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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So they're not only dealing with internal obstacles, obviously, but also ones from the world around them.
That's right. And so it's a general framework, which in part is, I think, why it has so much value. And there's research behind this showing it can help people achieve various kinds of goals. Now, there, of course, will be many situations that you have not developed whoops for.
And that's okay because you're going to have all these other tools in your toolbox to manage those situations on the fly when they occur. But then once you encounter new situations and you discover what tools are effective, then you learn. You create your whoop. And then you can become more strategic, automatic, and effortless with how you engage them down the road.
Well, I think it becomes especially difficult to manage even one when you're experiencing an emotional episode that is essentially hijacking your attention. And attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons. So number one, As a species, we have the most sophisticated attention deployment system on the planet.
We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention so we can willfully place it on the things we want or yank it away from the things we don't want or we can saccade our attention back and forth.
When it comes to emotion though, we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic because they fall into the category of prescriptive advice about magic pills. So often we hear, for example, that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions, things that you're anxious about or fearful, you should not avoid the problem.
You should focus on it. And there's been a lot of research on this. And what we have learned is on the one hand, chronically avoiding things is It's not good. It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond our physical lives to our health.
But oftentimes, the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand. Deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break, and then come back to it. And so this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently.
My grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in Poland during World War II, had her entire family slaughtered during the war. One of these kind of devastating experiences, lived in the forest for years, back and forth, all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth. And growing up, she made it out of the war, moved to the States.
I remember being just so exceptionally curious about... what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it. And whenever I would ask her questions about this, she would always say, don't ask me why or what happened, why is a crooked letter?
That was a phrase she would use, which was really interesting because she didn't speak English very well at all, heavily accented language, but she'd mastered this curious idiom, like why is a crooked letter? In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things. Your life is awesome. You're in a safe place. You have a loving family. Just enjoy life.
So she's trying to shelter me. So she, for most of the time that I would know her during the year, she would never focus on this horrific event that she experienced, except one day a year where There would be this remembrance day and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about or I would listen to them talk about their experiences and the emotions would come out. So she would dose herself.
her exposure to the emotional information. Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention. She was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her, but at other times when it didn't serve her well, she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences.
And a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that This capacity to be flexible in how we wield our attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really, really useful asset. And so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing, a problem, or always avoid it, they aren't always true.
And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation, I mean the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surrounding it, is in being really facile in how we can deploy our attention.
Oh, I mean, our emotional lives are anything but straightforward, but we do have guideposts to steer us in how we deploy our attention. And so a couple of common heuristics that I like to use and describe to folks is, so let's say something bad happens. and you divert your attention away. You distract with a positive distraction, not a harmful distraction. And then the problem doesn't resurface.
Keep going. You don't have to go back in time. I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue. So my parents were divorced. And I dealt with the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life. And When I think about it now, I don't get upset. I understand why it happened. I love both of my parents. I've moved on. I'm well-adjusted.
But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak, and he will often bring it up. And when he does, I'm like, well, we don't have to talk about it. I'm actually totally fine. This isn't a source of ongoing distress. Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives. And when that happens...
That's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well. We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing. If, on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting, and we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting, that is then a cue, okay, well, let's focus in on it.
And then once you focus in on it, of course, there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience. Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation. So getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts.
Showing 921–940 of 968 · page 47 of 49
← Previous
Next →