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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I don't want my emotions being shifted in a direction that is contrary to my goals right before I go to bed. I am at a typically high velocity level throughout the day, starting with physical stuff and exercise to the cognitive stuff and the politicking and the science talks and all that stuff.
When I'm finally done going through my email at night, I want like a good hour of just total mindless vegetation. And it puts me in a wonderfully serene state to then slide into bed, jump into that mental time travel machine, like do the fantasizing or savoring, and then puts me to sleep. And so I really value technology there for helping me do that. And I think that is the counterpoint.
to having this high velocity kind of experience. I will often, when I teach, like sometimes I'll teach for like three hours. So it's equivalent to what we're doing right now. It is so unbelievably engaging and rewarding. And like, this is why I got into this business.
You're having great conversations and you're hopefully like changing the way people think about things, getting them to discover interest, all that good stuff. couple hours later when I come home, first of all, I need a little refractory period to switch out of work life into home life, which can often be challenging on the personal front because like my kids are just waiting there.
Well, my youngest kid is waiting there. My oldest kid is now in her room doing her own thing. But they want to play right away and I need some time just to decompress. But then once I do, I've got to lean further into that state. And so that's That is shifting and understanding how to shift. That's a different kind of shift.
But it is all about shifting our states to meet our goals and trying to understand how to do that well. And I think that is the subtext to everything that we are talking about here.
And there's actually a framework to help people do this that I really like. And it's interesting because you mentioned the military earlier. And there's a... a wonderful corollary.
And I haven't experienced this too often in my life where I see something in science that scaffolds onto a practice that another organization, in this case, the military, implements to help people, number one, identify what are their, in the context of what we're talking about, what are their emotion regulation goals? What are their shifting goals? And how do you
go from having those goals to bringing them to fruition. And so in the military, like special forces before they have complicated operations, they will often first think about, okay, what's our goal? What's the outcome we hope to achieve? Then what are the obstacles that we can anticipate that might undermine our ability to achieve that goal?
And they'll go around the room and, you know, the person in charge will like cold call Socratic style on folks. Like what is the... potential obstacle. And then for every obstacle that they identify, they come up with a very specific, if this happens, then we will do this. And they have multiple if-then plans for each of those different obstacles.
So if we go back to the research landscape, there's a technique called WHOOP. Have you ever heard of this? Okay. So WHOOP is an acronym, and I promised you I wouldn't use any acronyms, but this is a useful one. It's a mnemonic to remember something. So How do you go from knowing to doing?
Whoop is designed to help you do that because what it is explicitly designed to do is target each of the places where goal pursuit often breaks down. Step one, what's your wish? What's the thing you hope to accomplish? Let's be really clear about what that goal is. We often don't stop to even think about what our specific concrete goals are.
Now that we have that goal, let's give ourselves some opportunity to energize. What is the outcome we hope to achieve if we fulfill that goal? What that's doing is giving us this motivation now, really energizing us to pursue it even further. Okay, we've got the outcome, but now let's get realistic. What are the obstacles?
What are the internal obstacles that might prevent me from achieving those goals? So that's something I wish is to be more present with my family after work. The outcome that I hope to achieve is to be a better father, a better husband, to have a richer social life in those regards. Now, what are the obstacles? Okay, internal obstacles, I got plenty.
Like the temptation to check my email and get to inbox zero before the night is done. Or I love my science and I also want to do some of that work. Or maybe I'm going to get distracted by friends who call. All of those things are obstacles that might get in the way of me achieving the goal of being more present with my family. Now the final step, let me come up with an if-then plan.
If I'm tempted to check my email after 7 or 8, then I'm going to remind myself about how important it is to be a dad. So I'll do a little reframing. If someone calls after 9 p.m. and I'm engaging in activity with my kids, then I'm going to politely decline. And you can imagine coming up with all sorts of plans for different levels of sophistication.
What those if-then plans do is they try to make emotion regulation automatic because they identify a specific trigger and If, that's the if, if this happens, and then they pair that trigger with a response. If then, if then, you rehearse that. And this way, when the trigger occurs, boom. You don't have to stop and think, what should I do? How should I behave?
You've got the plan and you implement it. I've got if then plans for chatter. If the chatter strikes, then I do distant self-talk and mental time travel. If the chatter is too overwhelming and those two tools don't work, then I go to nature and I go to my chatter advisors. And so I have these if-then plans that are linked up with my goals.
And that's an important technology that I think we can invite people to try to exercise in their own lives to make it more likely that they will achieve their regulatory goals.
And in the research space, it's mostly been personal obstacles, but you can generalize out as the Navy SEALs do. As an example, that's the branch of the military I was referring to that essentially uses a similar kind of framework to – Now you have me self-conscious about using the word optimize. To optimize the way they respond to missions and challenges.
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