Modern Wisdom
#914 - Dr Ethan Kross - How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time
Thu, 13 Mar 2025
Ethan Kross is a psychologist, professor, and author. Emotions are complex. We all feel them, but how often are they genuine? When should we express them, and when should we hold them back? And ultimately how do we gain mastery over them? Expect to learn what exactly emotions are and why we struggle to control them, why anxiety is the boogie man of modern times, how to actually get in control of your emotional state, the best ways to stop ruminating thoughts, the most powerful daily practices to make big change, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory?
the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. What's that mean?
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.
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,
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.
From your time decades looking at them, what are emotions from a definitional perspective? How do you come to actually define them?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, a state in the brain that informs us of what is going on in the rest of our body.
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Chapter 2: How do we define emotions and their role in our lives?
It really does. The reason I've become particularly interested in this, I did about a year of twice-weekly psychotherapy up until about six months ago. I've just started doing CBT. And I also did a very, very comprehensive
hundred page DNA analysis that takes down all of the different alleles and obviously polymorphisms, like there is no one gene for X or Y, but there are certain things that say you clear dopamine less quickly, or you clear adrenaline less quickly, or you do this with oxytocin, or you do that with serotonin.
And combining all of that together, I can't wait for AI to get its hands on the work that you've done and be able to feed in people's genetic data and then be able to say, based on other cases like mine and what you know about me, please give me the most likely best course of action that will allow me to regulate my very particular idiosyncratic cocktail of hormones. Yeah.
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?
And I think we will get there over the next several years, but we first have to do the work before we can give the actual answer.
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