels you of something, you believe it very quickly. So I was very happy to change my mind. Essentially what he described was his experiences of emotions, both positive and negative, were vital to his success.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Not his ability necessarily to shut them down, but he described the emotions he experiences as information he acted on that was useful for helping him determine how he should respond to different situations. And these emotions that he experienced were present throughout his experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The seer school experience that you asked about so seer school for those who are not familiar with that acronym is a school that you send. I think primarily military personnel to. teach them how to deal with the possibility of them essentially being abducted or trapped behind enemy lines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So you put people in different really uncomfortable situations, and uncomfortable is putting it pretty lightly, as John, I'm sure you can attest firsthand, so that, God forbid, if someone finds themselves in one of these situations, they have some tools they can use to manage them and to survive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So we're talking about not eating food for days, being held in cages, all sorts of really aggressive kinds of interrogatory. Is that a word? Interrogatory? I don't think it's a word. They were like mock interrogations and other things of that sort. Well, what am I missing? Give me more color here. water, simulated waterboarding, maybe?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I'm glad you were there to help illustrate it in more vivid detail. And so it's a grueling experience. But what was interesting about Matt's time there is that he was filled with all sorts of negative emotions when he was going through it. He was angry and frustrated and concerned about he had these training missions that he was going to be doing these cold water training up in, I think, Alaska.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And he's in order to be fit for that you need muscle and he found his muscle depleting because he wasn't eaten and so would he be able to accomplish those missions and alongside all those negative feelings he was having he also was falling in love with the woman he would eventually marry who was in the literal cage across the courtyard from where he was being kept in a cage
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
and he was flirting with her during this training exercise and in the process of doing so falling in love and so he's a perfect example of someone who i think many of us think shouldn't feel emotions and should just be robotic yet if you asked him hey would you give up your ability to experience any different kind of negative emotion or positive he would say no what he was really skilled at is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
experiencing those emotions learning from them but not allowing them to mushroom too greatly so not allowing those experiences to those emotional experiences to be triggered too intensely or for too long and that is the challenge i think that we all face when we think about how to manage our emotional lives i'm a proponent of the idea really strong one that all of our emotional experiences when they are triggered in the right proportions and contacts
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
are useful. I benefit from my ability to experience anxiety and sadness and anger and envy and jealousy. All of those different responses They tune me into specific features of the situations that I'm encountering to help me manage them more effectively. Give you a couple of examples. Anxiety. Anxiety captures my attention and focuses it on a potential threat that is looming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's effectively telling me, hey, dopey, focus. You got to prepare for this thing. It's important. When I think back to some of the engagements that i've had that haven't gone as well as i would have hoped they're the ones that i felt zero anxiety about as a result i had no cue inside me To trigger me to focus and prepare. So I didn't take envy. We think of envy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's one of the deadly sins, right? Like, it's uniformly bad. It is not uniformly bad. Sometimes I look at someone who I'm envious of and that then provides me with a target to aspire to achieve what they have accomplished. Now I've got something I can shoot for. So I'm reframing that envy as a way of, it's a kind of North Star of sorts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And you could play this game with all the different negative emotions we experience. They all have a functionality to them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, there are lots of ways you could tap into hope if that's the target. Our ability to both strategically wield our attention, what we focus on, and then how we focus on it, whether we're reframing or not. I think those are two specific cognitive tools we possess that can be really helpful for boosting hope. And let me give you a couple of concrete examples because that's a little abstract.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
things feel really bad and we're really sinking into the doldrums sinking into despair or we're finding ourselves really anxious or anger angry for that matter when we experience these big negative emotional states we often zoom in on them and what is driving them in that moment so we're focusing on the worst parts of the experience which makes good sense because what is one of the first things we're taught to do when we have a problem growing up
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
roll up your sleeves and deal with it, right? Don't avoid it. So that's what we often reflexively do when we're struggling with things. And it often perpetuates that negative experience. All of us, though, have had this experience that I'm going to describe probably millions of times, certainly hundreds of thousands, probably millions, depending on how old you are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the experience is as follows. And tell me if you disagree, John, like truly tell me if you disagree. we experience something and it triggers an emotion, that emotion activates. And then as time goes on, the emotion eventually begins to fade in its intensity. most of our emotional experiences follow that temporal trajectory, that time course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
They're triggered, they rise, and as time goes on, they fade. Some emotions rise more intensely than others, some fade more quickly, some take longer, but almost all of them follow that time course. Now, we lose sight of that in the moment, but
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
If you jumped into what I've called your mental time travel machine, and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this thing tomorrow, next week, next year, in 10 years when I'm dead? That is a powerful way of automatically making accessible the understanding that what you're going through is temporary. It will eventually fade. And when you have that recognition, It gives you hope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It gives you hope that things are going to get better. And that can be a powerful bomb when we're struggling with negative things. You know, I worried about something happened just yesterday that I was having some second thoughts about, oh, crap, did I say the wrong thing? And didn't feel good in the moment or in the immediate aftermath.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And then I asked myself, how am I going to feel about this next week? Instantly, I was reminded of the fact, John, that I, Ethan Cross, have put my foot in my mouth tens of thousands of times. And that doesn't feel good in the moment, but it usually amounts to nothing. And instantly that turned things down. So that's one way of finding hope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The other way of finding hope is to wield your attention onto things that are inspirations. So we do this often too, and this can be a kind of attentional deployment, right? Like if you're really struggling with something, try to find something in your life that is the source of hope. Something that just makes you really excited about the future and what lies ahead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage, a difficult home situation or problems at work. Life is constantly throwing curveballs at us. Sometimes it's not just that we don't hit the pitch. Sometimes we have the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing fastballs at our heads is the way it sometimes feels. And he's hitting us too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
For some parents, this is their children, grandparents or children and grandchildren, business owners or employees. It can be hope for future accomplishments. There's an infinite number of things and ways we can find hope. And so that would be another tactic that people can use if they're motivated to do so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
well what a great question and i wish there was a one-line answer but there isn't so let me do my best so one thing i think that is important to keep in mind is that we human beings are meaning makers one of the ways we navigate the world is with this motivation to constantly make sense of the world in which we live we need to make sense of it because if we understand this world and the place we
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
occupy in it, that makes this world easier to navigate. And as a general rule, that's like a general guiding motivation for human beings. We want to be able to navigate the world easily. So if we have meaning and purpose and we feel like we matter, that's great. Things feel right and we don't have to, we could just focus on the task at hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Oftentimes, the times that people get stuck is when they can't find meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
don't feel like they matter when that happens it's like a giant red button is pressed in your brain that says stop pay attention figure out what's going on here so that you can start feeling like you do matter and have meaning so that we could get on with life the way it's supposed to be lived but we're for having trouble developing that sense of purpose and meaning we often struggle we can ruminate about things we can experience
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
complicated negative emotions like anxiety and sadness as well. So finding meaning is really important. Being able to manage your emotions when you're struggling to find meaning is also really important because We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage or a difficult home situation or problems at work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Life is constantly throwing curveballs at us. Sometimes it's not just that we don't hit the pitch. Sometimes we have the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing fastballs at our heads is the way it sometimes feels. And he's hitting us too. And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And that's really where the science of emotion regulation comes into play, because we evolved this extraordinary capacity to experience emotions. And remember, emotions are tools. They're useful. You want to be able to feel anxiety. to motivate action, to focus on the task at hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Anger, when you perceive that there's some transgression, some violation of your understanding of the world, and there's an opportunity for you to fix things, anger is a powerful little message that propels you to do that. These are useful, but they are often unwieldy tools. And the gift that we have also been born into this world with is the capacity to manage those emotional states.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So on the one hand, we evolved this wonderful brain that allows us to experience all these emotions and these different kinds of shades and textures and blends. But we also co-evolved all of these different capacities that we can harness to manage those emotions. And the key is accessing those tools that we possess to rein in those emotional responses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And that's what I hope the book helps people do. Number one, simply introduce you to the tools that exist. And then number two, offer you some guidance in how you can use those tools. If we go back to the gym metaphor here, if you don't know how to work out, right? You just show up in a gym and you're looking at equipment like you can very well get hurt if you don't know how to use that equipment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the odds are that you don't just walk into the gym and you know how to seamlessly weave these different exercises together in a way that's going to dramatically improve your health right away. There might be some stumbling, some trial and error that you do in the gym and you find, oh, this is making me
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
My biceps a little bit bigger and my calves a little bit plumper, whatever you're trying to achieve. But it's not going to be the most efficient thing. I would argue that that is kind of how a lot of us navigate our emotional lives right now. We stumble on exercises. that sometimes work for us, oftentimes don't, sometimes even get us into trouble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the value of science here is that it doesn't, it's not can. Science provides us with a guide to introduce us to the exercises that are out there and to teach us how to begin to weave them together to help us achieve the emotion goals that we have. And that's, I think, the real opportunity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I will do so on one condition, which is when this podcast airs, you subtly have this song begin to play in the background as we talk. I call them shifters. What is a shifter? If you think about a shift, we want to shift our emotions. We can shift them up or down or make them last longer or shorter. So then the question is, well, what are the shifters that are out there?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, the first one that is often overlooked is what I call our sensory shifters. Senses, sight, sound, touch, smell is just a few examples. These are very powerful tools for pushing our emotions around. And when I use the word powerful to convey that not only can they generate very different kinds of emotional responses, but they can do so relatively easily.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And what's remarkable to me about these sensory shifters is that we all are intimately familiar with them, but we often overlook them. So there's this one study that asked people, why do you listen to music almost 100%
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
of the sample indicated they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel emotional but then if you ask people last time you were anxious angry or sad what did you do to change the way you felt Between 10% and 30% use music as a tool. Just 10% and 30%, even though close to 100% of people readily acknowledge that music is a powerful modulator of their emotional experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's not just people out there in the world who don't often think about sensation as a tool to manage their emotions when they're struggling. It's this expert that you're talking to right now as well. I'm using that expert title a little bit jokingly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I mean, I've listened to music my whole life, and it wasn't until this experience I had with my daughter that I began to start using it strategically. She woke up, was in a kind of morose mood. It was bumming me out because at the time that she was playing soccer, I looked forward to this weekend event throughout the week. It was like my release. I loved just watching her play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
and she just didn't want to go is in a funk and and then we get in the car and i put the radio or whatever you call the i don't know streaming device whatever we call them nowadays on and don't stop believing just came on and you know i can't help myself i start jamming out to that song i'm bopping my head i'm humming i'm singing and then i look in the rear view mirror and i see danny
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
without even knowing it, is like bopping her head along and she's into it. And that was really surprising because normally she tells me my choice of music is terribly embarrassing, but I guess that's a universal, that song.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And next thing I know, we're like, we're having a ton of fun in the car and we pull up to the soccer field and she just darts out of the car and, you know, scores seemingly a gazillion goals that game, as far as my memory tells me. We know memories are fallible, so... We won't fact check that detail, but she did do really well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And it was just this wonderful example of how sensory experiences can modulate how we feel super fast. And so since that moment, number one, we've done some research on this topic. We actually published a paper identifying this as a bit of a blind spot in the areas that we work in for emotion regulation researchers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
But I now have playlists that I have on my iPhone that I go to to help me reach certain kinds of goals that I have. I've got some pump-up music. I have some calming music. And it's a tool right there, and I avail myself of it all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, these are tools that organizations and other entities are wielding all the time. to trigger emotional responses in you. I mean, just think of not just the hotel and restaurant industry, which I talk about in the book, but think about every international airport you go to in the duty-free zone. It is populated by perfumes and colognes, right? This is an entire industry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I don't know what the number will put on it, but it's a pretty big one, I think. This is all about how scents are being applied to our skin to trigger emotional responses in other people. Typically approach, although we know that odors can also elicit the other kinds of response as well. Just take a ride in a New York City subway if you want the other experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
But these are some of the tools, and this is just an example of some of these tools that are hidden in plain sight that on the one hand, We've all experienced them. But I don't think a lot of us are consciously wielding those tools to help us reach our goals, our emotion regulation goals on a moment to moment basis throughout our lives. And so there are lots of shifters that take that form.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
You've probably worked with them, but you may not have realized it. Then there are shifters out there that you've never encountered before. And then we go even outside of the shifters that exist within us into the next part of the book that deals with how our interactions with other people can shift us. Our interactions with our physical spaces can shift us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And then we talk about culture more generally to think about how do the cultures that we are a part of shape our view of our emotional worlds and how we can manage them. And what role do we play as individuals that can shape the cultures that we belong to, to not only help ourselves, but to help other people that we work with and live with do the same?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
As you know, we were just talking offline. I've been looking forward to this for a while and I've missed you and I've been tracking all of your successes. And so it's great to be in the same virtual room with you again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, in some ways, culture is the most powerful shifter that exists because it's ever present. We are bathed in it. It is like the air we breathe. And what does it mean to be a part of culture? Well, culture determines our values and beliefs. So do you think you can control your emotions? Do you think you should control your emotions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Culture is influencing those values and beliefs that we have about emotions and emotion regulation. Culture is also providing us with norms. Norms are rules, both spoken and unspoken, that guide our behavior throughout our lives. And so culture is shaping the norms that govern the way we behave on a moment to moment basis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Is there a norm in your family or in your organization for talking about emotions or bottling them up? We have norms for all sorts of emotional behaviors that are then impacting us and those around us. And then culture also can give us practices tools that we use to manage our emotions. Rituals, as an example.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Families have rituals, organizations have rituals, some of which are designed to help us manage our emotions. Families, we often teach our kids and our loved ones how to manage our emotions. Employees, bosses, mentors are constantly mentoring those beneath them, ideally. without a deal with adversity. Adversity, by definition, an emotional experience in those kinds of organizational contexts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So culture is the kind of, what's the word I use for, they use for this in the book? It's the big kahuna of shifting. It's impacting it at every level. And the reason I think it's so important to start thinking about the role culture plays in our lives is because
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
on the one hand you're parts of different cultures so if you understand what culture is beliefs and values norms practices you can start getting in there to maybe push the culture around in a direction that you think is more beneficial for you and those that you love if though you find yourself as in part of a kind of culture that is toxic with respect to emotion emotion regulation and there's not much you can do about it
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
You can make the decision to leave that culture too. And that is a noble decision to make when that culture is working against you. And I think thinking about culture through the lens of emotion regulation makes it a lot easier for us to start reasoning about how to change culture, when to join new ones, leave them and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The best place to go is my website, www.ethancross.com. And there's information about Shift, my lab, my old book, and lots more. So check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We have a few days left and we're going to savor it because it was a wonderful ride last year. And even this year, although we've had some downs, we ended on a pretty positive note with two huge wins towards the end. So we're feeling pretty good in Ann Arbor. I'm going to embrace that because there have been years in which we haven't felt that way, which is actually like a perfect segue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We haven't even planned it into the topic of my book on managing our emotions, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I'm happy to, and they were very much and are related. So my first book, Chatter, dealt with the question of how do you manage the voice inside your head, which is often a really vital tool when you find that it starts ceasing to be a tool and starts to become your worst enemy. And what I'm talking about there is when
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
we start perseverating on things worrying and ruminating incessantly that mental chatter builds up to the point where we have problems thinking and performing relationship issues and even find that those nasty conversations we sometimes have with ourselves get under the skin to influence our health and that was a topic that i've spent a lot of my scientific career investigating
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Why does that happen and what tools exist to help you talk to yourselves more effectively? And the book came out and fortunately it was well received and I went on a book tour. And the experience I had on that book tour was really quite interesting because
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
as an author, and you know this, John, you work so hard on a book and you hope it's received well, but you don't really know until you get out there. And so I'm out there and I'm finally talking about all these ideas that I spent so much time writing about and researching, and it feels great. And then I get to the Q&A and effectively time after time, the experience I had was people saying,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
this is so interesting. Thank you so much. They lob a question or two about chatter, but then they start going off in all sorts of other directions. Like, well, what about anger and sadness? And what is an emotion? And should I try to manage them? And what do you think about being in the moment? And it just, the list of questions went on and on and on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the experience I had, and I write about this in my new book is it felt like I had just given a talk on how to deal with heart disease. And people were grateful for that information. But they also had questions about how to optimize their physical fitness, avoid cancer, reduce the risk of diabetes, and a slew of other questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And so when I took a step back, really, I think the opportunity that emerged was to write something about our emotional lives, which is a topic, of course, that we are all so intimately familiar with from the time we are born.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
actually before in the womb too there's you know likely we're experiencing various kinds of emotional states but we don't get a user's guide a science-based accessible user's guide for guiding us through that emotional world that we are bathed in all the time. And so I got really excited about that topic and shift was my attempt to address it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So it is, you know, it's like, welcome to your emotional life. What are emotions? Why do we have them? And most importantly, what does science have to teach us about what we can do to manage those emotions? All of them. When we find that they cease to serve us well and actually start conspiring against us because they're activated either too intensely and or for too long a period of time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So Dora and Izzy, as you mentioned, were my grandparents, and their story was one of the first I can remember hearing about growing up. And it always captivated me, and it still does to this day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
They lived in a relatively small town in eastern Poland where adolescents, teens, young adults around the time that the Nazis invaded, they were Jewish, and they effectively witnessed their loved ones be slaughtered and narrowly escaped that fate themselves. lived in a series of ghettos in the frozen Polish woods for years trying to evade capture. And
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The interesting thing about my grandparents was they were exceptionally emotive and loving. They did not talk to me about their experiences during the war. And I would ask them as a curious kid, hey, Bubby, Papa, what happened? Tell me more about it. These are heroes. It was like G.I. Joe. And I just wanted to know more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The only time I got a window into their experience was they would hold these Remembrance Day events one time a year with other members of the town that survived and ultimately moved to the states and during that one day a year i would see them fall into tears and and just describe atrocities that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around. I mean, I sit here right now at home.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I've got my daughter, who's a little under the weather, upstairs safely and snuggled up in her bed. And I'm looking out to the snowfall and I've got a fire in the back. I mean, life is really good and sweet. And their lives were really good and sweet. And yet they... just ended that version of their life so quickly. It's hard for a human being like I think any of us to contemplate that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So I only heard them talk about their experience just one time a year, never any other time. And as I got older, you know, and I learned more about psychology, what was really fascinating to me was it sure seemed on the surface that my grandmother in particular was avoiding talking about these experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And one of the first lessons I learned early on in life from my parents, and then it was reinforced in graduate school, was you shouldn't avoid focusing on things. Avoidance is bad because If you avoid it, the wound never heals and it'll just come back to haunt you later on. Yet by all accounts, my grandmother was actually doing pretty well. This was not a depressed or overly anxious woman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
This was a woman who saw her position in the world elevate. She moved to the States with nothing, worked really hard, saved up enough money to ultimately buy a home and even have a winter escape in your part of the country in Florida during the snowy winters. but she avoided. And what I ended up learning later on, I write about this in the book is that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I think this uncovers one of the myths surrounding emotion regulation that a lot of us buy into, which is this idea that avoidance is always toxic. It is not. And the science now pretty compellingly demonstrate that that is not the case. There are times and places when strategically avoiding emotional triggers and cues can actually be quite useful. And I'll give you a couple of examples.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Sometimes, and I speak from personal experience, I will get triggered, an email, something really bothers me or a conversation with someone at work or, you know, I will admit sometimes it happens at home too. Shocker, sometimes I get into an argument with my partner or my kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And I've discovered that actually, right when those emotions are first triggered, sometimes the best attempt to work through them right there in the moment is not the optimal solution. A better strategy is to take some time away, whether it be a few minutes, hours, even days, and then come back to the problem later on. And when I do, I've got more more bandwidth. I can think more objectively.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I can relate to the other person if it's an interpersonal problem more effectively too. That's an example of using avoidance strategically, right? Taking a break to then come back. Sometimes I take a break and I find that the problem just melts away because I realized it just wasn't significant in the first place and I was magnifying it excessively. Now, of course, there are instances where
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
taking that time away, the problem just continues to surface and that can be a cue to engage more deeply. But the point here is that avoidance isn't uniformly bad. It is a tactic, a tool that when used strategically can be quite effective. And so that was just one insight that my grandparents' experience provided me. The broader one, and I'll throw it back to you, is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
that there are just no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. I think we as human beings love the prospect of finding such solutions. There's something really seductive about this idea that there's a single tool or two you can use to be more emotionally fit, to be happier and more successful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I get asked all the time, what's the one thing you do to manage your emotions? It's a question I can't answer. because there are no single solutions. Do you ever work out, John? We haven't talked about this before, but do you exercise frequently? I just went to the gym earlier this morning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Okay, good. You're prepping up. And my memory of that podcast is that we're covering some different ground here, which is good. Let me ask another question about your gym experience.