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, you can. The question is, how can you do it better? So there's huge variability, number one, in the degree to which people are capable of managing their emotions. And I would argue that there's room for improvement regardless of where you are right now. You're really not great at it or you're really good. Understanding how this works is
That in and of itself, I think, is enormously empowering. I find it really useful to draw a distinction to physical fitness. You're going to get people who vary in their level of physical fitness. They can all benefit, though, from learning how to optimize that facet of their lives. Some people are physically fit.
just because of the way genetics has endowed them with, with natural physical aptitudes, you know, maybe they're really active, they walk places and so forth and so on, but teaching them like how to do different exercises, engage in different routines is going to benefit them. It's also going to benefit those people who aren't very predisposed to be physically fit.
I think the same is true when it comes to mental fitness. Like we don't, open up the gym to folks to explain here are the different tools here's how they work okay now the task for you now that you understand how these 12 machines work now i want you to figure out how to optimally fit those different exercises into your life to help you meet your specific goals that's really where we are
Yeah, that's a great question that I wish I could answer, but I can't. And let me give you one reason why. So what we have done a pretty good job of in the sciences is identifying specific tools and profiling how they work.
What we have not yet done, what we're doing right now, which is super exciting from the research point of view, is beginning to see how different tools optimally combine to help people manage their emotions. We're just beginning to do that. The reason I bring this up is I think that the key to really moving the needle on emotion regulation is
is understanding the combinations of tools that work well for different people in different situations. And that scientific basis, that knowledge base, it just isn't there. We just published a study or a paper, I should say, it was a couple of studies that looked at how people manage their anxiety during the COVID pandemic. And what we found in those studies was really interesting.
Every day we track people over time and every day we ask them, which of these, I believe it was 18 different tools did you use? And the tools varied in terms of their level of healthiness according to experts. And then we measure their anxiety each day. And what we wanted to see is what tool is moving the needle on people's anxiety from one day to the next.
First key insight, people seldom used just one tool, which is interesting for me because I'm often asked like, hey, what's the one thing people should do right now to manage bleep? On average, it was like between three and four different tools were used on any given day. Second, there was enormous variability in the tools that people use that actually help them manage their emotions.
So the three or four things that I benefited from on one day were different from the three or four things that you benefited from on the same day. And you... You varied from day to day. Some combinations of tools worked for you on one day and different ones worked for you on the next. We don't yet understand how to predict that variability. And that is what we are doing now.
So the invitation I'd love to give people is, I can give you the tools, right? And that's what my book is all about. Here are the tools. And then I could give you the challenge to start self-experimenting to figure out what are the tools that work best for you, right? If a tool works, keep using it. Layer on another one. See what added benefit you get. If it doesn't, move on to something else.
Not unlike the way we figure out what are the physical fitness routines that work best for us. Like the stuff that I benefit from, quite different from not just my wife, but my best friends as well. And it changes too, depending on what my goals are. And so that's a long-winded way of not answering your question.
I mean, this is in a very scaled down way. This is the work that we are currently doing in my lab, which is to say we are trying to identify the patterns that characterize people's optimal regulation across different situations. We're doing it in a way that for the literature is super complex, but relative to what you just articulated, which Is the dream quite simplified?
And I think we will get there over the next several years, but we first have to do the work before we can give the actual answer.
Well, you know, this is such an interesting question and it comes up so much. And on the one hand, it is very clear that if you look at the statistics surrounding the experience of anxiety, as well as a host of other negative experiences like loneliness, you know, they're all moving in the wrong direction in the sense that things seem to be getting worse. Yeah.
On the other hand, one of my favorite little detours while researching my book was to dive back into history to look at how we've thought about emotion regulation through the centuries. And it was really striking. We have been grappling with our emotions forever. for likely as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form.
So I'll just give you a few pieces of evidence to sink your teeth into. So first surgical technique ever developed, or what we think is the first surgical technique ever invented, it's called trepanation, carving holes in people's skulls while they were still awake. What was one of the reasons why this technique was believed to be used? That's a cue up.
Likely, but what else? Perhaps more germane to our conversation right now. Give you a little hint. People felt anxious and the pain distracted them from it. Big dysregulated emotions, right? Like, you know, imagine you are just totally overcome with an emotion. And our theories of what might be causing that response were quite different back then than they are now.
Maybe it had to do with some, you know, spiritual demonic possession. Let's let it out. Let the emotions out. You know, fast forward a couple of centuries, we use bloodletting to drain the toxic emotions The humors or the substance that were causing these negative emotions. Best-selling book of all time, the Bible. One of the most famous stories in that book, the story of Adam and Eve.
It's a story of emotion dysregulation. We've been grappling with this stuff for a really long time. So back to what's going on right now. Look, the world is extremely turbulent. Technology is upending things in ways that we are still trying to make sense of. It's likely multifactorial.
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