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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Like all of a sudden your stomach is churning, your palms are sweating, but in research, which shows like if you communicate to people, hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance you face, all of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame. And now, this is, I'm a Lamborghini, right? I am rising to the occasion.
My body's doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here. That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks. So step one is just recognizing if you experience intrusive thoughts at times, again, welcome to the human condition. It's a little blip in how our brain operates.
But a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful for nipping the repetitive thinking in the butt. So when you're curtailing chatter, you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating. The reason why we often perseverate on problems we're experiencing is we're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives.
And our brain, this wonderful problem-solving organ that we possess, it just keeps churning until we've solved that problem. And that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you get there. And so when you solve the problem, those thoughts tend to subside too.
That's right.
Well, just to that point, if I can interject. So just to normalize this further for folks. So my family is very special to me as it is to most people. When my first daughter was born, we used to live in this house that had this – on the second floor, there was a – I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass, but it was open to the floor beneath.
And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper or whatever, I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then – dropping her over into the, you know, and splat, like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the night. It speaks to this point that you are raising.
That was likely my mind's way of homing in on a really, really important issue in my life that I want to make sure never, ever, ever happens. It is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt or incredibly dark person.
Well, it certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing, but it also, as you alluded to, plays out in cognitive context. When there is this match, this sweet spot between the demands, like you're in a situation that is actually challenging, either physically or cognitively, and the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands.
So it's a taxing situation, but you are able to engage with it completely. That is the formula for getting... Stuck is the wrong word for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states, which are for many people, the goal that they have in their lives, both recreationally and professionally.
And so you as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests, I would hope and imagine, and that's always the aspiration, right? That must feel really good. I mean, you talk for a long time with people, right?
And that is because you are so absorbed in the moment and meeting the challenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that moment. And that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the chatter to percolate in the background. And so, you know, one often you might think like an ultra marathon or what's the correct term? Is that it?
And so that's a lot of time on the one hand to be alone with your thoughts, right? And you might think that might just be grounds for for experiencing chatter. But it's also a particularly challenging kind of physical feat that you have to devote a lot of resources to meeting those physical demands. And right, so that can propel you into a state of flow.
And then you get some runners high to boot, some like chemical boost to enhance your mood. And all of a sudden, now you have people running, you know, 130 miles. I'm exaggerating. How long is it?
Well, it's interesting that you say that because I actually engage in that exercise quite frequently. So I'm constantly reading for my job, right? If I'm not reading journal articles, I'm reading books for research that I'm doing, writing books. And- The way I do it is often through an audio form, and I will put the speed rate up to 2x. I'll often go as high as I can go on the app.
And I can retain a huge amount of information going that fast, but it does require that I'm very vigilant. I'm really carefully attending to that audio book when I'm moving at that speed. And so it's not what I would do on vacation when I'm trying to consume a book or information for fun.
There, I just want to kind of just gently go, let the paragraph kind of pass my gaze and take it in slowly and almost even savor the words on the page. But in other contexts, I do channel up the velocity and it can be incredibly engaging. It can also be depleting. So
When you have conversations that really you find immensely rewarding and cognitive philosophy, and I love that term, is a 10 out of 10. When you're done, do you ever find it a little tiring?
And you're more tired probably on those days, huh?
Cooking shows, prank reels. These are yours? These are mine. And like I am... You know, we often take for granted, too, that the TV in front of us is another emotion regulation device, right? And actually, people who are creating programs are deliberately trying to push your emotions in particular directions from the score that accompanies movies and the news. So...
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