Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, it's an absolute honor to be here with you. You know, I've been listening to you for quite some time and the compatibility between a lot of what you talk about and what I write about and do research on couldn't be better. So just an honor to be here.
I love Ethan.
Yeah.
Here's what I hope everyone takes away from this. Okay. Three things. Number one, you'll be able to take your inner critic and turn it into an inner coach. Number two, if you ever find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of rumination and worry, we're going to give you some lifelines to pull yourself out so you can actually use your mind to solve your problems rather than just get stuck in them.
And then number three, more broadly, we're going to give you lots of really pragmatic, tactical tools, simple to use tools that you can use to really master your emotions. So if you want to turn the volume on them up or down or shorten or lengthen how long they last or even switch from one emotional state to another, we're going to give you some guideposts that steer you in the right direction.
So we've got our work cut out for us.
Yeah. We better get started.
The first thing that I've learned over the past 25 or so years doing research in this space is if you ever find yourself going down that vortex of doom and despair or anxiety or even overcome with other negative emotions that don't really feel good in the moment, welcome to the human condition. We all do at times.
And I think that's a really important point for people to take home because I can't tell you how many people I meet who really feel bad about themselves when they find themselves slipping into one of those emotional states. We evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. And we'll talk more about that today when they're experienced in the right proportions, they can be useful.
So number one, if you experience worry, rumination, if you find your inner critic activating at times, there's nothing wrong with you. To the contrary, I would argue there's everything right with you. Number two, there are no one size fits all solutions for managing these states that we want to bring more under our control. We have evolved to possess lots and lots of different tools. And
I think the key to managing our emotional lives more effectively involves learning about what all those tools are and then figuring out what are the unique combinations that work for you based on who you are as a unique individual. It's a lot like in my mind's physical fitness.
Lots of people have the goal to be physically fit, but the way they get there can be radically different compared to other people. And the same is true when it comes to, if we want to call it emotional fitness, you got to learn about all the different machines in the gym. And then you got to figure out what are the exercises that work for me based on who I am and what my goals are.
Yeah.
Probably maybe a couple of months ago. And it was linked with one of my daughter's.
I'm actively monitoring it.
Yes, yes. No, this is something I'm used to experiencing. No, this is fair to say. So my youngest daughter was applying to get into the same school as my oldest daughter. And when my oldest daughter was applying to get into a school, you know, there was, okay, if it works out, great. And if not, no big deal. But now with the second daughter, there's a social comparison element here.
And, you know, she has this older sister that she looks up to and admires. And so I'm thinking, well, what would happen if she doesn't get in? And she fortunately did get in. And it was a great relief. But I did find myself going down the rabbit hole on occasion, playing the what if this happens?
And, you know, I should say that when I do that, when I go down the rabbit hole of despair, which I can get stuck in every now and again, like the best of us, it always amazes me. how exceptionally adept we are at brainstorming endless worst case scenarios to our problems. I mean, have you experienced this yourself?
That's right. Well, there's what we call this negativity bias. One of my favorite titles of a paper in psychology is bad is stronger than good. One of our few Nobel Prize winners won a Nobel Prize for discovering that we're more sensitive to losses than we are gains in our lives. And that all makes sense if you think about it.
The bad things in life have the potential to harm us or derail our lives a lot more than the good things. So we should be more sensitive to But sometimes that oversensitivity to the bad stuff can really lead us astray, especially because no one ever teaches us about how to rewrite the ship when we find it going in the wrong path.
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