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
And in fact, you get the opposite, plus usually like lawsuits as well.
Yeah, there's a beauty to it. And, you know, it is a tool. It is one kind of shifter that has to be obviously used in the appropriate context. All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for... I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions.
And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work to the extent that they believe you can regulate your emotions at all. We'll talk about that a little bit too, I'm sure. But, you know, self-control, emotion regulation, like let me roll up my sleeves and really kind of get in there.
Yes, it can at times be extraordinarily difficult to manage our emotions. And some of the tools that we have are effortful. One example would be expressive writing, this wonderful tool for working through problematic experiences. You sit down, just let yourself go for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days. This is the Pennebaker. This is the Pennebaker writing effect.
This is just a remarkably wonderful side effect-free, you could argue, intervention for helping you deal with curveballs that life throws at you.
We actually just re, um, restarted, uh, a prestigious speaker series at Michigan, the Katz Newcomb speaker series, which is, um, designed to honor luminaries in the field. And we actually kicked it off with Jamie coming to speak about his extraordinary work. Um, Because this is really a gift, I think, not just to the field, but humanity. And the but though here is that it's an effortful tool.
It takes 15 minutes to use. There is nothing wrong with that. Lots of things that we do in life are effortful. But we also know that We don't like exerting effort as a species. We like to conserve our resources as much as possible. So if there are easy things you could do as well, it's good to know about what those are. And these sensory shifters, music, looking at images, right?
These are modality, taste, touch. These are ways of pushing your emotions around pretty effectively for short periods of time that in a pinch, like when your daughter's not in a great mood or when you want to get pumped up before an important event, can be quite useful. And we often just go through our lives not recognizing how we can strategically harness them.
So that's my plug for sensory shifters.
Let's go back to just close the loop on the inner voice and the benefits that it provides. So we talked about Juve. Verbal working memory, keeping verbal information active for short periods of time. And we talked about simulating and planning things, like going over what you're going to say before an interview or an important presentation. Let's turn to... self-control and motivation.
So you exercise, because you've talked about exercising.
You ever talk to yourself when you exercise? Oh, all the time. So let's hear it. The world wants to know, Andrew, what do you say to yourself on your exercise?
But you have a very rich inner world, right? Your verbal working memory stream is filled with words when you are working out.
Well, you know, one of the reasons why the Pennybaker effect is believed to be so useful is because it imposes a structure on the stream going through our head, which is oftentimes not organized. And when you find that inner verbal stream going in the negative direction, so negative self-talk, so the chatter, right?
You're an idiot, such an idiot, or you're looping over a problem without making any progress. Putting those words in, actually taking that inner she-man and making a story out of it is essentially what the Penny Baker writing cues you to do. Because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences. There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking.
Up here in our minds, it's a free-for-all. It can go in all sorts of directions. And that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive.
Well, that's, I think, where the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality. So when we talk to people, there is a structure to the way we converse where we're not, if I were to just talk to you the way I pinball in my mind, you wouldn't be able to understand me and you would think I'm out of my bleeping mind, right? Because I would be unable to
have a meaningful conversation with you. So there's some research which shows that if you get people to think of, to recall a chatter-provoking experience, so think about something negative that's happened to you, and then you randomly assign them to just think about it and work it through in their mind versus write about it, so i.e.
a Penny Baker writing-like condition, or talk about it to someone else. The talking and the writing both do better in terms of how they feel when they're done as compared to the just thinking because there's no guardrails to the way we think. That we are taught, I should add, because we're going to give people guardrails later in this episode.
It's a useful practice and it's an underutilized practice. So we did two pretty large studies during COVID to look at how people... How are people regulating their emotions on a daily basis to deal with the anxiety surrounding COVID? And we gave them... a series of tools that they could check off if they used the tools that day. And we learned a couple of really interesting things.
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