Do you feel like you control your emotions, or do your emotions control you? What scientists call "emotion regulation" turns out to be one of the most important life skills we can possess. It's essential in dealing with setbacks, in balancing risks and rewards, and in maintaining successful relationships. This week, psychologist Ethan Kross explores the growing and fascinating science of managing our emotions. He explains why our feelings so often go astray, and shares insights into how to reel them back in.In this episode, you'll learn:*How to coach yourself through emotionally intense moments. *Why certain types of personal writing can help with your thorniest problems or challenges. *How to use music and your physical senses to regulate your mood. *How to use the technique of "selective avoidance" to shortcut emotional spirals and "what if" thinking.Hidden Brain is about to go on tour! Join Shankar in a city near you as we explore lessons we've learned in Hidden Brain's first decade. For more info and to purchase tickets, go to https://hiddenbrain.org/tour/.
Chapter 1: What insights does Shankar Vedantam share about Hidden Brain's tour?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Some months ago, I brought seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain to live stage performances in San Francisco and Seattle. The evenings were electric. We got so much positive feedback from those two sold-out shows that we've decided to launch a tour to more than a dozen cities in the coming months.
I'll be coming to Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Clearwater, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. To snap up your tickets, please go to hiddenbrain.org slash tour. You can also sign up to say hello and get a photo with me. In some places, you can sign up for an intimate chat with me and a handful of other fans.
I'd love to see you there. Again, go to hiddenbrain.org slash tour. Okay, on to today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The 19th century naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin is best known for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. He described the theory in his book On the Origin of Species, one of the most important publications in the history of science.
Less well known, but also scientifically important, was the biologist's research on emotions. Charles Darwin's view, which has since been adopted by contemporary scientists of emotion, is that our feelings are adaptations that help us survive and thrive in a complex world. Fear guides us to avoid things that can do us harm. Anger girds us for battle and conflict.
Love pulls us toward mates, family and friends. But if emotions are so useful, why do they so often seem to get us in trouble? Why do we lose our cool and yell at our kids or mope around for weeks following a professional disappointment? Why do we lie awake at night worrying about some imagined catastrophe?
How is it we get carried away when everyone around us is losing their heads and lose ours too? Most important of all, when we do get swept away by our emotions, how should we get back on track? Today on the show, we look at the growing and fascinating science of managing our emotions. What scientists call emotion regulation turns out to be one of the most important life skills we can possess.
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Chapter 2: How does Charles Darwin's research relate to our emotions?
This skill is essential in dealing with setbacks, in balancing risks and rewards, in maintaining successful relationships. Harnessing our feelings, this week on Hidden Brain. All of us can recall moments when we acted in ways that made us feel ashamed afterwards.
When we look back at these moments with a clear head, we cannot for the life of us understand why we got so angry or greedy or frightened. At the University of Michigan, psychologist Ethan Cross studies the science of emotions and techniques to help us manage them. Ethan Cross, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thanks for having me. It's a delight to be here.
Ethan, when you were growing up, your dad was someone who would regularly sit in the lotus position and practice meditation. He was a calm, patient, and sensitive man. But there was one situation that would transform him into someone completely different. What was that situation?
The situation was driving on the roads of Brooklyn, New York. He would often transform into a I have a mental image of Mad Max, if you're familiar with those movies. And he wasn't just a reckless driver right out of the driveway. But if he perceived any –
quote unquote, injustice on the road, that is another car that was driving recklessly or cut someone else off, he would take it upon himself to discipline that driver. And what I mean by that is He would get in front of them and then slow our car down so that the other driver would have to slow down.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of emotion regulation?
If I close my eyes right now, I can see us driving on the Belt Parkway, which is this freeway that wrapped around the perimeter of Brooklyn. And I could see him weaving in and out of cars to find the perpetrator.
Yeah. I mean, he was almost playing a cop without wearing a uniform, except he wasn't tailing people and getting them to slow down. He was pulling in front of them and hitting the brakes.
He did the tailing too. So, you know, the whole nine yards. But yes, that's exactly right. You know, that was one of the first observations I had of this idea that you could be really good at regulating your emotions in some contexts, but really bad in others.
So as you became a teenager, you yourself experienced your own extremes of emotion. You were unflappable on the soccer field, for example, but other situations would tie you up in knots?
So when I had crushes on girls in high school, it took a while for me to... ask them out on dates. And I remember many false starts, you know, starting to dial their numbers when we used to have, believe it or not, rotary phones. And I would turn the dial, you know, turn a three number, I'd get three numbers deep and then hang it up. And then I'd go four and then I'd hang it up.
And then I'd give it a rest for a day or two and have to have pep talks with my dad, for example, and some of my best friends in high school would give me pep talks to kind of build my confidence to ultimately dial the damn number and start the conversation, which I eventually did and was grateful for those pep talks.
But again, it just goes to show you, I think it's really easy for us to say, oh, that person, they're really good at managing their emotions? Are they really bad? But when you get into a person's life, you see that there's always nuance.
So you became a researcher who studies emotions and emotion regulation. But even all of that expertise went out the window on one occasion at the airport when you felt someone was behaving out of line. Paint me a picture of what happened, Ethan.
This was very early in my career, and I was with my family, both my wife and daughter, one daughter at the time, and my extended family as well. We were all going on a vacation for the winter break. The airport was jam-packed. And we had dutifully waited our turn to get to the check-in counter. And there was a very pleasant woman working there. And she begins to check us in.
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Chapter 4: How can we coach ourselves through emotional crises?
So this is a story of Jerry Leninger, who was working on the Mir space station. And he's doing some data entry when all of a sudden he begins to hear the space station alarms begin to siren. He stops entering the data and goes to investigate. And as he moves down the portal and turns around the corner, he begins to see fire and smoke. His first instinct is to go find a respirator.
So he begins to swim through the air, trying to find a respirator. And as he's swimming through the air trying to find this respirator, all sorts of random thoughts begin to fire in his mind, some of which are quite irrational. For example, one thought was open a window, not something that you either can do or want to do in outer space.
Just an example of how the mind is cycling through these different potential solutions to the problems we're in. So he keeps on looking for a respirator. He finds one and then it begins to malfunction. And at this point, the space station is filling with smoke. He's having trouble breathing. And he's really began to worry about his survival.
He's thinking about his wife and child back on planet Earth. And as he's beginning to search for that respirator, he actually starts talking to himself like he's giving advice to someone else. He says to himself, okay, Jerry, you've got to get going. You need oxygen here. You need to start acting. And... He just manages to go a tiny bit further and find one more respirator. And he puts it on.
It's working. And then he begins to put out the fire. One extinguisher after another, after another. Eventually, the fire gets under control. They extinguish it. They put it out. The fire on the space station goes down as one of the worst catastrophes in space travel history. And he lives to tell the story of what happened after.
So you've run multiple studies that explore the power of what Jerry did that day on the spacecraft. He talked to himself. He coached himself through the crisis. You've looked at something called distanced self-talk. What is this, Ethan, and what do you find?
What distant self-talk involves is coaching yourself through a problem, typically silently, using your name or you to give yourself instruction. You're essentially talking to yourself in your head like you would give advice to someone else. One of the things we know about people is that it is often much easier for us to give advice to others than it is to take our own advice.
There's the famous saying, do as I say, not as I do. And what we see happening across studies is that when you ask people to try to navigate intense negative emotional experiences, it's a lot easier for them to do so effectively when they're using this kind of self-talk. We find that it not only helps people calm down subjectively, it also helps them reason more wisely about their problems.
They're able to look at the bigger picture. They're able to recognize the limits of their own knowledge, predict multiple ways that the future might develop.
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Chapter 5: What role does music play in regulating emotions?
All of the major five senses are
have the potential to activate our emotions relatively effortlessly part of the way sensation operates is by triggering emotional responses sensation being the way we make sense of the world around us well it makes sense that if you have the equivalent of these satellite dishes mounted all over your body that are tuned to different kinds of information i.e your senses
If you come across stimuli or experiences that are positive or negative, you want those senses to trigger those emotional responses, to cue you to approach or avoid those kinds of stimuli or experiences. So sensation and emotion are intimately linked. I mean, we could go down the list. We just talked about music. Music can push our emotions around in all sorts of directions.
amplify our emotions and pump us up as Journey did, it can calm us down. Sometimes I now will strategically use music if I find myself too animated before a presentation or important interview, I'll listen to calming music. We can also listen to music to push us in the negative direction as we sometimes do when we're not feeling great.
We lean into those emotions even further by listening to ballads, love ballads, if you will. Vision, art, attractiveness, smell. Let's talk about smell for a second. Smell is a really interesting one. scent elicits emotions. So I remember when my daughters were younger, on vacation, we'd go to a hotel and inevitably the hotel would smell really wonderful in the lobby.
And I remember seeing on their face, there's just this expression of blissfulness. And they'd go, daddy, it smells so good in here. I love this place. And so what was happening there is those hotels were piping sense through their ventilation systems to arouse a kind of positive emotional response among the guests and visitors of the hotel. So these are shifters.
These are levers that you can pull, and they're really, really reliable movers of emotion. I will do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic in my classes where I will have people rate how they're feeling throughout the class. I'll get a baseline reading of how they're feeling after I've taught for 20 or 30 minutes. And then I'll give the first sensory experience.
Unbeknownst to them, I'll have pizza delivered into the class and I'll ask them to just take a bite of the pizza and taste it. And then I'll have them rate their emotions again. And you see this ginormous improvement in how they're feeling, right? They're almost at ceiling on the scale. Then I'll put on a scene from a Pixar movie where a character falls in love and then
and then gets old and their wife dies. And then I have them rate their emotions again. And you see the emotions go down. Then I give them one final experience. I do a little bit more lecturing. Then I play the fight song for the University of Michigan, which is our kind of rallying cry.
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Chapter 6: What is expressive writing and how does it help with emotions?
Chapter 7: How does being bilingual affect emotional regulation?
Talk about why using a variety of emotion regulation strategies might be better than using only one or two. Why would this be the case, Ethan?
Research in the space of emotion regulation began with researchers identifying specific tools and then carefully profiling how they work mechanistically across levels of analysis and in different groups. And so we've done that with lots of individual tools and we have identified dozens of
What research has yet to do though, is understand how different tools combine to help people dealing with different situations that they encounter in their lives. What we know is that when you look at how people manage their emotions in their daily lives, they don't restrict themselves to just one tool.
On average, we find that people use between three and four strategies each day to manage that experience. And so we know that people are using multiple tools and we also know that different combinations of tools are working for different people, right? It's not just one combination. We don't yet know why certain tools hang together for certain people.
The metaphor I like to use here to make sense of this, which really resonates strongly with me, is to look to physical fitness and exercise, right? When you go to the gym, number one, you don't do one exercise. If you're weight trading, for example, I haven't met anyone who only curls biceps as the only thing they do in the gym, right?
You do a few different things and you actually, you switch up the exercises every single day to meet different kinds of physical demands that you have, physical goals. We also know that different people avail themselves of different physical fitness regiments. So I may lift weights and run and do some high intensity interval training. My wife does Pilates and yoga.
Pilates and yoga works really well for my wife, and what I do works really well for me. So we use multiple tools, and different people use different kinds of tools. I think that actually scaffolds really nicely onto what we're learning about how to be emotionally fit.
I'm wondering if this is something that you yourself consciously do, Ethan. Do you find yourself reaching for different tools in the toolkits to regulate your own emotions?
I do. I'm incredibly... deliberate about the tools I use. And I have, I have, it's not haphazard for me. So I have different layers of intervention. So my initial intervention is I use distance self-talk and mental time travel. Those are my first two go-tos. Sometimes I'll throw in creating order around me.
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Chapter 8: What techniques can we use to manage our emotions effectively?
Ethan, you recently confronted a situation that called for all the emotion regulation skills you could muster. It began early one morning when your phone buzzed. Paint me a picture of what happened.
A text message went off on my phone early in the morning and There was a message that said school for one of my daughters was being canceled that day. And I saw the message, it was very early on in the morning. And then I tried to go back to bed, but I wasn't very successful because my mind kept on trying to suss out why school was being canceled.
Typically when we get text messages along these lines, the reason is given. Snow, really cold temperatures, et cetera. And so I kept on replaying it and I ended up realizing that I wasn't getting back to bed.
So I went downstairs and a few minutes later, I find out from a message from another parent that the reason school was being canceled was because a credible threat was made to the school, a threat to do really bad, harmful things. And this is a parent's worst nightmare to have to entertain these kinds of possibilities.
And the emails began to fly or the text messages back and forth between some of the other parents about what was going on. And it was very easy to see tensions beginning to escalate. And the moment I began to notice myself beginning to spiral, I instantly implemented some of the tools that we're talking about. The first thing I did is I broadened my perspective.
I tried to look at the bigger picture here. I used distance self-talk to help me do it. I said to myself, the school and law enforcement agencies are investigating things. I don't have to worry about this right now. I also leaned into strategic avoidance. I recognized that there was nothing I could possibly do in this situation personally to resolve it. So I leaned hard into my work.
I also went for a walk in the Arboretum near my house. And that further helped me rest and restore. And I also tapped into my advisory board. I spoke to someone in my network who had some experience dealing with these kinds of circumstances, and they were really helpful for further helping me look at that bigger picture and recognize the circumstances I was facing.
Now, engaging in those different tools did not make this problem go away. Fortunately, it did go away. They caught the person who sent the threat and nothing bad happened. What using those tools allowed me to do was keep my anxiety about this issue at a reasonable level of activation. This was an important situation that I did want to be focused on and keeping eyes on.
But what those tools allowed me to do was keep the emotions from metastasizing in ways that prevented me from doing anything else that day and feeling miserable as well.
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