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
As you know, we were just talking offline. I've been looking forward to this for a while and I've missed you and I've been tracking all of your successes. And so it's great to be in the same virtual room with you again.
We have a few days left and we're going to savor it because it was a wonderful ride last year. And even this year, although we've had some downs, we ended on a pretty positive note with two huge wins towards the end. So we're feeling pretty good in Ann Arbor. I'm going to embrace that because there have been years in which we haven't felt that way, which is actually like a perfect segue.
We haven't even planned it into the topic of my book on managing our emotions, right?
I'm happy to, and they were very much and are related. So my first book, Chatter, dealt with the question of how do you manage the voice inside your head, which is often a really vital tool when you find that it starts ceasing to be a tool and starts to become your worst enemy. And what I'm talking about there is when
we start perseverating on things worrying and ruminating incessantly that mental chatter builds up to the point where we have problems thinking and performing relationship issues and even find that those nasty conversations we sometimes have with ourselves get under the skin to influence our health and that was a topic that i've spent a lot of my scientific career investigating
Why does that happen and what tools exist to help you talk to yourselves more effectively? And the book came out and fortunately it was well received and I went on a book tour. And the experience I had on that book tour was really quite interesting because
as an author, and you know this, John, you work so hard on a book and you hope it's received well, but you don't really know until you get out there. And so I'm out there and I'm finally talking about all these ideas that I spent so much time writing about and researching, and it feels great. And then I get to the Q&A and effectively time after time, the experience I had was people saying,
this is so interesting. Thank you so much. They lob a question or two about chatter, but then they start going off in all sorts of other directions. Like, well, what about anger and sadness? And what is an emotion? And should I try to manage them? And what do you think about being in the moment? And it just, the list of questions went on and on and on.
And the experience I had, and I write about this in my new book is it felt like I had just given a talk on how to deal with heart disease. And people were grateful for that information. But they also had questions about how to optimize their physical fitness, avoid cancer, reduce the risk of diabetes, and a slew of other questions.
And so when I took a step back, really, I think the opportunity that emerged was to write something about our emotional lives, which is a topic, of course, that we are all so intimately familiar with from the time we are born.
actually before in the womb too there's you know likely we're experiencing various kinds of emotional states but we don't get a user's guide a science-based accessible user's guide for guiding us through that emotional world that we are bathed in all the time. And so I got really excited about that topic and shift was my attempt to address it.
So it is, you know, it's like, welcome to your emotional life. What are emotions? Why do we have them? And most importantly, what does science have to teach us about what we can do to manage those emotions? All of them. When we find that they cease to serve us well and actually start conspiring against us because they're activated either too intensely and or for too long a period of time.
So Dora and Izzy, as you mentioned, were my grandparents, and their story was one of the first I can remember hearing about growing up. And it always captivated me, and it still does to this day.
They lived in a relatively small town in eastern Poland where adolescents, teens, young adults around the time that the Nazis invaded, they were Jewish, and they effectively witnessed their loved ones be slaughtered and narrowly escaped that fate themselves. lived in a series of ghettos in the frozen Polish woods for years trying to evade capture. And
The interesting thing about my grandparents was they were exceptionally emotive and loving. They did not talk to me about their experiences during the war. And I would ask them as a curious kid, hey, Bubby, Papa, what happened? Tell me more about it. These are heroes. It was like G.I. Joe. And I just wanted to know more.
The only time I got a window into their experience was they would hold these Remembrance Day events one time a year with other members of the town that survived and ultimately moved to the states and during that one day a year i would see them fall into tears and and just describe atrocities that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around. I mean, I sit here right now at home.
I've got my daughter, who's a little under the weather, upstairs safely and snuggled up in her bed. And I'm looking out to the snowfall and I've got a fire in the back. I mean, life is really good and sweet. And their lives were really good and sweet. And yet they... just ended that version of their life so quickly. It's hard for a human being like I think any of us to contemplate that.
So I only heard them talk about their experience just one time a year, never any other time. And as I got older, you know, and I learned more about psychology, what was really fascinating to me was it sure seemed on the surface that my grandmother in particular was avoiding talking about these experiences.
And one of the first lessons I learned early on in life from my parents, and then it was reinforced in graduate school, was you shouldn't avoid focusing on things. Avoidance is bad because If you avoid it, the wound never heals and it'll just come back to haunt you later on. Yet by all accounts, my grandmother was actually doing pretty well. This was not a depressed or overly anxious woman.
This was a woman who saw her position in the world elevate. She moved to the States with nothing, worked really hard, saved up enough money to ultimately buy a home and even have a winter escape in your part of the country in Florida during the snowy winters. but she avoided. And what I ended up learning later on, I write about this in the book is that
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