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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Music's a really easy way to nudge your emotions, 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, to shift out of a particular emotional response, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention. Another kind of internal shifter is attention.
So where are you pointing your attentional spotlight? Are you thinking about the thing that is driving the emotional response or are you looking away from it? It's not as simple as... on or away, sometimes the best ways of managing our emotions is to be flexible. And we don't often talk about this.
We often talk about avoidance, not thinking about stuff as toxic, when in fact, what we see in lots of research is that people who are flexible actually end up doing pretty good. So if I get into an argument with my partner, rather than trying to fix the situation in the heat of the moment, right after the emotions are triggered, I might take a day or two off from thinking about it.
And then come back to it later on when temperatures have diminished and it's a lot easier for us to think reasonably about this experience. The third internal shifter is perspective. I think we hear a lot that you should change the way you think to change the way you feel, but it's not always so easy to do that. And the good news here is that we possess tools to
make it easier for us to reframe our circumstances. Those tools often involve taking a step back and thinking about what we're dealing with from a more distance objective perspective. You can use language to help you do this. Use your name and the second person pronoun you to try to coach yourself through a problem. All right, Ethan, how are you gonna deal with this?
We usually use the word you when we're thinking about and referring to other people. It's a lot easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to ourselves. So when you use the word you to refer to yourself, that automatically shifts your perspective, putting you into this more adaptive advice giving mode.
We can also jump into our mental time travel machines to think about how we're going to feel about something down the road. We've experienced all sorts of really tough things in our lives, most of which are have come but eventually gone, and we lose sight of that in the heat of the moment.
So thinking about how you're going to feel about what you're currently grappling with down the road can also be useful.
Well, that's a great observation. So step one, you gotta learn about what these different tools are. And once you do, then what you can do is you can start using frameworks, simple frameworks for enhancing the likelihood that you will use these tools
when you most need to use them and that you'll activate them automatically without thinking um you know the the the situation that you just described is not a trivial one we often get dealt curveballs uh that we're not prepared for and in the moment it can be really hard to figure out what to do because our emotions are are striking and are triggered so intensely it's precisely in those situations that we want to have plans
that prepare us for what to do.
One of the most impactful findings I've come across in psychology is the idea that bad is stronger than good. Losses loom larger than gains. The bad stuff in life just kind of sticks out a whole lot more strongly than the good stuff. It draws our attention, and I think it's why we often think about it more when it comes to managing our emotions.
Because the bad stuff, part of the reason it's so useful for us is it doesn't feel good. We want to minimize it as much as possible. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the positive side of our lives or that we need to be passive in terms of our positive experiences. You can absolutely cultivate positive experiences. So I gave you a couple of examples before.
Well, actually, before I give you more examples, let me further say, You should try to cultivate positive experiences if that's something you want to do. Some people have the goal of being kind of even keeled and just Buddha-like, if you will, and homeostatic. They don't want to get too high or too low. And if that's your goal... Great. Follow through with that goal.
Other people want to experience positive emotions more frequently. And if that's your goal, then the cool thing is you've got tools to help you achieve that goal. So certainly savoring, immersing yourself in positive past experiences or fantasizing about potential future eventualities, that's one thing you could do.
amplify positivity another thing you could do to make yourself feel better about stuff is to help other people this is my actual favorite finding right now in psychology it's a lot of research which shows that one of the best ways to make yourself feel better to make yourself feel good about things do something good for someone else I think there's just something really wonderful about that how it's win-win for everyone involved
Maybe the last one I'll slip in there is awe is an emotion, a positive emotion that has a lot of value. Because when you experience this emotion of awe, it's an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and seemingly indescribable, like a beautiful mountain view. Or sometimes you experience awe when you have a social experience, like singing in unison at a party.
sporting event or a lot of people who are religious experience all when they pray. This is a very positive experience that helps broaden our perspective. It makes us realize that there's more to the world than just us. That feels good and it can also help you manage your negative emotions as well.
We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage, a difficult home situation or problems at work. Life is constantly throwing curveballs at us. Sometimes it's not just that we don't hit the pitch. Sometimes we have the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing fastballs at our heads is the way it sometimes feels. And he's hitting us too.
And we need to understand how to get better at bats when that happens and how to not get injured.
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