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- [00:00]
A
The director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. What's that mean?
- [00:08]
B
Well, what that means is we get to ask two kinds of questions in my lab. So number one, we try to understand how do people work when it comes to managing their emotions. We really care about getting in there to understand the mechanics that underlie what we call emotion regulation. And, and then the second kind of question we tackle is how can we use this understanding of the nuts and bolts that explain how people can manage their emotions to actually help them do a better job of that in their daily lives outside the lab? And so trying to address those two big picture issues is something that keeps us really busy and is something that is really fun, a fun way to.
- [00:50]
A
Spend your life from your time, decades looking at them. What, what are emotions from a definitional perspective? How do you come to actually define them?
- [01:02]
B
It's a great question. And you know, it's funny, I often, when I'm speaking about this topic to folks, I. I often ask people, hey, who, who here feels comfortable coming up to the front and just telling us what, what it means to have an emotion. What is an emotion? It's kind of wild. We experience emotions. According to this one study that I book, about 90% of the time that we're awake, we're experiencing some type of emotional response. We are truly an emotional species. And yet, if you ask people, as I often do in presentations or when I'm teaching, what's an emotion? People often just stop and they have trouble answering that question. So let me pose it to you actually, before I go give you my definition. What do you think an emotion is? And don't worry about being right or wrong.
- [01:50]
A
Yeah. A state in the brain that informs us of what is going on in the rest of our body.
- [02:01]
B
So not bad. Not bad. So I define emotions as responses we have to events in our lives that we deem meaningful. That is, they capture our attention in some way. And these could be situations that happen to us as we're navigating the world outside, or even situations we imagine in our minds. And when we encounter those circumstances, it's almost like a software program that gets loaded up to help us manage that circumstance. And that software program has a few different pieces, a few different components. So emotions activate what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. What do I mean by that? Well, when we experience emotion, there's often a physiological component. So if I experience a little bit of anxiety, I often feel that in my stomach. It kind of feels like the stomach is Ringing. I've got to go to the toilet right away. Depending on how potent a response that is, that predicts the strength of that impulse. Our emotions are also capturing our cognition, how we're thinking about our circumstances. So anxiety will kind of zoom us in on the potential threat in front of us. And then. And then there are motor responses and facial displays that often come along with our emotions. So can you tell when someone is angry at you sometimes by looking at their face? There you go. Yeah, give me the sad look. What does that look like?
- [03:33]
A
Bottom lip.
- [03:34]
B
There you go. There you go. My daughters are super skilled at that facial expression. Whenever I'm disciplining them, as I sometimes have to do, and it elicits a response. So I say loosely coordinated because these different facets of our emotional experience often cohere, but sometimes they don't. In other words, sometimes I could be super angry during a meeting at something that's happened, but I maintain my poker face. Sometimes I'll even smile. So there's some flexibility there. But the point is, it's this coordinated response that is designed to help us deal with the situation at hand. And so I'm a proponent of the belief that all of our emotions, even the ones we call bad, are useful when they're experienced in the right proportions, not too intense or not too long. There's one other little tidbit let me throw in there, because I think it's important for just kind of clearing up the space here. The difference between an emotion and a feeling. We often use those terms synonymously, but scientifically, scientists actually draw a distinction. So you could think of an emotion as this umbrella term. It captures a lot of things that are happening within you, within your brain, within your body, your behaviors. Feelings are the conscious component of an emotional response. They're the part of an emotional response that we're aware of. It's a lot like when you are sick, when you get the flu. There are tons of things happening inside your body. You have no awareness of how the, you know, the composition of your. Your blood is changing, and your organs may be functioning differently and so forth and so on. What you do have awareness of are the fever and chills that you're experiencing, right? That's the. Like, the sweat, so to speak. So feelings are the part. The facet of our emotional experiences that. That we're aware of.
- [05:33]
A
Oh, that's interesting. And you mentioned there was this really interesting element at the beginning. Things that we determine as meaningful or things that are meaningful, things that are meaningful to us, which Is why there's a plant there, like a fake plant that we didn't use as a backdrop that I need to put away. I have no story that really comes along with that. I can look at it, and there's no salient emotional affect that comes up. The pen, that pen. Unless that pen was a pen that your daughter said is her favorite pen or something like that, you got it to sign your most recent book deal with. Presumably that pen is just. It's not meaningful to me.
- [06:11]
B
That's right. That's right now. But it does get interesting, right? Like if. If this were a pink pen and I had a fear of cancer, for example, the pink might activate the thoughts about that cancer and elicit an emotional response. If I have a fear of blood red color. So we could generalize and make associations. But right now, like, I'm free as a bird.
- [06:38]
A
There's people with fears. There's people with fears of blood all over the Internet. Turning away at the moment. Oh, my God.
- [06:43]
B
Sorry, I didn't mean to trigger you.
- [06:45]
A
Just before we get on from a. Let's take a sort of adaptive evolutionary lens. Why do we feel anything? Like, what's the point of emotions? Why have we got them?
- [06:56]
B
Because they give us an edge. Because they mobilize us to respond optimally to the situations that we find ourselves in. It's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it. So let's run through a couple of negative emotions that we often describe or hear them described as toxic. Anger, for example. Anger is an emotion we experience when our understanding of right and wrong, of how things should be is violated. And there's an opportunity for us to correct the record. Right. We could actually fix things. So, you know, my favorite example of this is my daughter rides her bicycle without her helmet. This is not the way things work in the cross household. Right. We care about brain safety. And I see this. She knows better. I. I get angry. What does that angry anger do? It zooms me in on the transgression. It motivates me to approach the situation. It is conveying facial expressions to her to say, not good. All of this with the intent of making sure she doesn't do this again so that she doesn't injure herself. Take another example. Sadness. Like what? How on earth could being sad be functional? Well, we experience sadness when our. Our understanding of the world and who we are is challenged in some way by something that happens that we cannot fix. So we're fired, we're rejected. We lose someone we love. Now we are Faced with the task of having to reframe how we think about the world and ourselves in it. And so that takes some. Some energy. Right. So what does sadness motivate us to do? It motivates us to kind of slow down, physiologically, turn our attention inward, to try to reflect on what's happening, to try to do that hard cognitive work. But. And this I find so fascinating. We're a social species, right? And like, going away and into a corner to now just brood on this heavy stuff that could be dangerous. We might want to throw some. Some lifelines out to the community to make sure they check up on us. And indeed we do. And the way that sadness allows us to do that is by doing what? Give it to me.
- [09:24]
A
Making the bottom.
- [09:26]
B
Right. Go. There you go. There you go. We're jamming now. Right, Right. Like, that is so powerful. A cue to pull us in. Um, you know, this conversation here about evolutionary significance touches on this topic of, like, toxic positivity, which I talk about in the book as something that I'm not a huge fan of. Because we often hear that the goal in life should be to maximize positivity and try to avoid negative emotional. Bad vibes. No bad vibes. Good vibes only. If that's your goal. Number one, good luck. You're giving people an unattainable goal. We have the capacity to experience these responses for a reason. When I think back to performances that I have given where I've not experienced any anxiety, those are the ones that have tended to fall flat. Cause there was no cue inside me that motivated me to energize and prepare. I mean, is this true for you? Have you ever found that a little bit of anxiety can be your friend?
- [10:33]
A
Yeah, almost always. It focuses attention. It makes you feel excited. It stops you from being distracted by other stuff. But as you say, intensity and duration are devil's in the details. The dosage.
- [10:44]
B
Devil's in the details. Look, no one is saying that negative emotions don't blow up and metastasize. This is why I got into this business in the first place. Because these emotions that we have, these negative emotions, they're tools, but they are unwieldy tools. We use the metaphor of a hammer. Hammer in the right hands. My grandfather was a carpenter. Built beautiful homes. Hammer in the wrong hand. My hand, a hammer. Source of massive destruction. Same is true of our emotions. And so what I find so interesting is, on the one hand, we're born into this world with this capacity to experience this wild range of emotions, positive and Negative. And they serve us well. They're tools, but they're really unwieldy. So guess what? We also evolve the capacity to rein these tools in through these regulatory techniques that we all possess, but they don't come with a user's manual. And that, in a certain sense, is what I and lots of other scientists have been doing for many decades now, is trying to build that user's manual to help people manage their emotions.
- [11:56]
A
Why do we struggle to control our emotions? Why is there no user manual? If. If I'm so capable of accessing my anger or my depression or my anxiety or my resentment or my fear, and then I'm so capable at managing to perpetuate that over time, why can't I also get in and stop it? Surely that would be adaptive, too.
- [12:18]
B
Oh, well, you can. The question is, how can you do it better? So there's huge variability, number one, in the degree to which people are capable of managing their emotions. And I would argue that there's room for improvement. Regardless of where you are right now, you're really not great at it or you're really good understanding how this works, that, in and of itself, I think, is enormously empowering. I find it really useful to draw a distinction to physical fitness. So, like, you're going to get people who vary in their level of physical fitness. Right. They could all benefit, though, from learning how to optimize that facet of their lives. Like, some people are physically fit just because of the way genetics has endowed them with. With natural physical aptitudes. You know, maybe they're really active, they walk places and so forth and so on. But teaching them, like, how to do different exercises and engage in different routines is gonna benefit them. It's also gonna benefit those people who aren't very predisposed to be physically fit. I think the same is true when it comes to mental fitness. Like, we don't open up the gym to folks to explain. Here are the different tools. Here's how they work. Okay? Now the task for you, now that you understand how these 12 machines work, now I want you to figure out how to optimally fit those different exercises into your life to help you meet your specific goals. That's really where we are.
- [13:57]
A
What are you. What are you looking at with regards to the sort of set point that people have? How. How much room is there? We're talking about heritability here. A bit of behavioral genetics, perhaps? You know, the difference between me and Usain Bolt when it comes to running speed is pretty high. Have we got Even more variability when it comes to the set point of people that are naturally usain bolt runners but managing their own emotions.
- [14:25]
B
Yeah, that's a great question that I wish I could answer, but I can't. And let me give you one reason why. So what we have done a pretty good job of in the sciences is identifying specific tools and profiling how they work. What we have not yet done, what we're doing right now, which is super exciting from the research point of view, is beginning to see how different tools optimally combine to help people manage their emotions. We're just beginning to do that. The reason I bring this up is I think that the key to really moving the needle on emotion regulation is understanding the combinations of tools that work well for different people in different situations. And that scientific basis, that knowledge base, it just isn't there. We just published a study or a paper, I should say it was a couple of studies that looked at how people manage their anxiety during the COVID pandemic. And what we found in those studies was really interesting. Every day we track people over time and every day we asked them, which of these, I believe it was 18 different tools did you use. And the tools varied in terms of their level of healthiness according to experts. And then we measured their anxiety each day. And what we wanted to see is what tool is moving the needle on people's anxiety from one day to the next. First, key insight, People seldom used just one tool, which is interesting for me because I'm often asked like, hey, what's the one thing people should do right now to manage bleep. On average, it was like between three and four different tools were used on any given day. Second, there was enormous variability in the tools that people use that actually help them manage their emotions. So the three or four things that I benefited from on one day were different from the three or four things that you benefited from on the same day? And you, you varied from day to day. Some combinations of tools worked for you on one day and different ones worked for you on the next. We don't yet understand how to predict that variability. And that is what we are doing now. So the invitation I'd love to give people is I can give you the tools, right? And that's what my book is all about. Here are the tools. And then I could give you the challenge to start self experimenting to figure out what are the tools that work best for you, right? If a tool works, keep using it, layer on another one. See what added benefit you get if it doesn't Move on to something else. Not unlike the way we figure out what are the physical fitness routines that work best for us. Like the stuff that I benefit from, quite different from not just my wife, but my best friends as well. And it changes too, depending on what my goals are. And so that's a long winded way of not answering your question.
- [17:17]
A
No, it really does. The reason I've become particularly interested in this, I did about a year of twice weekly psychotherapy up until about six months ago. I've just started doing CBT and I also did a very, very comprehensive hundred page DNA analysis that takes down all of the different alleles and obviously polymorphisms. Like there is no one gene for X or Y. But there are certain things that say you clear dopamine less quickly or, or you clear adrenaline less quickly or you do this with oxytocin, or you do that with serotonin. And combining all of that together, I can't wait for AI to get its hands on the work that you've done and be able to feed in people's genetic data and then be able to say, based on other cases like mine and what you know about me, please give me the most likely best course of action that will allow me to regulate my very particular idiosyncratic cocktail of hormones.
- [18:14]
B
I mean, this is in a very scaled down way. This is the work that we are currently doing in my lab, which is to say we are trying to identify the patterns that characterize people's optimal regulation across different situations. We're doing it in a way that for the literature is super complex but relative to what you just articulated, which is the dream like quite simplified. And I think we will get there over the next several years. But we first have to do the work before we can give the actual answer.
- [18:51]
A
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- [20:43]
B
Well, you know, this is such an interesting question and it comes up so much. And on the one hand it is very clear that if you look at the statistics surrounding the experience of anxiety, as well as a host of other negative experiences like loneliness, you know, they're all moving in the wrong direction in the sense that things seem to be getting worse. On the other hand, you know, one of my favorite little detours while researching my book was to dive back into history to look at how we've thought about emotion regulation through the centuries. And it was really striking. We have been grappling with our emotions for likely as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form. So I'll just give you a few pieces of evidence to, you know, sink your teeth into. So, first surgical technique ever developed, or what we think is the first surgical technique ever invented. It's called trepanation. Carving holes in people's skulls while they were still awake. What was one of the reasons why this technique was believed to be used? That's the cue up pressure and pressure.
- [21:53]
A
In the brain, I think. Pressure in the head, likely.
- [21:57]
B
But what else perhaps more germane to our conversation right now? Give You a little hint.
- [22:03]
A
People felt anxious and the pain distracted them from it.
- [22:08]
B
Big dysregulated emotions, right? Like, imagine you are just totally overcome with an emotion. And our theories of what might be causing that response were quite different back then than they are now. Maybe it had to do with some, you know, spiritual demonic possession. Let's let it out. Let the emotions out. You know, fast forward a couple of centuries. We use bloodletting to drain the toxic, you know, humors or the. The substance that was. That were causing these negative emotions. You know, Best selling book of all time, the Bible. One of the most famous stories in that book, Story of Adam and Eve. It's a story of emotion dysregulation. We've been grappling with this stuff for a really long time. So back to like, what's going on right now. Look, the world is extremely turbulent. Technology is upending things in ways that we are still trying to make sense of. It's likely multifactorial. But I think there's another point that we ought to consider, which is that our norms for talking about this have changed quite a bit, and technology likely has played a role in that too. So what do I mean by that? When I was growing up, no one talked about, you know, you just mentioned like, that you had gone to a course of psychotherapy for a while. I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm curious. 36. Okay, so my guess is, like, when you were growing up in school, is that something that you would have just come out and blurted out?
- [23:44]
A
Probably not. I mean, I don't think I knew of anybody who was in therapy. Therapy, I think, was for, you know, people that tried to throw themselves off a bridge or something.
- [23:53]
B
So the norms here have powerfully, powerfully changed. I remember when my parents got divorced when I was. When I was 12 years old, my mom insisted that I go to see a social worker to talk about it. He went, I don't know, two or three times. And, you know, I went. But, you know, I remember saying to her, if you tell anyone that we have gone here, anyone, right? Like, I was petrified. So I think because of the work that we have pushed to like, de. Stigmatize this, which is a really good thing. To be clear, we talk about this more openly. We maybe endorse having these experiences more openly than we did before. And I think that's another piece of, piece of the puzzle. So, you know, here's what I can say with confidence. There's a lot of suffering right now. People are struggling with their emotions. I think people have always been struggling with their emotions. What fills me with hope is that we've got some science based tools that we could share with people to actually help them. And these are for the most part, or you know, at least the ones that I talk about, these are non invasive tools. Here's another little tidbit that blows my mind, to use that technical phrase. 1949, I believe it was. A Portuguese physician invents an emotion regulation intervention that wins him the Nobel Prize in medicine. It is viewed as such an amazing advance that it wins the grandest prize in all of science and medicine. It is the frontal lobotomy. I mean, isn't that, isn't. Yeah, isn't that wild? Now, clearly these were for extreme cases of emotion dysregulation, not just the, the curveballs of life, which I hope it wasn't used too much for that purpose. But we've come a long way, like our, our understanding of what emotions are and how they work and how you could push them around, amplify, diminish them, extend them, make them, you know, more constrained, like vastly improved. That is something that is super exciting. But we don't, we don't teach people about this. So, you know, that's the other, the other question that you gestured towards. Like, why is it that we struggle so badly with this? Like, if we have these emotions, like, why aren't we actually reining them in more effectively? I never had a class in this growing up. Some of the things that I was actually taught growing up turns out are not correct. Like I was taught to always, always approach my emotions immediately, the moment they are elicited, dive in, try to fix them. Works in some cases. In other cases, taking some time away and then coming back can be really useful. So I think a big opportunity here is like, let's give people the tools, see what that does to them.
- [26:53]
A
I think to go back to your analogy of somebody who's not in shape or wants to start going to the gym, and you know that by going to the gym there's going to be these improvements that are made to you. It's funny how, and I find myself sometimes thinking in this way as well. My right arm doesn't move itself on its own. Like it's exclusively my volition. I'm moving this up and down for the people that are listening. I'm waving at you like I'm, that's me. I'm choosing to do it. My mind doesn't feel like the same sort of Place my mind moves itself up and down and makes gestures in manners that I don't feel like the originator of.
- [27:30]
B
Do you see what I just did? Sorry. I was about to say, but my wife always tells me, don't point your finger. It's just excitement. I'm just getting excited. Thank you for that. Let's address this. I think this fundamentally has to do with whether we think we can actually control our minds or not, control our emotions or not. Are they under our control or are they in the driver's seat? And, you know, several years ago, I came across this study that just floored me. Approximately 40% of, in this case, I believe was adolescents. When asked, can you control your emotions? Said, no, you can't. I mean, you gave everyone who's listening or watching the name of my lab, the Emotion and Self Control Lab. Like, viewing this finding was. I interpreted it as like an existential insult.
- [28:27]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:27]
B
It's like, what have I chosen?
- [28:29]
A
My life is my life.
- [28:31]
B
Yes. That's like, what is happening here? I'm too young for the midlife crisis. Right. And so I really kind of, you know, my advisor was a very wise, wise psychologist. I remember him always saying, like, listen to the data. And so I did, like, what could this possibly be capturing? And I spent a chapter talking about this in the book. There are facets of our emotional lives that we cannot control. And I now believe that with every iota of being that I am. Let me give you a couple examples. You ever brush up against someone who doesn't smell very good?
- [29:14]
A
Yes.
- [29:15]
B
Yeah. Do you have an automatic reaction when that occurs?
- [29:19]
A
For me, I'm so, like, olfactory pilled. If someone. This was like super common in fighting, Thai boxing, kickboxing. If someone just got their sweaty kit, threw it in their bag, and then put it back on again, it hadn't been aired. That sort of feisty, like, mildew kind of thing. I. I mean, you might as well just knock me out if we're sparring in the ring because I'm more concerned. I'm way more concerned about your smell than I am about the gloves that you've got on.
- [29:44]
B
Well, you know, it's not, it's not just you. This is a pretty, you know, automatic response that most of us have when we, when we encounter that kind of not discuss response. And the inverse is true as well. Like, I just got back from overseas and I was walking through the international terminal and I walked through this store that I've relabeled, the emotion regulation emporium. Why have I relabeled it? Because, like, all they sell are these sprays that we spritz all over us to manage how other people feel about us and how we feel about ourselves. Perfume and cologne. Right? Like, you just get a whiff of that stuff and. Ah, let's go. Let's go a little bit darker, though. That's. So that's one category of automatic responses. Like, I cannot control when I'm gonna encounter some. Have some experience, a sensory experience that pushes my emotions around. No control over that. What about. Or, I mean, I guess I could choose to evade certain people that might smell a certain way, but inevitably I'm gonna come across someone. Let's talk about dark thoughts for a second. So have you ever experienced a thought? It just popped up in your head, just seemingly randomly. You have no idea why, but it's a dark thought of sorts. It's something that you wouldn't want to readily admit to someone else. You're kind of embarrassed by it.
- [31:08]
A
If you could ever have. If you could see the inner texture of my mind, Ethan, you would know how familiar I am with that.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, well, you know, you are not alone. So there's research on this that describes this as close to a universal experience. We have these thoughts that just pop up in our heads. We don't always know why. Sometimes we could come up with explanations for it. I'll give you a fun example to stick with the. A physical fitness example or comparison. So when I'm in the gym, I will often have a thought when I'm carrying an exceptionally heavy dumbbell. It's like, really heavy. Just to be clear, when I'm carrying that dumbbell from one side of the gym to the next, I'll often imagine dropping it on a person's face that lies near my path. Like, that's a dark thought, right? Why am I thinking about dropping a dumbbell on someone else's face? It's probably adaptive. Like, I don't want to drop it on their face. So this is a thought that's cueing me into the possibility of what might happen if I do. So it leads me to switch arms. I don't have control. I'm not purposefully thinking about that. Right. Other kinds of thoughts like that pop up all the time in all of our minds. I'll do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic to my students, and. And I'll set up this, like, Google form that will allow them. I'll. I'll ask them the same question I posed to you. In the last couple of weeks, have you ever experienced a thought just popped up, you wouldn't want to tell someone else about it and you know, it just comes up and you write it into the field and it's anonymous and I could then see what the thoughts are. This is some, some dark stuff that we see coming up. So we don't have control always over the thoughts and feelings that arise spontaneously. But what we do have control over is how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they are activated. That's the playground of emotion regulation. And so there is room for both of these interpretations, right? You tell me before like you don't feel like you can move your, you can move your arm up and down pretty easily, it's under your control. But, but your emotions are not. Well, maybe it's the case that you can't control the feeling of anger or the emotional experience of anger anxiety that when it's elicited. But once it's activated, I assure you there are things that you could do to push that experience around and that's the part to really home in on.
- [33:41]
A
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- [35:19]
B
And I cannot tell you I'm speaking. I'll give you a personal example, and then I'll give you one from one of my kids, actually. It is bleeping liberating. Liberating to know that, huh? I just felt a certain way. There's nothing wrong with me, right? This is just how human beings work, right? Like, I'm gonna experience a dark thought every now and then. I'm gonna experience some anxiety every now and again. I don't feel bad about myself when I find myself getting anxious about something. Instead, I think, oh, this is my. My mind giving me an edge here. And that allows me to channel that experience productively. So a couple years ago, my daughter switched over to a new school. It was more academically demanding. And. And I go into her bedroom and. And I notice she's, like, visibly distraught. And I could. I'm like, what? What's going on? And so, you know, she's. She's kind of like, I don't know what's happening. Like, I feel it in my body and like, I don't know what this is. And she was. It was basically an anxiety reaction. Totally normal. She had a test the next day. This is her body and mind doing what it's supposed to be doing. There's an important thing that lies ahead. I need to focus in. Once I reframe this for her. This is nothing wrong with you. This is what we call anxiety. It's a normal reaction to important circumstances that are potentially threatening. And what it means is you gotta zoom in and focus in on your work. Once I gave her that interpretation, the entire response, the volume on it, diminished. That I think is. Is. Is the opportunity that exists if you understand a little bit about what emotions are and what their function is.
- [37:10]
A
Yeah, I think just to continue the gym analogy, everybody knows that if you go to the gym and you work out, you will get fitter. Everybody knows and a lot of people believe I can influence my career, my trajectory. But inside of my head, that's kind of. For some reason, the only thing we do have direct control over, like, literally, our brain is outside of the purview of our ability to influence it. That kind of. We're along for the ride and then we'll hopefully wrangle this unwieldy thing between our ears to get us to do what we wanted to do. So let's say that somebody feels at the mercy of their emotions. How can you convince them that they can actually influence their internal state? What's the most compelling story and evidence that you can give them?
- [37:55]
B
Well, let's. I mean, I would take them through a few different shifters and we could give plenty of examples if these aren't convincing. So let's start with one of my favorite shifters. I call the shifters these little tools you can use to push emotion around. Let's start with sensation. You listen to music?
- [38:16]
A
Of course.
- [38:17]
B
Why?
- [38:19]
A
It makes me feel good or sad or better.
- [38:22]
B
Okay, let's just stop with it makes you feel. You ask people this question of why we listen to music. Close to 100% will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. If you then ask people, though, in other studies, as we've done last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what'd you do to try to manage that emotion? Only between 10 and 30% will say they've used music. Music is a powerful, powerful emotional shifter. You get effects within seconds. They don't necessarily are. They're not necessarily long lasting. But have you ever listened to music to like, pump you up when you're a little distressed? Did it work? Yeah, like, it's like magic almost, how, how powerful it can be. So, you know, if you have doubts as to your ability to shift your emotions, I would do a little experiment where I would identify in advance a few pump me up happy songs. And try listening to those when you're not feeling that way and want to feel that way and observe what impact that has on you. That would be one thing you could try just to explain to folks like, why this works. This is not, by the way, this effect that music has on our emotions is not exclusive to hearing. It's a product of sensation. So sensation is how we bring in information about the world and make sense of it. Sensation, perception. And I like to think of sensation as, like, imagine you had satellite dishes mounted all over your body and their sole job is to help you bring in information about your surroundings to give you the best chance of optimally navigating the world around you. And a big part of that is making sure you go where it's safe and not where it's dangerous. And so one of the ways that sensation works is it is tightly linked with emotion in the sense that when you encounter something that might be approach oriented or might be threatening, it's activating the corresponding sets of emotions. All of our senses follow this property. So hearing music, you know, like look back in history, there are bands that accompany militaries through battle. Like, that's kind of interesting if you think about it, right? You've got these like, this is a threatening. Doesn't get much more threatening than this. Playing the music, right. Channeling our emotions. You should try. I don't know if people could do this quite easily. But if you ever like strip away the. The kind of soundtrack to films, we sometimes do this in studies. Like it is wild just to hear dialogue. Yeah. Like imagine Jaws without do do do, you know, I'll stop doing it right there. Or imagine like watching a sitcom without the laugh track. You don't. Doesn't have the same punch taste. We don't probably need to spend too much time on taste, right? Think of something that tastes great. It's an emotional experience. Something that tastes foul. Opposite direction. What about touch? Touch is a powerful tool. I call it like the technique of touch that I'm particularly fond of is affectionate but not creepy touch. Which is to say when an affectionate embrace is wanted between partners, parents and kids. There's a lot of research which shows that this could be a powerful tool for regulating your emotions very, very quickly. A creepy touch, of course, pushes us in the opposite direction. We gotta give people a disclaimer. So, you know, that's one set of examples that I would ask people to consider. But we could keep going deeper and deeper through the toolbox to give more instances in which there are things you could do to manage your emotions. Am I convincing you at all?
- [42:28]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. I think another hammer to drive a nail into the coffin of why you should care about this and why you should believe what studies have been done or what have you found about the differences in life outcomes between people who are good at managing emotions and people who are bad at managing emotions. What is. Because, look, I saw this sentence the other day. I am unusually adept at living in a emotion calorie controlled environment that my capacity for dealing with misery is greater than most people's than it should be. And I think a lot of people almost wear that as a badge of honor. It's like life is difficult and I'm going to overcome it. And there's no beyond the moment to moment sense of there not being that much joy. Life outcomes don't really change all that much. In fact, in many ways there's this sort of Protestant work ethic like sense of superior. Well, look at all of the things that I'm overcoming. So I'm interested about what the differences are in life outcomes from people who are good at managing emotions and ones who are less good.
- [43:34]
B
So, all right, let's get into that in a second. But I want to just frame why the motivational bit is so important here or this belief that you can do it is so ultra, ultra important. So reason. I started off this tool section of my book with this question of can you really control your emotions? The reason why genuinely believing that there are facets to your emotional experience that are under your control is because if we zoom out, I think of managing one's emotions, there are two ingredients to the recipe for how to do that. Well, one is motivation and the other is ability. Let's start. Motivation. If you're not motivated to manage your emotions, why would you take any efforts to even try to do so? It wouldn't make much sense. It's not logical, right? If there's nothing I can do to lose weight, why should I do this hard stuff of like lifting weights and going to the gym and paying for membership? It's just you shouldn't and you likely won't. Right? So step one is you need to have the motivation, the belief that you can manage your emotions. That's the first piece to this equation and it's what our conversation is getting at right now. But that alone is not in and of itself sufficient. Because I can think to go back to physical fitness, that, yeah, I can do stuff to get in shape and then I go to the gym. And if I've never gone to the gym, you know, I could start doing crazy things in there that actually cause more harm than good. So you also need to understand what are the tools that you can use to then achieve that goal. And if you have both of those pieces, the motivation, hell yeah, I can do this. And you know how to do it. Now we're talking business. So Dunedin. So this gets to the other part of the question, right? So, okay, but so help me believe, Ethan, that it makes sense that we should care about this. If you look at this one classic study, so this was a study done in New Zealand and it was, it began in the early 70s. And what the researchers started doing is tracking this, this group of, of babies from the time they were just Born every few years, they would profile these kids ability to manage their emotions and they would profile them in a very rigorous way. They would put the kids through different self control tests. They would get their teachers and, and and other people in their lives to report on how good they manage their emotions. And they'd get like really fine grained assessments of how good these kids were. And then they would, then they basically waited over time to see what does the capacity to manage your emotions in childhood and adolescents, what does it predict later on when you fast forward, what you find is it predicts pretty much most of the things that we care about in our lives. The kids who are good at managing their emotions, they're performing better at school, they're performing better at work. They're healthier too. Their organs are aging more slowly than the people who are less good at self control. And if you look at the mirror image, the kids who were not good at self control, they're doing pretty poorly at work and in school. They're relation, they're experiencing relationship difficulties and their health is impoverished as well. Now the other really thing that came out of that study that I find to be the most exciting finding and it's actually not the finding that got the most attention, is that you might come away from that study thinking well, either you got it or you don't. Either you're good at managing your emotions, it's a trap.
- [47:25]
A
Behavioral genetics all the way down.
- [47:27]
B
All right, that's it. So why bother? Well, what the researchers also saw is that some kids changed over time in their ability to manage themselves. Some kids got better, some kids got worse over time. The kids who got better, they fared better on all these different metrics over time. The kids who got worse, their performance declined. What we learned from that study, number one, is that this really matters a great deal. Like your ability to manage your emotions, it's relevant to your ability to think and perform optimally at work. This is what's allowing you to divert your attention to hunker down, to learn from critical feedback. It's impacting your relationships because I don't know about you, but last time I came in contact with someone who wasn't very good at managing their emotions. They didn't have very good relationships with their friends and partners, they weren't great parents. And it's also impacting our health and well being. The links between the inability to manage your emotions and all manner of psychological disturbances, as well as physical problems like cardiovascular disease, problems of inflammation, even certain forms of cancer, all of Those findings exist, but there's something you could do about it. Now, you mentioned you've been in. You just completed a course of psychotherapy, right?
- [48:50]
A
Correct.
- [48:50]
B
And you're doing psycho, you're doing cbt.
- [48:52]
A
Correct.
- [48:52]
B
I mean, these are, these are interventions that have a ton of evidence behind them. You could think about those activities as emotion regulation boot camp that have been tested over and over and over to show they have benefits for folks. Now, they don't work for everyone, as you probably well know. Right. They work for some people. And the hope that I have is that by giving people not just one category of tools, but by giving them the entire toolbox, we can expand the scope of people who these tools actually can benefit.
- [49:30]
A
Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers, which leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to your understanding of your health? Which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one. They've got a team of expert physicians that then takes that data, puts it into a simple dashboard, and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and hormone levels to your thyroid function. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. And right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom yeah, I just want to kind of drill on that point. This is something I've been fascinated by. I think psychotherapy kind of put me on this trajectory. But your entire life's body of work has kind of been an obsession of mine for the last year or so. I think psychotherapy was part of that trajectory. Understanding feelings. I don't think that I was fully connected with the things that I was feeling in life with my emotions, with sort of the felt sense of stuff. I'd be able to explain it rationally, but I don't think I was necessarily actually embodying it and tapping into it. And one of the, I guess, like, odd quirks of certain people's psychology, one of which is mine, is that if I hear you say you're going to live longer and you're going to have happier relationships and you're going to have all of the rest of this stuff, like the sort of External outcomes, those are compelling to me. But I do think that it's worth lingering just for a moment on the fact that your moment to moment experience of your life is almost exclusively determined by the emotions that you're feeling. 90% of the time you're feeling an emotion. And if that is something which when intensity and duration is too high on something that shouldn't be there or has been there before or isn't serving you, that this isn't a dress rehearsal, like this is it, you know, this is the one life that you're going to get. And to be honest, nobody is going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence. No one is going to give you that. This is the one shot that you've got to actually have some fucking fun, find some enjoyment in the biggest and smallest things that you do. And I just think that that point is one that often gets overlooked because people are so used to negotiating with the world and its difficulties and building up resilience and discipline and all of those things like hooray, great, good for that. You're going to be less at the mercy of bad stuff. But you also should be enjoying this because it's going to end pretty soon.
- [52:38]
B
Well, hopefully not that soon. But, um, but completely agree with this notion that our emotions are what makes life worth living. You know, we are this emotional species and they are just fundamental to who we are on a moment to moment basis. You know, when I think about the most salient experiences in my life, like they're all emotional experiences. And so look, I think there are reasons sometimes where we need to learn how to endure difficult things, right? Delay immediate gratification in order to achieve bigger long term goals. But we want to balance that, right? We don't want to find ourselves overcome with negativity all the time. Too big, too long. This detracts from the experience of being human. And I think that's what you're getting at here, right? Like we want if, like if we find ourselves living emotional lives that we don't want to be living, then that is a cue to intervene. And I think most of us have that experience at times. So like, I just got back from talking about this book for like two weeks all over the country. And like probably the most salient take on point, people are suffering, people are struggling, like you name it. Whether it's like wildfires or infidelity or parental stress or loneliness, like lots of different curveballs that life is throwing us. It's like this batting machine that Keeps on firing away curveballs, and it just doesn't stop. And we've got to figure out how to. How to hit them. Like, we've got to figure out how to deal with those barrage, that barrage of insults. And there are things that you can do. Like, I get asked all the time, do I ever struggle with my emotions? Yes, I am a human being. Like, last time I checked, of course I do. But what I am really good at is the moment I get triggered in some way. Anxiety, sadness, rejection, whatever, envy. I have tools that I go to immediately. I don't have to stop and think, what should I do? And at other points in my life, I did stumble through it all. Didn't quite know what to do. But now, because I understand how these work, I go right to them. They don't work every single time. 60% of the time. The first plan, the first three tools that I'll automatically implement, they get the job done. What about the other 40%? Well, I go deeper into the toolbox. I go to layer on a few other tools that. That may nudge me up to 80%. What about the other 20%? You know? Well, there's always room for, like, prayer. I'm, you know I'm kidding. But. But, like, it's not foolproof, but it's. It's pretty good, right? Like, because I have plans, I know what to actually do. And. And that's just not something that I think a lot of people have. And I think that's the opportunity here for really having impact.
- [55:55]
A
I think that was. That's the point I was trying to make earlier on, that my hand doesn't move itself on its own, but the thoughts in my inner voice do. And it's that sense of helplessness, right, that not only did I not. I don't feel like I architected this thought. Like, tell me what the next thought that's going to pop into your head is going to be. You can't do it. You don't know what it's going to be. And then on top of that. So first off, I didn't originate this thing, although I kind of did. And then I identify with it, and it's me, but it's also not me because it came from somewhere that wasn't me. And then I don't know how to get rid of it. So I'm like. I'm like the fucking prisoner and the prison guard of this same issue. So, look, we've done an entire hour, hopefully convincing people emotions are important. You can change them. And there Are going to be some tools. Second hour, let's get into some of the shifters that you talk about. So, first one, sensory shifters. What about them?
- [56:54]
B
Okay, so sensory shifters focus on the senses. Hearing, sight, sound, touch. Those are some smell. Those are some of the big ones. These are all levers that you can strategically pull to push your emotions in another direction. We talked a little bit about how music can do it. You know, in terms of just blindness, I will say I was totally blind to the power of sensation prior to doing some research in this space. And now that I know it, it just changes the way I operate on a daily basis. Like, here's my little emotion regulation machine that I keep in my pocket. It is loaded up with playlists to push my emotions in different directions. I have been listening to music since I'm five years old. I've said this during previous interviews, so I don't know if you've heard this or not, but do you want to guess? If you don't know what my first tape was? This was a cassette record. Cassette profile. Me. It's fine. What do you think?
- [58:01]
A
Stevie Ray Vaughan?
- [58:04]
B
MC Hammer? You can't.
- [58:08]
A
Oh, my God. And it all went downhill from there.
- [58:11]
B
Well, but I've always been very eclectic because after that, it was Madonna's immaculate collection, and I'm all over the place. I love lots of music, but I've been listening to music all my life, and I never thought to use it strategically as a tool to push my emotions around until I have this experience with my daughter. I'm coaching soccer several years ago. I look forward to this every weekend. It's like my release. Not because I'm an obnoxious soccer dad, mind you. It's just very different from my day job. And this one morning, she's just in a. I think I can say it without hurting her feelings. She'd admit that she's in a foul mood, Right? She just doesn't want to go play. She's moping around. I do everything I can to break her out of this funk. Unsuccessfully, I succumb. I'm like, all right, this is going to be a long morning. We get in the car. As we're driving, on the way to the soccer field, one of my favorite songs comes on the radio. Journeys. Don't Stop Believing. I start jamming out. I'm, like, bopping my head. I'm leaning into the song. And normally when I do this, she will look at me with disdain because I'm embarrassing her. But I look at her in the rearview mirror. And I see she's kind of getting into it as well. This song had rerouted our collective experience in that vehicle. She went on to score a ton of goals. It was a great day. Since that moment, this is one of the first things I will do if I find myself moving in a direction I don't want to be moving. Now, what's really interesting to me about music, we often. We often use this tool to regulate ourselves, but in a way that is not consistent with our goals. And what do I mean by that? You ever get sad and find yourself rather than listening to Journey you go to. Well, journeys don't stop believing. You go to another one of their. Their sound, their songs like. Or you go to Adele or some other music to just kind of bring you down a little bit more.
- [60:15]
A
Lewis Capaldi is my go to. Yeah.
- [60:17]
B
Okay. So now we talked earlier about there being a functionality to sadness. And if your goal is to stay in that emotional state because it's serving you well, it's helping you reframe things in ways that are ultimately productive, great, keep listening to that music. But if your goal is to not feel sad, don't go listen to that song, go in the opposite direction. So, you know, that's a little insight into how sensation can work. But all of the sensory channels can be leveraged to shift your emotions. You don't want to abuse them because they are so powerful. We often reflexively go to them. There are obviously some unhealthy forms of sensory experiences that we can engage in that can push us in the wrong direction. Emotional overeating as an example. So you want to be aware that this is a tool and you want to wield it carefully. Probably the easiest, low effort tool that exists in our toolbox are these sensory shifters. And that's just one category. Should we shift to another one?
- [61:29]
A
Should I keep shift. I just give me for touch, taste and smell. Give me your favorite non invasive. Usually makes people feel better ideas.
- [61:47]
B
So touch, you know, if it's someone at work, I do one of those. I do a fist bump. I mean, it just. It signals that there's someone there who's on your team. Right. And I've not gotten any HR complaints from doing that just yet. But like, you know, an innocuous fist bump, it's just like a. It's like shaking a hand almost. Right. Without the concern about transmission of germs.
- [62:13]
A
But.
- [62:13]
B
But certainly where does touch used most in my life? It's. It's with my loved ones, my friends. Like, if I see my Wife is dealing with some stuff. Like I'll go over to her and I'll just kind of rub her back and I'll do the same for my kids and I value when they do that for me is putting on a.
- [62:33]
A
Like a particularly comfortable blanket or a piece of clothing. Would that count as one as well?
- [62:37]
B
Yeah, there's some, there's some, there's some work suggesting that like soothing sensory experiences of the sort that you're describing can have benefit. Benefit as well.
- [62:47]
A
More powerful to do it with another person though I'm going to guess that.
- [62:51]
B
I don't know that they. I don't know studies that have compared the different kinds of sensory experiences. But if you ask me for my professional opinion, you. Yes.
- [62:57]
A
Get me on the journal. Get me on the journal. Ethan, let's, let's fucking, let's run. Let's run this up together.
- [63:02]
B
We've got to get you in the PhD program.
- [63:05]
A
You said I'm doing my first ever. I will be authored on my first ever study. I came up with an idea talking about how I thought fit people would have more of an aversion to Ozempic users than plus size people because it derogates the fitness signals that they achieved with hard work and gives people an easy route. And I'm going to do that with Candice Blake and McAn Murphy over in Australia. So I'm legitimately, I can say I am an academic now.
- [63:37]
B
Well, I will say that the best predictor of success in academia for me is the curiosity is the ability to have your eyes open to questions and then be able to kind of formulate a prediction about what you might see. So you've got the raw, raw skills there.
- [63:57]
A
Honorary PhD. Honorary PhD.
- [63:59]
B
Okay, there we go.
- [64:00]
A
Smell.
- [64:00]
B
Okay, so that's so smell a smell, you know. All right. If I'm admit it all the hell. I take baths and, and I love bath salts. You know, just this wonderful soothing experience. Of course there is this sensory element there too, like the heat, the warmth. Also I find that to be an amazing emotion regulator. I know people talk a lot about cold plunges and things of that sort. For me it's a bath every night.
- [64:33]
A
A little bit more gentle than a cold plunge.
- [64:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, kind of love it. Taste. Dark mini dark chocolate peanut butter cup. Works like a character, you know, calorifically.
- [64:45]
A
Negligible, but taste wise, pretty intense.
- [64:48]
B
Pretty intense. You know, you just have to be careful of the slippery slope there because they are so wonderful. You need to, you need to make.
- [64:56]
A
Sure titrate the dose.
- [64:58]
B
That's right. But think about, these are all emotional experiences, right. And sometimes we need to. They can be so powerful we actually have to use regulation to prevent ourselves from succumbing to that lover.
- [65:12]
A
From spending three and a half hours in the bath when you've got stuff to do. Yeah.
- [65:16]
B
I was thinking more about eating pizza at 10pm but if, but you know.
- [65:20]
A
In the bath isn't for three and a half hours.
- [65:22]
B
There's some feedback mechanisms that prevent that from happening in the bath. It's called pruning, you may be aware.
- [65:28]
A
Yeah, it's called the kids needing to be put to bed. Okay, next one. Attention shifters.
- [65:34]
B
Okay, so here's the deal with the attention, here's the high level, I think critically important take home. Many of us, myself included, are often taught when you have a problem, you dive in, you deal with it immediately. You don't run away, you approach. We also hear that chronically avoiding problems, not good, gets you into all sorts of trouble. It is absolutely true that chronic avoidance and what I mean by that is if a problem arises, you're coping tactic, your strategy is just like bury it, move on, deny, suppress and just keep going. Lots of data showing that that does not work out so well for folks, predicts all sorts of negative outcomes over time. What we have done though is we have overgeneralized from that observation that chronic avoidance is bad. To assume that all avoidance is bad and that is not true. Being strategic between how we engage with things that are troubling us, approaching and avoiding going back and forth can be a really, really useful approach to managing difficult circumstances. You don't have to actually choose between approaching or avoiding. You can do both. Now there are lots of very, very simple examples, simple illustrations I think of the value of this. So have you ever benefited from like getting an email that just pissed you off and not responding right away? But like you took some time away, a couple of hours or a couple of days, you come back to it and one of two things happens. Either, huh, what was the big deal in the first place? Like who cares? Or you can look at it from a different perspective. Right? You've got some. The psychological distance that taking some time away has provided you with allows you to approach this a little bit more objectively. I'm guessing both of those have probably been true for you, right?
- [67:36]
A
Yeah. One of the things that's been really interesting around that is if a clip from an old episode or a tweet that I sent a long time ago, if somebody gets a hold of that and takes offense to it. I don't know why, but it feels way less emotionally aggravating if it was something from two years ago than if it's something that I tweeted today. And there's. So that's kind of not too dissimilar to what you're talking about?
- [68:05]
B
Absolutely.
- [68:06]
A
Why? Because that's still me. Right. I still said it, but there's some amount of distance that's away from it that makes it feel less strong.
- [68:16]
B
Yeah. So. So as you get distance, you've got psychological distance from those experiences. The passage of time gives you that psychological distance. It gives you that mental space.
- [68:30]
A
On that point, that sounds great, but what if you're just spending the next two days ruminating about that fucking email and that fucking guy that sent that fucking email, and you're like, well, it's great that I've given myself this psychological distance, but all I've done is been in two days of turmoil.
- [68:47]
B
And this is why we don't just have attention as a shifter, but we also have sensation, perspective. We have people shifters. We have space shifters and culture shifters. So you don't have to choose between just either avoiding or approaching, but you also don't have to choose between just doing one of those and all of these other kinds of things.
- [69:10]
A
So you're listening to Joanie, Don't Stop Believing on repeat for two full days until you get to come back to the email and then you can do.
- [69:17]
B
Yep, you've read me. You now know me. You know me well. But, but look, but like, this is so, like, you know, in the book, I provide this decision tree, if you will, to. How do you know if approaching is working or not? Sometimes approaching a problem doesn't actually work because you end up ruminating endlessly. You try to work through this, but you just think of this jerk who said this thing. Like, why the hell did they have to say, like, why don't you say that to my face? That's by the way, my go to. Like, when someone, you know, why don't you say this to my face? You're like, really? This is how you do it? Like, it can. It can. Look at me, I'm getting lit up. I don't even have a transgression that in mind, and I'm getting aggravated on your behalf. That would be an indication that approach isn't working. Likewise, if you try to avoid. But you find that even when you're engaged with engaging distractors, the thoughts just keep intruding about this problem. Just keep Coming back, that's a cue that this kind of strategic avoidance may not be working and you should approach or do something else. So attention can be an incredibly powerful tool. You know, in the book I tell the story of my grandmother who, you know, was my hero growing up. She, she, you know, evaded the Nazis in eastern Poland for several years and she came over to the States with nothing, built a wonderful life. And all I wanted to do growing up was hear her tell me stories about how she did it, like how she managed to survive. And she would never tell me, never talk about it. She didn't want to go there, but she would allow herself to think about these issues. The war, once a year during a Remembrance day ceremony. She lived a really great life, but she avoided thinking about the problem. She would dose it. She's an example of how being strategic with your attention works for some people. But sometimes we don't have the luxury of looking away for a variety of reasons. We gotta stare the problem right in the face. And we can't even, you know, pop our headphones on sometimes when we've gotta look at that problem. And so in comes perspective. Like we could change the way we think about our circumstances when we're looking at it now. This can be sometimes a very tricky thing to do. One of my favorite recent experiences with close friends happened several years ago. We were driving home from dinner one night and a buddy of mine was like, just really struggling with something at work. It was really bringing him down. He was telling us about in the car and his wife looks over to him and says, why don't you just focus on the positive? Just like think about the bright side. And he pauses and he looks at her and goes, yeah, easier effing said than done. And it was just like, I smiled. I wrote about it in the book because it was so powerful, which I think captures this experience that all of us have at times. We know, we totally know that. Yeah, if only we could think about this a little bit more constructively, everything would be better. This is the basis of the intervention that you just went through or that you're going through now. CBT how to change the way you think, to change the, the way you feel. But it's not always easy to do that. And so how can you do that? Let's go back to distancing, because this is where getting some psychological distance can often be a difference maker. This capacity to step back and look at our experiences from a zoomed out perspective can often be very, very helpful. And the cool thing Here is that there are many different tactics that exist for reflecting on ourself and our circumstances from a distance. They don't come with a user's guide, but once you know it, like, these are my go to. I call them my psychological jujitsu moves. So, all right, mental time travel. I'm struggling right now. I'm really feeling whatever. Fill in the blanks. How am I going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? All of our experiences follow. Not all. Nearly all of our emotional experiences follow a nat the same time course, temporal trajectory. If you want to geek out with me, here's what happens. Something happens, boom. Emotions go up. Then as time goes on, the emotion fades. Depending on the experience, some go way up, some a little bit, some take longer, some recover more quickly. But nearly all of them follow that trajectory. We lose sight of that when we're in the midst of it. When we're in the cauldron, we zoom in on the awfulness. We forget that as time passes, things will settle down a bit. When you jump into the time travel machine, how am I going to think about this? How am I going to feel tomorrow, next week, next month, 10 years from now? It speeds up. You don't have to wait for time to pass because you get to the, oh, it's five years from now, what am I going to think about? This argument I just had. What that does is it highlights the fact that what you're going through is, is temporary, it's unstable, it will eventually fade. That turns the volume down on our emotions, right? So that's time travel into the future, go into the past. You could do this. It works a little bit differently. I find it to be equally effective. So shit hits the fan. Things aren't going well. Mental time travel machine. 1943, eastern Poland. Get out. I spend some time with my grandparents, like evading the Nazis in the frozen Polish woods. Like, I don't have to spend much time with them back then to realize that what I'm going through now, come on. This pales in comparison to what they had to endure. It's a powerful, powerful way of putting my adversity in perspective. Now, to be clear, these little jujitsu moves, these are not taking a negative experience and turning it into a tea party. What they are doing is they're turning the volume down on the negativity, allowing me to re engage, be objective and get on with things. Those are two distancing tactics. I'm going to throw two more at you really quick because these are just Very tactical moves here. One of my favorite tools, distance, self talk. Coach yourself through a problem silently. Very important. Silently using your name and you. All right, Ethan, how are you going to deal with this? Here's what you're going to do. We are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. We are all giant hypocrites at some level. This is not just me who says this, right? I mean, think about the phrase do as I say, not as I do. Right? Like we're all familiar with that phrase. When you use the word you and your name to coach yourself through a problem, you're using language to shift your perspective. Most of the time we use the word you I. So when we think about and refer to someone else, right? I is when we think about ourself, you is someone else. So when I'm talking to myself with you, it's putting me in this advice, coaching mode, if you will. This is how I talk to someone else. I'm really good at giving advice to other people. Not so good about giving advice to myself. So distant self talk. And the last tool I'll mention here, the last distancing tool, it's not the only one, but the last one that I'm fond of. It's a bit of a. How can I. It's a bespoke tool. Do you speak any second languages?
- [76:52]
A
Just British English and American English. That's it.
- [76:55]
B
Okay. I don't know if this will work for you, but many people who speak a second language that is totally distinct from their main. And I wouldn't say British and English are. Find that cursing in a second language doesn't quite have the same level of indignity and inappropriateness. So it's a lot easier. You know, you can. You can. Spanish is my. As my second language. As you know very well from our last. Our last conversation, it's easy for me to curse in Spanish and there's nothing. There's nothing. Doesn't seem as. As bad as when I. I curse in my native tongue, which I'm reluctant to do. So what research shows is that when you think through emotional problems in a second language, you have some mental space. From the emotions, you've got some distance.
- [77:48]
A
Oh, that's so interesting.
- [77:49]
B
Isn't that fascinating?
- [77:50]
A
Yeah, that's great. I was reading a study recently looking at patients who have had some sort of brain trauma and their primary or secondary language had been impacted but their secondary or primary language hadn't. Sort of showing that different languages can exist in sort of different portions of the brain. And it kind of makes sense with regards to this that we're just activating and I've got to assume that the primary language is going to be the one that's going to have the greatest sort of sense of self authorship. This is me.
- [78:24]
B
That's right.
- [78:25]
A
You got part of my sense of self.
- [78:27]
B
You're learning your, you're learning about your emotions. You're having these emotional experiences in your native language, not your second.
- [78:34]
A
That's the best justification for learning Spanish that I've ever heard.
- [78:38]
B
Really. Not, not my ability to skillfully walk you through the conundrum you faced in Guatemala.
- [78:43]
A
I, we together as a team navigated a very, how do you say, a very forthcoming, very keen maid in the hotel who came and put water next to me. So I think I tried to say like una ora, like one hour. And she said agua si and came over. I'm like, no fucking water. Never mind. And we left it in the episode just before we finish up on the attention thing. What was that NASA astronaut training thing?
- [79:10]
B
Oh, so. So one of the stories I tell is of this astronaut cosmonaut. So this is someone who is an American became an astronaut, but then also trained with, not changed, also trained with the Russian cosmonauts because he lived on the Mir space station for several months. And while he was on the space station he, he had to deal with one of the worst space fires in history. And this fire just happened out of nowhere. And one of the things he reported doing as he was trying to navigate this terrifying moment where like this fire is raging and you know, might spell the end of him and his fellow cosmonauts is he starts coaching himself through the problem using, using his name and you. So he starts using distant self talk in, in a moment of heightened stress. And there are lots of illustrations of this. A few Wimbledons ago, Jovovic, when he was early on during the tournament was getting, getting beat pretty badly by, by an opponent. He takes a break, goes to the bathroom and comes out of the bathroom and he's just like a bat out of hell. And he like demolishes his opponent, wins. I think he went on to win the entire tournament after that. And after the, after the match someone asked him, hey, you know, like what happened in the bathroom? When he took a break? And he's like, I, I gave, I coached myself through a problem. I gave myself advice. I said you can do it, the match isn't over. You got this. It was like textbook case of using this tool to coach himself through the problem. Tons of examples of this. Malala Yousavzi, talking about dealing with the threat of the Taliban, reported doing this, too.
- [81:09]
A
I had the first live tour that I did a year and a half ago. The Manchester show was the biggest one of the tour. It was the biggest crowd that I'd ever been in front of. The venue was brighter and it had a higher ceiling and sound wasn't quite so great. And it had all of my friends there. It was the closest one to the city that I was from in the uk. So Mum and Dad were there and my business ex, business partner was there and all of these people and all of this stuff. And I just wasn't happy with how the first half went. And there's an interval for 15 minutes. And without having read your book, because it was before it was even written, I went and had a word with myself for five minutes in the mirror. I was like, look, if you're not having fun now, like, what the fuck are you doing? You've got people here that love you. Everybody wants to see you succeed. They're not an adversary. There's nothing to fear. This can't go wrong. You're already. You've already done the thing. You've sold out this venue on your. You know, a lot of sort of positive reinforcement. Think about all of the prep that you've done. Think about how meaningful these ideas are to you. Go out there and enjoy it. And in some ways, it kind of feels a bit silly because, I don't know, it's just. There's a certain amount of pitifulness, I think when you're talking to yourself and you're like, God, I wish this was somebody else, or whatever, and you go, hey, man, fucking no one else is coming to do this. It's one of those unique challenges that is exclusively yours to bear. And nobody will care if you don't do it. It's just on you. And that was a moment that came to mind for me.
- [82:38]
B
Well, I love that. It's a perfect illustration. And it does seem, on the one hand, yeah, but we're talking to ourselves. But, like, let's think about for a moment the things we sometimes say to ourself when we're struggling. We say things to ourself, we think things about ourself that we would never dare offer to another human being, let alone someone we want to succeed. My buddy comes to me, my daughters come to me, my wife comes to me with a problem, like, I'm giving them the most constructive advice I possibly can doesn't mean I'm always being unrealistic with them and telling them, but I'm trying to always support them to the best extent possible.
- [83:19]
A
Opposed to. This always happens with you. You're useless.
- [83:21]
B
You. You useless. You suck. Why even I would never do that. Yet oftentimes lots of people default to doing that with themselves. And so by switching the pronouns that we're using to refer to ourselves and using our name even, it's automatically putting us into this more at constructive advice giving mode. And it's a simple thing to do. That's what I love about so many of these tools. If you know what they are. Boom. I mean, how long does it take me to think of. All right, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this next week?
- [83:59]
A
Oh, that's a nice little combination. I like that.
- [84:02]
B
And that's a blend. We don't know enough about blends either, but I blend the two together quite frequently. So we just covered the three, what I call internal shifters. Sensation, attention and perspective. And there are lots of tactics within those. These are things that you could do wherever you are, you have those tools within you. But then here's the beauty of the human condition. We also have these shifters around us in our relationships with other people, in our physical environments and in our cultures. And those are even more places that you could find resources to help yourself.
- [84:42]
A
Yeah, I wanted to sort of interject there and maybe front run a potential concern or criticism that some of the more diligent. I can't change my emotions holdouts might have a lot of this so far. Feels like sort of a top down dictation, which doesn't change the way that we feel, but it changes the story that we tell ourself about how we're feeling. Is there anything about sort of getting a little deeper, about actually sort of tapping into the feeling? Or is it just surprising when you deploy these tactics about how much of a. How permeable you are when you start to do this sort of stuff?
- [85:24]
B
You know, I think you do get deep change with some of these tools, you know, and I think it obviously varies person to person by circumstances, but the sensory experiences, I think you get really deep, deep shifts. They may not be long lasting, those sensory shifts, but sometimes a temporary reprieve is what we need to then either use another tool or get back on track. You know, just think about the sweaty Muay Thai fighter. I mean, like, that's a, that's a deep experience, emotional experience. I'm guessing you had or you've had when that occurs. You know, likewise with. With attention. Right. Like being able to divert your attention away from something that's bothering you onto a really immersive alternative experience. You could think of attention. It's your mental spotlight, like, what are you looking at? Right. If you change what you're looking at from something that is causing distress to something that is causing, maybe the opposite. This is going to change that emotional experience, perspective. In some ways, I think that's the shifter that lends itself most vulnerable to the critique that you just offered. But let's not misinterpret that vulnerability as an indictment as to the power of that tool. In many ways, it might be one of our most precious tools. So when we gotta look at something really hard and now reframe it, right. It's very hard to take something that is a giant negative and make it a giant positive. We don't see that happening very often. What we do see happening is taking something that is negative and reframing it to make it more manageable. Being able to do that. That is not like the fact that we don't take it to be a super positive, like the loss of a loved one or an immense rejection. I think that's impractical. And I think there are probably good reasons why you wouldn't want to be able to do that. I have come across certain people in my life, and I'm speaking from anecdote here, who were exceptionally adept, almost pathologically so, at reframing a really, really bad thing, just totally positive. And as a result, they didn't actually learn from that experience.
- [87:58]
A
I've been around those people too.
- [87:59]
B
Right. And so I think you do want to have some safeguards on our ability to reinterpret things.
- [88:07]
A
Well, let's not forget, you know, if everybody looks back on their life at the moments of greatest change, greatest inflection, invariably it's around. It's in the blast radius of some huge period of pain. You know, this thing occurs and you realize, oh, my God, I'm doing X or life's really short or nothing is promised, or the world wasn't the way that I thought it was or whatever it might be. And yeah, if you have a no bad vibes, good vibes only philosophy, you're robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn from those things.
- [88:43]
B
That's right. You would never experience them because we do have this motivation to avoid pain. So then you would live a life free of it and you would be robbed in your terms. So the example I like to Give people that really, I think, resonates is physical pain. Most of us try to minimize the experience of physical pain. We're motivated to avoid pain. I'm a great example of it. I do not like physical pain. Giant baby at the doctor, all these things. All right, well, what if we're successful? We never experience physical pain. We can actually look at people who never experience physical pain because there are people born into this world who are incapable of having that experience due to a genetic anomaly. What happens to those people is they die young because their hand gets caught in the stove and they don't experience a cue that tell them to pull it out. Right. So we want to be able to have these negative experiences because they have a functionality to them. What we don't want to have happen is keeping our hand in the stove or like a hypersensitivity to pain. That's the emotions getting triggered too greatly. So have I quieted the critique yet.
- [89:58]
A
Or very well litigated. Let's move on to the next ones. So, spaceships, people. Yep.
- [90:05]
B
Oh, spaceshifters. Okay, so space shifters. This is a tool that I was totally blind to, and it works at a few different levels. Let me ask you, are there any places, like physical places in your life that you find when you're in that presence of that place? It's just filled with a sense of comfort. It's just. It feels almost restorative.
- [90:28]
A
Yes.
- [90:29]
B
So might you care, giving a few examples?
- [90:32]
A
Yeah, of course. So the bedroom that I've got here, the sort of outside deck area next to a pool, the gym that I attend on a Saturday morning, maybe not super restorative. That's a slightly different emotion, I think, but those are some. And then the walk that I tend to take on the morning.
- [90:57]
B
So you've probably heard that we attach to other people and that certain people in our life can be these if we're securely attached to them. They're almost like this extension of like a resource that we could lean on to help us deal with adversity. You go to those people, just being in their presence can be soothing. And this goes back to early childhood when we. Not always, but when we develop secure, positive attachments to other people, when we find ourselves going to those caretakers, if they're a securely attached figure, everything feels better, like it's going to be okay. We also develop these attachments to places, and I don't think they're always top of mind for us, but when we visit those places that we have these positive attachments to, they can fill us with a sense of positivity that can often be useful for managing these distressing experiences. So I think about my kids often with this work because when they were young, they would often do this thing whenever they'd get upset, usually if I or their mom discipline them, they'd be like, I just want to go home. I just want to go to my room, just like you. Their bedroom. Their bedroom was this place that filled them with a sense of safety and security. And so the invitation here to folks is to think about. Do a kind of environmental audit, if you will. Like, what are the spaces around you in your immediate vicinity that provide you with a sense of safety and security? I often, like. I love watching these spy films where there are safe houses that are all over the city. You know what I'm talking about? Like, when a spy is being chased, if they. There was a safe house. Do you know what a safe house is?
- [92:46]
A
Yes.
- [92:47]
B
Okay. So it's like, that's this one. It's usually like an apartment or a place in the country. The bad guys never find them. There are supplies there. If you're in the house, as the name implies, you're safe. I would argue that we have the equivalent in our neighborhoods, in our general vicinities, spaces, that when we go to those spaces, when we're dealing with difficult things, they provide us with a sense of security and restoration. So for me, it's the arboretum near my home. It's the tea house that I wrote my first book, and it's one of my offices on campus. I'm in those places, and I just. Things feel a lot more manageable. That's one way that you can interact with your spaces strategically. The other thing you could do is more locally. You could design your immediate spaces, your office, your home, in two ways. You can add things that push your emotions in a desirable direction. So what am I talking about? Well, pictures of loved ones and friends. We've done this research where we ask people to think about a really painful event, and we'll then expose them to an image of a loved one or a friend on some trials. On other trials, we expose them to the image of another subject's loved one or friend. So in one case, you have an emotional attachment, a positive one. In the other case, you don't. And what we find is that a micro glance at a picture of a loved one speeds up the rate at which people recover from distress experiences. Yes, yes, way. And so, like, after I did that research, I populated my offices with pictures of my wife Is like, why are you. Why are you putting up pictures everywhere? You've never had pictures in your offices before. I have them all over the place. If I could turn my computer, I'd show you. So. So I've got them right there. I've got them on that, direct on that direction. And so I now, like, just glance over and I've got these little, like, jolts of resilience when I need it. Plants, we know that nature has restorative effects. We have a sense of why that happens. They can capture our attention, often giving us a little break from the tumult of life. That's true not just of going for a walk in a safe, natural setting. Although the more immersive the experience is, the better. So you should try to interact with nature more if you find that helpful. It's an easy thing to do. But if you can't get outside, like put some plants in your surrounds. I have one like right over there. Bought a bunch of plants. Never had plants in the house either. We dropped more money than I'd like to admit on plants all over the house. I live this stuff. So that's imposing things around you. You can also take things away from your environment that may be pushing you in the wrong direction. And I'll give you two examples there. Very concrete. Oftentimes when we're overcome with emotion, you don't feel like you're in control. Goes back to what we were talking about before. We don't like that feeling because human beings, we like to be in control. One way you can regain a sense of control is by creating order around you. That leads to what we call compensatory control. You're putting things away, you're organizing, cleaning up. That gives you a sense of order and control outside in the world that you're lacking inside here. Simple thing you could do. This is why people often clean and organize when they're stressed out. They don't know why they do it, but they have this reflexive urge to do so. Has that ever been true for you?
- [96:35]
A
Yes.
- [96:36]
B
Okay, so compensatory control, the other thing you can do, and this may be controversial, but I stand by it. If there are triggers that are challenging you and undermining your ability to meet your emotion management goals, get rid of those triggers. And so for me, this is where pizza, doggy bags come into play. So I have a. I have a love affair with pizza. It's my childhood food. I grew up in New York. I love New York City. Classic slice of pizza. If I see Pizza, I will eat it. And it doesn't matter what time of day it is. And I will eat it in the wee hours of the morning or late night when I shouldn't be eating that food. So why am I talking about pizza? If we have people over for a football watching party, I'll order the pizza, I will indulge in it. I will over order because I always like to know there's enough food for everyone there. When the party is over, I will insist on that people take the pizza with them. If there is leftover pizza, I will throw it out because I know that if it is in the refrigerator and I see it, I will go for it.
- [97:52]
A
It is far easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
- [97:56]
B
That's. That is correct. And so I'm proactively here structuring my environment to help me meet my goals. So that's another way you can use your space.
- [98:07]
A
You've sort of beautified certain spaces. You've used this friends and loved ones influence to help bring to life what it is that makes you feel good. Plants, great, safe walk in nature, maybe even better because it's more immersive and then the opposite. This compensatory control thing, I imagine as well there must be a version. You know, I got a bunch of friends that are musicians and their space invariably tends to be a little bit messier than mine. They may say inspirational, but you know, the place. The desk that you want to do your taxes at and the desk that you want to come up with the idea for your next novel are probably not the same spot you want to be. You know, going to an artist's studio, there's random socks and half finished cigarette butts and upended paint cans and torn pages from newspaper. You know, that's the space that you want to be in, but it's not maybe that if you want to answer your emails, I'll be on a zoom call.
- [99:02]
B
Well put. You know, you just get psych. Ph.D. here we come. Oh, there was actually this famous artist. I think his name is Hunderwasser. I'm butchering the name. But his artistic style was characterized by an aversion to straight lines. He thought they encroached on his creativity. And when I'm, when I'm in it, when I'm like writing and trying to be creative, like the office is a total mess. The only time my office is clean is when I'm having a little spell of rumination about something. That's when I put things away nice and orderly. So that speaks to the flexibility of our minds and how closely tethered they are to our surroundings. And again, once you know about these principles, it allows you to be less reactive and more strategic. So what do I mean by that? Earlier in life I would, I would like organize and clean up. When I was stressed out, I didn't know why. Now when I find the, the rumination just beginning to percolate, I immediately start cleaning and organizing. Like I get in there right away. So the amount of time between the trigger and my intervention has shortened quite a bit based on what I know about how these tools work.
- [100:24]
A
Yeah, that's so good. Okay, relationship shifters.
- [100:28]
B
Okay, so relationship shifters, let me give you three take homes here for how to harness your relationships with other people. There are lots of ways other people can affect us. Obviously we are a social species. One is when you go to them to talk about your problems, you've got to be careful about who you choose to talk to about your problems because they can either help you or harm you. And sometimes the harm comes even when they're really well intentioned. What do I mean by this? Lots of people think that the best way to provide support for someone else is just to let them vent about their emotions. What we have learned about venting is venting is good for strengthening the relational bonds between people. Good to know that someone else has your back. They're willing to hear you out, empathize with you. The problem with venting is if that is all you do, you leave the conversation. You feel tight about your relationship with that other person. The problem is still there. The best kinds of conversations do two things. You talk to someone who first gives you this opportunity to express your feelings. They listen, they engage, they empathize. But then at a certain point in the conversation, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. They're in an ideal position to help you do that. Problem isn't often happening to them. There's an art to doing this well. So if you're now the person that someone is coming to seeking support, you start off and you know, like, what's going on? Tell me about it. Oh, it sounds terrible. When you see your opening, you know, sometimes, hey, I have a thought. Can I share it with you? Sometimes they might say, no, I'm not done. And then they keep going, right? At other times it's like, yeah, tell me, what do you think? So you want to be delicate with that. Because depending on the person, what they're struggling with, some people need, need to do a little bit more of that emotional work.
- [102:25]
A
Problem solving versus emotional listening.
- [102:27]
B
Yeah. So we want to do both though, right? We want to follow that trajectory. First the emotional stuff, then the cognitive. The amount of time you need in that emotional zone is going to vary. But now we've just given folks a blueprint for both. How to find people to provide them with the best kind of support. And if someone comes to them, here's a roadmap that they can follow to give other people good support.
- [102:50]
A
How contagious are emotions?
- [102:54]
B
Unbelievably contagious. They can spread within seconds, which is why you should be incredibly alert to folks on your team who may be experiencing emotions that, if they spread, might not be conducive to the broader group. Why does this happen? Why are emotions contagious? Because, in particular, when we're in circumstances that we're not quite sure what we should feel, Other people are a pretty good source of information. So we're constantly referencing other people for info about what the situation is like, and we're using that information to inform our own reaction. So you get these contagiousness effects a lot where it's not certain how you should feel and you're more likely to be infected, I guess, is the. Well, let's stick with the metaphor. When it's. It's someone who is at your level or above your level, Someone that you just in. In the hierarchy, you're more vulnerable to.
- [103:58]
A
That's interesting.
- [104:00]
B
Yeah. So you want to pay attention to. To contagion and, you know, like, you can use this as a tool as well. Like you can affect, hopefully positively other people by trying to, you know, come in there with the right kind of attitude that you think is conducive to the goals that you have, if it's a workplace environment or even in your home. Another important way that people can shift us that I think is important to point out has to do with social comparisons. So we often hear that we should not compare ourselves to other people. You've heard this before? Yes.
- [104:38]
A
Comparison. Thief of joy.
- [104:40]
B
Thief of joy. Right. I'm on the record. It's in print. I've said this to my kids at times, and it's probably the worst advice I've ever given, because social comparisons are how we work. They're part of how we make sense of our standing in the world. We reference other people to gain some insight into where we are on dimensions that don't have clear standards. If you want to understand. Understand how successful you are in life, you're going to look to your surroundings and other people to draw an inference about that. And that's true of lots of different qualities that we care a great deal about. So number one, like, I think the, the challenge here is not to stop comparing yourself to other people because we're going to always be doing that at some level. But it's under to understand how you can benefit the most from engaging in those comparisons. And I want to share with you two shifts here that I have found to personally be game changing. So I inevitably will come across a profile of someone in my network who is outperforming me on some dimension that I care about. And the instant trigger that is out of my control is, oh, oh my God, I'm a failure.
- [105:58]
A
You know, like, look at the size of their H index. Look at how many books they sold last month.
- [106:03]
B
There you go. You know all my triggers, right? And that could be my default, which is an envy reaction. It is not an emotion that feels great. But I can reframe it and I can use that comparison to be a source of motivation. Wait a second, they were able to do this. They're like me. That means I could probably do something like that. So now I've taken a comparison that initially is a source of envy and its associated negative feelings and I've reframed it to be a source of motivation. Now that's a powerful reframe to have in your toolbox because especially if you are on social media, these things do happen more frequently now than before because we're constantly exposed to the accomplishments of other folks. And, and now you have a tool to, when you find yourself encountering those instances, flipping it. Now there's another reframe when it comes to comparisons that I think is also important. Sometimes we will come across individuals who have suffered some tragedy, work, health, relationship. And some people, when they come across that information, their default is to think, oh my God, it happened to them. It can happen to me. And that can be a source of negativity as well. That can bring us down.
- [107:34]
A
Odd type of empathy.
- [107:36]
B
Yeah, it's like, oh no, what if this happens to me? What if I get sick? What if I get nailed for whatever? That can be the default. But a reframe here is, wow, I'm so grateful this hasn't happened to me. Right? Like, doesn't mean you don't still feel bad for that individual. But now like, oh my God, I'm so fortunate I didn't get that diagnosis. Everything is fine. So it's a reframe there as well. So I'd like to share these with folks because I think these social comparisons that are such a huge part of our lives, we can often feel trapped when we engage in them. And there are things we can do to lessen the negative impact that they have. So that's another way in which you could manage your relationships. Yeah, go for it.
- [108:29]
A
What's the role of secure versus insecure attachments here.
- [108:36]
B
With respect to whether, like, how insecure you are, whether you fall victim to these. These social comparisons? Yeah.
- [108:43]
A
And also the people that are around you, you know, how important is it? You know, you've got this. This sense, this lineage between you and this person and whether they're on your team and whether they're supporting you and whether they've actually got your back. And you said before, be careful about who you give bad news to. Yeah, it's not. We don't always invest our emotions into the right people all the time.
- [109:10]
B
Well, I think they're. So I stand by this notion that social comparisons are an inevitable feature of the human condition, and that given that, you want to have tools to mitigate the negative impact that they have and actually turn those comparisons into something you could benefit from. Having said that, there are things you can do to curate your experiences in this world to minimize the likelihood of engaging in certain kinds of comparisons that might repeatedly lead you astray. So what do I mean by that? If you find, for example, that there's someone on your feed, whatever your social media application of choice is, that they're a vulnerability spot for you, so they are someone who maybe you don't like them you asked about liking. Maybe they're a real competitor, and you find that just, you know, learning about their monthly podcast downloads just sends you astray.
- [110:14]
A
These secret enemies who we've maybe never met or never spoken to or don't even know that we exist, and yet here we are, like, hating them secretly.
- [110:22]
B
That's right. So, you know, what did we talk about with the pizza before that? Getting rid of that pizza and the trigger in the first place, from a regulatory standpoint, is likely to be a lot more effective than having to deal with it once it is activated. So curating your feeds, right, Minimizing the degree in which you come into contact with that information, that's another step you can take.
- [110:48]
A
That's kind of like your environment design thing. Yeah, but it's a digital environment design.
- [110:54]
B
And it's blending the environment and the social, which is another important piece to keep in mind that these tools often go hand in hand. So, like another Example of that is nature. Going for a walk in nature. That's an environmental tool. But one of the reasons why nature is so restorative is it captures our attention from the sensory experiences, the smells, the sights. So there are these ways in which these different shifters are coming together in different experiences.
- [111:26]
A
Final one. Culture.
- [111:28]
B
Culture. It's the air we breathe. It is everywhere. And it's often something we take for granted. And I think the more we stop to really think about the role it plays in our emotional lives and the lives of people we care about, the better off we will all be. What is culture number one? It's our values and our beliefs. So let's bring this whole conversation full circle. Do you think you can actually control your emotions?
- [111:55]
A
Yes.
- [111:56]
B
Our culture. Thank you. Good answer. Our culture is giving us those beliefs. Like, I am communicating to my kids from the time they're little that, yeah, you may not be able to control when you experience an emotion, but once you have it, there's a lot of things you can do. You don't have to feel this way if you don't want to. You can do these other things. Right? So I am the culture, and family is a kind of micro culture. I'm giving my kids values and beliefs. Values like, we value the role that emotions play in our lives, and we also value the importance of regulating those emotions to help us achieve our goals. We believe that it is possible to do so. Another important thing that culture does, though, is, is it doesn't just give us these values and beliefs. It gives us tools to help us live up to those values and beliefs. Right. To actualize them. I'm giving my kids tools. How am I giving them tools? I'm talking about these things. I assure you I'm not giving lectures at dinner every night, like PowerPoint presentations on these things. But I'm talking about the stuff I learn about the stuff I am studying in the lab. I'm asking them about their experiences and how they are dealing with stuff. I'm having conversations like I think so many parents have with their kids, but I'm injecting lessons in there that I think are going to serve them well, which is what good parenting is all about, Right? We're socializing our kids to give them the best chance of living the best life they can live. And I think a big part of that is giving them tools to manage their emotions. So that's culture at its best. Now, the other thing to know about culture, though, is you may find yourself in cultures that, from an emotion management standpoint they are just remarkable. Certain organizations really value having a healthy, positive kind of orientation. They give you lots of tools, benefits for helping you manage your emotions. Other cultures can be toxic with respect to, you know, emotions like, they don't matter. We're going to grind you away. Survival of the fittest. If you find that you are in a culture that is pushing your emotions consistently in the wrong direction and there's not much you can do about it, then you've got some interesting options. And one option is to leave that culture and switch over to another one if it is not serving you well, because it is ever present and it can exert a powerful role on your emotional life.
- [114:35]
A
I suppose that some relationships will have that. You know, what is the. I heard it said the other day, it's so cool. When you get into a relationship with someone, you create your own subculture, and everybody knows that. You know, think about what was the tenor, the tone, the energetic sort of typical experience that you would have in the second relationship that you ever had that was long. And you think, oh, yeah, I remember that. And we used to talk about this stuff all the time. And then. And then I started getting interested in this thing, and then we broke up. On my next. My next partner, we talked about it was always like this, and that was so different to that one. So you're creating this subculture in your own life. And I suppose that if you check in with what is the emotional subculture within my household, within my friendship group, within my relationship, I don't like this. Well, I guess you've got two choices. You can either give them this podcast episode in your book and say, hey, look, we can change this, and I think that there's some room for improvement, and it would be better for you and better for me, or you can do some environment design and put yourself in a different place.
- [115:45]
B
That's exactly right. Those are the two options. And I think it's just so easy to overlook the power that culture has on us, but it's the air we breathe that's ever present.
- [115:57]
A
I get the sense that some sort of accountability buddy with a lot of the work that you're doing at the moment would be really great. The person that you speak to very regularly, maybe it is your partner or a close friend or whatever you say, hey, I really want to work on making my emotions my friend, and I want to feel less of the bad, and I want to feel more of the good. How do you feel about us reframing, learning these techniques, and sort of working on this together because you then. The Lollapalooza effect of all of that stuff happening at the same time is pretty wild. You've got social consistency bias, you've got accountability. You've got.
- [116:34]
B
Yeah, I love it. Yeah, let's start the movement right now. I think that's a huge part of it. And one of the things that I've learned in doing research in this space and often working with colleagues on this work, is we end up serving that accountability function for ourselves. Right. Because we're learning about this stuff together. We see the impact it has on participants and on ourselves, and so we're keeping ourselves accountable to this. And so I have, like, I call the. I have this emotional advisory board. These are folks in my network who. I mean, this is such an invaluable resource I possess. These are not trained clinicians per se. These are people just who understand the tools that exist for managing emotions, and they recognize that sometimes I'm going to need some support, because if the problem's really big, they're in a great position to advise me, and they help keep me accountable. And they tune me in to these different shifters that might not be performing optimally. And so I think that is a valuable, valuable commodity. You know, we can do a lot on our own, but we can do a lot better with other people and cultures on our side. And, you know, that's a hope of this book to really emphasize that for folks.
- [117:56]
A
I think the sort of final element I have, it's so great. I'm really, really glad that you wrote this. I get the sense that we are at the beginning of a tapping into emotionality that we haven't necessarily seen for quite a while. You know, we had the rationalist movement, lesswrong.com, astral Codex 10, that sort of stuff. We had a big push toward stoicism, which has a lot of benefits, but is often criticized for, I think, denying feelings. And you don't necessarily use them as advisors. You sort of treat them as adversaries and enemies. And I get the sense that, as with everything, pendulum swing one way, pendulum swing back the other. Rick Hanson, Dr. Rick Hanson, neuroscientist, phenomenal guy. All of his work that he's doing with his Sun Forest, your book that's just coming out, I think we're really sort of at this. The thing that is most primitive and salient to our experience, which is the way that we feel moment to moment, is sort of being rediscovered, revisited, and retreated in this way. But the final element to kind of Bring all of this together, all of this research is how. How do you advise people to make this emotional regulation more automatic, less effortful? How do we make it a habit? What are the powerful daily small practices? How do we sort of really instantaneze this?
- [119:20]
B
We have to whoop it up. So whoop this thing. No, no, no. I was gonna. I was hoping I was gonna tap into your knowledge of music there. The music. Whoop. Whoop. You know, the song. You don't know that song.
- [119:38]
A
You're on your. Just making weird noises into a mic. No, sorry.
- [119:41]
B
Oh, come on. You don't know that song. Whoomp, there it is.
- [119:44]
A
Oh, right. Of course. Right. Well, I. I think. Oof, there it is. Is. Or whoop, there it is. Yeah, Maybe. Maybe you're right.
- [119:51]
B
Yeah. Okay. Okay, I do know.
- [119:53]
A
Yep.
- [119:53]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [119:54]
A
Anyone know the actual name of that song? What's it called?
- [119:56]
B
I. I do. It's actually called Whoomp with an M, not Whoomp. But I thought for. I thought for decades it was Whoop. Okay, so this is a fantastic question, and it's actually the penultimate chapter of my book, and it's titled From Knowing to Doing. Because so often. And this is a huge source of frustration for me, Right? Like, we give people tools. Like, I encounter tools, but I learn about them, and then we just don't use them when we need to use them. And so this is a giant problem that scientists have noted for decades, and they've actually developed a framework for helping people go from knowledge to action, from making this emotion regulation, something you read about, to something that you make automatic in your life. And here's how it works. Whoop is an acronym. So there are a couple of steps. So w. That's the wish. What is your goal? My goal is to not get upset with my. Not, like, have a huge reaction with my kids when they don't listen to me or my wife. Okay. That's the. That's the goal. Oh, the first O. What's the outcome you hope to accomplish if you fulfill this wish? Well, I hope our family is. Is. It's a happier family. Like, we're closer. We have less arguments. The purpose of that O, that next step is to energize you, to really kind of show you what's at stake.
- [121:21]
A
Positive vision of what it could be.
- [121:23]
B
Yeah. To really commit you to engaging in this pursuit. Now let's get to the second O, which is the obstacle. All right, well, what are the obstacles that might stand in the way from you achieving this goal and the outcome you. That would come with it. Well, when I. When I hear them, you know, talk back to me or get ugly with each other, you know, it instantly affects me. It. You know, it. It reminds me of. Of things from my childhood that I didn't like, and I react impulsively. All right, now we've identified the chief obstacle that stands in the way. Now let's get to the p. Which is a plan, but it's not a specific plan. It's what we call an if, then plan. If my. I see my daughters fighting with each other or talking disrespectfully to my wife and I, then. And then you plug in your shifter, then I will think about how I'm going to feel about this a year from now, or then I'm going to broaden my perspective by recognizing they're kids, their brains are still developing, they don't have great control yet. And you just plug in the vens that you think are going to work best for you, and you actually write that out. You then rehearse it a few times. And what the research shows is that engaging in that exercise dramatically improves people's ability to activate this knowledge, to use these tools or whatever the tools are that are in their plan when they actually need them. Interestingly enough, this is something very similar to what the Navy seals do before they have missions. So they will sit down in a group. They will first specify what's their goal, what's the outcome they hope to achieve. Then they'll list out what are all the obstacles that might stand in the way. For every obstacle, they come up with a plan. If this happens, then we're going to do this. If this happens, then we're going to do that. And then they go around the room and Socratic style, call on one another to make sure everyone has that plan intact. This is one of the most successful organizations in the world at accomplishing their goals. And they're using a framework that is very similar to what scientists have suggested all of us can use to help us achieve the regulatory goals that we have. And so if you're committed to something, if there's a goal you have that's really important, consider doing one of these. The more you do it, the more ingrained it'll become.
- [123:58]
A
Wow. Yeah. I guess one other element. Would you mind giving us some of your favorite recipes or some of your favorite stacks of what you tend to put together? Because I think that would be. That would make. Give people a good place to start. There's a lot of experimentation that people can go through. But maybe getting to jump ahead a couple of steps might be useful.
- [124:24]
B
Yeah. So I'll give you my go to shifters. I'll preface it by saying, I think the challenge that everyone faces is a learn about all the tools that are out there and then start experimenting to finding, finding the tools that work best for you. I've done that and I have some great plans that work for me. So if I'm like phase one shifting, for me, I jump into the mental time travel machine. Forward in time, back in time, and I coach myself through the problem using my own name. And you like those three distancing tools. Very, very powerful for, for me, I will also. I'll also use attention. I'll take some breaks. I used to try to dive into something right away if I can afford not to. If I can take some time away and distract a little bit, I will do that as well. Depending on the context, music is always at, at the ready. And I specifically use music prior to performance context. I find that sometimes I actually need to amp. To like, amp myself up. Like, I speak a lot. And so sometimes it's. It's like I'm just, I'm going in there and I'm like, just going through the motion right now. Yeah, that's not good. Right. So I've got some, some heavy stuff. Kind of gets me, gets me going sometimes, though, if the stakes are really high. Right. It's the equivalent of your Manchester performance. Like, I need something to, to kind of like calm me down. Right. And get me locked in. And so I'll use music as a shifter as well. Let's say that round one suite of tools and I. And I. And I mix it up. Depending on the situation. Amongst those few. Let's say that doesn't work. Then I go right to my advocate, my emotional advisory board. I call a couple people. They are. They are on retainer. They're always available when I need them and I will activate them. And that's typically for more intense problems. And I'll go for a walk in nature. There's an arboretum near my house. That's like level two. If that doesn't work, we've got some serious problems. But typically, like, those are the things that I really benefit. Like, you know, nine times out of ten, those tools work. And sometimes I'll have to cycle through them a little bit, but it constrains the amount of time I spend in an undesirable state.
- [126:52]
A
One final question. Let's say that somebody's feeling something good. They're feeling A good emotional state. We've spoken a lot today about managing negative ones. Based on the evidence and the stuff that you look at, or maybe your personal life, what do you do to try and enjoy, absorb, perpetuate that enjoyable emotional state more?
- [127:16]
B
So you want to do the opposite of what we talked about before, when we talked about distancing and sometimes focusing away. Let's zoom in on this and immerse ourselves in it. I mean, my. We don't want to be you in your name. We want to like, just bring that experience really close and stay with it. So what I'm describing right now is what we often refer to as savoring. And this is my sleeping pill. What do I mean by that? I learned this shortly after my first daughter was born. That the best way to help me fall asleep at night is I would just. I close my eyes and I would just imagine her. I would just like see her as a new dad. This was just this intoxicating experience. And I imagine her doing something earlier that day and that just was this wonderful feeling that helped me go to bed. If I want to savor an event now, I'll think about something great that has happened to my kids, my wife, my lab, myself, and I'll just replay in very concrete detail the specific elements. The what. What happened to them in that experience or what happened to me. And that helps drive that state sometimes. I'll often talk about it with someone else. I have some people in my life who are very good at just helping me co. Savor this experience. They'll. They'll just really. That's so incredible. Tell me more. I want one person, like details. I want details, details of the positive stuff. That is a. That is a tool for savoring. And I, and I, and I relish those experiences. I'm all for it.
- [128:53]
A
So good. Ethan, we've managed to go from daylight to nighttime with you, but this is just so great. Like, I really do think that this is really, really important to change people's quality of life in the moment, how long they're going to live, et cetera, et cetera. And you're a fucking beast. So thank you for being here. Where can people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and improve your H index.
- [129:14]
B
Well, appreciate you and appreciate this conversation. Www.ethancross with a k k R-O-S.com and they can get all the information they'd like about shift the book, my lab, and lots of other stuff.
- [129:29]
A
Heck yeah, Ethan. Until next time, mate.
- [129:32]
B
All right. Look forward to it.