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 other way of finding hope is to wield your attention onto things that are inspirations. So we do this often too, and this can be a kind of attentional deployment, right? Like if you're really struggling with something, try to find something in your life that is the source of hope. Something that just makes you really excited about the future and what lies ahead.
For some parents, this is their children, grandparents or children and grandchildren, business owners or employees. It can be hope for future accomplishments. There's an infinite number of things and ways we can find hope. And so that would be another tactic that people can use if they're motivated to do so.
well what a great question and i wish there was a one-line answer but there isn't so let me do my best so one thing i think that is important to keep in mind is that we human beings are meaning makers one of the ways we navigate the world is with this motivation to constantly make sense of the world in which we live we need to make sense of it because if we understand this world and the place we
occupy in it, that makes this world easier to navigate. And as a general rule, that's like a general guiding motivation for human beings. We want to be able to navigate the world easily. So if we have meaning and purpose and we feel like we matter, that's great. Things feel right and we don't have to, we could just focus on the task at hand.
Oftentimes, the times that people get stuck is when they can't find meaning.
don't feel like they matter when that happens it's like a giant red button is pressed in your brain that says stop pay attention figure out what's going on here so that you can start feeling like you do matter and have meaning so that we could get on with life the way it's supposed to be lived but we're for having trouble developing that sense of purpose and meaning we often struggle we can ruminate about things we can experience
complicated negative emotions like anxiety and sadness as well. So finding meaning is really important. Being able to manage your emotions when you're struggling to find meaning is also really important because We are challenged throughout our lives, whether it's a deployment under hostile conditions on the world stage or 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.
And that's really where the science of emotion regulation comes into play, because we evolved this extraordinary capacity to experience emotions. And remember, emotions are tools. They're useful. You want to be able to feel anxiety. to motivate action, to focus on the task at hand.
Anger, when you perceive that there's some transgression, some violation of your understanding of the world, and there's an opportunity for you to fix things, anger is a powerful little message that propels you to do that. These are useful, but they are often unwieldy tools. And the gift that we have also been born into this world with is the capacity to manage those emotional states.
So on the one hand, we evolved this wonderful brain that allows us to experience all these emotions and these different kinds of shades and textures and blends. But we also co-evolved all of these different capacities that we can harness to manage those emotions. And the key is accessing those tools that we possess to rein in those emotional responses.
And that's what I hope the book helps people do. Number one, simply introduce you to the tools that exist. And then number two, offer you some guidance in how you can use those tools. If we go back to the gym metaphor here, if you don't know how to work out, right? You just show up in a gym and you're looking at equipment like you can very well get hurt if you don't know how to use that equipment.
And the odds are that you don't just walk into the gym and you know how to seamlessly weave these different exercises together in a way that's going to dramatically improve your health right away. There might be some stumbling, some trial and error that you do in the gym and you find, oh, this is making me
My biceps a little bit bigger and my calves a little bit plumper, whatever you're trying to achieve. But it's not going to be the most efficient thing. I would argue that that is kind of how a lot of us navigate our emotional lives right now. We stumble on exercises. that sometimes work for us, oftentimes don't, sometimes even get us into trouble.
And the value of science here is that it doesn't, it's not can. Science provides us with a guide to introduce us to the exercises that are out there and to teach us how to begin to weave them together to help us achieve the emotion goals that we have. And that's, I think, the real opportunity.
I will do so on one condition, which is when this podcast airs, you subtly have this song begin to play in the background as we talk. I call them shifters. What is a shifter? If you think about a shift, we want to shift our emotions. We can shift them up or down or make them last longer or shorter. So then the question is, well, what are the shifters that are out there?
Well, the first one that is often overlooked is what I call our sensory shifters. Senses, sight, sound, touch, smell is just a few examples. These are very powerful tools for pushing our emotions around. And when I use the word powerful to convey that not only can they generate very different kinds of emotional responses, but they can do so relatively easily.
And what's remarkable to me about these sensory shifters is that we all are intimately familiar with them, but we often overlook them. So there's this one study that asked people, why do you listen to music almost 100%
of the sample indicated they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel emotional but then if you ask people last time you were anxious angry or sad what did you do to change the way you felt Between 10% and 30% use music as a tool. Just 10% and 30%, even though close to 100% of people readily acknowledge that music is a powerful modulator of their emotional experiences.
It's not just people out there in the world who don't often think about sensation as a tool to manage their emotions when they're struggling. It's this expert that you're talking to right now as well. I'm using that expert title a little bit jokingly.
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