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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So, all right, let's get into that in a second. But I want to just frame why the motivational bit is so important here or this belief that you can do it is so ultra, ultra important. So the reason I started off this tool section of my book with this question of can you really control your emotions?
The reason why genuinely believing that there are facets to your emotional experience that are under your control is because if we zoom out, I think of managing one's emotions. There are two ingredients to the recipe for how to do that well. One is motivation and the other is ability. Let's start with motivation.
If you're not motivated to manage your emotions, why would you take any efforts to even try to do so? It wouldn't make much sense. It's not logical, right? If there's nothing I can do to lose weight, why should I do this hard stuff of lifting weights and going to the gym and paying for membership? It's just... You shouldn't, and you likely won't, right?
So step one is you need to have the motivation, the belief that you can manage your emotions. That's the first piece to this equation, and it's what our conversation is getting at right now. But that alone is not in and of itself sufficient, because I can think, to go back to physical fitness, that Yeah, I can do stuff to get in shape. And then I go to the gym.
And if I've never gone to the gym, I could start doing crazy things in there that actually cause more harm than good. So you also need to understand what are the tools that you can use to then achieve that goal. And if you have both of those pieces, the motivation, hell yeah, I can do this. And you know how to do it. Now we're talking business.
So Dunedin, so this gets to the other part of the question, right? So, okay, but so help me believe, Ethan, that it makes sense that we should care about this. If you look at this one classic study, so this was a study done in New Zealand, and it began in the early 70s. And what the researchers started doing is tracking this group of babies from the time they were just born.
Every few years, they would profile these kids' ability to manage their emotions. And they would profile them in a very rigorous way. They would put the kids through different... self-control tests. They would get their teachers and other people in their lives to report on how good they manage their emotions. And they'd get really fine-grained assessments of how good these kids were.
And then they basically waited over time to see... What does the capacity to manage your emotions in childhood and adolescence, what does it predict later on? When you fast forward, what you find is it predicts pretty much most of the things that we care about in our lives. The kids who are good at managing their emotions, they're performing better at school, they're performing better at work.
They're healthier too. Their organs are aging faster. more slowly than the people who are less good at self-control. And if you look at the mirror image, the kids who are not good at self-control, they're doing pretty poorly at work and in school. They're experiencing relationship difficulties, and their health is impoverished as well.
Now, the other really thing that came out of that study that I find to be the most exciting finding, and it's actually not the finding that got the most attention, is that You might come away from that study thinking, well, either you got it or you don't. Either you're good at managing your emotions. Behavioral genetics all the way down. Right. That's it. So why bother?
Well, what the researchers also saw is that some kids changed over time in their ability to manage themselves. Some kids got better. Some kids got worse over time. The kids who got better, they fared better on all these different metrics over time. The kids who got worse, their performance declined. So what we learned from that study, number one, is that this really matters a great deal.
Like your ability to manage your emotions, it's relevant to your ability to think and perform optimally at work. This is what's allowing you to divert your attention, to hunker down, to learn from critical feedback. It's impacting your relationships because I don't know about you, but-
Last time I came in contact with someone who wasn't very good at managing their emotions, they didn't have very good relationships with their friends and partners. They weren't great parents. And it's also impacting our health and well-being.
The links between the inability to manage your emotions and all manner of psychological disturbances, as well as physical problems like cardiovascular disease, problems of inflammation, even certain forms of cancer, All of those findings exist, but there's something you could do about it. Now, you mentioned you've been in, you just completed a course of psychotherapy, right? And you're doing CBT.
I mean, these are interventions that have a ton of evidence behind them. You could think about those interventions. activities as a motion regulation bootcamp that have been tested over and over and over to show they have benefits for folks. Now, they don't work for everyone, as you probably well know, right? They work for some people.
And the hope that I have is that by giving people not just one category of tools, but by giving them the entire toolbox of we can expand the scope of people who these tools actually can benefit.
But completely agree with this notion that our emotions are what makes life worth living. You know, we are this emotional species and they are just fundamental to who we are in a moment to moment basis. You know, when I think about the most salient experiences in my life, like they're all emotional experiences. And so look,
I think there are reasons sometimes where we need to learn how to endure difficult things, right? Delay immediate gratification in order to achieve bigger long-term goals. But we want to balance that, right? We don't want to find ourselves overcome with negativity all the time, too big, too long. This detracts from the experience of being human.
And I think that's what you're getting at here, right? If we find ourselves living emotional lives that we don't want to be living, then that is a cue to intervene. And I think most of us have that experience at times. I just got back from talking about this book for two weeks all over the country. And probably the most salient take-home point, people are suffering. People are struggling.
You name it, whether it's wildfires or infidelity or parental stress or loneliness, lots of different curveballs that life is throwing us. It's like this batting machine that keeps on firing away curveballs, and it just doesn't stop. And we've got to figure out how to hit them. We've got to figure out how to deal with those things.
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