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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And so in comes perspective, like we could change the way we think about our circumstances when we're looking at it. Now, this can be sometimes a very tricky thing to do. One of my favorite recent experiences with close friends happened several years ago. We were driving home from dinner one night and a buddy of mine was just really struggling with something at work.
It was really bringing him down. He was telling us about it in the car. And his wife looks over to him and says, why don't you just focus on the positive? Just think about the bright side. And he pauses and he looks at her and goes... Yeah, easier effing said than done. And it was just like I smiled.
I wrote about it in the book because it was so powerful, which I think captures this experience that all of us have at times. We know. We totally know. That, yeah, if only we could think about this a little bit more constructively, everything would be better.
This is the basis of the intervention that you just went through or that you're going through now, CBT, how to change the way you think, to change the way you feel. But it's not always easy to do that. And so how can you do that? Let's go back to distancing because this is where getting some psychological distance can often be a difference maker.
This capacity to step back and look at our experiences from a zoomed out perspective can often be very, very helpful. And the cool thing here is that there are many different tactics that exist for reflecting on ourself and our circumstances from a distance. They don't come with the user's guide, but once you know it, like these are my go-to, I call them my psychological jujitsu moves.
So, all right, mental time travel. I'm struggling right now. I'm really feeling whatever, fill in the blanks. How am I going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? All of our experiences follow, not all, nearly all of our emotional experiences follow the same time course, temporal trajectory, if you want to geek out with me. Here's what happens. Something happens. Boom.
Emotions go up. Then as time goes on, The emotion fades. Depending on the experience, some go way up, some a little bit, some take longer, some recover more quickly, but nearly all of them follow that trajectory. We lose sight of that when we're in the midst of it. When we're in the cauldron, we zoom in on the awfulness. We forget that as time passes, things will settle down a bit.
When you jump into the time travel machine, how am I going to think about this? How am I going to feel tomorrow, next week, next month, 10 years from now? It speeds up. You don't have to wait for time to pass because you get to the, oh, it's five years from now. What am I going to think about this argument I just had?
What that does is it highlights the fact that what you're going through is temporary. It's unstable. It will eventually fade. That turns the volume down on our emotions, right? So that's time travel into the future. Go into the past. You could do this. It works a little bit differently. I find it to be equally effective. So shit hits the fan. Things aren't going well.
Mental time travel machine, 1943. Eastern Poland. Get out. I spent some time with my grandparents evading the Nazis in the frozen Polish woods. I don't have to spend much time with them back then to realize that what I'm going through now, come on, this pales in comparison to what they had to endure. It's a powerful, powerful way of putting my adversity in perspective.
Now, to be clear, these little jujitsu moves, these are not taking a negative experience and turning it into a tea party. What they are doing is they're turning the volume down on the negativity, allowing me to re-engage, be objective, and get on with things. Those are two distancing tactics. I'm going to throw two more at you really quick because these are just very tactical moves here.
One of my favorite tools, distance self-talk. Coach yourself through a problem silently, very important, silently, using your name and you. All right, Ethan, how are you going to deal with this? Here's what you're going to do. We are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. We are all giant hypocrites at some level.
This is not just me who says this, right? I mean, think about the phrase, do as I say, not as I do. right? Like we're all familiar with that phrase. When you use the word you and your name to coach yourself through a problem, you're using language to shift your perspective. Most of the time we use the word you So when we think about and refer to someone else, right?
I is when we think about ourself. You is someone else. So when I'm talking to myself with you, it's putting me in this advice coaching mode, if you will. This is how I talk to someone else. I'm really good at giving advice to other people. not so good about giving advice to myself.
So distance self-talk and, um, and the last tool I'll mention here, the last distancing tool, it's not the only one, but the last one that I'm fond of. Um, it's a bit of a, how can I, it's, um, It's a bespoke tool.
Okay. I don't know if this will work for you, but many people who speak a second language don't that is totally distinct from their main, and I wouldn't say British and English are, find that cursing in a second language doesn't quite have the same level of indignity and inappropriateness. So it's a lot easier. Spanish is my second language, as you know very well from our last podcast.
our last conversation, it's easy for me to curse in Spanish. And there's nothing doesn't seem as bad as when I curse in my native tongue, which I'm reluctant to do. So what research shows is that when you think through emotional problems in a second language, You have some mental space from the emotions.
You're learning about your emotions. You're having these emotional experiences in your native language, not your second language.
Really, not my ability to skillfully walk you through the conundrum you faced in Guatemala?
Oh, so one of the stories I tell is of this astronaut slash cosmonaut. So this is someone who... He was an American, became an astronaut, but then also trained with the Russian cosmonauts because he lived on the Mir space station for several months. And while he was on the space station, he had to deal with one of the worst space fires in history. And this fire just happened out of nowhere. And
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