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Kwik Brain with Jim Kwik
Use Your Emotions Correctly & Get Results You’re After with Ethan Kross
00:19:54
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Kwik Brain Bite sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.
- [00:15]
B
I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear.
- [00:18]
A
I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu. Show me. Welcome back Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Today we'll be learning how to understand your emotions, what they are, why they matter, and most importantly, how to harness them. Our emotions, both the positive and the negative ones. They are tools that we use to navigate the world. They influence who we fall in love with and who we dislike. They motivate us to stay longer after hours at work to realize our dreams. And they are often the difference maker when it comes to sustaining close bonds with others or becoming mired in relationships fraught with conflict. And yet, for all their profound impact on our lives, few of us receive a science based guide for how to turn the volume on our emotions either up or down or or how to transition gracefully from one emotional state to another. Our guest, Ethan Cross is one of the leading experts on emotional regulation. He is an award winning professor at the University of Michigan's top rank psychology department and it's Ross School of Business. He is also the director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory and has participated in policy discussions at the White House. He is the author of Shift, which if you're watching this on YouTube where you could watch the extended version of this interview, managing your emotions so they don't manage you. Welcome to the show, Ethan.
- [02:04]
B
Thanks for having me, Jim. Ben, thanks for that lovely, lovely introduction.
- [02:08]
A
Why don't we start here? Why don't we define what are emotions and why from your perspective are they often difficult to manage?
- [02:19]
B
So emotions, you could think of them as these responses that are triggered when we encounter events in the world or when we imagine events in our minds that are meaningful to us. And it's almost like when we encounter such events, it's like a software program gets loaded up in our brains to help us ideally manage that circumstance. And so when we use the term emotion, we're actually talking about a coordinated set of responses, a loosely coordinated set of responses. Things are happening in your body, your thoughts may be tuned to certain kinds of information and, and you actually feel a particular way and maybe have an expression on your face. All of those different parts of this emotional response are designed to help us navigate the Situations we find ourselves in optimally. And so let me make that super concrete because that's a little abstract. Let's say I'm experiencing an emotion of anger. We experience anger when our view of the world is, is. Is transgressed, right? This isn't the way things are supposed to be, and there's an opportunity that you can do something to fix the situation. When we register that circumstance, we have this anger response, right? We get energized. Our attention zooms in on the problem at hand. We can often see the anger in someone else's faces, which is providing other people information. And that can sometimes be very helpful when it's activated in the right proportions, not too intense, not too long. What might be a situation which is as useful. I'm a parent. I want my kids to be safe. If I see my kids do something that is dangerous, I am going to feel this emotion, right? If I see my young daughter ride her bike without a helmet, that's a no, no in our house, I'm going to experience this emotion of anger. It's going to motivate me to approach the situation, confront my daughter, deal with it. She's going to see on my face that I am experiencing this state, and that's going to provide info to her to change the way that she's behaving. Now, whether or not that happens, that's another story. But that's just one example of how what we typically call a negative emotion can actually be functional. And I am of the belief that all of our emotions, even the ones we call bad emotions, are functional. They are useful when they are activated in the right proportions. That's hopefully a message that listeners find liberating, right? Because we often hear you should strive to live a life free of all negative emotions, like, number one, good luck. It's not the way that we are built. We are built to experience those emotions for a reason. And it's often helping you out. Jim, if I think about the times in my career, I do a lot of public speaking like you do. And if I think back to the times when a presentation didn't land as well as the other ones, when wasn't it an. A magical experience, it tended to be the times when I didn't feel any anxiety beforehand. As a result, there were no cues inside me to essentially say, hey, dopey, focus on this so you can prepare, practice, right? So a little bit of that anxiety, really useful now, too much of it. That's the topic of my book shift. Because oftentimes these Very helpful responses, they become unhelpful. Because emotions are unwieldy tools, we often experience them out of proportions with the situation we're in. And when that happens, then the question is, what do you do about it? And the good news is there are lots and lots of things you can do. And scientists like myself have spent our career trying to identify what those things are.
- [06:12]
A
So what would you distill is the core idea behind shift? And why for our listeners, is it crucial for them to learn how to manage their emotions more effectively?
- [06:26]
B
Well, the crucial idea behind SHIFT is that, number one, all of our emotions are useful. They're tools when they're activated in the right proportions. But as we all know from being human beings on this planet, oftentimes our emotions get the best of us. And we evolved a remarkable set of tools to help us in those situations. But we don't get a user's guide for how to implement those tools in our life. And so what SHIFT intends to do is provide readers with that science based, accessible user's guide so you don't have to wait to stumble on a solution when you find yourself spinning, so to speak. There's this wonderful research I talk about in my book that, that tried to index how much time during the day when you're awake are you experiencing an emotion. And the researchers found about 90% of the time that people are awake they are feeling something. Wow, this is, this is part of who we are as a species. We are constantly feeling different kinds of emotional responses. And the research compellingly shows that your ability to manage those emotions, to increase or decrease their intensity, to lengthen or shorten their duration, or even to shift. From what? From one emotion to another. That capacity predicts outcomes in life that all of us care a great deal about. It is directly relevant to your ability to think and perform. It predicts the quality of your interpersonal relationships. And it has direct implications for not just your subjective well being, which is critically important, but also your physical health.
- [08:07]
A
You introduce a number of science based strategies for managing emotions in your book. When someone's spinning or which technique or tool do you find most people are surprised by in terms of effectiveness? Or do you have a default in terms of where you your go to?
- [08:26]
B
So I have a default set of responses. When I find myself needing to manage my emotions, the first thing I do is I use a set of what I call perspective broadening shifters. When we get stuck in an emotional state, we often zoom in really narrowly and we focus on the features of the situation that are driving that emotional response, oh my God, what happened? Or what if this happens? And when we focus in on those provocative features of the situation, it perpetuates our emotional response. And as a result, it can sometimes be really hard for us to just change the way we think about our circumstances. People often say, why don't you just look on the bright side, change the way you think. Like, yeah, that sounds really great, but, but easier said than done. Sometimes it's not so easy to reframe how we're thinking. One of the hacks, if you will, for helping people reframe what they're going through is to change their perspective. And there are lots of different ways you could do this and some of them are really simple. So the first thing I'll do is I'll use a tool called distanced self talk. Jim, I'm going to guess I don't know you very well. I hope to get to know you more in the future, but I'm going to guess you probably had an this following experience where you have found it at times in your life easier to give advice to other people than to follow that advice to yourself. Is that a fair assumption to make?
- [09:46]
A
Sure, yeah, I would imagine, imagine a lot of people could relate to that.
- [09:49]
B
This is close to a universal experience we have. Right. We can often dole it out, give really great advice to other people who are struggling with big problems. But when we are mired in the problem, much, much more challenging to wait through it. Well, you can, you can harness that feature of how people work to your benefit. Distance self talk is a way to do it. I will silently try to coach myself through a problem and give myself advice using my name and you. So I might think to myself, ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? What using those parts of speech does is it shifts your perspective. Most of the time that we use the word you, it's when we're thinking about or referring to someone else. That word is the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger. So when you use that word or your name to refer to yourself, it's putting you in this mode of thinking about another person altogether. And that makes it much easier for us to wisely and objectively work through our problems. Also happens to be one of the most effortless tools that we possess. I'll then layer on another set of tools that I call mental time travel. First thing I'll typically do is travel into the future and I'll and I'll still talk to myself using my name and you to do this all right, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? I, just like you, Jim, have lived through millions of emotional episodes over the course of my existence on this planet. And what's interesting about those episodes, almost all of them follow a specific time course. Your emotions get triggered, they elevate, and then as time goes on, they eventually fade. Even lots of the big things in life, right, as time goes on, they gradually fade in their intensity. There are always exceptions to this rule, chronic conditions that we may be dealing with, but most of the emotional experiences we have follow that logic. We lose sight of that in the heat of the moment when we're struggling with our anxiety and our sadness and our anger. Jumping into the mental time travel machine and asking ourselves, how are you going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? Automatically makes accessible the idea that as bad as what you're going through is, it will eventually get better. That further helps turn the volume on our emotions down, making them more manageable. So the last thing I'll mention is I can also jump into this mental time travel machine and go into the past. And that's also really useful for me for shifting my perspective, but it works a little different. If I'm struggling with a problem, I'll go back in time and I might think, how have I dealt with other kinds of circumstances like this in the past?
- [12:35]
A
Is there ever a time where avoiding our emotions and not being in the moment ever works out well in our favor? And if so, how do we know when to express and when to suppress? Do you want to be able to remember confidently the information that you hear on this podcast? Do you want to improve your memory to easily and confidently be able to remember names and faces, client information, give a speech without notes, learn another language, remember what you read, and so much more? There's a solution, and I call it your quick recall. In just 15 minutes a day for 30 days, I've designed the order ultimate course, how to unlock your quick recall. Just go to quickbrain.com recall Enter Podcast 15 for your immediate discount. As a thank you for listening to our show.
- [13:30]
B
Avoidance is a great question that you're asking about because one of the most common messages I hear is that you should never avoid things that are bugging you. And indeed, that was a message that I was exposed to growing up. I was raised to always deal with the problem as soon as it happens, confront it, work through it, move on. I got to graduate school, heard the same thing, right? Avoidance is bad. Turns out it's not that simple. So there's been research on this and yes, it is true that chronically avoiding problems is linked with negative outcomes consistently and there's a large literature on that. What I'm saying with chronic avoidance is you've got a rule rule. Every time you are provoked or triggered in some way, you're just going to not think about it and you're going to maintain that avoidant response across the board. This is not good. It is also not good to try to distract yourself by engaging in risky behaviors or taking illicit substances. Tends not to work out well for people when they do that. But being strategic in how you approach anavoid can be really useful, right? So you don't have to choose between only approaching or only avoiding. You can move back and forth. And I and I must confess, Jim, I was late in the game to embrace this in my own life and has really made a difference. So because of the way I was raised, when I get confronted with information directly or in an email, I'll typically want to approach the situation and deal with it. What I've learned is sometimes taking some time away, distracting myself, avoiding that issue for a few hours or even a few days, and then coming back to it can be remarkably useful. Sometimes I take the time away. When I come back to the problem, I realize there is no problem, right? It just this was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And the passage of time helped me realize that in other situations I'll take some time away, I'll avoid. And then when I come back to the problem, I'll. I'll find that it's still there, but it's not quite as intense. And I have a different perspective when I approach it and I can engage more productively with this problem, that is being strategic in how I approach and avoid. Now, there's an art to figuring out when you should approach and when you should avoid. If you find, for example, that your attempts to avoid, you keep on getting these recurring thoughts compelling you to want to approach a situation. That means either you're not engaging in an immersive distractor, but you might need to actually deal with the situation at hand if you can't actually get away with it for a specific period of time. The flip side, though, is also true. If you find that trying to work through the problem, you're not making any progress, you just continue to turn it over and over in your mind in ways that make the problem grow and feel even worse. That might be a cue to avoid for a little while or engage in another kind of strategy and I break down a few others. This is kind of like a decision tree that, that follows when to approach, when to avoid, when to go back and forth in the book.
- [16:42]
A
Yeah, this really underscoring the importance of cognitive and emotional flexibility. I'm curious to finish this conversation, this episode. Is there one thing right now that you are currently learning about or studying that has you excited?
- [17:00]
B
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [17:01]
A
Yes.
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B
I mean I, I'm a, first and foremost, you know, a scientist and I still have a kid in the candy store response when I think about improving our understanding of our emotion regulatory lives. And let me, let me, let me present to you and everyone who's listening what I think is the big, the big question we now face as in the field. I think if you look back at the past few decades of research, scientists have done a pretty good job at identifying individual tools of the sort that we've talked about today. And carefully, carefully studying those tools, profiling how they work, you know, when do they work and so forth. What we have not yet done is studied how these tools work together optimally. How do they combine and how do different combinations of tools work for different people in different situations? I wish you could come to me and present me with a specific, different set of circumstances that you're struggling with and I could prescribe to you different combinations of tools to perfectly help you deal with each of those different situations. I cannot make that prescription, nor can any scientist that I know of because we don't have that knowledge base yet. But that is precisely what we are trying to do. Develop that very nuanced, fine grained understanding about how tools combine. So that to me is a very exciting opportunity that awaits the field. What I'd like to remind people who are listening, what I'd like to remind people who are listening to this though is in the meantime, you don't have to wait for us to come up with those principles. You could start self experimenting yourself with these tools. These are simple tools that you know they're more or less side effect free. These aren't substances you're consuming. Try a tool out. If it works, keep using it, layer on another tool, see how that affects your circumstances. If you find a tool is not serving you well, move on to another one. That's the challenge, I think that presents itself to everyone right now. And it's one that is an easy challenge to avail yourself of.
- [19:09]
A
Amazing. We could talk to you for hours. Ethan Cross. Where can our listeners get more of you? Go deeper in your work. Where do they get the book? How do they connect with you? Maybe some social media or your website.
- [19:22]
B
Yeah, my website's great. It has links to the book, information about the book, my lab, my social media accounts. Www.ethan cross with a k k r o s s.com and I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn.
- [19:37]
A
Perfect. And your book shift is available where? Where books are sold?
- [19:42]
B
Wherever books are sold. Grab a copy and I hope you find it enriching.
- [19:47]
A
Amazing. Highly recommend it, Ethan. Thank you so much for taking time. Everyone listening as always, we put links to everything mentioned that Dr. Cross mentioned. His social media, his website, the book at our show notes@jimquik.com notes and as always, you can find out more ways to fuel your potential, your mental potential on our YouTube channel where we post the extended version of this episode. This episode went a lot longer than 20 minutes, so I hope you listen to it and watch it on YouTube. You could certainly hit subscribe as a way of supporting us. Leave a comment. I read every single one. And let us know what you think. This is your brain coach Jim Kwik. Until next time, be limitless.