Leading Neuroscientist: Turn Anxiety and Anger Into Peace and Power | Ethan Kross

Summary

Good Life Project Podcast Summary
Episode: Leading Neuroscientist: Turn Anxiety and Anger Into Peace and Power | Ethan Kross
Release Date: February 6, 2025

In this enlightening episode of the Good Life Project, host Jonathan Fields engages in a deep and transformative conversation with Ethan Kross, a leading neuroscientist renowned for his expertise in emotional regulation. Kross, the best-selling author of Chatter and Shift, shares groundbreaking insights into mastering emotions, turning negative feelings like anxiety and anger into sources of peace and power.

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1. Understanding the Role of Emotions [00:00 - 07:02]

Ethan Kross kicks off the discussion by likening emotions to software programs designed to help us navigate specific life situations. He emphasizes that while all emotions are inherently adaptive when experienced in balanced intensity and duration, problems arise when emotions become too intense or prolonged.

“Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter.”
— Ethan Kross [00:21]

Kross challenges the common misconception that living a good life entails avoiding negative emotions. Instead, he argues that emotions like anxiety and anger serve essential functions. For instance, anxiety signals important goals and mobilizes resources to achieve them, while anger can communicate boundaries and prompt corrective actions.

“Reframing those experiences as helpful can be a tremendous boon to our daily lives.”
— Ethan Kross [06:55]

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2. The Myth of Emotional Detachment [07:02 - 14:09]

Jonathan Fields introduces Eastern philosophies around non-attachment to emotions, reflecting on the aspiration to experience life without emotional turmoil. However, both he and Kross agree that emotions add richness to human experience and are integral to a fulfilling life.

Ethan Kross elaborates on the necessity of emotions, using pain as a prime example. He explains that without the ability to feel negative emotions like pain or sadness, humans would lack critical survival mechanisms and the capacity for deep emotional connections.

“Emotions carry information that is actually really important for us to make good decisions.”
— Ethan Kross [21:58]

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3. Emotional Regulation: Turning Emotions into Allies [10:46 - 21:58]

The conversation delves into emotional regulation—the ability to adjust the intensity and duration of emotions to align with personal goals. Kross introduces the concept of reframing negative experiences positively, which can transform how individuals perceive and respond to their emotions.

“Emotional regulation is about harnessing tools that exist within us and around us to achieve the emotion goals that we have.”
— Ethan Kross [10:53]

Kross also discusses common beliefs about emotional control, revealing that approximately 40% of adolescents doubt their ability to regulate emotions. He underscores the importance of understanding that while certain emotional triggers are uncontrollable, the way we respond to these emotions is within our power.

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4. Sensory Shifters: Utilizing the Senses to Modulate Emotions [42:28 - 46:42]

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on "sensory shifters"—strategies that engage our senses to influence our emotional states. Kross highlights music as a powerful tool, noting that while almost everyone listens to music for its emotional impact, only a fraction actively uses it for emotional regulation.

“Music is probably the sensory modality that is used most often for these regulatory purposes.”
— Ethan Kross [42:28]

Other sensory tools mentioned include touch, which can instantly elevate positive emotions through physical affection, and modifying one's physical environment to trigger desired emotional responses. Kross emphasizes the ease and accessibility of these methods, making emotional regulation more attainable.

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5. Attention as a Lever for Emotional Control [48:50 - 54:23]

Jonathan Fields shares a personal anecdote about managing migraines through shifting attention, highlighting the intricate relationship between attention and emotional experiences. Kross expands on this by explaining how strategically directing attention can either amplify or dampen emotional responses.

“Attention is determining what's getting into our brains. It's like our spotlight.”
— Ethan Kross [50:05]

He advises flexibility in attentional focus—knowing when to confront emotions directly and when to divert attention to allow emotional responses to temper over time.

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6. Shifting from the Outside In: Environmental and Relational Influences [55:27 - 66:38]

The dialogue transitions to external shifters, such as altering one's physical environment and leveraging relationships to influence emotions. Kross discusses how attachment to places and people can serve as anchors for positive emotional states. He provides practical tips on modifying one's surroundings to enhance emotional well-being, such as surrounding oneself with meaningful images or removing stimuli that trigger negative emotions.

“Changing your space is one way that you can leverage your surroundings to help you achieve the emotional states you want to achieve.”
— Ethan Kross [55:27]

Kross also introduces the WOP (Wish Outcome Plan) framework, inspired by Navy SEALs, which involves pre-planning responses to potential emotional obstacles, thereby making emotional regulation more automatic and less reliant on conscious effort.

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7. Personalizing Emotional Regulation Tools [66:38 - 69:51]

A pivotal point in the conversation emphasizes that emotional regulation is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Kross shares research indicating significant variability in the effectiveness of different tools across individuals and even within the same person over time.

“There are dozens of tools and we understand how they work. The real opportunity is to start experimenting to find the ones that work best for you.”
— Ethan Kross [69:38]

He encourages listeners to engage in self-experimentation with various emotion regulation strategies, reinforcing that discovering personalized tools is key to effective emotional management.

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8. Concluding Insights: Living a Good Life Through Emotional Mastery [69:22 - 71:46]

As the episode draws to a close, Kross and Fields encapsulate the essence of living a good life by emphasizing purpose, relationships, and contentment. Kross reiterates that emotional mastery involves understanding and utilizing both internal and external shifters to navigate life's emotional landscape effectively.

“Purpose, Relationships, Contentment. Having purpose and meaning to drive you, wonderful people to surround yourself with, and being content with what you have.”
— Ethan Kross [69:51]

Fields echoes this sentiment, encouraging listeners to adopt rituals and habits that make emotional regulation instinctive, thereby reducing the friction in managing emotions daily.

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Key Takeaways:

• Emotions are Adaptive: Every emotion serves a purpose when managed correctly. Negative emotions like anxiety and anger can be harnessed positively.

• Emotional Regulation Tools: Utilize sensory shifters (music, touch), modify physical environments, and manage attention strategically to influence emotional states.

• Personalization is Crucial: There is no universal method for emotional regulation. Individuals must experiment to find what works best for them.

• Pre-Planning with WOP: Creating contingency plans for emotional obstacles can make emotional regulation more automatic and effective.

• Holistic Approach to a Good Life: Purpose, meaningful relationships, and contentment are foundational elements that contribute to living a good life.

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Notable Quotes:

“Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter.”
— Ethan Kross [00:21]

“Emotional regulation is about harnessing tools that exist within us and around us to achieve the emotion goals that we have.”
— Ethan Kross [10:53]

“Music is probably the sensory modality that is used most often for these regulatory purposes.”
— Ethan Kross [42:28]

“Changing your space is one way that you can leverage your surroundings to help you achieve the emotional states you want to achieve.”
— Ethan Kross [55:27]

“There are dozens of tools and we understand how they work. The real opportunity is to start experimenting to find the ones that work best for you.”
— Ethan Kross [69:38]

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of how emotions, both positive and negative, play a crucial role in our lives. By understanding and applying the strategies discussed by Ethan Kross, listeners can transform their emotional experiences, leading to a more balanced and fulfilling life.

For those interested in further diving into emotional mastery, don’t miss Ethan Kross’s books Chatter and Shift, which delve deeper into the science and practical tools for managing inner mental chatter and emotional regulation.

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Produced by Jonathan Fields and executive producers Lindsay Fox and Troy Young. Special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research contributions.

Transcript

[Ethan Cross]

We have a range of different emotions we experience like for a reason. They are.

[Jonathan Fields]

Ethan Cross is a leading expert on controlling our inner voice and transforming mental chatter. He's the best selling author of Chatter and his new book Shift reveals groundbreaking tools for mastering your emotions. What do emotions actually do for us?

[Ethan Cross]

Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter. The problem is that sometimes those emotions get experienced too intensely or for too long. And that's really when you need. You know, Music is probably the sensory modality that is used most. Why do you listen to music?

[Jonathan Fields]

Because of the way it makes me feel.

[Ethan Cross]

It's interesting. It's not used nearly as often as you would think. So research shows that.

[Jonathan Fields]

Hey there. Before we dive into today's show, one quick thing. If you haven't yet followed the show, it would mean the world to me if you took just two seconds to tap the follow button on whatever app you're listening in. It helps us grow our Good Life Project community and continue creating the best possible show we can for you. And it ensures you'll never miss an episode. Now onto the show. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

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[Jonathan Fields]

Excited to explore the world of emotions with you. You and I touched bases a couple years back now when your last book, Chatter, came out, talking about one very particular way that our minds do interesting things to us. In your new exploration, it's really more of a broad exploration of how emotions work within us, how they affect us and how we regulate them, how we work with them, how we allow our emotions to work with us. One of my curiosities has always been why do we emote? Because nothing lasts in the human condition unless it serves a very particular role. What do emotions actually do for us?

[Ethan Cross]

So I'm a proponent of the belief that all emotions are adaptive when they are experienced in the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long. And when I say all emotions, I really mean all emotions. And I think that's an important message to share with people, in part because I fundamentally believe it to be true, but it also is a liberating message. One myth that I often come across is this idea that to live a good life is to live a life free of negative experiences of negative emotions. We could go through some of the big negative emotions we have. They serve a really useful function in our lives. Take anxiety. I call this in my book, the boogeyman emotion of modern day times. So many of us, right, we think about anxiety and instantly we think to ourselves, oh my God, it's the last thing I want to feel when I think about experiences I've had giving talks. I've given hundreds, maybe thousands of talks over the course of my career. If I think about the one or two that didn't go so well, they're the talks where I didn't experience any butterflies in my stomach a couple of days before. No anxiety whatsoever. What does anxiety do? It alerts us to an important goal that we have that is ahead of us, and it mobilizes resources within us to help us prepare for that goal. So anxiety, just a little bit, that can be really useful for motivating an appropriate kind of response. Take anger as another example. We often think of anger as a toxic emotion. And when do we experience anger? We experience anger when we encode some kind of transgression of our worldview, like something now has gone wrong. This is not the way I expect things to go. But there's an Opportunity for me to correct the situation, for me to right the ship. So my daughter, let's say one of my youngest daughters, they know they're not supposed to ride their bike. She knows she's not supposed to ride her bike without her helmet. If she rides her bike without a helmet, I might experience some anger in her presence, express that anger to her so she can see it. And that serves a function. It is, this is a very important situation that I care about, the safety of my kid, most important thing in the world, right? And now I'm displaying this emotion that is communicating to her that what she did was incorrect. And hopefully that's having downstream effects on her behavior. We evolve this capacity to emote for a reason. Different emotions are like loading up different software programs within us to help us deal with specific situations we encounter. The problem is that sometimes those emotions get experienced too intensely or for too long. And that's really when you need to know how to regulate them, which is what most of my work is focused on and my book deals with. But, you know, if you experience anger or anxiety or sadness or envy or guilt at times, welcome to the human condition, my friend. We all do. And reframing those experiences as helpful, I think can be a tremendous boon to our daily lives.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, I mean, I've always been curious about that. You know, there are some sort of Eastern philosophical teachings around non attachment, non grasping. And part of those teachings, and this may be my. Part of this may be my filtering, my overlay, is a non grasping to feeling a certain way, to a lot of what we would identify as emotion. You know, the ability to just notice at a certain thing is happening and coming up, allowing yourself to feel it and then allowing it to just move through you and not hold on to anything. So that you return to a state of, you know, what's often considered just sort of emptiness, a void, which I equate to a state that exists sort of like without emotion. And it's always been teed up as a bit of an aspiration to me. And I've never quite been able to wrap my head around that, in part because I think for the typical person, it's largely an impossible thing to ever experience, but also because I can't imagine wanting a life devoid of emotion. I mean, sure, maybe a little less anxiety, a little less angst, a little less of that side of it, but at the same time, there's so much. As you described, each one of these things serves a function that allows us to experience life in a richer way. And Then the other side of the emotional spectrum, we are like, oh, more. But even all of the diversity of emotions that we can experience. If I even try to imagine a life without them, both the highs and the lows, that doesn't feel like a life that I want to be in.

[Ethan Cross]

Agree. I'm very familiar with that argument. That kind of shooting for that even keel in this homeostatics point where you let yourself experience something and let it slide by. Sometimes I want to immerse the hell out of an emotional experience. When I am feeling joy out of something that just went really well for my family or my students or me. Like, immersing in that, that's the stuff that sometimes makes life worth living. I was out to dinner with some close friends, my wife and I, and some close friends the other day. We were laughing and sharing stories, and it was a fundamentally emotional experience. And it's one that stands out in my mind right now. I remember it even though it happened several days ago. Like, those are the moments that I want more of. I crave those. And so I think what we're talking about is a different view or goal that we're giving people potential for how to relate to their emotions and their emotional lives. When I experience a negative emotion, I don't just notice it necessarily and let it go away. That can work for some people. One big theme of my book is, if the way in which you are handling your emotions is working really well for you, keep doing it right. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. For most of us, the statistics and common experience would suggest there is some room for improvement, if not a great deal. What works for me. And this has been a real game changer for me. When I experience a little bit of anxiety, I reinterpret that as I lean into it. Well, this is my body. This is evolution gearing me up to deal with the situation at hand. This is an adaptive response. It shows I care, and it's allowing me to focus in on what I have to do. So I'm reframing this negative experience in positive terms. Now, that can be really energizing. So I'm not thinking, oh, what's wrong with me? That I'm having this experience. I'm thinking, this is what's right with me. Reframing them in those terms can serve a helpful function.

[Jonathan Fields]

I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. So when you use the phrase emotional regulation, what are we actually talking about here?

[Ethan Cross]

So we're talking about being able to turn the volume up or down on the emotions you're experiencing, or shorten or lengthen the amount of time we stay in those experiences. So intensity up or down, and duration shorter or longer, and how we want to get in there and skillfully deal with our emotions or regulate them is going to depend entirely on what our goals are. Right? So if you want to have the goal of maximizing this experience of joy, but maybe have it confined to the moment because you have to go and meet with a client in 10 minutes, then it's about just amplifying up, but not also extending it. And you could play that game for all of the different states that we experience. But that is fundamentally what emotional regulation is about. It is about harnessing tools that exist within us and around us. I mean, in our relationships with other people, in our physical spaces, in the cultures that we belong to, utilizing those tools to allow us to achieve the emotion goals that we have.

[Jonathan Fields]

So, and I want to get into some of those tools. But the question that's lingering as you lay that as like, okay, yes, and to what end?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, you know, different emotions have different consequences that we just discussed, like for our lives. If you find, for example, that an emotion is getting tweaked, let me give you two different kinds of examples. Let's say an emotion, anxiety, is not being experienced in proportion. It's too intense and it's lasting way too long. That can be enormously disruptive. Right? We're now having difficulty concentrating, difficulty sleeping. We're taking it out on our partner, and maybe we're getting some gastric distress as well. The end there, the purpose of regulation there is to constrain that anxiety response, reduce its intensity, and reduce how long it's lasting. We may not want to eliminate it altogether. If it's anxiety about something really important, you may want to still keep some vigilance active. But we need this to be a more proportional response. So that's one end. Let's go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Not about reducing intensity and duration, but amplifying it. The time I mentioned earlier when I didn't prepare for a presentation because I had no butterflies beforehand, that's an example where it probably would behoove me to be able to turn up a little bit of anxiety or a little bit of that anxious arousal to get me motivated. Right? To actually practice the presentation, to be able to perform well. So that would be an example of an instance where you'd want to turn on a negative response. Now we're just talking about negative responses. We could Also have the same conversation for all sorts of positive experiences, too. But the idea is that these emotions have implications for really everything that matters. Our ability to think and feel, our relationships and our health. And so we want to make sure that we're experiencing emotions in ways that lead to the ideal outcomes in those different domains.

[Jonathan Fields]

And the ideal outcome is going to be unique to the context, to the person, to the moment, to the circumstance. We do seem to still hold on so fiercely to this desire to, like, if you're like, oh, hey, listen, we can look at each one of these emotions and we can adjust the amplitude and the duration to make it optimal for our experience. I would imagine there's going to be a tendency for everyone to say, okay, so I know Ethan says that anxiety has a certain use, it's important to us, and anger has a certain use, and sadness has a certain use. But really, if I actually have the ability to reduce the amplitude and the duration of these, why not just reduce them all the way? How is that actually going to be destructive to my life?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, let's use the example of pain because it's a kind of emotional response, and I think it powerfully answers your question and makes a point. There are certain people that are born into this world, and they're incapable of experiencing physical pain. If you look at those people's lives, what you find is that they're not very good lives. Those people end up usually dying early. They die early because they put their hand in the fire accidentally, and there's no cue that tells them to pull it away. They start itching the mosquito bite and the scab that forms, and they keep doing it, right, because there's no cue to say, stop. You now have an open wound that can become infected. What makes these different negative emotions functional is the fact that they hurt at some level. Right? That hurt, that subjective experience of distress that accompanies different emotional responses is what is grabbing our attention and telling us to pay attention to this situation in a very particular way, that the emotion is driving. And so if you were to just get rid of those negative emotions altogether, the prediction would be, and even some data like I just discussed, is that this would probably not be a very successful life that you would live. And so it's going to be really hard to ever test that idea, because guess what? You can't get rid of every negative emotion. It is hardwired into us, this capacity to experience it. And so I think the more we can wrap our head around that, the easier it becomes to really embrace this notion that there's a role that negative emotions have in our lives. They're giving us information, information about the circumstances that we're in that we can use to live better lives. Let's take envy as another example. Like envy, we usually think of us as, isn't that the seventh deadly sin.

[Jonathan Fields]

Or something like that?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, right. It's like, you know, it's not a good one. Envy can lead us to, if experienced too intensely too long, lead to some negative outcomes. But you know what it can also do? It can be unbelievably motivating. Right? If you see someone who is outperforming you or out achieving you in some way that can have a motivating effect, a motivating consequence to lead you to strive harder to reach the goals that you have. So these emotional experiences, these negative experiences can be easily reframed in how we think about them in ways that I personally find exceptionally liberating. Because if you're telling me that hey Ethan, like, you really shouldn't be experiencing any anger, any sadness, any envy, like name your favorite negative emotion and then I experience those states, we all experience these emotions for a reason.

[Jonathan Fields]

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[Ethan Cross]

It does. And I think it also makes it much more challenging for us to live the lives we want to live because it compounds the negative experience. So take an example. That happens. True story. With my oldest daughter several years ago, she had one of her first really evaluative moments in school with a big test. And it was stressful and she started experiencing some real anxiety about it and she didn't understand what it was. What's happening? What's wrong with me? Sweetie, there's nothing wrong with you. This is your body doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing to help prepare you for the exam tomorrow to say, hey, we have a little bit more studying to do. That instantly changed the way she was relating to this experience she was having. This is not something that is wrong with me. This is how human beings work. Clearly, if the anxiety is too extreme too long, then we really want to intervene. But in the right proportions, this simple reframe often helps bring down the intensity of that response. You said something else that I want to just engage in because I think it's really important you raise this notion of having some agency with respect to the way that we relate to our emotions and our emotional lives. I think it's a really important point to harp on for a moment because one of the most eye opening experiences I had doing research was coming across an article. And I tell this story in my book that looked at people's beliefs about whether they can actually control their emotions. And the researchers basically surveyed a large group of adolescents and asked them a series of questions about do you think you can control your emotions? And about 40% of the sample said, no, I don't think I can control my emotions. That to me is astounding for a variety of reasons. The first of which is, if you don't think you can control your emotions, why would you take any steps to ever do so, right? Like, if I don't think there's anything I can do to lose 10 pounds or lower my blood pressure or improve my cholesterol levels, like, I'm not going to change the way I diet or exercise, right? Because why bother? Those are often effortful, take time, right? If I do think I can do it, then that should motivate me to take some action. And yet 40% of this sample did not think they could control their emotions. So as I break down in the book, there is good reason for that and I think it's worth just very quickly sharing with listeners. There are facets of our emotions that we can't control and parts of our emotional experience that we can, we cannot control. When an emotion is going to be automatically triggered, right? Like I was just in New York and I was in a cab. It was not a pleasant sensory experience. There was like heavy sense of body odor. You can relate. You lived in New York. This happens at times. Lovely driver, but wow, instantly there was a negative experience, a negative emotional response. A sensory mediated response was triggered. I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I engage with that emotion. Do I reframe it? Do I divert my attention elsewhere? Do I try to have another kind of sensory experience, you know, sniff some perfume or cologne to combat it? All sorts of things we can do to channel that emotional response in different directions to increase or decrease its amplitude or duration. So you can't control those automatically triggered feelings that are just part and parcel of living our lives, but you can control the trajectory of those experiences. I think that too can be a really liberating idea for people to just noodle on. Because sometimes, I mean, let me ask you, Jonathan, do you ever have a dark thought?

[Jonathan Fields]

Never, of course. Never. I mean, like, I had one back in 87, but back in it, you're.

[Ethan Cross]

You're a saint, a total saint. Well, I'll tell you though, that if that were true, which of course I know it is not, you would be an anomaly. I do this exercise with my classes when I hear Michigan. I did this just a few months ago. I asked about 60 students anonymously to indicate whether they had experienced a really dark thought over the past week. And then to tell me what those thoughts were anonymously, type it into a computer program that would allow me to then see these thoughts. Everyone has these dark thoughts and they are really heavy sometimes. They're about violence towards others, towards the self, dark sexual thoughts. Like, you name it, we saw it there. This mind of ours sometimes generates those dark thoughts and the feelings that accompany them. And that's a universal. So if you understand that, hey, if you experience a dark thought at times like, it doesn't mean you're a bad human being. It means you're a human being. And it's part of the way your brain is just working. It sometimes produces these wacky dark thoughts. But if you act on those thoughts, then that's a different story because there Are ways of engaging with them or not?

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, I mean, it's such an important point. I'm glad you teased that out. It's almost like the way that so many of us react to anxiety, creating a spiral. It's like something happens, it makes us anxious, and then we basically start thinking about our own anxiety and we create this spin cycle where we shame ourselves for feeling this way. We shouldn't feel this way. There's something horribly wrong. How can I not let go of this? And we keep giving fuel to this feeling based on our beliefs about what it's actually telling us, or whether it's good or bad, or whether it's normal, normal or abnormal. It's interesting to hear you describe the role of our beliefs about our emotions and how they contribute to the amplitude and the duration potentially of those emotions.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, there's a reason why the second chapter of the book, Before I Talk About Any Tools, deals with precisely this issue of beliefs, because it is the starting point. My advisor, I remember in graduate school, one of the first things he taught me was, look, we can break down emotion regulation into two parts. Really simple. There's your motivation. Do you think you can do it? Do you want to do it? And then the tools that exist to help you achieve those goals, if you're not motivated, like we just said before, you're not going to use any of that. You can know all the different. Let's use physical exercise as an analogy here. I could know how to use every machine in the gym. If I'm not motivated to lose weight, if I don't think I can do it, I'm not going to avail myself of those tools. The flip side, though, is I can be super motivated to get fit. But if I don't know how any of those tools, those machines work, not only am I going to be unsuccessful in achieving that goal, I may actually harm myself. Right. I may, like, try to, like, you know, I don't know. I'm going to make something up here, but, like, bench press with my neck and sprain something or, you know, whatever. That was probably not the best example. I had the open terrain there. To do something funny, you need both. You need the beliefs that you can do this. And science compellingly shows that we possess this capacity to manage the trajectory of our emotional responses. We have, like, sophisticated brain networks that evolve to help us do this, to transform our emotional experience by redirecting our attention on or away from what's driving those emotions, to reframing those experiences, to transporting ourselves in time to Allowing us to find the right people to talk to. It's remarkable the array of tools we possess to be able to modulate our emotions. And so just conveying that to folks, I think, is just really important.

[Jonathan Fields]

That makes a lot of sense to me. My question that brings up for me then is, if we take that 40% of people that you described who answered, like, actually don't believe that I have the ability to in any meaningful way control my emotions, how do we bridge the gap, the belief gap? Because as you described, there are a whole bunch of tools, you lay out a whole bunch of tools that we're going to drop into shortly that are really effective and that are highly accessible and often don't cost anything. These are things that people can do. But if you're in that 40%, somebody's listening to this right now, and they're saying, I've been feeling this way. I've been flying off the handle. I've been deeping into this since literally for as long as I can remember. I've done all the different things. I've tried X, Y, and Z. And I'm just at a point where I literally do not believe that it is possible for me to in any way, shape or form regulate my emotions anymore. And then you're sitting there on the other side of conversation saying, I am sitting on top of a vault of tools that I know will help you. What's the shortest path between that profound disbelief and somebody even believing just enough so that they're willing to try one of them to let their own experience start convincing them? Or is that, in fact, the thing that starts to open the vault for them?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, two answers to that very good question. So, first of all, I think it's not that the 40% who say they can't control their emotions are wrong. You know, I think people focus on different facets of our emotional experience when they're answering that question. So the people who are sometimes saying, you can't control an emotion, they're really focusing on this emotional trigger. I can't control the emotions I experience. When I'm walking down the street and, you know, someone insults me or I smell something that's aversive, like, I can't. I have no control over that. How can you make the claim that I do? Whereas the people who are saying you can control your emotions, they're the ones who are thinking about, well, you know, if I'm in the smelly cab, I can do this. I can pinch my nose or see the person who just gave me a scowl and think, oh, well, maybe they're having a bad day. Like, maybe they, you know, just got some really bad news. So I think it's not that one person is right, one group of people is right and the other is wrong. It's that we're focusing on different parts of our emotional experience. Let's say there's some skeptics that fall through the cracks and still don't believe there's anything they can do to manage their emotions. Give them a piece of chocolate. Put on some, you know, Bon Jovi or Adele, have him sniff some perfume. What's the shortest way to showing that we can have some agency and our ability to modulate our emotional experience? Activate the senses? Part of the way that our senses operate is through emotion. I mean, why do you listen to music, Jonathan? What's your favorite kind of music?

[Jonathan Fields]

Probably classic rock.

[Ethan Cross]

Classic rock. Why do you listen to it?

[Jonathan Fields]

Because of the way it makes me feel.

[Ethan Cross]

The way it makes you feel.

[Jonathan Fields]

Faster access to a feeling. For me.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right.

[Jonathan Fields]

Than the right music.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. And if you ask people this, which many researchers have, about 96 or so percent will say exactly what you said. So why do you listen to music? I like the way it makes me feel. So you want to fast track to showing you can change your emotions around. Like, that's how you do it. I have songs on my phone that are designated for different kinds of moods. Like, I can get pumped up really fast. Some of it is cliche and it'll make listeners think much less of me. I'll share it. Nonetheless, if you want to pump me up like you go into some rock and roll, even verging on even some. I was. I'm a big Yankees fan. One of my favorite players of all time is a guy by the name of Mariano Rivera, who you, no doubt. Are you a baseball fan? Anyway, this guy, we always come greatest closer of all time. So if the team was down or was up and the manager wanted to just end the game with a win, they put him in and he always approached the mound. To mentality, to zenter the Sandman. You put that up, I feel like I'm ready to conquer the world. And I have songs like that that can get me going. And I have songs that can bring me down. One very powerful way that people can just experience some agency with respect to our emotional lives. Now, those effects fleeting right after the music goes off, our emotions often return to where they were before. But nonetheless, they demonstrate. There are things you can do to Push those emotions out.

[Jonathan Fields]

And it's certainly. It's one of the levers that I throw pretty regularly in my own life when I want to feel a particular way. And interestingly, it's also, you know, I will listen, you know, like, if I go, like if I'm listening to U2 from the 80s or the 90s, it gives me a very particular feeling that's lost in some sort of transcendent type of moment or experience. But I might also listen to Leonard Cohn because I actually want to feel a certain kind of deep melancholy because I may just be in a space where I'm just like, I really want to. I want to drop into my heart for a moment. And it's powerful. So it works on both ends of the spectrum.

[Ethan Cross]

Totally. Let's talk about that. That's another great example of how negative emotions can have some functionalities. We tend to experience sadness when we experience some loss that we can't replace. Right? Like we lose someone we love or we screw up in a way that we cannot fix. When we experience sadness, a few things happen. First, there's this kind of slowing down of our physiology. There's this also this motivation to withdraw and be introspective, to turn our attention inward. Why? To make sense and meaning out of this new circumstance that we're finding ourselves in. Like something happened. We cannot fix this situation. We can't replace the loss. We gotta now reframe how we're thinking about ourselves and the world around us to make sense of this new reality. So we need some time to do that introspective work.

[Jonathan Fields]

But.

[Ethan Cross]

But. And I love this feature of sadness. You know, go to when you're in that kind of darkish state, right? You're not feeling great and you're withdrawing. That could be dangerous if you pull too far away. So what does evolution endowed us with? A sad facial expression that is like a lifeline that broadcasts to those around us, hey, don't leave this person alone. Check up on them. Now, some people use this to their benefit. And yes, daughters, I'm talking to you like my daughters. If I'm sometimes upset, they'll just put on the sad face. You know, it's like an exaggerated lower lip gets. And even though I know it's being deliberate, it still instantly melts me. And that's because we are social species. We are highly attuned to the emotions of other people. So there's a functionality to sadness. And you can use music to go deeper into that state. So there's this effect called the emotional congruency effect, which is when we are experiencing certain emotional states, we often seek out experiences to match those states. So we're in a sad mood, we're going to want to listen to some sad music. Nothing wrong with that. If you're feeling sad and you don't want to feel sad anymore, that is a cue that, hey, maybe you shouldn't listen to the Leonard Cohen and you should go listen to Journey instead.

[Jonathan Fields]

I mean, it's interesting also, as you're describing them, thinking of the phrase a good cry. And it's interesting that phrase exists because you're kind of saying, okay, so there's actually. There are times where you just feel heavy or sad and you're carrying something. And there's something in us that knows that if we just push it, if we just move into the point where we have this physiological response like crying, that also it creates a release mechanism that almost gives us access to then move out of it, to process our way through it and then move into that state of I feel differently now. But it's like we had to tip ourselves into it almost to get that extra physiological response to sort of release us into a better place.

[Ethan Cross]

It makes total sense to me and it makes me want to ask you, how does having that insight change the way you experience sadness? Does it make it a more acceptable experience to have?

[Jonathan Fields]

I'll answer. From my perspective, I don't necessarily shy away from the heart experiences or emotions. So it doesn't sort of meaningfully change the way I would process it. Because I'm okay going there, actually.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Fields]

And I'm okay crying. I'm okay actually feeling all the feels because I also feel like to try and regulate them to the point where I'm not feeling them. It doesn't mean that whatever the stimulus that evoked them in the first place is not in some way going to find its way out in my body. And often that is through other emotions that are equally hard or through physiological harm, as you described earlier in our conversation. Maybe it's going to show up in GI distress. Maybe it's going to show up in pain. Maybe it's going to show up in inflammation or an illness. And that has happened in my past and probably will happen again. I think what I've tried to learn over time is that I actually need, in order to be healthy physiologically, psychologically, but also physically, I actually need to feel all these things and I need to own them and I need to fully feel them, because they're not going to just Go away. They're just going to find another way through me. And oftentimes that way is going to be much more destructive.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So that attitude, a very evolved one. And it's. I would describe it as you through a. I mean, it would be interesting to learn how you got to this point and when you did, based on what kinds of experiences. But you're working with the machine that is you, rather than against it. When we talk about these sayings that, you know, suggest to people that you should aspire to, never experience negative emotions or another one of my favorite, you know, directives, always be in the moment or never avoid pain. Always approach it like these are impossible directives. We're giving people goals, and we're telling them they're really important that they cannot possibly accomplish. And that, I think, is a huge problem because you are setting people up for failure from the very beginning when there are better goals to have. And I realize better can sound judgy, but I'm saying this based on what I know of how emotions work. Like, they can be useful in the right dosages. So I think your view is enlightened.

[Jonathan Fields]

So let's drop into what we kind of. We backed our way into actually the early part of a conversation around what you describe as shifts. Like these are like, mechanisms or tools to be able to actually in some way navigate the amplitude and the duration of these things that we're feeling so that we can experience them, but also experience them in a way that actually feels better to us. That feels like, okay, I can deal with this. I'm okay with this, and maybe I can even find value in it. You talk about in the early part of this, you kind of divide into shifting from the inside out as the starting point. And sensory shifters is this huge mechanism. We talked about it in the context of music, but just more broadly. Describe to me what is a sensory shifter.

[Ethan Cross]

A sensory shifter is when you are activating your senses, which have these powerful connections, neurologically speaking, to emotion networks in our brain. You're strategically activating your senses to generate a desired emotional response. So, in English, what do I mean? You want to feel happy. You are firing up music that makes you feel happy. You want to feel a little bit more sedated and calm. You're putting on maybe some classical music or the music that helps you achieve those goals. Music is probably the sensory modality that is used most often for these regulatory purposes. Though it's interesting, it's not used nearly as often as you would think. So research shows that most people like, almost at ceiling. 96, 97% of people, when asked across studies why you listen to music, they say they like the way it makes them feel. But if you then look at what they do to manage their emotions when they're experiencing really big ones, 10 to 30% avail themselves of that sensory modality. We all have this kind of experience of listening to music. Like, I was just at a concert a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, oh, my God. People have paid collectively millions of dollars to just have their emotions be regulated for three or four hours. This was just an emotion regulation event. Everyone's happy for most of it. There are a couple of sad songs that were played. But I talk about this in the book. Even for me, as someone who has studied emotion for 25 years, I have often lost sight of earlier in my life, of the role that the senses play in impacting our emotions, that they are a tool that can be strategically levered. Like, when I go into the car now, I look at the dashboard and I don't see, you know, I guess we wouldn't call it a radio, but we call it a device for activating playlists. Like, I see an emotion regulation tool that I can move my emotions around and everyone in that car, depending on what channels I select, right? What playlist, what songs I put up there. And so it's a tool that's right there. It is so easy to use, and I don't think we use it frequently enough. Another just to give you one more powerful sensory tool is touch. You know, an affectionate embrace has been shown to generate positive feelings pretty automatically. If it's an unwanted embrace, it actually leads to the opposite regulatory outcomes. Right. It can lead to a kind of cringe, get away from me. Touch is the first sense to develop. We are a tactile species. And so if I'm not having a great day and, you know, my wife comes over and, you know, just kind of gives me a hug or rubs my back, like, there's an automatic regulatory effect that has, and it's one that I can leverage as well to help other people, you know, and clearly we need to give all the caveats about, you want to do this judiciously, you don't want to haphazard touch people at work. Like, that would not be a good thing. But let's not kid ourselves. We're a tactile species, right? And so you can leverage that sensory modality as well. So those are just two examples, but we see similar data linked with the other sensory modalities vision, hearing, scent as well. These are all gateways for relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions. And I threw in that relatively effortlessly there for a reason. We know that human beings, we don't like to do things that are hard. This is true for all of us. There's a law of least effort that characterizes us, and there's good reason for this. We have limited resources. We're always trying to preserve our cognitive or thinking resources. And so the easier something is to do, the more likely you are to do do it. These sensory modalities aren't necessarily going to help us fix the giant problems we experience, but they can nudge us in the right emotional directions. Being aware of that, I think is really important.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like the speed of action for the sensory shifters is. It can often be so fast, you know, that maybe it's just like the match that just kind of like immediately starts to shift us into something and maybe then we have to do some work to sustain it or to change or to add exactly to it. Yeah. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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[Jonathan Fields]

Thanks.

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[Jonathan Fields]

One of the other shifters that you talk about under this category of inside out is also attention, which I've always been so fascinated between. The relationship between attention and emotion and what we feel you brought up earlier in the conversation. Pain and attention have always had a really strong relationship to me. And I learned years ago. A million years ago, I owned a yoga studio in Hell's Kitchen, New York. And I also have migraines. I had migraines my entire adult life. I had to teach a class. So 6, 30, 50 people are piling into a room that just had a hard day. It's my job to show up and give them everything that I can for 90 minutes. And there were times where I would show up and you're like, I've got a raging headache and I don't know how I'm going to do this. I step into the room and I sit down and everybody's just sitting there. And all of a sudden my attention shifts from me to these 50 other beings who I'm in service of in the moment that we're in together. And for the 90 minutes the pain drops away and then when the last person leaves the room, it comes back, you know. And so I really began to explore like the relationship between attention and felt experience, like whether it's physiological or emotional, psychological. And you know, you speak to this and I think it's such a powerful lever for us.

[Ethan Cross]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, attention is determining what's getting into our brains, right? Like it's what we are, how we are. It's like that is our spotlight. And what you put the spotlight on is that what you are going to then focus on. And what's interesting about attention is that it's often talked about in very non nuanced ways. We've learned a couple of things over the past few decades about attention and emotion that suggest that maxim is not true. So here's what we know. We know that chronically avoiding problems. So if you have this rule that you should always avoid things, this is not good. This can lead to negative outcomes and does over time. At the same token, like chronically attending to every source of pain possible. Probably not a good idea either. And probably going to elicit lots of mental chatter too, if you're just always zooming in on the problems that are in front of you. What seems to be the most effective strategy is being able to be strategic in how we deploy our attention. Being flexible, being able to engage with negative feelings. At times when it's useful and productive, like when we do need to solve a problem and work through it and learn from our experiences, focusing on the problem, wielding our attention to it can be very helpful. But at other times, sometimes getting some mental space away from the problem can be really helpful because what it allows to happen. Let's say I distract like you did, you distracted by focusing on other people. If we're dealing with an emotional experience, time often tempers our emotional reactions. Like, you know, we often say time heals all wounds. It's a pretty powerful effect that time has on many of the emotional trials and tribulations that we experience. And so you getting some time away from a problem, it is remarkable how when you then come back to that problem later, sometimes it's just not even there. And in other cases it's there but in a less intense form where we can engage with it more effectively. I'll give you an example from my own life. You know, just last night there was something that, you know, it was very. It was a long day and I didn't have probably as many resources cognitively as I do when I first wake up and I'm fresh and I thought about something and it was beginning to get me anxious, like, oh my God, did I screw this up? And for a little bit, I started to focus on it, to really get to the bottom of it, to see if I had screwed up. And I found that the more I focused in on it and zoomed in, the bigger the problem seemed to be. And then I purposely taking a page out of my book, no pun intended, I diverted, I positively distracted, I strategically avoided and said to myself, I'm not going to come back to this until tomorrow. And so I engaged in a positive set of distractions. I played with my kids. I watched some funny clips on social media which consumed my attention. I talked to my wife and lo and behold, guess what happened this morning when I woke up.

[Jonathan Fields]

Jonathan, it was magically dealable or gone.

[Ethan Cross]

It was gone. It wasn't even there. Whereas 12 hours earlier, it felt like one of the biggest problems I had ever encountered. And so that's an example of the power of being able to strategically divert our attention on or away from things can be really useful. Now, we don't tend to teach people how to strategically deploy our attention. We just give them these maxims, work through it, don't avoid. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard over the course of my life and career, you should never avoid talking about this or focusing on this. Always confront the problem head on. Sometimes confronting is really good, other times, move away from a little bit and come back to it. That kind of flexibility seems to be the name of the game. And so there are these, like, rules that I try to flesh out in the book of when to avoid, when to approach, when to go back and forth that we've learned from the science over time. And I think that learning about what those contingencies, what those rules are, it almost gives us a playbook for how to steer our attentional spotlight in ways that can be productive.

[Jonathan Fields]

So agree with that. And I think that having those rules, having that sort of basic guidelines that say, okay, I have a better sense for when to step in or when to step out. I want to switch out into some of the more external things that you explore as well. And you describe this as shifting from the outside in. And one of the things that you talk about is physical environments. I thought this was really fascinating because I'm somebody who's also really strongly affected by both my immediate physical environment and also geographically where I am and have found that they have a really strong effect on whatever I'm feeling in any given moment in time. This kind of combines with the internal. Because it's oftentimes when you shift your physical environment, you're also probably making a change in your attention and the senses. It's hard to kind of tease this out and just control for only one of these. So if I'm stressed about something and I'm getting a little anxious about it, I actually need to get up, I need to get out of my office. This, and I need to be outside. And, you know, the change in the physical space around me often is really powerful, at least for me. It tends to be fairly immediate and very.

[Ethan Cross]

Oh, well, you're not alone either. I mean, this is a very powerful shifter. And there are a couple of different ways it works. You already described one set of properties that characterize it. Like when you change your space, your inputs are different, so your attention is focused on different things. Your sensations are different too. One of the most popular spaces that can have emotionally restorative effects for people is going out in nature. When you go out in nature. Now all of a sudden, you're not necessarily looking at a computer screen, but you're looking at your surroundings. You have sights and smells and sounds that are often pleasant. You can sometimes also be in a place that is filled with grandeur that makes you feel, wow, this life seems a little bit bigger than just me. These trees have been here for hundreds of years, and I'm worried about this little episode that didn't go well with a guest. So they can help also shift your perspective, which is another internal shifter we haven't talked about. Places also have meaning to us in a deeper sense, almost. So, Jonathan, where are you from? New York originally.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yep. Long is a little island water town called Port Washington.

[Ethan Cross]

Okay, Port Washington. Did you like where you grew up or not like where you grew up? Yeah, loved it. And so I bet that if we were to magically drop you back into Port Washington, you would instantly be filled with positive, warm feelings. Is that a fair thing to say?

[Jonathan Fields]

Probably. Except for a few, like, days, a minute or so.

[Ethan Cross]

Right. Well, I'm saying right now, if you took you. Yeah. I think middle school would not elicit positive feelings from. For most of us, we often talk about the attachments that we form to other people. Right. We develop these kind of secure attachments to our partners, hopefully our parents, hopefully, where they become a source of emotional salvation and strength for us. Right. Their mere presence makes us feel better. Well, what we also know is people develop attachments to places. And so if you know what places you are positively attached to, maybe it's a place you grew up, maybe it's green spaces. Simply being in those spaces can elicit positive feelings. Now, we can also develop negative attachments to places as well, in the same way that we can develop negative attachments to. To people. So I grew up not too far from you in Port Washington, maybe, I don't know, an hour drive away in Brooklyn, New York. And the neighborhood that I grew up in was a neighborhood that I never really loved. It was a rough and tumble place with fights and muggings and things like that. And I was always on guard. If you put me there now, I would have a negative response. I say this because I think it can be useful to think about what are the places in your immediate and broader environment that you have those positive attachments to. If you can, like, think about what those are really carefully, you could be proactive in how you visit those spaces when you may be struggling. So here in Ann Arbor, I could tell you it's the arboretum, it's the law school. Quad, it's Huron Park. These are places where I go to them. I instantly feel better. So changing your space is one way that you can leverage your surroundings to help you achieve the emotional states you want to achieve. The other thing you can do is if you can't change your space, which we can't often do for various reasons, you can modify the space that you are in. And that's another way that you can shift your emotions. You can modify your space to activate emotional responses that you desire. For example, on the sides of me and flanking the computer, you can't see there are picture frames all around me. They're just not back there. I don't look behind me very often. There are picture frames of people I love. And research shows that glancing at those picture frames, that instantly activates thoughts, memories of those individuals, and it activates positive emotional states that can help repair negative responses. So I've modified my space to surround myself with cues that are capable of helping me repair when I'm struggling. Pictures of plants or real plants also have been linked with other kinds of positive responses. So those are ways that you can modify your space to activate a desirable response. You can also modify your space to eliminate the activation of undesirable emotional responses. And the story that I give somewhat tongue in cheek in the book, but it's true for me, coming from New York, I don't know if the same is true for you, but my weakness is pizza, and the colder it is, the better. And it doesn't matter what my cholesterol looks like or what time of the early morning it is. If I see that slice in the fridge, it is activating an emotion, emotional response that is going to drive me to consume it, and then I'm going to feel terrible as a result. And so if we have a party and we have people over and I've got a couple of extra pizza pies and they go in the fridge, One thing I can do to eliminate the likelihood that I'm going to be tempted. An undesirable emotional response. Give the pizza away. Right. Like, get. Modify my space so I'm not actually triggered by it. People who are struggling with addiction are often told not to visit old haunts because the mere sight of those places can activate these undesirable responses. So this is a way now of structuring our physical spaces to help us achieve our regulatory goals.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I imagine that for a lot of folks, even things as simple as lighting and temperature make a real difference. I know for Me, lighting is actually, is a huge thing. If I'm kind of getting a little ornery and cranky and I'm really like, oh, wait a minute, the sunset. It's actually really dark in my studio. Let me just turn on the lights. And it's like, oh, wow, light in the world is better.

[Ethan Cross]

Light is huge, temperature is huge. And these are also sensory experiences. And so it's all connected. And you know, like, my hope is with this book is to break these down into bite sized bits so that people understand how you can be really strategic in pulling these different shifters to push you in the directions you want because they can have really positive effects.

[Jonathan Fields]

Yeah, I mean, no doubt you under that same outside in. You also explore relationships and the broader culture and the impact that this has. And you also drop into, as you wrap up the conversation in your book, you drop into a conversation around how can we take the decision making process out of a lot of these things? So it's like these go tos just become our go tos. These shifts become the levers that we don't have to take our time and think and then make happen. But they're just like, this is what happens when I feel X, I do Y. I feel like if we can get to that place, not with all of them and not with all of our emotions, but if we can at least start to dip into creating the rituals and the habits where you just kind of, you don't have to think about it. You just, oh, I'm feeling this. Like, here are the two things. It's like that it takes one major friction point away and we're so. Yeah, like the slightest bit of friction seems to derail people so easily. I'm raising my hand right here. It's just if you can remove those friction points and almost automate the process of like, this is what, what I know to do now. It can be transformative.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, and we can, you know, so I talk about there are these technologies, these simple steps that we can take to make emotion regulation automatic. And I lay this out in the book, right? You. It's called Whoop. Like, you know there it is, right? It's actually, you know that song.

[Jonathan Fields]

Of course I do. You're referring to Gabby Utenson's work instead.

[Ethan Cross]

Yes, exactly. I was disheartened because when I the song, you know, I was so excited to use that in a very cheesy way as a subheader in the book. But the actual song is titled Whoomp with an M. Not just Whoop, kidding Yeah. So people often ask me, do I ever struggle with emotions? You know, I run a lab. I've spent 25 years studying this. I'm author, I'm an authority in this area. And, you know, I. I usually pause. Of course, I sometimes struggle with my emotions, like, sometimes they can get the best me. But here is where I really excel. And it is a testament to the value both of the tools that I talk about and this issue of how to make the usage of those tools reflexive, automatic. I'm really good at the moment. I detect an undesirable emotional response brewing and becoming too big. I know exactly which tools I'm going to go for. So there are like two or three things I do instantly. 40% of the time, 50% of the time, that's it. It helps me deal with the situation. I'm back on track. Another 20% of the time, I've got to layer on a few additional tools and, you know, 15% more, a few others. And then that 5% of the time where, like, I don't know what the hell to do. But the idea here is I have plans that I activate to help me reach the desirable end states that I seek to attain. And more often than not, that helps. And it turns out, like these ways that we know to make emotional regulation automatic, these are frameworks that people in many other industries use to be successful. This is one of the most successful organizations in the world at what they do. And the way they do it is ahead of time. They think about, all right, what's my desired outcome? What are the potential obstacles I might encounter? Now let me come up with plans to address those different potential obstacles. If this happens, then I'll do this. If this happens, then I'll do that. If this happens, I do this and it doesn't work, then I'll do that. You do that enough times, you don't have to think about what to do if some calamity strikes. You know exactly what to do, and you do it automatically. That is the opportunity that I think exists for everyone.

[Jonathan Fields]

Makes so much sense. And by the way, you just walked us through that when you first shared wop. WOP is actually an ACKERMAN acronym, W O P, which shorthand for wish outcome, Obstacle Plan, which is an approach that you just described and Navy seals took. And there's also really interesting research around goal achievement with this technique. And it's like when you actually identify the potential obstacles in advance, you kind of know. And oftentimes they're the internal obstacles, the emotions the feelings that pop up, the gremlins. And you're like, if this happens, this is my plan. When you do that in advance, it's so much more likely to actually happen and won't derail you.

[Ethan Cross]

Exactly.

[Jonathan Fields]

You can feel it and move through it because you know what to do in advance. You don't have to sit there trying to figure it out when you're then presently dealing with the emotion itself and how it's affecting you.

[Ethan Cross]

Thank you.

[Jonathan Fields]

I think the final point here I wanted to ask you about, and I think it's probably become pretty evident here, is that while you list out a whole bunch of different go tos like internal and external shifts that we can all explore, that there's no universal diet of tools here. There's no universal thing that says for every person that's feeling this, this is the thing to do, that we are all unique individual beasties and we kind of need to figure our own way through. We can look at the toolbox, but we've got to try on all the different things and see what works for us.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the point to end on. There are no one size fits all solutions solutions. And anyone who tells you that there are, you should run the other way because that is not the way we work. And the science powerfully demonstrates that that is not true. We recently this paper accepted, we've been working on it for a while. It summarized the results of these two large studies that we did during the COVID pandemic where we basically tracked people for several weeks. It was a nationally representative study where we looked at how are you feeling, how much anxiety are you feeling on this day and what tools did you use to manage the anxiety. We asked people like 20 different tools. What we found is that there was remarkable variability not only between people in the tools that benefited them. So the three things that worked really good for you may have been entirely different from the four things that worked really well for me on a particular day. But even within the same person over time, the three things that worked for me on day one were quite different from the four things that worked for me on day five. Now we don't yet know how to prescribe tools to people. You do these six things and then when Tammy comes to me and tells me about her circumstances and who she is, I can prescribe these three things. Where we have gotten is we know what a lot of the tools are. There are dozens of them and we understand how they work. We've profiled how they work pretty well, and so the real opportunity that exists for folks as you just described is start, start playing. Start self experimenting with these tools to find the ones that work best for you. If you find one that works, keep using it. Layer on another one. See how that helps matters. The beauty of these tools is that they're not just cheap, they are free. I guess you have to maybe subscribe to. Well, this is a free download, right? I mean, or to get the book for free from your library, you gotta find the tools, right? Minimal cost there. This is not like taking a powerful medicine that is loaded with side effects, right? The cost to trying these are pretty minimal. So give it a shot. If it works, keep doing it. If not, shift to something else.

[Jonathan Fields]

Love that. It feels like a great place for us to wrap up as well. Come full circle. So I'll ask it again. In this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

[Ethan Cross]

Purpose, Relationships. Contentment. Having purpose and meaning to drive you. Having wonderful people to surround yourselves with that, contribute to that purpose and being content with what you have. Because there's always more that can be attained.

[Jonathan Fields]

Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Ethan in an earlier episode about overcoming mental chatter. You'll find a link to that episode in the show Notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too. But just one person Even then, invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered. To reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.

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