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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The seer school experience that you asked about so seer school for those who are not familiar with that acronym is a school that you send. I think primarily military personnel to. teach them how to deal with the possibility of them essentially being abducted or trapped behind enemy lines.
So you put people in different really uncomfortable situations, and uncomfortable is putting it pretty lightly, as John, I'm sure you can attest firsthand, so that, God forbid, if someone finds themselves in one of these situations, they have some tools they can use to manage them and to survive.
So we're talking about not eating food for days, being held in cages, all sorts of really aggressive kinds of interrogatory. Is that a word? Interrogatory? I don't think it's a word. They were like mock interrogations and other things of that sort. Well, what am I missing? Give me more color here. water, simulated waterboarding, maybe?
I'm glad you were there to help illustrate it in more vivid detail. And so it's a grueling experience. But what was interesting about Matt's time there is that he was filled with all sorts of negative emotions when he was going through it. He was angry and frustrated and concerned about he had these training missions that he was going to be doing these cold water training up in, I think, Alaska.
And he's in order to be fit for that you need muscle and he found his muscle depleting because he wasn't eaten and so would he be able to accomplish those missions and alongside all those negative feelings he was having he also was falling in love with the woman he would eventually marry who was in the literal cage across the courtyard from where he was being kept in a cage
and he was flirting with her during this training exercise and in the process of doing so falling in love and so he's a perfect example of someone who i think many of us think shouldn't feel emotions and should just be robotic yet if you asked him hey would you give up your ability to experience any different kind of negative emotion or positive he would say no what he was really skilled at is
experiencing those emotions learning from them but not allowing them to mushroom too greatly so not allowing those experiences to those emotional experiences to be triggered too intensely or for too long and that is the challenge i think that we all face when we think about how to manage our emotional lives i'm a proponent of the idea really strong one that all of our emotional experiences when they are triggered in the right proportions and contacts
are useful. I benefit from my ability to experience anxiety and sadness and anger and envy and jealousy. All of those different responses They tune me into specific features of the situations that I'm encountering to help me manage them more effectively. Give you a couple of examples. Anxiety. Anxiety captures my attention and focuses it on a potential threat that is looming.
It's effectively telling me, hey, dopey, focus. You got to prepare for this thing. It's important. When I think back to some of the engagements that i've had that haven't gone as well as i would have hoped they're the ones that i felt zero anxiety about as a result i had no cue inside me To trigger me to focus and prepare. So I didn't take envy. We think of envy.
It's one of the deadly sins, right? Like, it's uniformly bad. It is not uniformly bad. Sometimes I look at someone who I'm envious of and that then provides me with a target to aspire to achieve what they have accomplished. Now I've got something I can shoot for. So I'm reframing that envy as a way of, it's a kind of North Star of sorts.
And you could play this game with all the different negative emotions we experience. They all have a functionality to them.
Well, there are lots of ways you could tap into hope if that's the target. Our ability to both strategically wield our attention, what we focus on, and then how we focus on it, whether we're reframing or not. I think those are two specific cognitive tools we possess that can be really helpful for boosting hope. And let me give you a couple of concrete examples because that's a little abstract.
Let's first talk about finding hope when...
things feel really bad and we're really sinking into the doldrums sinking into despair or we're finding ourselves really anxious or anger angry for that matter when we experience these big negative emotional states we often zoom in on them and what is driving them in that moment so we're focusing on the worst parts of the experience which makes good sense because what is one of the first things we're taught to do when we have a problem growing up
roll up your sleeves and deal with it, right? Don't avoid it. So that's what we often reflexively do when we're struggling with things. And it often perpetuates that negative experience. All of us, though, have had this experience that I'm going to describe probably millions of times, certainly hundreds of thousands, probably millions, depending on how old you are.
And the experience is as follows. And tell me if you disagree, John, like truly tell me if you disagree. we experience something and it triggers an emotion, that emotion activates. And then as time goes on, the emotion eventually begins to fade in its intensity. most of our emotional experiences follow that temporal trajectory, that time course.
They're triggered, they rise, and as time goes on, they fade. Some emotions rise more intensely than others, some fade more quickly, some take longer, but almost all of them follow that time course. Now, we lose sight of that in the moment, but
If you jumped into what I've called your mental time travel machine, and you ask yourself, how am I going to feel about this thing tomorrow, next week, next year, in 10 years when I'm dead? That is a powerful way of automatically making accessible the understanding that what you're going through is temporary. It will eventually fade. And when you have that recognition, It gives you hope.
It gives you hope that things are going to get better. And that can be a powerful bomb when we're struggling with negative things. You know, I worried about something happened just yesterday that I was having some second thoughts about, oh, crap, did I say the wrong thing? And didn't feel good in the moment or in the immediate aftermath.
And then I asked myself, how am I going to feel about this next week? Instantly, I was reminded of the fact, John, that I, Ethan Cross, have put my foot in my mouth tens of thousands of times. And that doesn't feel good in the moment, but it usually amounts to nothing. And instantly that turned things down. So that's one way of finding hope.
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