Dr. Ethan Kross
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
We've got to get you in the PhD program.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
For me, um, It's a bath every night.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
So have I quieted the critique yet?
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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?
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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...
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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,
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Modern Wisdom
#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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
Let's first talk about finding hope when...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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%
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
I played when I was a kid.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Ethan Kross on How to Make Your Emotions Work for You | EP 568
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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?
Something You Should Know
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?
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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?
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
that prepare us for what to do.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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
Something You Should Know
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.
Something You Should Know
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.