How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I could elaborate on the dark thought that's running through
my mind and question why I'm having that thought in
ways that might really send me down the rabbit hole.
Or I can shift my perspective and realize, hey, this
is part of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates
worst case scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but you

(00:21):
know it does that to help us feel better.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't

(00:52):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
What if I told you that everything you've been taught
about emotions, how to control them, avoid them, or even
embrace them might be too simplistic. Today, I sit down
with doctor Ethan Cross, author of Shift Managing your Emotions
so they don't manage you, to explore a different way
of thinking about emotions, not as enemies to conquer or

(01:38):
burdens to bear, but as tools that, when understood, can
actually work for us instead of against us. I've spent
years trying to navigate my own emotional landscape, sometimes avoiding,
sometimes over analyzing, often caught between the two. And if
you've ever felt like you're either suppressing emotions or them,

(02:01):
this conversation will give you a more nuanced, more effective
way forward. We'll talk about the myth of one size
fits all emotional solutions, why controlling your emotions isn't as
simple as we think, and practical tools what Ethan calls
shifters that help you move from emotional chaos to clarity.

(02:21):
This is the one you feed. I'm Eric Zimmer, and
if you've ever wished for a better way to work
with your emotions, you don't want to miss this one.
Hi Ethan, welcome back.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's great to be back. It's been too long.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Yeah, I don't remember when it was, but I remember
your interview very well. And your book Chatter is one
that I go back to often because there were so
many really useful ideas in it, and your new book
lives up to it, right. It's great. It's called shift
managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And we're
going to get into the book in a moment, but

(02:54):
we'll start like we always do, with the parable. In
the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
of us that are always at battle. One is a
good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops

(03:16):
think about it for a second. They look up at
their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And
the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like
to start off by asking you what that parable means
to you in your life and in the work that
you do.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
You know, the parable is so relevant to the theme
of Shift that we're going to talk about today. It's
really remarkable when I hear the word which wolf you feed?
What it raises in my mind, is the importance of
being really deliberate about how you engage with those different
forces in your lives, and not just haphazardly, you know,

(03:54):
kind of shoving nutrients down either one's throat depending on
what's available, but being pretty careful about what you shop
for and how you interact with them. Because one theme
of Shift, and a general point that I believe very
strongly in, is that when it comes to our emotional lives,
the two wolves, they're both valuable companions throughout our lives,

(04:16):
and we don't want to get rid of one. We
want to make sure that we are in their presence
for the right amount of time and in the right circumstances.
And so I don't actually want one wolf to win.
I want each wolf to know when they're supposed to
be there with me, protecting me. And protection I think

(04:39):
is relevant here too, because I think of emotions, all
of them as tools we use to navigate the world.
All of them are useful when they're triggered in the
right proportions, not too intensely, not too gently, not too long.
They don't last too long, they don't last too short,
but in the right proportions, all of our emotions serve

(05:01):
a vital function, and I think the real challenge we
all face is to figure out how to keep our
emotions in that sweet spot zone where they're working for
us rather than against us. I think that is a big,
big problem we face on this planet for most of us,
and I think we've learned a lot about how to
solve that problem.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah, and I think most people who've thought about this
very much, and I don't mean scientists like you, I
mean just average people who've thought about this very much,
realize that we can go to two extremes, right. We
can go to one where we're trying to push away
any emotion we don't want. You know, this is a
bad emotion, don't have it, avoid it leads to all

(05:42):
kinds of problems. And the other extreme where we just
let whatever emotion there is drive our lives. Neither of
those are ways that are useful, and your book is
a really good way of walking through what are some
strategies that allow us to take the best of what
emotions have to offer without getting the worst of what

(06:04):
they can offer if we let them completely run the show.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
That's exactly right, great characterization. We should have contracted you
to write the book flap Copy. Yeah. I mean, like
we have this bias to think in terms of categories,
in terms of like white and black boxes, right, good
and bad. It's easy to make sense of the world
in that way, and we apply that way of thinking

(06:28):
reflexively to our emotional worlds too. There are good emotions,
are bad emotions. You should always strive to be positive
and not negative. Avoidance is always toxic. Be in the
moment all the time. No, no, no, no. It's a
whole lot more beautifully complex than that, and I don't
think that should scare us away. I think we should
embrace that beauty that is in the complexity. I was

(06:51):
just talking to someone else about our wonderfully diverse emotional lives.
I mean, Eric, do you doubt for a second that
your emotional experiences on this planet are unique from every
other human being in the sense of the unique combinations
of emotions you've experienced, when, in how you've experienced them,
and so forth and so on.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
No, I think it's obvious that there are ways in
which you have an emotion. I can understand it because
I've had it, and vice versa, but varying degrees, and
when we get into talking about that there's more to
an emotion than just a feeling that there are cognitive
pieces that go with it, there are behavioral pieces that
go with it. Once you start introducing that level of complexity,
you're right. We're all different. And that's one of the

(07:34):
things that I love about this book, and that you
say it early and you say it often, which is
there are no one size fits all solutions to our
emotional problems. And I think that is really so important
and something that took me a while to fully really understand.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
I think it is critically important, and I think it
is liberating. Is liberating for me to know that if
the tools that are working well for my buddies don't
work well for me, no problem. There are lots of
other things that I can do to manage my emotions.
I think it takes a lot of us some time
to understand that, because there's a seductive appeal to thinking

(08:13):
that there are one size fits all solutions, because that
would make things really easy. I mentioned this in the book,
but we're governed by this law of least effort whenever possible.
We're looking for the easy way out in life because
in terms of being an organism. It's easier for us
to conserve our resources, so easier is better. But I

(08:34):
think Einstein said this, we should fact check it, so
we'll give it to Einstein, but will allow for the
fact that someone else may have said it. It's this
wonderful quote. You should make things as simple as possible,
but no simpler. I mean, that's a deep, deep statement, right.
We should make it as easy as possible to manage emotions,

(08:54):
but let's not oversimplify to the point where we're actually
doing harm. I love using a metaphor of physical fitness
and exercise to really havem our home. Why this no
one size fits all solutions idea can be a lot
more intuitive than we think nowadays. Lots of people exercise.
It's kind of normative to stay in shape for one's health.

(09:17):
If I look in my social circle at the different
ways my close friends exercise, all of us have different routines.
We're all doing different kinds of things, and even within
the kinds of exercises that we are engaged in, let's
say it's weight training, there are lots of different exercise
that we use us. I don't go to the gym

(09:39):
eric and curl dumbbells to make my biceps bigger for
forty five minutes straight. That would not make any sense, right,
That would be silly. But that's using one exercise to
achieve the goal of being mentally fit. Why would we
think that one exercise, meditation, being in the moment, talking

(10:01):
to other people, whatever it is, choose your favorite, would
likewise help us be emotionally fit. Given how complex our
emotional lives are, it doesn't make sense to me. And
the data demonstrate that there are no one size fits
all solutions. So I say embrace it, and embracing that
should be liberating.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
I agree. I've been thinking about this idea recently of
the sort of testimonial. I'm from a twelve step program, right,
and you know the testimonial is part of it. Right.
I got sober, I did this, this is what worked
for me. Or I had emotional problems and I started meditating,
and Boyett did all these things for me. There's benefit

(10:42):
in that. But I've been thinking lately about the people
who hear that message and that thing didn't work for them, right,
And what does that do to them? And if you
don't have the mindset that you're saying, which is simply, oh,
that thing may not work for me. It may have
worked for Eric, but it may not work for me.
But something else will we go searching for it. If

(11:03):
we don't have that mindset, we can foundly discouraged and
begin to think there's more wrong with us, because well,
it worked for these guys, it's not working for me,
what's wrong with me? And I think our desire to
share what worked for us comes from a good place
because it worked for us and we're excited about it.
But we've got to be careful because it doesn't land

(11:23):
on everybody in the same way.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
You got it one hundred percent. I mean, you perfectly
characterized it. I mean, let me give you some data
that's hot off the presses, so to speak, even though
I guess it will be published in an actual physical
journal soon. So we did these studies during COVID. Took
us a while to finish analyzing them, but what we
wanted to look at was what are the tools that

(11:47):
are helping people manage their COVID anxiety from one day
to the next. What are the tools that are really
moving the needle on people's anxiety. And what we found was,
I think phenomenally interesting. Each day we would ask people
to rate their anxiety and also to indicate which of
a slew of different healthy and unhealthy tools they use,

(12:08):
and we covered a very broad space in some ways
scaffolds onto the tools I talk about and shift. What
we found was there were tools that help people, but
there was enormous variability. So number one, most people in
general didn't do one thing to help them feel better.
They did like between three and four different tools each day, right,

(12:29):
so they're not just curling dumbbells for their biceps, are
also doing chest press and running and sit ups. But
what we also found was there was a lot of
variability between the tools that worked for one person and
the tools that worked for another person, so much so
that it was like virtually you couldn't predict the unique
combinations of tools that would work for any one person.

(12:51):
We also saw variability across days, So the three or
four things that worked for you on day one were
different from the four there are five things that you
did on day two. And so this just makes this
point that, gee, if we're looking for single shot solutions
that are working for everyone across the board, we're very

(13:12):
likely to not be successful.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
I remember this conversation clearly in a twelve step meeting,
and people will get fundamental or dogmatic about anything, and
people get fundamental and dogmatic about twelve steps. And somebody
was saying, like, look, it's like a recipe. You follow
the twelve steps, you get this. You know, it's like
cooking brownies, you get the thing you find. I said,
people are not brownies, for God's sake, Like, I think

(13:37):
we're a little bit more complex than a brownie, and
even a brownie. I could give you five variables that
could play into how that brownie comes out, on the
hardness of your water and the temperature and the humidity
and as you're oven calibrated, and even on a brownie.
So I clearly feel strongly about this.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Let's pull that threat at step further because I feel
strongly about it too, And I think this is just
such a critical important issue because I think if we
get this part right, learning about the different tools you
know comes easy. You're motivated to do it. You're talking
about a brownie, and I think most people who are
brownie connoisseurs, of which I consider myself to be one,
and by that I mean I love brownie's and I've

(14:16):
sampled many There's huge variability and how tasty a brownie is,
and that variability is determined in part by the ingredients
that compose the brownie and how skillfully they are assembled,
as well as the taster and the unique taste buds
that they have and how they process those, you know,

(14:36):
brownies that they're trying. You want to tell me that
an emotion is on the same level as a brownie
in terms of complexity, right, Like, come on, right, think
about how unbelievably distinctive our emotional lives are. It's not
just that we are experiencing the anger and anxiety and sadness.

(14:59):
Those that we're using capture a whole different slew of
different emotions, of various gradations that differ from one another
and in slight ways that may be meaningful. We also
often experience emotions that are blending together. You know, yesterday
some good news came in and there was this opportunity

(15:20):
that I was really excited about came out of nowhere,
and I was initially elated, and then the elation was there,
and then I had this recognition of what I had
to do during this engagement, like oh no, and now
I'm like overcome with dread, right, and then I go
back and forth. So now we're having a mixed emotional response.

(15:42):
There's such complexity here, so yeah, it just doesn't make sense.
I think when you break it down that there'd be
this single solution. So let's embrace it. And once you do,
it naturally motivates you to try to understand, well, what
are the different tools and how do they work? And
let me start trying to figure out what are the

(16:02):
regimens that work best for me. You go to a gym.
Step one is you learn about how all of the
different apparatus work. Right, one of my daughters, my youngest daughter, like,
first time she comes with me to a gym and
a hotel on a holiday, it's like, what is this
you look at? You have no idea. Step one, learn
how everything works. Step two, now, let's see how you

(16:25):
can start incorporating these different exercises into your life in
a way that allows you to achieve the goals that
you have. That's what this is all about.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
Wonderful. I think that's a good segue for us to
move on to getting us closer to what those tools
or as you call them, shifters are but before we
do that, I do really think we need to talk
a little bit more about what emotions are. You reference
in the book that there's no shortage of theories on
this right, there's well over at least half a dozen

(16:57):
different theories of what emotions are. But you do go
on to say, here's some things that we can sort
of agree on. Walk me through when we're talking about emotion,
what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
So when I'm talking about emotions, first thing to recognize
is I think that emotions are tools. They are responses
to things that happen in the world around us or
in our minds. When we think about the world that
we think about things that are meaningful, they elicit these
different responses, and those responses that are elicited, these emotions

(17:31):
are typically activated to help us manage the situations we
are in. You can think about emotions like little software
programs that are getting loaded up to help you deal
with the situations you're in. And emotions an umbrella term
because when you experience an emotion, it activates what we

(17:53):
call a loosely coordinated set of responses. So your body
starts to react in a certain way. When you're anxious,
you might experience this fight or flight response. Your attention
narrows on the threat at hand, so you could zoom
in on it. You may have a particular kinds of
motor behavior. So if we stick with anxieties, example, crunching

(18:14):
is often an example of that, and it's also visible
to other people. Why might that be Well, we're a
social species, and it can be useful to learn how
other people are feeling. That gives them information so that
they can respond accordingly, maybe to approach or avoid you.
So if the emotion is calibrated properly, not too intense

(18:38):
or shallow, and not too long or short, it can
be very helpful, even the bad ones. And so I
like to point out how the bad emotions can be useful.
Anxiety helps you prepare for a threat. But you know,
when I think about the misses in my life professionally,
they're usually engagements where I wasn't at all anxious before

(18:58):
I had nothing motive me to prepare for them. Anger.
We experience anger when we perceive some violation of our
understanding of how things should be, and there's an opportunity
to fix the situation that elicits an anger response. So
if I see my daughters do something dangerous, I'm going
to get angry, and that's going to motivate me to

(19:19):
approach this situation and make sure it doesn't happen again. Sadness.
Sadness is one that some people often struggle to think
about how it can be adaptive. I think sadness is
kind of beautiful. We experience sadness when we encounter some
irrevocable loss in our life. There's some threat to our

(19:40):
way that we make sense of the world, and we
can't change this situation. So you lose someone you love,
you're fired. That has implications for how you think about
yourself and the world, and you can't fix it. There's
nothing you could do to get that person back. And
so what sadness does is it motivates us to turn
our attention inward, slow down physiological, turn our attention inward,

(20:01):
to start trying to do the difficult cognitive work of
now making new meaning given the circumstances at hand. And
we often withdraw to do that so that we could
spend time kind of reflecting on the situation. That can
be a little dangerous though. Right you're in a negative state,
you're going off alone, and so what evolution has also

(20:23):
gifted us with this sad response is typically a facial
display that it acts as a kind of lifeline or
alarm or signal. Is the word I'm looking for to
other people to say, hey, you know, check up on
me and don't kind of leave me hanging here by myself?
And what does that look like? Whenever I see my
daughters who strategically display that facial expression when I'm like,

(20:46):
you know, mad at them, it's amazing, Like it doesn't
matter if I know they're being strategic, I feel bad.
I want to help them. And that's what that's doing,
It's drawing other people. And so those are three ways
that those negative emotions can be helpful. And that's what
emotions are. One little bit of editorial there. One question
people often have is what's the difference between a feeling

(21:08):
and an emotion. A feeling is the subjective component of
an emotional experience. It's the part of the emotion that
we are aware of. When you're experiencing an emotion, lots
of things are happening in your mind and body that
you have no awareness of. The feeling is what rises
to conscious awareness. It's akin to when you are physically ill.

(21:29):
Let's say you've got the flu. There are lots of
things happening with your immune system and your organs, and
you have no awareness of that, but you are aware
of the lethargy and maybe the fever and chills you're experiencing.
The feeling is the equivalent of the fever in the shills.
That's how I think about emotion.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
And so really what you're describing is it sounds like
there's a few things. There's the what's going on in
my body, There's what's going on in my mind, what
I'm thinking about right that you bust is despite common thinking,
emotion and thought are not necessarily separate things. They're intertwined, right,

(22:07):
They're intertwined, yes, and then there's a behavioral expression. So
those three things, and it sounds like you almost just
added a fourth, which is the received sense of what
all this constellation is.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, like how it all comes together often is part
of our awareness.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Yep. Yeah, I didn't have as good as terms, but
I used to teach this idea of what I would
call sort of an emotional storm, and the point was
you're going to have physiological feelings, there's going to be
drive to do a certain thing, you're going to have
a physiological reaction. And then there's the thing that you
typically might call the feeling itself, what you call sad.
What the meta experience of all that together.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Is yep, yeah, very compatible.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
So let's now move on to control of emotions, because
that's often where people go. Right. I have negative emotions
that feel really strong, and either I really don't like
how they feel, or I'm following their push and I'm
behaving in ways that are not really good for me.
So the answer is I got to control my emotions.

(23:11):
Let's talk about that word control. Is it possible? Why
or why not? Would that be the goal?

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Critically important topic to address because you've got to think
it's possible to control your emotions, because if you don't
think you can, you're not going to take efforts to
do so. Right, And I don't think that's a controversial
piece of logic. If you don't think it's possible to
lose weight by going to the gym, why on earth

(23:41):
would you pay for a membership fee and do these
very hard things? Doesn't make sense. This is an issue
that is particularly relevant to the topic at hand because
a lot of people don't think you can control emotions.
I tell a story in the book about how several
years ago I came across an article that indicated that
fort of participants sampled when asked if they could control

(24:05):
their emotions, said they could not in some ways. When
I first read that, I was taken aback. Like I'm
the director of a lab called the Emotion and Self
Control Lab. Like, embedded in the whole enterprise of what
I do is the idea that you can control your emotions.
So what's going on? Because I don't dismiss these accounts

(24:26):
like trying to understand why people might think this way,
Here's how I make sense of it. We cannot control
a lot of the emotions that are automatically triggered in
our lives. Remind me where you're filming.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Right now, Eric Columbus, Ohio.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Columbus, Oh boy, I know, I know, I know.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
You're in ann Arbor.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, okay, well that's all right. We'll see there is
an automatically elicited emotion. But I forget that. Tally well,
you know you are so pleasant to counteract that. But
I can't predict when you're going to say, Columbus, Ohio
and what association that is going to automatically elicit. If
I'm in New York right in the subways and then

(25:08):
someone comes by and they don't smell too good, like,
that's going to listen a negative reaction automatically. Sometimes I
experience some dark thoughts, as all people do, some intrusive thoughts,
and they elicit negative reactions. I don't have control over
those experiences. But what I do have control over is

(25:28):
how I engage with those emotions once they are activated.
I can impact the trajectory of my emotional experience. I
can make a decision to lean into the smelly scent
that's causing me distress and maybe change my behavior. Or
you know, I could try to distract myself. I could
elaborate on the dark thought that's running through my mind

(25:50):
and question why I'm having that thought in ways that
might really send me down the rabbit hole. Or I
could shift my perspective and realize, hey, this is part
of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates worst case
scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but you know, it
does that to help us feel better, and so forth

(26:10):
and so on, and so there's room in this world
for both those believe that you can't control your emotions
and those that believe you can. And what I would
love is if we could both embrace the idea that
it's not either or. It's that there are parts of
your experience that you cannot control, but then a whole
lot that you can't. And the territory of shift is

(26:32):
in the latter. It is embracing that complexity of our
emotional lives and saying I want to commit to understanding
what are the tools to modulate my emotional experience once
it's activated.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
There's that old famous serenity prayer. We accept the things
we can't change, we change the things we can. You know,
Epictetis talked about at the doctrine of control, and he
made it sound like, well, you can change it or
you can't change it, And that's not the reality of
a lot of things in life. A lot of things
in life. You can have influence on parts of it.
You may not be able to control the final outcome.

(27:21):
But if it was just that simple, either you can
or can't control your emotions, or you can or can't
control the situation, it'd be easy to figure out what
to do. But as we've talked about things are not
that simple.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
That's exactly right, you know, and some emotional experiences are
more difficult to modulate than others. And there's a hefty
amount of self experimentation and trial and error that we
have to engage with to become emotional jiu jitsu experts,
if you will. I think what science has done a

(27:52):
fairly good job at doing is identifying different individual tools
that are out there for managing emotions, and I talk
about a bunch of them in the book. You can
think about these as specific exercises, specific tactics. What we
have not yet done is figure out how these tools
optimally combine to help different people struggling with different situations.

(28:16):
I wish we had this knowledge base. We do not.
We're looking at this in my lab and several others,
and you know, I hope in five or ten or
fifteen years we've made some progress there. It's a really
exciting scientific question. But until we get to that point,
there are things you can do, and what they involve

(28:36):
doing are familiarizing yourself with the tools and then start
experimenting with what works uniquely for.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
You, right, And I think that's so important is that
it can be useful to know what the tools are.
For example, we're going to get to some of these tools.
One of the tools is cognitive. You change how you
think about the situation, and sometimes that's magic. It's a
classic example was used in Buddhism. You're walking at night
and it's dark and you see something on the ground.

(29:04):
You think it's a snake. You're terrified. You shine your
flash and like, oh, it's a rope. Problem solved, motion gone.
So cognitive is sometimes it. But we also know, like
my experience is, if my emotional temperature is really high,
I'm past cognitive right, Like, I'm a little bit past
cognitive now, So I need strategies that help me lower

(29:24):
that temperature enough that maybe I can move back into cognitive.
And so I think that what you're saying makes a
lot of sense.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Well, let me just say, Eric, because you said that
so beautifully. Those are precisely the kinds of decision rules
that we want to help people discover for themselves. Like,
so you know, if my intensity is above a certain level,
like I'm not going cognitive, I'm going another route because
there's no point for me. It's not that I don't
go cognitive, I go to someone else when that happens,

(29:52):
and that someone else is often capable of helping me
go cognitive. So we're both similar in that there's a
tip point where a tried and true tool no longer
is useful for us temporarily, but then where we go
from there might differ. And those are the unique profiles
that we want to help people discover. That should be

(30:15):
a fun enterprise.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, I made an attempt years ago and promptly stopped attempting,
although I think it's what you're talking about. It was
sort of like a flow chart. It was like, you know,
try this and if that doesn't work, go here. But
if this does this, go then Suddenly I was like,
hang on a second, Like this flow chart is getting
out of control, you know, And like you said, sometimes

(30:36):
the flow chart goes a completely different direction. But let's
make sure we get to tools here. So we've sort
of set up what work, some of the things that
don't work, some ways of thinking about it. Let's get
to offering people some actual tools that allow them to shift.
So I think the first one maybe, and maybe we
can make it through each of them if we're quick enough,

(30:56):
which is not my strong suit, but we will try,
And the first one is.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
A so attention. Think of attention as our mental spotlight.
It's what we're focusing on and what we become aware of.
And things that are in your attention activate emotional responses,
and once you get things away from your attention, the
emotional responses tend to turn off. Now, what's interesting about

(31:19):
attention is it's been extensively studied and there are strong
beliefs that people have about the role of plays in
managing our emotional lives. In particular, there's a very strong
belief that we should not avoid the big problems in
our lives. We should instead approach them and face them
head on, because if you avoid them, they're just going
to linger and metastasize, and when you come back to them,

(31:41):
they're just going to be just as big, if not bigger,
and they're going to blow up. This was, interestingly, one
of the first lessons that I remember my parents teaching
me about coping. You know, our parents are some of
the first educating agents about emotion regulation in our lives,
and it's a message that was then reinforced when I
got to graduate school and I came across tons of
research and professors who talked bad nauseum about the perils

(32:05):
of chronic avoidance. I think we've overgeneralized, though, because avoidance
at times, research shows can actually be quite helpful. Being
strategic about when we approach and avoid turns out to
be a really useful tactic for dealing with big emotional experiences.

(32:26):
So let me give you a couple of examples. You know,
for a long time, I used to think that if
I ever got into an argument with my wife and
I was to blame, I'm really good at not being
defensive and taking blame, maybe almost to a fault, but
you know, I do it, and I remember I would
screw up in some way and it was really my fault,

(32:47):
and I would try to think, Okay, well, let's just
fix the problem and work through it. And my wife,
who is exceptionally regulated, but at times if I screw
up bad, gets upset. She wouldn't want to talk to
me about it for a while. She needed some time
to recover. But my temptation was always to just immediately
work through and fix the problem and find a solution.

(33:07):
Took me a while to realize that actually avoiding the
problem for a while, sometimes even a few days, and
then coming back to it at that point. It was
like a godsend of an intervention for our relationship because
when we came back to it later on, we were
able to deal with it more effectively. So that's an

(33:27):
example of how avoidance in the right dosa just can
actually be quite helpful. I'm not advocating for chronic avoidance.
The data showing that that is harmful across the board
is pretty definitive, but such a seductive allure to wanting
to just nip that problem in the bud right away.

(33:47):
I feel this really strongly in my own life. Counteracting
that by drawing away can be quite useful.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
I'm really good at drawing away. I mean, avoidance just
comes natural to me. If there's an emotional situation going
on between me and another person, I'm happy to avoid
it indefinitely. And this gets to kind of what we've
talked about, right knowing yourself. I know myself if I'm
in a situation and I'm not sure should I approach
or avoid. It's not always this way, but I know

(34:15):
that my tendency is to avoid, So if I'm in doubt,
maybe approach is the right thing. But when you were
telling that story about you and your wife. It made
me think of that old marriage advice, like never go
to bed angry. I'm like, that is such bad advice.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
I love the fact that you brought that up, because
we got that advice at our wedding from a lot
of people, you know, lots of elder statesmen and stateswomen
said this to us. And I have thought about that
on several occasions. I consider myself really, really happily married.
I'm in a wonderful relationship with a magical woman, and
we go to a bit angry with each other at times,

(34:49):
and I've thought about that, and sometimes I feel bad
about the fact that, well, there are other couples that
don't do that, and this is the toxicity of the
ones size fits all solution. Yeah right, it's exactly the
phenomenon you were talking about earlier. I never put it
together before, but you know, that just doesn't work for
my wife and me, and that's totally okay. So what

(35:12):
I do in this chapter on attention, though, is I
break down I give some guidelines for how to know
when to avoid and when to approach and when to
go back and forth. And there are some general principles
out there that people can follow, and I won't walk
you through all of them, but the basic point here
is that we want to be flexible with the role
that attention plays in our lives. It is a tool

(35:34):
that can be strategically deployed. And the mistake that I
think people often make is to be too rigid in
how they deploy their attention, either always approaching or always avoiding.
The sweet spot is often in between.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Give us an idea or two of some guidelines for
how to know when to do which.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Okay, so let's say something. You know, something happened, and
you take some space away, and you find that you
come back to the problem and it ceases to be
a problem. Right, nothing more to approach, just keep going
with your life. Oftentimes, like things happen that feel really
big in the heat of the moment, and once you
take some time away and let what we call your

(36:16):
psychological immune system do its work, let time to pass,
you come back and you realize this was nothing. It's
not actually worth your effort. That's one indicator that avoidance
is working just fine. Let's say you avoid something and
you find that you just can't avoid it because every
time you try to take your attention away. Thoughts keep
bubbling up about this experience and it's pretty disruptive. Well,

(36:39):
then recognize that avoidance is not the right solution in
that context, and maybe you need to approach and try
to work through the experience or use a different kind
of coping tactic. It goes without saying that unhealthy forms
of avoidance. I'm not an advocate of so certain kinds
of substance abuse and risky behavior. Although those are often

(37:00):
linked with temporary reprieve, they have a lot of other
negative outcomes linked with them that I think you just
don't want to get into. Approach can sometimes get you
into trouble too, though I gave you one example. If
it's an interpersonal problem and one person isn't ready to
talk about the issue and you want to, it can
create huge amounts of friction if you keep trying to

(37:21):
work through it. You may also be overcome with an
emotion to the point where approaching and trying to work
through it cognitively isn't going to serve you well and
instead lead you to just start spiraling into a chatter episode.
That a whole book on the perils of chatter. That's
an indication of approach not working either. So there are
some Here's when approach is working, here's when avoidance is working,

(37:43):
and here's when you should go back and forth between
the two.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
And I love that you point that out that there
is a place for tactical avoidance. You know, not everything
has to be faced in the moment. We don't always
have to be present. There's a time and a place to,
like just lick your wounds for a few minutes and
figure out kind of the next steps. All right, let's
move on to next. Perspective one of my favorite topics.

(38:08):
Talk to me about the role of perspective in shifting emotion. Well,
let's try to just make clear to folks who are
listening how attention and perspective fit together in our worlds.
If we think of the mind like a camera, attentions
where we point the lens, But then perspective is how
we adjust the lens, how we filter the incoming information.

(38:30):
And we have this remarkable capacity to filter and distort
it in lots of different directions whatever's incoming. And that's
a really important skill because although deploying our attention away
from things can sometimes be really helpful, sometimes we can't.
We're in a circumstance where we have to face the
things that are bugging us. What's interesting about perspective, and

(38:52):
the reason I called this chapter perspective shifting, not cognitive shifting,
is because of the following. We're all been told to
change the way that we think, to change the way
we feel. This is a mantra of the cognitive approach,
the cognitive movement in psychology. But one of my favorite

(39:12):
memories of talking about this issue with friends we were
driving home from dinner one night, my wife and I
and another couple in.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
The back seat. The husband was experiencing some difficulties at
work with other people, and he was getting kind of
negative and down about the situation, and his wife said, frustratingly, well,
you know, just change the way you think about it,
just reframe it and be more positive. And you know,
he looks at her at the pause and this kind

(39:39):
of snare goes, Yeah, easier effing said than done, which
I think captures something really powerful for most of us
that in that heat of the moment, we know we
have a capacity to reframe something, but it can be
really hard to do it. And this is where perspective

(39:59):
comes into play, because what we have found is that
in those situations, taking a few steps back, getting some
psychological distance from our problems often makes it a lot
easier for us to effectively reframe what we are going through.
So what do I mean by distance? I mean adopting

(40:20):
a more objective perspective, thinking about yourself like you or
someone else to some degree. We know that, you know,
it's a lot easier for us to give advice to
other people than it is to take that advice ourselves.
When you have distance from the problem, you can think
about it more flexibly, more objectively. We can build on
that insight to figure out how to help ourselves reflect

(40:41):
on our own problems more effectively, because there are things
we can do to get some mental space from our
problems to broaden that perspective. One tool I talk about
in this book I talked about in Chatter Too. It's
one of my personal favorite tools, distant self talk. Use
the word you to coach yourself through a problem. How
are you going to manage this? What should you do?

(41:02):
If you think about when we use the word you,
it's a word we use to think about and refer
to other people. When you use that part of speech
to refer to yourself. It's automatically shifting your perspective. It's like,
now you are talking to someone else, and we have
these scripts for talking to someone else. We don't put
them down typically, like we give them good advice, and

(41:23):
so that can help you reframe things more effectively. Mental
time travel is another big one for me. I use
this quite a bit, right. It's so easy to get
zoomed in on a problem where you just magnify it. Well,
I've experienced emotional episodes that I've not enjoyed throughout my life,

(41:43):
as I'm sure has everyone on this who's listening to
us speak right. Our life is filled with these negative
experiences that are triggered too intensely and for too long. Well,
guess what. Virtually all of them, in my case, have
dwindled with time in their intensity. Time is a way
of taking the edge off these experiences. Some hang around

(42:06):
longer than others, and there are some experiences that are
resistant to the effects of time, but a whole lot
of them do wane in intensity as time goes on.
So I jump into my mental time travel machine and
I'll ask myself how I'm going to feel about something
a year from now two years from now, and it
instantly makes accessible this idea that what I'm going through

(42:26):
is not going to last. That's really anxiolytic that really
takes the temperature down on my response. I'll also go
back in time. I'll put my experience in perspective by
imagining or thinking about how I've dealt with adversity in
the past, or how other people have dealt with adversity.
I'll think about my grandmother trying to escape Nazis and surviving,

(42:49):
and then I'll juxtapose her experience have seeing her family
slaughtered in World War Two, surviving, and then I'll think
about how that compares to the reject I may have
just you know, received from a journal or from a
periodical like That's a powerful way of putting things in
perspective to change my emotions. And those are just some

(43:11):
of the tools. There are many others, but one real
asset that I think I have. I'm often asked if
I ever struggle with emotions. Of yeah, of course, at times,
I'm a human like you know, pinch right, like everyone else.
I am good though, at raining those responses in when
they're triggered, because I know what to do I know

(43:34):
I can strategically travel in time this way or that way,
or talk to myself this way, or deploy my attention,
and that is a gift I'm really grateful for and
it's something that I hope readers take away from this book.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
see people making. And that's really that we don't think
about these new habits that we want to add in
the context of our entire life.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Right.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
in the life that we have. So when we just
keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
really thought about what we're not going to do in
order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
you to think about where is this going to fit
and what in my life might I need to remove.

(44:48):
If you want to step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
the free masterclass. I think you're right having those tools,
and the more you use them the more that you
automatically turn towards them. I seem to have an automatic
like the time travel one. This question that I heard

(45:09):
it years ago and I was like, oh my god,
that's brilliant. Which is is this going to bother me
in like five hours, five days, five months? And I
just now think of that question pretty whenever I start
to get bothered, and the answer is that most of
the time, the answer is no, it's not going to
bother me in five hours, probably not five weeks, five months.
But if it is going to bother me in five months,
that is a pretty good indicator to me that this

(45:31):
thing deserves my time and attention. So the answer isn't
always that you go out to cosmic view and you
see that everything is a speck of dust. Sometimes I go, oh,
this still does matter. Okay, good, Yes, then this is
worth thinking about.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
All right.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
I could talk about perspective the rest of the day,
but I'm not going to because we have some other
things to get to that I think are important. So
let's move on to shifting your environment.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
So environment I love this work. There are tools for
manager emotions like sprinkled in the world around us kind
of like easter eggs, you just got to nowhere to
find them. There are a couple of ways that I
zoom in on in the book on how you can
be more strategic with how you engage with your environment
to your betterment. One thing I point out is that

(46:14):
a lot of us, I think, take for granted that
we attach to certain people in our life, either in
a secure way or maybe a less positive way. But
other people can be sources of resilience. They're mere presence,
These are security figures. Being around them provides us with
a source of resilience. Well, it turns out we can

(46:34):
attach to places too, in both the positive add and
the negative directions I might add, but thinking about places
in our lives where we find restorative, where we have
these positive attachments, they can be a source of resilience
during times of stress. And so if I think about
the neighborhood I live in, there's the arboretum, there's the
tea house where I wrote my first book, there's my

(46:57):
office on campus. Every time I'm in those spaces, they
fill me with a sense of positivity that is comforting,
and that can be another kind of regulatory tool. You can,
of course, you take this even further. I've just pointed
out ways of navigating ones immediate environment that are accessible
to most. You can also travel. I think it's not

(47:17):
surprising that people travel to different destinations. Like travel is
what a lot of people do on vacation to restore right.
And so there are certain places you go to to
have that kind of emotional experience. More locally, within your home,
there are also ways of interacting with your environment. You

(47:39):
can either add features to your space or take features away.
Add features to your spaces to elicit desired responses, or
remove features to get rid of undesirable responses. So photographs,
I talk about some research we've done which shows that
glancing at pictures of loved ones actually, you know, if

(48:00):
you've had a bad experience, you micro glance at those
pictures and it speeds up the rate at which you
recover emotionally. What's happening there is you look at that
picture and it activates mental representations, thoughts and feelings you
have of those people, and the positivity that is linked
with it helps you feel better. So, you know, after
we did that science, I went on a shopping spree,

(48:23):
got lots of picture frames, printed out pictures and now
they're all around my offices. Plants. We know that green
spaces are a source of restoration. They gently draw your
attention away. You find them restorative, They capture attention. I
typically have plants in my offices and windows that face
green spaces. If I can't get windows, I put up
pictures of trees. I also have tried to remove triggers

(48:47):
from my environment that illicit undesirable responses. So for me,
I tell a story in the book. Some people think
I'm joking. It's a true story of However, when we
have parties, like football watching parties, we get pizza. It's
my favorite food in the world. If I see a
slice of pizza, I turn into like a.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
Rabbit animal cookie monster.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
Oh my god, hungry mungery. You're familiar with the shel
Silverstein poem.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
I don't know hungry mungery, but I do know a
cookie monster.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, well that's me. If I see pizza, doesn't matter
what form it's in, what style. Like, I'm there and
it becomes paradoxically even more attractive. As the minutes of
the day pass, so past eight o'clock, when I shouldn't
be eating anymore, it's like, oh, even better, the colder,

(49:36):
the better, not good for me. So I get rid
of it. I try to give it away. I throw
it out. I'll admit right, I throw it out because
I don't want to have that. Cue my cell phone
right here is sitting face down, not face up, because
I don't want to be tempted if a notification comes
in to look in my email while we're talking. These

(49:59):
are microwaves, not microwaves. Little ways of interacting with our
spaces that can push us. And there are lots of
other ones like that.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah, I said a couple times lately, Like if you
were to get a group of behavior scientists all in
one room and ask them to agree on one thing,
I think they would all agree on the fact of, like,
you can't do too much in setting up your environment
in ways that are conducive to you doing or not
doing the thing you want. Like to miss something that

(50:32):
basic is very problematic.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
And I think the fact that it is so basic
though we often overlook it. I mean, oh yeah, I
have overlooked these things, Like why does cleaning and organizing
your space make you feel better when you're upset? Like
it does? The research shows it helps you give you
a sense of control. There are such basic things that
we can do. We take them for granted. You know,

(50:54):
one other shifter we haven't talked about is sensation. Sensory
shifters right like music, scent, sound like, these are powerful
modulators of our emotional lives that we've all had so
many experiences with our emotions being shifted by those sensory experiences.
But if you look at what people do when they're

(51:17):
really struggling, they often don't avail themselves of that very
easy to implement tool. Not to say it's the only
tool we should use, but it's a tool, and it's there.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Yeah, Yeah, I somehow skipped right by that, because that's
a really big one for me. Music And I figured
this out years ago for myself. I'm glad I did,
because I use it all the time. I sometimes get
I don't know what to call it anymore. Is it
just antedonia, is it a low mood? I don't know,
but I get it. And one of its characteristics is that,

(51:47):
unfortunately everything that I'm normally interested in, it doesn't register
as interest. So my brain will go, oh, music, and
I'll go to my music and I'll start looking through
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. So what I've
done is I've just built a playlist in advance that
I know has music that helps me, so I don't
have to go figure it out. I just go to
the positive playlist hit shuffle, and I know that what's

(52:09):
going to come is going to be helpful because I'm
designing for the fact that, like you said, a lot
of times, we just don't think of these things, or
even if I do think of it, I don't think
it's going to work.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
There you go. And I've done the same with playlists
to push my mood in whatever direction I want pump
up or calm down. And the beauty of having the
playlist is I don't have to stumble on, oh I'm
feeling good and the music a song just happens come
on and pushes me out. I can be really strategic

(52:40):
and deliberate about how to activate it to get me
to the desired state.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
Okay, now we have covered sensory, we've covered emotional, we've
covered attention, perspective, environment, you did hit a little bit
on relationships and connections. So let's go to what I
think is the last one, which is culture.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Yeah, so culture, you know, I think is an often
overlooked shifter of our emotion, in part because it's invisible.
It's been compared to the air we breathe. But guess
what air we breathe is pretty important? And you want
your culture ideally to be one that is helping you
when it comes to your emotional life. What does it

(53:22):
mean when we talk about culture? While cultures are beliefs
and values. So do you believe, for example, that you
can manage your emotions? Are you part of a family
or a friend group or an organization that emphasizes, yeah,
you can manage your emotions. Do we believe it's important
to manage our emotions? Right? Beliefs and values? What are

(53:43):
the tools that we think are important? Culture's given that
to us. Culture is also giving us norms, norms being
the rules, the unspoken and spoken rules for how to
conduct ourselves. Organizations have norms about emotions and emotion regulations.
In my house, we have a norm where you don't
actually call each other stupid like I don't know why

(54:07):
and it just really rubs me the wrong way, and
no judgment to other families where you know, ah, don't
be stupid like I don't you know, judge it just
it doesn't work for me in my family, and you know,
if my daughter one daughter calls the other one that
there's an intervention where they apologize and so forth and

(54:27):
so on. So that's just a belief and a value
that's shaping the way we relate to each other emotionally.
Culture also gives us tools, So I model tools for
my kids. I explicitly teach them about some of these tools.
I do that and lots of difference. Sometimes I talk
about research that we're doing at the dinner table. That's
usually not a very popular conversation, but I try to

(54:49):
slip it in there.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
But you know, how old are your daughters.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
They're now fifteen and ten.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
Were they more receptive to it when they were, like,
you know, seven and two? Or is it getting worse?

Speaker 1 (54:58):
It's getting worse. I'm becoming a perpetually embarrassing organism on
this planet. Here's what I tell people, and here's what
I do. Indeed, practice, you say things to your kids
and they roll your eyes and they tell you that
you know that you're the most annoying human being on
the planet. Leave me one great Their normal kids keep

(55:19):
on saying the stuff to them because it does penetrate
their awareness. And I've seen my daughters, you know, but
grudgingly they admit it, but they use the tools that
we give them and they benefit from it. My oldest
daughter is a diver, and at one point she was
a little concerned about like elevating up to like this
what I think of as a death defying height, you know,

(55:41):
jumping off and doing stuff. And I said, hey, why
don't we talk about it, you know, like I do
research on this. Leave me alone. And then a couple
of weeks later, she succeeded. She fought through the fear
and she rose to the occasion. I said, oh, what
did you do? And she just spouted off like a
bunch of the different tools that we've talked about over
the time. So that was a major parenting victory that

(56:03):
I will take with.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Me absolutely, that one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Yeah, But that's culture, right. Culture beliefs in values, norms,
and practices tools. Here's the interesting thing about culture. Sometimes
we find ourselves and cultures that are just humming for us.
They're resonating with us. They have the same values that
we as individuals have. When it comes to how we
think about our emotions and emotionalized are giving us tools
it's working well. Sometimes we find ourselves in toxic cultures

(56:31):
that are not leading us to feel the way we want.
They don't value emotions and emotion regulation. And in some
cases you might want to leave that toxic culture if
it's really affecting you very powerfully. But the other thing
you can often do is you can work to change
the culture. And once you understand how to break culture
down believes, values, norms, practices, it becomes I think, more

(56:55):
manageable to think about how to do that. And so
culture is a powerful tool for or your day to
day emotional life, but it's also a really powerful tool
for how to affect other people that you care about.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I thought maybe
we would end I really wanted to talk about from
knowing to doing, but we're running out of time. So
I wondered if you could just walk us through bringing
some of these tools together. You do it late in
the book where you talk about your kid's school getting
canceled because of a threat, and how you sort of

(57:28):
brought a couple of these different tools together to sort
of manage your emotions or work with your emotions, and
maybe as a way of sort of putting everything we've
talked about disparately into one sort of story with a
threatening ye yeah, and how you kind of work through that.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
So I tell the story at the end of the
book about how there was a threat called into one
of my kids' schools and I was just, you know,
a terribly frightening experience. And I used a lot of
the tools that we're talking about to manage my emotions
in that situation. So I resisted the temptation to co

(58:04):
ruminate endlessly about what was happening with some of the
other parents. I diverted my attention by thrusting myself in
my work. I sought out some comfort by talking to
a friend who is also an expert in the space
who could help broad my perspective about the probability of
a bad thing happening. I also went out for a

(58:27):
walk in nature to just kind of draw my attention
away from things as well, and engaging in that blend
of using those different tools didn't wipe away the concern
about what might happen, and fortunately nothing did, but it
did make it a lot more manageable to deal with.
And I think that is the opportunity that we all face, right,

(58:52):
is to find practices that don't get rid of the
negative experiences altogether, because it's not really possible, but find
tools that just make these negative experiences a lot more
palatable in our lives so we can swiftly move on
from them and to have other kinds of emotional experiences.
And so, you know, I live and breathe this stuff

(59:13):
every day, and that's why it's easy for me to
talk about it not just as a scientist, but also
as a living, breathing, emodeing human being.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
Yeah. I really loved the way that you sort of
set that up in the book, because you said, this
doesn't turn school shooting threats into birthday parties, right, And
I think there's something important there, because we often think
that what we need is to feel way, way better.
And a lot of what you were talking about I
often refer to, and I've jokingly referred to some of

(59:44):
what I teach sometimes is like, well, you know, what
I'm teaching you is how to not make it worse.
And sometimes that's a real accomplishment, right, because the ways
that we can spin out emotionally, and the ways we
can deepen our emotional holes, and the way we can
and lash out to other people or act in ways
that are helpful. If we can just be with the

(01:00:05):
thing that is in some sort of reasonable way by
using these tools, that's a victory.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
Absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly the messaging behind
this book, right Like, life's going to continue to throw
curveballs at us. And you know, if we use the
baseball metaphor, we're not expecting anyone to bat a thousand,
right like in baseball, you know two eighty and above

(01:00:31):
is an amazing almost Hall of Famelike career. Right So
we're talking about getting better at harnessing these emotions and
that is something that we all have the ability to do.
We just need to know how to do it. And
that's why it's exciting to talk about this stuff. So
I really appreciate the ability to do it with you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
Thank you, Ethan. The book is wonderful. We'll have links
in the show notes to where you can get it.
It's called shift Managing your Emotions, so the I don't
manage you, and it's a really good one. Thank you, Ethan.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
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(01:01:41):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross