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
I'm pretty sure that when David is activating different voices, they're not always a very gentle voice that is encouraging him to take it easy and be kind to oneself.
Quite the opposite. Sometimes, yes. And sometimes, this is important, because negative self-talk is often equated with harmful outcomes. Negative emotions are functional when they are activated in the right proportions. Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective.
So if I go to when I'm exercising and I'm doing classes sometimes where coaches are telling me to do really painful things, like sometimes I'm pretty tough on myself. I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me, right? You know, you better like shape up, you know, you can't, you know, wimp out here. That serves a motivating function for me there.
So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per se. What is bad is if we start looping. That is what we really want to equate with chatter. It's getting stuck in those thought loops. That's when things get harmful, when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long.
Well, it goes a little bit beyond even just calming. So yes, there is data linking going for a walk in a beautiful setting with feeling better. But But scientists have actually gone even deeper to understand the various mechanisms through which interacting with green spaces and other kinds of environments can help us. And so there are two major pathways that I often talk about.
One is interacting with a green space can be cognitively restorative. So as we talked about earlier, when people get stuck experiencing chatter or other kinds of big emotions, our attention often fixates on the problem at hand. We focus really hard in trying to work through the problem, and that can drain us of our precious attentional resources.
Well, when you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, you're surrounded by interesting cues that capture your attention in a very gentle way. So I'm talking about the flowers and the trees, the scents, the sounds. Our attention often drifts onto those features of our environment.
Now, most of us are not doing the equivalent of carrying a magnifying glass and studying the geometrical structure of the leaves and the flowers, right? We're just kind of taking it in. But the surroundings are sufficiently intriguing to capture, to grasp our attention. And that gives us this opportunity to restore that precious commodity.
So there's work, there's a lot of work showing that going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be cognitively restorative. That's another feature that, or another mechanism through which nature exposure can help us. The other pathway that I just find so – this is so cool from a research point of view.
Going for walks in natural settings often elicit the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that just feels bigger than ourselves. So in the arboretum near my house, there are these trees that have been there for hundreds of years. And you look up at these trees and you think, my God, like –
You've been there way longer than me and my parents and my grandparents, and you probably will be there longer than all of my progeny. Like, wow, that just broadens my perspective. Or an amazing sunset. You can also experience this emotion through feats of innovation. So I'm a science geek, I guess you could say. And for me, the two biggest awe triggers are
Number one, the images of the galaxy that the latest telescope produces, which if you follow this, physicists have somehow figured out, engineers, how to take pictures of what the universe looked like billions of years ago. Somehow, I don't understand the physics. We can see what it looked like. This vast amounts of time ago.
And we also, of course, have the equivalent of an SUV currently roaming on Mars, sending us back footage of that planet. So when I think of that, like we've actually landed a vehicle on another planet. this vastly expands. Like I am filled with awe. So when we are experiencing something vast and indescribable like that, this is the ultimate perspective broadener.
So it leads to what we call shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, guess what else feels smaller? So this is an easy way of utilizing the world around you to powerfully manage your emotions. And so what I love about that work is it highlights the fact that there are tools that are just hidden in plain sight.
They're waiting to be harnessed. And if you know where to look, you can often find them. And nature, by the way, isn't the only set of environmental tools that exist. There are lots of ways that you can interact with your environment strategically to help you feel better. We often develop attachments to places, for example. So you're probably familiar with the concept of attachment figures.
So there are these figures from our childhood that we often, though not always, securely attach to. They are a source of safety and comfort, and they serve a powerful regulatory role in our lives and our partners. If we're in positive relationships, as I am, love you, as to my wife, she is an attachment figure for me. Well, we also develop these associations with places.
And so sometimes places can be the source of safety and comfort. Going back to those places during times of distress can be really rejuvenating. I know one person who discovered that there was infidelity in his relationship. And what really helped him get a grip on the situation was going back to his childhood home and sleeping in his bedroom at home.
That was the turning point that allowed him to reroute his ability to navigate his life. That's an example of the power of places to affect us. So how many times do we think about, hey, what are the places that are my emotional oasis, if you will, that I can go to when I need it? We can also structure our environments. Like you and I are both talking right now across the table from one another.
We don't have our cell phones out on the table. No, not for me, not even in the room. Not in the room for me either. If we did and we had it facing up, we would be distracted, but we're not.
This is not John Wick here.
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