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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Appearances
Well, I will say that the best predictor of success in academia for me is the curiosity, is the ability to have your eyes open to questions. and then be able to kind of formulate a prediction about what you might see. So you've got the raw, raw skills there.
So that's, so smell, a smell, you know, all right, if I'm going to admit it all, the hell, I take baths and, and I love bath salts. Yeah. you know, just this wonderful soothing experience. Of course, there is this, um, sensory element there too, like the heat, the warmth. Also, I find that to be an amazing emotion regulator. I know people talk a lot about cold plunges and things of that sort.
For me, um, It's a bath every night.
Yeah. Kind of love it. Taste dark, mini dark chocolate peanut butter cup. Works like a charm, you know, calorifically negligible, but taste wise, pretty intense. Pretty intense. You know, you just have to be careful of the slippery slope there because they are so wonderful. You need to, you need to make sure. That's right. But, but think about these are all emotional experiences, right?
And sometimes we need to, they can be so powerful. We actually have to use regulation to prevent ourselves from succumbing to that lover.
I was thinking more about eating pizza at 10 p.m. But if but, you know, in the bath for three and a half hours, there is there's some feedback mechanisms that prevent that from happening in the bath. It's called pruning. You may be aware. It's called the kids needing to be put to bed.
OK, so here's here's the deal with the attention. Here's the here's the high level, I think, critically important take home. Many of us, myself included, are often taught when you have a problem, you dive in, you deal with it immediately. You don't run away, you approach. We also hear that chronically avoiding problems, not good, gets you into all sorts of trouble.
It is absolutely true that chronic avoidance, and what I mean by that is if a problem arises, your coping tactic, your strategy is just like bury it, move on, deny, suppress, and just keep going. Lots of data showing that that does not work out so well for folks, predicts all sorts of negative outcomes over time.
What we have done, though, is we have overgeneralized from that observation that chronic avoidance is bad to assume that all avoidance is bad. And that is not true. Being strategic between how we engage with things that are troubling us, approaching and avoiding, going back and forth, can be a really, really useful approach to managing difficult circumstances.
You don't have to actually choose between approaching or avoiding. You can do both. Now, there are lots of very, very simple examples, simple illustrations, I think, of the value of this.
So have you ever benefited from getting an email that just pissed you off and not responding right away, but you took some time away, a couple of hours or a couple of days, you come back to it, and one of two things happens. Either, huh, what was the big deal in the first place? Who cares? Or... you can look at it from a different perspective, right?
You've got the psychological distance that taking some time away has provided you with allows you to approach this a little bit more objectively. I'm guessing both of those have probably been true for you, right?
Yeah. So as you get distance, you've got psychological distance from those experiences. Yeah. The passage of time gives you that psychological distance. It gives you that mental space.
And this is why we don't just have attention as a shifter, but we also have sensation, perspective. We have people shifters, we have space shifters, and culture shifters. So you don't have to choose between just either avoiding or approaching. But you also don't have to choose between just doing one of those and all of these other kinds of tools that are available to you.
You know me well. But look, but like this is so like, you know, in the book, I provide this decision tree, if you will, to how do you know if approaching is working or not? Sometimes approaching a problem.
doesn't actually work because you end up ruminating endlessly you try to work through this but you just think of this jerk who said this thing like why the hell did they have to say like why don't you say that to my face that's by the way my go-to like when someone you know said why don't you say this to my face like really this is how you do it like It can look at me. I'm getting lit up.
I don't even have a transgression in mind, and I'm getting aggravated on your behalf. That would be an indication that approach isn't working. Likewise, if you try to avoid, but you find that even when you're engaged with Engaging distractors, the thoughts just keep intruding about this problem, just keep coming back.
That's a cue that this kind of strategic avoidance may not be working and you should approach or do something else. So attention can be an incredibly powerful tool. In the book, I tell the story of my grandmother who... And as my hero growing up, she evaded the Nazis in Eastern Poland for several years. And she came over to the States with nothing, built a wonderful life.
And all I wanted to do growing up was hear her tell me stories about how she did it, how she managed to survive. And she would never tell me, never talk about it. She didn't want to go there. But she would allow herself to think about these issues, the war, once a year during a Remembrance Day ceremony. She lived a really great life, but she avoided thinking about the problem. She would dose it.
She's an example of how being strategic with your attention works for some people. But sometimes we don't have the luxury of looking away for a variety of reasons. We got to stare the problem right in the face. And we can't even, you know, pop our headphones on sometimes when we've got to look at that problem.
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