Emotional Fitness: Dr. Ethan Kross On Dealing With Difficult Feelings, Controlling Your Inner Voice & The Science of Emotional Regulation | The Rich Roll Podcast

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So many people are hungry for the solution to what to do when our emotions are getting the best of us.

There's a functionality to anxiety, to anger, to sadness, to envy, to guilt, and they're not necessarily a bad thing.

when I get the butterflies before a big presentation, game on." I don't know about you, but I definitely plead guilty to letting my inner monologue get the best of me, taking way too much of all of that negative self -muttering as gospel truth, even when there's no evidence to support it.

You know what I'm talking about?

That incessant voice in my head telling me, I'm not enough of this, or I'll never be good enough for that.

I mean, who is that person doing all of that talking?

Is it me? And if it is, who is he talking to and why?

What is the purpose of it all?

And how can I gain better control over that voice rather than letting it control me?

What about all those negative emotions that spring up that commandeer our behavior, make us reactive, compel poor decisions, and always seem to drive negative outcomes?

How exactly can we make our emotions work for us rather than against us?

Your brain is an unbelievable supercomputer.

Your ability to come up with an infinite number of what -if worst -case scenarios, usually it's helping you out.

Attention, it's your mental spotlight.

What are you pointing it at?

Dr. Ethan Cross is a New York Times bestselling author and award -winning Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he runs the Emotion and Self -Control Laboratory, which explores how the conversations we have with ourselves shape our health, our performance, our decisions, and our relationships.

Bottom line, as Ethan explains in this conversation, all those wild and out of control negative emotions are things we have more agency to regulate than we realize.

And today, Ethan shares all the tools you need to do just that.

There is no one -size -fits -all solution.

I mean, we're all struggling.

But the good news is that these wonderful brains that we possess also comes with tools.

Great to have you here.

I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

I am hoping that you are going to unlock all the mysteries of the messiness of the human condition.

Can you make that promise to me today?

I fear not. You will leave with an armamentarium of tools to deal with it.

In wrapping my head around, you know, how I think about you and the work that you do.

So I think of you as somebody who's operating from this perspective or from this philosophy that emotions are indeed messy.

Humans are messy by default.

There's no hard and fast rules as much as we try to kind of crack the code of the human mind.

But there does seem to be some semblance of an operating system.

And your work is really intent upon understanding that operating system, what the rules are and how we can harness those rules to live, you know, better, healthier, more fulfilling lives.

Is that an accurate, reductive assessment of your work?

No, it's absolutely right.

I mean, we're all struggling.

And I have yet to meet a human being who does not deal with curve balls on a fairly regular basis.

But the good news is that these wonderful brains that we possess didn't just come with the capacity to give rise to responses to those curve balls that sometimes can get the best of us.

It also comes with tools, but we don't get a user's manual for how to access those tools and how to use them.

And that's where I think science has done a real service in beginning to identify those tools and tell us how they work.

There's a ton more that we need to do.

But step one is sharing those tools with folks.

And that's something that I've committed my life to doing.

It seems to me that even amongst the most high -performing individuals on the planet that we tend to be our own worst enemies and we often unnecessarily trip ourselves up and get in our own way, so to speak.

And most of that is due to our relationship with our own emotions and our inability to kind of make them work for us and instead, sort of we're serving them, right?

And that's kind of the focus of the new book.

Yeah, I think this is one of the big challenges of the human condition is the fact that we have this gift, which is this capacity to experience different emotions.

And I'm a proponent of the belief that all of the emotions that we experience in the right proportions tend to be functional, tend to be useful.

So there's a functionality to anxiety, to anger, to sadness, to envy, to guilt, when those emotions are triggered in the right proportions, and we could get into how you figure that out.

But the real conundrum is, they're often not triggered in the right proportions.

So rather than just benefiting from the anxiety, Oh, okay, I've got a really important presentation coming up.

I'm experiencing some gastric distress.

That's my physiological signature of anxiety And I'm now focusing, oh crap, I gotta start preparing.

Like that's useful, right?

It's focusing my attention in on something important.

But I then sometimes don't just do what I need to do.

I lean into that anxiety response even more.

But what if this? And what if that?

And once it then starts to grow and metastasize in that way, that can be counterproductive.

The really good news is there are things you can do.

We also evolve this capacity to rein in those responses.

And as we were talking about before, so many people are hungry for the solution to what to do when our emotions are getting the best of us.

But they're looking for singular us solution.

And what we know definitively is that there is no one size fits all solution for different people or any one individual, different tools work in different situations.

And that's not a message that I think we do a great job of conveying to folks because we want that simple solution.

But Rich let me ask you, like how would you describe your emotional life?

Do we get a simple portrait if I were to peer into your emotions and your emotional world?

No, it's a morass of confusion and you know, a full spectrum of everything that I often feel beholden to and not in control of, despite, you know, reading books like yours and understand...

There's like the intellectual like understanding that I could be better managing my emotional state and the way I respond to the world.

And then there's the real world lived experience of feeling incapacitated or incapable of, you know, of doing that, you know what I mean?

And I think that's, we were chatting beforehand and it's like, this is the human condition.

And nobody gets out of life alive and nobody escapes this sort of experience of being bewildered and confused by our own emotional state.

And just to say to like put a, put another kind of layer on top of that, there's the emotions that we have. And then there's the emotions we have about the emotions that we're having.

It's our relationship to those emotions.

and it's like, there's so many layers to all of this before you even get to the part about reacting and responding and translating it into behavior.

I'm so glad you brought up the attitudes we have about our emotions.

Because I think what you just described has a potential to give listeners a gift. I cannot tell you how liberating people that I speak to, as well as I myself, find it to be able to say, if I experience negative emotions at times, there's nothing wrong with me, right?

This is how we all work.

Lots of people have a disposition such that if they find themselves getting angry or anxious about something, they start beating themselves up about it.

Like, why am I having this emotion?

Why am I not happy?

When I experience those different emotional states and I do, even though I'm an expert on this, that's how we work.

I don't beat up myself about it.

I recognize that I'm in a situation now that is often calling for that kind of experience.

So when I get sad at times, you know, I'm constantly rejected.

I don't know about you but I get rejection feedback all the time.

It's part of what I signed up for when I went into academia and publishing.

I recognize that when I get rejected, I'm turning inward. I'm now trying to understand, okay, I thought this was gonna happen.

Now, let me like reframe how I'm gonna make sense of who I am in light of this new reality.

That's what sadness motivates us to do.

And I recognize that that can have some value.

That is liberating, right?

It's liberating to know that my goal is not the unattainable goal of always being positive.

A, I don't think that's possible given how our brains work.

I don't think it's actually desirable.

I don't think I am the person that I am today which is still to be clear.

A person who has much improvement still to obtain lots of improvement I can still benefit from but my negative emotional experiences have helped me progress.

They have helped me get better and I'm not giving those up moving forward. On some level, it's a practice of self -acceptance.

You know, there's the, let's say you have a moment of anger and you spontaneously act in a way that you're not proud of and that creates that cascade of guilt and shame.

And so you're just like sort of piling on top of yourself and going into this spiral over the whole thing.

And the antidote to that is really one of first recognizing objectively what's actually happening and accepting yourself as human for having that type of reaction.

Being curious about the causes of it, the triggers, et cetera doing maybe a forensic analysis of like why this happened and what led up to it and owning it but also detaching yourself like not self identifying with it such that you go into that inner monologue that you talk about in your other book Chatter about like beating yourself up and the like that becomes a story that's entrenched that then defines who you are that you are self identifying with?

Yeah, this acceptance is really important and part of being able to I think accept in the way that you just described means really embracing the truth that negative emotions are inevitable parts of life and they're not necessarily a bad thing.

They can actually serve us well.

I think that's another piece to this acceptance story that makes the acceptance a lot easier.

So I'll share a story, I've told the story before.

I actually don't think this is in my book.

My oldest daughter is a diver.

And at one point she was moving up from one platform, a platform that, from my point of view, was already sufficiently high, mind you, to an even higher one that I'm thinking now.

The three to the 10.

Yeah, I'm like, you are not my daughter.

What are you doing here with this kind of extracurricular pursuit?

Do you have Adam Grant on speed dial for diving tips?

Well, I should've, I should have. I did talk to him about this at some point.

And so she's going up to the higher platform, and she's really beginning to experience some anxiety to the point where she gets onto the platform and then comes down, and she does that a few times.

And at some point the coach says to her, you know, you kind of have to jump off to be on this team.

It was, it was actually some harsh feedback.

And, and like, I started talking to her about like, what this anxiety that she is experiencing?

What does it mean? And she was initially, she had no story.

She had no way of framing it, right?

But then she starts it.

Well, this is a cue that's saying, this is a really important thing.

It's potentially threatening.

It's dangerous. So I really need to make sure that I'm properly equipped to do this.

And once we reframe the experience in that way, it made it much more easier for her to then start implementing tools to reign the anxiety in.

But she no longer started to get on herself for experiencing that anxiety in the first place.

When I get the butterflies before a big presentation, game on.

I know that a little bit of arousal actually enhances performance if I'm well -equipped to perform the task.

Like this is now, I'm getting energized, so I embrace it.

that's a reframe that can really make a difference.

That's part of, I think, what we're talking about here.

Yeah, I mean, you bust a variety of myths, but the one you're busting right now is basically this idea that all negative emotions are bad.

Like we have these emotions for a reason.

They're wired into us for purposes of survival, et cetera.

And when you are experiencing a negative emotion rather than leaping to this presumption that it's negative and should be eradicated.

Instead, try to understand why you're having it and understand that it's there for a reason.

Like, yeah, you don't wanna jump off a 10 meter platform and like hurt yourself, right?

So her trepidation is not only understandable, but like in her best interest, right?

So rather than shame her for it or for her to feel guilty about it within herself to say, yeah, this is part, like I need to go up and down a few times and I'll slowly acclimate myself to this and you know, that's the way I'm gonna get through this.

And that's a game changer when we reframe our experience with our negative emotions.

So let me give you another example that I have found powerful both personally and also with different groups.

So have you ever experienced a dark thought that popped up in your head that you're maybe ashamed of, didn't want to share with someone else?

Never, Ethan. Never.

This has never occurred to me.

Right, and it's never occurred to any human being.

This is a universal feature, right?

of the human condition experiencing these intrusive thoughts at times.

And this is not a phenomenon restricted to clinical populations who may struggle with that experience more frequently, but there's lots of research that just looks at a cross section of people in the world, across different countries.

This experience of a dark thought popping up every now and again, it's how we function.

I do an exercise with students where I will ask them to anonymously write into like a Google form.

The last time you experienced a thought you were ashamed of.

And they don't have to leave their name.

I have no way of tracing it back.

It's powerful though.

The entire class puts these thoughts up there.

And like some of them are really quite shame worthy, if you will.

You're able to construct it so it's fully anonymous and they feel like they can say these horrific things.

Yeah, I mean, it's wildly like voyeuristic, right?

And it's, but it taps into something so fundamental.

And I think changing the way we perceive and relate to those thoughts that pop up can be a game changer.

So I'll give you one of my favorite personal examples.

When I have been in the gym on several occasions, I will be carrying a dumbbell from one side of the gym to the other.

And I have this thought about dropping the dumbbell on this person's face, who's lying on a like a yoga mat in the path between me and the dumbbell rack.

And this is like a crazy thought on the surface.

Like I don't want to harm anyone, there's no ill intent behind that.

It's probably my brain's way of, constantly gaming out all the potential worst case scenarios, things that could go wrong and insulating myself against it because when I have that thought, what it leads me to do is like, I squeeze the dumbbell a lot tighter.

Sometimes I put it in the hand, furthest away from the person, right?

I have yet to drop a dumbbell on someone's face.

But I know what's happening because I understand how the brain works and how psychology, right, these intrusive thoughts.

Before I did, if I experienced a thought like that, I would think to her, like, what's wrong with me?

Why am I having such a dark thought?

Does that mean that there's something wrong with me?

I know that human beings cannot control the automatic thoughts that get triggered throughout the day.

We don't have control over a lot of these emotion generating cognitions.

But what we do have enormous agency over is how we engage those thoughts.

Engage with those thoughts once they're activated.

That's our playground.

And that's where the user's guide that I tried to write here with Shift really comes into play to give us this potpourri of options for getting in there.

Sometimes it's acceptance.

Sometimes it may be refocusing on our bodily sensations as many mindfulness practices guide you to do, but the depth of the armamentarium that we possess is extraordinarily deep.

It goes well beyond those skills.

And we are not in the practice of teaching those skills to folks, either as adults or kids.

And I think that is a great disservice.

Yeah. There's sort of an overlap or blending of these two books and what you just shared.

I mean, the initial thought really derives from Chatter your first book, which is all about the inner voice, the inner monologue that we all have. And then shift is about the emotions that we have in our relationship to those emotions.

And so thoughts on the one hand, emotions on the other, you just mentioned that we don't have necessarily control over the thoughts that pop into our head.

And it's so fascinating that we have this inner monologue that thoughts pop up that are seemingly liberated from free will, and that we have a conversation with ourselves about those thoughts.

So, in a dualistic sense, there's like the brain that's doing all these things, and then there's the observer of the brain that's making judgments about what the brain is doing.

And within that, there's a deeply profound philosophical question like what is the self?

And if these thoughts are popping into my mind, like do we have free will?

Like we could go down that rabbit hole, but I just think the idea in and of itself.

You would describe that as a rabbit hole?

I'm curious with that.

Oh, well, I think there's a real conversation to be had there, right?

And I know just by practicing meditation for a long time, I'm becoming more and more convinced that we don't have free will.

Like, things are happening in my mind that I have no agency over, and like where is that coming from?

And when you protract that out or you really extrapolate upon that idea, like all these threads start to unravel about the mystery of not just consciousness but like, you know, everything essentially.

And I would say on top of that, like if you're confused by, by that idea, just reflect upon the last vivid dream that you had where you're having a conversation with someone and that person that you're having a conversation with is saying something to you that you didn't know they were going to say.

Right, like obviously your brain is conjuring that from your unconscious.

and there's some kind of firewall between what you're aware of and what you're not.

Like, it gets incredibly, I mean, it's the most fascinating thing I could imagine, spending your life studying.

Yeah, well, I think it's certainly a thorny issue.

And I was obviously being facetious before.

It can take you into the rabbit hole.

I wanna back up a second though, because I think this distinction that you drew between the automatic and controlled parts of our lives.

And, you know, maybe we get into is the controlled really under control, which is where you're going here.

But I think before we do that, it's important to emphasize that that is an important distinction, right?

That we have this psychological apparatus that the brain underlies and much of what is happening in our brain is happening outside of our awareness.

And there's automatic things that are happening, right?

And a lot of those automatic processes are generating emotional responses that we don't have control over.

Recognizing that I think is important.

And I tell this story in the book about how I came across several years ago, this finding that 40 % of adolescents want to ask, can you control your emotions?

Didn't think they could, which absolutely floored me as someone who has in his email signature director of the emotion and self -controlled laboratory, like talk about an existential threat to my existence that we have no control over our emotions.

Yet 40 % of people believe this and I've devoted my life to understanding how we can give people more control over their emotions.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Like, how can I make sense of this apparent contradiction?

And it is this distinction between these reactions that we have as we live our life.

There are these triggers we experience.

The thought about dropping the dumbbell on someone's head, maybe it's a physiological sensation that just pops up out of nowhere that maybe leads us to feel anxious or we're driving on the road and we see someone cut us off and we instantly become filled with rage, that is not controllable in most cases, but once those emotional reactions are triggered, there are choices that we can make.

Now, what is the neural calculus that underlies those choices and does that, you know, if we think about are there things that are preceding our awareness of those choices?

I think there's some discussion we could have about that.

But certainly at a level that is intuitive to most listeners, I think.

They do have choices that they can make if presented with 10 different tools or ways of responding to a set of reactions.

They can make a conscious choice about what kind of tool they want to implement.

We know this because we do experiments in which we give people directions to think in different ways or behave in different ways.

And then we see that they can grapple with that information and go on different paths.

And that is, I think, a playground for pushing around our emotions that people can have a lot of fun with.

Maybe fun is the wrong adjective, but they can begin to start testing out approaches to managing their emotions at work for them.

We'll get into all of those shifts.

So you have a different chapter for a different category of shift and you take people through all these kind of varieties and tools that are pretty easy to implement like changing your environment and thinking about the community that you're in and spaces and sensory shifts that can kind of immediately just alter your perspective or your relationship with uncomfortable emotion that you're experiencing.

But before we do that, I just wanna stay in just the more general idea of negative emotions themselves and that idea around agency.

I think you've mentioned that email you got was, that was from adolescence, right?

Yeah. So there's a hormonal piece there too.

Like they're not the best at being able to like, pause when agitated.

You know, like the half -life between impulse and reaction is pretty quick at that age.

but the fact that adults kind of report similar results, like the idea that I have no agency over my emotions.

I'm a victim to whatever's happening is despairing because we do have agency over these things to some extent, at least with respect to how we can shift them or interpret them or respond to them.

And my vernacular is always like through recovery.

And what you learn in that program is this idea of contrary action, like, or pause when agitated.

There's all kinds of, you know, phrases and aphorisms that capture a similar idea that you're trying to communicate.

And they all have to do with, you know these pattern interrupts.

But what you're suggesting is something different from, look, you should exercise and you should go to sleep early or you should get in the cold plunge or like, you know, kind of daily habits, journaling, et cetera.

these are like almost tactical and immediate in their impact.

That's right. You know, what I'm suggesting is first and foremost, giving people some familiarity with the options that exist for pushing their emotions around.

What I mean by pushing their emotions around is really three things, increasing or decreasing the volume on an emotional response, shortening or lengthening how long that response lasts or switching from one state to another altogether.

And there are many different tools that we can reach for to achieve those goals.

What I cannot do as an extremely well -intentioned scientist who has been studying this stuff for 25 years is meet someone, learn about their goals and then prescribe to them six tools that they should use for this goal.

But then when someone else comes to me with a slightly different goal, say, oh well these three tools should work for you.

The science has not yet gotten to that point where we are able to essentially personalize the prescription of tools with that level of precision.

What I can do is I can offer you access to the tools and then invite you to start self -experimenting to figure out what are the combinations that work best for you given your unique emotional makeup.

It's not that different from physical fitness in the way that I think about it.

When I started off trying to be physically fit, first thing I did when I was younger, I went to the gym and I learned how to use the different machines.

And I learned about different exercises and even different approaches to staying fit from weight training, to cardiovascular activity, to yoga, and then if I look now at my social network, the top 10 people, my closest friends and loved ones, everyone has fitness goals, everyone does work out to some degree, we all have distinctive profiles that help us meet our goals.

I think the same is true when it comes to this concept of mental fitness, and it really begins with identifying what these tools are.

Now a lot of people will have come in contact with some of the tools I talk about in the book.

Some of them are familiar, some of them are not, and maybe a little bit more surprising.

Maybe talk about those.

But what I think a lot of us do is we stumble on these tools.

Like we're struggling and we come across experiences that may be help us, maybe don't, or someone in our community has shared an approach which has worked for them and encourage us to do it.

And I think the real hope of being guided by the science here is to shift us from stumbling on using these tools to allowing us to be a lot more deliberate and strategic.

So when people ask me, do I ever struggle with emotion regulation?

Yes, I'm not perfect.

But what I am really good at is the moment I detect the need to regulate.

I have action plans.

I know exactly what my three initial tools are.

And then if those tools don't work, 65 % of the time they do, I'm making that number up, but majority of the time they do nip the reaction, but I go deeper into the toolbox.

So I never really just kind of flailing away and I'm really grateful for having that capacity.

And that's I think the hope that we can offer lots of people.

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Well, let's get into the tools themselves.

Maybe, you know, top level, give us an idea of what these various shifts are by category and explain what they mean.

Okay, so let's start with the two big buckets, internal shifters, which are things you could do on your own the moment you learn about these things, you could start implementing them.

And then there are what I call external shifters, which are tools that exist in our relationships, in our physical environments, and in our cultures that can exert a powerful role on how we relate to our emotions and how we manage our emotional lives.

And the whole idea here is to offer people basically a blueprint for finding those shifters and accessing them to help them meet their goals.

So if we started with internal shifters, probably the easiest low effort tool you can use.

And this is actually another myth that I try to bust this idea that, God damn it managing our emotions is hard. It's hard to reign those suckers in.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the tools that we have to use are indeed effortful and they're really good.

But it doesn't always have to be hard. And a lot of the tools can actually be quite simple.

So sensation is an incredibly powerful tool for temporarily pushing our emotions around in different directions.

So what am I mean by sensation?

Sight, sound, hearing, touch, smell.

You could think of sensation as we have these satellite dishes mounted all over our body and these satellite dishes are tuned to the world around us.

They're constantly taking in information to help us optimally navigate the world.

So we don't get into a danger.

We do it safely. We know where we're going.

Part of the way sensation works is as information is coming in, we really need to know whether this is good or bad for us.

So sensation is intimately linked with the experience of emotion.

We all know this intuitively, yet we don't act on it strategically.

I myself was guilty of this earlier on in my life, actually early years too generous up until relatively recently.

You know, I've been listening to music from the time I'm five years old, my first tape.

You want to guess what it was, one guess, 1985.

1985? Yeah. I'll give you one hint.

It was a hip hop sensation, very catchy dance.

I'm not a hip hop guy.

I was thinking like Steve Miller band or something like that.

No, that's on there.

I have very eclectic tastes.

Yeah, Boston. That was in there too.

MC Hammer, you can't touch this.

Yeah, followed soon after by Madonna's of immaculate collection.

So I'm all over the place, but I've always listened to music.

I mean, why do you listen to music?

Why do I listen to music?

I mean, for pleasure enjoyment.

Stop right there. For nostalgia, for modulating my emotions.

So if you ask people why they listen to music as scientists have done, virtually a hundred percent of the sample say they listen to music because they liked the way it makes them feel.

It is a fundamentally emotional enterprise.

As I recently went to the Taylor Swift concert.

This was a, you know, a major coup in my household.

You're a girl dad. My two daughters and wife planned this for a year.

I almost botched the entire trip.

Maybe I'll tell you about that later, how avoidance saved my butt.

But eventually we went to this concert and I'm sitting there in this arena, I'm doing the math on how much money was spent to attend this concert.

And I'm thinking to myself, my God, these tens of thousands of people just paid all of this money to have their emotions be regulated by this one enormously talented musician on stage with their guitar.

We just paid for an emotion regulation experience.

So, I've been listening to music my whole life but I don't really give it second thought.

And then I have this experience with my daughter one day before a soccer game, I'm coaching the game, looking forward to this.

She's in a not so positive mood, she's bumming me out.

And serendipitously we're driving to the game and one of my favorite songs come on the radio, journeys don't stop believing.

I start jamming out, I'm having fun.

I look in the back seat in the rear view mirror.

Normally when I do that sort of stuff, My daughter's like cringe with embarrassment, but for some strange reason on that particular morning, my daughter's bopping along with me and she's getting into the music, and it lifts her emotions, her positive emotions as it lifts mine.

And she goes off to have a great, great game.

That experience was a tipping point for me that actually led me to then start doing some research to look at the links between sensation and emotion, And what you find when you dig into that science is that this is a really powerful tool for giving us a quick kick in the butt in the direction we want to go into.

Now we're often not aware of this, case in point you ever go to a hotel that smells really awesome in the lobby?

You're like, oh my God, I feel at home.

Let me just spend a little bit more money here.

Actually I'd say a little bit longer.

Hotels are capitalizing on this phenomenon.

They are piping in pleasant, sending sense into their ventilation system to arouse a particular positive response.

We're not always aware of that.

And sometimes we even get this wrong.

Have you ever found yourself in a sad mood and you didn't really wanna stay in that mood.

if for some strange reason you found yourself going to your iPad or iPhone or whatever the device is and putting on depressogenic music, Adele, Chicago, Air Supply, right?

This is a well -established phenomenon where when we're in a particular mood state, we seek out experiences that cohere with that state.

Now that's fine if the sadness is serving some function and sadness can be functional, but if your goal is to not be sad anymore, don't put on the Adele in that case.

Put on, fill in the blank, whatever your upbeat music is.

So that's just one example, but go down the senses.

And I think you will find that, this is remarkable for like touch, affection and touch. This is what we do to soothe babies the moment they are born into this world.

when you are struggling and you've talked about your difficulties, I mean, I have to presume that at some point, someone came over to you and put their hand on your back in a non creepy way or gave you a hug.

I mean, did that ever happen?

Sure, I guess where my head is going at this moment is thinking, I'm trying to put myself in that state of distress.

And I know myself well enough to know that when I'm in the midst of a negative emotional experience, it's more difficult to grasp for the solution.

There's something that, as uncomfortable as it is, you're resistant to changing it.

It is doing something for you.

Like on some unconscious level you're choosing it in an adaptive way, I suppose, that makes me resistant to reach out for help or to find a way out of it.

I'm more likely to indulge it.

Well, and if you find that that approach is serving you well, that is...

I mean, it's not, but.

Well, then I think, if that's not serving you well, having the foresight to recognize, actually, this intuition I have to lean into this emotion even further, it is not going to help me.

Rehearsing that ahead of time, and we can go over how to do that, because actually the penultimate chapter of my book is all about how you go from knowing to doing, right?

How when you find yourself in the midst of the storm, can you be reminded that your default tendencies may not be adaptive?

Let's plug in some of these shifters.

We'll talk about how you could do that.

But I think recognizing that sometimes our instincts don't serve us well.

I mean, Worry is a great example of this, right?

So Worry was the topic of my first book.

So a lot of people worry because they think it's going to help them.

There's something that feels really secure about worrying.

Because I look, this is a really important thing.

So let me try to figure out every possible angle on this.

Like your brain is an unbelievable supercomputer.

Your ability to come up with an infinite number of what if worst case scenarios, this is remarkable.

At a certain point, like it's useful until it ceases to be useful.

Typically I think the ceases to be useful happens like three minutes into the worry bout rather than three days or three weeks or three months.

So recognizing that this temptation you have to lean into this is not serving you well and giving yourself the permission and to do a little experiment, just give yourself like the next time you find yourself really wanting to indulge in the sadness or the anxiety, let's try something else and see how that works out and try some of those shifters.

That is something I would invite you and everyone else listening to do.

Yeah. And like, again, myself too.

Like I've sometimes had to, like I love approaching problems right when they happen.

I'm not dispositionally avoidant.

when something happens, I like to deal with it, nip it in the bud, move on.

Very tactical. I have learned that sometimes that does not work well.

In particular, in an interpersonal context, sometimes if I'm in an argument with someone else they need some time to recalibrate before we can productively deal with the situation at hand.

I have to force myself, all right, Ethan you're gonna distract for a while.

and I lean into work hard for like several hours or several days even.

And that really serves me well.

And I'll tell you what.

Now that I've benefited from that, it has broken the previous automatic response pattern that was not serving me well.

Yeah, what's interesting about that predisposition to problem solve.

Like I would imagine your inner monologue is like, this is a positive quality.

Like when I see a problem, I solve it right away.

but if you're curious about why that is, perhaps you may find a deep discomfort with uncertainty.

It's like, what's driving behavior, right?

And that uncertainty is so uncomfortable that it has to be eradicated and the best way to eradicate it is to just solve the problem, right?

As opposed to, what does it feel like to sit in that uncertainty instead?

Or you could sit in the uncertainty, That's one thing you can do.

You can also productively distract from the uncertainty and let time temper the emotional response linked with whatever is driving that certainty and see what that does for you.

Or you can talk to someone else.

You gotta be careful who you talk to to help you reframe the uncertainty.

Or you can lean on your culture for support.

And if you believe in a higher power or are spiritual, activate some of those resources.

There are lots of things you can do to deal with that experience.

And one of those things or two or three may be far more productive than the default, which is to just try to kinda hammer it away with the worries, which isn't serving you well.

But I wanna go back for a second because you said something really important.

You said that this intuition is coming from a very logical place.

So what is that logical place?

Well, this brain we possess, usually it's helping you out.

Like what are you taught to do from the time you are a little kid when you have a problem?

You taught to run away, or you taught to roll up your sleeves, get in there, solve the problem.

Most of the time in your life, even for those of us who really struggle a lot, you're pretty successful at using this brain to solve your problems. So in terms of like, if we go back and just look at our, I'll give you the technical term, the base rates, right?

Like what does that mean?

Let's look at just our history of successes.

Most of the time focusing on the problem like works out for us.

We come up with a solution.

When you inject some big emotions and uncertainty into the equation though, it doesn't always work out.

And that's where we often get stuck.

That's where we get jammed up because we have trouble overriding this history of successes that we've had.

to say to ourselves in the moment, hey, let's try something else.

So, you know, one way to reduce the uncertainty is let's just try to dogmatically dive into, to work through it.

Sometimes we do some other really hazardous things, scapegoating and like believing in conspiracy theories.

Those are other ways that we sometimes try to deal with uncertainty.

We will go to great lengths to try to quell the uncertainty Because as human beings, we love to know that the world is predictable and under our control.

And the fundamental truth of our existence is that it often is not.

And that's where you need to have some tools to navigate that more effectively.

Yeah, we're pattern seeking and pattern recognizing animals who identify those patterns and construct stories around them that then inform that inner monologue about who we are, what we're capable of, based upon what happened in the past as a means of casting a prediction about what's going to happen in the future.

And of course, much of that is adaptive, but your work is really around when these things become compulsions, It's like the idea isn't to eradicate negative emotions from your life, it's to recognize them for what they are and to learn when they're leading you astray and when they're serving you, right?

That's right. So, within that, you have this option to either avoid or approach, right?

So, when a negative, I think there's a cultural sort of idea like, well, we should just be free of all negative emotions.

That's right, we've just given, I think listeners a gift because we've just taken that impossible to achieve goal off the table.

And we've communicated that, number one, if your goal is to be free of negative emotions, good luck.

It's not how we are built.

And number two, it's actually not desirable in terms of optimizing your experience on this planet because you take those negative emotions away from people And they're not gonna be as successful in reaching their goals and the best, most powerful example I can give someone of that is the experience of physical pain.

This really resonates with folks like, Rich, I am a giant baby.

You should know this about me.

I do not like physical pain.

And yet I appreciate its value.

You can look at what would happen to people if they could not experience physical pain.

Every year, there are kids born into this world incapable of experiencing physical pain.

they die young because their hands get caught in the stove and there's no cue that tells them to retract their hands.

That's a negative emotional experience.

You would not want to live life without the capacity to experience physical pain.

Most of us don't want to constantly be in a state of physical pain, but let's appreciate that there's a time and place for all of these negative emotions that we experience.

Yeah, there are healthy responses to life stimuli, like you're supposed to feel grief and sadness when somebody you care about passes away or is having a hard time, like, these aren't things we wanna remove from our lives, we wanna be able to experience the full spectrum of human emotions, but have a healthy relationship with them so that they're not derailing our lives and we're not making up stories about sort of judging ourselves for having them, right?

So how do you do it?

What happens is in the context of what we would call quote unquote, like negative emotions, there does seem to be an epidemic of anxiety and stress.

Absolutely. And this like, there is this very real kind of experience that people, at least in the modern world have of being riddled with anxiety.

Having a whole sort of series of negative emotions that are overriding their ability to experience their life in a positive way?

And either they feel victimized by it, they don't have, they feel like they don't have agency over it.

Or when they do kind of like share with a friend, this is what's going on.

The response is something along the lines of like, well, you know, you shouldn't feel that way.

Or, you know, you should just be positive.

Look at how good your life is, like not very helpful, right?

Those aren't shifts that actually work.

That's right. To be clear, like I'm not dismissing the fact that there's enormous human suffering that we are experiencing as a society right now.

That's the reason I've devoted my life to doing what I do because these negative emotions that we experience often get triggered too intensely and they last too long.

And that's the opportunity zone to get in there and guided by science to not fall victim to the traps that you just articulated.

Take other people as an example.

We all have, I think many of us have this intuition that you should talk to other people when you're really struggling with things.

But how many of those conversations actually help you out?

And sometimes do they actually backfire and either not help you at all or lead you to feel worse?

I remember when I was much younger, before I got into this space, people would come to talk to me about really big things that they were struggling with.

I wanted to help them.

I'm empathic. Like I care about these people, but like, what the hell do I know?

Like no one ever told me how to have a productive conversation with someone else.

Science tells us, like we have a guide that we can follow.

I now know that there are two steps to being a great emotional advisor to someone else.

Step one, I need to empathically connect with you, to listen to you, to learn about what you're going through, to validate what you're experiencing as a human being, to communicate to you that you are not alone.

And once I learn about this, and once you genuinely feel heard, then I can get in there and start working with you to broaden your perspective.

And as someone who is not necessarily experiencing what you are undergoing, I'm in a pretty good position to bring that discerning, more objective point of view, to helping you work through the problem, which is fundamentally why you're coming to me to talk about it, right?

but I've got to follow those two steps and I've got to do it in the sequence that I just laid out.

If I just jump into advice giving mode from the outset, I'm an a -hole, I'm an insensitive, who the hell is this guy?

Like just telling me what to do.

I'm dying inside. I'm being, I'm tortured.

And you're just saying, it's as easy as doing this, that doesn't work.

The flip side also doesn't work.

If I just get you to vent about what you're going through and express it, I let you do that for a couple minutes or a couple hours, you leave our conversation.

You feel great about our connection.

Ethan, that guy he's here for me.

I can, without worrying about judgment, just talked to him.

But you leave the conversation feeling good about our relationship, but the problem is still there.

So I've got a little compass to steer my conversations with other people, I use it all the time and I also use it to find the right people to talk to in my network.

So I don't talk to everyone in my network about the things I'm struggling with.

Some people I love deeply, I respect enormously.

I never go to them to talk about my problems because I know they'll like go in one of those two directions, I just described that, take me someplace I don't wanna go.

I've got a wonderful curated board of advisors three or four for work stuff, five or six for personal.

Those are the people I go to.

That's the kind of deliberativeness I think we can have to try to channel these useful states that sometimes become really unhelpful.

The generations that preceded us had a tendency to kind of compartmentalize or repress sharing the emotions around a difficult life experience, like very stoic, right.

And, you know, I was raised by parents like that.

Many people have been, and now we're in a time where we're like, that's not the way to do it.

Like, you know, when you have these experiences, what you need to do is immediately, you know, find somebody to talk to and like process it, every single time and work your way all the way to the other side of it.

You have a different thought on this or a more nuanced thought, I should say.

Yeah, it's absolutely not true that everyone should immediately process and work through it.

We know that there are different strokes for different folks, no one size fits all solutions.

There are different pathways to dealing with adversity.

Some people to be clear benefit quite a bit from doing precisely what you just described.

Something happens, let's engage, let's focus on the problem, reframe it so that it ceases to be an ongoing source of distress.

But there are studies that have tracked people as they deal with adversity.

And they've highlighted that what I've just described, that's one pattern of being successful that really resonates for some people.

Other people benefit from not talking about it and they do other things.

So the evidence here about there not being one size fits all solutions in my mind is quite strong.

Sometimes avoidance can even be useful.

We tend to think about approach and avoidance as these two different categories of responses.

It's almost like you've got to like cast your vote at some point in your life about what team you're on and that's it, that's all you can do.

We are a lot more flexible in terms of our ability to use attention, which is fundamentally what we're talking about with approach and avoidance.

So, like attention, it's your mental spotlight.

What are you pointing it at?

If you point it at the source of distress, the distress is gonna get in the system and you're gonna think about it and probably be distressed.

Or you could point it away.

And there are lots of ways.

You could point it away and keep it away.

Some more healthy than others.

But it's not like you just have to do one or the other.

you can also go back and forth.

So what do I mean by back and forth?

I tell a story in the book that was a pretty pivotal story growing up in my life.

And it really made a...

It was part of the reason I got into psychology story of my grandparents who were in their early twenties, living in Eastern Poland, the Nazis came, witnessed their entire community be slaughtered, very narrowly escaped that fate themselves.

Steven Spielberg movie -like experience for three years, come over to this country with zilch end up, classic American story, work hard, make some money and so forth and so on.

Growing up, I spent a ton of time with them.

Every day after school, while my parents were working, I went to my grandparents house.

And I would ask my grandmother in particular because my grandfather never really learned English, but I would ask my grandmother to tell me about the war.

like in my mind, she's this heroine.

And I admire her so much. I just, I'm so thirsty to learn about what she went through and she consistently would deflect those questions.

Now, just focus on your homework or what else do you wanna eat?

She like was very good at supplying me with food.

Except the only time I would hear about these experiences was one time a year when she and her fellow survivors and the community she lived in would hold a remembrance day event and they would just let it out at that event.

And I would see emotion and hear details that I would never hear in the proceeding 364 days.

What she was doing there, like my interpretation of that is she was dosing her experiences with this war.

Right, which was still painful for her.

There was some need for her to deal with it.

And she would do it that one day a year.

or if by some chance she would run into a fellow survivor at the grocery store, she would get into it.

But on all other days, she would keep it aside.

And that was a coping approach, that flexibility, right?

Getting some time away and then coming back to it that served her really well.

That is a profile that some people can engage in and you don't have to do it across the board for the big traumas and the little curve balls.

Some people may really benefit for the smaller stuff, doing that kind of, let me take some time away from this and then come back.

Other people may benefit from the big stuff.

This is where the whole need to self -experiment with these tools comes into play.

Yeah, it's a defense mechanism and adaptation, if the trauma is so severe, I would suspect that it feels life -threatening you know, to talk about it, like it's a way of protecting yourself.

But I would imagine at some point, like it does have to be processed.

Like if you just continue to repress and compartmentalize your whole life, there's going to be negative downstream consequences in terms of like your outward behavior.

Without question chronic avoidance, which is implementing a very simple coping decision role.

I'm just gonna not go there, repress, suppress, deny across the board, not re -engage, that has been definitively linked with negative outcomes.

No disagreement there.

And I do not encourage folks to chronically avoid or engage in harmful avoidance practices.

So, dangerous drugs and behaviors of that sort.

I think we've over generalize though from that finding because chronic avoidance, because it can be so harmful, we have assumed that all avoidance is harmful.

When in fact, we can be a lot more skillful in how we weave avoidant tactics into our lives.

Healthy distractions can be really useful at times.

I mean, have you ever had a situation where you were really peeved about something and you were able to really get your mind off of that for a while, and you come back to it a few hours or days later, and you realize either that this wasn't a big deal to begin with or you can now approach the problem from a new light?

Yeah, of course. Of course, right?

Of course. That's using avoidance as a tool.

Let's go to some of the bigger things in life, though.

The kind of traumas that we're talking about now.

There's data would show that not all people benefit from actively talking about these things.

So what the hell might be going on?

How are they well adjusted?

Well, the important thing to remember is that there's a universe of other tools that they can use, right?

So some people may really benefit from getting out in nature, right?

Like how might that work?

Well, it smells good in nature.

Is that all it does?

No, that's a lot more complex than that.

I'm sure you've talked about this with other guests on your shows, but there's this wonderful research which shows that nature experiences can fill us with awe an emotion we experienced when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable.

And that can broaden our perspective, really help us see our experiences in a new light.

They might interact with nature.

They might lean hard on their community, on their culture, on their religion, like religion.

religion I think is a really useful tool for helping people manage their emotions.

And it helps people know lots of different ways.

It gives people rituals.

Rituals are sequences of behaviors that are under our control.

Right, we talked before about how people like certainty and control, hey, I can do a ritual the same way every time.

And religions bundle those rituals up with other things like prayer, where you're now performing a ritual or often with other people.

So there's a sense of solidarity.

And we're connecting with a higher power that is capable of dealing with clearing up the muck of life and the existential distress that surrounds it.

My grandparents leaned hard into religion to help them deal with things.

So it's not only that we decide between approaching and avoiding, we're making decisions about lots of tools oftentimes that we're bundling together to help us deal with adversity.

We did this research on COVID anxiety and how people manage debt.

We wanted to know, was there a silver bullet strategy or set of strategies that help people?

Two large studies, very fine graying, we track people over time.

Every day we had them report what they were doing.

Which of 18 tools did they use and how did they feel?

Well, no silver bullet.

First thing we find on average people use between three and four different tools.

Second thing, there is a enormous heterogeneity, enormous variety in the combinations of tools that people are using.

So that's really the mindset I think we wanna start adopting.

It's not about doing one thing versus the other.

It's about doing one combination things versus others.

And the combinations that work for us may not work for someone else.

That's a big challenge.

Figure out what those combinations are.

I like that. Yeah, this idea that, you know, using your grandparents as an example, you know, talk therapy isn't necessarily, you know, the be all end all like they found all these other ways to process those complicated emotions emanating from that trauma and we're able to live fulfilling lives.

Like they didn't do what we now think is the single only way or best way to manage it.

That is... But we'll judge them.

Like, look, we'll cast our judgment on them.

Like, oh, if they only knew what we knew now.

Yeah. And maybe not is what you're saying.

Maybe not. I mean, I think hear the evidence about the single only way.

I mean, the more we can move away from that mantra, that way of thinking about things, I think the more good we'll come to our collective emotional health.

It makes really good sense that we, and I put myself in this category, often default to wanting one size fits all solutions, because we like to simplify things.

It makes the world easier to navigate if we have one thing that you can do.

But it's just so interesting to me because I think I always go back to physical fitness, or even nutrition.

There's so many different pathways to being physically fit or to being nutritionally sound.

And we don't really question that anymore.

In fact, we kind of embrace it.

It's fine. And it's kind of cool that you know, I can do my high intensity interval training and yoga, and my wife can do her pilates and resistance.

And that's fine. Just don't go on Twitter and make any declarative statements about that.

Like, you go there, like everyone has very strong opinions about, you know, those topics in a very binary, you know, tribal way.

Well, it's binary. And I think just recognizing that we all have the, Like look, when I get involved in a new exercise regimen, I'm the best unpaid marketer for that.

I tell everyone, you've got to try this and this.

It's so great it'll change.

Like, there's good reason that we do that.

But just I think recognizing that we have these tendencies, like we want to share what works for us with other people, but recognize there's just enormous complexity to our emotional lives, our emotional lives are like fingerprints, unbelievably distinct.

And so if we accept that, why is it so hard for us to accept the fact that the solutions to optimizing our emotional life wouldn't also be distinct?

Is there not another piece to accepting our negative emotions that relates to accepting responsibility for them.

Like there's a lot of talk, you know, about like being triggered, like I was, you know, it's a way of like, obviating responsibility for your reaction.

Like well, I was triggered, so that rationalizes this like negative behavior and this state of negative emotional arousal, right?

Yeah. If only these people would like do what I think they should do, or if this situation would finally change, then I wouldn't have to feel the way that I feel and behave the way that I do.

And so it's an extrinsic kind of offloading of responsibility and an obsession with things that you actually don't have control over that are in control of your emotional regulation.

Well, I think this is another instance of the either -or mentality.

and to me, these are not competitive accounts of the difficulties of regulating.

It is true that there are things that happen in this world that can trigger certain reactions and that if those circumstances were different, the triggering would be different too.

Like I accept that reality.

And I think if we can identify toxic environments, we should strive to change those.

But it is also true that once those reactions are triggered, we have agency over how we manage them.

That's what this entire conversation is about.

There are things we can do within us, ways of interacting with our other people, environments, our cultures that provide us with some agency to manage those reactions.

And I don't think we need to choose between those two interpretations To the contrary, I think we should embrace both of those sources of influence on our emotional lives because that provides a more complete picture of why we're feeling the way we are and what we can do about it.

And so I think, yeah, that's where that distinction between like the trigger and the trajectory for me becomes such a valuable heuristic, such a valuable framework for thinking about our emotional lives.

The trigger being the emotions that are popping up, right?

Like sometimes we put ourselves in situations that cause those emotions to happen.

Sometimes we just find that they do happen to us.

And then there's what we do once they're triggered, once we become aware of them.

That distinction I find really valuable.

You mentioned like right now, it really seems like we're really struggling.

We are really struggling right now, But I do wanna point out that the topic that we're talking about right now, managing our emotions, is a timeless challenge that we have been struggling with.

And I'm a history like enthusiast, I love it as a little hobby.

I spent a little bit time in the book, just very little, just maybe two pages, right.

I indulge this interest I have in going into the history of emotions and emotion regulation.

And to use a technical term, Rich, it blew my mind.

First surgical technique, the first thing we think was the first surgical technique was a technique used that in part to help people manage big emotions, trepanation, carving holes in people's heads eight to 10 ,000 years ago, that's what we're doing.

But some of the first writing samples ever discovered in ancient Persia describe people dealing with emotional afflictions, like sadness and a broken heart rejection.

The best -selling book of all time.

One of the most famous stories in that book, the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve is a story of having difficulty managing our emotions.

The Buddha life is suffering.

So I bring this up because on the one hand, yes, times right now don't just seem, but are incredibly turbulent.

And we're struggling with these emotions all the time.

And we're documenting this in ways that we have never documented them before.

But that is kind of like a bleak message to put the spotlight on that.

set of facts, what I prefer to put the spotlight is on the fact that the solutions that we now have for providing people with tools for managing these conditions are a heck of a lot better than what we were doing eight to 10 ,000 years ago, right?

Like there are things you can do.

These are not invasive.

These are very easy to implement things And so that, kind of, on a mushy note, fills me with hope.

How do you see your approach as similar or different from a mindfulness approach, which is to say that meditation and mindfulness exercises provide you with that buffer between impulse and response.

So something happens, you feel your emotions welling up, you know this is a negative emotional response, but rather than reflexively reacting, you take that moment to have a more mindful response.

So it's reaction versus response, which is a little bit different from the way that you're finding your way into this.

Well, first of all, I have enormous admiration for mindfulness and meditation as a tool.

But I think of it as one tool amongst many others.

You know, I should share with you that I've been meditating on and off since I'm five years old.

I know, it's crazy I've heard you, I've heard you say that.

How did you start meditating at five?

I'll tell you exactly how it's a flash ball memory, right?

You know flash ball memories, like take a picture of the scene.

Five years old, my dad takes me to the, you know I've got a surprise for you little guy.

And he takes me to the transcendental meditation center in New York city.

And I walk and I have to go in.

and I've got like a handkerchief and some fruit, which is part of the whole ritual of getting your mantra.

And then I walk in and I see mattresses all over the floor.

I'm like, dad, what's with the mattresses?

And he's like, it's for yogic flying.

So this is a real thing like you could Google.

He was this very complex character.

Yes, he was part hippie, but he was also, you know chain smoking, New York Yankees, flip you off on the road kind of guy.

So complex stew of features.

But that was my introduction to meditation.

I got my child mantra at that point.

He took me back when I was older, insisted before college that I get the adult mantra.

You upgraded your mantra.

Which was the same one by the way, didn't change.

And I have leaned on meditation and mindfulness practices at various points in my life.

You described the philosophy behind response and reaction, whatever the language you used, that's compatible with this idea of the trigger and trajectory for sure.

Mindfulness as a exercise to help you recognize what facets of your inner world are outside of your control, as an exercise to help you develop the ability to accept things, that mental events and emotions come and go, to tune you to your senses.

These are all gifts to humanity but they're only one set of tools.

And here's what else I know about mindfulness, it doesn't benefit everyone.

For a variety of reasons, some people are not committed to the practice, some people try it and just don't take to it, right?

So yet again, we see it's a one size, it's not a one size fits all solution.

Number two, I know that there are so many other tools, so many other ways of pushing your emotions around that if you were to limit yourself only to mindfulness, I think you would be doing yourself a disservice because these other tools that are out there, it's not like they are in competition with mindfulness, you know, for what you can do.

you don't have to make a choice.

And I think the problem with mindfulness is often not at all about the philosophy behind it or the practitioners, but it is often how it is promoted as a panacea.

And I just don't believe in panaceas because I haven't seen any compelling data to suggest that they actually exist. So let me give you just like one thing we haven't talked about that from a shifter point of view we haven't talked about a bunch. But one thing that is really important are perspective shifters.

So we talked about sensation, you know, all the different music and taste and touch and smell.

We talked about attention and how avoidance isn't always toxic.

Well, what about when you just wanna reframe the way you think about something?

Right, mindfulness actually gives you, I think reframes on your experience that are quite powerful.

I remember the school bus metaphor, you know, the school bus metaphor.

Yeah. I mean, game changer for me.

Right, your thoughts and feelings, imagine them like you're the driver on the bus and then annoying passengers, they'll get on.

But you know what, they'll still fire away some spitballs at your neck, but they'll eventually get off and you keep going.

That's a powerful reframe for thinking about, for accepting the thoughts that...

The perspective shift feels like the hardest lift to me because I can get my head around like, okay, I just need to take a beat here, go outside and go on a walk, or light incense or some smell that has a sense memory experience that allows me to shift or go for a runt, these sort of pattern interrupts, all of those feel very like tactile, but the perception shift is more of like, it's a mind game, you know what I mean?

I mean, to me, there is something about it.

My resistance to it is more like, it feels more like the Stuart Smalley look in the mirror and like, you know, I'm a good person and like, you know, you're worthy and all you know, all of that and that, like, you know, well, that like gets me agitated.

Well, let's see if we can reduce the agitation with some.

And I'm saying this because I know you have a response to this.

Yeah. Well, and let's see if they work for you because again, no one size fits all.

What you just described, Like this is one of my favorite memories in recent years.

I tell this anecdote in the book is it captures this experience I had with friends where we're driving home from dinner my wife and I and this other couple and my friend is bemoaning a problem at work.

And it's like bringing him down and he's getting into it.

And his wife turns him and says, why don't you just think about it more positively Just reframe it.

And he pauses for effect and then says, yeah, easier F 'ing said than done.

And I think that captures a reality that you just described that so many of us have experienced, which is we understand at this intellectual level that we can change the way we think to change the way we feel, but it is so damn hard to do that when we're flooded with emotion.

And it almost feels like this futile effort, right?

Cause we can't manage to zoom out.

We're so fixed by the emotion.

And so what I've benefited from and what we have learned can be useful in those instances is to practice what I affectionately refer to a psychological jiu -jitsu.

There are some relatively easy things you can do to shift the way you are thinking about things that can change the trajectory.

So the first category of these shifters, and this is, I mentioned earlier, like I've got a couple of things, first line of defense for me.

This is part of my first line of defense when I'm struggling with something, mental time travel.

So mental time travel directly contradicts the notion that you should always be in the moment and that your default should be to get in the moment and present when you're struggling.

That works for some people some of the time for sure.

But we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Our minds evolved to travel in time.

We're doing this all the time and benefiting from it.

I don't know much about you Rich, I mean, I guess you sometimes look back and learn from your mistakes, correct?

Sure. I'm gonna also guess that.

Hopefully. Yeah, I suspect you have. I'm to suspect that you also, I still sometimes really, really enjoy fantasizing about things that might happen in the future.

Yeah, but those are few and far between in comparison to the disaster castings and the kind of...

I like that disaster casting.

I haven't heard that one before.

Revisionist version of the past that I like to spin where everything was horrible, you know what I mean.

And so I think, I get what you're saying.

Like there is this notion that, if we could just be present that all of our problems go away.

And what you're saying is, no, like we are unique in the animal kingdom in that we have the ability to time travel and think about the past and the future.

The problem is, modernity has created a scenario in which we're absolutely captured by past and future and rarely very present.

Well, let's go a bit further into this mental time travel because what you described A I think captures so many of our experiences.

So yes, we have this capacity to time travel in our minds.

Yes, we often benefit from it like when we learned from past mistakes or plan for the future in productive ways or fantasize about good things that might happen.

But so often we jump into that time travel machine.

we go to the negative past and it breaks down, or we go to the negative future filled with the what ifs and it breaks down, meaning we just, we're living now in this, what was the word?

The phrase? For the future or the past?

I've heard, the Doom Loof, the rabbit hole, I have so many phrases people have. Disaster casting?

Disaster casting, I like that one.

That's like, that could be a new media company name, huh?

Yeah, I don't know.

So yes, that happens, But here is what I love about the research in this space.

And these are two tools that I use a lot.

You can actually use mental time travel to help you.

So one thing you can do when you're struggling is you could time travel into the future.

So when we find ourselves disaster casting, we often fixate, we zoom in on the awfulness of what we are thinking about, worrying about right now.

you can ask yourself, how am I gonna feel about this next week, next year, in five years, when I'm 80.

Now it sounds so simple.

It's almost like we should dismiss this.

Yet that very, very simple psychological jujitsu move, it has a technical name, it's called temporal distancing.

It does something remarkably profound.

you have experienced a lifetime of emotional reactions.

Most of which follow a particular, what we call temporal trajectory.

They follow a particular time course and this is what it looks like, you're living life.

Something happens, your emotion gets triggered and then as time goes on, it eventually fades.

There's a lot of variability there.

Different emotions get triggered to different intensities.

Some come down right away, some last longer, or some emotions just categorically stick around longer than others.

But most of our experiences follow that time course.

I don't really have to convince you that that is true because you have lived that probably millions of times.

When we are down in the doldrums and disaster casting, we lose sight of that truism that we fundamentally believe And so jumping into that time travel machine, how am I gonna feel about this next week?

It makes accessible this idea as bad as it is.

Things are going, it's temporary.

It's not gonna stick around forever.

I cannot tell you how much that brings the volume down on the negative experience.

It doesn't make it go away.

It's not turning a terrible event into this joyous birthday party occasion, but it's turning the intensity down often enough to be more productive.

So that's one version of using mental time travel to your benefit.

You can also go back in time and this works differently.

The mechanism here is different.

My go to response here.

It goes back to my grandparents.

I get into the mental time travel machine.

I go back to 1943. I spend time with my grandparents in the frozen Polish woods, when they're living in a bunker, but they can't leave because if they do, they're afraid the Nazis are gonna shoot them, right?

I spend a little time with them there.

I don't have to spend much time because that moment with them in my mind broadens my perspective.

It makes it clear that what I'm going through could be a whole lot worse.

It highlights in some ways it like the, insignificance of what I'm dealing with compared to what they endured.

And I think we all have, whether it be our own personal experiences, familial experiences, societal, cultural moments that we can use with that tool.

So those are two illustrations of how just understanding how mental time travel works.

Like those are at the ready for me when I have something I'm dealing with, I can do both.

I can also repeat my mantra for five minutes too.

I do not have to limit myself to any one of those tools.

And the research we have done it suggests that the more healthy tools you use, the more you benefit.

So there is this kind of cumulative effect.

What I hear and what you just shared is on some level, like in antidote to self -obsession, like there's an ego piece here.

Like both of those examples that you gave about past and future are exercises in humility, right?

Like the perspective shift is finding a way to really connect with the idea that you're not the center of the universe.

other people have had it worse than you.

It's probably not gonna be as bad.

And ultimately like everything is not revolving around you.

And I wonder what you can say about the relationship between these, you know, compulsive or repetitive, negative emotions that continue to creep up that are, you know, patterned and disruptive.

What the relationship between those are and our ego, cause there does feel like to be, there's some kind of egocentrism to it.

like the world is against me.

Yeah, absolutely. And so it's like, it's all like in your mind, it's like a self obsession.

And in recovery, we learn tools to disabuse us of that self obsession.

And one of the primary ones is like service.

Like if you're caught up in your own mind, like there's an acronym like HALT, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, like, well, maybe you're, you know, like there's a couple of simple things you can do to shift. But the real fundamental tool is to like, go help somebody else.

Like that is the cure for your self obsession.

And that's another way of getting out of your perspective and inhabiting the perspective of somebody else.

Well, you know, I say this in the book, I talk about that tool divorced from the AA world.

One of my favorite findings in all of social psychology is the finding that one of the best ways is to help you feel better is to help someone else.

This has been shown across the board, different cultures, people earning different amounts of money, helping other people, doing good for someone else, has these reciprocal effects, it helps us too.

This point you're making about the ego though, is very much relevant.

So when we get flustered with emotions, we tend to zoom in.

We experience them in a very, what we call egocentric way.

And when that happens, this ability to broaden our perspective to zoom out or game what we call some distance from the self or like taking a step back.

That can be really, really helpful for diffusing the intensity of that response, which is in part driven from our intrinsic connection with it.

When our ego gets tapped, it's like a direct assault on our sense of who we are.

So when we broaden our perspective and zoom out and realize, hey, there may be more to it than just me and this experience, that's directly counteracting the force that is driving this emotion.

Now here's what I find to be so freaking cool about the science in this space.

There are multiple ways to get that kind of distance or zoom, zooming out.

We've talked about several already.

You could go into the future.

or how you're gonna feel next year.

You could go into the past, think of adversity that others have experienced.

You can go for a walk in a beautiful setting that elicits the emotion of awe or contemplate something that is awe -inspiring, like the fact that there's an SUV roaming on planet Mars right now.

When we experience awe, that's an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves, And what researchers have shown happens when you experience awe, is it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self.

Use your lingo to describe that, right?

A reduction of our ego involvement.

And once you shrink the self, guess what else shrinks along with it?

The significance of your problems. So, when I'm sitting there, and I'm you know, looking out at beautiful, you know, The Huron River and the Arboretum near my home and these trees that have been there for hundreds of years or when I'm contemplating the fact that we have a vehicle on Mars, I'm realizing that the thing I'm worried about today, it's not just a tiny bit smaller in the vastness of this world and the universe, but it's quite a bit and there's comfort that often comes from that.

Other people can do this for you too.

I think the most skilled emotion advisors that I possess, they broaden my perspective when I'm having trouble doing it myself.

Like Ethan, do you realize what you're worried about?

Many people don't even have the opportunity to worry about this, right?

They reframe it for me.

So other people can do that for us and our cultures do it for us too.

AA did it for you, right?

It was an AA or some whatever.

Yeah, religion does that for a lot of people.

I would argue that we are all authors of the cultures that exist in our homes.

And to some extent in our organizations too.

And we have the opportunity to impress these ideas among those people in those cultures too.

So there are lots of different ways that we can help people get less ego involved to broaden out.

And just to bring this full circle, mindfulness is one wonderful way to do that.

Meditation, thank you dad at five years old, kind of.

It's one way to help you do it, but it's only one.

And why should we be limiting ourselves to just one lever?

When there are 12 others that exist that you can help yourself with.

What can you say about the difference between addressing these negative emotions when they arise, by dint of these shifts, versus the value or the means by which to address the root cause of what's driving them in the first place.

So, if you are in a pattern where you're looping negative thoughts and this is just something you've been doing for a very long time and it is disrupting your life in ways that you're very aware of, You can engage in these shifts and it's super helpful, but at some point, do you not need to figure out like what's causing this in the first place?

Absolutely. Whether it's something that happened in childhood or whatever it is, right?

So talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely and again, it's not a either or, it's both, right?

I think we wanna give people tools so that they can be proactive and resilient because life is inevitably gonna throw curveballs at us that are not predictable.

And we wanna have people prepared for how to deal with those events.

So they're not flustered and just stumbling.

That's those tools right there.

And we could give some frameworks for helping make sure that people implement them.

But known causes of distress, known triggers, nip those in the bud.

Let's deal with them for sure.

And there are lots of ways you could try to deal with them.

There's some research which shows, for example, that positively reframing things can be really useful if you can't do anything to control the situation.

But if you can do something to fix the situation, you're better off fixing the situation, nipping it in the bud, rather than trying to just positively reframe it.

Like, that's a lot harder to do.

If you could get rid of the trigger to begin with, much better than giving someone a tool to continually deal with that trigger.

So we should be acting on both of those levels all the time.

We should be alert to the circumstances in our life that are repetitively eliciting reactions that undermine us from achieving our goals, which by the way is how I think about what emotion regulation or self -regulation is all about.

It's about aligning your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals.

So it is an inherent inherently idiosyncratic enterprise.

If there's circumstances at work or at home that are triggering you in the wrong way and you could deal with those circumstances, absolutely address them.

But we also want you to have tools to deal with everything else.

And if your fundamental malfunction is avoidance, it's gonna be tough, you know, Because you're gonna avoid wanting to like go there to do anything about it.

Fundamental dysfunction.

You just already identify.

Malfunction. It's not working, if it's not working for you, don't use it.

And we also know that using avoidance as a blunt tool, chronically avoiding across the board tends not to work for people, right?

So that is not the approach that you want to implement, it's being more flexible with attention.

And that's the point I'm really trying to drive home that sometimes approaching things universally doesn't actually work.

It gets you stuck in your doomsday thought chamber.

I forgot the phrase already, but so it's just about flexibility.

What's the relationship between these negative emotional patterns and the inner voice, the inner monologue?

How do these two things kind of interface with each other?

What the inner voice often does is it often prolongs our emotional responses.

So something happens and we have this remarkable tool which is language that we can use inner silent language that is to solve problems. And we rely on our inner voice all the time to make meaning out of our experiences, to craft our sense of who we are, to motivate and control ourselves.

So you reach for that singularly effective tool, but you find that it starts taking you in a wrong direction.

So you start elaborating on an experience verbally in ways that just keep it alive.

That's when your inner voice, which is a Swiss army knife of the human mind starts turning into something really toxic and gives rise to the state of chatter or the emotions now are just continually reverberating in your head.

And we know that that undermines lots of the goals that people have to perform well at work, to have good relationships and to be healthy.

The inner monologue is often an unreliable narrator of our lives and yet we seem to trust it, listen to it to a fault.

And you speak a lot about ways to regulate that, to like change what that inner monologue is.

And you use this example of Djokovic and he's sort of giving himself a speech. We're all familiar with some version of that giving ourselves a pep talk.

So I'm curious about how you can kind of grab the reins of that inner monologue and find ways to redirect it if it's often kind of your worst enemy.

Yeah, so here again, there are lots of tools one of my favorites that you just gesture towards is something we call distanced self -talk.

And what it involves doing is silently and the silent part is pretty important, coaching yourself through a problem using your own name and the second person pronoun, you.

All right, Ethan, are you going to manage a situation?

The reason why this helps people shift is Because we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves.

I take it you've experienced this before, you can be this sage elder when it comes to someone else, but then you find yourself in the same situation.

And it's like, I'm the biggest hypocrite on the planet, right, I'm not following what I preach. We have like sayings to track this experience.

Like do as I say, not as I do.

if you think about it, like when do you use the word you, when you're thinking about and referring to another person.

Think about how often you use the word you in your life or name, you also use names to think about other people.

The links between the word you and thinking about or referencing someone else in your brain, super, super strong.

So the idea is that when you're using the word you to refer to yourself, it's automatically putting you into this mode of relating to yourself, like you're relating to someone else, that makes it a lot easier for us to give ourselves wise objective advice, so this is a kind of distancing tactic actually.

We talked about getting some space from the ego, right, this is akin to stepping back and relating to yourself as someone else, if you will, from a more observer point of view, but you still have full access as to what you're experiencing.

So that's a simple linguistic shift that can often reroute our inner monologues.

And, you know, it's interesting.

Like, Rich, I often think about it.

I have friends who come to me all the time and, you know, they're struggling with stuff and I'm not a clinician, I'm just a friend.

And they wanna talk to me about this engagement that they have coming up that they're really worried about or this problem in their relationship.

The things that they say to themselves are things that they would never dream of saying to another human being.

Yeah, of course. Sometimes they're even unlike, They're familiar with that.

They don't even want to articulate them out.

I've done workshops with people where I've asked them to just write down what those thoughts are.

And like, unless I promise to have the shredder there, people don't want to even do it.

There's a resistance to have any evidence of admitting what these thoughts are.

That is often what we ourselves subject ourselves to when we get lost in chatter and that inner voice gangs up against us.

But then think about it.

Have you ever said to someone you care about those things that you say to yourself?

No, of course not, I would never, yeah.

Like you not in, you know, not in the worst case scenario would I ever say to someone else what I told - You're an idiot, you unbelievable God, I mean, it's wild.

And so this is another one of these jiu -jitsu moves, if you will, I call it a jiu -jitsu move because jiu -jitsu is like you're just, you're shifting momentum a little bit and you're putting people on a totally different plane when you're practicing that martial art.

And so by shifting the words we're using to relate to ourself, we're rerouting our perspective, we're getting us to relate to ourselves like we're someone else.

And that can be useful for for shifting those inner monologues.

How is that different or similar to the idea of creating an alter ego?

Like there's very interesting science coming out about that.

You see athletes who do that or refer to themselves in the third person and there's this superhero version that they can visualize.

And so they can distance themselves from their own weaknesses and insecurities and inhabit this other skin for the purposes is of elite performance or whatever.

Yeah, mechanistically, I think of those as very similar.

We've actually done some work with kids where we call this the Batman effect, where we have them assume the role of a superhero.

And what would Batman do in this really hard situation?

That's a distancing move, you're assuming this other persona and that gives you some distance to help you manage the situation that you find yourselves in.

For some people, the inner monologue, the chatter that can be utterly debilitating.

Like it's just a nonstop gnawing on the soul of negative self -talk, you know, it's never gonna work out.

Who do you think you are?

Like, oh, that person, you think they're gonna do that?

It's never gonna hat like that to the point where it's debilitating.

And the person just thinks like, I just wish it would go away.

Like I would be better off without this inner monologue.

Every human being has an inner monologue, make the case for why that might not be a good idea if you could flick the switch, cause you've had experience with people who have had a brain injury or stroke, right?

And that happened. So Jill Bolte -Taylor, right, is a powerful example of she was a neuro anatomist working at Harvard and very top of her game.

And like many other high performing individuals, she often experienced the inner monologue ganging up on her.

So turning into what I call chatter, getting stuck in the doom loop, if you will.

And she would think to herself often, what would happen if I just got rid of this voice?

And she did get rid of it, she silenced her inner voice, she experienced a stroke one day.

And so she temporarily lost her ability to use words, not just out loud, but she lost the ability to use words silently, which is a mind -blower of an experience for me to contemplate.

Cause I use words all the time in my head to reflect on my life.

Like what would it be like Rich to not be able to rehearse a phone number or curse herself out?

I mean like choose - Yeah, it's hard to imagine because we've never had any experience to relate to that would allow us I just understand what that would feel like.

Now, what's interesting about her case is she ultimately did regain her linguistic faculties, wrote a book about her experience.

She initially described losing the inner voice as this wonderful experience.

She actually says, she describes it as it felt like she had gone to la -la land and she elaborates that, well, you know, it was an inconvenience to not be able to use words to communicate with other people or myself, but all those worries and ruminations, poof.

They just went away.

And initially that felt like a compromise that was worth it.

But then she goes on to explain that a little bit of an inconvenience to not have the ability to use language in her life.

So I usually give her example, her case is one example of why the question about silencing the inner voice and getting rid of it, it's probably not the optimal question to ask ourselves because your inner voice is a tool.

We haven't talked about what it does for you in short order.

It lets you keep information in your head for short periods of time.

So if you want, if you go to a cocktail party you want to remember someone's name you repeat in your head.

Ever do that? Like your inner voice is part of your verbal working memory system, fundamental system of the mind.

It lets you keep nuggets of verbal information active.

You go to the grocery store, repeat your grocery list in your head.

That's your working memory system.

Your inner voice helps you simulate and plan.

You ever go over what you're gonna say before an interview?

Sure. That's your inner voice.

Imagine if you couldn't do that.

Your inner voice helps control and motivate yourself.

You have probably had many experiences with this in the endurance sports and competitions that you've participated.

And you ever talked to yourself on those engagements?

Yeah, it's a constant communication.

It's constant. I think everybody's in constant communication with themselves in that weird, detached way.

Well, some people would debate that.

So there is variability.

So, some people will lean on their inner voice more for certain functions than others.

Some people report not getting lost in those dialogues with themselves.

But, yeah, they can repeat a grocery listing in your head.

But certainly, it's a very common experience.

And there's one final thing we haven't mentioned.

Some final function that serves your inner voice this helps you make meaning out of your life.

Right, it helps you author your sense of who you are.

You mentioned telling a story before and the importance of telling a story.

Well, guess what helps you tell those stories that define our sense of who we are, it's your inner voice.

So imagine I was to go to market with a tool that lets you keep information active in your head, lets you simulate and plan for the future, lets you control and motivate yourself and allows you to make meaning out of your existence, that would be an incredibly valuable tool, right?

That is what your inner voice is.

But like our emotions, your inner voice doesn't come with a user's manual.

So you're seeing the theme in my books, right?

Trying to take these fundamental and really important universal human experiences and use science to provide us with an accessible guide for harnessing those tools that are really powerful but also have the potential to be destructive.

It's like nuclear energy, right?

Like wonderful gift to humanity in many ways but can also lead to the greatest calamities of all time.

We got to know how to wield these tools.

And that's where I think we have the opportunity to help lots of folks.

And what are some of those tools if you're finding yourself indulging in that negative self -talk to shift that to a more positive version.

Yeah, so we talked about one with distance self -talk.

Another one that can be quite useful is journaling.

The journaling is another distancing tool.

It's an effortful tool.

It's probably one of the most effortful tools in the toolbox because it takes about 15 to 20 minutes a day to benefit from journaling.

And what journaling involves doing is, is just sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and just letting yourself go, write about your deepest thoughts.

If you don't worry about grammar. And what's interesting about that act of journaling is that you start off and you're kind of dumping your emotions down.

But then as you continue to write, there's a form that the writing imposes on your experience.

Right, because what do we learn about?

We learn how to tell stories and had to write stories in time or little.

And one of the first things we learned is the story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

And it's actually organized in the sense that you don't tend to write just incomprehensible rubbish when you write something down.

In our heads though, I mean, when you're in a chatter spell, I'm gonna guess you're pinballing all around, you're thinking of my element.

Yeah, there's no structure, there's no hero's journey happening.

There's no hero's journey, right?

The act of writing imposes a structure on your cognition.

And that helps us move along.

And guess what, there's also a target, a character in that story you're writing about.

And that character is you.

So you're writing about yourself.

So the act of writing forces us to kind of reflect on ourselves from a more third -person point of view.

we've actually done research to show this.

And that can be really useful for helping people work through their emotions.

There are lots of other tools too.

I mean, nature can be super powerful as we talked about before.

Nature is one of those things that I think lots of people think it feels good, but it goes beyond just feeling good.

Nature has this restorative effect on our cognition.

One of the things that happens when we get lost in chatter is it trains us.

Like, do you ever feel just tired from just getting lost?

I mean, it's tiring.

And what's happening there is you have limited attentional resources in your brain.

Like attention is a limited resource.

I'm sure you've had guests on the show who've talked about this before.

Chatter acts like a sponge.

It consumes that attention, leaving very little left over to do the things we want and need to do.

this is why when you sit down to read a few chapters in a book or a few pages, and if you're worried about something, you read the material but you don't remember anything you've read, fair?

So what nature does, it's so cool.

When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, your attention is gently captured by the surroundings, the smells, the sounds, the views, to the point where you get to the end of the walk and now you've had this opportunity to rest and restore.

So studies show that when you index people's cognitive reserves, if you will, before versus after a walk, they're cognitively replenished by the end of the walk.

So that's another way that you can help deal with this kind of chatter.

So those are two different, qualitatively different things Because the journaling you were talking about using the pronoun you like all of these create distance between yourself and that dialogue.

It's a way of like disabusing you of that self -identification, right, that creates space so that you're not just buying into it.

You're not so enmeshed in it that you think it's you.

You're, you're, you're creating kind of a boundary.

Whereas the nature walks that's more of a way of quelling the volume and the kind of intensity of the voice, right?

like to create, to like get it to stop chattering at all a little bit.

Well, it's doing that.

Plus it's also giving you an injection if you will of cognitive resources, which are important because that ability, that that neural juice if you will that to use that technical term that is often needed to reframe things and think constructively, which is what is often sapped from the chatter.

So nature is like a cocktail, it's working in a few different levels.

There are like lots of other ones too.

Let me give you another language one and then a totally different one.

So another linguistic tool is something that we call the universal you.

It's a little bit different from what I told you about before.

And so bear with me, give me 60 seconds to explain it and then it's gonna really resonate.

So we talked before about coaching yourself through a problem like giving yourself advice like you would a friend and using the word you to communicate with yourself.

Ethan, what are you going to do?

Like you're giving yourself a pep talk.

There's this other very strange things, seemingly strange thing that people do, you're gonna see this all over the place once I describe it to you.

I mean, I guess you might've been blind to it before because I was and lots of people are.

When people are trying to make meaning and the people being out of their difficult experiences, the kinds of stuff that Alyssa chatter.

They often do this strange thing and they shift from talking about their experiences in the first person to using the word you to refer to like the collective.

So, when you get rejected from a publisher, what are you going to do?

You just gotta move on.

So different usage of the word you, right?

I mean, I'm still using the word you to refer to my - You is we.

It's you is we, and so here's the super cool thing about this linguistic jujitsu move.

When I'm doing that, first I'm getting some distance, right?

It's no longer I mean I.

It's now a little bit pushed away from me, but it's also about everyone and anyone.

And guess what human beings love?

to not be alone in how they think about their circumstances.

There is comfort that we derive from knowing that we're not alone in our struggles and that other people share them.

And so when you use the word you, in this universal sense, this isn't just about me, this is about everyone and anyone, it's doing both of those things, it's giving you a little bit of distance from the problem Because there's nothing more immersive than thinking about your circumstances in the first person with I mean, my.

It's given you some space, but it's also tapping into this broader collective.

And if that weren't enough rich, there's an additional bonus you get from this tool.

It brings you into my world because you are part of that universe.

So I'm talking about my experience in these universal terms. What are you gonna do when you're rejected?

What are you gonna do when you lose someone you love?

What do you do when you feel like you just can't go on?

It's automatically bringing you into my experience and that's strengthening the rapport between us.

It also in research we find it, it enhances the persuasive value of what we say.

So that's another little linguistic jujitsu move that you can use.

Yeah, that's super interesting.

You're inviting people in, there is a kind of a perspective shift. we're in this together.

When you do that, like, this is my experience, but we're together, right?

And you're trying to be in their mindset.

And this is something that we do reflexively, unconsciously.

And I wonder, like, it's that thing you mentioned at the outset, like we find our way to these strategies and tools that are kind of healing and curative.

And now that you know it, right?

So yes, you going to see this like Look at a newspaper article where people are talking about something that they're struggling with or look at a press conference with athletes following a loss.

You'll typically see people making this shift, but it's it's often completely out of people's awareness.

And so now that you know how this works, it empowers you to use this tool more proactively, more strategically.

So I know when something happens, I'm starting to think about it now, not I mean my mode.

I'm gonna talk about it in this generic sense.

We did this one study that I think it's kinda cool just to show the value that this has in sucking you into my world.

This was a study we did, it's a big package but one of them was we looked at books, I think it was an Oprah's book club.

And you know how in a Kindle you can highlight different segments of the books And so we looked at the highlighted segments of books and we compared it to unhighlighted segments.

Because you can see the most highlighted sections of - Correct.

Correct. And what we find is that the highlighted segments have significantly more usage of this generic you, this universal you.

It's almost like it's calling you to relate to this material.

So, you know, if you think of a highlight as this is calling to me in some way, right?

Like the word is having that effect, and we show that through lots of other rigid approaches that using you has that kind of sucking you into my world function.

I wonder if that's on the uptick, like if that is a trend that has increased as kind of people have succumbed more and more to their negative emotional states and negative inner monologues.

Well, we find that if you give people instructions to try to relive an event versus try to make meaning out of it, you get significantly higher utilization of this generic you when people are trying to make meaning out of their experience versus just relive it.

So we actually think that this is a linguistic mechanism that underlies meaning making because what meaning making is often about is being able to think about this experience in a broader sense.

And this is a linguistic tool that creases the wheels for allowing you to do it.

And so we describe this as both providing a window into where people are in the meaning making process, but also a lever or a shifter that can be pulled to hypercharge meaning making.

So it's a kind of cool little tool.

So, one of the tools I'll just mention though, just to bring it full circle, rituals.

Like that's another tool.

Like, you know, rituals under your control.

Chatter often doesn't feel like it's under your control.

Right, like, oh my God, this inner voice again, it's ganging up on me again, and performing a ritual, a rigid sequence of behaviors that you could do the same way every time.

It's not surprising to me that so many people clean and organize when they're filled with stress.

Like they do it reflexively and they report that it helps them.

What that's doing is it is activating what we call compensatory control.

You're compensating for the lack of control you feel inside by exerting control and creating order around you.

So it's another little move you can make.

What is the most surprising or counterintuitive finding that you've had, whether it's with respect to these negative emotional states and how we can better emotionally regulate them or the inter -monologue, the chatter.

Most surprising counterintuitive.

So for me, the most, the finding I think about most frequently nowadays and admittedly this has changed is really the no one size fits all solution finding.

And in some ways it's like, why wasn't that obvious from the first place, but the way science works is, or at least it worked the way I was trained was like you identify one tool and you very carefully study how it works and profile it with different populations.

We were talking about this earlier, off mic, right?

Like you go super deep and narrow to understand all the intricacies.

But then we do these studies where we look at like what are people doing in their lives to move the needle on emotion regulation.

And what we find, number one is they're not doing one thing.

In general, most people are doing lots of different things and they're not doing the same different things.

Everyone's doing something really different and a lot of people are switching things up from one day to the next.

That was really surprising to me.

really surprising about how we are cobbling together these tools.

You know, it's almost like we're just like reaching for stuff to get us through every day.

I will say that that observation has rerouted both how I think and talk about emotion regulation has also rerouted the work that my lab is doing right now.

The work we are doing is focused on understanding the dynamics that exist between people, tools, and situations.

What we are trying to do is crack the code that explains if Rich finds himself in situation A, what are the three tools that he benefits from?

And how is that different if Rich finds himself in situation B, what are these other tools?

And how does Rich in situation A and B and the tools that he benefits in those two, how how does that compare to Ethan's response to situation A and B?

That I think is a huge puzzle of human psychology in figuring out that kind of triple dynamic.

And so that's what we're spending a lot of time doing.

And I think it's really important.

That code is a very complex algorithm, to your point of no one size fits all.

It's for whom and when, in what context?

And there's a lot of variables at play here.

Like that's a very difficult equation to solve for.

Amen. It's a difficult equation.

And I think that's part of the reason why we haven't made more progress in trying to address it.

There is a sociology that explains how science works and there are realities that exist about needing to produce research and to get a job and keep it.

but I don't think we should shy away from this question because I think answering it has the potential to solve what I think is one of the big problems we face.

It's a problem that I've devoted my life to trying to address using the tools of science.

So if you ask me, yeah, it's an intimidating question but that's okay.

You know, we've got some tools that we can bring to bear to address it and we can break it down.

We can make baby steps in terms of how we try to crack that puzzle.

Notice I didn't say situations A through Z.

I said situations A and B, right.

And I think if we could start small and just kind of do that and start understanding that dynamics, then this grows.

And you know, technology might help us there too.

Let's say, you could set aside all budgetary constraints, even ethical considerations and construct the ultimate human trial to answer your most strident question about human behavior.

Like, what would that study be?

Like when you drill down to it, what is the one question you're trying to answer that keeps you up at night or gets you excited when you wake up in the morning?

See when you say drill down, I think of trepanation.

And it makes me nervous.

We're gonna go back in time.

Yeah. And ethical considerations.

Yeah, no, I don't think we have to move outside of the ethical world here.

It is doing an incredibly fine grained analysis of that triple dynamic, if you will.

It is being able to continually assess people as they live their lives and take in information about the situations they're finding themselves.

And by situations, I mean, the psychological situations are finding themselves in.

So you can describe a situation in just descriptive terms. Like, Ethan is in a podcast in Northern LA right now.

Is this Northern LA?

Sort of. Not whatever.

But go ahead. Or it could be Ethan is in a diagnostic situation where he doesn't have a lot of control, let's just say that's what it is.

try to identify situations in terms of their, what we call their psychological features.

Are these situations where you do, or don't have control?

Are there situations that are filled with certainty or do they not have certainty?

Are these situations that are relevant to your goals in life or not relevant?

Are they at work? Are they at home?

So, there are different, there's a taxonomy that we can use to profile situations.

I want to know what all the situations you're in each day.

I also wanna know about who you are as an individual, what are some of your predispositions that you are bringing into this equation?

What's your knowledge of the shifting tools?

How vulnerable are you to experiencing chatter?

What is your familial history with regulating emotions?

So kind of profile people on all those background dynamics.

And then I wanna know, what are you doing in those situations?

How are you interpreting them?

And what tools are you using?

And I also wanna get some geolocation data so I can take stock of your surroundings.

And I wanna know about the different people you're coming in contact with and how you're communicating with them.

And also cultural variations.

Absolutely, and the geo data is gonna be able to help me with that as will your commentary, if you will about the cultures that you're moving through without the day.

with that level of data, that data richness that you consent to provide, with that would allow us to do if we do it on enough people, so here's the trick, like the rate limiting step for me as a scientist doing this kind of a search is that I need massive samples of data to begin to identify the signal in all of the noise so I can extract those patterns.

If I could do that, and you know, I think AI there could be helpful too as a tool.

I think that would go a really long way in moving the needle on our understanding of how people can manage their emotional lives.

But that study that I just described is a really expensive study.

It is really, it's like above my current pay grade.

But I will tell you, Rich, like, you know, we have all of these moonshots that we are reaching for and devoting huge amounts of money towards billions of dollars, what is a more important moonshot effort than -

[Mastering the Emotional Operating System: Tools for Agency and Resilience]-[Emotional Fitness: Dr. Ethan Kross On Dealing With Difficult Feelings, Controlling Your Inner Voice & The Science of Emotional Regulation]

📋 Summary

The Architecture of Human Emotion

Busting the "One-Size-Fits-All" Myth

Tactical Shifts: Internal and External

The Role of the Inner Monologue

Conclusion: Toward Emotional Agency

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript