Leading Neuroscientist: Turn Anxiety and Anger Into Peace and Power | Ethan Kross

If you LOVED this episode:

• You’ll also love the conversations we had with Ethan in an earlier conversation about overcoming mental chatter.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode Transcript:

Ethan Kross: [00:00:00] We have a range of different emotions we experience, like for a reason. They are.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:06] Ethan Kross is a leading expert on controlling our inner voice and transforming mental chatter. He’s the best selling author of chatter, and his new book, shift reveals groundbreaking tools for mastering your emotions. What do emotions actually do for us?

Ethan Kross: [00:00:21] Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter. The problem is that sometimes those emotions get experienced too intensely or for too long, and that’s really when you need, you know, music is probably the sensory modality that is used most. Why do you listen to music?

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:45] Because the way it makes me feel, it’s interesting.

Ethan Kross: [00:00:47] It’s not used nearly as often as you would think. So research shows that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:54] Hey there. Before we dive into today’s show, one quick thing if you haven’t yet followed the show, it would mean the world to me if you took just two seconds to tap the follow button on whatever app you’re listening in. It helps us grow our Good Life Project community and continue creating the best possible show we can for you, and it ensures you’ll never miss an episode. Now on to the show. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:22] Excited to explore the world of emotions with you. You and I touched base a couple years back. Now, I think when your last book chatter, came out. Talking about one very particular way that our minds do interesting things to us. In your new exploration, it’s really more of a broad exploration of how emotions work within us, how they affect us and how we regulate them, how we work with them, how we allow our emotions to work with us. One of my curiosities has always been, why do we emote? Because nothing lasts in the human condition unless it serves a very particular role. What do emotions actually do for us.

Ethan Kross: [00:01:59] So I’m a proponent of the belief that all emotions are adaptive when they are experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long. And when I say all emotions, I really mean all emotions. And I think that’s an important message to share with people, in part because I fundamentally believe it to be true. But it also is a liberating message. One myth that I often come across is this idea that to live a good life is to live a life free of negative experiences, of negative emotions. We could go through some of the big negative emotions we have. They serve a really useful function in our lives. Take anxiety. I call this in my book The Boogeyman Emotion of Modern Day Times like so many of us, right?

Ethan Kross: [00:02:48] We think about anxiety and instantly we think to ourselves, oh my God, it’s the last thing I want to feel. When I think about experiences I’ve had giving talks. I’ve given hundreds, maybe thousands of talks over the course of my career. If I think about the 1 or 2 that didn’t go so well, they’re the talks where I didn’t experience any butterflies in my stomach. A couple of days before. No anxiety whatsoever. What does anxiety do? It alerts us to an important goal that we have that is ahead of us. And it mobilizes resources, resources within us to help us prepare for that goal. So anxiety just a little bit that can be really useful for motivating an appropriate kind of response. Take anger as another example. We often think of anger as a toxic emotion. When do we experience anger? We experience anger when we encode some kind of transgression of our worldview like something now has gone wrong. This is not the way I expect things to go. But there’s an opportunity for me to correct the situation, for me for me to right the ship. So my daughter, let’s say one of my youngest daughters, they know they’re not supposed to ride their bike.

Ethan Kross: [00:04:03] She knows she’s not supposed to ride her bike without her helmet. If she rides her bike without a helmet, I might experience some anger in her presence. Express that anger to her so she can see it. And that serves a function. It is. This is a very important situation that I care about. The safety of my kid. Most important thing in the world, right? And now I’m displaying this emotion that is communicating to her that what she did was incorrect, and hopefully that’s having downstream effects on her behavior. We evolve this the this capacity to emote for a reason. Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter. The problem is that sometimes those emotions get experienced too intensely or for too long, and that’s really when you need to know how to regulate them, which is what most of my work is focused on and my book deals with. But, you know, if you experience anger or anxiety or sadness or envy or guilt at times. Welcome to the human condition, my friend. We all do. And reframing those experiences as as helpful, I think, can be a tremendous boon to our daily lives.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:24] Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been curious about, you know, there are some sort of eastern philosophical teachings around non-attachment, non-grasping and, and part of those teachings. And this may be my part of this. Maybe my filtering, my overlay is a non-grasping to feeling a certain way to a lot of what we would identify as emotion, you know, the ability to just notice that a certain thing is happening and coming up, allowing yourself to feel it and then allowing it to just move through you and not hold on to anything so that you return to a state of, you know, what’s often considered just sort of emptiness, a void which I equate to a state that that exists sort of like without emotion. And it’s always been teed up as a bit of an aspiration to me, and I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around that, in part because I think for the typical person, it’s largely an impossible thing to ever experience, but also because I can’t imagine wanting a life devoid of emotion. I mean, sure, you know, like maybe a little less anxiety, a little less angst, a little less of that side of it. But at the same time, you know, there’s so much as you describe, like each one of these things are a function that allows us to experience life in a richer way. And then the other side of the emotional spectrum, we are like, oh, more. But even all of, you know, like the full like, you know, like the diversity of emotions that we can experience. If I even try to imagine a life without them, both the highs and the lows. That doesn’t feel like a life that I want to be in.

Ethan Kross: [00:07:00] I agree. I’m very familiar with that argument, that kind of shooting for that even keeled in this homeostatic point where you let yourself experience something and then let it slide by. Sometimes I want to immerse the hell out of an emotional experience when I am feeling joy out of something that just went really well for my family or my students or me. Like immersing in that. That’s the stuff that sometimes makes life worth living. I was out to dinner with some close friends, my wife and I, and some close friends the other day. We were laughing and sharing stories, and it was a fundamentally emotional experience, and it’s one that stands out in my mind right now. I remembered even though it happened several days ago. Like, those are the moments that I want more of, I crave those. And so I think what we’re talking about is a different view or goal that we’re giving people. But as for how to relate to their emotions and their emotional lives, um, when I experience a negative emotion, I don’t just notice it necessarily and let it go away. That can work for some people. One big theme of my book is if the way in which you are handling your emotions is working really well for you, keep doing it right. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. For most of us, the statistics and common experience would suggest there is some room for improvement, if not a great deal. What works for me and this has been a real game changer for me. When I experience a little bit of anxiety, I reinterpret that as I lean into it. Well, this is my body. This is evolution gearing me up to deal with the situation at hand. Right. This is an adaptive response. It shows I care, and it’s allowing me to focus in on what I have to do. So I’m reframing this negative experience in positive terms. Now that can be really energizing. So I’m not thinking, oh, what’s wrong with me that I’m having this experience? I’m thinking this is what’s right with me. Reframing them in those terms can serve a helpful function.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:08] I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. So when you use the phrase emotional regulation, what are we actually talking about here?

Ethan Kross: [00:09:16] So we’re talking about being able to turn the volume up or down on the emotions you’re experiencing, or shorten or lengthen the amount of time we stay in those experiences. So intensity up or down and duration shorter or longer. And how we want to get in there and skillfully deal with our emotions or regulate them, is going to depend entirely on what our goals are. Right. So if you want to have the goal of maximizing this experience of joy, but maybe have it confined to the moment because you have to go and meet with a client in ten minutes. Like then it’s about just amplifying up, but not also extending it. And you could play that game for all of the different states that we experience. But that is fundamentally what emotional regulation is about. It is about harnessing tools that exist within us and around us, in our relationships with other people and our physical spaces and the cultures that we belong to, utilizing those tools to allow us to achieve the emotion goals that we have.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:26] So and I want to get into some of those tools. Um, but the question that’s lingering as you lay that out is like, okay. Yes. And to what end?

Ethan Kross: [00:10:36] Well, you know, different emotions have different consequences that we just discussed. Like for our lives, if you find, for example, that an emotion is getting tweaked, I mean, even two different kinds of examples, Let’s say an emotion. Anxiety is not being experienced in proportion. It’s too intense and it’s lasting way too long. That can be enormously disruptive, right? We’re now having difficulty concentrating, difficulty sleeping. We’re taking it out on our partner. And maybe we’re getting some gastric distress as well. The end there. The purpose of regulation there is to constrain that anxiety response, reduce its intensity and reduce how long it’s lasting. We may not want to eliminate it altogether. If it’s anxiety about something really important, you may want to still keep some vigilance active. But we need this to be a more proportional response. So that’s one end. Let’s go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Not about reducing intensity and duration, but amplifying it. The time I mentioned earlier when I didn’t prepare for a presentation because I had no Oh butterflies beforehand. That’s an example where it probably would behoove me to be able to turn up a little bit of anxiety or a little bit of that anxious arousal to get me motivated right to to actually practice the presentation, to be able to perform well. So that would be an example of an instance where you’d want to turn on a negative response. Now we’re just talking about negative responses. We could also have the same conversation for all sorts of positive experiences too. But the idea is that these emotions have implications for really everything that matters our ability to think and feel, our relationships and our health. And so we want to make sure that we’re experiencing emotions in ways that lead to the ideal outcomes in those different domains.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:31] And the ideal outcome is going to be unique to the context of the person, to the moment, to the circumstance. We do seem to still hold on so fiercely to this desire to like if you’re like, oh, hey, listen, we can look at each one of these of these emotions, and we can adjust the amplitude and the duration to make it optimal for our experience. I would imagine there’s going to be a tendency for everyone to say, okay, so I know Ethan says that anxiety has a certain use. It’s important to us, and anger has a certain use and sadness has a certain use. But really, if I actually have the ability to reduce the amplitude and the duration of these, why not just reduce them all the way? How is that actually going to be destructive to my life?

Ethan Kross: [00:13:16] Well, let’s use the example of pain, because it’s a kind of emotional response, and I think it powerfully answers your question. It makes the point there are certain people that are born into this world and they’re incapable of experiencing physical pain. If you look at those people’s lives, what you find is that they’re not very good lives. Those people end up usually dying early. They die early because they put their hand in the fire accidentally, and there’s no cue that tells them to pull it away. They start itching, the mosquito bite and the scab that forms. And they keep doing it right. Because there’s no cue to say stop. You now have an open wound that can become infected. What makes these different negative emotions functional is the fact that they hurt at some level, right. That hurt. That subjective experience of distress that accompanies different emotional responses is. Is what is grabbing our attention and telling us to pay attention to this situation in a very particular way, that the emotion is driving. And so if you were to just get rid of those negative emotions altogether, the prediction would be and even some data like I just discussed is that this would probably not be a very successful life that you would live. And so it’s going to be really hard to ever test that idea, because guess what? You can’t get rid of rid of every negative emotion. It is hard wired into us, this capacity to experience it. And so I think the more we can wrap our head around that, the easier it becomes to really embrace this notion that there’s a role that negative emotions have in our lives. They’re giving us information, information about the circumstances that we’re in that we can use to live better lives. Let’s take envy as another example. Like envy, we usually think of us as isn’t that the the seventh deadly sin.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:16] Or something like that?

Ethan Kross: [00:15:17] Yeah, right. It’s like, you know, it’s not a good one. Envy can lead us to, if experienced too intensely, too long, lead to some negative outcomes. But you know what it can also do. It can be unbelievably motivating, right? If you see someone who is outperforming you or out achieving you in some way, that can have a motivating effect, a motivating consequence to lead you to strive harder to reach the goals that you have. So these emotional experiences, these negative experiences can be easily reframed in how we think about them in ways that I personally find exceptionally liberating. Because if you’re telling me that, hey, Ethan, like, you really shouldn’t be experiencing any anger, any sadness, any envy, like, name your favorite negative emotion. And then I experience those states. We all experience these emotions for a reason.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:14] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, I think part of what you’re speaking to here is our capacity to be intentional about the way that we live our lives, to make decisions that are in some way beneficial to us and to others around us. It’s like, I think we love to think of ourselves as these like we’re rational beings, like we make intelligent, rational choices. And yet, you know, as you describe, the motion carries information. That information is actually really important for us to make good decisions, even if we don’t like the feeling that goes along with it. So it’s like if we strip away the emotion, and by doing that, we also strip away the information, then it kind of sabotages our ability to then make decisions and take actions in a way that actually would allow us to live the life that we want to live. Does that make sense?

Ethan Kross: [00:17:07] It does, and I think it also makes it much more challenging for us to live the lives we want to live, because it compounds the negative experience. So take an example that happens. True story. With my oldest daughter several years ago, she had one of her first really evaluative moments in school with a big test. And it was stressful. And she started experiencing some real anxiety about it, and she didn’t understand what it was. What’s happening? What’s wrong with me? Oh, sweetie, it’s nothing wrong with you. This is your body doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing to help prepare you for the exam tomorrow to say, hey, we have a little bit more studying to do. That instantly changed the way she was relating to this experience she was having. This is not something that is wrong with me. This is how human beings work. Clearly, if the anxiety is too extreme, too long, then we really want to intervene. But in the right proportions. This simple reframe often helps bring down the intensity of that response. You said something else that I want to just engage in, because I think it’s really important you raise this notion of having some agency with respect to the way that we relate to our emotions and our emotional lives. I think it’s a really important point to harp on for a moment, because one of the most, um, eye opening experiences I had doing research was coming across an article, and I tell this story in my book that looked at people’s beliefs about whether they can actually control their emotions. And the researchers basically surveyed a large group of adolescents and asked them a series of questions about, do you think you can control your emotions? And about 40% of the sample said, no, I don’t think I can control my emotions. That to me is astounding for a variety of reasons. The first of which is, if you don’t think you can control your emotions, why would you take any steps to ever do so? Mhm. Right. Like if I don’t think there’s anything I can do to lose £10 or lower my blood pressure or improve my cholesterol levels, like I’m not going to change the way I diet or exercise. Right. Because why bother. Those are often effortful.

Ethan Kross: [00:19:35] Take time. Right. If I do think I can do it, then that should motivate me to take some action. And yet, 40% of this sample did not think they could control their emotions. So as I break down in the book, there is good reason for that. And I think it’s worth just very quickly sharing with listeners. There are facets of our emotions that we can’t control, and parts of our emotional experience that we can, we cannot control. When an emotion is going to be automatically triggered, right. Like I was just in New York and I was in a cab, it was not a pleasant sensory experience. It was like heavy sense of body odor. You can relate. You lived in New York. This happens at times. Lovely driver. But wow. Instantly there was a negative experience, a negative emotional response. A sensory mediated response was triggered. I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I Engage with that emotion. Do I reframe it? Do I divert my attention elsewhere? Do I try to have another kind of sensory experience, you know, sniff some perfume or Cologne to combat it? All sorts of things we can do to channel that emotional response in different directions, to increase or decrease its amplitude or duration. So you can’t control those automatic, automatically triggered feelings that are just part and parcel of living our lives. But you can control the trajectory of those experiences. I think that, too, can be a really liberating idea for people to just noodle on, because sometimes, I mean, let me ask you, Jonathan, do you ever have a dark thought?

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:23] Never. Of course.

Ethan Kross: [00:21:24] Never. I mean, like.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:26] I had one back in 87, but.

Ethan Kross: [00:21:28] Back in, you were a saint, a total saint. Well, I’ll tell you, though, that if that were true, which, of course I know it is not, you would be an anomaly. I do this exercise with my classes when I here at Michigan. I did this just a few months ago. I asked about 60 students anonymously to indicate whether they had experienced a really dark thought over the past week, and then to tell me what those thoughts were, anonymously type it into a computer program that would allow me to then see these thoughts. Everyone has these dark thoughts and they are really heavy. Sometimes they’re about violence towards others, towards the self. Dark sexual thoughts like you name it, we saw it there. This mind of ours sometimes generates those dark thoughts and the feelings that accompany them. And that’s a universal. So if you understand that, hey, if you experience a dark thought or at times like it doesn’t mean you’re a bad human being, it means you’re a human being, and it’s part of the way your brain is just working. It sometimes produces these wacky, dark thoughts. But if you act on those thoughts, then that’s a different story because there are ways of engaging with them or not.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:44] Yeah. I mean, it’s such an important point and I’m glad you teased that out. It’s almost like the way that so many of us react to anxiety creating a spiral. It’s like something happens, it makes us anxious. And then we basically start thinking about our own anxiety, and we create this spin cycle where we shame ourselves for feeling this way. We shouldn’t feel this way. There’s something horribly wrong. How can I not let go of this? And we keep giving fuel to this feeling based on our beliefs about what it’s actually telling us, or whether it’s good or bad, or whether it’s normal or abnormal. It’s interesting to hear you describe the role of our beliefs about our emotions, and how they contribute to the amplitude and the duration, potentially, of those emotions.

Ethan Kross: [00:23:26] Well, there’s a reason why the second chapter of the book, before I talk about any tools, deals with precisely this issue of beliefs because it is the starting point. My advisor I remember in graduate school, one of the first things he taught me was, look, we can break down emotion regulation into two parts. Really simple. There’s your motivation. Do you think you can do it? Do you want to do it? And then the tools that exist to help you achieve those goals. If you’re not motivated, like we just said before, you’re not going to use any of that. You can know all the different. Let’s use physical exercise as an analogy here. I could know how to use every machine in the gym. If I’m not motivated to lose weight, if I don’t think I can do it, I’m not going to avail myself of those tools. The flip side, though, is I can be super motivated to get fit, but if I don’t know how any of those tools those machines work, not only am I going to be unsuccessful in achieving that goal, I may actually harm myself. Right? I may, like, try to like, you know, I don’t know. I’m gonna make something up here, but, like, bench press with my neck and sprain something or, you know, whatever. That was probably not the best example. I had the open terrain there. To do something funny. You need both. You need the beliefs that you can do this. And science compellingly shows that we possess this capacity to manage a trajectory of our emotional responses. We have, like sophisticated brain networks that evolve to help us do this, to transform our emotional experience by redirecting our attention on or away from what’s driving those emotions, to reframing those experiences, to transporting ourselves in time, to allowing us to find the right people to talk to. It’s remarkable the array of tools we possess to be able to modulate our emotions. And so just conveying that to folks, I think is just really important.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:31] That makes a lot of sense to me. My question that brings up for me then, is if we take that 40% of people that you described who answered, like, actually don’t believe that I have the ability to in any meaningful way, control my emotions. How do we bridge the gap, the belief gap. Because as you described, there are a whole bunch of tools. You lay out a whole bunch of tools that we’re going to drop into shortly that are really effective and that are highly accessible and often don’t cost anything like these are things that people can do. But if you’re in that 40%, somebody listening to this right now and they’re saying, like, look, I’ve been feeling this way. I’ve been flying off the handle. I’ve been dipping into this, you know, like since literally for as long as I can remember, I’ve done all the different things. I’ve tried X, Y, and Z, and I’m just at a point where I literally do not believe that it is possible for me to in any way, shape or form, regulate my emotions anymore. And then you’re sitting there on the other side of a conversation saying, I’m sitting on top of a vault of tools that I know will help you. What’s the shortest path between that profound disbelief and somebody even believing just enough so that they’re willing to try? One of them to let their own experience start convincing them? Or is that, in fact the thing that starts to open the vault for them?

Ethan Kross: [00:26:51] Well, two, two answers to that. Very good question. So first of all, I think it’s not that the 40% who say they can’t control their emotions are wrong. You know, I think people focus on different facets of our emotional experience when they’re asked answering that question. So the people who are sometimes saying you can’t control an emotion, they’re really focusing on this emotional trigger. I can’t control the emotions I experience when I’m walking down the street and, you know, someone insults me or I smell something that’s aversive, I have no control over that. How can you make the claim that I do? Whereas the people who are saying you can control your emotions, they’re the ones who are thinking about, well, you know, if I’m in the smelly cab, I can do this. I can pinch my nose or see the person who just gave me a scowl and think, oh, well, maybe they’re having a bad day. Like maybe they, you know, just got some really bad news. So I think it’s not that one person is right. One group of people is right and the other is wrong. It’s that we’re focusing on different parts of our emotional experience. Let’s say there’s some skeptics that fall through the cracks and still don’t believe there’s anything they can do to manage their emotions. Give them a piece of chocolate. Put on some, you know, Bon Jovi or Adele. Have them sniff some perfume. What’s the shortest way to showing that we can have some agency in our ability to modulate our emotional experience? Activate the senses part of the way that our senses operate is through emotion. I mean, why do you listen to music? Jonathan, what’s your favorite kind of music?

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:34] Probably classic rock.

Ethan Kross: [00:28:37] Classic rock. Why do you listen to it?

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:40] Because of the way it makes me feel. Makes you feel faster. Access to a feeling for me. That’s right. Than the right music.

Ethan Kross: [00:28:48] That’s right. And if you ask people this, which many researchers have, about 96 or so percent will say exactly what you said. So why do you listen to music? I like the way it makes me feel. So you want to fast track to showing you can change your emotions around like that’s how you do it. I have songs on my phone that are designated for different kinds of moods, like I can get pumped up really fast. Some of it is cliche and it’ll make listeners think much less of me. I’ll share it nonetheless. If you want to pump me up like you go into some rock and roll, even verging on even some, I was. I’m a big Yankees fan. One of my favorite players of all time is a guy by the name of Mariano Rivera. Who you no doubt. Are you a baseball fan? Anyway, this guy will always come. Mariano was the greatest closer of all time. So if the team was down or was up and the manager wanted to just end the game with a win, they put him in and he always approached the mound to Metallica’s Enter the Sandman. You put that up. I feel like I’m ready to conquer the world, and I have songs like that that can get me going, and I have songs that can bring me down. One very powerful way that people can just experience some agency with respect to our emotional lives. Now those effects are fleeting. Right after the music goes off, our emotions often return to where they were before, but nonetheless, they demonstrate there are things you can do to push those emotions around.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:19] And it’s certainly it’s one of the levers that I throw pretty regularly in my own life when I want to feel a particular way. And interestingly, it’s also, you know, I will listen, you know, like if I go like, if I’m listening to U2 from the 80s or the 90s, it gives me a very particular feeling. You know, that’s lost in, you know, some sort of transcendent type of moment or experience. But I might also listen to Leonard Cohen, because I actually want to feel a certain kind of deep melancholy, because I may just be in a space where I’m just like, you know, like I really wanted like I want to drop into my heart for a moment. And it’s powerful. Like, so it works on both ends of the spectrum.

Ethan Kross: [00:30:59] Totally. Let’s talk about that. That’s another great example of how negative emotions can have some functionality. We tend to experience sadness when we experience some loss that we can’t replace, right? Like we lose someone we love, or we screw up in a way that we cannot fix. When we experience sadness, a few things happen. First, there’s this kind of slowing down of our physiological Physiology is. It’s also this motivation to withdraw and be introspective, to turn our attention inward. Why? To make sense and meaning out of this new circumstance that we’re finding ourselves in. Like something happened. We cannot fix this situation. We can’t replace the loss. We got to now reframe how we’re thinking about ourselves and the world around us to make sense of this new reality. So we need some time to do that introspective work. But and I love this feature of sadness, you know, go to when you’re in a that kind of darkish state, right? You’re not feeling great and you’re withdrawing. That could be dangerous if you pull too far away. So what is evolution endowed us with? A sad facial expression that is like a lifeline that broadcasts to those around us.

Ethan Kross: [00:32:16] Hey, don’t leave this person alone. Check up on them. You know, some people use this to their benefit. And yes, daughters, I’m talking to you like my daughters. If I’m sometimes upset, they’ll just put on the sad face. You know, it’s like an exaggerated lower lip gets. And even though I know it’s being deliberate, I’d still instantly melts me. And that’s because we are social species. We are highly attuned to the emotions of other people. So there’s a functionality to sadness, and you can use music to go deeper into that state. So there’s this effect called the emotional congruency effect, which is when we are experiencing certain emotional states, we often seek out experiences to match those states. So we’re in a sad mood. We’re going to want to listen to some sad music. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re feeling sad and you don’t want to feel sad anymore, that is a cue that, hey, maybe you shouldn’t listen to the Leonard Cohen and you should go, you know, listen to journey instead.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:19] I mean, it’s interesting also, as you’re describing that I’m thinking of the phrase a good cry, you know, and it’s interesting that phrase exists, you know, because you’re kind of saying, okay, so there’s actually, you know, like there are times where you just feel heavy or sad and you’re carrying something and there’s something in us that knows that if we just push it, if we just move into the point where we have this physiological response like crying, that it also it creates a release mechanism that almost gives us access to then move out of it to process our way through it and then move into that state of like, you know, like I feel differently now, but it’s like we had to tip ourselves into it almost to get that extra physiological response to sort of release us into a better place. Tense at all.

Ethan Kross: [00:34:07] It makes total sense to me. And it makes me want to ask you, how does having that insight change the way you experience sadness? Does it make it a more acceptable experience to have?

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:24] I’ll answer it from my perspective. I don’t necessarily shy away from the hard experiences or emotions, so it doesn’t sort of meaningfully change the way I would process it because I’m okay going there, actually. Yeah, and I’m okay crying. I’m okay actually feeling all the feels because I also feel like to try and regulate them to the point where I’m not feeling them. It doesn’t mean that whatever the stimulus that evoked them in the first place is not in some way going to find its way out in my body. And often that is through other emotions that are equally hard or through physiological harm. You know, as you described earlier in our conversation, maybe it’s going to show up in GI distress, maybe it’s going to show up in pain, maybe it’s going to show up in inflammation or an illness. And that has happened in my past and probably will happen again. And I think what I’ve tried to learn over time is that I actually need in order to be healthy, physiologically, psychologically, but also physically. I actually need to feel all these things and I need to own them, and I need to fully feel them because they’re not going to just go away. They’re just going to find another way through me. And oftentimes that way is going to be much more destructive.

Ethan Kross: [00:35:40] Yeah. So that attitude a very evolved one. And it’s I would describe it as you through a I mean, it would be interesting to learn how you got to this point. And when you did, based on what kinds of experiences. But you’re working with the machine that is you rather than against it. When we talk about these sayings that, you know, suggest to people that you should aspire to never experience negative emotions or another one of my favorite, you know, directives always be in the in the moment or never avoid pain. Always approach it like these are impossible directives. We’re giving people goals and we’re telling them they’re really important that they cannot possibly accomplish. And that, I think, is a huge problem because you are setting people up for failure from the very beginning, when there are better goals to have. And I realize better can sound judgy. But I’m saying this based on what I know of how emotions work. Like they can be useful in the right dosages. So I think your view is enlightened.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:53] So let’s drop into what we kind of we backed our way into, actually the early part of the conversation around what you describe as shifts like these are like mechanisms or tools to be able to actually in some way navigate the amplitude and the duration of these things that we’re feeling so that we can experience them, but also experience them in a way that actually feels better to us. That feels like, okay, like, I can deal with this, I’m okay with this, and maybe I can even find value in it. You talk about in the early part of this, you kind of divide into shifting from the inside out as the starting point and right. Sensory shifters. Is, is this huge mechanism we talked about in the context of music, but just more broadly, describe to me what is a sensory shifter?

Ethan Kross: [00:37:37] A sensory shifter is when you are activating your senses, which have these powerful connections, neurologically speaking, to emotion networks in our brain, you’re strategically activating your senses to generate a desired emotional response. So in English, what do I mean? You want to feel happy? You are firing up music that makes you feel happy. You want to feel a little bit more sedated and calm. You’re putting on maybe some classical music or the music that helps you achieve those goals. Music is probably the sensory modality that is used most often for these regulatory purposes, though it’s interesting, it’s not used nearly as often as you would think. So research shows that most people like almost at ceiling 9,697% of people. When asked across studies, why are you listening to music? They say they like the way it makes them feel. But if you then look at what they do to manage their emotions when they’re experiencing really big ones, 10 to 30% avail themselves of that sensory modality. We all have this kind of experience of listening to music. Like I was just at a concert a couple of weeks ago and I was like, oh my God, people have paid collectively millions of dollars to just have their emotions be regulated for 3 or 4 hours. It was just an emotion regulation event. Everyone’s happy. Um, for most of it, there are a couple of sad songs that were played.

Ethan Kross: [00:39:09] Um, but I talk about this in the book. Like, even for me, as someone who has studied emotion for 25 years, like I have often lost sight of earlier in my life, of the role that the senses play in impacting our emotions, that they are a tool that can be strategically levered. Like when I go into the car now, I look at the dashboard and I don’t see, you know, I guess we wouldn’t call it a radio, but we’d call it a device for activating playlists. Like, I see an emotion regulation tool that I can move my emotions around and everyone in that car, depending on what channels I select, right, what playlists, what songs I put up there. And so it’s a tool that’s right there. It is so easy to use, and I don’t think we use it frequently enough. Another just to give you one more powerful sensory tool is touch. You know, an affectionate embrace has been shown to generate positive feelings pretty automatically. If it’s in an unwanted embrace, it actually leads to leads to the opposite regulatory outcomes, right? It can lead to a kind of cringe. Get away from me. Touch is the first sense to develop. We are a tactile species. And so if I’m not having a great day and, you know, my wife comes over and, you know, just kind of gives me a hug or rubs my back like there’s an automatic regulatory effect that has.

Ethan Kross: [00:40:35] And it’s one that I can leverage as well to help other people. You know, and clearly we need to give all the caveats about you want to do this judiciously. You don’t want to haphazard touch people at work like that would not be a good thing. But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re a tactile species, right? And so you can leverage that sensory modality as well. So those are just two examples. But we see similar data um linked with the other sensory modalities vision hearing scent as well. These are all gateways for relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions. And I threw in that relatively effortlessly there for a reason. We know that human beings, we don’t like to do things that are hard. This is true for all of us. There’s a law of least effort that characterizes us. And there’s good reason for this. We have limited resources. We’re always trying to preserve our cognitive or thinking resources. And so the easier something is to do, the more likely you are to do it. These sensory modalities aren’t necessarily going to help us fix the giant problems we experience, but they can nudge us in the right emotional directions. Being aware of that, I think, is really important.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:51] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like the speed of action for the sensory shifters is it can often be so fast, you know, that maybe it’s just like the match that just kind of like immediately starts to, to shift us into something, and maybe then we have to do some work to sustain it or to change or to add exactly to it. Yeah. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. One of the other shifters that you talk about under this category of Inside Out is also attention, which I’ve always been so fascinated between the relationship between attention and emotion and what we feel. You brought up earlier in the conversation. Pain and attention have always had a really strong relationship to me, and I learned years ago. A million years ago, I owned a yoga studio in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and I also had migraines. I had migraines my entire adult life. I had to teach a class, you know, like so six, 30, 50 people are piling into a room. They’ve just had a hard day. It’s my job to show up and give them everything that they can for 90 minutes. And there were times where I would show up and I’ve got a raging headache and I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I step into the room and I sit down and everybody’s just sitting there, and all of a sudden my attention shifts from me to these 50 other beings who I’m in service of. And the moment that we’re in together. And for the 90 minutes, the pain drops away. And then when the last person leaves the room, it comes back, you know. And so I really began to explore, like the relationship between attention and felt experience, like whether it’s physiological or emotional or psychological and, you know, like you speak to this and I think it’s such a powerful lever for us.

Ethan Kross: [00:43:31] Oh, absolutely. I mean, attention is determining what’s getting into our brains, right? Like, it’s what we are, how we are. It’s like that is our spotlight. And what you put the spotlight on is that what you are going to then focus on? And what’s interesting about attention is that it’s often talked about in very non nuanced ways. We’ve learned a couple of things over the past few decades about attention and emotion. That suggests that maxim is not true. So here’s what we know. We know that chronically avoiding problems. So if you have this rule that you should always avoid things, this is not good. This can lead to negative outcomes and does over time. But at the same token, like chronically attending to every source of pain possible, probably not a good idea either, and probably going to elicit lots of mental chatter too. If you’re just always zooming in on the problems that are in front of you. What seems to be the most effective strategy is being able to be strategic in how we deploy our attention being flexible, being able to engage with negative feelings at times when it’s useful and productive, like when we do need to solve a problem and work through it and learn from our experiences. Focusing on the problem, wielding our attention to it can be very helpful, but at other times, sometimes getting some mental space away from the problem can be really helpful because what it allows to happen. Let’s say I distract like you dig, you distracted by focusing on other people. If we’re dealing with an emotional experience, time often tempers our emotional reactions.

Ethan Kross: [00:45:16] Like, you know, we often say time heals all wounds. It’s a pretty powerful effect that time has on many of the emotional trials and tribulations that we experience. And so you’re getting some time away from a problem. It is remarkable how when you then come back to that problem later, sometimes it’s just not even there. And in other cases it’s there, but in a less intense form where we can engage with it more effectively. I’ll give you an example from my own life. You know, just last night there was something that, you know, it was very it was a long day, and I didn’t have probably as many resources cognitively as I do when I first wake up and I’m fresh and I thought about something and it was beginning to get me anxious, like, oh my God, did I screw this up? And for a little bit, I started to focus on it, to really get to the to the bottom of it to see if I had screwed up. And I found that the more I focused in on it and zoomed in, the bigger the problem seemed to be. And then I purposely taking a page out of my book. No pun intended, I diverted, I positively distracted, I strategically avoided and said to myself, I’m not going to come back to this until tomorrow. And so I engaged in a positive set of distractions. I played with my kids. I watched some funny clips on social media which consumed my attention. I talked to my wife and lo and behold, guess what happened this morning when I woke up? Jonathan?

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:40] It was magically dealable or God.

Ethan Kross: [00:46:43] It was God. It wasn’t even there. Whereas 12 hours earlier, it felt like one of the biggest problems I had ever encountered. And so that’s an example of the power of being able to strategically divert our attention on or away from. Things can be really useful, and but we don’t tend to teach people how to strategically deploy our attention. We just give them these maxims. Work through it. Don’t avoid. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard over the course of my life and career. You should never avoid talking about this or focusing on us. Always confront the problem head on. Sometimes confronting is really good. Other times move away from a little bit and come back to it. That kind of flexibility seems to be the name of the game. And so there are these like rules that I try to flesh out in the book of when to avoid, when to approach, when to go back and forth. That we’ve learned from the science over time. And I think that learning about what those contingencies, what those rules are, it almost gives us a playbook for how to steer our attentional spotlight in ways that can be productive.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:49] So agree with that. And I think that having those rules, having that sort of like basic guidelines that say, okay, like here’s I have a better sense for when to step in or when to step out. I want to switch out into some of the more external things that you explore as well, and you describe this as shifting from the outside in. And one of the things that you talk about is physical environments. I thought this was really fascinating because I’m somebody who’s also really strongly affected by both my immediate physical environment and also geographically where I am, and have found that they have a really strong effect on whatever I’m feeling in any given moment in time. This kind of combined with the internal, because it’s oftentimes when you shift your physical environment, you’re also probably making a change in your attention. And the sense is it’s hard to kind of tease this out and just control for only one of these. So if I’m stressed about something and I’m getting a little anxious about it, I actually need to get up. I need to get out of my office and I need to be outside. And, you know, the change in the physical space around me often is really powerful, at least for me. It tends to be fairly immediate and very.

Ethan Kross: [00:48:53] Oh, well, you’re not alone either. I mean, this is a very powerful shifter, and there are a couple of different ways it works. You already described one set of properties that characterize it, like when you change your space, your inputs are different, so your attention is focused on different things. Your sensations are different too. One of the most popular spaces that can have emotionally restorative effects for people is going out in nature. But when you go out in nature now, all of a sudden you’re not necessarily looking at a computer screen, but you’re looking at your surroundings. You have sights and smells and sounds that are often pleasant. You can sometimes also be in a place that is filled with grandeur, that makes you feel, wow, this life seems a little bit bigger than just me. These trees have been here for hundreds of years, and I’m worried about this little episode that didn’t go well with a guest. So they can help also shift your perspective, which is another internal shift that we haven’t talked about. Places also have a meaning to us in a in a deeper sense almost. So, Jonathan, where are you from?

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:01] Um. New York.

Ethan Kross: [00:50:02] Originally.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:04] A little island at Watertown called Port Washington.

Ethan Kross: [00:50:07] Okay. Port Washington. Did you like where you grew up or not? Like where you grew up?

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:11] Yeah.

Ethan Kross: [00:50:11] Loved it. And so I bet that if we were to magically drop you back into Port Washington, you would instantly be filled with positive, warm feelings. Is that a fair thing to say?

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:25] Probably, except for a few.

Ethan Kross: [00:50:27] Days in Minnesota. Right? Well, I’m saying right now, if.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:29] You took you right now, you feel pretty.

Ethan Kross: [00:50:31] Good. Yeah. I think middle school would not elicit a positive feelings from for most of us. Um, we often talk about the attachments that we form to other people, right? We develop these kind of secure attachments to our partners, hopefully our parents, hopefully, where they become a source of emotional salvation and strength for us. Right. Their mere presence makes us feel better. Well, what we also know is people develop attachments to places. And so if you know what places you are positively attached to, maybe it’s a place you grew up. Maybe it’s green spaces. Simply being in those spaces can elicit positive feelings. Now we can also develop negative attachments to places as well. In the same way that we can develop negative attachments to people. So I grew up not too far from you in Port Washington. Maybe, I don’t know, an hour drive away in, in in Brooklyn, New York. And the neighborhood that I grew up in was a neighborhood that I never really loved. It was a rough and tumble place with fights and muggings and things like that. And I was always on guard. If you put me there now, I would have a negative response. I say this because I think it can be useful to think about what are the places in your immediate and broader environment that you have those positive attachments to. If you can like think about what those are really carefully.

Ethan Kross: [00:52:01] You could be proactive in how you visit those spaces when you may be struggling. So here in Ann Arbor, I could tell you it’s the arboretum. It’s the law school quad, it’s Huron Park. These are places where I go to them. I instantly feel better. So changing your space is one way that you can leverage your surroundings to help you achieve the emotional states you want to achieve. The other thing you can do is if you can’t change your space, which we can’t often do for various reasons, you can modify the space that you are in, and that’s another way that you can shift your emotions. You can modify your space to activate emotional responses that you desire. For example, on the sides of me and flanking the computer, you can’t see there are picture frames all around me. They’re just not back there. I don’t look behind me very often. There are picture frames of people I love, and research shows that glancing at those picture frames that instantly activates thoughts, memories of those individuals, and it activates positive emotional states that can help repair negative responses. So I’ve modified my space to surround myself with cues that are capable of helping me repair when I’m struggling. Pictures of plants or real plants also have been linked with other kinds of positive responses, so those are ways that you can modify your space to activate a desirable response.

Ethan Kross: [00:53:31] You can also modify your space to eliminate the activation of undesirable emotional responses. And and the story that I give somewhat tongue in cheek in the book, but it’s true for me. Um, coming from New York, I don’t know if the same is true for you, but my weakness is pizza, and the colder it is, the better. And it doesn’t matter what my cholesterol looks like, or what time of the early morning it is. If I see that slice in the fridge, it is activating an emotional response that is going to drive me to consume it, and then I’m going to feel terrible as a result. And so if we have a party and we have people over and I’ve got a couple of extra pizza pies and they go in the fridge, one thing I can do to eliminate the likelihood that I’m going to be tempted, an undesirable emotional response, give the pizza away, right? I get modified my space so I’m not actually triggered by it. People are struggling with addiction, are often told not to visit old haunts, because the mere sight of those places can activate these undesirable responses. So this is a way now of structuring our physical spaces to help us achieve our regulatory goals.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:51] Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I imagine that for a lot of folks, Even things as simple as lighting and temperature make a real difference. I know for me, lighting is actually is a huge thing. If I’m kind of getting a little ornery and cranky and I’m really like, oh, wait a minute, the sun set, it’s actually really dark in my studio. Let me just turn on the lights and it’s like, oh, wow, the world is better.

Ethan Kross: [00:55:15] Light is huge, temperature is is huge. And these are also sensory experiences.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:20] And so it’s all connected.

Ethan Kross: [00:55:23] And, you know, like my hope is with this book is to break these down into bite sized bits so that people understand how you can be really strategic in pulling these different shifters to push you in the directions you want, because I can have really positive effects.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:41] Yeah. I mean, no doubt you under that same outside in, you also explore relationships and the broader culture and the impact that this has. And you also drop into as you wrap up the conversation in your book, you drop into a conversation around like, how can we actually how can we take the decision making process out of a lot of these things? So it’s like this, these go to’s just become our go to’s. These shifts become like the levers that we don’t have to take our time and think and then make happen. But they’re just like, this is what happens. Like when I feel x, I do y, I feel like, you know, if we can get to that place, not with all of them and not with all of our emotions, but if we can at least start to dip into creating the rituals and the habits where you just kind of you don’t have to think about it, you just go, oh, I’m feeling this. Like, here are the two things. It’s like that it takes one major friction point away and, and we’re so, you know, like the slightest bit of friction seems to derail people so easily. I’m raising my hand right here, like, you know, like it’s just if you can remove those friction points and almost like, automate the process of, like, this is what I know to do now. It can be transformative.

Ethan Kross: [00:56:49] Well, and we can you know, so I talk about there are these technologies, these simple steps that we can take to make emotion regulation automatic. And I lay this out in the book. Right. You. It’s called woop. Like, you know, there it is. Right. It’s actually, you know that song I.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:06] Of course I do. You’re referring to Gabriele Oettingen’s work instead?

Ethan Kross: [00:57:09] Yes, exactly. I was disheartened because when I the song, you know, I was so excited to use that in a very cheesy way as a subheader in the book. But the actual song is titled woop with an M, not just woop.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:22] No kidding.

Ethan Kross: [00:57:23] Yeah, so people often ask me, do I ever struggle with emotions? You know, I run a lab. I’ve spent 25 years studying this. I’m a I’m an authority in this area. And, you know, I usually pause. Of course, I sometimes struggle with my emotions. Like, sometimes they can get the best of me. But here is where I really excel. And it is a testament to the value, both of the tools that I talk about and this issue of how to make the usage of those tools Reflexive, automatic I am, I’m really good at the moment. I detect an undesirable emotional response brewing and becoming too big. I know exactly which tools I’m going to go for, so there are like 2 or 3 things I do instantly 40% of the time, 50% of the time. That’s it. It helps me deal with the situation. I’m back on track another 20% of the time. I’ve got to layer on a few additional tools and, you know, 15% more, a few others, and then that 5% of the time where like, I don’t know what the hell to do. But the idea here is I have plans that I activate to help me reach the desirable end states that I seek to attain, and more often than not, that helps. And it turns out like these ways that we know to make emotional regulation automatic. These are frameworks that people in many other industries use to be successful. This is one of the most successful organizations in the world at what they do and the way they do it is ahead of time. They think about, all right, what’s my desired outcome? What are the potential obstacles I might encounter? Now, let me come up with plans to address those different potential obstacles. If this happens, then I’ll do this. If this happens, then I’ll do that. If this happens, I do this and it doesn’t work. Then I’ll do that. You do that enough times. You don’t have to think about what to do if some calamity strikes. You know exactly what to do, and you do it automatically. That is the opportunity that I think exists for everyone.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:27] Makes so much sense. And by the way, you just walked us through that. When you first heard the whoop, whoop is actually an acronym, an acronym WP, which shorthand for wish outcome obstacle plan, which is an approach that you just described and Navy Seals took. And there’s also really interesting research around goal achievement with this technique. And it’s like when you actually identify the potential obstacles in advance, you kind of know and oftentimes they’re the internal obstacles, the emotions, the feelings that pop up the gremlins. And you’re like, if this happens, this is my plan. When you do that in advance, it’s so much more likely to actually happen and won’t derail you.

Ethan Kross: [01:00:03] Exactly.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:04] You can feel it and move through it because you know what to do in advance. You don’t have to sit there trying to figure it out. When you’re then presently dealing with the emotion itself and how it’s affecting you.

Ethan Kross: [01:00:14] Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:14] I think the final point here I want to ask you about, and I think it’s probably become pretty evident here, is that, you know, while you list out a whole bunch of different go to’s, you know, like internal and external shifts that we can all explore that, you know, there’s no universal diet of tools here. There’s no universal thing that says, you know, like for every person that’s feeling this, this is the thing to do, that you know, that we are all unique, individual beasties and we kind of need to figure our own way through. Like we can look at the toolbox, but we’ve got to try on like all the different things and see what works for us.

Ethan Kross: [01:00:48] Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly the point to end on. There are no one size fits all solutions, and anyone who tells you that there are, you should run the other way, because that is not the way we work. And the science powerfully demonstrates that is not true. We recently this paper accepted. We’ve been working on it for a while. It summarized the results of these two large studies that we did during the Covid pandemic, where we basically tracked people for several weeks. It was a nationally representative study where we looked at, how are you feeling? How much anxiety are you feeling on this day, and what tools did you use to manage the anxiety? We asked people like 20 different tools. What we found is that there was remarkable variability, not only between people in the tools that benefited them. So the three things that worked really good for you make an entirely different from the four things that worked really well for me on a particular day, but even within the same person over time, the three things that work for me on day one were quite different from the four things that worked for me on day five. Now, we don’t yet know how to prescribe tools to people.

Ethan Kross: [01:01:58] You do these six things, and then when Tammy comes to me and tells me about her circumstances and her and who she is, I can prescribe these three things. What we where we have gotten is we know what a lot of the tools are. There are dozens of them, and we understand how they work. We’ve profiled how they work pretty well. And so the real opportunity that exists for folks, as you just described is start, start playing. Start experimenting with these tools to find the ones that work best for you. If you find one that works, keep using it. Layer on another one. See how that helps matters? The beauty of these tools is that they’re not just cheap. They are free. I guess you have to maybe subscribe to both. This is a free download, right? I mean, to get the book for free from your library, you gotta find the tools, right? Minimal cost there. This is not like taking a powerful medicine that is loaded with side effects, right? The cost to trying these are pretty minimal. So give it a shot. If it works, keep doing it. If not, shift to something else.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:03] I love that it feels like a great place for us to wrap up as well. We’ve come full circle, so I’ll ask it again in this container. Good Life Project.. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Ethan Kross: [01:03:17] Purpose. Relationships. Contentment. Having purpose and meaning to drive you. Having wonderful people to surround yourselves with that contribute to that purpose, and being content with what you have because there’s always more that can be attained.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:37] Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode safe bet, you will also love the conversation we had with Ethan in an earlier episode about overcoming mental chatter. You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor and share it with just one person. If you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too, but just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered. To reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.