A neuroscientist's guide to managing our emotions

Summary

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TED Radio Hour: "A Neuroscientist's Guide to Managing Our Emotions"

Host: Minouche (Manoush) Zomorodi
Guest: Ethan Kross, Psychologist & Neuroscientist
Date: March 27, 2026
Duration covered: [00:27] – [51:34]

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Episode Overview

This episode centers around one of the biggest questions in modern psychology: How do we manage our emotions so that they don’t manage us? Host Minouche Zomorodi talks with neuroscientist Ethan Kross—author of Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You—about the science of emotional regulation, sharing practical tools and philosophical insights from cutting-edge research and real-world experience. The discussion explores why emotions can feel overwhelming, demystifies what "normal" emotional experience looks like, and covers actionable strategies for anyone seeking to harness their emotional lives with greater wisdom.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Stradivarius Analogy – Emotions as Instruments

• [01:53] Ethan Kross compares emotional regulation to playing a Stradivarius violin: even the finest instrument can sound awful if improperly played.
  • Quote: "When our emotions are triggered out of proportions, that's akin to me trying to play a Stradivarius violin. It can cause enormous pain for both the player as well as those around us." (Ethan Kross, [03:00])
• Like learning an instrument, managing emotions is a skill anyone can practice; the problem is most of us never receive a science-based 'blueprint' for it.

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2. What Is Normal? The Human Condition and Emotional Resilience

• [04:56] Discussion about the tendency to pathologize emotions—especially on social media—and self-diagnosis trends.
  • Quote: “If they experience negative emotions at times, welcome to the human condition. We all do. And there’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, there’s everything right with you... All of the emotions we experience are useful when they’re experienced in the right proportions.” (Ethan Kross, [05:22])
• Negative emotions are necessary and healthy in proper measure; striving for total happiness or zero negativity is unrealistic and counterproductive.

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3. A Real-World Example: Louisa’s Story

• [06:41] Ethan recounts the story of Louisa, a mother whose quick thinking saved her daughter having an in-flight allergic reaction but left Louisa consumed by ongoing anxiety and "doom loops."
  • She obsessively worries about future scenarios, illustrating how imagination—a mental strength—can become a psychological trap.
  • Relief came for Louisa not from suppressing her emotions, but through immersive distraction and the realization that believing you can manage emotions is key to doing so:
    • Quote: “She had the epiphany there that if she distracts herself by engaging in something that is really immersive and a positive experience that turned the volume down on the intensity of her anxiety and that ended up really renewing this belief that she had that she actually could manage her emotions.” (Ethan Kross, [11:32])

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4. Self-Control and its Malleability

• [09:44] The Dunedin study: followed 1,000 people from birth, finding that the ability to manage emotions (self-control) is not fixed.
  • People naturally get better (or worse) at self-regulation over their lifetimes.
  • Quote: “How we manage our emotions is malleable. It can change. ... We have the capacity to get better or worse.” (Ethan Kross, [10:55])
• The story transitions to emphasizing the importance of exposing oneself to different tools and actively experimenting to find what works.

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5. Language as a Tool: Distanced Self-Talk

• [15:47] Example of Malala Yousafzai using “distance self-talk”—referring to herself in the second or third person—to navigate fear and stress.
  • Quote: "But then I said, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? Then I would reply myself that 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But... you must not treat others that much with cruelty... You must fight others, but through peace and through dialogue." (Malala Yousafzai, relayed by Ethan Kross [16:31])
• Research shows this technique, called 'distanced self-talk,' weakens negative emotions and triggers more effective self-coaching almost immediately ([18:16]).
  • Quote: "It is called distanced self-talk. And it is useful because we human beings are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice." (Ethan Kross, [17:10])
  • The easier a tool, the likelier people are to use it. "Low effort stuff is often my first line of defense." (Ethan Kross, [18:52])

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6. Senses as Emotional Tools

• [19:39] Everyday sensory experiences—music, scent, touch, visual beauty—are underused levers for mood management.
  • Quote: “If you ask people in the context of studies why do you listen to music, close to 100% will report they like the way it makes them feel... Between only 10 and 30% report using music to shift their emotions.” (Ethan Kross, [20:11])
• Strategic use of senses can quickly shift emotional states; having a music playlist, admiring nature, or leveraging scent (candles, perfumes) are practical tactics.

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7. The Power of Awe

• [22:24] Awe, as measured in a study with veterans rafting the Green River, was the best predictor of reduced PTSD and stress.
  • Experiencing awe (nature, science, beauty) leads to a "shrinking of the self", bringing emotional relief and perspective ([23:27]).

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8. The Emotional Toolbox: Individuality and Experimentation

• [24:00] Findings from a large COVID-era study: people spontaneously use a variety of tools (3–4 per day on average), and combinations that help vary widely.
  • No "one-size-fits-all" solution for emotional management.
  • Quote: “Each person had their own unique way of managing their Covid anxiety. There are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives.” (Ethan Kross, [25:23])

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9. Rethinking Venting

• [27:47] While venting can strengthen relationships, it rarely soothes the negative emotion itself, and may even worsen it without perspective shift.
  • Most effective advice-givers can both empathize and help broaden perspective, helping others reach closure ([29:27]).
  • Exercise: Emotional Advisor Audit (build your personal ‘emotional advisory board’ by identifying people who both empathize and constructively help you reframe problems, [29:51]).

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10. The Inner Voice – Superpower and Saboteur

• [37:04] Human brains naturally wander up to half our waking lives, generating "chatter"—the sometimes helpful, sometimes sabotaging inner dialog.
  • Quote: “The problem is, it is a tool that often jams up on us when we need it most. We don’t come up with clear solutions to our problems. We get stuck in negative thought loops.” (Ethan Kross, [38:47])
  • Recognizing unproductive negative loops is the first step to intervening.

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11. Reframing Doesn't Always Work—And That's Normal

• [39:51] Brain study shows reframing negative thoughts can be effortful or even backfire for chronic worriers ([41:41]).
  • Quote: "...the more prone participants were to worrying, number one, the more effortful it was to try to positively reframe what they were seeing. But then, number two, in many cases, it often backfired." (Ethan Kross, [41:41])
• There are no universal solutions. If standard tools don’t work, try others without self-blame ([43:30]).

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12. The Myth of “Always Approach”—Avoidance Can Be Strategic

• [44:57] Avoidance is often labeled universally toxic, but strategic, temporary avoidance (taking breaks or “dosing” exposure to trauma, as with Kross’s Holocaust survivor grandmother) can be just as helpful as direct confrontation.
  • Quote: “You don’t actually have to choose between those two states. You can actually go back and forth flexibly between them.” (Ethan Kross, [46:01])
  • For Kross’s grandmother, deliberate but circumscribed engagement with painful memories (Remembrance Days) was key: “That ability to be flexible is a skill that works for some people.” ([47:13])

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13. Concluding Thoughts: The Evolution of Emotion Regulation

• [49:58] Historical context: From trepanation and lobotomy to modern science-based skills for emotion regulation. We must devote as much time to learning to communicate with ourselves as we do with others ([51:22]).
  • Quote: “Our toolbox of science based skills is vastly improved. What we need to do a better job doing is using these tools in our lives and sharing them with other people.” ([51:18])

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Notable Quotes

• "If they experience negative emotions at times, welcome to the human condition. We all do. And there's nothing wrong with you."
  — Ethan Kross ([05:22])

• "We are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice."
  — Ethan Kross ([17:10])

• "Each person had their own unique way of managing their Covid anxiety. There are no one size fits all solutions."
  — Ethan Kross ([25:23])

• "The easier something is to do, the more likely one is to do it. ... We're all lazy to some degree. That's human beings."
  — Ethan Kross ([18:52])

• "You can actually go back and forth flexibly between [approach and avoidance]."
  — Ethan Kross ([46:01])

• "What we need to do is devote an equivalent amount of resources to teaching ourselves how to communicate more effectively with ourselves."
  — Ethan Kross ([51:22])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Topic | |-----------|-----------| | 03:00 | Stradivarius violin as analogy for emotions and their management | | 05:22 | What constitutes normal emotions; pathologizing negativity | | 06:56 | Louisa’s story—emotional overwhelm, anxiety, and recovery | | 09:44 | Dunedin study on malleability of self-control over life | | 15:47 | Malala Yousafzai and distanced self-talk | | 18:16 | How “distanced” language reduces emotional intensity almost instantly | | 19:39 | Using the senses (music, scent, vision) for emotional regulation | | 22:24 | The science and power of awe | | 24:00 | The “Emotional Toolbox” study—no one-size-fits-all | | 27:47 | Venting: why it feels good but doesn't fix the feeling | | 29:27 | Emotional Advisor Audit—finding right people for support | | 37:04 | The inner voice as both tool and obstacle, “chatter” | | 39:51 | Brain study—reframing can backfire for chronic worriers | | 44:57 | Strategic avoidance and the story of Kross’s grandmother | | 49:58 | Closing: how far we've come in managing emotion; importance of teaching inner communication |

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Memorable Moments

• Malala’s use of her own name in self-dialogue as an example of a simple, immediate emotional tool.
• The exercise for auditing your emotional advisory board, with advice on identifying truly helpful confidantes ([29:27]).
• Reframing being “easier said than done” (and the humor of a friend’s direct response in the car; [41:59]).
• The nuanced discussion of avoidance vs. approach, with personal and historical family context.

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Final Takeaways

• Emotions, even negative ones, are normal and useful when managed with awareness and proportion.
• There are many evidence-based tools for emotional management: some are as simple as language, music, or shifting perspective; others involve more effortful practices or supportive conversations.
• Emotional management is a skill: flexible, highly individual, and always improvable.
• There is no shame in needing different tools at different times, or in taking breaks from confronting pain.
• The ultimate goal: investing as much in learning to communicate with ourselves as we do with others, so that—like with any fine instrument—we can play the ‘music’ of our minds well.

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Transcript

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

[Podcast Announcer]

Our job now is to dream big.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Delivered at TED Conferences to bring about the future we want to see around the world.

[Ethan Cross]

To understand who we are.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

[Ethan Cross]

You just don't know what you're gonna find challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like,

[Podcast Announcer]

why is it noteworthy and even change you?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and npr, I'm Minouche Zamorodi. Today on the show, managing our emotions so they don't manage us. But we start with a story about a violin.

[Auctioneer]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Not long ago, Sotheby's in New York held an auction for a Stradivarius.

[Auctioneer]

The Joachim Stradivarius, A masterpiece of sound. And we can start the bidding here at $8 million. At $8 million. At 8.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

The bids rose quickly. 8,500,000 now, some from anonymous clients phoning in 9 million.

[Auctioneer]

I have Ella at $9 million. At $9 million already at 9,500,000 and up until sold, $10 million.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So what makes a Stradivarius so valuable? Well, for one thing, they're very rare. Only about 600 Stradivarius violins are believed to exist today. But perhaps more important are the sounds that they produce. Musicians swear by their exquisite craftsmanship and say no other violin can match their rich to tones.

[Ethan Cross]

A Stradivarius is this instrument that is capable of creating this magical music that transports us and creates beauty in the world for those who listen to it and for the person playing it as well.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But here's the thing. Even a Stradivarius can sound terrible if it's played poorly.

[Ethan Cross]

Have you ever heard someone play a violin the wrong way?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Oh, yeah. It's painful. Please stop. Painful is the.

[Ethan Cross]

Is the perfect word, right? Because if you don't know how to play that instrument, it can cause pain. And that's true of our emotions as well.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This is Ethan Cross. He is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan who specializes in emotional regulation. His latest book is called managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And he compares regulating our emotions to playing an instrument. Our brain is like our very own Stradivarius.

[Ethan Cross]

When our emotions are triggered out of proportions, that's akin to me trying to play a Stradivarius violin. It can cause enormous pain for both the player as well as those around us. Now, we can all learn to play that instrument effectively? It takes practice. I genuinely believe that the same is true when it comes to our emotions. We can all learn to manage our emotions more effectively. To do that, though, we need to know what tools are out there to help us achieve that goal. And the big problem, I think, that so many of us face is that we're never given that blueprint, that science based blueprint for steering our emotional lives.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Emotions can feel overwhelming for some of us. They overpower our common sense and ability to make decisions, sending us spiraling into feelings of doom and despair. So how can we modulate our emotions to help us make better decisions in stressful situations, become more in tune with what we need? Today on the show, Ethan Cross shares the latest tools and research from his Emotion and Self control laboratory at the University of Michigan.

[Ethan Cross]

So what we do in the lab is we try to understand the nuts and bolts of the human mind. So in other words, how can you think, feel or behave the way you want to think, feel and behave? And sometimes that can be kind of tricky to do. And so we really get in there and just try to figure things out. What's happening in your brain and the patterns of thoughts that are streaming through your head, in your bodies. Can we create interventions to help kids and adults manage themselves more effectively?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I'd love to put sort of an asterisk here or conversational footnote, if you will, because there's a lot of self diagnosing going on on social media. Help us understand, is there a line? What is a normal part of being human and what is an illness? Because we live in an era where we pathologize each other's behaviors a lot.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, one thing I would love listeners to know is that if they experience negative emotions at times, welcome to the human condition. We all do. And there's nothing wrong with you. In fact, there's everything wrong right with you. I am of the belief that all of the emotions we experience are useful when they're experienced in the right proportions. I have found that when people hear that, when they realize that if they're experiencing anxiety or anger or sadness or envy or regret or guilt, that there's nothing wrong with them. In fact, that this is how they should be operating to a large degree. This is something that people really find liberating. And I think for really good reason, because we're often told we should constantly strive to lead a life free of all negative emotions. We should just yearn to be totally happy. Look, I love being happy, but I also recognize that the bad emotions are my friends. They are not de facto toxic. They can be useful as long as they're not triggered just too intensely or not intense enough, too long or too short.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So there's an example you give in the book when you're talking about emotions getting the best of you is a lot of times how we think of it. There's an example you give in the book about a woman named Louisa. Can you share what happens to her in terms of her emotions?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. She's this mom.

She's taking a flight home with her young child. There were 35,000ft. It's a pleasant flight. And all of a sudden she sees her kid begin to stir a little bit. And then she looks down and sees that her kid took a bite of this granola bar. And in the ingredient list, she sees peanuts. And so her child had a pretty severe peanut allergy and immediately begins to go into this allergic shock reaction. First thing she does is reach for her bag. She does what she had practiced in her mind countless times before. She reaches for the EpiPen that she carried with her and jams the EpiPen into her daughter's thigh. And after a few minutes pass, her daughter begins to recover. Everything was fine after that scenario. Her daughter walked off the plane. She felt totally fine. But Louisa did not feel fine because she kept on thinking, thinking after this incident about what we call counterfactuals, what might have happened. What if she didn't have the EpiPen? And then she also started projecting herself into the future and finding additional ways to worry about her experience. What if her daughter goes to a birthday party and the parent serves cake that was prepared in a facility that had peanuts? What if her daughter's at school and another kid gives her a taste of a snack that has peanuts in it and these thoughts begin to really consume her?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

All true, right? I mean, those things could happen.

[Ethan Cross]

Minouche. Our minds are unbelievable hypothesis generating machines. We can generate all sorts of hypotheses. Many of them are actually quite feasible and not outlandish. We are also sophisticated at generating the outlandish variety of possibilities for things that might occur too. But yes, these are all possibilities that begin to consume her. And as a result, she begins to lead a life that is not the kind of life that she wants to lead because she finds herself continually overcome with anxiety to the point where she begins to question whether she can actually control her emotions at all.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Right. That is the big question. And I think, you know, we assume that some people are more prone to negativity. And if you are a person who's always struggled with that, you think, well, that's just the way it is. This is who I am. But is there research into what we can do or if, if that can change?

[Ethan Cross]

So there was this remarkable study that was performed in Dunedin, New Zealand back in the early 1970s at began and it's actually still to this day. What happened in this study is the researchers started tracking about 1,000 kids right around the time that they were born. And they measured these kids periodically over the course of their lives. And every few years they assessed the kids ability to control themselves, which also includes how we control our emotions. And they looked at how does a kid's ability to exert control when they're young predict different outcomes later on in life. And what they found is that kids who are really good at self control, they progressed further in their careers, they saved more money, they planned more conscientiously for retirement, and they were physically healthier. So one's ability to manage themselves has implications for lots of really important things in our lives. The other thing that we learned from the study that was so interesting was as time progressed, some kids got better at self control and some kids got worse just quite naturally. And the kids who improved in self control, their progress on all these different outcomes also improved. The kids whose self control success went down over time, they started faring more poorly. And so the reason I like to mention that last finding is because what it really demonstrates is that how we manage our emotions is malleable. It can change. If you're not good at it at one point in life, whether you're a child or an adult, that doesn't mean you're destined to always be bad at it. We have the capacity to get better or worse. And that's where I think understanding how self control works, familiarizing ourselves with the tools that are out there, that's why that's such an incredibly important thing for all of us to do. And so back to Louisa. It wasn't until an experience she had with her daughter that really helped break her out of her funk. She realized that when she was stuck in one of these doom loops, her daughter came in just rushing into the room, you know, had a problem she wanted to talk to her about. And then they did a behavior together, an activity. And after the activity was over, Luisa realized that she wasn't stressed anymore. And so she had the epiphany there that if she distracts herself by engaging in something that is really immersive and a positive experience that turned the volume down on the intensity of her anxiety and that ended up really renewing this belief that she had that she actually could manage her emotions. What I love about her story is it demonstrates just how important believing that you can manage your emotions is for bringing that outcome to fruition.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

When we come back, more with Ethan Cross on the tools that can help us in moments of anxiety or crisis, including the stre strategies of the world's youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Today on the show Managing Our Emotions. I'm Anoush Zumarodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back.

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[Ethan Cross]

Right before Malala Yousafzi became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating for the rights of young girls to receive an education, she was invited onto the Daily show with Jon Stewart to talk about her experience. At one point during the interview, she begins to explain what went through her head when she first discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her.

[Malala Yousafzai]

And I used to think that the Talib would come and he would just kill me.

[Ethan Cross]

She's talking to herself in the first person, the way we typically think about our lives. But the moment she gets to this part of the experience, right, the Taliban, they're on my doorstep. Once she gets to that part, she does something kind of strange.

[Malala Yousafzai]

But then I said, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? Then I would reply myself that Malala, just take a shoe and hit him. But then I said, but then I said, if you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and that Talib. You must not treat others that much with cruelty and that much harshly. You must fight others, but through peace and through dialogue.

[Ethan Cross]

So she starts off in the first person, but then she switches.

She's coaching herself.

She's giving herself advice like she would someone else, using her name and the word you. In this instance, what Malala is doing,

she's using a tool that we have studied.

It is called distanced self talk.

And it is useful because we human

beings are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice. There's even a name for this phenomenon. It's called Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famous for

being able to give great advice to other people.

But when it came to his own affairs, he stumbled mightily. Using your own name and you shifts your perspective.

It gets you to relate to yourself

like you were giving advice to someone else. And that makes it much, much easier for us to wisely work through Our problems.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

It's funny though, because like I was talking to my producer Rachel about this and she said that she often refers to herself in her head as young lady when she really needs a talking to. Young lady, get it together.

[Malala Yousafzai]

And.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And it. You actually did a study that showed that people who did this referred to themselves with this distance. Sel talked, they experienced less negative emotion within seconds of doing that. And she said, well, that makes sense. It really works for me.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. The reason this is one of the first tools that I use is it's a remarkably simple tool. We've done some neuroimaging studies to demonstrate that when you tell people to use this tool in the context of an experiment, you see reductions in the amplitude of their emotional responses that occur within seconds. And you don't see any concomitant increase in signs that people are really exerting a lot of effort to rein their emotions in. And that's noteworthy because oftentimes the tools we use to manage our emotions do feel really effortful. And I should say there's nothing wrong with that. Effortful things can be really good for us. As anyone who ever goes to the gym knows, like, sometimes physical exercise takes a lot of effort to see gains. Some of the tools that are out there require more effort than others. What I like about the low effort tool is the easier something is to do, the more likely one is to do it. And that's because we're all lazy to some degree. And yeah, that's all of us. That's human beings. We're always trying to conserve our resources. So, you know, the low effort stuff is often my first line of defense. And then I'll ratchet it up and bring in some more heavy hitting tools if I find that I need to do so. But that often isn't the case.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, one of those easy things to do is, you know, put on a good song, a like hype up song to make yourself feel like you're ready to go do something hard or, you know, my daughter's very much in a stinky candle phase right now in the evenings when she wants to chill out. And you say like that you were surprised. There was no research in to this using the senses to control our emotions. So you've been doing some of that?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So I find the senses as a tool for shifting our emotions both really powerful and just super interesting. Right. Like sight, sound, touch, smell. We've had those experiences since before we were born. Right. Touch develops in the womb. Think about what is the first thing we do with babies that are born into this world screaming their head off. We engage in skin to skin contact to soothe them. And yet I think we often overlook the potential of the senses to help us manage our emotions when we're struggling. And maybe I'll start with a personal experience. Actually, I've been listening to music my entire life, and it has always been a fundamentally emotional experience. And yet, if you ever ask me, like, when I was struggling with a problem, anxious or angry or sad or needed to be lifted up, did I strategically put on music to shift my emotions? No, the answer would be to that question. This is true of people more generally. So if you ask people in the context of studies, why do you listen to music? Close to 100% will report they like the way it makes them feel. If you then do studies where you ask people, hey, the last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what did you do? Between only 10 and 30% report using music to shift their emotions. And so that's just an example of low, low hanging fruit for pushing our emotions around. And now that I know how this works, on my phone, I have a playlist. It has songs in that playlist that consistently shift my emotions, my positive or negative emotions, up or down. And I use it when I need to. And music and sound is just one example. Scent is another. You know, think about perfumes and cologne. Think about the scents that hotels pipe through their ventilation system to make you feel a particular way. Vision. Think about art, think about beauty. These are all shifters. And if you think about them with that lens on, it gives you the possibility to start incorporating them into your lives more strategically.

That brings me to my favorite. It's experiencing awe. About 10 years ago, scientists at Berkeley tracked a group of military veterans and first responders as they paddled down Utah's majestic Green River. They measured participants levels of PTSD and stress both before and after the rafting trip. Not surprisingly, they found that most of the participants, their stress and PTSD levels declined from the beginning to the end of the experiment. But what was surprising was the factor that predicted those declines in PTSD and stress. It was participants experience of awe. Awe is an emotion we experience when we are in the presence of something vast and indescribable. Lots of people get it from an amazing sunset. I'm a science geek, so I get it when I contemplate outer space and interplanetary travel. We have an SUV on Mars right now sending us footage back of that terrain. That is awe inspiring to me. When we experience this emotion of awe.

It leads to what we call a shrinking of the self.

We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You had a study come out just very recently. It was called Managing emotions in everyday life. Why a Toolbox of strategies Matters. This was absolutely fascinating. Thousands of people who you had keep track of what tools they were using, whether they knew to call them that or not. I'm curious, Tell us about that, the research that you just put out.

[Ethan Cross]

So, in short, what we did is we ran these studies during the COVID pandemic. And the question we were interested in was really simple. Lots of research up until this point, or up until relatively recently, has looked at how individual tools work. What we've begun to do as a field more recently is begun to look at how different kinds of tools work together. And so what we wanted to do in this study is we wanted to see what, if anything, were people doing each day to manage their Covid anxiety. And importantly, did any of the tools that they used actually move the needle on their anxiety from one day to the next? So did it make a difference? And so we tracked people for several days, couple of weeks, and. And each day we gave them a checklist. At the end of the day, which of the following. I believe it was 18 tools did you use to manage your Covid anxiety? And we had them rate how anxious they felt each day.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So let's go through. We are Swiss army knives. What are these tools? That's a big toolbox.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So we asked about talking to other people and going out in nature, journaling, positively reinterpreting things, thinking about that this won't last forever. We looked at some harmful tools, too, like substance abuse. We asked people whether they were suppressing their emotions. We looked at whether people exercised, spend time outside, whether they interacted with someone, sought out physical touch and comfort from another person. So we looked at a very broad collection of strategies, and the strategies also varied in terms of how, quote, unquote healthy or unhealthy they were, according to a group of experts in this area. Now, what we found that was really interesting was, number one, most people used multiple tools each day to manage their emotions between three and four. Number two, and this is really the finding that hits home for me. There were many combinations of tools that made a real difference in terms of how anxious people felt. When people used these three or four tools, they ended up experiencing a decline in their anxiety from one moment to the next. But there was tremendous variability in terms of the combinations of tools that worked for different people. The way I like to think about this is that it's not unlike going to the gym and exercising. We all have our unique ways of physically exercising to meet our health goals. And what I take away from this study is that the same is true for people who participate in our studies. Each person had their own unique way of managing their Covid anxiety. There are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. I wish I could tell a person who comes to me with a particular problem what three or five or seven tools they should specifically use to manage that problem. I cannot make that type of prescription. What we can do in the absence of that data is give people individual tools, invite them to learn about what these tools are, and then encourage them to start self experimenting with those tools. Try a tool out. If it works for you, great, keep using it. Layer on another one, see if a combination helps. If it doesn't work for you, move on to something else.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Can I ask you a question? One of the tools that you mentioned, this might surprise people, but you have found. Actually, we think it might be useful, but it's not. Venting.

[Ethan Cross]

Yes.

So venting is a really interesting phenomenon. There's a very strong cultural belief that when you are struggling with a big emotion, you should just vent it, get it out, express it to someone else. And there's been a lot of research on this. And what we've learned is that venting your emotions to someone else can be very helpful for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people. It's good to know that there are other people who care about you. The problem is if that is the only thing you do, you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with. But all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated because you've just spent, you know, however long you're with that other person talking about this experience, just going over all of the things that are stoking your emotional response. What we've learned is the best kinds of conversations when it comes to managing our emotions actually do two things. First, it is important to express your emotions to some degree. We do have these needs to connect with other people and feel validated and empathized with. But after those needs are met, ideally you speak to someone who helps you broaden your perspective. It's a person who is adept at allowing you to look at that bigger picture in ways that helps you generate a solution to what you're going through. Helps you reach a sense of Closure.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You describe this in the book as well. You say that there's an exercise that people can do to help them pinpoint the right people to talk to when you're dealing with negative emotions. Can you walk us through that exercise?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, let's do it. We're going to do an emotional advisor audit, and we're going to do this exercise to help you build your emotional advisory board, which I think is a critically important asset in all of our lives. So here's how it goes. I'd love for you and everyone who's listening to take out a piece of paper and draw a table with two columns.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

All right, I'm doing it now.

[Ethan Cross]

I want you to label the first column personal stuff, use a technical term. And the other column, work or school stuff, problems. Then what I want you to do is I want you to take a minute to list all the names of people that you go to to talk about the problems you experience in those two important domains of your life. Now, some of you may have the same names in both columns, so you talk to the same people about problems, regardless of where they come from. Others may have totally different names in each column. Still others may have no names. There is no right or wrong way to complete this exercise. Okay, so now what I want you to do is I want you to circle the names of the people who do two things for you when you come to them with a problem. First, they let you express your emotions. They listen. They empathize with you. They validate what you're going through. They normalize it. But then after they do that, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. They help you work it through. They help you problem solve. They help you reach closure. Circle the names of the people who do both of those things in that order. Okay, so do you have any names on your list that you did not circle?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yes.

[Ethan Cross]

Okay. Get out your thickest red Sharpie and make a. You know, cathartically put an X through their. Their names. And, and what I mean by that is they're not on your advisory board. This doesn't mean you need to sever your connections with these people. There are many people in my life who I met exceptionally close to. I don't talk to them about the problems I experience in those domains. I talk them about lots of other things, but they don't help me work through my problems. They don't follow those two steps, and that's totally fine. And improvement is absolutely possible. I am an example of that. Prior to me knowing about how this all worked prior to me knowing about the science. I remember distinctly when people would come to me with really big problems like they'd lose a loved one or something really bad would happen at work and they'd call to talk to me or they'd come over and I just wouldn't know what to say. Intuitively, I would try to empathize. I'm so sorry. Oh, it sounds terrible. I can understand. But beyond that, I had no compass to steer the conversation. What the science does here is it gives me a compass to steer those conversations that I have with people who come to me for support. And it also helps me identify who I should talk to. And that is an invaluable tool that I possess, that science based compass.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So these are people who are constructive in your life.

[Ethan Cross]

Constructive, absolutely, in steering you the right way. Other people are a remarkable asset when it comes to manage your emotions because in those moments they can help us find those tools that we already possess and activate them to our benefit.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In a moment. More from Ethan Cross on that little voice inside your head that can often get in your way with all its chatter on the show today, Managing our Emotions. I'm Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Stay with us.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and onshore. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover [e-mail] it's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zumarodi. On the show today, a conversation with psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Cross on managing our emotions better. These days, many people are bringing in an expert. They're seeing a therapist to work through their problems and learn to coach themselves in tough situations.

[Ethan Cross]

There are lots of different therapeutic approaches, and we know that different kinds of therapy work for different people. Having said that, I do think the science here is pretty clear in the sense that the emotional connection, the rapport in therapy talk that's sometimes referred to as therapeutic alliance, the alliance between the therapist and the client. You want to have that, but you also want to help people ultimately reframe an experience so it ceases to be an active source of distress. And there are lots of ways you can change the way you're thinking about something. Sometimes you could do it directly, like when a friend encourages you to think about times when you've dealt with similar things in the past, or what did you tell me if I was dealing with this experience? Those are ways of shifting perspective. Sometimes our perspectives naturally shift with time. We realize as time goes on and we get some actual, what we call temporal distance, some, some time away from the problem, that it's not as big as it seems. So there are lots of ways that you can get people to think differently about experiences that are. Are bugging them. But getting them to that point is pretty important, because if you don't, you have this. Think about it as like a memory of an experience. And every time the memory is activated, every time you're reminded of it, all the emotions come flooding back into your awareness.

A key to managing one's emotions effectively involves understanding how to harness this mysterious force called the voices inside our head. Here's a scientific fact that I absolutely love. We spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not focused on the present. Between one half and one third of the time, our minds, they are drifting away. We are thinking, thinking about other things. Some of you are doing that right now. Please stop. Once we find ourselves drifting away, one of the things that we're doing is talking to ourselves and listening to what we say. Now, when scientists like myself use the term inner voice, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And it turns out this is one of your superpowers, because your inner voice lets you keep information active in your head for Short periods of time, like when you go to the grocery store, and if you're like me, 15 seconds into the expedition, you forget what you're supposed to buy. You repeat that list in your apples, cheese, Pepto, Bismol, tmi. We also use our inner voice to simulate and plan. Like when we silently rehearse what we're going to say before an important presentation or an interview.

Perhaps most magically, we use our inner

voice to make sense of this messy world that we often live in. When we experience challenges, we turn our attention inward. We try to try to work through them.

And our inner voice helps us create those stories that shape our sense of self, stories that really craft our identity. So your inner voice, this is a remarkable tool.

The problem is, it is a tool that often jams up on us when we need it most. We don't come up with clear solutions to our problems. We get stuck in negative thought loops.

Instead, we worry.

We ruminate. We experience what I call the dark side of our inner voice. Chatter. How do you know if you're experiencing chatter? If you ever find yourself trying to work through a problem but not making any progress, or if you find yourself berating yourself incessantly? I'm an idiot. Such an idiot. Those are two telltale signs. One thing that chatter does, it makes it really hard for us to think and perform. It consumes our attention, leaving very little left over to do the things that we often want and need to do.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

One of the things therapists often do when they work with people is teach them to reframe their emotions, to put them in a more constructive light. That is something that you have studied, right? What our brains look like when we do that?

[Ethan Cross]

Yes, we did do a study on this. And what we wanted to do was we wanted to understand do people who tend to really struggle with reframing things, that is, people who are worrying what's really going on when they're trying to reframe things. And what we did is we brought in a group of women and we profile them on the degree to which they tended to dispositionally worry about things. And during the actual procedure, we put on essentially this skull cap that had electrodes hooked up to it. It's an EEG cap electroencephalogram. And it's a technique that we used. If you really want to geek out with me here, we use this technique called event related potentials. And what it allows us to do is see just how quickly different types of psychological processes or experiences like becoming emotional or exerting effort. This technique allows us to see how quickly those different processes activate in your brain. And so in the study, we presented these participants with images that were selected to arouse a negative emotional response.

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And.

[Ethan Cross]

And we gave the participants the instruction to try to positively reframe these experiences. Find the silver lining, if you will. And so what we found in the study, which was really, really interesting, was that the more prone participants were to worrying, number one, the more effortful it was to try to positively reframe what they were seeing. But then, number two, in many cases, it often backfired. The attempts to reframe actually weren't successful. So they actually start feeling worse when

they're trying to do this.

And, you know, it reminds me of this experience. I tell this story very briefly in my book. My wife and I were out to dinner with another couple several years ago, and we were driving back from Detroit. And, you know, we're talking about life as couples are apt to do when they go out.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And.

[Ethan Cross]

And at one point, my friend in the backseat starts talking about this difficult, difficult situation at work that's really affecting him. It's really bringing him down. And his wife says to him, why don't you just think differently about it? Just. Just focus on the bright side. And. And my friend then looks. Looks over, pauses, and goes, yeah, easier bleeping said than done. And I, like, almost crashed the car from. From laughter. But what I think that response really captures is that many of us know intuitively that if. If we could reframe how we're thinking about something, we would feel better. But we struggle to do it when we're anxious, when we're sad, when we're angry, when we're filled with regret. That's where knowing about these different tools that are out there can be so useful, because they can help us shift precisely when we need it most in those circumstances.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That's so interesting. I'm thinking about someone in my life who. Who I'm like, well, you just. I'm the wife in this scenario. I'm like, you just change the way you think about it. Just do it. And for him, he's like, oh, my God, there are so many reasons why I can't do that. And I. I guess what you're saying is, yes, maybe you are prone to rumination. Maybe you didn't develop that tool as a young person, so it's hard for you to do it now. Maybe your brain just doesn't work like that.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, you know, that's somewhat fatalistic. So here's another message that I Hope listeners find liberating. It goes back to this no one size fits all solution idea. A, it's true, like, we see that different tools work for different people in different situations. But B, I think what that does is it conveys to people that if you try something that everyone is telling you is this panacea. But guess what? It's not having that effect for you. No big deal. That's true of all of us to some extent. Right? Different tools for different people in different situations. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the course of my career and said something to the effect of everyone tells me how much they're benefiting from. From mindfulness or going for a walk in a green space. It just doesn't do it for me. And I think that's a common response, right? If everyone else is benefiting from this other tool, or if we think everyone is benefiting from it, because I assure you, it is not everyone. We start to feel bad for ourselves, recognizing that different strokes for different folks, right? It just, it alleviates that addiction. Additional source of pressure and judgment we often put on ourselves, inviting us to seek out additional tools that do work for us.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In the last few minutes, I want to talk about someone who maybe did the opposite of what our culture thinks is the right way to deal with a painful emotion, and that is your grandmother. You wrote about her in your book. She was a Holocaust survivor. And you say that she really avoided talking about the trauma that she experienced. And I think very often people think, at least in the United States, we think, oh, you need to dig into your grief, you need to explore it so you can get over it. But you actually come to a very different conclusion after thinking about your grandmother's approach and all the studies that you have done in the lab.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. We tend to talk about avoidance as a universal harm. It's toxic. It's true that chronically avoiding things is linked with negative outcomes across the board. But what's often lost when we talk about avoidance as toxic and approach is useful. And by approach I mean confronting our negative experiences to work through them, is that you don't actually have to choose between those two states. You can actually go back and forth flexibly between them. You can approach things for a while, take some time off, avoid them, and then come back. And lots of research demonstrate that that can often be really useful for people. This was true of my grandmother. So my grandmother had this really extraordinary set of circumstances befall her. She's growing up in Eastern Europe and Poland around the time of World War II. She, in many ways, has an idyllic childhood. Then the Nazis come in. She witnesses her family be slaughtered. For the most part, she. She flees and goes from ghetto to ghetto, living in the woods with partisans, freezing woods. She's almost killed several times over. She ultimately makes it out, and when she gets to the States with nothing, she and my grandfather begin a new life, and they ultimately thrive, and they have kids, and their kids have kids, and I was one of them. And I spent almost every day after school, in elementary school at my grandmother's. She was watching me while my parents worked. And I remember constantly asking her to tell me about her experience, but she would never do it. She would talk to me about lots of other things, and she was an exceptionally expressive and warm grandmother. But she didn't like to revisit those traumatic times, understandably. Except for one day a year when there'd be this Remembrance Day that she and some of her fellow survivors organized, where I'd go to this synagogue, and for a full day, I'd listen to all of the people who survived the war, including my grandmother and grandfather, in tears. They would scream and cry as they recounted the atrocities. And what I didn't realize at the time was she would dose thinking about her experiences during the Holocaust. And that was a strategy that really worked well for her. It wasn't that she would chronically avoid it. She would deliberately not think about it for long stretches of time, but then during the Remembrance Day event, she'd allow herself to really get in there. If she happened to see another survivor, they would talk about it. And that ability to be flexible is a skill that works for some people. There are no, again, one size fits all solutions. And this is true for dealing with trauma and grieving as well. There are different trajectories and different kinds of tools that people can benefit from. This lesson that we learned from my grandmother is not just relevant to dealing with the extraordinarily disturbing circumstances that befall some of us during our lives. It's also relevant to the more minor blips that we sometimes encounter. I was raised to always approach my emotions the moment something happens. You should deal with it right then and there. What I've since learned, based on the data that I've encountered, but also just experiences I've had, is that sometimes forcing myself to take some time away from a problem, whether it be a few hours or days, and then coming back to that problem with some more psychological distance, if you will, can be quite useful because when I come back to the problem later on, the intensity is often diminished and I can often view it in a different light. That is a case of being strategic with how I divert my attention. It's being strategic with avoidance, if you will. So the real take home lesson here for me is you don't have to choose between approaching and avoiding. You can go back and forth between them.

I want to wrap things up by sharing with you a set of observations about our at times messy emotional lives that I find myself thinking about quite a bit. And every time I do it fills me with both dread and I find it inspiring. Between 8 and 10,000 years ago, our ancestors invented the first surgical technique. Its name was trepanation and what it involved doing was drilling holes in people's skulls. One of the reasons why this technique

was believed to be used was to

help people manage their emotions. Big dysregulated emotional responses let the evil spirits out. Fast forward to 1949. A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for another emotion regulation intervention. This one's named the Frontal Lobotomy. We have come a long way, thankfully, from carving holes in people's heads and sticking ice picks in our frontal cortices to provide people with emotional relief. Our toolbox of science based skills is vastly improved. What we need to do a better job doing is using these tools in our lives and sharing them with other people. We spend enormous amounts of resources teaching

ourselves how to communicate more effectively with other people.

What we need to do is devote an equivalent amount of resources to teaching ourselves how to communicate more effectively with ourselves. Thank you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Cross. He runs the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. His latest book is called Managing youg Emotions so they Don't Manage youe. Before that he wrote Chatter, the Voice in Our Head, why It Matters and How to Harness It. You can see his full talk and many other talks at ted. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. If you found it helpful, please share it with a friend or a family member or take a moment to follow us and write a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like listening to podcasts. We really appreciate it. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Guerin, James Delahuel, Matthew Cloutier, Katie Monteleone, Hersha nahada, and Kai McNamee. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were David Greenberg and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, Alejandra Salazar and Daniela Belarrezzo. I'm Minouche Zamarodi and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

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