Dr. Ethan Kross
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I remember being just so exceptionally curious about... what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it. And whenever I would ask her questions about this, she would always say, don't ask me why or what happened, why is a crooked letter?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That was a phrase she would use, which was really interesting because she didn't speak English very well at all, heavily accented language, but she'd mastered this curious idiom, like why is a crooked letter? In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things. Your life is awesome. You're in a safe place. You have a loving family. Just enjoy life.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So she's trying to shelter me. So she, for most of the time that I would know her during the year, she would never focus on this horrific event that she experienced, except one day a year where There would be this remembrance day and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about or I would listen to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would come out. So she would dose herself.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
her exposure to the emotional information. Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention. She was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her, but at other times when it didn't serve her well, she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that This capacity to be flexible in how we wield our attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really, really useful asset. And so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing, a problem, or always avoid it, they aren't always true.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation, I mean the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surrounding it, is in being really facile in how we can deploy our attention.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Oh, I mean, our emotional lives are anything but straightforward, but we do have guideposts to steer us in how we deploy our attention. And so a couple of common heuristics that I like to use and describe to folks is, so let's say something bad happens. and you divert your attention away. You distract with a positive distraction, not a harmful distraction. And then the problem doesn't resurface.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Keep going. You don't have to go back in time. I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue. So my parents were divorced. And I dealt with the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life. And When I think about it now, I don't get upset. I understand why it happened. I love both of my parents. I've moved on. I'm well-adjusted.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
is all emotions are functional when they are experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long. So sadness, as an example, is an emotion we experience when we've experienced some loss that we can't rectify right away. Something has happened and you can't fix that. So you've lost someone. And so what does this emotion do? Well, it...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak, and he will often bring it up. And when he does, I'm like, well, we don't have to talk about it. I'm actually totally fine. This isn't a source of ongoing distress. Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives. And when that happens...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well. We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing. If, on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting, and we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting, that is then a cue, okay, well, let's focus in on it.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then once you focus in on it, of course, there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience. Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation. So getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance. And we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things. We can look at it from different perspectives. We can focus on the silver lining. We can contextualize it. So you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus, but you don't always need to refocus on the problem. So you want to be flexible.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Flexibility and how you deploy your attention is really the mantra that I personally live by based on what I know of how all this works. There are a couple of caveats I wanna throw out there. When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding, I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are not productive like substance abuse. We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding, not good. So you wanna be balanced.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. I mean if the problem keeps – like you want to listen to what your mind and body are telling you. And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it. But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis, which may not be positive, negative experiences, as time moves on, sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks, like you have to do it this way, that tends not to work out very well.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's a religion in the city that I live in. That's right.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So we actually, it's called the Big House, actually the largest football stadium in the country. So close to 110,000. Whoa. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. And we sing in unison. And it's actually, I never really was into football before moving to Ann Arbor. And now I embrace it. It helps when you're the national championships, which we were champions, which we were last year.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
hijacks the way we are thinking, feeling, and our bodies are responding. So it motivates us to introspect, to turn our attention inward, to reflect on this situation, to now try to make sense of it. Something really important in my life has happened. I now have to change the way I'm thinking about my life so I can find meaning and move on.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Congratulations. We're working on it this year.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We should definitely have you out there. It is a load of fun.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. So emotional contagion is a very powerful phenomenon. Emotions can spread within seconds. They tend to... We tend to catch emotions more quickly when we're not sure of how we should be thinking or feeling in a particular situation. So we often are referencing other people in those instances as a source of information. The people around us, of course, are different.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
a rich source of information. This is also why we compare ourselves to other people so frequently, right? We're trying to learn something about how to respond. And we know it can have these cascading effects, both in everyday life, in both the positive and the negative direction. But also, you know, in the digital world, we see these emotions that can spread really fast too.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So it's a very powerful phenomenon. It's one I'm often very attentive to when I come into the classroom, like you're trying to... You tend to not want to have a negative mood spread through an audience when you are teaching to them. And so you're sensitive to that kind of certain kinds of displays or tones that might convey that kind of emotional response.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I think it's something that we need to be increasingly aware of, especially when we're working in any kind of group context. Like when you're working in a team, it is really important to keep the team engaged.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
at the level of emotional tone that you feel if you're the leader or even just a member of this team that is committed to it, you want to keep that tone at the most productive level because if it dips below or above, that can sabotage how well you perform. And there's a lot of research on that.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
My physiology is slowing down so I can engage in that slow introspection. But what's also really interesting about sadness is it's also impacting my facial display, giving a sign to all of the people in my environment to say, hey, Maybe we should check up on that person, that guy, because he looks like he's on his own in a corner, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I'm very, very attentive to this when I am in group context, especially when I'm leading those groups, those teams, those labs, like really making sure that that kind of negative mojo does not, does not spread.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, you know, I haven't experienced firsthand the phenomenon that you're describing in the classroom, but obviously a lot of my colleagues have, and we see this playing out on lots of universities. These are very turbulent times. Turbulence activates emotion, and we know going back to...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
an earlier part of our conversation when people experience strong emotions are often motivated to share those emotions with other people. That often takes the form of vocalizing them and that can elicit contagion throughout. And so now we're beginning to actually understand how the emotional processes are making their way through people, groups, and societies.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
What should you do in those circumstances? Well, I think it depends a lot on the context and what the nature of the emotional response is. And is the emotion becoming really counterproductive or harmful? And there are differing views about when you should intervene and how to do it. I think in general, though, you bring the playbook of always wanting to
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
kind of validate like your emotional experience is a genuine response that you are having to the situation. In most cases, yes, we can try to purposefully experience an emotion in a duplicitous way. But I think in a lot of cases, the kinds of phenomenon we're talking about, like these are just honest emotional reactions. These are really difficult times. And I think
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And trying to understand where those emotions are coming from is often a really great first step. I mentioned to you before we started talking that I had this wonderful conflict mediator come to one of my classes recently to talk about how do you not just engage with emotional groups, but how do you engage with others?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
emotional groups at the same time that are having emotions because of one another. And the approach that she has found to be very successful in her career as a mediator is to ask folks, to train them, not to enter conversations to try to change each other's minds, but to enter those conversations with
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So can you detect when someone is sad, if you see like a sad facial expression?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
a state of humility and curiosity and genuine interest in first and foremost trying to just understand the other group's position. I haven't done that myself, but it strikes me as a pretty viable approach to a first step to having conversations about difficult issues. And it makes me think about how in the lab we often define wisdom. So wisdom is...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
this concept of it indexes how well you are able to deal with social situations involving uncertainty. Like we don't know how these social situations are gonna play out and wise individuals are skillful in navigating those circumstances. How do you define wisdom? What are its features?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, a few of its core features are humility, recognizing that I don't know everything, a commitment to perspective taking, putting myself in the other person's shoes,
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
um dialecticism recognizing that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are changing and we need to be aware of that and then also a general orientation towards the social good like doing good in the world and it strikes me that entering these difficult situations with that kind of mindset is potentially productive for um for bridging divides i love that and um
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Great. And presumably it's available for pre-sale now or soon? Yeah, it's available. And it is essentially designed – it is written – to kind of just open the book on what emotions are, what we often get wrong about them, and what are the tools that we have to rein them in.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And my hope is that it addresses this big problem that I think we've been facing for a while, which is how to wrangle these emotions that sometimes get the best of us.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, thanks for having me. It was an incredible conversation. So I appreciate it. I feel the same way. Thank you so much.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And it enhances social interactions. And so some people are really good at detecting it. Others are really good at displaying it. I'm gonna go back to my daughter. So if something happens where she feels sad, she exhibits this exaggerated response like she'll stick out her lower lip. And even if I'm kind of upset at her, like it is amazing the power that that has on me.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It is so, so beautifully manipulative. And it's a testament to the power that these displays can have on us. So I wanna go back to one other question you raised in your last comment, and we'll go back to the inner voice and its functionality. You raised the question about being shifted by others, other people, and perhaps either just our surroundings, music or spaces.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Sometimes you don't want to have your emotions be shifted. And in fact, when other people try to do that, it can elicit what we call reactants. Like you get defensive because I don't want you pushing me in the particular direction.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think that's a really important point that we need to be aware of as people living and working in these social environments where we're often well-intentioned, but sometimes our well-intentioned behaviors can backfire. And so there's this beautiful research which shows that
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them, that can blow up in your face. Because what it does is it often communicates to people that you are thinking that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances. And most of us, like, we're motivated to think that we're capable of handling ourselves.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so there are still ways you can help people in those circumstances. It's called providing invisible support, which involves providing support to the person who can genuinely benefit from it, but not shining a spotlight on the fact that that is what you are doing. So how might this transpire? There's some really simple things you could do. So let's say my wife is...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
really overwhelmed with stuff. And she hasn't asked me for help, but I know she is at her wit's end, work and kids and other kinds of stuff that are on her plate. I can proactively do things to lessen her burden. If it's her turn to pick up the dry cleaning and the groceries, I'm doing that voluntarily. I'm doing that and I'm not coming home and saying, hey, sweetie, look what I did today.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I did all these things. Can I have a pat on my back? That's not what we're talking about. It's about your group, your lab is working under a deadline, right, to submit a grant application and they don't have time to eat and you proactively have pizza delivered to the lab. It's those little things that can help. Give you two more examples.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Let's say that someone on your team is really struggling with their ability to translate their work for for popular audiences and that's something they're motivated to do. Really important skill for a scientist to be able to translate what they do for others to consume.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Before you pull them aside and say, hey, you know, I noticed that you're stumbling on a few different issues and here are a couple of things I think you can do better. Before you do that direct intervention, you might have a team meeting where you share out best practices. Hey, what are the two things that I've learned that really have benefited my ability to communicate with different audiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
What you're doing there is you're getting people the resources they can benefit from, but you're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you are directing it to them. So it's kind of a back doorway of helping or of shifting. The last tool I'll mention brings it back to sensation. one of the most powerful ways we can shift other people is, is through touch, tactile sensation.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Um, you know, what's the first thing that you do with a child to soothe them when they are born? Hold them, hold them. Skin to skin contact. I remember, uh, both times my, my kids were born. It was like, you know, I want to get on that. Like, you know, cause my wife got first, first dibs with, with both of our daughters. Like I want some of that, you know, skin to skin contact. Uh,
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That doesn't end after we leave the womb. The comfort that we experience, the release of stress-fighting chemicals that occurs when affectionate embraces are registered, that continues throughout the lifespan. So if my daughters who don't particularly like dad to volunteer advice to them on most things nowadays.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If I know they're having a bad day, I'll go over and I'll rub their back in a totally uncreepy way. That is an important caveat we should give to everyone who's listening. What we're talking about here is affectionate but not creepy or unwanted touch. It is touch that is mutually desired. And there is some research which shows actually that when it is not desired, you don't get these benefits.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And in fact, you get the opposite, plus usually like lawsuits as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah, there's a beauty to it. And, you know, it is a tool. It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for... I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all. We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure. But, you know, self-control, emotion regulation, like let me roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions. And some of the tools that we have are effortful. One example would be expressive writing, this wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences. You sit down, just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days. This is the Pennebaker. This is the Pennebaker writing effect.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect-free, you could argue, intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We actually just re, um, restarted, uh, a prestigious speaker series at Michigan, the Katz Newcomb speaker series, which is, um, designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work. Um, Because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity. And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effortful. But we also know that We don't like exerting effort as a species. We like to conserve our resources as much as possible. So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And these sensory shifters, music, looking at images, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
These are modality, taste, touch. These are ways of pushing your emotions around pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch, like when your daughter's not in a great mood or when you want to get pumped up before an important event, can be quite useful. And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So that's my plug for sensory shifters.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Let's go back to just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides. So we talked about Juve. Verbal working memory, keeping verbal information active for short periods of time. And we talked about simulating and planning things, like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to... self-control and motivation.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So you exercise, because you've talked about exercising.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You ever talk to yourself when you exercise? Oh, all the time. So let's hear it. The world wants to know, Andrew, what do you say to yourself on your exercise?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But you have a very rich inner world, right? Your verbal working memory stream is filled with words when you are working out.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, you know, one of the reasons why the Pennybaker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized. And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You're an idiot, such an idiot, or you're looping over a problem without making any progress. Putting those words in, actually taking that inner she-man and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do. Because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences. There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all. It can go in all sorts of directions. And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality. So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not, if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right? Because I would be unable to
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall a chatter-provoking experience, so think about something negative that's happened to you, and then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it, so i.e.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
a Penny Baker writing-like condition, or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking because there's no guardrails to the way we think. That we are taught, I should add, because we're going to give people guardrails later in this episode.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people... How are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID? And we gave them... a series of tools that they could check off if they used the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Number one, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for folks. So remarkable variability characterized the tools that work for person A versus person B. Number two, it was seldom the case that people used one tool.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
In general, people used on average three or four tools each day, which I think is another really important take home because I am often asked as, for example, what is my favorite tool for managing emotions? I don't have a favorite tool because I'm typically using multiple tools and most people are doing exactly the same.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So it's kind of like what we're learning about emotion regulation is in some ways it's similar to physical exercise. You're not only going to work out your rear deltoids with the same exercise every day. You would have like funky looking shoulders if you did, right? And you'd probably be pretty weak in lots of other parts of your body. You're doing multiple things.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And the multiple things that you do to exercise, I'm guessing, are different from the multiple things that I do to exercise. Yet we may well be equally fit. Well, you may be a little bit more fit than me, but you get the drift. So there's this beautiful... variability to how we manage our inner worlds.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
To bring it back to expressive writing, we found that expressive writing, when people used it, was really, really useful. It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety, but it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much. And I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I was trying to – I actually – Isn't it amazing, by the way, when we're in those situations – and I know exactly what you're talking about because I was pretty sure I was in exactly the same position – The things you do in those circumstances to get some insight are wacky. Like I'm sure you were Googling things that – you had no business Googling these kinds of decision trees and – Oh, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So it speaks to this idea that, first of all, there are no one size fits all solutions to addressing many of the big kinds of problems and decisions we have to face. So there are different modalities to self-discovery and insight. And yes, you can think very rationally and work it through and write about it and have conversations with other people. And then you can also allow your
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
unconscious problem solving machinery to do its thing. We don't understand completely how this works, but we do know that your experience is not infrequent. many people report having moments of insight when they are not otherwise engaged. And one line of thinking is that we are doing problem solving behind the scenes that we're not aware of and the solutions are bubbling up to awareness.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So I actually, this may be the wrong usage of terms, but I weaponize this process for myself. So before I exercise, before I get on the treadmill or row or do whatever I'm gonna do, I will load up the particular issue that I'm trying to find a solution for. Sometimes it's how to word a paragraph. It might be if I'm working on a book, how to find the right kind of story.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If it's an interpersonal issue that I've got to... smooth over, I load that up. And then I just get on the device. It's usually an aerobic exercise that I'm doing. And I just, I don't really think about it in any fixed way, but inevitably the ideas, the potential solutions bubble up into awareness.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That is a real valuable tool that I possess that I think allows me to have success in various areas of my life. It also identifies one of the reasons why chatter can be so unbelievably pernicious. So we didn't get to all the benefits of the, there's one more benefit of the inner voice that I want to get to, but I'm going to take a detour here for a second because I think this is really important.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If we think of chatter as the dark side of your inner voice, you're basically continuing to loop over the same problem in your head without making any progress. What if this happens? Why did this happen? I'm such an imbecile. You're just continually going over that negative problem. phenomenon or experience. You're not making any headway.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
One of the things that that does is it consumes our attentional resources. It acts like a sponge that soaks up those limited resources. And so what that means is when I get on the treadmill or rowing machine, and that's typically the time that I spend innovating, coming up with solutions that allow me to progress personally and professionally,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I don't have, my mind's not working to solve those problems. Instead, it is stuck dealing with this other muck where I'm not getting anywhere. And so we actually see, if you look at the literature, that one of the ways that chatter undermines people is it interferes with their ability to focus and solve problems. And that's just one way it undermines people, but that is a huge, huge liability.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I would say even more than an association. So we often think of chatter as what we call it is a transdiagnostic mechanism. So it's a mouthful that predicts various kinds of mood disorders. So what that means is chatter refers to a process, a process of looping, turning the same material over and over in your head. The content of that looping can take many different forms.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You could inject some sad cognitions in there. I'm a shit, such a shit. Is it okay to say shit?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I actually boxed in high school.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I would agree. In any case, I promise not to leap across the table if you do the same. Fair enough. Deal? Deal. So basically chatter refers to this process of looping over and over. If you inject some sad cognitions in there, I'm an imbecile, I'm never going to live up to my potential, I don't belong here.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So then you get, if you take that to an extreme high intensity and you perseverate over time, then you're getting towards depression. If you inject anxiety-provoking cognitions, oh my God, what if this happens? And what if that happens? And you go down that path of uncertainty and fear, well, that leads you to more of the anxious route. And if you are filling that loop with anxiety,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
traumatic memories and reminders of really painful experiences, you can get pushed towards trauma too. So it is a process that cuts across many different really serious conditions that we grapple with in society. But I want to also be clear to folks who are listening that If you experience chatter, that does not mean you have any of those disorders.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If you experience chatter, welcome to the human condition, my friends, because most of us do at times. And so we often don't experience it as intensely or for long stretches of time, which tends to characterize some of those clinical groups.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, let me tell you about a couple of things that I do personally. Because as we try to regulate lots of different emotional experiences, different tools work for different people in different situations. There are...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
upwards of two dozen or more science-based tools that I covered when I wrote Chatter, when I got into Shift, the broader train of regulating your emotions, there are even more tools out there. So I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone. My first line of defense when it comes to Chatter are two distancing tools. So
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When I'm using the term distancing, what I'm talking about is not avoidance per se. We should talk about avoidance later. But what I'm talking about when I say distancing is the ability to step back and view myself from a slightly more objective perspective. And it turns out there are many different tactics that exist for doing this. One tactic that I find very powerful is language.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So I can manipulate the words I use to refer to myself. So I will often use my name and the second person pronoun you to try to think through a problem. Ethan, how are you gonna manage this situation? If you think about when we use words like you, they are the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. And when you use your name and you to work through a problem,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
it's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you to relate to yourself, like you're giving advice to someone else. And it turns out that's a really powerful tool because one of the things we know about human beings is we are much better at giving advice to others than we are taking that advice ourselves. Have you ever experienced this, Andrew? Gosh, no.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But you're taking special steps to be able to align yourself with the advice that you would give to someone else. Like reflexively, sometimes we stumble, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it's interesting. If you go back to when Facebook first came on the scene, one of the early prompts that it would use to get people to contribute textual information to, do you remember what this was? What is on your mind? So you would be cued to share what is on your mind.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And, you know, in some ways you could think of various forms of social media as providing people with a giant megaphone for their inner voice. It is literally asking you, or it did, what is on your mind right now?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We should come back to that because that's also modifying your your spaces, which is another tool that I think is underutilized. So we should talk about that too.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's remarkable and not always bad. So we often talk about social media like it is a de facto harm to society. There are negative features of social media that are well documented. There are also some, I would argue, redemptive qualities to it. I'll give you one of my personal ones, which is sometimes like to unwind before bed, I'm thinking all day.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I wanna just watch some ridiculously funny short reels. Yeah, raccoon videos. Yeah, I mean, you know, my wife looks over at me and she's like, what are you laughing at? And then I sometimes I show her and she goes, why are you laughing at that, right? So, but, you know, the algorithm has learned the specific kinds of funny videos that I like. And no, I'm not gonna tell you what they are.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And it just lightens the load. And so that's a way that I'm using social media very strategically to shift my emotions in a direction I want them to be shifted
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
At a certain time, I think when we talk about social media and our emotional lives, the real challenge we face is how to learn how to navigate these new digital environments in ways that serve us rather than serve against us and undermine our goals. We basically got thrown into social media without any rule book.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We're the experiment. But if you think about it, it's a new environment. We were born into this physical world and our parents, our caretakers, from the time we were able to understand things and probably before, they were teaching us, they were socializing us how to navigate this space profitably. They don't just like Lord of the Flies throw us into the world and let us kind of figure it out.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Outcomes wouldn't be likely as good as they are for us if we didn't have the kind of instruction that we receive. And we're only now developing that knowledge base to understand, hey, here are the healthy versus harmful versus benign ways of of navigating social media. And I'm talking about social media now, like it's this unitary environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah, so I think this is a great question because the inner voice is something that we carry with us wherever we go, but we don't tend to learn what it is, right? And actually, sometimes I get up there and speak to people and... they often wonder like, what is a purported serious scientist doing talking about a squishy topic like the voice inside our heads?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Different social media applications, of course, have their own norms and rules of the games. You could think of them as like little different countries. They have their own little microcultures that you wanna learn how to navigate. And scientists are really busy trying to understand how they function, but it's tricky. And it's tricky because creators
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
can change how these applications govern by a press of a button, right? You could change the way the algorithm works and then you've got to start over to some extent.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's a shifter, but this is a perfect segue back to, you know, you asked me about the tools that you recommend for fighting chatter and I'm telling you about the ones I use. So there's a second tool that I will use automatically when I detect the chatter brewing and I call it my 2 a.m. chatter strategy. And I call it my 2 a.m.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
chatter strategy because every seemingly like four to six weeks, I will go to bed happy and content. And then I'll wake up at 2 a.m. and like it is all going to hell really fast. What time do you typically go to sleep? Usually around 11, 1130.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So the tool that I use actually implicitly activates an idea like the one you are describing. So at 2 a.m. when the chatter strikes, and by the way, you say like, oh, this is common. This is more than common. When I present to audiences and you know, thousands and thousands of people over the years. And I ask, hey, you ever get 2 a.m. chatter? Maybe 2.30 a.m.? All the hands go up. This is a...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I don't want to say universal affliction, but it is an incredibly common problem that people struggle with, like the chatter at night. So what I do is I use something called mental time travel, mental time travel into the future. And what I do is I ask myself, and I typically use my own name to do it, so I'm blending Another distancing tool, distance self-talk.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I said, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this tomorrow morning? No matter how bad the chatter ever is at 2 a.m., to your point, when I wake up the next morning and my brain is fully awake and I have access to my prefrontal cortex and I can think constructively about things, it is never as bad that next morning as it is in the middle of the night.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And it turns out that this is a remarkable tool of the human mind. So when I use the term inner voice, what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on things in our lives. And it turns out that's a type of Swiss army knife that we possess. It lets us do many different things. So just from the outset, Let me distinguish chatter from other inner voice operations.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We, of course, have learned that over time because how many mornings have we woken up in our lives? We could do the math. If I was more sophisticated, I'd do it on the fly. I can't, right? But like many, many mornings we've experienced this, like chatter at 2 a.m., at 7 a.m., Not so bad.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So when you jump into this mental time travel machine and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning, next week, next year, 10 years from now? What that does is it activates this understanding that what you are going through, as bad as it may seem, It is temporary. It will eventually subside. And that does something very powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It turns the volume down on it, which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed. So the official name for this tool is not mental time travel. It is called temporal distancing. And it's a flexible tool. You can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem, how are you going to feel about it tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now. And it's another way of broadening your perspective.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's another kind of distancing tool that has a lot of science behind it. So those are the two of the cognitive things that I do on my own. And And that nips a significant chunk of the chatter that I experience in the bud when it happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I should add that because I know about what chatter is and I know about how these tools work, I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing. So people will often ask, Hey, do you ever experience chatter? Like, yeah, of course. Pinch me. I'm a living, breathing human being. I do at times.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But I'm really good at detecting it and then implementing tools in an almost automatic manner. If this happens, if the chatter strikes, then I'm going to coach myself through the problem using my own name and you, and I'm going to jump into the mental time travel machine and ask myself, how am I going to feel about this in the future? Yeah.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If that's not sufficient, then I'll go to like the level two response, which consists of if weather permits, I'll go for a walk in a safe natural setting. I always feel the need to give the caveat about safe and natural because where I grew up in Brooklyn, like the natural settings were the place you got mugged. So they were not safe.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But, you know, a park I find restorative, and there's a ton of work highlighting the restorative features of green spaces. But then what I'll also do is I'll dial up the chatter advisory board. So I have a couple of people that... I have carefully thought about what these people do for me when I have a problem.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And they importantly don't just let me vent my emotions or cathect, to use that term before. I don't just get it out. A lot of people think that the key to feeling better is to vent your emotions. There's research on this. Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people. It's good to know that We're buddies now. I could call you up if I'm struggling.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You're going to listen to me and empathize with me. That's great for our relationship. But if all you do is just validate what I'm going through and you don't take the next step to additionally help me look at that bigger picture and problem solve, I leave the conversation feeling really good about my relationship with you, but the problem is still there.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So, just venting ends up leading to what we call co-rumination, which can be pretty harmful. The people on my chatter advisory board, they know to first validate, empathize with me, learn about what I'm going through. They've got my back. They communicate that powerfully.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But then once they do that, they start working with me to broaden the perspective, to try to think through that problem, which I'm having difficulty doing sometimes when the chatter is really, really loud. And typically when I get to that stage, I'm in pretty good shape.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think of chatter as the dark side of the inner voice, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But having the ability to silently use language That is a boon to the human condition. So I'll give you a couple of benefits that it serves. What's your favorite sports team?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. It's a very interesting question. And there's not much data that I'm aware of directly linking chatter with with time perception the way you're describing it. But what does come to mind are our experiences of flow, which in many ways you might consider the opposite of chatter. Flow being this state where you're just in the moment and time is effortlessly passing.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
The demands of the situation completely match the skills that you bring to bear. It almost seems like the antithesis of what you're describing. When I think about time and chatter, what becomes most accessible for me is this tendency that we have to really zoom in very narrowly on the object of the chatter, on the thing that is causing that distress.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And we focus so narrowly on it, which of course makes a great deal of sense because what are we taught to do from the time we're little kids when we have a problem? think about it, share it.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Okay. Sorry for the Washington Generals. So if you were to go to a game and root for them, what would you say? Go Globetrotters. Go Globetrotters. Okay. Can you repeat that phrase silently three times in your head right now? Yes. Okay. You've just used your inner voice.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You got it on try number one, zoom in, focus on the problem, roll up your sleeves and get to the bottom of it. And so that's that kind of really, you're getting in there in fine grain detail. And that does work for us a lot of the time, but it turns out when you inject a lot of emotion into the equation, that can get really troubling.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that's where this zooming out, taking this broader view, whether you do that through visual modalities, imagination modalities like mental time travel. You could time travel into the future, like I've just described. You can also go back in time.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity, I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life or someone else's life that I know of when times were even worse and they got through it. And oh, if I got through that, well... sure as heck I can get through this.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so that's expanding our perception of time, our looking at that bigger picture to work through something in the present moment.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah, so people have looked at this, and my memory of this wonderful paper I think was published in Science. I think the title was A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. And basically the takeover from the article was that people spend between – well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it, what we can deduce is that people spend between one-half and one-third of their waking hours –
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
not focused on the present. So between one half and one third of the time, we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things. And this one particular paper linked that process with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse. I think there's huge levels of variability there though. I think being lost in thought can be a wonderful experience. I love, love, love, love Mind wandering.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think it's one of my strengths. It is the source of idea generation for me. It is also the source of emotion regulation. I will... One of, you know, my sleeping pill, metaphorically speaking, is... mental time travel. It's getting away from the present. It is fantasizing about the future, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system, basic system of the human mind that lets us do something that I think is both extraordinary, but totally ordinary also. Your verbal working memory system, it's a mouthful, lets you keep information active for short periods of time. So before we had cell phones, How did you memorize phone numbers?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Thinking about the good things that could happen, the potentialities, or going into the past and savoring some of the positive things that happen. I'm thinking about the soccer game where my kids scored goals or something good happened to someone I know or to me. And And that to me is a wonderful way of going to bed. That is mental time travel.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It is not being in the moment, which actually raises another really important point that I wanna get in there. And I'd love to get your take on this because in popular culture, we often hear that It's really important to be in the moment. This has emerged as a type of cultural maxim, like be in the now.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment, we sometimes think there's something wrong with us. Like, oh, we've got to train our attention to bring it back to the present. Being in the present can be very useful in many contexts.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And certainly when we experience chatter, we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, refocusing on the present, our breath, a mantra. Yes, lots of data support the utility of that. But I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time. And lots of amazing things accompany that process. If I can't go into the past...
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Not only am I not savoring positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life, I'm also not learning from my screw-ups, which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past. And if I'm not going into the future, then I'm not planning. I'm not simulating. I'm not fantasizing. So... We don't want to shut down mental time travel.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think what we want to learn how to do is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively without that time travel machine breaking down in the past, which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So being in the moment can be good, but it is not the end point I think we always want to strive for.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it often isn't, but it can be harnessed. And here's the way I think about texting and really how social media and the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want, how this has thrown a curveball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions of not just other people, but groups of people, and societies.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So when we experience emotions, we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others. There's this wonderful research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Ramey, who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions? And he found over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize it, to get it out.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And there are a couple of reasons for that. We want to relate to other people, get their support, but we also want to usually process it. In the pre-social media era, two things had to happen typically to share our emotions. First, you had to find someone. to share them with. And typically in the process of looking for someone, either to find someone face to face or via phone, time would pass.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Now, what we know about time is that as time proceeds, our emotions in general tend to fade. So there's this wonderful work on the duration of emotional experiences and our emotional experiences all follow a common trajectory. So something happens in the world or in our mind. We imagine something that is provoking in some way. Our emotions get triggered.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then as time goes on, they eventually peter out. And depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with, some people may peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly. Some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to subside. But they all follow that basic trajectory over time. So let's go back to the pre-social media era, right? So you got to find someone to talk to.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And while you're trying to find someone to talk to, time is passing. That's acting to temper our emotions. Now, once you find someone to talk to, either face-to-face or via phone, the moment you start talking, you are now awash in all of this feedback happening. This emotional feedback, whether it's coming from your face, like you're giving me all sorts of information right now.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I would benefit from smiling if you could. There we go. Thank you. I'm just joking for those who are listening. But I'm getting information from you. And if I'm talking to someone on the phone, likewise, I'm getting their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel. That is also working to constrain how we communicate with others.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And it's typically keeping our emotions, I would argue, in check, in balance, in proportion. We're stripping away time with social media and we're also stripping away that kind of emotional feedback. This enables us to release our emotions in a much more unfiltered way. And I think this is why you often have situations that people are saying things via text
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
or online that they would never say to another person's face or over the phone. And I think this is one of the factors that can promote some pretty negative forces in society. So cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage surrounding certain issues that might take a more constructive form if they were done in a different context. Now, that is not to say that social media
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Interesting. Well, it's funny. When I go through this content, I give talks or workshops, I often say, 2090501, repeat that in your head three times. That's my childhood phone number. I'm like, go give it a shot. Give them a call. So for all I know, that person may be getting lots of phone calls. It's not my phone number. Um, But that's your verbal working memory system.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
isn't useful for spreading certain kinds of messages that require attention and are deserving of collective distress, it can be an amazingly useful tool that brings about needed change. But I think we do need to be conscious of how interacting with this technology has really fundamentally altered the way we communicate emotional information.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I just got emailed this morning about And interviewed a fact check that I did in 2019. Yeah.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it can be. And I think AI, I think of it as a new tool that has amazing potential. And I actually think it has the potential to help us advance on a problem where psychologists like myself currently find ourselves fixed.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You go to the grocery store and you try to remember what you were supposed to get. Most people don't do that out loud. Like, oh crap, what was I supposed to get? Milk, cheese, eggs. You repeat that silently in your head. So that's one thing your inner voice allows you to do. Keep information active, verbal information. Your inner voice also helps you simulate and plan.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if I look back at the last 20, 30 years of research on emotion regulation, I'm talking here not just about managing chatter, but managing the whole suite of unwanted emotional states that we might encounter in our lives. What I can do is I can point to several individual tools that that are empirically supported, science-based tools.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Scientists have done a really good job profiling how these individual tools work mechanistically. They've often gone down to the brain level. They've looked at them in intervention context and everything in between. So we have a pretty good sense of how individual tools work. But what we are now learning is
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Individual tools are not the name of the game because we are often doing multiple things to manage our emotions and the combinations of tools we use Within people, they often vary across situations in ways that we don't completely understand. And there's variability between people as well. So the blends or cocktails of tools that are most beneficial to us remain to be illuminated.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if someone comes to me with a problem, I can go through all the tools in the toolbox. What I can't do is I can't prescribe combinations of tools and say, hey, For the kinds of problems that you are experiencing and the kind of person that you are, here are the four things that you should do, but that person over there, they should do these six things.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think AI has the potential with the right inputs to help us learn about those patterns that explain how to optimize emotion regulation on an individual basis. And that is a remarkably tantalizing possibility for that technology.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So before presentations or interviews, a lot of people report going over what they're going to say before that event.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. Isn't it remarkable that this is such a common human experience? And for most people, they never talk about this with anyone else because this is such a private experience. So I often start presentations with a quote from Rafael Nadal, the tennis great, him answering a question about what's the hardest thing that he struggles with. And he
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then I go to the audience and I say, hey, what do you do if someone comes up to you at a party and says they're struggling with the voices inside their head, right? Like that is typically warning sign, right? That maybe something is awry here and someone needs support. Yet, this is a very common feature of the human experience that we just never really touch on.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So to answer your question, is it common for kids to have imaginary friends and maybe talk to themselves? Yes. I believe this is called the study of pretense. According to one famous Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky, One of the ways self-control is first learned is actually through self-talk. And so what happens is you as a child will hear your parents telling you to do things.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Andrew, you should do this or don't do that and sit this way and not that way. And then what children will often do is go off on their own and they will repeat those kinds of messages out loud to themselves. And so if you've ever been around young kids, you've probably seen them talking out loud to themselves or playing with dolls. No, Jimmy shouldn't do this. Jimmy should do that.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Some kids do it in the form not of with an actual toy, but they have an imaginary friend in their mind that they are engaging with these different interactions. And what the kids are doing in those contexts, according to this idea, is they're practicing self-control. They are repeating the things, the messages that their caretakers have told to them, right? They are reinforcing it in those ways.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then as time goes on, and your sister demonstrated this, that outer voice becomes our inner voice. And we have the capacity to recruit that inner voice then throughout our lives. But it is interesting that during moments of extreme stress, Many people sometimes report actually talking to themselves out loud, right? And there's very little research on this. And a lot of this is anecdotal.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But I have, when speaking to a lot of individuals, they say, yeah, sometimes I will actually just start talking to myself out loud. And I thought something was wrong with me. It's always what I'm struggling with. like a major stressor.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if we go back to reviewer number two, right, in the academic world, I remember once I wrote this invited article and a reviewer did not say very nice things to me in this response. And I remember just walking, I was, it was so offensive. I remember walking around the neighborhood and I said, why don't you say that to my face? You know,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
and I was just repeating what they said and I was rehearsing it. I was getting more and more upset and then ultimately working through it. But it almost seems like in real moments of stress, we revert back to this very primordial way of regulating ourselves that we first exercised when we were kids, which is this self-talk.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so David has become exceptionally skilled at harnessing different voices, according to you, to manage the challenges that he is facing. I've heard David talk on a number of occasions, and I think there is another important point to bring up here, which is
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices, they're not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and be kind to oneself.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Quite the opposite. Sometimes, yes. And sometimes, this is important, because negative self-talk is often equated with harmful outcomes. Negative emotions are functional when they are activated in the right proportions. Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
remembering the first line of each paragraph in my head and then the rest just kind of falls out yeah we have a very similar similar style i will i will bullet out what the key ideas are and as long as i could bullet that out i am good to go but i will also rehearse those bullets in my head abcd so uh That's you using your inner voice as well.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if I go to when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where coaches are telling me to do really painful things, like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself. I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me, right? You know, you better like shape up, you know, you can't, you know, wimp out here. That serves a motivating function for me there.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per se. What is bad is if we start looping. That is what we really want to equate with chatter. It's getting stuck in those thought loops. That's when things get harmful, when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming. So yes, there is data linking going for a walk in a beautiful setting with feeling better. But But scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the various mechanisms through which interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us. And so there are two major pathways that I often talk about.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
One is interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative. So as we talked about earlier, when people get stuck experiencing chatter or other kinds of big emotions, our attention often fixates on the problem at hand. We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem, and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, when you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, you're surrounded by interesting cues that capture your attention in a very gentle way. So I'm talking about the flowers and the trees, the scents, the sounds. Our attention often drifts onto those features of our environment.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Now, most of us are not doing the equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying the geometrical structure of the leaves and the flowers, right? We're just kind of taking it in. But the surroundings are sufficiently intriguing to capture, to grasp our attention. And that gives us this opportunity to restore that precious commodity.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So there's work, there's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be cognitively restorative. That's another feature that, or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us. The other pathway that I just find so – this is so cool from a research point of view.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Going for walks in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. So in the arboretum near my house, there are these trees that have been there for hundreds of years. And you look up at these trees and you think, my God, like –
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You've been there way longer than me and my parents and my grandparents, and you probably will be there longer than all of my progeny. Like, wow, that just broadens my perspective. Or an amazing sunset. You can also experience this emotion through feats of innovation. So I'm a science geek, I guess you could say. And for me, the two biggest awe triggers are
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Now, before a big presentation like a live event, I will go over the opening to my presentation and sometimes just carry that dialogue through when I'm going for a walk around the hotel before the event.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Number one, the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces, which if you follow this, physicists have somehow figured out, engineers, how to take pictures of what the universe looked like billions of years ago. Somehow, I don't understand the physics. We can see what it looked like. This vast amounts of time ago.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And we also, of course, have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars, sending us back footage of that planet. So when I think of that, like we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet. this vastly expands. Like I am filled with awe. So when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that, this is the ultimate perspective broadener.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, guess what else feels smaller? So this is an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manage your emotions. And so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
They're waiting to be harnessed. And if you know where to look, you can often find them. And nature, by the way, isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist. There are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better. We often develop attachments to places, for example. So you're probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So there are these figures from our childhood that we often, though not always, securely attach to. They are a source of safety and comfort, and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners. If we're in positive relationships, as I am, love you, as to my wife, she is an attachment figure for me. Well, we also develop these associations with places.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort. Going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating. I know one person who discovered that there was infidelity in his relationship. And what really helped him get a grip on the situation was going back to his childhood home and sleeping in his bedroom at home.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That was the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life. That's an example of the power of places to affect us. So how many times do we think about, hey, what are the places that are my emotional oasis, if you will, that I can go to when I need it? We can also structure our environments. Like you and I are both talking right now across the table from one another.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We don't have our cell phones out on the table. No, not for me, not even in the room. Not in the room for me either. If we did and we had it facing up, we would be distracted, but we're not.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
This is not John Wick here.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so by leaving our phones outside of the space, we are managing our emotions in a very blunt and effective way. When laptop screens are open in my seminars, I know that I've already lost the battle because I know the object, the stimulus is so tempting.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
even if I'm the most captivating professor in the world, which I am not, I aspire to be captivating, but I know that I'm always going to lose compared to the screen, the email. I ask them to, yeah, no laptops in my class.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So far, so good. I actually explain to them the science behind this. I explain why I'm doing this. And I say that, hey, if I have my laptop open and I'm in your shoes, this is a divided attention task. I'm not able to focus as well as if I don't have it open. And in the courses that I teach, it's more about discussion and thinking through things.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So they don't really have a need to type notes for exams, which I think makes it easier for me. But modifying our space is really strategically, like this is another valuable tool in our toolbox. Like when we have people over for football watching parties, let's say, it's pretty common where I come from in Ann Arbor. And my favorite food in the world is pizza.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And we have this wonderful New York City style pizza place in Ann Arbor now. I will order vast amounts of it, much more than we need. And when the game is over, I will insist that everyone take it with them because I know if it is in the refrigerator and I open the refrigerator later that night to just get some water, if I see the pizza box, the queue,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
it will elicit a emotional response, this desire, this appetitive response to consume the pizza, which is not the goal that I have from either a fitness or emotion regulatory point of view. So I am structuring my spaces strategically all the time to give me the best chance of being successful at meeting my regulatory goals.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. I love the fact that you brought up songs there. So if you want to take a little detour here. So in my new book, Shift, we talk about, or I talk about how the different shifters that exist to push your emotions around and sensation, sensory experiences are one powerful, and I would argue often overlooked modality for shifting our emotions. So if you ask people, why do you listen to music?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. Your example of your advisors resonates so strongly with myself.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it entirely depends on my mental state. And prior to really getting involved in this space, I had no insight into why sometimes my office was a total mess and sometimes it is spic and span, unbelievably organized and clean. And so let me share with you some of the research in this space because I think it'll bear on this question you're asking.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
a lot of people find that when they are experiencing chatter, they reflexively start organizing their spaces. So I'm a great example of this. My entire life, if we called my mother up right now, please let's not do it. But if we did, she could attest to the fact that there would always be a trail of towels and clothing from the bathroom to my bedroom and all over the place.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And my office is similar, piles of papers and books. And that's when life is good. I'm kind of free flowing. I'm getting in there. I'm being creative. I'm generating ideas. And I'm not really worried about everything around me. In fact, I'm really good at typically like tuning out my surroundings to focus in on the task at hand. I
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When I'm experiencing chatter though, and this is true from the time I was little, I would always start putting things away. I would always start organizing things, making them nice and tidy. My office is always spotless. Sometimes I even take it further presently when I'm experiencing chatter. I clean up my office, then I go into the kitchen and I make sure that's nice and tidy.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And if it's really bad, like I'll clean up my kids' rooms and things like that. This is a very common experience. When you're experiencing chatter, you don't feel like you are in control. You're not in the driver's seat. The thoughts and feelings are taking over and they're pushing you in directions and to places that you don't want to be.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
What do you think most people say?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's an aversive state and it's chronically activated for a lot of people. Human beings... In general, we crave control. We like to know that the world is orderly and predictable. There's some survival value that that communicates to us, right? If we know things are certain and proceeding in a predictable way. Creating order around us compensates for the lack of order and control we feel inside.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Feel, right? It's about emotions, feel good. So one study, the number was around like 95, 96% of participants who were asked said exactly gave the answer that you just gave. But then if you look at in other studies, hey, the last time you felt anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to push your emotions around?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
It's called compensatory control. And this is the explanation that is often provided for why so many of us augment our spaces to counteract, in this case, our emotional state. And so I don't know if that perfectly answers your question, but it, for me, highlights the way that we are tightly tethered to our surroundings in some circumstances.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When I'm not experiencing chatter, it really doesn't matter if the place is nice and tidy versus not. Like, no big deal. But when I'm motivated to think, feel, and behave in a particular way, then my circumstances are becoming more important.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
The way I carve up the emotion regulation space is there are multiple shifters that exist and Some of those shifters are inside us. So there are these sensory shifters we talked about. There are attentional shifters. We haven't gotten into that yet, but we can shine our mental spotlight on or away from things that are causing emotions, and we can be strategic in how we do that.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
There are perspective shifters, the way we think about our circumstances, reframing, distancing. Those are all on the inside. But then there are also shifters that exist outside of us in our relationships, how other people can push our emotions in different directions. Sometimes other people can be amazing assets, sometimes tremendous liabilities.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
The number of people who report using music to modulate their experience drops way down 10 to 30%. Music is a really powerful tool for modulating our emotions. I actually, an unintentional parenting victory for me was when my youngest daughter was around five or six and I was coaching soccer. I lived for these experiences. soccer games on the weekend.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
There are physical shifters, like in our spaces, and we just talked about those. You can then go a layer out even further and talk about culture as a shifter. People talk about culture as the air we breathe, right? We are in different cultures throughout our lives. And sometimes we move from one culture to another within the day.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So, you know, if you're going to your lab or you're on campus at Stanford, that's one very specific culture with certain values and norms and weird practices maybe. That's no offense to Stanford, by the way, that's more academics. Academia has some weird practices.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If you then go to your podcast community, the team in the studio that we're sitting here, there's a different culture that characterizes the way you function here. And those cultures that we are a part of, they powerfully shape our emotional lives. They influence what kinds of emotional experiences we value. So what kinds of emotional experience are we motivated to have?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
They give us practices, rituals to meet those emotion regulatory goals that we have as well. So that's another kind of influence that I don't think we often think about, but that is really quite powerful.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Remarkable. It's science fiction. If we were to turn back the clock to when we were kids to think about what we have in our pockets right now or on our wrists or some people, the glasses that they are wearing, we probably wouldn't have believed that this was possible when we were kids.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah, this is a question that comes up quite a bit, and it's a really hard one to answer because we haven't, of course, been tracking people's chatter and emotion dysregulation levels over the centuries. I think it's absolutely true that we now have new forms of technology that
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
are perennially now presenting us with challenges that we need to figure out how to overcome, but they are also providing us with opportunities. So to be clear, I think social media and technology can and does do a lot of harm. And I think it can and does do a lot of good for us as well.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And the real challenge we face right now is figuring out how to navigate those digital technological landscapes. And I think we probably jumped into them without a user guide too quickly. And we're only learning now, 15 years later, or whatever the number is, that that was the case. But I don't know that I would... Well, I'll speak for myself.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I wasn't one of these overbearing coaches who would, you know, go crazy on the sidelines. It was just such joy to just watch these kids play. And typically my daughter was really excited to go to the game. But one morning she was just like not into it at all. She was bummed, like she was bummed out. It was bumming me out. I was, you know, catching her emotions. We
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think net positive, there's a lot of good that has come from these technologies. If we think back centuries ago... It's not clear to me that the world wasn't a challenging place either.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I mean, you know, we used to get into fights and pull swords and there is huge, you know, people would invade readily if you go back further and there was the threat of illness and, you know, we weren't living nearly as long. And so I think it's easy to also forget just how far we have come as a species because
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But, and this is I think a really important but, and I think about this often, the issues that we are talking about today on this podcast, this question of how we manage our emotional lives, this is a question that we have been struggling with likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our current form. Because humans have constantly been evolving new technologies.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We've always been challenged by circumstances. And those circumstances are constantly evolving, providing new threats to us that now we need to learn how to manage. When, you know, when I was digging deep into the history of emotion regulation for SHIFT, I couldn't believe it that when I look back at the first surgical tool ever developed, you know what that is? Trephining. Trephining.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So trephination, tell everyone who's listening what that involved.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Or brain, or if we go back 8,000 to 10,000 years ago when this technology was first cutting edge, right? Like the new iPhone of the times, trephination- For spirits. For spirits. or maybe spirits, right? So one of the reasons it was believed to be used was to allow the evil spirits to escape that are maybe causing tremendous emotion dysregulation.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So that was a cutting edge tool at one moment in time that we use to manage our emotions. Then let's jump into the mental time travel machine or just the time travel machine and go to the late 1940s where there was another major spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That's right.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
A Portuguese physician develops the lobotomy. I think it was initially called a leucotomy. Essentially, making some holes in your frontal cortex.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Relieved people's interest in pursuing lots of... It caused major, major, major dysfunction. And to be clear... This is not an advocated emotion regulation intervention.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah. Generally not a good thing. But, you know, just to go back to the lobotomy, what's amazing to me is like, that was... perceived to be such an advance that it won the Nobel Prize. Like the Nobel Prize. Because it calmed people down. Calmed people down, right?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Got into the car and it just so happened that my cell phone was connected and the next song on the playlist happened to be Journeys Don't Stop Believin'. So you know the song, I presume. Don't judge me for having this on my playlist, please. The song comes on and I start jamming out to it, singing out loud like an embarrassing dad. And then I look in the back seat and I find her bopping her head.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So I raise these issues to just point that, like we've been struggling to identify tools to manage our emotions effectively for a really long time. And now fast forward to the present,
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation yet, but I would argue that we have made major advances in identifying non-invasive science-based tools that can be leveraged to help people lead more productive emotional lives. And so, you know, you raised this question earlier about what is a productive life? What is a good life? And I think answering that question is in part
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
relevant to how I think about, how do you define self-control in many ways or emotion regulation? Or let me, not just how you define it, but what are the component parts? So we've been talking about tools throughout this conversation, all these different tools that exist, these different shifters for pushing our emotions or chat around. That's one core part of regulating effectively.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But another core part is our motivation or our goals. And you need both motivation and tools. So I can know about all the tools on the planet that scientists have discovered. If I'm not motivated to manage my emotions, I'm not going to use those tools. If, on the other hand, I am highly motivated to regulate my emotions, but I don't know what the tools are, I'm not going to be that effective.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I may, in fact, do some bad things, right? I may, you know, use unhealthy tools, substances that really can very powerfully, you know, substance abuse I'm talking about, that can modulate my emotions, but has some negative consequences. So it's about what are my goals for me for my emotional life? And do I possess the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals?
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I think that is a formula for the good life. Hey, here are the goals that I have. And if these are healthy, productive goals and I have the means to achieve them, that should bring me a sense of satisfaction. Sometimes our goals, of course, aren't optimal and we use that maybe controversial word, but we do change our goals throughout our life.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But it's about finding the right set of goals for us as individuals and then identifying the tools that we can use to bring those goals to fruition.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then the chorus comes, we get really excited. And then I pull up to the soccer court field and she just bursts out of the car and is like invigorated. That is the power of music to impact us. So I will often also have songs on prior to big talks that I'm getting ready to get in that mental frame of mind. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many athletes do this as well.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Yeah, I mean, they're mechanistically, you know, we understand the mechanisms that are... underlying the benefits of these tools. They are easy to implement and not always, but for a lot of them, they're easy. And I think that's in part where their power resides. We are still trying to understand how the brain functions. As you well know, you've contributed to this.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I've worked on this a little bit myself too. The brain is a remarkably complicated organ and we still have a lot to learn. I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomena like emotion play out at different levels of analysis, at the psychological level of thinking and feeling, but also at the biological level in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually down the road, Try to help people manage their emotions through multiple different sources of intervention, through the pharmacological level, through the behavioral level, through the interpersonal level. But it's a messy, messy space right now.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I think one of the big problems is, and this is in part gets to bigger questions about science and how science is done. it can be hard to cross levels of analysis. And there are multiple practical constraints that become active here.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So having the large enough samples and the right collaborators to look at how different kinds of interventions interact with one another, work in different populations. And so we tend not to do those more complicated designs because they're a lot harder to do.
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How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
They take a ton more money, a ton more time and effort, and oftentimes scientists are on timelines and their incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do. But big picture, down the road, I think the big questions are about how do these different kinds of interventions interact with one another.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
The good news is, though, that for any person who is watching or listening who's motivated to manage their emotions right now, there are many things you can do to start. And it begins, step one, learning about what these tools are. and then starting this process of experimenting with the tools. I don't use that word experimenting lightly.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I wouldn't advocate experimenting with agents that have serious side effects of the sort that some of the biological interventions you articulated earlier do. Those kinds of tools I think should be used in the context of medical supervision.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But a lot of these other tools that we're talking about, small changes in how you think and behave and interact with your environments, those are things people can start doing right now.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So a couple of responses to that. So first of all, I think step one is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice, like if you can hear your dad's voice in your head, It's not your dad who is in your head. That is a simulation that you are engaging in that your brain is capable of producing. And so that I think can be informative for people who are curious about these inner worlds.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
They've stumbled onto this tool that is quite powerful for pointing our emotional experience, our emotional trajectory in the direction we want it to point.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating as I have found liberating from just knowing the science. So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in shift. Yeah. They are incredibly normative. And so there's research which looks at like, how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought over the past week or month or two months?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally high. I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling. I will do an exercise with my classes, my undergraduate classes, where I will ask them to anonymously... whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week. Almost all of them are capable of generating them.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And some of these thoughts are really, really dark. I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym. You're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if I'm carrying like a heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack, I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it on the face of of another person on a mat. It's terribly dark. It's a terrible, terrible thought. So why am I experiencing that? It is most likely the brain's simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing it. Of course, I don't wanna drop a dumbbell on someone I never have.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so that's one explanation for why this is so normative. It's your brain's way of constantly, there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen. And most of these simulations, the probability of them coming to fruition are exceptionally low, infinitesimally small. But on occasion, some of the wacky ones do escape into awareness.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal in a pretty aggressive, egregious way, or in my case, dropping the dumbbell on the person stretching on their face. And so here's what I find liberating. Me understanding that this is just how my brain works. Well, that doesn't mean now that I'm something wrong with me as a human being, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That I'm morally corrupt in any way. My brain's going to sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts. I'm not going to act on them. And as long as I'm not acting on them, it's all good. It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety, they're before they know what is happening, that can often be an incredibly distressing experience.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Like all of a sudden your stomach is churning, your palms are sweating, but in research, which shows like if you communicate to people, hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance you face, all of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame. And now, this is, I'm a Lamborghini, right? I am rising to the occasion.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
My body's doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here. That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks. So step one is just recognizing if you experience intrusive thoughts at times, again, welcome to the human condition. It's a little blip in how our brain operates.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful for nipping the repetitive thinking in the butt. So when you're curtailing chatter, you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating. The reason why we often perseverate on problems we're experiencing is we're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And our brain, this wonderful problem-solving organ that we possess, it just keeps churning until we've solved that problem. And that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you get there. And so when you solve the problem, those thoughts tend to subside too.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That's right.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, just to that point, if I can interject. So just to normalize this further for folks. So my family is very special to me as it is to most people. When my first daughter was born, we used to live in this house that had this – on the second floor, there was a – I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass, but it was open to the floor beneath.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper or whatever, I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then – dropping her over into the, you know, and splat, like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the night. It speaks to this point that you are raising.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That was likely my mind's way of homing in on a really, really important issue in my life that I want to make sure never, ever, ever happens. It is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt or incredibly dark person.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing, but it also, as you alluded to, plays out in cognitive context. When there is this match, this sweet spot between the demands, like you're in a situation that is actually challenging, either physically or cognitively, and the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So it's a taxing situation, but you are able to engage with it completely. That is the formula for getting... Stuck is the wrong word for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states, which are for many people, the goal that they have in their lives, both recreationally and professionally.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so you as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests, I would hope and imagine, and that's always the aspiration, right? That must feel really good. I mean, you talk for a long time with people, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that is because you are so absorbed in the moment and meeting the challenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that moment. And that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the chatter to percolate in the background. And so, you know, one often you might think like an ultra marathon or what's the correct term? Is that it?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And so that's a lot of time on the one hand to be alone with your thoughts, right? And you might think that might just be grounds for for experiencing chatter. But it's also a particularly challenging kind of physical feat that you have to devote a lot of resources to meeting those physical demands. And right, so that can propel you into a state of flow.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And then you get some runners high to boot, some like chemical boost to enhance your mood. And all of a sudden, now you have people running, you know, 130 miles. I'm exaggerating. How long is it?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently. So I'm constantly reading for my job, right? If I'm not reading journal articles, I'm reading books for research that I'm doing, writing books. And- The way I do it is often through an audio form, and I will put the speed rate up to 2x. I'll often go as high as I can go on the app.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I can retain a huge amount of information going that fast, but it does require that I'm very vigilant. I'm really carefully attending to that audio book when I'm moving at that speed. And so it's not what I would do on vacation when I'm trying to consume a book or information for fun.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
There, I just want to kind of just gently go, let the paragraph kind of pass my gaze and take it in slowly and almost even savor the words on the page. But in other contexts, I do channel up the velocity and it can be incredibly engaging. It can also be depleting. So
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When you have conversations that really you find immensely rewarding and cognitive philosophy, and I love that term, is a 10 out of 10. When you're done, do you ever find it a little tiring?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And you're more tired probably on those days, huh?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I have a couple of – they touch on a couple of amazingly important issues that we need to get into. So let's just do them serially. So number one, has the study been done when you expose people to different kinds of music, sad versus – arousing, you know, happy music? Do you see that push people's emotions around? Yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Cooking shows, prank reels. These are yours? These are mine. And like I am... You know, we often take for granted, too, that the TV in front of us is another emotion regulation device, right? And actually, people who are creating programs are deliberately trying to push your emotions in particular directions from the score that accompanies movies and the news. So...
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
I don't want my emotions being shifted in a direction that is contrary to my goals right before I go to bed. I am at a typically high velocity level throughout the day, starting with physical stuff and exercise to the cognitive stuff and the politicking and the science talks and all that stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When I'm finally done going through my email at night, I want like a good hour of just total mindless vegetation. And it puts me in a wonderfully serene state to then slide into bed, jump into that mental time travel machine, like do the fantasizing or savoring, and then puts me to sleep. And so I really value technology there for helping me do that. And I think that is the counterpoint.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
to having this high velocity kind of experience. I will often, when I teach, like sometimes I'll teach for like three hours. So it's equivalent to what we're doing right now. It is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding. And like, this is why I got into this business.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You're having great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things, getting them to discover interest, all that good stuff. couple hours later when I come home, first of all, I need a little refractory period to switch out of work life into home life, which can often be challenging on the personal front because like my kids are just waiting there.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, my youngest kid is waiting there. My oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing. But they want to play right away and I need some time just to decompress. But then once I do, I've got to lean further into that state. And so that's That is shifting and understanding how to shift. That's a different kind of shift.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand how to do that well. And I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And there's actually a framework to help people do this that I really like. And it's interesting because you mentioned the military earlier. And there's a... a wonderful corollary.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And I haven't experienced this too often in my life where I see something in science that scaffolds onto a practice that another organization, in this case, the military, implements to help people, number one, identify what are their, in the context of what we're talking about, what are their emotion regulation goals? What are their shifting goals? And how do you
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
In fact, sensory tools like music or visual images are one of the most powerful tools that we have in our arsenal for pushing people's emotions around in the context of experiments. So we want to induce a particular kind of state. We can play certain kinds of music or show people images that are designed to elicit positive or negative negative emotional experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
go from having those goals to bringing them to fruition. And so in the military, like special forces before they have complicated operations, they will often first think about, okay, what's our goal? What's the outcome we hope to achieve? Then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And they'll go around the room and, you know, the person in charge will like cold call Socratic style on folks. Like what is the... potential obstacle. And then for every obstacle that they identify, they come up with a very specific, if this happens, then we will do this. And they have multiple if-then plans for each of those different obstacles.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So if we go back to the research landscape, there's a technique called WHOOP. Have you ever heard of this? Okay. So WHOOP is an acronym, and I promised you I wouldn't use any acronyms, but this is a useful one. It's a mnemonic to remember something. So How do you go from knowing to doing?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Whoop is designed to help you do that because what it is explicitly designed to do is target each of the places where goal pursuit often breaks down. Step one, what's your wish? What's the thing you hope to accomplish? Let's be really clear about what that goal is. We often don't stop to even think about what our specific concrete goals are.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Now that we have that goal, let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize. What is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that goal? What that's doing is giving us this motivation now, really energizing us to pursue it even further. Okay, we've got the outcome, but now let's get realistic. What are the obstacles?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those goals? So that's something I wish is to be more present with my family after work. The outcome that I hope to achieve is to be a better father, a better husband, to have a richer social life in those regards. Now, what are the obstacles? Okay, internal obstacles, I got plenty.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Like the temptation to check my email and get to inbox zero before the night is done. Or I love my science and I also want to do some of that work. Or maybe I'm going to get distracted by friends who call. All of those things are obstacles that might get in the way of me achieving the goal of being more present with my family. Now the final step, let me come up with an if-then plan.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
If I'm tempted to check my email after 7 or 8, then I'm going to remind myself about how important it is to be a dad. So I'll do a little reframing. If someone calls after 9 p.m. and I'm engaging in activity with my kids, then I'm going to politely decline. And you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans for different levels of sophistication.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
What those if-then plans do is they try to make emotion regulation automatic because they identify a specific trigger and If, that's the if, if this happens, and then they pair that trigger with a response. If then, if then, you rehearse that. And this way, when the trigger occurs, boom. You don't have to stop and think, what should I do? How should I behave?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You've got the plan and you implement it. I've got if then plans for chatter. If the chatter strikes, then I do distant self-talk and mental time travel. If the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work, then I go to nature and I go to my chatter advisors. And so I have these if-then plans that are linked up with my goals.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that's an important technology that I think we can invite people to try to exercise in their own lives to make it more likely that they will achieve their regulatory goals.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So images being another sensory modality vision. So that's number one. Number two, there's this very interesting phenomenon where when we are in a particular emotional state, let's say we're feeling sad, We often don't reflexively seek out the happy music. We don't go to Journey. Instead, we go to Adele, right? We're going to Chicago. I'm giving you my age bracket here, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And in the research space, it's mostly been personal obstacles, but you can generalize out as the Navy SEALs do. As an example, that's the branch of the military I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to – Now you have me self-conscious about using the word optimize. To optimize the way they respond to missions and challenges.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
So they're not only dealing with internal obstacles, obviously, but also ones from the world around them.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
That's right. And so it's a general framework, which in part is, I think, why it has so much value. And there's research behind this showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals. Now, there, of course, will be many situations that you have not developed whoops for.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
And that's okay because you're going to have all these other tools in your toolbox to manage those situations on the fly when they occur. But then once you encounter new situations and you discover what tools are effective, then you learn. You create your whoop. And then you can become more strategic, automatic, and effortless with how you engage them down the road.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Well, I think it becomes especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing an emotional episode that is essentially hijacking your attention. And attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons. So number one, As a species, we have the most sophisticated attention deployment system on the planet.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention so we can willfully place it on the things we want or yank it away from the things we don't want or we can saccade our attention back and forth.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
When it comes to emotion though, we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic because they fall into the category of prescriptive advice about magic pills. So often we hear, for example, that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions, things that you're anxious about or fearful, you should not avoid the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
You should focus on it. And there's been a lot of research on this. And what we have learned is on the one hand, chronically avoiding things is It's not good. It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical lives to our health.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
But oftentimes, the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand. Deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break, and then come back to it. And so this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently.
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
Like the music that has sad associations for me. So there's this mood congruency. If I'm feeling a certain way, I'm going to go deeper into that state and have the music facilitate me. Why on earth would we do that? Are we all masochistic? Do we just want to feel even worse? This gets at, I think, a critically important point that is not always talked about, which
Huberman Lab
How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience | Dr. Ethan Kross
My grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in Poland during World War II, had her entire family slaughtered during the war. One of these kind of devastating experiences, lived in the forest for years, back and forth, all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth. And growing up, she made it out of the war, moved to the States.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Not unlike the way we figure out what are the physical fitness routines that work best for us. Like the stuff that I benefit from, quite different from not just my wife, but my best friends as well. And it changes too, depending on what my goals are. And so that's a long-winded way of not answering your question.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So let me pose it to you actually before I go give you my definition. What do you think an emotion is? And don't worry about being right or wrong.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I mean, this is in a very scaled down way. This is the work that we are currently doing in my lab, which is to say we are trying to identify the patterns that characterize people's optimal regulation across different situations. We're doing it in a way that for the literature is super complex, but relative to what you just articulated, which Is the dream quite simplified?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And I think we will get there over the next several years, but we first have to do the work before we can give the actual answer.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So not bad, not bad. So I define emotions as responses we have to events in our lives that we deem meaningful, i.e. they capture our attention in some way. And these could be situations that happen to us as we're navigating the world outside or even situations we imagine in our minds. And when we encounter those circumstances, we're
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, you know, this is such an interesting question and it comes up so much. And on the one hand, it is very clear that if you look at the statistics surrounding the experience of anxiety, as well as a host of other negative experiences like loneliness, you know, they're all moving in the wrong direction in the sense that things seem to be getting worse. Yeah.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
On the other hand, one of my favorite little detours while researching my book was to dive back into history to look at how we've thought about emotion regulation through the centuries. And it was really striking. We have been grappling with our emotions forever. for likely as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So I'll just give you a few pieces of evidence to sink your teeth into. So first surgical technique ever developed, or what we think is the first surgical technique ever invented, it's called trepanation, carving holes in people's skulls while they were still awake. What was one of the reasons why this technique was believed to be used? That's a cue up.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Likely, but what else? Perhaps more germane to our conversation right now. Give you a little hint. People felt anxious and the pain distracted them from it. Big dysregulated emotions, right? Like, you know, imagine you are just totally overcome with an emotion. And our theories of what might be causing that response were quite different back then than they are now.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Maybe it had to do with some, you know, spiritual demonic possession. Let's let it out. Let the emotions out. You know, fast forward a couple of centuries, we use bloodletting to drain the toxic emotions The humors or the substance that were causing these negative emotions. Best-selling book of all time, the Bible. One of the most famous stories in that book, the story of Adam and Eve.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's a story of emotion dysregulation. We've been grappling with this stuff for a really long time. So back to what's going on right now. Look, the world is extremely turbulent. Technology is upending things in ways that we are still trying to make sense of. It's likely multifactorial.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay. So my guess is like when you were growing up in school, is that something that you would have just come out and blurted out?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
The norms here have powerfully, powerfully changed. I remember when my parents got divorced when I was 12 years old, my mom insisted that I go to see a social worker to talk about it. We went, I don't know, two or three times. And, you know, I went, but, you know, I remember saying to her, if you tell anyone that we have gone here, anyone, right? Like I was petrified.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So I think because of the work that... we have pushed to like de-stigmatize this, which is a really good thing to be clear. We talk about this more openly. We may be endorsed having these experiences more openly than we did before. And I think that's another piece of piece of the puzzle. So, um, you know, here's what I can say with confidence. Um, there's a lot of suffering right now. Uh,
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's almost like a software program that gets loaded up to help us manage that circumstance. And that software program has a few different pieces, a few different components. So emotions activate what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. What do I mean by that? Well, when we experience emotion, there's often a physiological component.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
people are struggling with their emotions. I think people have always been struggling with their emotions. What fills me with hope is that we've got some science-based tools that we could share with people to, to actually help them. And these are for the most part, or, you know, at least the ones that I talk about, these are non-invasive tools.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Here's another little tidbit that blows my mind to use that technical phrase. Um, 1949, I believe it was, a Portuguese physician invents an emotion regulation intervention that wins him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. It is viewed as such an amazing advance that it wins the grandest prize in all of science and medicine. It is the frontal lobotomy. I mean, isn't that wild?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Now, clearly, these were for extreme cases of emotion dysregulation, not just the curveballs of life, which I hope it wasn't used too much for that purpose. But we've come a long way. Our understanding of what emotions are and how they work and how you could push them around, amplify, diminish them, extend them, make them more constrained, vastly improved. That is something that is super exciting.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But we don't teach people about this. So that's the other question that you gestured towards. Why is it? That we struggle so badly with this. If we have these emotions, why aren't we actually reining them in more effectively? I never had a class in this growing up. Some of the things that I was actually taught growing up, turns out, are not correct.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Like I was taught to always, always approach my emotions immediately the moment they are elicited. Dive in, try to fix them. Works in some cases. In other cases, taking some time away and then coming back can be really useful. So I think a big opportunity here is like, let's give people the tools.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Sorry. I, I, I was about to say, but my wife always tells me, don't point your finger. It's just excitement. I'm just getting excited. Um, thank you for that. Let's, let's address this. Um, um, I think this fundamentally has to do with, uh, whether we think we can actually control our minds or not, control our emotions or not. Are they under our control or are they in the driver's seat?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And several years ago, I came across this study that just floored me. Approximately 40% of, in this case, I believe it was adolescents, when asked, can you control your emotions? Said, no, you can't. I mean, you gave everyone who's listening or watching the name of my lab, the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. Like, viewing this finding was, I interpreted it as like an existential threat.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So if I experience a little bit of anxiety, I often feel that in my stomach. It kind of feels like the stomach is ringing. I've got to go to the toilet right away, depending on how potent a response that is that predicts the strength of that impulse. Yeah. Our emotions are also capturing our cognition, how we're thinking about our circumstances.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Personal insult, yeah. Yeah, it's like, what have I chosen to do with my life? My life has been a lie! Yes, that's like, what is happening here? I'm too young for the midlife crisis, right? And... And so I really kind of, you know, my advisor was a very wise, wise psychologist. I remember saying, listen to the data. And so I did. Like, what could this possibly be capturing?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And I spent a chapter talking about this in the book. There are facets of our emotional lives that we cannot control. And I now believe that. With every iota of being that I am. Let me give you a couple examples. You ever brush up against someone who doesn't smell very good?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, do you have an automatic reaction when that occurs?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, it's not just you. This is a pretty automatic response that most of us have when we encounter that kind of noxious response. And the inverse is true as well. I just got back from overseas and I was walking through the international terminal and I walked through this store that I've relabeled the emotion regulation emporium. Why have I relabeled it?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Because all they sell are these sprays that we spritz all over us to manage how other people feel about us and how we feel about ourselves. Perfume and cologne, right? Like you just get a whiff of that stuff and, ah, let's go, let's go a little bit darker though. That's, so that's one category of automatic responses. Like I cannot control what I'm going to encounter, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Some have some experience, a sensory experience that pushes my emotions around. No control over that. What about or I mean, I guess I could choose to evade certain people that might smell us our way. But inevitably, I'm going to come across someone. Let's talk about dark thoughts for a second. So have you ever experienced a thought? It just popped up in your head to seemingly randomly.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You have no idea why. But it's a dark thought of sorts. It's something that you wouldn't want to readily admit to someone else. You're kind of embarrassed by it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, you know, you are not alone. So there's research on this that describes this as close to a universal experience. We have these thoughts that just pop up in our heads. We don't always know why. Sometimes we could come up with explanations for it. I'll give you a fun example to stick with the physical fitness example or comparison.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So when I'm in the gym, I will often have a thought when I'm carrying an exceptionally heavy dumbbell. It's like really heavy, just to be clear. When I'm carrying that dumbbell from one side of the gym to the next, I'll often imagine dropping it on a person's face that lies near my path. That's a dark thought, right? Why am I thinking about dropping a dumbbell on someone else's face?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So anxiety will kind of zoom us in on the potential threat in front of us. And then there are motor responses and facial displays that often come along with our emotions. So can you tell when someone is angry at you sometimes by looking at their face? Frowns, frowns, frowns. There you go. Yeah. Give me the sad look. What does that look like? Bottom lip.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's probably adaptive. I don't want to drop it on their face. So this is a thought that's cuing me into the possibility of what might happen if I do. So it leads me to switch arms. I don't have control. I'm not purposefully thinking about that, right? Other kinds of thoughts like that pop up all the time in all of our minds.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'll do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic to my students, and I'll set up this Google form. that will allow them, I'll ask them the same question I posed to you.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
In the last couple of weeks, have you ever experienced a thought just popped up, you wouldn't want to tell someone else about it, and it just comes up and you write it into the field, and it's anonymous, and I can then see what the thoughts are. This is some dark stuff that we see coming up.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So we don't have control always over the thoughts and feelings that arise spontaneously, but what we do have control over is, is how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they are activated. That's the playground of emotion regulation. There is room for both of these interpretations. You tell me before, you don't feel like you can move your arm up and down pretty easily.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's under your control, but your emotions are not. Well, maybe it's the case that you can't control the feeling of anger or the emotional experience of anger, anxiety that when it's elicited, but once it's activated, I assure you there are things that you could do to push that experience around. And that's the part to really home in on.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And I cannot tell you, I'm speaking, I'll give you a personal example, and then I'll give you one from one of my kids, actually. It is bleeping, liberating, liberating to know that, huh, I just felt a certain way There's nothing wrong with me, right? This is just how human beings work, right? I'm going to experience a dark thought every now and then.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
There you go. My daughters are super skilled at that facial expression whenever I'm disciplining them as I sometimes have to do. And it elicits a response. So I say loosely coordinated because these different facets of our emotional experience often cohere, but sometimes they don't.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm going to experience some anxiety every now and again. I don't feel bad about myself when I find myself getting anxious about something. Instead, I think, oh, this is my mind giving me an inch here. And that allows me to channel that experience productively. So A couple of years ago, my, my daughter switched over to a new school. It was more academically demanding.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And I go into her bedroom and, and I noticed she's like visibly distraught. And I could like, what, what's going on? And so, you know, she's, she's kind of like, I don't know what's happening. Like I feel it in my body. And like, I don't know what this is. And she was, is basically an anxiety reaction. Totally normal. She had a test the next day. This is her.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
body and mind doing what it's supposed to be doing. There's an important thing that lies ahead. I need to focus in. Once I reframe this for her, this is nothing wrong with you. This is what we call anxiety. It's a normal reaction to important circumstances that are potentially threatening. And what it means is you got to zoom in and focus in on your work.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Once I gave her that interpretation, the entire response, the volume on it diminished and That I think is the opportunity that exists if you understand a little bit about what emotions are and what their function is.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, I would take them through a few different shifters. And we could give plenty of examples if these aren't convincing. So let's start with one of my favorite shifters. I call the shifters these little tools you can use to push emotion around. Let's start with sensation. You listen to music? Of course. Why? Why?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay. Let's just stop with it makes you feel. You ask people this question of why we listen to music, close to 100% will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. If you then ask people, though, in other studies as we've done, last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what did you do to try to manage that emotion? Only between 10% and 30% will say they've used music.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
In other words, sometimes I could be super angry during a meeting at something that's happened, but I maintain my poker face. Sometimes I'll even smile. So there's some flexibility there. But the point is, it's this coordinated response that is designed to help us deal with the situation at hand.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Music is a powerful, powerful emotional shifter. You get effects within seconds. They're not necessarily long-lasting, but have you ever listened to music to pump you up when you're a little distressed? Did it work? It's like magic almost, how powerful it can be.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So if you have doubts as to your ability to shift your emotions, I would do a little experiment where I would identify in advance a few pump-me-up happy songs and try listening to those when you're not feeling that way and want to feel that way and observe what impact that has on you. That would be one thing you could try.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Just to explain to folks why this works, this is not, by the way, this effect that music has on our emotions is not exclusive to hearing. It's a product of sensation. So sensation is how we bring in information about the world and make sense of it, sensation perception. And I like to think of sensation as like, imagine you had satellite dishes mounted all over your body.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And their sole job is to help you bring in information about your surroundings and to give you the best chance of optimally navigating the world around you. And a big part of that is making sure you go where it's safe and not where it's dangerous. And so one of the ways that sensation works is it is tightly linked with emotion in the sense that when you encounter something,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
that might be approach-oriented or might be threatening, it's activating the corresponding sets of emotions. All of our senses follow this property. So hearing, music, you know, like... Look back in history. There are bands that accompany militaries through battle. That's kind of interesting if you think about it, right?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You've got these... This is a threatening... It doesn't get much more threatening than this. Playing the music, right? Channeling our emotions. You should try... I don't know if people can do this quite easily, but if you ever like strip away the, the kind of soundtrack to films, we sometimes do this in studies. Like it is wild just to hear dialogue. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Like imagine jaws without, I'll stop doing it right there. Or imagine like watching a sitcom without the laugh track. You don't, doesn't have the same punch. Um, Taste. We don't probably need to spend too much time on taste, right? Think of something that tastes great. It's an emotional experience. Something that tastes foul, opposite direction. What about touch? Touch is a powerful tool.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I call it – the technique of touch that I'm particularly fond of is affectionate but not creepy touch, which is to say when an affectionate embrace is wanted between partners, parents, and kids – There's a lot of research which shows that this could be a powerful tool for regulating your emotions very, very quickly. A creepy touch, of course, pushes us in the opposite direction.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And so I'm a proponent of the belief that all of our emotions, even the ones we call bad, are useful when they're experienced in the right proportions. Not too intense or not too long. There's one other little tidbit let me throw in there because I think it's important for just kind of clearing up the space here. Okay. The difference between an emotion and a feeling.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We've got to give people the disclaimer. So, you know, that's one set of examples that I would ask people to consider. But we could keep going deeper and deeper through the toolbox to give more insight.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And then the second kind of question we tackle is how can we use this understanding of the nuts and bolts that explain how people can manage their emotions to actually help them do a better job of that in their daily lives outside the lab. And so, um,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So, all right, let's get into that in a second. But I want to just frame why the motivational bit is so important here or this belief that you can do it is so ultra, ultra important. So the reason I started off this tool section of my book with this question of can you really control your emotions?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
The reason why genuinely believing that there are facets to your emotional experience that are under your control is because if we zoom out, I think of managing one's emotions. There are two ingredients to the recipe for how to do that well. One is motivation and the other is ability. Let's start with motivation.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If you're not motivated to manage your emotions, why would you take any efforts to even try to do so? It wouldn't make much sense. It's not logical, right? If there's nothing I can do to lose weight, why should I do this hard stuff of lifting weights and going to the gym and paying for membership? It's just... You shouldn't, and you likely won't, right?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So step one is you need to have the motivation, the belief that you can manage your emotions. That's the first piece to this equation, and it's what our conversation is getting at right now. But that alone is not in and of itself sufficient, because I can think, to go back to physical fitness, that Yeah, I can do stuff to get in shape. And then I go to the gym.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And if I've never gone to the gym, I could start doing crazy things in there that actually cause more harm than good. So you also need to understand what are the tools that you can use to then achieve that goal. And if you have both of those pieces, the motivation, hell yeah, I can do this. And you know how to do it. Now we're talking business.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So Dunedin, so this gets to the other part of the question, right? So, okay, but so help me believe, Ethan, that it makes sense that we should care about this. If you look at this one classic study, so this was a study done in New Zealand, and it began in the early 70s. And what the researchers started doing is tracking this group of babies from the time they were just born.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We often use those terms synonymously, but scientifically, scientists actually draw a distinction. So you could think of an emotion as this umbrella term. It captures a lot of things that are happening within you, within your brain, within your body, your behaviors. feelings are the conscious component of an emotional response. They're the part of an emotional response that we're aware of.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Every few years, they would profile these kids' ability to manage their emotions. And they would profile them in a very rigorous way. They would put the kids through different... self-control tests. They would get their teachers and other people in their lives to report on how good they manage their emotions. And they'd get really fine-grained assessments of how good these kids were.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And then they basically waited over time to see... What does the capacity to manage your emotions in childhood and adolescence, what does it predict later on? When you fast forward, what you find is it predicts pretty much most of the things that we care about in our lives. The kids who are good at managing their emotions, they're performing better at school, they're performing better at work.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
They're healthier too. Their organs are aging faster. more slowly than the people who are less good at self-control. And if you look at the mirror image, the kids who are not good at self-control, they're doing pretty poorly at work and in school. They're experiencing relationship difficulties, and their health is impoverished as well.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Now, the other really thing that came out of that study that I find to be the most exciting finding, and it's actually not the finding that got the most attention, is that You might come away from that study thinking, well, either you got it or you don't. Either you're good at managing your emotions. Behavioral genetics all the way down. Right. That's it. So why bother?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, what the researchers also saw is that some kids changed over time in their ability to manage themselves. Some kids got better. Some kids got worse over time. The kids who got better, they fared better on all these different metrics over time. The kids who got worse, their performance declined. So what we learned from that study, number one, is that this really matters a great deal.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Like your ability to manage your emotions, it's relevant to your ability to think and perform optimally at work. This is what's allowing you to divert your attention, to hunker down, to learn from critical feedback. It's impacting your relationships because I don't know about you, but-
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Last time I came in contact with someone who wasn't very good at managing their emotions, they didn't have very good relationships with their friends and partners. They weren't great parents. And it's also impacting our health and well-being.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
The links between the inability to manage your emotions and all manner of psychological disturbances, as well as physical problems like cardiovascular disease, problems of inflammation, even certain forms of cancer, All of those findings exist, but there's something you could do about it. Now, you mentioned you've been in, you just completed a course of psychotherapy, right? And you're doing CBT.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I mean, these are interventions that have a ton of evidence behind them. You could think about those interventions. activities as a motion regulation bootcamp that have been tested over and over and over to show they have benefits for folks. Now, they don't work for everyone, as you probably well know, right? They work for some people.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And the hope that I have is that by giving people not just one category of tools, but by giving them the entire toolbox of we can expand the scope of people who these tools actually can benefit.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's a lot like when you are sick. When you get the flu, there are tons of things happening inside your body. You have no awareness of how the composition of your blood is changing and your organs may be functioning differently and so forth and so on. What you do have awareness of are the fever and chills that you're experiencing, right? That's like the sweat, so to speak.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But completely agree with this notion that our emotions are what makes life worth living. You know, we are this emotional species and they are just fundamental to who we are in a moment to moment basis. You know, when I think about the most salient experiences in my life, like they're all emotional experiences. And so look,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I think there are reasons sometimes where we need to learn how to endure difficult things, right? Delay immediate gratification in order to achieve bigger long-term goals. But we want to balance that, right? We don't want to find ourselves overcome with negativity all the time, too big, too long. This detracts from the experience of being human.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And I think that's what you're getting at here, right? If we find ourselves living emotional lives that we don't want to be living, then that is a cue to intervene. And I think most of us have that experience at times. I just got back from talking about this book for two weeks all over the country. And probably the most salient take-home point, people are suffering. People are struggling.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You name it, whether it's wildfires or infidelity or parental stress or loneliness, lots of different curveballs that life is throwing us. It's like this batting machine that keeps on firing away curveballs, and it just doesn't stop. And we've got to figure out how to hit them. We've got to figure out how to deal with those things.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So feelings are the part, the facet of our emotional experiences that we're aware of.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
barrage that barrage of insults and there are things that you can do like i get asked all the time do i ever struggle with my emotions yes i am a human being like last time i checked of course i do but what i am really good at is the moment i get triggered in some way anxiety sadness rejection whatever envy i have tools that i go to immediately i don't have to stop and think uh i
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What should I do? And at other points in my life, I did stumble through it all. Didn't quite know what to do. But now because I understand how these work, I go right to them. They don't work every single time. 60% of the time, the first plan, the first three tools that I'll automatically implement, they get the job done. What about the other 40%? Well, I go deeper into the toolbox.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I go to layer on a few other tools. That may nudge me up to 80%. What about the other 20%? Well, there's always room for prayer. I'm kidding. But it's not foolproof, but it's pretty good. Because I have plans, I know what to actually do. And that's just not something that I think a lot of people have. And I think that's the opportunity here for really having impact. I think that was...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay, so sensory shifters focus on the senses, hearing, sight, sound, touch. Those are some... Smell, those are some of the big ones. These are all levers that you can strategically pull to... push your emotions in another direction. We talked a little bit about how music can do it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You know, in terms of just blindness, I will say I was totally blind to the power of sensation prior to doing some research in this space. And now that I know it, it just changes the way I operate on a daily basis. Like here's my little emotion regulation machine that I keep in my pocket and It is loaded up with playlists to push my emotions in different directions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I have been listening to music since I'm five years old. I've said this during previous interviews, so I don't know if you've heard this or not, but do you want to guess, if you don't know, what my first tape was? This was a cassette record. Profile me. It's fine. What do you think? Stevie Ray Vaughan. MC Hammer, you can't.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, but I've always been very eclectic because after that, it was Madonna's Immaculate Collection. And I'm all over the place. I love lots of music. But I've been listening to music all my life, and I never thought to use it strategically as a tool to push my emotions around until I have this experience with my daughter. I'm coaching soccer several years ago.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I look forward to this every weekend. It's like my release. Not because I'm an obnoxious soccer dad, mind you. It's just very different from my day job. And this one morning, she's just in a I think I could say it without hurting her feelings. She'd admit that she's in a foul mood, right? She just doesn't want to go play. She's moping around.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I do everything I can to break her out of this funk unsuccessfully. I succumb. I'm like, all right, this is going to be a long morning. We get in the car. As we're driving on the way to the soccer field, one of my favorite songs comes on the radio, Journeys Don't Stop Believin'. I start jamming out. I'm like bopping my head. I'm leaning into the song.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And normally when I do this, she will look at me with disdain because I'm embarrassing her. But I look at her in the rear view mirror and I see she is, she's kind of getting into it as well. This song had rerouted our collective experience in that vehicle. She went on to score a ton of goals. It was a great day. Since that moment,
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This is one of the first things I will do if I find myself moving in a direction I don't want to be moving. Now, what's really interesting to me about music, we often use this tool to regulate ourselves, but in a way that is not consistent with our goals. And what do I mean by that?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You ever get sad and find yourself, rather than listening to Journey, you go to... Well, Journeys Don't Stop Believing, you go to another one of their songs, or you go to Adele or some other music to just kind of bring you down a little bit more. Lewis Capaldi is my go-to, yeah. Okay, so now... We talked earlier about there being a functionality to sadness.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And if your goal is to stay in that emotional state because it's serving you well, it's helping you reframe things in ways that are ultimately productive, great. Keep listening to that music. But if your goal is to not feel sad, Don't go listen to that song. Go in the opposite direction. So, you know, that's a little insight into how sensation can work.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But all of the sensory channels can be leveraged to shift your emotions. You don't want to abuse them because they are so powerful. We often reflexively go to them. There are obviously some unhealthy forms of sensory experiences that we can engage in that can push us in the wrong direction. Emotional overeating as an example.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So you want to be aware that this is a tool and you want to wield it carefully. Probably the easiest low effort tool that exists in our toolbox are these sensory shifters. And that's just one category. Um, should we shift to another one?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I do one of those. I do a fist bump. I mean, it just it signals that there's someone there who's on your team. Right. And I've not gotten any HR complaints from doing that just yet. But like, you know, an innocuous fist bump, it's just like it's like shaking a hand almost right without the concern about transmission of germs. Right.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's right. Now, but it does get interesting, right? Like if this were a pink pen and I had a fear of cancer, for example- The pink might activate the thoughts about that cancer and elicit an emotional response. If I have a fear of blood, red, color. So we could generalize and make associations. But right now, I'm free as a bird.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But certainly where it is touch used most in my life, it's with my loved ones, my friends. Like if I see my wife is dealing with some stuff, like I'll go over to her and I'll just kind of rub her back and I'll do the same for my kids. And I value when they do that for me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, there's some work suggesting that soothing sensory experiences of the sort that you're describing can have benefit as well.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I don't know studies that have compared the different kinds of sensory experiences, but if you ask me for my professional opinion, yes.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We've got to get you in the PhD program.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, I will say that the best predictor of success in academia for me is the curiosity, is the ability to have your eyes open to questions. and then be able to kind of formulate a prediction about what you might see. So you've got the raw, raw skills there.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So that's, so smell, a smell, you know, all right, if I'm going to admit it all, the hell, I take baths and, and I love bath salts. Yeah. you know, just this wonderful soothing experience. Of course, there is this, um, sensory element there too, like the heat, the warmth. Also, I find that to be an amazing emotion regulator. I know people talk a lot about cold plunges and things of that sort.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
For me, um, It's a bath every night.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah. Kind of love it. Taste dark, mini dark chocolate peanut butter cup. Works like a charm, you know, calorifically negligible, but taste wise, pretty intense. Pretty intense. You know, you just have to be careful of the slippery slope there because they are so wonderful. You need to, you need to make sure. That's right. But, but think about these are all emotional experiences, right?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And sometimes we need to, they can be so powerful. We actually have to use regulation to prevent ourselves from succumbing to that lover.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I was thinking more about eating pizza at 10 p.m. But if but, you know, in the bath for three and a half hours, there is there's some feedback mechanisms that prevent that from happening in the bath. It's called pruning. You may be aware. It's called the kids needing to be put to bed.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
OK, so here's here's the deal with the attention. Here's the here's the high level, I think, critically important take home. Many of us, myself included, are often taught when you have a problem, you dive in, you deal with it immediately. You don't run away, you approach. We also hear that chronically avoiding problems, not good, gets you into all sorts of trouble.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It is absolutely true that chronic avoidance, and what I mean by that is if a problem arises, your coping tactic, your strategy is just like bury it, move on, deny, suppress, and just keep going. Lots of data showing that that does not work out so well for folks, predicts all sorts of negative outcomes over time.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What we have done, though, is we have overgeneralized from that observation that chronic avoidance is bad to assume that all avoidance is bad. And that is not true. Being strategic between how we engage with things that are troubling us, approaching and avoiding, going back and forth, can be a really, really useful approach to managing difficult circumstances.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You don't have to actually choose between approaching or avoiding. You can do both. Now, there are lots of very, very simple examples, simple illustrations, I think, of the value of this.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So have you ever benefited from getting an email that just pissed you off and not responding right away, but you took some time away, a couple of hours or a couple of days, you come back to it, and one of two things happens. Either, huh, what was the big deal in the first place? Who cares? Or... you can look at it from a different perspective, right?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You've got the psychological distance that taking some time away has provided you with allows you to approach this a little bit more objectively. I'm guessing both of those have probably been true for you, right?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah. So as you get distance, you've got psychological distance from those experiences. Yeah. The passage of time gives you that psychological distance. It gives you that mental space.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And this is why we don't just have attention as a shifter, but we also have sensation, perspective. We have people shifters, we have space shifters, and culture shifters. So you don't have to choose between just either avoiding or approaching. But you also don't have to choose between just doing one of those and all of these other kinds of tools that are available to you.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You know me well. But look, but like this is so like, you know, in the book, I provide this decision tree, if you will, to how do you know if approaching is working or not? Sometimes approaching a problem.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Because they give us an edge, because they mobilize us to respond optimally to the situations that we find ourselves in. It's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it. So let's run through a couple of negative emotions that we often describe or hear them described as toxic. Anger, for example.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
doesn't actually work because you end up ruminating endlessly you try to work through this but you just think of this jerk who said this thing like why the hell did they have to say like why don't you say that to my face that's by the way my go-to like when someone you know said why don't you say this to my face like really this is how you do it like It can look at me. I'm getting lit up.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I don't even have a transgression in mind, and I'm getting aggravated on your behalf. That would be an indication that approach isn't working. Likewise, if you try to avoid, but you find that even when you're engaged with Engaging distractors, the thoughts just keep intruding about this problem, just keep coming back.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Trying to address those two big picture issues is something that keeps us really busy and is something that is really fun, a fun way to spend your life.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's a cue that this kind of strategic avoidance may not be working and you should approach or do something else. So attention can be an incredibly powerful tool. In the book, I tell the story of my grandmother who... And as my hero growing up, she evaded the Nazis in Eastern Poland for several years. And she came over to the States with nothing, built a wonderful life.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And all I wanted to do growing up was hear her tell me stories about how she did it, how she managed to survive. And she would never tell me, never talk about it. She didn't want to go there. But she would allow herself to think about these issues, the war, once a year during a Remembrance Day ceremony. She lived a really great life, but she avoided thinking about the problem. She would dose it.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
She's an example of how being strategic with your attention works for some people. But sometimes we don't have the luxury of looking away for a variety of reasons. We got to stare the problem right in the face. And we can't even, you know, pop our headphones on sometimes when we've got to look at that problem.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And so in comes perspective, like we could change the way we think about our circumstances when we're looking at it. Now, this can be sometimes a very tricky thing to do. One of my favorite recent experiences with close friends happened several years ago. We were driving home from dinner one night and a buddy of mine was just really struggling with something at work.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It was really bringing him down. He was telling us about it in the car. And his wife looks over to him and says, why don't you just focus on the positive? Just think about the bright side. And he pauses and he looks at her and goes... Yeah, easier effing said than done. And it was just like I smiled.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I wrote about it in the book because it was so powerful, which I think captures this experience that all of us have at times. We know. We totally know. That, yeah, if only we could think about this a little bit more constructively, everything would be better.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This is the basis of the intervention that you just went through or that you're going through now, CBT, how to change the way you think, to change the way you feel. But it's not always easy to do that. And so how can you do that? Let's go back to distancing because this is where getting some psychological distance can often be a difference maker.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This capacity to step back and look at our experiences from a zoomed out perspective can often be very, very helpful. And the cool thing here is that there are many different tactics that exist for reflecting on ourself and our circumstances from a distance. They don't come with the user's guide, but once you know it, like these are my go-to, I call them my psychological jujitsu moves.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Anger is an emotion we experience when our understanding of right and wrong, of how things should be, is violated, and there's an opportunity for us to correct the record. We could actually fix things. My favorite example of this is my daughter rides her bicycle without her helmet. This is not the way things work in the Cross household. right? We care about brain safety. And I see this.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So, all right, mental time travel. I'm struggling right now. I'm really feeling whatever, fill in the blanks. How am I going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? All of our experiences follow, not all, nearly all of our emotional experiences follow the same time course, temporal trajectory, if you want to geek out with me. Here's what happens. Something happens. Boom.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Emotions go up. Then as time goes on, The emotion fades. Depending on the experience, some go way up, some a little bit, some take longer, some recover more quickly, but nearly all of them follow that trajectory. We lose sight of that when we're in the midst of it. When we're in the cauldron, we zoom in on the awfulness. We forget that as time passes, things will settle down a bit.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
When you jump into the time travel machine, how am I going to think about this? How am I going to feel tomorrow, next week, next month, 10 years from now? It speeds up. You don't have to wait for time to pass because you get to the, oh, it's five years from now. What am I going to think about this argument I just had?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What that does is it highlights the fact that what you're going through is temporary. It's unstable. It will eventually fade. That turns the volume down on our emotions, right? So that's time travel into the future. Go into the past. You could do this. It works a little bit differently. I find it to be equally effective. So shit hits the fan. Things aren't going well.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Mental time travel machine, 1943. Eastern Poland. Get out. I spent some time with my grandparents evading the Nazis in the frozen Polish woods. I don't have to spend much time with them back then to realize that what I'm going through now, come on, this pales in comparison to what they had to endure. It's a powerful, powerful way of putting my adversity in perspective.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Now, to be clear, these little jujitsu moves, these are not taking a negative experience and turning it into a tea party. What they are doing is they're turning the volume down on the negativity, allowing me to re-engage, be objective, and get on with things. Those are two distancing tactics. I'm going to throw two more at you really quick because these are just very tactical moves here.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
One of my favorite tools, distance self-talk. Coach yourself through a problem silently, very important, silently, using your name and you. All right, Ethan, how are you going to deal with this? Here's what you're going to do. We are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. We are all giant hypocrites at some level.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This is not just me who says this, right? I mean, think about the phrase, do as I say, not as I do. right? Like we're all familiar with that phrase. When you use the word you and your name to coach yourself through a problem, you're using language to shift your perspective. Most of the time we use the word you So when we think about and refer to someone else, right?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I is when we think about ourself. You is someone else. So when I'm talking to myself with you, it's putting me in this advice coaching mode, if you will. This is how I talk to someone else. I'm really good at giving advice to other people. not so good about giving advice to myself.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So distance self-talk and, um, and the last tool I'll mention here, the last distancing tool, it's not the only one, but the last one that I'm fond of. Um, it's a bit of a, how can I, it's, um, It's a bespoke tool.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay. I don't know if this will work for you, but many people who speak a second language don't that is totally distinct from their main, and I wouldn't say British and English are, find that cursing in a second language doesn't quite have the same level of indignity and inappropriateness. So it's a lot easier. Spanish is my second language, as you know very well from our last podcast.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
our last conversation, it's easy for me to curse in Spanish. And there's nothing doesn't seem as bad as when I curse in my native tongue, which I'm reluctant to do. So what research shows is that when you think through emotional problems in a second language, You have some mental space from the emotions.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
She knows better. I get angry. What does that anger do? It zooms me in on the transgression. It motivates me to approach the situation. It is conveying facial expressions to her to say, not good. All of this with the intent of making sure she doesn't do this again so that she doesn't injure herself. Take another example, sadness. How on earth could being sad be functional?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You're learning about your emotions. You're having these emotional experiences in your native language, not your second language.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Really, not my ability to skillfully walk you through the conundrum you faced in Guatemala?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Oh, so one of the stories I tell is of this astronaut slash cosmonaut. So this is someone who... He was an American, became an astronaut, but then also trained with the Russian cosmonauts because he lived on the Mir space station for several months. And while he was on the space station, he had to deal with one of the worst space fires in history. And this fire just happened out of nowhere. And
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
One of the things he reported doing as he was trying to navigate this terrifying moment where this fire is raging and might spell the end of him and his fellow cosmonauts is he starts coaching himself through the problem using his name and you. So he starts using distant self-talk. in, in a moment of heightened stress.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And there are lots of illustrations of this, um, few Wimbledon's ago, uh, Jovovic when he was, um, early on during the tournament was getting, uh, getting beat pretty badly by, um, by an opponent, he takes a break, goes to the bathroom and comes out of the bathroom and he's just like a bat out of hell. And he like demolishes his opponent wins.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I think he went on to win the entire tournament after that. And after the, after the match, someone asked him, Hey, you know, like what happened in the bathroom? Um, when he took a break and he's like, I coached myself through the problem. I gave myself advice. I said, you can do it. The match isn't over. You got this.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It was like textbook case of using this tool to coach himself through the problem. Tons of examples of this. Malala Yousafzai talking about dealing with the threat of the Taliban reported doing this too.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, I love that. It's a perfect illustration. And it does seem on the one hand, yeah, but we're talking to ourself. But let's think about for a moment the things we sometimes say to ourself when we're struggling. We say things to ourself. We think things about ourself that we would never dare offer to another human being, let alone someone we want to succeed. My buddy comes to me.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, we experience sadness when our understanding of the world and who we are is challenged in some way by something that happens that we cannot fix. So we're fired. We're rejected. We lose someone we love. Now we are faced with the task of having to reframe how we think about the world and ourselves in it. And so that takes some energy, right? So what does sadness motivate us to do?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
My daughters come to me. My wife comes to me with a problem. Like, I'm giving them the most constructive advice I possibly can. It doesn't mean I'm always being unrealistic with them and telling them, but I'm trying to always support them to the best extent possible.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You suck. Why even? I would never do that. Yet. Oftentimes, lots of people default to doing that with themselves. And so by switching the pronouns that we're using to refer to ourselves and using our name even, it's automatically putting us into this more constructive advice giving mode. And it's a simple thing to do. It's what I love about so many of these tools. If you know what they are, boom.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I mean, how long does it take me to think, all right, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this next week?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And it's a blend. We don't know enough about blends either, but I blend the two together quite frequently. So we just covered like the three, what I call internal shifters, sensation, attention, and perspective. And there are lots of tactics within those. These are things that you could do wherever you are. You have those tools within you. But then here's the beauty of the human condition.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We also have these shifters around us in our relationships with other people, in our physical environments and in our cultures. And those are even more places that you could find resources to help yourself.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You know, I think you do get deep change, um, with some of these tools. Um, you know, and I think, um, it obviously varies person to person by circumstances, but the sensory experiences, I think you get really deep, deep shifts. They may not be long lasting, those sensory shifts, but sometimes a temporary reprieve is what we need to then either use another tool or get back on track. Um,
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Just think about the sweaty Muay Thai fighter. I mean, that's a deep experience, emotional experience, I'm guessing you had or you've had when that occurs. Likewise, with attention, being able to divert your attention away from something that's bothering you onto a really immersive alternative experience is you can think of attention as your mental spotlight. Like, what are you looking at, right?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If you change what you're looking at from something that is causing distress to something that is causing maybe the opposite, This is going to change that emotional experience. Perspective, in some ways, I think that's the shifter that lends itself most vulnerable to the critique that you just offered. But let's not misinterpret that vulnerability as an indictment as to the power of that tool.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
In many ways, it might be one of our most precious tools. So- When we've got to look at something really hard and now reframe it, right? It's very hard to take something that is a giant negative and make it a giant positive. We don't see that happening very often. What we do see happening is taking something that is negative and reframing it to make it more manageable.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Being able to do that, that is not like the fact that we don't take it to be a super positive, like the loss of a loved one or an immense rejection. I think that's impractical. And I think there are probably good reasons why you wouldn't want to be able to do that. I have come across certain people in my life, and I'm speaking from anecdote here, who were exceptionally adept at
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It motivates us to kind of slow down physiologically, turn our attention inward to try to reflect on what's happening, to try to do that hard cognitive work. But, and this I find so fascinating, we're a social species, right? And like going away and into a corner to now just brood on this heavy stuff, that could be dangerous.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
almost pathologically so, at reframing a really, really bad thing, just totally positive. And as a result, they didn't actually learn from that experience. I've been around those people too. Right. And so I think you do want to have some safeguards on our ability to reinterpret things.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You would never experience them because we do have this motivation to avoid pain. So then you would live a life free of it and you would be robbed in your term. So like the example I like to give people that really I think resonates is physical pain. Most of us try to minimize the experience of physical pain. We're motivated to avoid pain. I'm a great example of it. I do not like physical pain.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Giant baby at the doctor, all these things. All right, well, what if we're successful? We never experience physical pain. We can actually look at people who never experience physical pain because there are people born into this world who are incapable of having that experience due to a genetic anomaly. What happens to those people is they die young.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
because their hand gets caught in the stove and they don't experience a cue to tell them to pull it out, right? So we want to be able to have these negative experiences because they have a functionality to them. What we don't want to have happen is keeping our hand in the stove or like a hypersensitivity to pain. That's the emotions getting triggered too greatly.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So have I quieted the critique yet?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So space shifters, this is a tool that I was totally blind to, and it works at a few different levels. Let me ask you, are there any places, like physical places in your life that you find when you're in that presence of that place, it's just filled with a sense of comfort? It's just, it feels almost restorative. Yes. So might you care giving a few examples?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So... you've probably heard that we attach to other people and that certain people in our life can be these, if we're securely attached to them, they're almost like this extension of like a resource that we could lean on to help us deal with adversity. You go to those people, just being in their presence can be soothing. And this goes back to early childhood when we
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Not always, but when we develop secure, positive attachments to other people, when we find ourselves going to those caretakers if they're a securely attached figure, everything feels better, like it's going to be okay. We also develop these attachments to places. And I don't think they're always top of mind for us.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But when we visit those places that we have these positive attachments to, they can fill us with a sense of positivity that can often be useful for managing things. these distressing experiences. So I think about my kids often with this work because when they were young, they would often do this thing. Whenever they'd get upset, usually if I or their mom disciplined them, they'd be like,
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We might want to throw some lifelines out to the community to make sure they check up on us. And indeed we do. And the way that sadness allows us to do that is by doing what? Give it to me. Making the... There you go. We're jamming now, right? That is so powerful a cue to pull us in.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I just want to go home. I just want to go to my room, just like you, their bedroom. Their bedroom was this place that filled them with a sense of safety and security. And so the invitation here to folks is to think about, do a kind of environmental audit, if you will. What are the spaces around you in your immediate vicinity? that provides you with a sense of safety and security.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I often, like I love watching these spy films where there are safe houses that are all over the city. You know what I'm talking about? Like when a spy is being chased, if there was a safe house, do you know what a safe house is?
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay, so it's like, that's this one, it's usually like an apartment or a place in the country. The bad guys never find them. There are supplies there. If you're in the house, as the name implies, you're safe.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I would argue that we have the equivalent in our neighborhoods, in our general vicinities, spaces that when we go to those spaces, when we're dealing with difficult things, they provide us with a sense of security and restoration. So for me, it's the Arboretum near my home. It's the tea house that I wrote my first book. And it's one of my offices on campus. I'm in those places and I just...
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Things feel a lot more manageable. That's one way that you can interact with your spaces strategically. The other thing you could do is more locally. You could design your immediate spaces, your office, your home in two ways. You can add things. that push your emotions in the desirable direction. So what am I talking about? Well, pictures of loved ones and friends.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We've done this research where we ask people to think about a really painful event and we'll then expose them to an image of a loved one or a friend. On some trials, on other trials, we expose them to the image of another subject's loved one or friend. So in one case, you have an emotional attachment, a positive one. In the other case, you don't.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And what we find is that a micro glance at a picture of a loved one speeds up the rate at which people recover from distressing experiences. No way. I populated my offices with pictures. My wife is like, why are you putting up pictures everywhere? You've never had pictures in your offices before. I have them all over the place. If I could turn my computer, I'd show you.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So I've got them right there. I've got them on that direction. And so- I now just glance over, and I've got these little jolts of resilience when I need it. Plants. We know that nature has restorative effects. We have a sense of why that happens. It can capture our attention, often giving us a little break from the tumult of life.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's true not just of going for a walk in a safe natural setting, although the more immersive the experience is, the better. So you should try to interact with nature more if you find that helpful. It's an easy thing to do. But if you can't get outside, put some plants in your surrounds. I have one. Mm-hmm. right over there. I bought a bunch of plants, never had plants in the house either.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We dropped more money than I'd like to admit on plants all over the house. I live, I live this stuff. So that's imposing things around you. You can also take things away from your environment that may be pushing you in the wrong direction. And I'll give you two examples. They are very concrete. Oftentimes when we're overcome with emotion, You don't feel like you're in control.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
This conversation here about evolutionary significance touches on this topic of toxic positivity, which I talk about in the book as something that I'm not a huge fan of because we often hear that the goal in life should be to Maximize positivity and try to avoid negative emotional experiences. No bad vibes. Good vibes only. If that's your goal, number one, good luck.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It goes back to what we were talking about before. We don't like that feeling because human beings, we like to be in control. One way you can regain a sense of control is by creating order around you. That leads to what we call compensatory control. You're putting things away. You're organizing, cleaning up.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That gives you a sense of order and control outside in the world that you're lacking inside here. Simple thing you could do. This is why people often clean and organize when they're stressed out. They don't know why they do it, but they have this reflexive urge to do so. Has that ever been true for you? Yes. Okay, so compensatory control. The other thing you could do, and this may be controversial,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But I stand by it. If there are triggers that are challenging you and undermining your ability to meet your emotion management goals, get rid of those triggers. And so for me, this is where pizza doggy bags come into play. So I have a love affair with pizza. It's my childhood food. I grew up in New York. I love New York City classic slice of pizza. If I see pizza, I will eat it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And it doesn't matter what time of day it is. And I will eat it in the wee hours of the morning or late night when I shouldn't be eating that food. So why am I talking about pizza? If we have people over for a football watching party, I'll order the pizza. I will indulge in it. I will over-order because I always like to know there's enough food for everyone there.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
When the party is over, I will insist that people take the pizza with them. If there is leftover pizza, I will throw it out because I know that if it is in the refrigerator and I see it, I will go for it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That is correct. And so I'm proactively here structuring my environment to help me meet my goals.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
yeah well put um you know you just get psych phd here we come um oh there was uh there's actually uh this famous artist i think his name was hunder hunderwasser some i'm butchering the name but his artistic style was characterized by an aversion to straight lines he thought they encroached on his creativity and when i'm when i'm in it when i'm like writing and trying to be creative like
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
The office is a total mess. The only time my office is clean is when I'm having a little spell of rumination about something. That's when I put things away nice and orderly. That speaks to the flexibility of our minds and how closely tethered they are to our surroundings. Again, once you know about these principles, it allows you to be less reactive and more strategic. What do I mean by that?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Earlier in life, I would organize and clean up when I was stressed out. I didn't know why. Now, when I find the rumination just beginning to percolate, I immediately start cleaning and organizing. I get in there right away. So the amount of time between the trigger and my intervention has shortened quite a bit based on what I know about how these tools work.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You're giving people an unattainable goal. We have the capacity to experience these responses for a reason. When I think back to like performances that I have given where I've not experienced any anxiety, those are the ones that have tended to fall flat because there was no cue inside me that motivated me to energize and prepare. I mean, is this true for you?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Okay, so relationship shifters. Let me give you three take-homes here for how to harness your relationships with other people. There are lots of ways other people can affect us, obviously. We are a social species. One is when you go to them to talk about your problems... you've got to be careful about who you choose to talk to about your problems because they can either help you or harm you.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And sometimes the harm comes even when they're really well-intentioned. What do I mean by this? Lots of people think that the best way to provide support for someone else is just to let them vent about their emotions. What we have learned about venting is venting is good for strengthening the relational bonds between people. Good to know that someone else has your back.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
They're willing to hear you out, empathize with you. The problem with venting is if that is all you do, you leave the conversation, you feel tight about your relationship with that other person, the problem is still there. The best kinds of conversations do two things. You talk to someone who first gives you this opportunity to express your feelings. They listen, they engage, they empathize.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But then at a certain point in the conversation, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. they're in an ideal position to help you do that. Problem isn't often happening to them. There's an art to doing this well. So if you're now the person that someone is coming to, seeking support, you start off and, you know, like, what's going on? Tell me about it. Oh, it sounds terrible.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
When you see your opening, you know, sometimes, hey, I have a thought. Can I share it with you? Sometimes they might say, no, I'm not done. And then they keep going, right? And other times it's like, yeah, tell me, what do you think?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So you want to be delicate with that because depending on the person, what they're struggling with, some people need to do a little bit more of that emotional work first.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So we want to do both though, right? We want to follow that trajectory. First, the emotional stuff, then the cognitive. The amount of time you need in that emotional zone is going to vary. But now we've just given folks a blueprint for both how to find people to provide them with the best kind of support
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And if someone comes to them, here's a roadmap that they can follow to give other people good support. How contagious are emotions? Unbelievably contagious. They can spread within seconds, which is why you should be incredibly alert to folks on your team who may be experiencing emotions immediately.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That if if they spread might not be conducive to the broader to the broader group you know why does this happen why are emotions contagious because in particular when we're in circumstances that we're not quite sure. What we should feel? Other people are a pretty good source of information. So we're constantly referencing other people for info about what the situation is like.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It's a great question, and it's funny. I often, when I'm speaking about this topic to folks, I often ask people, hey, who here feels comfortable coming up to the front and just telling us what it means to have an emotion? What is an emotion? It's kind of wild.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And we're using that information to inform our own reaction. So you get these contagiousness effects a lot where it's not certain how you should feel. And you're more likely to be... infected i guess is the well let's stick with the metaphor um when it's it's someone who is at your level or above your level someone that you um just in in the hierarchy you're more vulnerable to that interesting
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah. So you want to pay attention to contagion. And you can use this as a tool as well. You can affect, hopefully positively, other people by trying to come in there with the right kind of attitude that you think is conducive to the goals that you have, if it's a workplace environment or even in your home. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Another important way that people can shift us that I think is important to point out has to do with social comparisons. So we often hear that we should not compare ourselves to other people. You've heard this before, yes? Comparison, thief of joy, yeah. Thief of joy, right? Like I'm on the record. It's in print. I've said this to my kids at times. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And it's probably the worst advice I've ever given because social comparisons are how we work. They're part of how we make sense of our standing in the world. We reference other people to gain some insight into where we are on dimensions that don't have clear standards. If you want to understand how successful you are in life,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Have you ever found that a little bit of anxiety can be your friend?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You're going to look to your surroundings and other people to draw an inference about that. And that's true of lots of different qualities that we care a great deal about. So number one, I think the challenge here is not to stop comparing yourself to other people. Because we're going to always be doing that at some level.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
But it's to understand how you can benefit the most from engaging in those comparisons. And I want to share with you two shifts here that I have found to personally be game-changing. So I inevitably will come across a profile of someone in my network who is outperforming me on some dimension that I care about. And the instant trigger that is out of my control is, ugh.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
oh my god i'm a failure you know like look at the size of their h index look at how many bucks they sold last month there you go you know all my triggers right and um and that could be my default which is an envy reaction it is not an emotion that feels great but i can reframe it and i can use that comparison to be a source of motivation wait a second They were able to do this. They're like me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That means I could probably do something like that. So now I've taken a comparison that initially is a source of envy and it's associated negative feelings and I've reframed it to be a source of motivation now.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's a powerful reframe to have in your toolbox because especially if you are on social media, these things do happen more frequently now than before because we're constantly exposed to the accomplishments of other folks. And now you have a tool to, when you find yourself encountering those instances, flipping it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Now there's another reframe when it comes to comparisons that I think is also important. Sometimes we will come across individuals who have suffered some tragedy, work, health, relationship. And some people, when they come across that information, their default is to think, oh my God, it happened to them. It can happen to me. And that can be a source of negativity as well that can bring us down.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Look, no one is saying that negative emotions don't blow up and metastasize. This is why I got into this business in the first place. Because these emotions that we have, these negative emotions, they're tools, but they are unwieldy tools. If we use the metaphor of a hammer, Hammer in the right hands? My grandfather was a carpenter.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Odd type of empathy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, Oh no. Like what if this happens to me? What if I get sick? What if I get nailed for whatever? Um, That can be the default, but a reframe here is, wow, I'm so grateful this hasn't happened to me. It doesn't mean you don't still feel bad for that individual, but now like, oh my God, I'm so fortunate I didn't get that diagnosis. Everything is fine.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So it's a reframe there as well. So I'd like to share these with folks because I think these social comparisons that are such a huge part of our lives... We can often feel trapped when we engage in them. And there are things we can do to lessen the negative impact that they have. So that's another way in which you could manage your relationships. Yeah, go for it.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
With respect to how insecure you are, whether you fall victim to these social comparisons.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, I think they're So I stand by this notion that social comparisons are an inevitable feature of the human condition, and that given that, you want to have tools to mitigate the negative impact that they have and actually turn those comparisons into something you could benefit from. Having said that, there are things you can do to curate your
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
experiences in this world to to minimize the likelihood of engaging in certain kinds of comparisons that might repeatedly lead you astray so what do i mean by that if you find for example that there's someone on your feed whatever your social media application of choice is that they're a vulnerability spot for you so they are someone who you know maybe you don't like them you asked about liking maybe they're a real competitor and and you find that just you know
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Learning about their monthly podcast downloads just sends you astray.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's right. So, you know, what did we talk about with the pizza before? that getting rid of that pizza and the trigger in the first place from a regulatory standpoint is likely to be a lot more effective than having to deal with it once it is activated. So curating your feeds, right? Minimizing the degree in which you come into contact with that information. That's another step you can take.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And it's blending the environment and the social, which is another important piece to keep in mind that these tools often go hand in hand. So like another example of that is nature, going for a walk in nature. That's an environmental tool. But one of the reasons why nature is so restorative is it captures our attention from the sensory experiences, the smells, the sights.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
built beautiful homes, hammer in the wrong hand, my hand, a hammer, source of massive destruction. Same is true of our emotions. And so what I find so interesting is on the one hand, we're born into this world with this capacity to experience this wild range of emotions, positive and negative, and they serve us well. They're tools, but they're really unwieldy. So guess what?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So there are these ways in which These different shifters are coming together in different experiences. Final one, culture. Culture. It's the air we breathe. It is everywhere. And it's often something we take for granted. And I think the more we stop to really think about the role plays in our emotional lives and the lives of people we care about, the better off we will all be. What is culture?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Number one, it's our values and our beliefs. So let's bring this whole conversation full circle. Do you think you can actually control your emotions? Yes. Our culture, thank you, good answer. Our culture is giving us those beliefs. I am communicating to my kids from the time they're little,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That, yeah, you may not be able to control when you experience an emotion, but once you have it, there's a lot of things you can do. You don't have to feel this way. If you don't want to, you can do these other things, right? So I am the culture, and family is a kind of microculture. I'm giving my kids values and beliefs. Values, like...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We value the role that emotions play in our lives, and we also value the importance of regulating those emotions to help us achieve our goals. We believe that it is possible to do so. Another important thing that culture does, though, is it doesn't just give us these values and beliefs. It gives us tools. To help us live up to those values and beliefs, right? To actualize them.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm giving my kids tools. How am I giving them tools? I'm talking about these things. I assure you, I'm not giving lectures at dinner every night, like PowerPoint presentations on these things, but... I'm talking about the stuff I learn about, the stuff I am studying in the lab. I'm asking them about their experiences and how they are dealing with stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I'm having conversations like I think so many parents have with their kids, but I'm injecting lessons in there that I think are going to serve them well, which is what good parenting is all about, right? We're socializing our kids to give them the best chance to of living the best life they can live. And I think a big part of that is giving them tools to manage their emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So that's culture at its best. Now, the other thing to know about culture, though, is You may find yourself in cultures that from an emotion management standpoint, they are just remarkable. Certain organizations really value having a healthy, positive kind of orientation. They give you lots of tools, benefits for helping you manage your emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Other cultures can be toxic with respect to emotions like they don't matter. We're going to grind you away. Survival of the fittest. If you find... that you are in a culture that is pushing your emotions consistently in the wrong direction and there's not much you can do about it, then you've got some interesting options.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And one option is to leave that culture and switch over to another one if it is not serving you well because it is ever-present and it can exert a powerful role on your emotional life.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We also evolve the capacity to to rein these tools in through these regulatory techniques that we all possess, but they don't come with a user's manual. And that in a certain sense is what I and lots of other scientists have been doing for many decades now is trying to build that user's manual to help people manage their emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That's exactly right. Those are the two options. And I think it's just so easy to overlook the power that culture has on us. But it's the air we breathe.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Let's start the movement right now. I think that's a huge part of it. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned in... doing research in this space and often working with colleagues on this work is we end up serving that accountability function for ourselves, right? Because we're learning about this stuff together. We see the impact it has on participants and on ourselves.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And so we're keeping ourselves accountable to this. And so, you know, I have like, I call it the, I have this emotional advisory board. These are folks in my network who I mean, this is such an invaluable resource I possess. These are not trained clinicians per se. These are people just who understand the tools that exist for managing emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And they recognize that sometimes I'm gonna need some support because if the problem's really big, They're in a great position to advise me and they help keep me accountable. And they tune me in to these different shifters that might not be performing optimally. And so I think that is a valuable, valuable commodity.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
You know, we can do a lot on our own, but we can do a lot better with other people and cultures on our side. And, you know, that's a hope of this book to really emphasize that for folks.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So whoop, this thing no no no oh i was gonna i was hoping i was gonna tap into your knowledge of music there the music whoop whoop you know the song you don't know that song you're on you're just making weird noises into a mic no sorry oh come on you don't know that song whoop there it is oh right of course right well i i think oof there it is is or whoop there it is
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, okay. I do know. Anyone know the actual name of that song? What's it called? I do. It's actually called Wump with an M, not Wump. But I thought for decades it was Wump. Okay, so this is a fantastic question. And it's actually the penultimate chapter of my book. And it's titled From Knowing to Doing. Because so often... And this is a huge source of frustration for me, right?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Like we give people tools, like I encounter tools, but I learn about them. And then we just don't use them when we need to use them. And so this is a giant problem that scientists have noted for decades. And they've actually developed a framework for helping people go from knowledge to action, from making this emotion regulation something you read about,
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
to something that you make automatic in your life. And here's how it works. WHOOP is an acronym. So there are a couple of steps. So W, that's the wish. What is your goal? My goal is to not get upset with my, not like have a huge reaction with my kids when they don't listen to me or my wife. Okay, that's the goal. O, the first O, what's the outcome you hope to accomplish if you fulfill this wish?
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, I hope our family is, it's a happier family, like we're closer, we have less arguments. The purpose of that O, that next step, is to energize you, to really kind of show you what's at stake here.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, to really commit you to engaging in this pursuit. Now let's get to the second O, which is the obstacle. All right, well, what are the obstacles that might stand in the way from you achieving this goal and the outcome that would come with it? Well, when I hear them talk back to me or get ugly with each other, it instantly affects me.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
It reminds me of things from my childhood that I didn't like, and I react impulsively. All right, now we've identified the chief obstacle that stands in the way. Now let's get to the P, which is a plan. But it's not a specific plan. It's what we call an if-then plan.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If I see my daughters fighting with each other or talking disrespectfully to my wife and I, then, and then you plug in your shifter, then I will... Think about how I'm going to feel about this a year from now. Or then I'm going to broaden my perspective by recognizing their kids, their brains are still developing, they don't have great control yet.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And you just plug in the thens that you think are going to work best for you. And you actually write that out. you then rehearse it a few times. And what the research shows is that engaging in that exercise dramatically improves people's ability to activate this knowledge, to use these tools Or whatever the tools are that are in their plan when they actually need them.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Interestingly enough, this is something very similar to what the Navy SEALs do before they have missions. So they will sit down in a group. They will first specify what's their goal. What's the outcome they hope to achieve? Then they'll list out what are all the obstacles that might stand in the way. For every obstacle, they come up with a plan. If this happens, then we're going to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, you can. The question is, how can you do it better? So there's huge variability, number one, in the degree to which people are capable of managing their emotions. And I would argue that there's room for improvement regardless of where you are right now. You're really not great at it or you're really good. Understanding how this works is
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
If this happens, then we're going to do that. And then they go around the room and Socratic style call on one another to make sure everyone has that plan intact. This is one of the most successful organizations in the world at accomplishing their goals. And they're using a framework that is very similar to what scientists have suggested.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
all of us can use to help us achieve the regulatory goals that we have and so if you're committed to something if there's a goal you have that's really important consider doing one of these whoops the more you do it the more ingrained it'll become wow
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, so I'll give you my go-to shifters. I'll preface it by saying, I think the challenge that everyone faces is, A, learn about all the tools that are out there and then start experimenting to finding the tools that work best for you. I've done that. And I have some great plans that work for me. So if I'm...
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
like phase one shifting for me i jump into the mental time travel machine forward in time back in time and i coach myself through the problem using my own name and you like those three distancing tools very very powerful for for me i will also um i'll also use attention i'll take some breaks i i used to try to dive into something right away if i can afford not to if i can take some time away and distract a little bit i will do that as well um
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
depending on the context, music is always at the ready. And I specifically use music prior to performance contexts. I find that sometimes I actually need to amp myself up. Like I speak a lot. And so sometimes it's like I'm just, I'm going in there and I'm like, I don't feel anything right now. That's not good, right? So I've got some heavy stuff that kind of gets me going.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Sometimes though, if the stakes are really high, It's the equivalent of your Manchester performance. I need something to calm me down and get me locked in. And so I'll use music as a shifter as well. Let's say that round one suite of tools, and I mix it up depending on the situation amongst those few. Let's say that doesn't work. Then I go right to my emotional advisory board.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I call a couple people. They are on retainer. They're always available when I need them. And I will activate them. And that's typically for more intense problems. And I'll go for a walk in nature. There's an arboretum near my house. That's like level two. If that doesn't work, we've got some serious problems. Typically, those are the things that I really benefit. Nine times out of ten,
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Those tools work, and sometimes I'll have to cycle through them a little bit, but it constrains the amount of time I spend in an undesirable state.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
That in and of itself, I think, is enormously empowering. I find it really useful to draw a distinction to physical fitness. You're going to get people who vary in their level of physical fitness. They can all benefit, though, from learning how to optimize that facet of their lives. Some people are physically fit.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So you want to do the opposite of what we talked about before. When we talked about distancing and sometimes focusing away, let's zoom in on this and immerse ourselves in it. I mean, my, we don't want to be you in your name. We want to like, just bring that experience really close and stay with it. So what, what I'm describing right now is what we often refer to as savoring.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And this is my sleeping pill. What do I mean by that? I learned this shortly after my first daughter was born, that the best way to help me fall asleep at night is I would just, I'd close my eyes and I would just imagine her. I would just like see her as a new dad. This was just this intoxicating experience. And I imagine her doing something earlier that day.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
And that just was this wonderful feeling that helped me go to bed. If I want to savor an event now, I'll think about something great that has happened to my kids, my wife, my lab, myself. And I'll just replay in very concrete detail. the specific elements, the what, what happened to them in that experience or what happened to me. And that helps drive that state.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Sometimes I'll often talk about it with someone else. I have some people in my life who are very good at just helping me co-savor this experience. They'll just really, that's so incredible. Tell me more. I want one person like details. I want details, details of the positive stuff. That is a tool for savoring. And I relish those experiences.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, appreciate you and appreciate this conversation. www.ethancross.com and they can get all the information they'd like about Shift, the book, my lab, and lots of other stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
just because of the way genetics has endowed them with, with natural physical aptitudes, you know, maybe they're really active, they walk places and so forth and so on, but teaching them like how to do different exercises, engage in different routines is going to benefit them. It's also going to benefit those people who aren't very predisposed to be physically fit.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Well, what that means is we get to ask two kinds of questions in my lab. So number one, we try to understand how do people work when it comes to managing their emotions. And we really care about getting in there to understand the mechanics that underlie what we call emotion regulation.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We experience emotions, according to this one study that I cite in my book, about 90% of the time that we're awake, we're experiencing some type of emotional response. We are truly an emotional species. And yet if you ask people, as I often do in presentations or when I'm teaching, what's an emotion? People often just stop and they have trouble answering that question.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
I think the same is true when it comes to mental fitness. Like we don't, open up the gym to folks to explain here are the different tools here's how they work okay now the task for you now that you understand how these 12 machines work now i want you to figure out how to optimally fit those different exercises into your life to help you meet your specific goals that's really where we are
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Yeah, that's a great question that I wish I could answer, but I can't. And let me give you one reason why. So what we have done a pretty good job of in the sciences is identifying specific tools and profiling how they work.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
What we have not yet done, what we're doing right now, which is super exciting from the research point of view, is beginning to see how different tools optimally combine to help people manage their emotions. We're just beginning to do that. The reason I bring this up is I think that the key to really moving the needle on emotion regulation is
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
is understanding the combinations of tools that work well for different people in different situations. And that scientific basis, that knowledge base, it just isn't there. We just published a study or a paper, I should say, it was a couple of studies that looked at how people manage their anxiety during the COVID pandemic. And what we found in those studies was really interesting.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Every day we track people over time and every day we ask them, which of these, I believe it was 18 different tools did you use? And the tools varied in terms of their level of healthiness according to experts. And then we measure their anxiety each day. And what we wanted to see is what tool is moving the needle on people's anxiety from one day to the next.
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#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
First key insight, people seldom used just one tool, which is interesting for me because I'm often asked like, hey, what's the one thing people should do right now to manage bleep? On average, it was like between three and four different tools were used on any given day. Second, there was enormous variability in the tools that people use that actually help them manage their emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So the three or four things that I benefited from on one day were different from the three or four things that you benefited from on the same day. And you... You varied from day to day. Some combinations of tools worked for you on one day and different ones worked for you on the next. We don't yet understand how to predict that variability. And that is what we are doing now.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So the invitation I'd love to give people is, I can give you the tools, right? And that's what my book is all about. Here are the tools. And then I could give you the challenge to start self-experimenting to figure out what are the tools that work best for you, right? If a tool works, keep using it. Layer on another one. See what added benefit you get. If it doesn't, move on to something else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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?
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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?
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
And you could play this game with all the different negative emotions we experience. They all have a functionality to them.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
Let's first talk about finding hope when...
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
Oftentimes, the times that people get stuck is when they can't find meaning.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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?
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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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%
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
I played when I was a kid.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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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.
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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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
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Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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?
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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.
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And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
We haven't even planned it into the topic of my book on managing our emotions, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
I think we all have something to learn about this topic. I think it's one of the big problems we face as a species. It's something that we struggle with. When I'm talking about not managing our emotions effectively, I'm talking about our emotions getting triggered either too intensely or for too long. And how do you know what that means? We have goals for how we want to live our lives.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And if our goal is to not feel a particular way, and we find that our emotional experiences are lasting outside of that bandwidth, so to speak, too intense or too long, or maybe even too short or too little, those are typically cues that we want to manage or shift those emotions.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
so can you give me an example of that sure i have a very important presentation coming up i feel a little bit of anxiety about it which is adaptive because the anxiety that i feel is motivating me to focus on the task at hand to prepare for it to make sure i do a good job but Over time, as the minutes go on and the hours, the anxiety begins to metastasize. It gets bigger.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
I start going into worst case scenarios and it lasts longer than is actually useful. That would be a context in which I would want to manage that emotional response. Let me give you one other example in the opposite direction. Something really great happens. My kid has a real success in their life and I hear about it, I experience some happiness, but then the happiness quickly fades.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And maybe I want to savor that emotional experience because it makes me feel good, and I want to feel good more than I'm currently feeling. That would also be a context in which I would want to shift my emotions.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, I do a few different things. And I want to preface before I tell you what I do, which I happily will, I want to share with you and everyone who's listening, different tools work for different people in different situations in the same way that... We likely have different exercise routines for maintaining our fitness, and there are multiple routes to becoming physically fit.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We're increasingly learning that that is also true for our emotional lives when it comes to being emotionally fit. So with that little bit of a disclaimer out of the way, What I do to manage my anxiety? Typically, I'll first engage one of my senses. I've got a music playlist that is very effective for calming me down or sometimes even pumping me up and getting excited. And both of those
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
emotional shifts work against the anxiety, I will often reframe what I'm experiencing. I will remind myself of the fact that I've done hundreds, if not thousands of presentations, and they've all gone well. So I'm broadening my perspective there, and I'm getting out of this, what if this happens? What if? And instead, I'm reminding myself, well, the what if virtually never happens.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
If the anxiety is really intense, I will often call up one of my emotional advisors. These are people who are really skilled at not just hearing me out, listening and learning to what I'm going through and empathizing with me, connecting with me emotionally in a way that communicates to me that they really care about me, but they're also really useful for helping me look at that bigger picture.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And that's an invaluable resource I possess. So those are a couple of the things that I would typically do. I might sprinkle in a walk outside in a safe, natural setting at times. And at other times, I might also distract myself for a circumscribed period of time.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Immerse myself in something else that has nothing to do with the thing I'm worried about to allow myself to come back to the task at hand with a little bit of freshness.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Not exactly. First of all, they take different routes to doing that, number one. But just to give you some counterexamples there, when I'm listening to music, I often will listen to music in the background when I'm working on something.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So I'm still focusing there on the task at hand, but I have this sensory experience that is shifting my emotions really outside of my awareness and doing it relatively effortlessly. Distracting myself by focusing on something else entirely, that's a real attentional shift. Now I'm just not thinking about the issue at hand. And that's giving me some mental space.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
But when I'm looking at the bigger picture, once again, I still have the experience I'm concerned about in full view. It isn't a focus of my attention, but I am reframing. I'm changing the way I think about it. Now, when I go to speak to another person, they are certainly helping me reframe it. So there's overlap there. But the added benefit I get when I talk to someone else is
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
that it's sometimes a lot easier for us to reframe when other people guide us through it than when we try to do it ourselves.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
It's a great question. It's something that scientists actively study. I like to think of emotions as tools. So these are tools that we evolved to help us navigate the world. You can think about emotions as like these little software programs that get loaded up in particular situations. And these are programs that activate emotions. what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
What I mean by that is when you experience an emotion, your physiology may start to shift. So if we stick with anxiety, you might start to experience a kind of fight or flight response. You have to go to the bathroom, your palms start to sweat. Emotions capture our cognition or how we think as well. So when I experience anxiety, it zooms me in, it focuses me in on the problem at hand.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So I'm focusing really intently on it. Emotions also can influence our motor behavior or our facial display. So Mike, can you often tell when someone is sad, for example, by the look on their face? Sure, of course. So this is a loosely coordinated set of responses.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
I say loosely because it's not the case that all three of those things always get triggered every time you experience an emotion, but they tend to hang together. And the whole idea here is that we evolve the capacity to experience these emotions because they help us. So anxiety focuses us in on potential threats, allowing us to prepare for them. Anger is another example.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Anger is something we experience when we perceive that our view of how things should work is violated. There is the opportunity to fix the situation. We experience anger. What about sadness? How on earth could sadness be useful? Well, we tend to experience sadness when we experience some change in our way of understanding ourself or the world. Something happens that challenges that worldview.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And there's nothing you can do or nothing you think you can do to actually change Fix it. So the loss of a loved one, getting fired, right? Now your view of yourself and the world is forever changed. You can't bring that person back. You can't get that new job.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So we experience this emotion that motivates us to introspect, to turn inward, to start doing that important thinking work that we need to do to start reframing
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
our lives and our place in this world this sadness experience also motivates us to slow down physiologically like just kind of pull back and withdraw but it also does something quite beautiful if you ask me which is it leaves this it gives off this kind of alarm
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
signal to everyone in our network in the form of a sad facial display that communicates to other people that, hey, don't leave me alone for too long because I am social and I need some connection. So check up on me at times, which is why when you see someone with a sad facial expression, you often want to help them. So that's what emotions are. They're different.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
People often wonder what's the difference between emotion and a feeling. I like to point out that Feelings are the subjective part of an emotional experience. If you think about what happens when you are physically ill, there are lots of things happening in your body that you have no awareness of. But what you typically are aware of is your fever, right? The feelings of chills and the sweats.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
That's a component of physical illness that you become aware. Feelings are that subjective component of an emotional response. It's like the temperature you experience when you're physically ill. Is that helpful for emotions?
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
I like to divide the world of tools into six buckets, three of which include exist inside you. These are tools that you can use wherever you are, really. These are what I call internal shifters. And then there are some shifters, shifter being shorthand for a tool you use to shift your emotion. There are some external shifters that exist outside of us. What are the three internal shifters?
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
The first one is sensation or sensory experiences. I think this is a shifter that we all have lots of intimate experiences with, but don't avail ourselves of in the heat of the moment. So when I'm talking about sensory experiences, I'm talking about things like sight, sound, touch, smell, experience.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
You know, if you walk through an airport, the international duty-free section, you know, I think of that as an emotion regulation store because there's so many perfumes and colognes that are smelled. I think about... Why do we put those on? We put those on to manage the way other people feel about us.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
A pleasant scent instantly elicits a type of emotional reaction, so much so that many hotels actually work with I'm making up that name. There is a technical name that is alluding me right now. But they work with folks to create these bespoke smells that they then pipe through the ventilation of the hotels to provide people with this positive emotional experience when they're in their facility.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
That's one way you could shift your emotion. Another thing you could do is music.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
you ask people as experimenters have hey why do you listen to music approximately 100 percent of participants will tell you i listen to music because i like the way it makes me feel but if you then ask people hey the last time you were angry anxious or sad what did you do to manage your emotions only between 10 and 30 percent of participants report listening to music
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Music's a really easy way to nudge your emotions, to shift your emotions in a particular direction. The shifts aren't always long-lasting, but if you need a kick in the butt, so to speak, to shift out of a particular emotional response, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention. Another kind of internal shifter is attention.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So where are you pointing your attentional spotlight? Are you thinking about the thing that is driving the emotional response or are you looking away from it? It's not as simple as... on or away, sometimes the best ways of managing our emotions is to be flexible. And we don't often talk about this.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We often talk about avoidance, not thinking about stuff as toxic, when in fact, what we see in lots of research is that people who are flexible actually end up doing pretty good. So if I get into an argument with my partner, rather than trying to fix the situation in the heat of the moment, right after the emotions are triggered, I might take a day or two off from thinking about it.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And then come back to it later on when temperatures have diminished and it's a lot easier for us to think reasonably about this experience. The third internal shifter is perspective. I think we hear a lot that you should change the way you think to change the way you feel, but it's not always so easy to do that. And the good news here is that we possess tools to
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
make it easier for us to reframe our circumstances. Those tools often involve taking a step back and thinking about what we're dealing with from a more distance objective perspective. You can use language to help you do this. Use your name and the second person pronoun you to try to coach yourself through a problem. All right, Ethan, how are you gonna deal with this?
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We usually use the word you when we're thinking about and referring to other people. It's a lot easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to ourselves. So when you use the word you to refer to yourself, that automatically shifts your perspective, putting you into this more adaptive advice giving mode.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We can also jump into our mental time travel machines to think about how we're going to feel about something down the road. We've experienced all sorts of really tough things in our lives, most of which are have come but eventually gone, and we lose sight of that in the heat of the moment.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So thinking about how you're going to feel about what you're currently grappling with down the road can also be useful.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, that's a great observation. So step one, you gotta learn about what these different tools are. And once you do, then what you can do is you can start using frameworks, simple frameworks for enhancing the likelihood that you will use these tools
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
when you most need to use them and that you'll activate them automatically without thinking um you know the the the situation that you just described is not a trivial one we often get dealt curveballs uh that we're not prepared for and in the moment it can be really hard to figure out what to do because our emotions are are striking and are triggered so intensely it's precisely in those situations that we want to have plans
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
that prepare us for what to do.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
One of the most impactful findings I've come across in psychology is the idea that bad is stronger than good. Losses loom larger than gains. The bad stuff in life just kind of sticks out a whole lot more strongly than the good stuff. It draws our attention, and I think it's why we often think about it more when it comes to managing our emotions.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Because the bad stuff, part of the reason it's so useful for us is it doesn't feel good. We want to minimize it as much as possible. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the positive side of our lives or that we need to be passive in terms of our positive experiences. You can absolutely cultivate positive experiences. So I gave you a couple of examples before.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, actually, before I give you more examples, let me further say, You should try to cultivate positive experiences if that's something you want to do. Some people have the goal of being kind of even keeled and just Buddha-like, if you will, and homeostatic. They don't want to get too high or too low. And if that's your goal... Great. Follow through with that goal.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Other people want to experience positive emotions more frequently. And if that's your goal, then the cool thing is you've got tools to help you achieve that goal. So certainly savoring, immersing yourself in positive past experiences or fantasizing about potential future eventualities, that's one thing you could do.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
amplify positivity another thing you could do to make yourself feel better about stuff is to help other people this is my actual favorite finding right now in psychology it's a lot of research which shows that one of the best ways to make yourself feel better to make yourself feel good about things do something good for someone else I think there's just something really wonderful about that how it's win-win for everyone involved
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Maybe the last one I'll slip in there is awe is an emotion, a positive emotion that has a lot of value. Because when you experience this emotion of awe, it's an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and seemingly indescribable, like a beautiful mountain view. Or sometimes you experience awe when you have a social experience, like singing in unison at a party.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
sporting event or a lot of people who are religious experience all when they pray. This is a very positive experience that helps broaden our perspective. It makes us realize that there's more to the world than just us. That feels good and it can also help you manage your negative emotions as well.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Music's a really easy way to shift your emotions in a particular direction. The shifts aren't always long-lasting, but if you need a kick in the butt, so to speak, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Lots of people talk to themselves and what they say varies tremendously from what you just described to come on, you got this to I really want a bagel right now. And so on and so forth. And we know that people who are skilled at harnessing this voice to be motivating and encouraging, they actually perform better in those contexts. So I, knowing this stuff...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I'm very strategic about how I harness my self-talk when I'm exercising. I will be motivating. Come on, man, you've got this. That's right. I refer to myself in the second and third person. We'll talk more about how that works. I also can become somewhat in my head aggressive towards the instructor that is telling me to do painful things. Oh, like the woman that I was like-
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Why don't you try doing that? I don't like the way you're talking to me. I want to do it this way. I don't say that out loud. I smile out loud. But in my head, right, I'm having that kind of conversation. So the point here is another thing your inner voice helps you do is control and motivate yourself. The fourth and final thing I want to flag here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
To me, I describe this as the most magical feature of our inner voice. Your inner voice helps us make sense of this messy world that we live in. We are bombarded by things all the time that have the potential to lead us astray. we get rejected, we get into arguments, we experience anxiety about what may come.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And when those different kinds of curve balls get thrown at us, what we do is we often stop and we try to, okay, how do we make sense of this so we could get back on track of living our lives? And we make meaning, we use our inner voice to try to make sense of our circumstances, to essentially create a story that helps us understand what we're going through. and who we are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So your inner voice is actually shaping your sense of self. So if we just pause here and zoom out, your inner voice helps you do things as simple as reminding yourself what's on your grocery list and memorizing a phone number when you're repeating in your head, to simulating and planning for the future, to controlling and motivating yourself, to making meaning
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
If I told someone I could give you a tool that does all those things, like these are the things that are really important to us in life. Your inner voice is central to all of those things. It's an invaluable tool that you do not want to live life without. The big question, of course, that really got me into this business in the first place was, on the one hand, we have this remarkable capability.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We reach for it when we're struggling, but as you know, as I know, as you who are listening knows, oftentimes we don't activate this voice and get clear solutions to how to move on. we just start stumbling. We start looping over our problems in an attempt to work through them, or we start berating ourselves incessantly for mistakes that are endemic to human life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And when that happens, I think that is one of the big problems we face as a species. And as I have said before, I say that not to scare or sensationalize. I say it based on what I know of the data, because if you look at what Chatter, which I define as the negative manifestation of your inner voice, when it turns into that negative thought looping, that self-beratement, that just tanks us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It makes it hard for us to think and perform. It creates friction in our relationships and it undermines our health and wellbeing. These are the things we care about in our lives. And so that's why I think it's just critical to address it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, thank you. I mean, it is truly remarkable when you take a 30,000-foot view and think about What does our chatter look like? What does it sound like? I mean, we say things to ourselves that many people not only wouldn't say to a buddy, right? We often talk about that. Talk to yourself like you would talk to someone else. This is a great tool, by the way. We'll talk more about that later.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We sometimes say things to ourselves that... We are ashamed to even say out loud. Sometimes when I do exercises, workshops with groups or students, I'll sometimes invite people to just write down their chatter on a piece of paper. And it's really remarkable. People are often reluctant to even put in writing what they're thinking, even when I assure them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Like the shredders right here, there's another garbage bag with lighter fluid, like not bag, garbage can, right? You can, I'm joking here, but like no one is going to look at this. Just admitting to what is happening up here can be so challenging for folks. And I think that speaks to the gravity of what we're talking about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
There are three key forms. Number one, what I call rumination, which is going over the past, something you did in the past, you can't fix it, right? But you just keep turning it over and over in your mind. Why did I do this? Why didn't I do it that way? What implications might this have moving forward? So rumination is getting lost in this thought. It's a legitimate issue from the past.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And you're trying to work through it, but you just keep turning it over and over. You're not making any progress. That's often a telltale sign of chatter. Legitimate issue. You want to work through it, but you don't make progress.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, it's a predominant form because I often think that we navigate life in an ideal sense on autopilot. We just kind of want to live the life knowing that the world is orderly, it's safe, it's predictable. And then when we encounter some challenge to that view that the world is safe, that everything's okay. It's like an alarm gets hit in our brains that says, stop, pay attention, fix this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And so then we zoom in really narrowly on what the impediment is. And so maybe it's something from the past and then we keep focusing on it until we can resolve it. Oftentimes though, we don't know how to resolve it. We just keep on playing it over and over in our minds. And then the alarm button stays pressed and And we just get into this rut of turning it over and over and over.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Some of us don't want to let go of that either, because at least if we're focusing on it, that's step one. But in the process of doing that. we're really harming ourselves. We're making it very challenging to think and perform.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I mean, have you ever gotten stuck in rumination and then tried to have a conversation with someone or read a book only to find that you're physically there or you're reading the information on the page, but nothing is penetrating because your mind is somewhere else?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Exactly. So that's thinking and performance, right? Like that is a major, major obstacle to being successful in life. If your ability to really hone your attention now is lost. And the way that works, just if you want to geek out with me for 30 seconds, our ability to focus is limited. We have these limited attentional resources.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
They are subserved by our prefrontal cortex, the front part of our brains. And chatter acts like a sponge that soaks up all of those attentional resources. And it leaves very little left over to do the things that we often want and need to do, whether that be just pay attention to the person we're talking to or read the chapter in the book and absorb the information.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's one of the ways it really sinks us. So you asked, though, how does chatter manifest? Rumination about the past is one. Right. Another one that will be familiar to everyone in the world or most of us is worry, right? We worry about the future. We think about the what-ifs. We are what-if machines. We can easily, what if this happens? What if that happens? And before you know it, you know.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
life is over, right? And that goes really fast. So worrying is getting stuck in these negative thought loops, typically about the present and future.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The third form that is very common to folks is this self-beratement, this kind of like, you idiot. How could you do this? You're worthless. So this kind of inner critic is another manifestation of it. It can, however, take different forms. So chatter really is this process of just looping, looping negative information over and over.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
If you're being super critical about yourself, that's very common. Sometimes it can be just anxiety. right? You're looping over. What if this happens? What if this happens? And so it's really this looping of negative stuff. It's like you keep on getting hit over and over and over. You said it before. I think you said death by a thousand cuts.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And then it's just tiring, right? Like it's exhausting. People often who are experiencing chatter, they report just like being fatigued. And I want to be clear also.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We all have this capability of experiencing chatter at times. And just because you do doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Again, this is normative. If it morphs into the extreme state, that is like the volume is super high and it's on for long stretches of time, like more than two weeks, then we get into the more clinical state.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
But what we're talking about here today is really, this is just true of human beings and how we operate. And again, a big, big part of what I hope to do in talking to you about this and sharing the science is to convey first and foremost that this is normal. This is just part of this messy world that we live in. We have these tendencies to slip into the States.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. The opportunity though, is to learn about what you can do to help yourself when you go down this path. If you don't want to stay on it,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, there's not one simple thing that everyone can do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yes, I'm sure you don't, but I'm going to give you- There goes my negative chatter right out my mouth at you. But I'm going to give you, there are lots of simple things you can do is the way to think about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So yeah, you should. There's a lot of hope. There's a lot.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I think you should feel good when I tell you that there's not one thing you can do to manage your chatter because here's what often happens when you give people one solution. They try it. That one thing doesn't work for them. And now they think, what's wrong with me?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Why is this working for everyone else but not me? We just published some research not too long ago that looked at how people dealt with their anxiety during the COVID pandemic. So we did these large studies. We track people over time. And every day, we had them rate their COVID anxiety. And we had them indicate which of something like 18 different tools they used.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Now, all we wanted to know was, well, what are the tools that are moving the needle?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So what was really interesting about that study was there was no individual tool that moved the needle on people's anxiety. It was only like when you used a combination of tools. It's like curling biceps didn't do it on its own. You had to do bicep curls, pushups, and sit-ups, right? Except for journaling. Journaling was the one tool that alone moved the needle on people's anxiety. However...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It was also the most infrequently used tool of all the tools we ask people about. How does that make sense?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's effortful to sit down for 15 to 20 minutes and actually write. There's also a vulnerability to putting it out there. And so I think teaching people about that is really useful too, because that could be a powerful tool for folks. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. Well, for me, it's like straight out of the pages of the literature. So I tell people to write about your deepest thoughts and feelings about whatever it is that's bothering you. Really let yourself go. Don't worry about punctuation or grammar. Write continuously for 15 or 20 minutes. Now, what do we learn from the time we're young about stories? They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So what writing does is it gives these guideposts to help you take this jumble of crap in our minds, which are making us nuts, and we're organizing it. And that's the beauty of what we call expressive writing. So the whole idea here is that we have this remarkable set of tools that we can leverage to help us work through our chatter. But we need to know what those tools are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And what really mystifies me is we don't get a user's guide. for where to find these tools and a user's guide that teaches us how to use it when we are born into this world. We're born into the world with the ability to experience this chatter or this emotion dysregulation, but no one teaches us how to use it or how to manage it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. And there is hope. There's absolutely hope. What I find it liberating to know that there are so many different tools that I can bring to bear to deal with the different circumstances that I might encounter. You know, my emotional life is utterly distinct. It's like a So why would we expect the same single tool to work for every single one of us, given how unique we are?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
My grandfather was a master carpenter. And I remember distinctly when he would show up to a job site, he would show up with this remarkable set of tools, this toolkit. No matter what problem he encountered on the job site, no matter what he needed to do, He had a tool, a general, he knew how to use these tools and he could wield them to solve the problem.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
If he showed up with just a hammer, he'd be out of business. And that's how I think about tools. You want to give people those basic tools that exist for pushing our emotions around. And once you have them, you've got a great resource.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And you know, I've actually heard you use this on prior podcasts and you weren't even aware of it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So can you think about times when you might have coached yourself through a problem using your own name and you?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah, there you go.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You just did distance self-talk. So distance self-talk involves using your name and you to typically silently coach yourself through a problem. You could do it out loud, but if you do it out loud, you want to be aware of who's listening because it violates social norms, not only to talk to ourselves out loud, but use our own name to do it. We talked before and you've talked before about
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
how much better we are at giving advice to other people than we are taking that advice ourselves. A little factoid there, there's actually a name for that phenomenon that we've studied this in my lab. It's called Solomon's Paradox.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Named after the Bible's King Solomon. Here, I'm going to give you another pop quiz. Don't get nervous.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
No, I think you will. I think you will. So what was King Solomon famous for? Being? A king? Being wise.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
He was a wise guy. So King Solomon, like super wise individual. People would travel from all over the world to receive his counsel. But when you look at his own life, he made a slew of terrible decisions. This is true of humanity. Like when I ask audiences, hey, you're much better at giving advice to others and taking that advice yourself, every hand in the room goes up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When you use distance self-talk, what it's doing is you're using language to automatically shift your perspective, to put you into this, I'm talking to someone else advice giving mode. Think about the word you. The word you is the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. Most of the time we use the word you when we're thinking about or referring to another person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's exactly right. You're putting yourself into this coach advice giving mode. And what did we say earlier? We don't say to our friends the things that we say to ourselves when we get stuck in that chatter. So when you use your own name and you to coach yourself through a problem, it's like it's putting guardrails up on your self-talk that prevents you from going down that more negative route.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Ethan, all people make mistakes. You've made mistakes before. You've learned from them and you'll be fine.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Rather than I'm such an idiot. I mentioned before we started filming that I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And although you may not hear the accent right now, in my mind, when I go into the chatter zone, it's a filthy sometimes interberatement. And so I'm not doing that when I'm in distant self-talk mode.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So really what we see happening is you get into this more challenge mode. I can manage this. I can do it. As opposed to being in what we call threat mode. I can't manage this. I'm going to screw up. So another example would be one of my favorites from a study was someone was thinking about having to plan a huge event for someone and it was really, really stressful. You can do this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You can manage this retirement party for this person and get a great turnout. People are going to come and they're going to love it. You've got this. You know, in my book, I actually, I share an artifact from Mr. Rogers. Remember Mr. Rogers? He was the- Really? Wow. There is some cosmic connection that led me to bring this up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So Mr. Rogers in my mind is the human equivalent of a warm cup of tea on a rainy afternoon, right? Just kind of soothing. And there was this moment where he had taken some time off from filming his show and then he was about to come back and he was racked with chatter, racked with self-doubt. And he journaled a little bit about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And he's, you know, it's how can I possibly live up to expectations? I've been gone and I'll never be good enough. And then at a particular moment in that essay, he switches. He starts using distant self-talk, essentially. You've got this, the hour have come. You're going to do a great job and so forth and so on. It's in the book.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And it's just remarkable because you see the entire tenor of the conversation shift. when he goes into this distant self-talk mode.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah, so rituals in popular culture get a bad rap because we often equate them with certain forms of anxiety. And there are those links that do exist where you have people who are suffering from anxiety conditions become really over-reliant on a ritual to a point where it can be harmful. But a ritual in the right proportions can be quite helpful. I often call them ancient chatter fighting tools.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So if you think about it, are you religious in any way or? Very spiritual person. Okay, very spiritual person. So I'm sure that there are certain spiritual rituals that you've been exposed to. Grieving rituals, right? Religions around the world have been like, well, let's just stop for a second. Let's pause for a second. Take the loss of someone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
This is like a real chatter challenge for a lot of people. Like their worldview is shattered now. How are they going to go on without this person that they love, that they care about? Religions have identified, hey, that might be a really hard time that people are dealing with. Let's give them a tool to manage that situation. It's a grieving ritual. So here's what we know about rituals.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Rituals are relatively rigid sequences of behaviors that you perform them the same way each time, more or less. They don't necessarily, it's not clear why you do the things that comprise a ritual. Like if you've ever watched an athlete before a game do a ritual, they do some funky things like, you know, tug on their earlobe a few times, pick a wedgie, put their hand through their hair. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The key is you're doing the same thing in a sequenced order, in a rigid sequence order the same way. Here's how this can help us. Chatter is often triggered when we don't feel like we have order and control. Things are just not under our control. You've written extensively about this, right? A ritual is under your control. You can perform that ritual the same way each time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And when you do, it leads to what we call, this is a mouthful, compensatory control. You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside when your chatter is taking over by exerting control around you. This is also why people do this, I'm guessing, pretty common thing. I'm going to guess you do this. Here's another.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. I feel like I'm putting you on edge throughout our conversation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Do you ever organize and clean when you're experiencing chatter?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So that was true of me as well before I got into this space. And this was a super aha as a technical term for me. So growing up, I've always been, I would describe myself as positively disposition, very happy, clean. I've always believed in hygiene. I shower daily, sometimes twice. Twice? Sometimes. If I go to the gym, I like to stay fresh. But-
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Not terribly organized in the sense of putting my things away. Probably like my wife's biggest pet peeve are the trail of clothing that exists from the shower to the closet around the room. And if you go into my office, I assure you it does not look like this facility that we're taping in right now. Piles of books. That's when times are good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yet, going back to when I was a kid, whenever I would experience chatter, I would do this, something deep inside me would beckon myself to, it was like, remember Field of Dreams, like build it and they will come? For me, it was like, And you will experience relief. And so I would go and put things away. And I do this, I go into the kitchen, do all the dishes, maybe even scrub the counter.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, it's an absolute honor to be here with you. You know, I've been listening to you for quite some time and the compatibility between a lot of what you talk about and what I write about and do research on couldn't be better. So just an honor to be here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Same, even. And then even masochistically, and tell me if you do this, sometimes I even go in my kids' rooms and put their stuff away. Of course. And all of a sudden, things feel a little bit better.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside by trying to exert order and control around you. And now that you know how this works, you can weaponize this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's exactly right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's a way of organizing. And so these can be useful tools for helping people to constrain their chatter as long as we don't become over-reliant on them. And I'm giving you that caveat. That is true, by the way, of all the tools that we're talking about and that I write about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Tell me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
you described yourself so interesting. You get caught up in this kind of tizzy, so to speak, of, ah, right? That's kind of how it feels, right? Like, let me out. Give me freedom. And you're reflexively going to clean. And if that's working, great. But we can also get even more sophisticated about
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And beforehand thinking about what are the two or three things that we want to do when we find ourself in that state? And then basically ahead of time coming up with a plan. What do we do? So here's what we whoop it up. What do you mean whoop it up? Whoop it up. Just like, all right, another question here. What comes to mind when I say whoop?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You just redeemed yourself. Now we're back. We're at like 75%. We're getting back. Yeah. Whoop. There it is. Right. So, so, um, so people have struggled endlessly. You go from listening to a podcast, reading a book, you learn about information and then the bleep hits the fan. And the question is, you don't do it right. It's the new year's resolution dilemma. I'm going to lose the weight.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I love Ethan.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I'm going to go to the gym every day. Three days later, you stop doing it. And so scientists have spent a ton of time trying to figure out why are we so bad at following through with our intentions and how do we make people better? And you could boil down the decades of research into a simple framework called WHOOP. Here's what it stands for. The W, that's step one. That's your wish.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So what is your goal? So your goal might be to calm the chatter down, like reduce the noise when you find yourself slipping into that state. That's the goal I want to achieve.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's the wish. Okay. The first O, that's the outcome. So what's going to happen to you if you achieve that goal?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So great job. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Hey, I'm happy to give them. But it's true. And the reason why we do the outcome next, now you've articulated your goal. We want to energize you. Like this is a goal worth pursuing. This is worth my time. So now you're in this energized state for pursuing this goal. Now we get to the second O, which are the obstacles. Okay. The personal obstacles that are going to stand in the way
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
of you achieving this goal. So what might be an obstacle that might prevent you from turning the volume on your chatter down?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. So you mean turn the volume down?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. So you've just gone through your obstacles. So what we would then do, we would focus on one of those obstacles to start and we get to a P, which is our plan.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
But it's not any kind of plan. It's what we call... an implementation intention. It's easier to call it a plan. It's basically an if-then plan. So if I find myself doom casting and becoming this savant in negative self-talk, then, and you plug in what you are going to do. You plug in the tools that you're going to use in that situation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So if I find myself berating myself incessantly, then I'm going to coach myself using distance self-talk.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Go for a walk in nature.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Jump into the mental time travel machine. Go forward and back. We'll talk about that in a little bit.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Let's talk about it right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Mental time travel, these are two of the most useful tools that I possess along with distance self-talk. Super simple.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We talk a lot about the importance of being in the moment, grounding ourselves in our breath. That is useful. But what we forget when we talk about being in the moment is number one- Our minds evolved to travel in time. And you can actually use that to your benefit. So number one, how am I going to feel about this issue next week, next month, next year? Most of our emotions follow a time course.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Here's what I hope everyone takes away from this. Okay. Three things. Number one, you'll be able to take your inner critic and turn it into an inner coach. Number two, if you ever find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of rumination and worry, we're going to give you some lifelines to pull yourself out so you can actually use your mind to solve your problems rather than just get stuck in them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
They get triggered, and as time goes on, they eventually subside. Most of our emotional experiences follow that trajectory. But when we are stuck in chatter, we just zoom in on the awfulness. It feels like it's never going to end. When you jump into the time travel machine, how am I going to feel about this 10 years from now, 20 years from now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It highlights the fact that what you're going through, as bad as it is, it's not permanent. Things will eventually get better. It gives you hope. And that turns the volume on or chatter down. That's one thing. That's mental time travel to the future.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's powerful for me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You got it. So you're blending these tools, which is also how these things actually operate in daily life, right? So we go back to the one thing. It's not one. Now we're doing two.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's right. So you can customize the tools based again on who you are and the circumstances you're in. So let's close the loop though on mental time travel because we just talked about going into the future. You could also go into the past. Works a little bit differently. For me, this is my, is ace in the hole the right term? I think it is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's like my secret superpower.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I think I might've gotten wrong, but that's okay. So- We'll give it to you. Yeah. Now you're giving me the aphorisms. This is reciprocal. It goes very well. So the story I open up my second book with, Shift, is a story of my grandmother in World War II, surviving the Nazis, basically slaughtering her whole family. My grandmother's my ace in the hole. When things feel so big-
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And just kind of how am I possibly going to get through this? I jump into the mental time travel machine. I go back to 1940 whatever. I spent just a little bit of time with my grandmother in my mind. And what that does for me is it zooms me out. It makes it super clear to me that what I'm going through, as difficult as it is, it pales in comparison to what she went through and survived.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And I think we all have those personal experiences or experiences in our family or our culture that you can anchor on to put what we're going through in perspective.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You want to keep the spotlight on the challenge that they endured compared to what you're dealing with right now. Right. And really use it as a source of motivation. Got it. Okay. Exactly. You don't want to slip back into, well, anything sets you off. That would defeat the purpose of that exercise. And if you find that doing that leads you into that territory, don't use that tool.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Use a different one.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And then number three, more broadly, we're going to give you lots of really pragmatic, tactical tools, simple to use tools that you can use to really master your emotions. So if you want to turn the volume on them up or down or shorten or lengthen how long they last or even switch from one emotional state to another, we're going to give you some guideposts that steer you in the right direction.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And that's a really important take home for these tools. Different tools work for different people in different situations.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It can play a big role in a few different ways. So we already talked about your local environment, how the way you structure your environment, how organized it is, can affect what's happening between your ears.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
There's also ways of putting things in your environment to trigger positive experiences like pictures of loved ones, which sounds so silly on the one hand, but we did this research years ago where we had people... Think about really painful experiences.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And we had them then look at a picture of a loved one or a picture of someone else's loved one to see what are the implications of looking at your, what we call attachment figure, someone you're really connected to.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And what we found is that looking at that person that you care about, this activates a sense that there are people in this world that support you, which sped up how quickly people recovered. From, from a distressing experience.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So after that research, I like went on a shopping spree for, um, picture frames and like my, my off, all of my offices have pictures of, of my family and friends all around it for that reason.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Helps put things in perspective. Correct. So that's one thing you can do. Okay. Green space exposure. I was a little hesitant to really buy into this when I first started researching this space. I come from A place we talked about before, Brooklyn, New York.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I like to remind people that one of the most famous books to come out of this borough or about this borough was titled A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Singular, right? So like there's not a lot of... There was not a lot of green space growing up and I'm a city guy. I find green space exposure to be quite profound in terms of how it impacts my emotional life. And there's been a lot of research on this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And what happens is when you're stuck in chatter, it consumes your attention. It's the only thing you can think about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, what happens is your attention is captured by your surroundings, but in a very gentle way. The sights, the sounds, the smells, like your attention just drifts on them. And what that does is it gives you this opportunity to rest and restore over the course of that walk.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So you finish it, you're feeling more rejuvenated, and you actually have more attentional capacity to work through your problems. So that's one way that your environment, in particular, green space exposure can help you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So we've got our work cut out for us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. We better get started.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah, so a couple of things I want to point out. So number one, you said 13 minutes. You said it took about 13 minutes. And the way I interpreted you saying that, I was like, it took a while. But if you think 13 minutes is a while, how much time have you spent in that negative self-talk? 56 years. 56 years. I think 13 minutes is pretty damn good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Like 13 minutes is probably quicker than the amount of time it takes for Tylenol to have its effect when you've got a bad headache, right? Like that is pretty magical. So we talked a little bit about how Nature can help us restore. That's one way it can help us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Another thing that it does is it gives us the opportunity to experience the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. And nature is replete with those awe triggers, like the moon. It's so beautiful. And you're in Southern Vermont. I've been up there at times.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The first thing that I've learned over the past 25 or so years doing research in this space is if you ever find yourself going down that vortex of doom and despair or anxiety or even overcome with other negative emotions that don't really feel good in the moment, welcome to the human condition. We all do at times.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's gorgeous up there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When we experience this emotion of awe, what it does, it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self. You feel smaller when you're contemplating something vast and indescribable. Here you are, Mel, you're worried about this thing. I'm sure it doesn't almost feel legitimate. I'm sure it feels existential in the moment that you're having it. Yes. It's over. I'm over. The world is over, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Like, yeah, we've all been there. We know what it's like. Well, when you're in nature and you have this opportunity to experience, oh, it's just, it makes you and your concerns feel a whole lot smaller when you're contemplating the vastness. of maybe like the site you're in. I mean, you're probably walking somewhere, trees are alive for hundreds of years, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Like that makes what you're dealing with just feel a little bit more insignificant. And when we shrink ourselves in that way, our problems shrink too. So I will often weaponize this by going for walks in the local arboretum when I'm really struggling with something. And it inevitably helps. It's like, what am I worried about this?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Like when there are so many more things happening in the universe, like, come on, let's get back into gear.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Okay, so let's enter into the rapid fire part of the conversation. Sensory experiences, tremendously underutilized tool. I was blind to this up until relatively recently in my life when my daughter was in a terrible mood, was bumming me out. And One of the great songs of all time came on the radio in the car or iPad, whatever you call it nowadays. Journeys don't stop believing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And everyone got excited and happy in the car. Music effortlessly shifts our emotions. You can use this yourself. You can use it to shift other people's emotions. All of the senses shift. are useful tools to shift our emotions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Since I'm staying at a hotel not far from here, the moment I walked into the hotel, I was awash with this pleasant scent that the hotel has been piping through the ventilation system to make the patrons feel comfortable. We spritz ourselves with chemicals to make ourselves feel good and make other people feel good. Our senses are powerful tools.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Let's talk about other people though, because other people I think are really important. And it touches back to this problem where sometimes you go to other people and we push them away. So how do you find other people in your life to actually help you when it comes to your chatter? or the big emotions you're experiencing. I call these our chatter advisors. How do you find your chatter advisors?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And I think that's a really important point for people to take home because I can't tell you how many people I meet who really feel bad about themselves when they find themselves slipping into one of those emotional states. We evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. And we'll talk more about that today when they're experienced in the right proportions, they can be useful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You want to look for people who do two things. There are two key steps to providing good chatter support. Step one, you want to listen, empathize, validate, connect with the person. Lots of big terms there, but what I mean is you want to be there emotionally for that person. I want to learn about what you're going through. I really would like to know. what set you off at 5 a.m. the other day?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Tell me about it. Terrible. I've been there too. Genuinely connecting. What that does is it helps satisfy the person who's suffering these needs they have to feel connected. Once I do that, Then I want to shift into this kind of advice or cognitive mode. So, all right, now we're connected. You can rely on me, but the problem's still there. Let's try to look at it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And as someone who is not going through the problem myself, I'm in a great position to help put it in perspective for you. Those are the two steps to providing good chatter support. And you would be amazed at how frequently people who are exceptionally well-intentioned don't follow those two steps. There are two ways it breaks down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Number one, some people think that their job is just give you a sounding board to let it out. Just keep going, right? There's value in that, in connecting and learning. But if that's all we do in a conversation, it can lead to what we call co-rumination. Now we're just kind of bathing ourselves in the problem together.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And as a function, we often leave the conversation feeling connected, but the problem's still there. That doesn't work. The other thing that doesn't work, you come to me with a problem and within five seconds, Mel, this is simple. I wrote a paper on this. Here's what you need to do. Just do A, B, C, D. You'll be fine. Call me in the morning. We call those people jerks, right? Or Mel Robbins.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I doubt that. And so you really want to follow both of those steps in that order. Listen and then advise. There's an art to doing that well. I'll use my wife here as an example. Is she going to kill you? She might kill me, but it's okay. We love each other. So if my wife came to me with a problem that she was experiencing some chatter about, I
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I would immediately start listening, empathizing, connecting. And when I sensed that she had gotten it out and I really understood the problem, I would ask her for permission. I'd be like, hey, I totally get it. I have a thought. Do you want to keep going or can I share it with you? Sometimes the way that she'll answer that question is, no, I'm not done. Just let me keep going.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And then I let her keep going and then I come back to it. At other moments, it'll be, yes, please. What do you think? Let's help me. And so what I love about this framework that I essentially just described that we just talked about is it gives me guideposts for how to steer this conversation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When someone comes to me, my wife, my friend, my students, whoever, there are these two steps that I follow in the same sequence each time. Step one is I'm there to empathize and connect, listen and learn. Step two, now I'm going to try to help work with the person to broaden their perspective. So this has happened to you before. How'd you deal with it last time?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So number one, if you experience worry, rumination, if you find your inner critic activating at times, there's nothing wrong with you. To the contrary, I would argue there's everything right with you. Number two, there are no one size fits all solutions for managing these states that we want to bring more under our control. We have evolved to possess lots and lots of different tools. And
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Or, you know, something like this happened to me and here's what I did. Simple ways for broadening perspective. Like a couple of questions like that you ask, it often... helps the person find the answer. I will often ask people to do a chatter advisor audit. So I'll have people like divide their world into personal and professional.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And then I asked them to list all the names of the people they go to, to talk about the chatter when it erupts. Then I'll explain to them how this art of chatter advising that we've just gone over, that the key to being a good advisor is to empathize, listen, and then Shift into that advising and I'll have them circle the names of the people on their list who do both of those things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And I have them cross out the names of the people who don't. The people whose names you circle, that's your advisory board. And it's not always the people that you're closest to.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's not. And that's okay. There are people who I love, who I'm super close to. I don't talk to them about my chatter. It doesn't help me. It actually pushes me in the wrong direction. But my board is an amazing asset that I possess and I lean on it frequently to deal with my chatter.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So I like to divide the way of helping others into two buckets. One thing you can do, if they come to you for help, as often happens to us, people want to talk to us, people want our support, then you follow that guide that we just talked about. You listen and learn, and then you advise. And part of the advice is giving them the tools. The way we help others is teaching others about these tools.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I do this to my kids all the time. I'm constantly complaining that we're born into the world with the ability to experience chatter and big emotions. We're not born into the world with the user's guide that teaches us these tools. So if my kids come to me, I listen, and then I offer them tools.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
But then there's another situation where you see people you care about, your colleagues, your loved ones, and they don't ask you for help. And then the question is, well, what do you do? Do you let them just figure it out on their own, suffer in silence? Do you volunteer the support without them asking? There's been research on this, and it's tricky.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The research shows that if you volunteer the support without the person asking, it has the potential to blow up in your face. As a parent, I'm sure you've experienced this, as I know I have. So sometimes if I've seen my kids, I know they're struggling with something, This is something I can help them with. And I volunteer the advice. It's basically a mild version of how they respond.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When you offer support and it's not asked for, what that does is it communicates to the person that they're not capable of handling their own circumstances. And that can elicit defensiveness. So here's the really cool thing. We have learned how you can still help people when they don't ask for help. And what it involves doing is is providing support invisibly.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
This is a secret weapon that everyone that you are listening, if you're listening, you now have a secret weapon.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Invisible support is providing people with support, but without shining a spotlight on the fact that you're doing, you kind of asked me about this earlier when you asked me about how do you tactfully help another person when they're struggling? This is how you do it. Okay. And there are many forms this can take. I'll give you a couple of examples. Let's say someone on my team,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
or my lab is working under a really tense deadline. And they don't have time to take care of themselves and do simple things. I can just order in food for them. If my wife is struggling with lots of stress at work, lots of chatter, it's her turn to get the groceries. I just do the groceries, pick up the dry cleaning. I don't do it, come home and ask for a pat on my back.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I just do things to make the other person's life just a little bit easier, a little bit more manageable. That's one way of supporting someone invisibly. Let's say someone else is struggling with a skill. Let's say it's public speaking. So someone on my team is struggling with communicating their science skills. in a way that people can understand with impact.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I think the key to managing our emotional lives more effectively involves learning about what all those tools are and then figuring out what are the unique combinations that work for you based on who you are as a unique individual. It's a lot like in my mind's physical fitness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Before I take them aside and say, hey, I've noticed that you could do a little bit better here. Here are three things I want you to try. I'll first have a team meeting and we'll all share out best practice. What are the two or three things that we've all benefited from for speaking more effectively?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
What I'm doing there is I am getting the person information they can benefit from, but I'm not shining a spotlight on the fact that I'm targeting it to them. So even sharing sources that you've benefited from, podcasts, episodes, books, share that with someone else. You don't have to target it to them and say, hey, this is going to help you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
But if you found the material meaningful, just share it in that context. And what it does is it gives them the opportunity to benefit as well. But without them thinking, this was specifically targeted to them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
This episode was awesome. I learned so much. Or this book was great. Yeah, those are simple things you can do. And I do that all the time. Let me close the loop on invisible support because I told you about two ways you can do it. There's a third and it's my favorite.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
It's affectionate, but not creepy touch. Are you familiar with this one?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, definitely not uncles, but it's what moms and dads do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yeah. Like what do you do with your kids when they're born into this world? First thing we do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's right. And we have receptors on our skin that encode for an affectionate embrace. And when it's registered, there's this automatic release of stress-fighting chemicals that flood our system. And so if my daughters are experiencing something challenging or my wife, I'll You know, just kind of give them a hug, caress their back. Again, not creepy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
But even at work, you know, like a fist bump, right, is a simple way. We are a social- Pat on the back. Pat on the back, right? Tactile species. That's a way of supporting someone invisibly as well.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You do want to make sure to convey the not creepy part of it, though.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The most important thing to do is learn about the tools. Just familiarize yourself with them. What I love about these tools is decades of research have gone into their identification. Complex, back-breaking effort. But the take-homes are super simple. Mental time travel. How am I going to feel about this next year? Into the past. How does this compare with what Bubby went through, my grandmother?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Lots of people have the goal to be physically fit, but the way they get there can be radically different compared to other people. And the same is true when it comes to, if we want to call it emotional fitness, you got to learn about all the different machines in the gym. And then you got to figure out what are the exercises that work for me based on who I am and what my goals are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Ethan, you've got this. I mean, these are simple things that don't take a whole lot of time and energy to practice. Just familiarize yourself with them and then start self-experimenting. That is the launch pad. for gaining control of your chatter.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And so my invitation to you is to familiarize yourself with the tools that are out there, start self-experimenting, find the tools that work best for you and share them with other people. That is the way I think we help really combat this universal affliction. Ethan, you are so awesome. Now you're giving me all the- Well, no, I actually mean it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Well, the feeling is totally, totally, totally mutual.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I see.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Sounds liberating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
No, I'm a little bit of both. Positively shifting people's emotions at how big the shift you get from going to the bathroom when you really need to go.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
You're probably bracing and tense. I just went up like on a 10 point scale, four points. I'm so much happier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Probably maybe a couple of months ago. And it was linked with one of my daughter's.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
I'm actively monitoring it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Yes, yes. No, this is something I'm used to experiencing. No, this is fair to say. So my youngest daughter was applying to get into the same school as my oldest daughter. And when my oldest daughter was applying to get into a school, you know, there was, okay, if it works out, great. And if not, no big deal. But now with the second daughter, there's a social comparison element here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And, you know, she has this older sister that she looks up to and admires. And so I'm thinking, well, what would happen if she doesn't get in? And she fortunately did get in. And it was a great relief. But I did find myself going down the rabbit hole on occasion, playing the what if this happens?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
And, you know, I should say that when I do that, when I go down the rabbit hole of despair, which I can get stuck in every now and again, like the best of us, it always amazes me. how exceptionally adept we are at brainstorming endless worst case scenarios to our problems. I mean, have you experienced this yourself?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's right. Well, there's what we call this negativity bias. One of my favorite titles of a paper in psychology is bad is stronger than good. One of our few Nobel Prize winners won a Nobel Prize for discovering that we're more sensitive to losses than we are gains in our lives. And that all makes sense if you think about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
The bad things in life have the potential to harm us or derail our lives a lot more than the good things. So we should be more sensitive to But sometimes that oversensitivity to the bad stuff can really lead us astray, especially because no one ever teaches us about how to rewrite the ship when we find it going in the wrong path.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So when we think, we are not always thinking in full sentences. We're thinking in these sound bites that have deep meaning. And when you spell out what those sound bites are equivalent to, you get essays in your mind. And I'm sure you've felt this kind of bombardment of information when you find yourself going down that rabbit hole. It's like our mind is
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
pinballing all over the place verbally and we're just inundated, which is in part why when we find ourselves kind of racked with chatter, it can feel so oppressive. This is one of the reasons why writing about our experiences, doing something we call expressive writing can be so helpful for folks because it helps us organize our thoughts so that we're not pinballing all around. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
So when scientists like myself use this phrase, self-talk, or the inner voice, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And it turns out that is a remarkable tool that we possess for navigating this crazy world. So let me flag four key functions that this ability to use language silently provides.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Number one, we're the same vintage here, you know, age-wise more or less.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
When we were growing up, what would you do when you wanted to remember a phone number or a name?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
In your head?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Right. So that's probably the most basic function that your inner voice serves for us. It's part of what we call our verbal working memory system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's one function. So you could think of your inner voice as like a Swiss army knife. Multi-purpose tool. It does many different things for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We're going to get there. Okay. We're going to get there. Don't you worry. So number one, memorizing a phone number, repeating a phone number, repeating a name. going to the grocery store and asking yourself, what was I supposed to buy? Milk, cheese, yogurt. I guess I'm in the dairy aisle. But the whole point here is you're doing that silently, typically, not out loud.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
That's one thing your inner voice lets you do. Another thing your inner voice lets you do Simulate and plan. So before, well, you do a lot of presentations as part of your job. You ever go over what you're going to say before you go on stage in your head? Always. Okay. That's your inner voice. You are silently rehearsing, preparing, simulating for what you need to do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
There you go. You're simulating and planning. People do this before interviews, before consequential conversations that they are going to have. I am not as good at giving a presentation if I don't do this simulation beforehand. My favorite function, so the name of my lab at University of Michigan is the Michigan Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I love the topic of self-control.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We use our inner voice to control and motivate ourselves. So, all right. So Mel, tell me, what do you do to exercise?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Do you ever talk to yourself when you're exercising?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
We have room for intervention here. do we? We have tons of room. If you're already doing fine in the gym, we're going to make you do a lot better by the time this episode is over. So that's another thing. If you're listening, you're going to take home with you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Stop Negative Thoughts & Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking
Absolutely. You can change your self-talk. But if we just go back to a second, this is one of my favorite questions to ask people when I'm giving talks on this stuff. I just kind of scan the room for what do you say to yourself when you're exercising?