Dr. Ethan Cross
Appearances
Embedded
Alternate Realities: Facing the Facts
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
Embedded
Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
Fresh Air
Comic Bill Burr [Extended Version]
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
What distant self-talk involves is coaching yourself through a problem, typically silently, using your name or you to give yourself instruction. You're essentially talking to yourself in your head like you would give advice to someone else. One of the things we know about people is that it is often much easier for us to give advice to others than it is to take our own advice.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
There's the famous saying, do as I say, not as I do. And what we see happening across studies is that when you ask people to try to navigate intense negative emotional experiences, it's a lot easier for them to do so effectively when they're using this kind of self-talk. We find that it not only helps people calm down subjectively, it also helps them reason more wisely about their problems.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
They're able to look at the bigger picture. They're able to recognize the limits of their own knowledge, predict multiple ways that the future might develop.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
She was doing an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he asked her to tell the audience what was going through her head when she discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her for the advocacy work she was doing for the rights of young girls to receive an education. And she then goes on to narrate her inner monologue.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And she starts off by saying, you know, I used to think to myself, what would I do if the Taliban would come and kill me?
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So it seems there's some internal radar that guides some of us to use this tool automatically when we're really struggling with our experiences. And what we've learned from the research is that you don't have to wait to just spontaneously slide into that way of talking to yourself, likely without any conscious awareness of
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How to Harness Your Feelings
the fact that you're doing that, you can actually be a lot more strategic in using this type of self-talk in your own life to help you deal with your emotions.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So it was early in the Wimbledon tournament and he's playing a much, much lower ranked opponent and he's getting creamed in the match. He's really doing poorly. And he takes a break in the middle and he goes to the bathroom. And then when he comes out of the bathroom, he's like a different player. He proceeds to dominate the rest of the match and ultimately win. After the match is over,
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How to Harness Your Feelings
A journalist asks him, what happened in the bathroom? What happened that turned the match around? And he says he went to the bathroom and he gave himself a pep talk. Listen to what he says as a direct quote, what he said to himself in the locker room. You can do it. Believe in yourself. Now is the time. Forget everything that has happened. New match starts now. Let's go, champ.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
That's the kind of advice you would give to another person. When my friends come to me and they are experiencing self-doubt and they confess it to me, looking for support, those are precisely the things that I say to them. And I think the big question for us all to ponder is why don't we say those kinds of things to ourselves when we're struggling?
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So there's this interesting phenomenon where when you talk about emotional experiences in a second language, they don't seem to have the same impact. For me personally, there are two languages that I've learned later on in life. And with each one, when I've tried cursing in those languages, inevitably you learn about the expletives. And at least for me, I try them out.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Saying those bad things doesn't seem quite as inappropriate as if I were to say the same expletive in English. This is a documented phenomenon. So our emotions are encoded in our native language. And there's deep resonance between emotions and our native language as a result.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
When you ask people to try to reason about really thorny emotional dilemmas in a second language, it allows them to do so more objectively.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
What expressive writing involves is sitting down and writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings about an experience you're struggling with for 15 to 20 minutes a day for anywhere between one to three consecutive days. And the research on this tool is pretty compelling. It shows that when you ask people to engage in this form of
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How to Harness Your Feelings
emotion regulation, when you ask people to use this tool, it helps them feel better about their experiences. Over time, you find that they're less distressed about the experience. They're healthier. They visit the doctors less over the next few months. The thinking here is when you sit down to write about an experience, you have to write about someone who that experience is happening to.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So essentially, you're thrust into this narrator role, and you become a character in the story that you're writing about. And in a set of studies, we find that that has a distancing function, which predicts some of the benefits linked with this tool.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So this was my youngest daughter, Dani, and I was one of the coaches on her soccer team. And the time we got to spend together on that soccer field was just And so I would wake up ready to go. And then one morning, Dani comes down the stairs and she's just not, she's not into it. She's moping along. And I try all my dad tricks to break her out of her funk. None are effective. We pile into the car.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
I glance in the back seat and I could see her head drooping down. And I will admit it was beginning to bring me down. And then a few minutes into the ride to the soccer field, a song starts playing over the speakers in the car. One of my favorites, Journeys Don't Stop Believin'. And without really thinking about it, I just start bopping my head and singing the song.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
I turn the volume up a bit and I'm feeling good again. And then I look in the rear view window and I see that Dani's bopping her head too. and mouthing the words along. And before you know it, I'm really leaning into this song in true dad fashion, singing it very loud, banging on the wheel as I'm doing it.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And usually she would cringe at the sight of me doing it, but for whatever reason, she was just playing along this time. And we both were just energized by the music. And Fast forward a couple of minutes, we pull up to the soccer field. Dani bolts out of the car. She runs around the field. She has a great game.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And what really stood out to me about that experience after it happened was just how powerful music was for rerouting both of our emotional experiences on that morning. And now I have, of course, listened to music my entire life, and I've enjoyed it. But up until that moment, I never really thought about using music strategically as a tool to modulate how I feel.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So after this experience, my colleagues and I dug into the literature on music and emotion and asked people, why do you listen to music? And almost 100% of the participants in the sample, I think the number was 96% of them, reported that they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. In other words, it's having a regulatory effect.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
But then when we do studies and we ask people across a series of studies... Think back to the last time you were anxious or angry or sad. What did you do to manage your feelings? Only between 10 and 30% of the participants in those studies report availing themselves of this tool. Just like I, before this experience, didn't avail myself of this tool.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So what we're talking about here, the light bulb that went off for me in that moment is that our senses are powerful, powerful shifters of our emotions.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
have the potential to activate our emotions relatively effortlessly part of the way sensation operates is by triggering emotional responses sensation being the way we make sense of the world around us well it makes sense that if you have the equivalent of these satellite dishes mounted all over your body that are tuned to different kinds of information i.e your senses
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How to Harness Your Feelings
If you come across stimuli or experiences that are positive or negative, you want those senses to trigger those emotional responses, to cue you to approach or avoid those kinds of stimuli or experiences. So sensation and emotion are intimately linked. I mean, we could go down the list. We just talked about music. Music can push our emotions around in all sorts of directions.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
amplify our emotions and pump us up as Journey did, it can calm us down. Sometimes I now will strategically use music if I find myself too animated before a presentation or important interview, I'll listen to calming music. We can also listen to music to push us in the negative direction as we sometimes do when we're not feeling great.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
We lean into those emotions even further by listening to ballads, love ballads, if you will. Vision, art, attractiveness, smell. Let's talk about smell for a second. Smell is a really interesting one. scent elicits emotions. So I remember when my daughters were younger, on vacation, we'd go to a hotel and inevitably the hotel would smell really wonderful in the lobby.
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And I remember seeing on their face, there's just this expression of blissfulness. And they'd go, daddy, it smells so good in here. I love this place. And so what was happening there is those hotels were piping sense through their ventilation systems to arouse a kind of positive emotional response among the guests and visitors of the hotel. So these are shifters.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
These are levers that you can pull, and they're really, really reliable movers of emotion. I will do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic in my classes where I will have people rate how they're feeling throughout the class. I'll get a baseline reading of how they're feeling after I've taught for 20 or 30 minutes. And then I'll give the first sensory experience.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Unbeknownst to them, I'll have pizza delivered into the class and I'll ask them to just take a bite of the pizza and taste it. And then I'll have them rate their emotions again. And you see this ginormous improvement in how they're feeling, right? They're almost at ceiling on the scale. Then I'll put on a scene from a Pixar movie where a character falls in love and then
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and then gets old and their wife dies. And then I have them rate their emotions again. And you see the emotions go down. Then I give them one final experience. I do a little bit more lecturing. Then I play the fight song for the University of Michigan, which is our kind of rallying cry.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And this is my favorite moment in the class because I play this song and then I look around and I see students who have never uttered a word in class. Their eyes are closed. They start bopping their head just like Danny did in the car that day. And then they start like getting even more aggressive with the head bopping.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Some are singing along and then they rate their emotions again, their positive emotions, and they're back up to where the pizza was. So I'm essentially triggering different levels of positive and negative emotion like a symphony orchestra conductor.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Based on my understanding of how the senses impact the way people feel, the opportunity here for everyone is to think about how can you trigger your senses in a healthy way to bring about the emotional outcomes that you desire.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So the scene is one that you've likely encountered countless times. You're on a plane and you see a mob sitting with their little child. And they're at 30,000 feet, and the kid takes a bite of a granola bar and then begins to cough. And immediately, the mom, named Louisa, reaches over to look at the granola bar wrapper, and there it is. She missed it. She sees on the ingredient list, peanuts.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And the kid has a pretty severe peanut allergy. The first thing she does is she whips out some Benadryl from her bag and gives her kid a dose of Benadryl, but it doesn't have the intended effect. And so the daughter starts to writhe in pain, her stomach hurts, she begins to vomit. So she has to take the more extreme measure of reaching in her bag for the EpiPen
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How to Harness Your Feelings
pulls down her daughter's pajamas and jams the pen into her thigh. Fortunately, the intervention does this time have the intended effect and the allergic reaction subsides. The emotional reaction that Louisa struggled with after this flight persisted for months. She couldn't stop thinking about what if. On the one hand, going back in time, what if she hadn't had the EpiPen?
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How to Harness Your Feelings
What if the EpiPen didn't work? Then she'd go into the future and she would do the same thing. What if another kid at school gives her daughter a taste of his or her snack and it has peanuts? What if her daughter goes to a birthday party and another parent unwittingly serves her a piece of cake that was prepared in a kitchen with peanuts?
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And these thoughts, these intrusive thoughts, begin to metastasize in her mind and are becoming unbelievably disruptive.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
She did. So several months later, she had begun to spin into one of these thought spirals. And her daughter actually came in, distracted her, and she realized that she began to feel better. She then had the insight that, wait a second, if I divert my attention away and I don't do what I want to do, what I desperately want to do, which is engage in these what-if scenarios.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
If I resist the temptation to do that and I focus on something else entirely, then I actually feel a lot better.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
There's a giant myth that Avoidance is always harmful, and I think we need to correct that myth because the ability to strategically deploy your attention away from things at times can actually be really useful. There's no question that chronically avoiding things is not good. But in Louise's case, taking time away from the experience often just let that experience fizzle altogether.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
I've experienced this in my life many times before. And I should say, Shankar, that sometimes I can get triggered by an email, a conversation, a thought. And then if I force myself to take some time away from it, the experience ceases to bother me at all. Or sometimes when I come back to the problem
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How to Harness Your Feelings
after taking some time away, I find that the problem has tempered quite a bit, and it's a lot easier for me to deal with the problem objectively and effectively.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So my grandmother was a hero of mine. I spent almost every afternoon at her house growing up after school while my parents were working. She took care of me and her backstory was a really interesting one. So she was born and was raised in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and witnessed her family be slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II. And she then
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Basically fled the Nazis, lived in the forest for years as she tried to survive with my grandfather. And growing up, I would always want to hear about the stories that she experienced, but she would never talk to me about them. Except one time a year. There would be this remembrance day that she and other members of her community from Eastern Europe, the survivors, would organize this day.
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And I would just listen to my grandmother and grandfather and others just wail. They would talk in detail about what they went through. They would say things and tell stories that I would never hear on any other day except that one day. And then the day was over and she would go back to being her more stoic self when it came to these experiences.
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And so what I later realized is what my grandmother was doing is she was being strategic in terms of allowing herself to think about what she went through and her family members who perished. selectively though, and on her terms. And that was a solution that worked well for her. And it's a solution that flies in the face of, I think, lots of popular calls to always approach our emotions.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
We now know from research that some people benefit from not reflexively approaching their emotions. And sometimes this capacity to be strategic in how you deploy your attention can actually be really, really effective.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
That's right. And by all accounts, she... led a great life. And so this was a tool that worked well for her. It reminds me of some of the data surrounding how people coped following the 9-11 attacks. So I was living in New York. I had just moved to graduate school actually a week or two before the plane struck the Twin Towers.
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The situation was driving on the roads of Brooklyn, New York. He would often transform into a I have a mental image of Mad Max, if you're familiar with those movies. And he wasn't just a reckless driver right out of the driveway. But if he perceived any –
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And I remember in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, there was a lot of discourse about the need to care for the people in New York City, and in particular, the people living and working around ground zero. And there was this assumption that we have to get them to talk about their feelings. We've got to force them to really just get it all out. Don't keep it bottled up inside.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Fast forward several years, there have been studies which have tracked people's tendencies to talk about what they experienced during the 9-11 attacks over time. And what the data show is that in some cases, talking about what people went through actually didn't have any effect on their emotional experience. And in some cases, it actually made them feel worse.
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And so if there's one big take home that I have learned over the past 25 years of doing research in this space, It is that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. Some people benefit enormously from talking to other people about their experiences and processing and working through them. I happen to be someone like that.
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I do tend to like to work through the experiences when it occurred. Other people don't avail themselves of that tool and they do different things instead. We have access to a vast armamentarium of tools that we can wield. And as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, different strokes for different folks.
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So this is a story about Dennis Rodman when he's playing with the Bulls and they're vying for another championship. And there's a break between games. And rather than just taking it easy, maybe joining the team for a light practice, he takes off, goes to Detroit, participates in a wrestling match. And then comes back, rejoins his team, and has...
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one of the best games of his career, or that season one of his best games, and they ultimately win the championship yet again. And so my interpretation of Rodman's behavior there is he's doing something not that different from what my grandmother did in the sense that he's in this very high-pressure situation
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right, like playing for a championship at the highest levels with the elite, you know, the most elite athletes in the world. And he's totally diverting his attention by going into a totally different context for a short period to essentially restore and then comes back fresh. This is a form of avoiding, it's an avoidance behavior. Now, I wanna be really clear.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
There are some kinds of avoidance behaviors that are harmful across the board. Drug usage, risky sexual behavior. These have been definitively shown to not be helpful for people's lives. That's not what we're talking about. When I talk about strategic avoidance, I mean temporarily diverting your attention, shift your attentional spotlight.
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Let the other problem simmer down so that when you return to it, if you return to it at all, if you need to return to it, you can do so from a more objective and restored point of view.
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quote unquote, injustice on the road, that is another car that was driving recklessly or cut someone else off, he would take it upon himself to discipline that driver. And what I mean by that is He would get in front of them and then slow our car down so that the other driver would have to slow down.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Research in the space of emotion regulation began with researchers identifying specific tools and then carefully profiling how they work mechanistically across levels of analysis and in different groups. And so we've done that with lots of individual tools and we have identified dozens of
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How to Harness Your Feelings
What research has yet to do though, is understand how different tools combine to help people dealing with different situations that they encounter in their lives. What we know is that when you look at how people manage their emotions in their daily lives, they don't restrict themselves to just one tool.
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On average, we find that people use between three and four strategies each day to manage that experience. And so we know that people are using multiple tools and we also know that different combinations of tools are working for different people, right? It's not just one combination. We don't yet know why certain tools hang together for certain people.
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The metaphor I like to use here to make sense of this, which really resonates strongly with me, is to look to physical fitness and exercise, right? When you go to the gym, number one, you don't do one exercise. If you're weight trading, for example, I haven't met anyone who only curls biceps as the only thing they do in the gym, right?
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You do a few different things and you actually, you switch up the exercises every single day to meet different kinds of physical demands that you have, physical goals. We also know that different people avail themselves of different physical fitness regiments. So I may lift weights and run and do some high intensity interval training. My wife does Pilates and yoga.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Pilates and yoga works really well for my wife, and what I do works really well for me. So we use multiple tools, and different people use different kinds of tools. I think that actually scaffolds really nicely onto what we're learning about how to be emotionally fit.
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I do. I'm incredibly... deliberate about the tools I use. And I have, I have, it's not haphazard for me. So I have different layers of intervention. So my initial intervention is I use distance self-talk and mental time travel. Those are my first two go-tos. Sometimes I'll throw in creating order around me.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So we know when emotions are feeling really big and out of control, we don't feel like we have order in our minds. Creating order around us compensates for that experience. So I'll do those two or three things. Sometimes though, it's not enough. And I have to ratchet it up and go to another layer of intervention. What I'll do in that point is I'll call some of my emotional advisors up.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
What I mean by emotional advisors, these are not clinically trained individuals. I'm not paying them for support. These are people in my network who do two things for me. Number one, they're really adept at connecting with me emotionally. They empathize, they validate what I'm going through. There's a resonance that I don't have to worry about being created.
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If I close my eyes right now, I can see us driving on the Belt Parkway, which is this freeway that wrapped around the perimeter of Brooklyn. And I could see him weaving in and out of cars to find the perpetrator.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
And then after that kind of emotional connection is achieved and they learn about what I'm going through, they help me work through the experience. So that'll be the second line of intervention. I'll sometimes often, this is weather permitting in the state in which I live in Michigan, I'll go for a walk in our arboretum or down certain tree-lined streets in our neighborhood.
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I've been really, really impressed by the data demonstrating how restorative and regulating going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be. And so I'll layer that in as well. And 90% of the time, that's what I need to do to break out of my funk.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
Well, Lori had just taken over duties as the head of one of Yale's colleges where she effectively acted as a type of den mother to the undergrads. She was there to not just make sure the dorm was kept in order, but to also be a type of mentor-like figure for the students. And while acting in that capacity, she noticed about
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the struggles, the everyday kinds of struggles they were often encountering. And so she very creatively decided to teach a course on the topic of how to have a good life. And what she didn't expect was that once enrollment for the course was open, that a record number of students would sign up for it. I believe the number was over 900. She quickly catapulted from a professor with
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an excellent reputation on campus to a veritable superstar. And it wasn't just being a superstar on campus. Pretty soon, the New York Times and other periodicals caught wind of what she was doing and they started covering her. And so the next thing you know, she's giving lectures and then flying out to do interviews and give talks elsewhere.
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At one point, she's so busy that an invitation comes in to literally meet with the Pope that she had to turn down just to put in perspective how much her life had changed. And from the outside looking in, it would seem like everything is going so unbelievably well for Lori.
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That was certainly the impression that I had from afar as a friend of hers who was just proud of her and relishing her successes. What I didn't realize at the time and what you didn't realize either when you interviewed her was that Lori was really struggling because with this new fame came all of these demands. And Lori is such a helper. She wants to help everyone.
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And these requests were coming in from all over the place. And she just found herself totally overworked and totally burnt out. She had also began to record a podcast, The Happiness Lab, which very quickly ascended the ranks of popularity in the podcast world. And so she had a gazillion things going on.
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And she was teaching students about the tools, about many tools that they can use to be happier and lead more successful lives. And it goes back to this finding about how we're much better at giving advice to others than sometimes implementing that advice on our own. And I don't think that discounts the advice we give in any way.
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He did the tailing too. So, you know, the whole nine yards. But yes, that's exactly right. You know, that was one of the first observations I had of this idea that you could be really good at regulating your emotions in some contexts, but really bad in others.
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The advice we give, the counsel we offer to others is sometimes enormously helpful. But there are some impediments that we sometimes experience when we try to apply that advice to ourselves.
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She slams her keyboard in frustration and And breaks it. And then sheepishly has to go into tech to get it fixed. It's a very human experience. Sometimes we reach our breaking points. And this is true of the experts as well. And she had reached her breaking point.
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So this was a real turning point for Lori where she realized she had to do something different. A student emails her with this benign question. He or she is looking for dental resources. They need a dentist. She is by very nature someone who likes to help others. She took this position as being the head of a college because she liked to help others. And this request comes in for some help.
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And rather than instantly trying to share resources with the student and get them the information that they need, Instead, she immediately experiences irritation and anger and frustration. One more thing I have to deal with. I don't have time to deal with this. Those thoughts and the accompanying feelings were elicited automatically.
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And actually, she was embarrassed that she had even entertained those thoughts. But it was that experience that really signaled to Lori that she had to do something.
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She left. So she put in for an unpaid leave, and she essentially took a sabbatical. She moved to another college town. And she settled there and the moment she changed her space, she found that she was overcome with a sense of emotional relief.
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I find this really interesting because I think it's easy to underestimate the role that our environment, our physical environment plays in our emotional life. And in fact, our environment contains resources that we can use to manage our emotions if we understand where to find them. So we often talk about attachment.
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I'm sure you've had many scholars on this show talking about the attachments we form to other people and the role they play in our emotional lives. people that we are securely attached with, positively attached to, they can provide a real source of resilience during stressful times. Research shows that we also develop attachments to places.
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So there are places that we are positively connected with. And when we visit those spaces, they elicit a positive emotional response. I used to see this a lot with my daughters when they were little. I remember this was very striking. Whenever they would get really upset about something, either a fight they had with someone at school or maybe if...
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they got in trouble with me or my wife, they would instantly say, I just wanna go home. I wanna go to my room. I wanna go to my room. Their room was a place that was a safe place for them, a sense of security. And they intuited this, and when feeling down, wanted to visit it to regain that sense of security.
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And so I think it's really instructive to stop and think about what are the places in our lives that are the equivalent of safe houses when we are struggling with emotional problems. So I love watching these videos. these spy movies where the spy is being chased or the Jason Bourne character, and there are safe houses embedded among the cities. We all have the equivalent of safe houses around us.
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For me, it's the Arboretum in Ann Arbor, a couple of blocks from my home. When I'm in that space, it has this very positive soothing effect. It's also the local tea house where I spent a significant amount of time writing my first book. I have very positive associations about that tea house and simply sitting there fills me with a sense of comfort.
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And so that's another tool that people can use to manage their emotions.
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How to Harness Your Feelings
So when I had crushes on girls in high school, it took a while for me to... ask them out on dates. And I remember many false starts, you know, starting to dial their numbers when we used to have, believe it or not, rotary phones. And I would turn the dial, you know, turn a three number, I'd get three numbers deep and then hang it up. And then I'd go four and then I'd hang it up.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
That's right. Switching spaces both provided her with a sense of comfort and resilience. It also acted as a type of distancing tool. In this case, it was a physical distancing tool. Getting the physical space away from the locus, from the location of the epicenter of the problem allowed her to look at her circumstances from a wider point of view.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
She could see that bigger picture and she could see that maybe it's time to make some hard decisions about where to invest and where to divest.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
A text message went off on my phone early in the morning and There was a message that said school for one of my daughters was being canceled that day. And I saw the message, it was very early on in the morning. And then I tried to go back to bed, but I wasn't very successful because my mind kept on trying to suss out why school was being canceled.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Typically when we get text messages along these lines, the reason is given. Snow, really cold temperatures, et cetera. And so I kept on replaying it and I ended up realizing that I wasn't getting back to bed.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So I went downstairs and a few minutes later, I find out from a message from another parent that the reason school was being canceled was because a credible threat was made to the school, a threat to do really bad, harmful things. And this is a parent's worst nightmare to have to entertain these kinds of possibilities.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And the emails began to fly or the text messages back and forth between some of the other parents about what was going on. And it was very easy to see tensions beginning to escalate. And the moment I began to notice myself beginning to spiral, I instantly implemented some of the tools that we're talking about. The first thing I did is I broadened my perspective.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
I tried to look at the bigger picture here. I used distance self-talk to help me do it. I said to myself, the school and law enforcement agencies are investigating things. I don't have to worry about this right now. I also leaned into strategic avoidance. I recognized that there was nothing I could possibly do in this situation personally to resolve it. So I leaned hard into my work.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
I also went for a walk in the Arboretum near my house. And that further helped me rest and restore. And I also tapped into my advisory board. I spoke to someone in my network who had some experience dealing with these kinds of circumstances, and they were really helpful for further helping me look at that bigger picture and recognize the circumstances I was facing.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Now, engaging in those different tools did not make this problem go away. Fortunately, it did go away. They caught the person who sent the threat and nothing bad happened. What using those tools allowed me to do was keep my anxiety about this issue at a reasonable level of activation. This was an important situation that I did want to be focused on and keeping eyes on.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And then I'd give it a rest for a day or two and have to have pep talks with my dad, for example, and some of my best friends in high school would give me pep talks to kind of build my confidence to ultimately dial the damn number and start the conversation, which I eventually did and was grateful for those pep talks.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
But what those tools allowed me to do was keep the emotions from metastasizing in ways that prevented me from doing anything else that day and feeling miserable as well.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
But again, it just goes to show you, I think it's really easy for us to say, oh, that person, they're really good at managing their emotions? Are they really bad? But when you get into a person's life, you see that there's always nuance.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
This was very early in my career, and I was with my family, both my wife and daughter, one daughter at the time, and my extended family as well. We were all going on a vacation for the winter break. The airport was jam-packed. And we had dutifully waited our turn to get to the check-in counter. And there was a very pleasant woman working there. And she begins to check us in.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And then I begin to hear behind me this kerfuffle. And all of a sudden, this guy just has this outburst. And he starts shouting at the woman who's helping us and doing her very best to deal with these enormous crowds. And this person's saying how he's gonna miss his flight and this is ridiculous. And the woman is trying to calm him down.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And then he says something to the effect of, I don't have to calm down. I have, that's why I bought a business class ticket or that's why I have airline status. I forget which of the two he uttered. And the moment that I heard that, a tripwire was crossed in my brain and I turned around and I said things to him that were very confrontational.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
The moment the words came out of my mouth, I felt ashamed of saying them. And then interestingly, I remember turning around and seeing my wife and the other members of my family who were nearby, you know, moving away from me Ever so gently, I could see that they were so uncomfortable from my behavior.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And it's interesting to think about that incident in light of the early experiences with my dad that I mentioned to you before. In a certain sense, it was a similar dynamic. There was this perception of injustice that automatically led to an emotional hijacking, if you will.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Will Smith gets out of his seat, walks relatively patiently right up to Chris Rock, and then winds up and slaps him in the face powerfully. in front of everyone there and everyone who's watching.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And then he turns around and goes and sits back down in his chair.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
And in that moment, we witnessed a remarkable takeover of emotion that led this at the time esteemed actor, Hollywood royalty, to do something that his career still hasn't recovered from many years later.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Powerfully upstaged the moment. For anyone who was watching, it was just unbelievable to see someone do this. In fact, many people, myself included, initially thought that this was something that was rehearsed. He didn't really do this because who would do such a thing?
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
because they're what I call unwieldy tools. All of the emotions we experience when we experience them in the right proportions are useful. anger when experienced not too intensely or not too long can be valuable.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
The problem that we all struggle with, and this is what I call an ancient problem, this has been something that we've been struggling with for likely as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form, is that often these emotions are triggered and they're not triggered in the right proportions. They are triggered either too intensely or not intensely enough
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
or they last too long or not long enough. And what I find so fascinating about us, about human beings is, guess what? We also evolved tools to reign those emotional responses in so that if and when we are triggered, we can very quickly reign those emotional responses in to help us reach whatever emotion regulatory goals we have.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So this is a story of Jerry Leninger, who was working on the Mir space station. And he's doing some data entry when all of a sudden he begins to hear the space station alarms begin to siren. He stops entering the data and goes to investigate. And as he moves down the portal and turns around the corner, he begins to see fire and smoke. His first instinct is to go find a respirator.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
So he begins to swim through the air, trying to find a respirator. And as he's swimming through the air trying to find this respirator, all sorts of random thoughts begin to fire in his mind, some of which are quite irrational. For example, one thought was open a window, not something that you either can do or want to do in outer space.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
Just an example of how the mind is cycling through these different potential solutions to the problems we're in. So he keeps on looking for a respirator. He finds one and then it begins to malfunction. And at this point, the space station is filling with smoke. He's having trouble breathing. And he's really began to worry about his survival.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
He's thinking about his wife and child back on planet Earth. And as he's beginning to search for that respirator, he actually starts talking to himself like he's giving advice to someone else. He says to himself, okay, Jerry, you've got to get going. You need oxygen here. You need to start acting. And... He just manages to go a tiny bit further and find one more respirator. And he puts it on.
Hidden Brain
How to Harness Your Feelings
It's working. And then he begins to put out the fire. One extinguisher after another, after another. Eventually, the fire gets under control. They extinguish it. They put it out. The fire on the space station goes down as one of the worst catastrophes in space travel history. And he lives to tell the story of what happened after.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-10-2025 5PM EDT
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-02-2025 7PM EST
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
TED Talks Daily
How to tame your advice monster | Michael Bungay Stanier
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: Cancelling cancel culture with Loretta Ross | ReThinking with Adam Grant
Aber... Das Problem ist, du verlässt oft diese Konversation, fühlst dich wirklich gut über die Person, mit der du nur kommuniziert hast. Aber alle negativen Gefühle sind immer noch da. Manchmal sind sie sogar noch aktivierter.
TED Talks Daily
Why social health is key to happiness and longevity | Kasley Killam
Neuroscientist Ethan Cross says you may think it's healthy to vent about what's bothering you, but... The problem is you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Okay. So my last question, then I'll give you the punchline is when you go to lift weights, do you do more than just exercise your biceps with curls? Of course. Okay. Of course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
That's the kind of response I hope this book and conversations like the one we're having can help push people towards that awareness, that of course response when it comes to thinking about the tools we use to manage our emotional lives. The question should not be, what's the one thing you do to manage your emotions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The question should be, as far as I'm concerned, what are the tools you use to manage your emotions? Depending on the goals that I have at any given point in my life, when I go to the gym, I'm doing a range of exercises. I may be doing some cardio, high interval training, calisthenics. I'm blending in different things because there are different components to physical health.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
What we have learned is that the same is true when it comes to managing our emotional lives. Our emotional worlds are incredibly nuanced and the goals we have are not always the same when it comes to emotion management. So why on earth would there be one tool that all of us can benefit from? It just doesn't make sense and the science don't support it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So that was another insight I got from Bubby and Papa. So they ended up being a, quite influential in my life and I wish they were here for me to tell them about it directly now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Absolutely. And I think the fires are a great and tragic example of how important it is to be able to manage our emotions effectively for our own well-being and survival. You know, I was actually just in LA last week, and I had to evacuate on Wednesday evening. When I arrived, the fires weren't really raging at all, and they just took off. And I was able to see some of that devastation firsthand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And It was tragic, and it was an inherently deeply emotional experience that required a lot of empathy, people banding together to support one another, but also the ability to manage some pretty potent emotional responses, sadness, fear, anxiety, in order to take action to protect oneself and one's loved ones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Sadly, as I think this tragedy stretches out, we're going to need more help managing our emotions just given the amazing devastation that is occurring. It is a parallel to what we're talking about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So Matt is just such an interesting character. He was a Michigan alum who, after graduating, became a SEAL, deployed, was a hero, came back, became a SEAL instructor, and then actually went to Harvard to get his leadership degree and was selected by the president of the United States to carry the nuclear codes or selected by whoever selects such an individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And so he has this just unbelievable personality. record of achievement. And for me, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about him before I interviewed him and became friendly with him was this guy must be a robot, right? Like emotions just don't enter the equation. given the kinds of extraordinary things that he has had to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And in our very first meeting, he swiftly dispelled me of that notion. And when a Navy SEAL of his level of accomplishment and physical prowess dispels you of something, you believe it very quickly. So I was very happy to change my mind. Essentially what he described was his experiences of emotions, both positive and negative, were vital to his success.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Not his ability necessarily to shut them down, but he described the emotions he experiences as information he acted on that was useful for helping him determine how he should respond to different situations. And these emotions that he experienced were present throughout his experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The seer school experience that you asked about so seer school for those who are not familiar with that acronym is a school that you send. I think primarily military personnel to. teach them how to deal with the possibility of them essentially being abducted or trapped behind enemy lines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So you put people in different really uncomfortable situations, and uncomfortable is putting it pretty lightly, as John, I'm sure you can attest firsthand, so that, God forbid, if someone finds themselves in one of these situations, they have some tools they can use to manage them and to survive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So we're talking about not eating food for days, being held in cages, all sorts of really aggressive kinds of interrogatory. Is that a word? Interrogatory? I don't think it's a word. They were like mock interrogations and other things of that sort. Well, what am I missing? Give me more color here. water, simulated waterboarding, maybe?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I'm glad you were there to help illustrate it in more vivid detail. And so it's a grueling experience. But what was interesting about Matt's time there is that he was filled with all sorts of negative emotions when he was going through it. He was angry and frustrated and concerned about he had these training missions that he was going to be doing these cold water training up in, I think, Alaska.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And he's in order to be fit for that you need muscle and he found his muscle depleting because he wasn't eaten and so would he be able to accomplish those missions and alongside all those negative feelings he was having he also was falling in love with the woman he would eventually marry who was in the literal cage across the courtyard from where he was being kept in a cage
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
and he was flirting with her during this training exercise and in the process of doing so falling in love and so he's a perfect example of someone who i think many of us think shouldn't feel emotions and should just be robotic yet if you asked him hey would you give up your ability to experience any different kind of negative emotion or positive he would say no what he was really skilled at is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
experiencing those emotions learning from them but not allowing them to mushroom too greatly so not allowing those experiences to those emotional experiences to be triggered too intensely or for too long and that is the challenge i think that we all face when we think about how to manage our emotional lives i'm a proponent of the idea really strong one that all of our emotional experiences when they are triggered in the right proportions and contacts
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
are useful. I benefit from my ability to experience anxiety and sadness and anger and envy and jealousy. All of those different responses They tune me into specific features of the situations that I'm encountering to help me manage them more effectively. Give you a couple of examples. Anxiety. Anxiety captures my attention and focuses it on a potential threat that is looming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's effectively telling me, hey, dopey, focus. You got to prepare for this thing. It's important. When I think back to some of the engagements that i've had that haven't gone as well as i would have hoped they're the ones that i felt zero anxiety about as a result i had no cue inside me To trigger me to focus and prepare. So I didn't take envy. We think of envy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's one of the deadly sins, right? Like, it's uniformly bad. It is not uniformly bad. Sometimes I look at someone who I'm envious of and that then provides me with a target to aspire to achieve what they have accomplished. Now I've got something I can shoot for. So I'm reframing that envy as a way of, it's a kind of North Star of sorts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And you could play this game with all the different negative emotions we experience. They all have a functionality to them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, there are lots of ways you could tap into hope if that's the target. Our ability to both strategically wield our attention, what we focus on, and then how we focus on it, whether we're reframing or not. I think those are two specific cognitive tools we possess that can be really helpful for boosting hope. And let me give you a couple of concrete examples because that's a little abstract.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
things feel really bad and we're really sinking into the doldrums sinking into despair or we're finding ourselves really anxious or anger angry for that matter when we experience these big negative emotional states we often zoom in on them and what is driving them in that moment so we're focusing on the worst parts of the experience which makes good sense because what is one of the first things we're taught to do when we have a problem growing up
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
roll up your sleeves and deal with it, right? Don't avoid it. So that's what we often reflexively do when we're struggling with things. And it often perpetuates that negative experience. All of us, though, have had this experience that I'm going to describe probably millions of times, certainly hundreds of thousands, probably millions, depending on how old you are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the experience is as follows. And tell me if you disagree, John, like truly tell me if you disagree. we experience something and it triggers an emotion, that emotion activates. And then as time goes on, the emotion eventually begins to fade in its intensity. most of our emotional experiences follow that temporal trajectory, that time course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
They're triggered, they rise, and as time goes on, they fade. Some emotions rise more intensely than others, some fade more quickly, some take longer, but almost all of them follow that time course. Now, we lose sight of that in the moment, but
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
If you jumped into what I've called your mental time travel machine, and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this thing tomorrow, next week, next year, in 10 years when I'm dead? That is a powerful way of automatically making accessible the understanding that what you're going through is temporary. It will eventually fade. And when you have that recognition, It gives you hope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It gives you hope that things are going to get better. And that can be a powerful bomb when we're struggling with negative things. You know, I worried about something happened just yesterday that I was having some second thoughts about, oh, crap, did I say the wrong thing? And didn't feel good in the moment or in the immediate aftermath.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And then I asked myself, how am I going to feel about this next week? Instantly, I was reminded of the fact, John, that I, Ethan Cross, have put my foot in my mouth tens of thousands of times. And that doesn't feel good in the moment, but it usually amounts to nothing. And instantly that turned things down. So that's one way of finding hope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The other way of finding hope is to wield your attention onto things that are inspirations. So we do this often too, and this can be a kind of attentional deployment, right? Like if you're really struggling with something, try to find something in your life that is the source of hope. Something that just makes you really excited about the future and what lies ahead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage, a difficult home situation or problems at work. Life is constantly throwing curveballs at us. Sometimes it's not just that we don't hit the pitch. Sometimes we have the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing fastballs at our heads is the way it sometimes feels. And he's hitting us too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
For some parents, this is their children, grandparents or children and grandchildren, business owners or employees. It can be hope for future accomplishments. There's an infinite number of things and ways we can find hope. And so that would be another tactic that people can use if they're motivated to do so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
well what a great question and i wish there was a one-line answer but there isn't so let me do my best so one thing i think that is important to keep in mind is that we human beings are meaning makers one of the ways we navigate the world is with this motivation to constantly make sense of the world in which we live we need to make sense of it because if we understand this world and the place we
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
occupy in it, that makes this world easier to navigate. And as a general rule, that's like a general guiding motivation for human beings. We want to be able to navigate the world easily. So if we have meaning and purpose and we feel like we matter, that's great. Things feel right and we don't have to, we could just focus on the task at hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Oftentimes, the times that people get stuck is when they can't find meaning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
don't feel like they matter when that happens it's like a giant red button is pressed in your brain that says stop pay attention figure out what's going on here so that you can start feeling like you do matter and have meaning so that we could get on with life the way it's supposed to be lived but we're for having trouble developing that sense of purpose and meaning we often struggle we can ruminate about things we can experience
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
complicated negative emotions like anxiety and sadness as well. So finding meaning is really important. Being able to manage your emotions when you're struggling to find meaning is also really important because We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage or a difficult home situation or problems at work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Life is constantly throwing curveballs at us. Sometimes it's not just that we don't hit the pitch. Sometimes we have the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing fastballs at our heads is the way it sometimes feels. And he's hitting us too. And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And that's really where the science of emotion regulation comes into play, because we evolved this extraordinary capacity to experience emotions. And remember, emotions are tools. They're useful. You want to be able to feel anxiety. to motivate action, to focus on the task at hand.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Anger, when you perceive that there's some transgression, some violation of your understanding of the world, and there's an opportunity for you to fix things, anger is a powerful little message that propels you to do that. These are useful, but they are often unwieldy tools. And the gift that we have also been born into this world with is the capacity to manage those emotional states.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So on the one hand, we evolved this wonderful brain that allows us to experience all these emotions and these different kinds of shades and textures and blends. But we also co-evolved all of these different capacities that we can harness to manage those emotions. And the key is accessing those tools that we possess to rein in those emotional responses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And that's what I hope the book helps people do. Number one, simply introduce you to the tools that exist. And then number two, offer you some guidance in how you can use those tools. If we go back to the gym metaphor here, if you don't know how to work out, right? You just show up in a gym and you're looking at equipment like you can very well get hurt if you don't know how to use that equipment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the odds are that you don't just walk into the gym and you know how to seamlessly weave these different exercises together in a way that's going to dramatically improve your health right away. There might be some stumbling, some trial and error that you do in the gym and you find, oh, this is making me
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
My biceps a little bit bigger and my calves a little bit plumper, whatever you're trying to achieve. But it's not going to be the most efficient thing. I would argue that that is kind of how a lot of us navigate our emotional lives right now. We stumble on exercises. that sometimes work for us, oftentimes don't, sometimes even get us into trouble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the value of science here is that it doesn't, it's not can. Science provides us with a guide to introduce us to the exercises that are out there and to teach us how to begin to weave them together to help us achieve the emotion goals that we have. And that's, I think, the real opportunity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I will do so on one condition, which is when this podcast airs, you subtly have this song begin to play in the background as we talk. I call them shifters. What is a shifter? If you think about a shift, we want to shift our emotions. We can shift them up or down or make them last longer or shorter. So then the question is, well, what are the shifters that are out there?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, the first one that is often overlooked is what I call our sensory shifters. Senses, sight, sound, touch, smell is just a few examples. These are very powerful tools for pushing our emotions around. And when I use the word powerful to convey that not only can they generate very different kinds of emotional responses, but they can do so relatively easily.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And what's remarkable to me about these sensory shifters is that we all are intimately familiar with them, but we often overlook them. So there's this one study that asked people, why do you listen to music almost 100%
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
of the sample indicated they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel emotional but then if you ask people last time you were anxious angry or sad what did you do to change the way you felt Between 10% and 30% use music as a tool. Just 10% and 30%, even though close to 100% of people readily acknowledge that music is a powerful modulator of their emotional experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
It's not just people out there in the world who don't often think about sensation as a tool to manage their emotions when they're struggling. It's this expert that you're talking to right now as well. I'm using that expert title a little bit jokingly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I mean, I've listened to music my whole life, and it wasn't until this experience I had with my daughter that I began to start using it strategically. She woke up, was in a kind of morose mood. It was bumming me out because at the time that she was playing soccer, I looked forward to this weekend event throughout the week. It was like my release. I loved just watching her play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
and she just didn't want to go is in a funk and and then we get in the car and i put the radio or whatever you call the i don't know streaming device whatever we call them nowadays on and don't stop believing just came on and you know i can't help myself i start jamming out to that song i'm bopping my head i'm humming i'm singing and then i look in the rear view mirror and i see danny
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
without even knowing it, is like bopping her head along and she's into it. And that was really surprising because normally she tells me my choice of music is terribly embarrassing, but I guess that's a universal, that song.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And next thing I know, we're like, we're having a ton of fun in the car and we pull up to the soccer field and she just darts out of the car and, you know, scores seemingly a gazillion goals that game, as far as my memory tells me. We know memories are fallible, so... We won't fact check that detail, but she did do really well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And it was just this wonderful example of how sensory experiences can modulate how we feel super fast. And so since that moment, number one, we've done some research on this topic. We actually published a paper identifying this as a bit of a blind spot in the areas that we work in for emotion regulation researchers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
But I now have playlists that I have on my iPhone that I go to to help me reach certain kinds of goals that I have. I've got some pump-up music. I have some calming music. And it's a tool right there, and I avail myself of it all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, these are tools that organizations and other entities are wielding all the time. to trigger emotional responses in you. I mean, just think of not just the hotel and restaurant industry, which I talk about in the book, but think about every international airport you go to in the duty-free zone. It is populated by perfumes and colognes, right? This is an entire industry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I don't know what the number will put on it, but it's a pretty big one, I think. This is all about how scents are being applied to our skin to trigger emotional responses in other people. Typically approach, although we know that odors can also elicit the other kinds of response as well. Just take a ride in a New York City subway if you want the other experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
But these are some of the tools, and this is just an example of some of these tools that are hidden in plain sight that on the one hand, We've all experienced them. But I don't think a lot of us are consciously wielding those tools to help us reach our goals, our emotion regulation goals on a moment to moment basis throughout our lives. And so there are lots of shifters that take that form.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
You've probably worked with them, but you may not have realized it. Then there are shifters out there that you've never encountered before. And then we go even outside of the shifters that exist within us into the next part of the book that deals with how our interactions with other people can shift us. Our interactions with our physical spaces can shift us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And then we talk about culture more generally to think about how do the cultures that we are a part of shape our view of our emotional worlds and how we can manage them. And what role do we play as individuals that can shape the cultures that we belong to, to not only help ourselves, but to help other people that we work with and live with do the same?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
As you know, we were just talking offline. I've been looking forward to this for a while and I've missed you and I've been tracking all of your successes. And so it's great to be in the same virtual room with you again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Well, in some ways, culture is the most powerful shifter that exists because it's ever present. We are bathed in it. It is like the air we breathe. And what does it mean to be a part of culture? Well, culture determines our values and beliefs. So do you think you can control your emotions? Do you think you should control your emotions?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Culture is influencing those values and beliefs that we have about emotions and emotion regulation. Culture is also providing us with norms. Norms are rules, both spoken and unspoken, that guide our behavior throughout our lives. And so culture is shaping the norms that govern the way we behave on a moment to moment basis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Is there a norm in your family or in your organization for talking about emotions or bottling them up? We have norms for all sorts of emotional behaviors that are then impacting us and those around us. And then culture also can give us practices tools that we use to manage our emotions. Rituals, as an example.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Families have rituals, organizations have rituals, some of which are designed to help us manage our emotions. Families, we often teach our kids and our loved ones how to manage our emotions. Employees, bosses, mentors are constantly mentoring those beneath them, ideally. without a deal with adversity. Adversity, by definition, an emotional experience in those kinds of organizational contexts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So culture is the kind of, what's the word I use for, they use for this in the book? It's the big kahuna of shifting. It's impacting it at every level. And the reason I think it's so important to start thinking about the role culture plays in our lives is because
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
on the one hand you're parts of different cultures so if you understand what culture is beliefs and values norms practices you can start getting in there to maybe push the culture around in a direction that you think is more beneficial for you and those that you love if though you find yourself as in part of a kind of culture that is toxic with respect to emotion emotion regulation and there's not much you can do about it
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
You can make the decision to leave that culture too. And that is a noble decision to make when that culture is working against you. And I think thinking about culture through the lens of emotion regulation makes it a lot easier for us to start reasoning about how to change culture, when to join new ones, leave them and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The best place to go is my website, www.ethancross.com. And there's information about Shift, my lab, my old book, and lots more. So check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We have a few days left and we're going to savor it because it was a wonderful ride last year. And even this year, although we've had some downs, we ended on a pretty positive note with two huge wins towards the end. So we're feeling pretty good in Ann Arbor. I'm going to embrace that because there have been years in which we haven't felt that way, which is actually like a perfect segue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
We haven't even planned it into the topic of my book on managing our emotions, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I'm happy to, and they were very much and are related. So my first book, Chatter, dealt with the question of how do you manage the voice inside your head, which is often a really vital tool when you find that it starts ceasing to be a tool and starts to become your worst enemy. And what I'm talking about there is when
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
we start perseverating on things worrying and ruminating incessantly that mental chatter builds up to the point where we have problems thinking and performing relationship issues and even find that those nasty conversations we sometimes have with ourselves get under the skin to influence our health and that was a topic that i've spent a lot of my scientific career investigating
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Why does that happen and what tools exist to help you talk to yourselves more effectively? And the book came out and fortunately it was well received and I went on a book tour. And the experience I had on that book tour was really quite interesting because
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
as an author, and you know this, John, you work so hard on a book and you hope it's received well, but you don't really know until you get out there. And so I'm out there and I'm finally talking about all these ideas that I spent so much time writing about and researching, and it feels great. And then I get to the Q&A and effectively time after time, the experience I had was people saying,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
this is so interesting. Thank you so much. They lob a question or two about chatter, but then they start going off in all sorts of other directions. Like, well, what about anger and sadness? And what is an emotion? And should I try to manage them? And what do you think about being in the moment? And it just, the list of questions went on and on and on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And the experience I had, and I write about this in my new book is it felt like I had just given a talk on how to deal with heart disease. And people were grateful for that information. But they also had questions about how to optimize their physical fitness, avoid cancer, reduce the risk of diabetes, and a slew of other questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And so when I took a step back, really, I think the opportunity that emerged was to write something about our emotional lives, which is a topic, of course, that we are all so intimately familiar with from the time we are born.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
actually before in the womb too there's you know likely we're experiencing various kinds of emotional states but we don't get a user's guide a science-based accessible user's guide for guiding us through that emotional world that we are bathed in all the time. And so I got really excited about that topic and shift was my attempt to address it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So it is, you know, it's like, welcome to your emotional life. What are emotions? Why do we have them? And most importantly, what does science have to teach us about what we can do to manage those emotions? All of them. When we find that they cease to serve us well and actually start conspiring against us because they're activated either too intensely and or for too long a period of time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So Dora and Izzy, as you mentioned, were my grandparents, and their story was one of the first I can remember hearing about growing up. And it always captivated me, and it still does to this day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
They lived in a relatively small town in eastern Poland where adolescents, teens, young adults around the time that the Nazis invaded, they were Jewish, and they effectively witnessed their loved ones be slaughtered and narrowly escaped that fate themselves. lived in a series of ghettos in the frozen Polish woods for years trying to evade capture. And
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The interesting thing about my grandparents was they were exceptionally emotive and loving. They did not talk to me about their experiences during the war. And I would ask them as a curious kid, hey, Bubby, Papa, what happened? Tell me more about it. These are heroes. It was like G.I. Joe. And I just wanted to know more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
The only time I got a window into their experience was they would hold these Remembrance Day events one time a year with other members of the town that survived and ultimately moved to the states and during that one day a year i would see them fall into tears and and just describe atrocities that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around. I mean, I sit here right now at home.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I've got my daughter, who's a little under the weather, upstairs safely and snuggled up in her bed. And I'm looking out to the snowfall and I've got a fire in the back. I mean, life is really good and sweet. And their lives were really good and sweet. And yet they... just ended that version of their life so quickly. It's hard for a human being like I think any of us to contemplate that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
So I only heard them talk about their experience just one time a year, never any other time. And as I got older, you know, and I learned more about psychology, what was really fascinating to me was it sure seemed on the surface that my grandmother in particular was avoiding talking about these experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And one of the first lessons I learned early on in life from my parents, and then it was reinforced in graduate school, was you shouldn't avoid focusing on things. Avoidance is bad because If you avoid it, the wound never heals and it'll just come back to haunt you later on. Yet by all accounts, my grandmother was actually doing pretty well. This was not a depressed or overly anxious woman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
This was a woman who saw her position in the world elevate. She moved to the States with nothing, worked really hard, saved up enough money to ultimately buy a home and even have a winter escape in your part of the country in Florida during the snowy winters. but she avoided. And what I ended up learning later on, I write about this in the book is that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I think this uncovers one of the myths surrounding emotion regulation that a lot of us buy into, which is this idea that avoidance is always toxic. It is not. And the science now pretty compellingly demonstrate that that is not the case. There are times and places when strategically avoiding emotional triggers and cues can actually be quite useful. And I'll give you a couple of examples.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Sometimes, and I speak from personal experience, I will get triggered, an email, something really bothers me or a conversation with someone at work or, you know, I will admit sometimes it happens at home too. Shocker, sometimes I get into an argument with my partner or my kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
And I've discovered that actually, right when those emotions are first triggered, sometimes the best attempt to work through them right there in the moment is not the optimal solution. A better strategy is to take some time away, whether it be a few minutes, hours, even days, and then come back to the problem later on. And when I do, I've got more more bandwidth. I can think more objectively.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I can relate to the other person if it's an interpersonal problem more effectively too. That's an example of using avoidance strategically, right? Taking a break to then come back. Sometimes I take a break and I find that the problem just melts away because I realized it just wasn't significant in the first place and I was magnifying it excessively. Now, of course, there are instances where
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
taking that time away, the problem just continues to surface and that can be a cue to engage more deeply. But the point here is that avoidance isn't uniformly bad. It is a tactic, a tool that when used strategically can be quite effective. And so that was just one insight that my grandparents' experience provided me. The broader one, and I'll throw it back to you, is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
that there are just no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. I think we as human beings love the prospect of finding such solutions. There's something really seductive about this idea that there's a single tool or two you can use to be more emotionally fit, to be happier and more successful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
I get asked all the time, what's the one thing you do to manage your emotions? It's a question I can't answer. because there are no single solutions. Do you ever work out, John? We haven't talked about this before, but do you exercise frequently? I just went to the gym earlier this morning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2268 - Rick Caruso
Okay, good. You're prepping up. And my memory of that podcast is that we're covering some different ground here, which is good. Let me ask another question about your gym experience.
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