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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I call a couple people. They are on retainer. They're always available when I need them. And I will activate them. And that's typically for more intense problems. And I'll go for a walk in nature. There's an arboretum near my house. That's like level two. If that doesn't work, we've got some serious problems. Typically, those are the things that I really benefit. Nine times out of ten,
Those tools work, and sometimes I'll have to cycle through them a little bit, but it constrains the amount of time I spend in an undesirable state.
So you want to do the opposite of what we talked about before. When we talked about distancing and sometimes focusing away, let's zoom in on this and immerse ourselves in it. I mean, my, we don't want to be you in your name. We want to like, just bring that experience really close and stay with it. So what, what I'm describing right now is what we often refer to as savoring.
And this is my sleeping pill. What do I mean by that? I learned this shortly after my first daughter was born, that the best way to help me fall asleep at night is I would just, I'd close my eyes and I would just imagine her. I would just like see her as a new dad. This was just this intoxicating experience. And I imagine her doing something earlier that day.
And that just was this wonderful feeling that helped me go to bed. If I want to savor an event now, I'll think about something great that has happened to my kids, my wife, my lab, myself. And I'll just replay in very concrete detail. the specific elements, the what, what happened to them in that experience or what happened to me. And that helps drive that state.
Sometimes I'll often talk about it with someone else. I have some people in my life who are very good at just helping me co-savor this experience. They'll just really, that's so incredible. Tell me more. I want one person like details. I want details, details of the positive stuff. That is a tool for savoring. And I relish those experiences.
Well, appreciate you and appreciate this conversation. www.ethancross.com and they can get all the information they'd like about Shift, the book, my lab, and lots of other stuff.
Music's a really easy way to shift your emotions in a particular direction. The shifts aren't always long-lasting, but if you need a kick in the butt, so to speak, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention.
I think we all have something to learn about this topic. I think it's one of the big problems we face as a species. It's something that we struggle with. When I'm talking about not managing our emotions effectively, I'm talking about our emotions getting triggered either too intensely or for too long. And how do you know what that means? We have goals for how we want to live our lives.
And if our goal is to not feel a particular way, and we find that our emotional experiences are lasting outside of that bandwidth, so to speak, too intense or too long, or maybe even too short or too little, those are typically cues that we want to manage or shift those emotions.
so can you give me an example of that sure i have a very important presentation coming up i feel a little bit of anxiety about it which is adaptive because the anxiety that i feel is motivating me to focus on the task at hand to prepare for it to make sure i do a good job but Over time, as the minutes go on and the hours, the anxiety begins to metastasize. It gets bigger.
I start going into worst case scenarios and it lasts longer than is actually useful. That would be a context in which I would want to manage that emotional response. Let me give you one other example in the opposite direction. Something really great happens. My kid has a real success in their life and I hear about it, I experience some happiness, but then the happiness quickly fades.
And maybe I want to savor that emotional experience because it makes me feel good, and I want to feel good more than I'm currently feeling. That would also be a context in which I would want to shift my emotions.
Well, I do a few different things. And I want to preface before I tell you what I do, which I happily will, I want to share with you and everyone who's listening, different tools work for different people in different situations in the same way that... We likely have different exercise routines for maintaining our fitness, and there are multiple routes to becoming physically fit.
We're increasingly learning that that is also true for our emotional lives when it comes to being emotionally fit. So with that little bit of a disclaimer out of the way, What I do to manage my anxiety? Typically, I'll first engage one of my senses. I've got a music playlist that is very effective for calming me down or sometimes even pumping me up and getting excited. And both of those
emotional shifts work against the anxiety, I will often reframe what I'm experiencing. I will remind myself of the fact that I've done hundreds, if not thousands of presentations, and they've all gone well. So I'm broadening my perspective there, and I'm getting out of this, what if this happens? What if? And instead, I'm reminding myself, well, the what if virtually never happens.
If the anxiety is really intense, I will often call up one of my emotional advisors. These are people who are really skilled at not just hearing me out, listening and learning to what I'm going through and empathizing with me, connecting with me emotionally in a way that communicates to me that they really care about me, but they're also really useful for helping me look at that bigger picture.
And that's an invaluable resource I possess. So those are a couple of the things that I would typically do. I might sprinkle in a walk outside in a safe, natural setting at times. And at other times, I might also distract myself for a circumscribed period of time.
Immerse myself in something else that has nothing to do with the thing I'm worried about to allow myself to come back to the task at hand with a little bit of freshness.
Not exactly. First of all, they take different routes to doing that, number one. But just to give you some counterexamples there, when I'm listening to music, I often will listen to music in the background when I'm working on something.
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