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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And I think we all have those personal experiences or experiences in our family or our culture that you can anchor on to put what we're going through in perspective.
You want to keep the spotlight on the challenge that they endured compared to what you're dealing with right now. Right. And really use it as a source of motivation. Got it. Okay. Exactly. You don't want to slip back into, well, anything sets you off. That would defeat the purpose of that exercise. And if you find that doing that leads you into that territory, don't use that tool.
Use a different one.
And that's a really important take home for these tools. Different tools work for different people in different situations.
It can play a big role in a few different ways. So we already talked about your local environment, how the way you structure your environment, how organized it is, can affect what's happening between your ears.
There's also ways of putting things in your environment to trigger positive experiences like pictures of loved ones, which sounds so silly on the one hand, but we did this research years ago where we had people... Think about really painful experiences.
And we had them then look at a picture of a loved one or a picture of someone else's loved one to see what are the implications of looking at your, what we call attachment figure, someone you're really connected to.
And what we found is that looking at that person that you care about, this activates a sense that there are people in this world that support you, which sped up how quickly people recovered. From, from a distressing experience.
So after that research, I like went on a shopping spree for, um, picture frames and like my, my off, all of my offices have pictures of, of my family and friends all around it for that reason.
Helps put things in perspective. Correct. So that's one thing you can do. Okay. Green space exposure. I was a little hesitant to really buy into this when I first started researching this space. I come from A place we talked about before, Brooklyn, New York.
I like to remind people that one of the most famous books to come out of this borough or about this borough was titled A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Singular, right? So like there's not a lot of... There was not a lot of green space growing up and I'm a city guy. I find green space exposure to be quite profound in terms of how it impacts my emotional life. And there's been a lot of research on this.
And what happens is when you're stuck in chatter, it consumes your attention. It's the only thing you can think about.
When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, what happens is your attention is captured by your surroundings, but in a very gentle way. The sights, the sounds, the smells, like your attention just drifts on them. And what that does is it gives you this opportunity to rest and restore over the course of that walk.
So you finish it, you're feeling more rejuvenated, and you actually have more attentional capacity to work through your problems. So that's one way that your environment, in particular, green space exposure can help you.
Yeah, so a couple of things I want to point out. So number one, you said 13 minutes. You said it took about 13 minutes. And the way I interpreted you saying that, I was like, it took a while. But if you think 13 minutes is a while, how much time have you spent in that negative self-talk? 56 years. 56 years. I think 13 minutes is pretty damn good.
Like 13 minutes is probably quicker than the amount of time it takes for Tylenol to have its effect when you've got a bad headache, right? Like that is pretty magical. So we talked a little bit about how Nature can help us restore. That's one way it can help us.
Another thing that it does is it gives us the opportunity to experience 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. And nature is replete with those awe triggers, like the moon. It's so beautiful. And you're in Southern Vermont. I've been up there at times.
It's gorgeous up there.
When we experience this emotion of awe, what it does, it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self. You feel smaller when you're contemplating something vast and indescribable. Here you are, Mel, you're worried about this thing. I'm sure it doesn't almost feel legitimate. I'm sure it feels existential in the moment that you're having it. Yes. It's over. I'm over. The world is over, right?
Like, yeah, we've all been there. We know what it's like. Well, when you're in nature and you have this opportunity to experience, oh, it's just, it makes you and your concerns feel a whole lot smaller when you're contemplating the vastness. of maybe like the site you're in. I mean, you're probably walking somewhere, trees are alive for hundreds of years, right?
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