1KHO 454: How to Shift Into the Driver’s Seat When Emotions Take the Wheel | Ethan Kross, Shift

Summary

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
Episode 1KHO 454: How to Shift Into the Driver’s Seat When Emotions Take the Wheel | Ethan Kross, Shift
Release Date: April 1, 2025
Host: Jenny Yurt
Guest: Ethan Kross, Author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You

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Introduction and Welcome

Jenny Yurt opens the episode by introducing herself as the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and warmly welcomes Ethan Kross, renowned author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. She highlights his previous work, Chatter, and commends his ability to provide practical tools for emotional regulation.

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Resilience Through Adversity: The Story of Grandmother Dora

[00:31] Jenny Yurt & [02:00] Ethan Kross
Jenny delves into Ethan's family history, particularly focusing on his grandmother, Dora, a Holocaust survivor who endured unimaginable atrocities. She poses a poignant question about how individuals like Dora maintain the will to survive without knowing when their suffering will end.

Ethan Kross:
"Human beings are amazingly resilient, and we can find meaning, even in the worst of circumstances." [03:06]
He references Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, emphasizing the importance of finding purpose to endure hardship. Ethan admits uncertainty about Dora's internal motivations but underscores that her avoidance of discussing her trauma doesn't negate her ability to build a fulfilling life post-survival.

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Challenging the Myth of Universal Approach in Emotion Management

[06:24] Ethan Kross
Ethan addresses the prevalent belief that one should always confront problems head-on. He introduces the concept of the "myth of universal approach," explaining that strategic and flexible coping mechanisms—such as sometimes avoiding immediate confrontation and returning to the issue later—can be more effective.

Ethan Kross:
"Being strategic and flexible can actually be useful at times. Sometimes, focusing on the problem, then taking some time away from an issue and then coming back can be useful." [06:24]

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Leveraging Sensory Experiences for Emotional Regulation

[10:37] Jenny Yurt & [11:18] Ethan Kross
The discussion shifts to practical tools for managing emotions, with a focus on sensory experiences. Jenny shares personal strategies like setting specific timeframes to process emotions, which Ethan relates back to his grandmother's annual Remembrance Day practice.

Ethan Kross:
"You can also travel back in time to help you... it's a powerful way of broadening our perspective." [10:37]
He explains the concept of "mental time travel," encouraging listeners to contemplate how they will feel about current issues in the future to gain perspective and reduce emotional overwhelm.

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Emotional Contagion and Its Effects

[31:43] Ethan Kross
Ethan explores the phenomenon of emotional contagion—the rapid spread of emotions within groups—and its implications both in personal interactions and online environments. He discusses strategies for leaders to mitigate negative emotional influences within teams.

Ethan Kross:
"Emotions are contagious. They spread like wildfire." [31:43]
He emphasizes the importance of leaders being vigilant and proactive in managing the emotional climate of their groups to maintain a positive and productive environment.

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Building a Supportive Emotional Culture

[34:00] Ethan Kross
Continuing on emotional contagion, Ethan highlights the role of culture in shaping emotional responses. He defines culture as the collective values and beliefs of a group, which can either exacerbate or alleviate emotional challenges.

Ethan Kross:
"We are teaching our kids about... the framework for thinking about how to manage their emotional lives." [34:00]
He advocates for cultivating an emotional culture that values flexibility and the understanding that different tools work for different individuals, promoting emotional fitness akin to physical fitness.

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Practical Applications: Tools and Warning Signs

[49:13] Ethan Kross
Ethan introduces the metaphor of a carpenter's toolbox to illustrate the necessity of having diverse tools for emotional regulation. He warns against relying on a single method and underscores the uniqueness of each person's emotional landscape.

Ethan Kross:
"There are no one size fits all solutions to manage your emotional life." [50:18]
He encourages listeners to experiment with various emotional tools to discover what works best for them, emphasizing the personalized nature of effective emotional management.

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Emotional Peaks, Slopes, and Warning Signs

[49:35] Jenny Yurt & [49:36] Ethan Kross
The conversation touches on the natural ebb and flow of emotions, noting that most emotional experiences peak and then subside over time. Ethan discusses the importance of recognizing when emotional regulation strategies are insufficient, pointing out warning signs like substance abuse or constant reassurance-seeking.

Ethan Kross:
"Emotions are what it's all about. They make life both worth living and sometimes really hard to deal with." [37:38]

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Personal Reflections and Practical Takeaways

[56:03] Jenny Yurt & [56:08] Ethan Kross
Jenny shares her personal experiences of how outdoor activities have enriched her emotional life compared to screen time, aligning with Ethan's research on sensory experiences enhancing emotional memories.

Jenny Yurt:
"The memories we form are stronger and reverberate in our awareness longer when they have an emotional tinge, often due to sensory experience." [57:18]

Ethan Kross:
"If you are finding getting outside to be more beneficial than staying on screens, you should keep doing that." [56:03]

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Conclusion: Empowering Emotional Agency

Jenny wraps up the conversation by reinforcing the importance of emotional fitness and personal agency in managing one's emotional life. She commends Ethan for providing accessible tools and insights that empower individuals to lead more emotionally resilient lives.

Jenny Yurt:
"You have to find the tool that works for you at that particular time." [16:23]

Ethan Kross:
"Emotions are part of who we are. They make life both worth living and sometimes really hard to deal with. We need to spend more time educating ourselves about how to better manage our emotional lives." [38:37]

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Key Takeaways:

• Resilience and Meaning: Finding purpose is crucial for enduring and overcoming severe adversity.
• Flexible Coping Strategies: Avoidance isn't inherently bad; strategic and timely avoidance can aid in emotional regulation.
• Sensory Tools: Utilizing senses like music, nature, and touch can effectively shift emotions.
• Emotional Contagion: Being aware of how emotions spread within groups can help in managing team dynamics and personal relationships.
• Personalized Emotional Fitness: Just as physical fitness requires diverse exercises, emotional fitness benefits from a variety of tools tailored to individual needs.
• Cultural Influence: The emotional culture within a group significantly impacts how emotions are managed and expressed.

Notable Quotes:

• Ethan Kross:
  "Human beings are amazingly resilient, and we can find meaning, even in the worst of circumstances." [03:06]
  "There are no one size fits all solutions to manage your emotional life." [50:18]

• Jenny Yurt:
  "The memories we form are stronger and reverberate in our awareness longer when they have an emotional tinge, often due to sensory experience." [57:18]
  "You have to find the tool that works for you at that particular time." [16:23]

---

Conclusion:
In this enlightening episode, Jenny Yurt and Ethan Kross explore the complexities of emotional regulation, debunking myths and introducing flexible, personalized strategies to help listeners take control of their emotional lives. Drawing from personal stories, scientific research, and practical tools, they provide a comprehensive guide to achieving emotional resilience and fostering a supportive emotional culture both personally and within groups.

Transcript

[Ethan Cross]

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[Jenny Yurt]

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[Ethan Cross]

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[Ethan Cross]

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[Jenny Yurt]

All right. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Yurt. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and Back for a second time. I'm so excited. I've been excited since the last time we talked because this book was on the horizon. It was a ways out still, but it's here now. Ethan Cross, author of Shift Managing your emotions so they don't manage you welcome.

[Ethan Cross]

Ginny, it's so good to be back. I've been looking forward to coming back since our last conversation and you'll pardon my, my somewhat raspy voice. I've been talking, talking too much about stuff over the past week and a half. But it's a delight to be here.

[Jenny Yurt]

You just got home, so what an honor to get this a bit of your time. You've been touring. I've just been seeing picture after picture after picture. This is such a big problem. It's a problem for myself. How do we manage our emotions so that they don't manage us? It gives us a better quality of life. And you wrote a phenomenal book called Chatter. I've taken so many of those concepts, like, you know, that you talk to yourself in the third person and all these little tweaks that you can do really change your life and immediately. So I just found that book to be so fascinating and life changing and same thing, same thing with this one. You are phenomenal with a toolbox. And here's what you can do. But I'd love to start here. I interviewed a woman this year named doctor Last year named doctor Edith Eger, who had survived the holocaust like your Grandma Dora and almost didn't survive. I mean, right at the very end. I mean, she's kind of on death's door when she gets rescued out of there. I mean, it very easily could have tipped the other way. So you talk about your grandma. It's really, really interesting about how some people have gone through the biggest atrocities that you could ever really imagine and then they seem to come out and still build this good life. And I love that you Frame the book in her story, and you talk about her throughout it, and you talk about how she. I mean, she lived in the woods. She gets betrayed. They're hardly eating. And what I've always wondered, and I've never asked anybody, is, oh, there we go. Well, do you think that they had a sense that it would end at some point? That's what I've never really understood. It's like you're in this survival for months, for years, the survival situation. You're not getting in news, like how we get in all the news all the time. You're not getting any of that. You're in a concentration camp. You're living in the woods off the land and hiding and all of that sort of stuff. It's like, how do you find the will to survive if you don't even know if it's going to end at all?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, you know, we do know that human beings are amazingly resilient, and we can find meaning, even the worst of circumstances. One of my favorite books of all time was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. He was actually also a Holocaust survivor, and he writes this account of how, despite facing terrible atrocities of the sort that my grandmother experienced, too, he was still able to cling to some semblance of hope that he might be able to make it. And. And he went on to make it and lived a very rich life after. Rich in terms of meaning and purpose. So I think you can always find that meaning. But your specific question about my grandmother, you know, what did she think in terms of when it went? And I wish I knew, but she never told me. And in fact, that was. You know, that's a big theme of this book, right? That. One of the reasons I started the book with the story of my grandmother very narrowly surviving the Holocaust after seeing her family be slaughtered, was as a kid, growing up with her and being exceptionally close with her, I spent every day after school in her house, like, while my parents were working, I would ask her to tell me about her experience. I would have questions like the one you just raised, and she would consistently deflect them. Those questions I would ask, she would not go there. The only time she would really talk about her experience was one day a year when there was a. A locally organized Remembrance Day event. And on that day, she would get up at the podium in the congregation where those events were held, and she would just let it go. But that was it. And I always found that so puzzling because on the one hand, she absolutely avoided talking about this experience, except for that one day a year and I had been raised. Ginny, I'm curious if this is true of you as well. But, like, when I was brought up, like my parents told me, you don't avoid things if you've got a problem, face it head on, deal with it, get to the bottom, move on. And there is research which shows that chronically avoiding problems can be harmful. But here's my grandmother avoiding, and she actually has this, like, wonderful life in the end, like, she came here, she had nothing. She ended up having a family, working hard, owning a home, all this great stuff, but she was avoiding like crazy. So how does that actually work? And in the book, one chapter actually talks about what I call the myth of universal approach, which is this. It's a myth because we have this idea that you should always approach your problems. And if you look at the research, what we find is actually being strategic and being flexible can actually be useful at times. So sometimes, like, focusing on the problem, then taking some time away from an issue and then coming back can be useful. So I think it's really important for people to understand that we have the ability to approach and avoid things for a reason. Both serve their purpose at different times. And we want to. We want to be sensitive to when those different forms of coping might be helpful.

[Jenny Yurt]

I found that to be very eye opening because, same as you, it's like you always hear that, like, well, this thing happens. And so then you go to therapy and you talk through it, and here's your grandma. I mean, we're talking about, you know, maybe you get bullied at school or you have these different, you know, your. Maybe your parents split up or these different things and you, and you go to counseling and that type of thing. But here's your grandma escaping out of windows and being ambushed. And you said, it sounds like it's out of a movie. And it really did. I mean, she's a kid and she's escaping and running through the woods, and yet she didn't go to therapy. Like you had said, it wasn't even sort of recognized as a thing that people should do at that point. And yet she was such a wonderful grandmother and she would always have this food. You wrote, I haven't eaten at a Michelin star restaurant that could compare with, you know, the food that she made. She was like a second mom. She showed up every day and, you know, made it known that she loved me. So I love the twist here that maybe all these things that you've heard might not Be correct for every single situation. You said you became an observer of emotion. Do you feel like your life's work stemmed from that or were there other factors?

[Ethan Cross]

Well, that was certainly, I think, a big part of it, right? This curiosity that developed early on about her life and about how she managed. I remember thinking throughout my childhood about if I were in her situation, how could I. How could I manage that? Like, you know, there was some turbulence in my life growing up, but nothing of the sort where I saw my family slaughtered, like, basically right before my eyes. And I was homeless for years, living in the woods, you know, not knowing when I might be killed or betrayed from one day to the next. I mean, what kind of existence is that? And what kinds of skills does one need to possess in order to be able to live through that and not just live through it, but also, like, move on with their life after and thrive? And so those were curiosities. And if I look back at the last 25 years of me doing research, now, in many ways I'm doing research to satisfy those curiosities. But I want to go back to something you said before because it was a big goal of the book, right? So my grandmother's story. And as you know, as you know, because we've spoken before, I think stories are so useful for sharing tools and science because they bring those tools and science to life. So whenever I write books, I'm always trying to see what are the real world accounts that illustrate how the tools I want to talk about play out. How do they actually work outside the lab? One goal, though, in putting together different stories for this book was to highlight the myths that exist surrounding how we manage our emotions, because we've been searching for solutions to manage our emotions for a really, really long time. And in our quest to find those solutions, we've been led astray often because we hear things about what is good for us. And then if you look at the science, what we learn is that in fact, those things we've heard aren't so good for us. And so we've touched on one of those myths already, which is this idea that avoidance is always bad. It's absolutely true that chronically avoiding things across the is not good for you. There's a lot of research which shows that. But what we also know is that being flexible can be very helpful. So if I get into a fight with my wife, and I'm the one who caused the fight, I might be really motivated to resolve it because I don't like being in an argument and I Feel bad about maybe something I did to screw up. It happens on a regular basis. So I don't like doing that. I don't like feeling that way. But what I've learned is sometimes actually the best way to resolve those tensions is to take some time away from them. Like let. Give it a couple hours or even a day or two to simmer down and then come back to it. I mean, how often have you found, Ginny, that you get triggered in some way? Anxious or angry or even sad. And in the moment that it happens, it feels all consuming, suffocating. But if you take a little time away, you come back to it and you can either think about it from a new light or you come back to it and find where's the problem? I can't even find it because this is inconsequential right now. Is that fair to say?

[Jenny Yurt]

Yeah, it kind of dissipates. And I've had. I think I felt like I don't have a lot of strategies, but like, sometimes you have a strategy that you use in your life and then you read a book like yours and it sort of confirms. But have we been in upheaval? Major upheaval in a situation here or there. And it could be all consuming. I've used the strategy of giving myself a timeframe wherein I can think about it because I've got a parent or I've gotta work. So you just can't be consumed all the time. So I would say, okay, from 9:30 to 10 at night, I'm gonna allow myself to stew about this problem, but not right now. And if it would come up, I would say I'm saving it for 9:30. And so often, like you write in the book, it just dissipates.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So that's in part what my grandmother did with giving herself this time that she was able to deal with it once a year. But what's interesting about what you just described, like, I'm gonna give myself 15 minutes at 5:00 to just indulge myself however much I want with this problem. I've tried that myself sometimes. And what I often find is then I get to 5 o'clock and I don't even do it because I really. Yeah, because you're not thinking, I don't have to, but. But compartmentalizing it in that way to say I'm gonna get to it. I'm not gonna not get to it. I'm just gonna put it off a little bit. It just sometimes works. Works magic. And that magic is not Magic. It's time. We know that all emotion or nearly all of our emotional experiences fade with time. You've experienced this millions of times in your life because you've experienced millions of emotional reactions, and they get triggered, and then as time goes on, they tend to fade. So that's one way that this strategic avoidance can help. That actually raises that. That brings up another tool I talk about in the book about how you can mentally time travel, and it breaks another myth, right? So the other, another big myth is you should always be in the present. If things are going bad, like, focus on the here and now. Focus on your bodily sensations. That can be helpful, for sure, but. But it's not like you can't. Like traveling in time in your mind is bad for you. It can actually be good for you. So one way it can be good for you is to think about how are you going to feel about this problem tomorrow, next week, next month, next year? What that does is it speeds up your ability to benefit from the passage of time. And here's how this works. We've just agreed, and I think most listeners would agree with this, that most of our experiences fade with time. Well, when you're in the midst of it, you lose sight of that because you zoom in on the awfulness. When you jump into your mental time travel machine, you say, how am I going to feel about this next week? It automatically makes accessible this idea that you've lived so many times, which is, oh, by next week, it probably will have gotten better. And that highlights the instability of what you're going through. And that gives you hope because you know when it will end. To go back to that first question you asked, you can also. I'll just put the slip this in there. You can also travel back in time to help you. And this is where my grandmother helps me all the time when I'm struggling with something that feels really big and challenging. And it's. It's the first part of. It's. It's the subtitle, right? Like when your emotions are managing you, rather than the other way around. I jump into my mental time travel machine. I go back to 1943, and I spend some time with my grandparents in the frozen Polish woods. I don't spend a lot of time with them there. I don't need to. What spending just a little bit of time with them back then does for me is it makes clear, wow, circumstances could be much, much worse than they are now. Even though things may not be great right now. My entire family wasn't Just killed and I'm not homeless, not knowing who's going to betray me. That is a really powerful way of broadening our perspective. And that's something that I think all of us can do because we all have our own personal experiences that we can use to broaden our perspective. Other times in our life that might have been worse than what we're dealing with now. Or if that doesn't feel true of us in the moment, given what we're experiencing, we have familial or cultural experiences we can lean on. And. And so that's another, another myth that you can bust that we should always be in the moment.

[Jenny Yurt]

And you end up with this toolbox. And you said your Grandma Dora's toolbox, different than your toolbox. But what you do and what you've done in both books is you give a whole bunch of them. There's just a ton of tools that you could choose from. You know, I think that perspective shift, and like you said, it doesn't work for every situation. But I had read somewhere one time where it said at any moment, at any given moment, you're within 20 miles of a hospital full of people who would gladly trade places with you. There's this perspective shifts, like you said, your time traveling back to World War II, and it changes your perspective on maybe what seems like a big deal may not be as big of a deal as it actually is. And in some cases, things are a really big deal. So that's why you're saying it's like it shouldn't be this universal blanket thing. There's variability here. Find the tool that works for you at that particular time.

[Ethan Cross]

No, let me. I'll just punctuate. That's. If there's one point I hope people take away from the book is that there are no one size fits all solutions to manage your emotional life. And I think endorsing that idea does more harm than good. I think of being emotionally fit, if you will, a lot like being physically fit. How do you get there? You do lots of different things. And the things that I do are different from the things that you do and the things that my best friend does. And that's okay. That's how this all seems to be working. And you could even change up your gym routine from one day to the next and still benefit. That also seems to be true about emotional fitness.

[Jenny Yurt]

And you even say that we don't even feel emotions the same way as another person. There's variability in that.

[Annie F. Downs]

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[Jenny Yurt]

Another myth is that the negative emotions are bad, but you're like no. Envy can give you that little bit of push to work harder. Or regret can help you avoid repeating mistakes. Guilt can prompt you to make amends. Anger helps you respond to a threat. Fear compels you to act. So just a lot of myths that you are exposing in this book that allow people to think through it and they make sense. They make sense. This is really important because you say being able to manage emotions predicts a lot about our lives. So this is an incredibly important book. People were coming up to you on your last book tour crying. You said it was every type of person. It's an elite athlete, it's a CEO, it's a mother, you know, it's a farmer. All these people are coming up to you on your last book tour. They're crying, they're struggling to manage their emotions. And this matters because it predicts a lot about how your life is going to go. So one of the things I loved, one of the tools was leveraging sensory experiences. And I love it because when you go outside, there are a lot of sensory experiences. And I do think that that helps with emotional health. It helps with mine. It helps with our kids. But in particular, you told this story about a song on the radio and how just music can do that, but people don't. They know it, but they don't really use it.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. That's right. So this is true, by the way, not just of people, but also, quote, unquote, experts on a topic like me, which is a story that I share in the book. I've been listening to music my entire life. MC Hammer, You Can't Touch. This was my first cassette tape. I was 5 years old. Loved it. And I never really stopped to think about how I could strategically use music as a tool to shift my emotions. Up until I had this experience with my daughter that she was in a bad mood. It was before a soccer game. She was bumming me out. We're driving to soccer. She's got a scowl on her face. And then one of my favorite songs comes on the radio. Journeys. Don't Stop Believing. Please don't Judge Me for admitting that. And, you know, I love that song. And I start jamming out, right? I'm bopping my head. I'm singing along. I'm really. I'm leaning into it. And, you know, admittedly, I'm leaning into it to get some rise out of my daughter in the backseat. But normally when I do that, the response I typically get from my daughter is just like almost a disgust facial expression. Like, leave me alone. You're so embarrassing. Why can't we have a car with tinted windows so no one can see who I am? But in this case, she's getting into it, right? She's bopping along and humming. And we had a great day after that. And that experience really got me to think about why is emotion. Why is music and our senses more generally such a powerful tool? And are people availing themselves of this tool? And so we actually did some research, or a lot of research on this in my lab. First thing to know is, like, when I say sensation, Music is a form of a sensory shifter. What am I talking about? Well, we have all of these senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell. And what they function to do is allow us to detect information from the world outside and bring it into our minds. And so, like, I describe it as, imagine having, like, satellite dishes mounted all over your body, and there are different kinds of dishes that are all tuned to different kinds of information. But you're trying to gather all this information so that you can optimally navigate the world. And one of the things that's really important for taking that information in and then Navigating the world is to know if it's good or bad for you. So sensory experiences are very closely linked with emotions. That should come as no surprise to folks, right? Scent's a great example here. You brush up against someone who hasn't showered in three weeks, they have really bad stinky stinkiness, Official termination, you're going to have an emotional reaction. You brush up against someone who smells great, that's going to be positive. Pleasant tasting food versus foul tasting food, and so forth and so on. And so senses, they function to shift our emotions. And the question is, are you strategic when you are suffering, do you go to your senses to push your emotions around? We ask people, last time you were anxious, angry or sad, what did you do to move your emotions around? Only between 10 and 30% reported using music as a tool. Despite in other work. Close to 100% of people say the reason why they listen to music is they like the way it makes them feel. So the senses are just a tremendously unappreciated tool that can effortlessly shift your emotions around. Lots of people think emotion regulation is hard, hard work. Sometimes it is, but it doesn't always have to be. And I think music is a great example of that. Now you mentioned nature. We know that the benefits of nature on mental health and well being are, are quite robust. It exerts a positive influence. One of the things that nature does for us is it allows us to restore our limited attention. You go for a walk in a beautiful, safe natural setting. And if we measure people's like, cognitive capacity, so to speak, like how much information they can keep in their head at any given moment in time, people are much more cognitively capable at the end of the walk than before. What's going on there? Well, there are lots of things in nature like sight, sounds, smells, sensory experiences and that capture our attention. So you, you start the walk, you're worried about something and then you're in the safe, natural setting. What people often find happens is their attention gently drifts onto their surroundings. They're not really like focusing super hard on the trees, like the species and how old it is and things like that. They're just taking it in through the senses and that helps us restore. So, so nature's a great example of a kind of sensory bomb, if you will, like sensory cocktail. It's pulling on multiple levers at once.

[Jenny Yurt]

These are such important things to be made clearly aware of because when you're in that spot, like I even feel this way when I get sick and I've Got a midwife that lives in Ann Arbor. And she will be like, well, have you taken oregano or whatever the thing is? Like, well, no, because sometimes I think when you're down and out and you're in that spot, you almost just kind of stay down and out and you don't really do anything. And I think the same can be true here when you're wallowing in different emotions and you're struggling, but just to be clearly made aware that, look, turn on some music that you like or go take a walk or bake some cookies and you like that smell. Our ability to see, taste, touch, hear and smell act as emotional levers. I see my car radio as an emotion regulation machine. You even talk about touch, that our neurobiology is almost instantly changed by touch. Person to person, touch and even self soothing touch affects emotions within milliseconds. So this is, this is your thing, Ethan. You've got the shifts which in both books chat or two, you've got them that can change things so rapidly. You know, it's not for everything, but it's for a lot.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. And you know, people often ask me if I'm like, if I ever get stuck, you know, having some trouble managing my emotions. Yeah, at times. But what I'm really good at is I know what these tools are, so I reach for them. And most of the time it does help me shift really, really fast to down regulate those negative emotions and shorten the amount of time I spend in them. You know, just to, just to kind of lean into what you said a beat further. What's also interesting about some of these senses is you have this kind of intuitive understanding that they might affect our emotions, but we leverage them in the wrong way and sometimes that can get us into trouble. And this, this is where like knowing about how these things work I think is so useful. Like to use the gym metaphor again, if you go to the gym, you could have a sense that the chest press and the bicep curl machine are going to do you good. But if you don't know how to use, could get you in trouble. So let's take music. Like a lot of people have had the experience that when they're sad, they actually find themselves wanting to listen to music, but they don't listen to happy music to make them feel better. They actually put on some depressogenic music like Chicago Adele, like songs that make them feel even more glum, pushing you deeper into the experience. Like if there's value you are deriving from staying in that sad state. And there can be to be clear value from sadness. It helps us make sense of loss. Fine, keep doing it. But if your goal is to feel better and you find yourself listening to the sad music, now, you're engaging in a behavior that's contrary to your goal. And so I always like to point that one out, because a lot of people have had this experience of, I'm feeling bad. Let me just listen to music to.

[Jenny Yurt]

Let me watch this really sad movie.

[Ethan Cross]

Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Hey, if it works for you, great. But if that's not your goal, you.

[Jenny Yurt]

Gotta listen to Journey.

[Ethan Cross]

That's right. Well, you gotta be careful which. Which Journey. Turns out, Journey could push you in both directions.

[Jenny Yurt]

Yeah, you gotta be choosy. And you even talked about someone baking bread. Super busy. Like, but. But he said the minute he put his hands in the dough and you've got that smell, it's the whole thing. His whirring thoughts and emotions start to settle. So, I mean, I think for me, it's like, starting to create a list of the things that really help in making sure that I prioritize those. And if I get in a slump, I use those tools. You said something really interesting when you were talking about going to your daughter's soccer game. You said she was bumming me out. And that was actually something that I wasn't expecting as a parent. So you have kids when they're little, they're having tantrums. One of our kids would want to eat pizza, but she would want it to be pepperoni pizza. But you had to take the pepperonis off, but she wouldn't eat cheese pizza. And it was a whole thing. So you can't get her cheese pizza. She wants to have pepperoni pizza. You take the pepperonis off, and she would have a tantrum. You know, you have these little nuances with little kids. They have these tantrums, and then they kind of grow out of them. There's no more tantrums. And then they maybe hit these tween teen years, and they just have moody days, like how anybody has a moody day. And I was not prepared for, like, how much that would affect my emotions.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah.

[Jenny Yurt]

You know, I've been driving with my kids, and they've been all done. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like, I have to get it to stop because it's, like, really affecting how I feel. So can you talk about emotional contagion?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, I mean, emotions are contagious. They spread like wildfire. In many ways, the emotions do spread that fast. You Know, there's studies which show they spread within seconds, which is why, you know, if I ever find myself in situations where someone in my team is displaying emotions that are maybe, like, stirring up other folks in the wrong direction, I try to intervene really fast. Why does this happen? Well, other people are rich sources of information for helping us understand what's going on in the world. And, Ginny, one things that our brains are constantly, constantly doing all the time, even when you're not aware of it, it's happening in our unconscious, is constantly trying to understand our circumstances because, first and foremost, that is relevant to our survival. I need to know what is the safety level of where I am? What is the mood, you know, because all that information affects how I should behave. And so we're constantly referencing other people to see how they feel about things, because we're a social species and, you know, we've learned over time that other people are often like, a pretty good source of information about how we should feel when it's not clear how we should feel about something. Right. And so you're. You're just so used to looking to others for an emotional cue that we do it unconsciously. And that's in part, why the emotions can spread so unbelievably fast.

[Jenny Yurt]

Yeah, I felt it, and then I, like, I need it to stop. So I. I think that having those emotional levers and teaching your kids about them is helpful for, like, the whole family unit. And you throw on some music that you like or something like that. Okay. When you notice that this is happening on your team, so people are listening, and maybe they're a business owner. We've talked about having employees. Our company isn't big enough to have employees yet, but I. I don't know how well I would do it that I have no idea how well I would do at being a boss or managing different people's situations. When that starts to happen and you say you intervene, what do you do with.

[Ethan Cross]

With the. Oh, with my team.

[Jenny Yurt]

So, like, if. Yeah. Something's happening with your team and you notice things are kind of sliding downhill.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, there are a couple of ways that I intervene. First, I try to. I'm usually somewhat indirect. I try to, you know, shift the emotional pulse of. Of the group and of that individual, I might try to. Hey, what are you excited about? You know, if it's a. If it's a group setting, what's going well. Right. Like, and if they're really upset about something, I try to get to the bottom of what is upset, to diffuse that if that doesn't work, then, you know, I have to take more extreme action to intervene. But I'm always sensitive to whether there is someone in a group that is consistently bringing the rest of the group down. And if that is happening, then I'm, I'm trying to address that in the ways that I just described. But more broadly, Ginny, I want to go back to, you know, the family unit and how knowledge of what we're talking about today can be so incredibly helpful. So I spend one of the final chapters of the book talking about culture. And I describe culture as the air we breathe. It's all around us, we're soaking it up all the time. And I genuinely think it's one of the most powerful tools we have for shifting other people's emotions, including teaching them how to shift their own emotions. So we use this term culture a lot, but what does it actually mean? Culture. Culture consists of the values and beliefs a group cares about, right? And so you're giving those values and beliefs as a leader of your family or the co leader of your family, you're in a position to give your kids specific kinds of values and beliefs. So like in our family, we believe that all emotions are good for you, even the bad ones. They serve a function at times. I'm giving my kid that belief so that when they find themselves experiencing a little bit of anxiety about an upcoming exam, they recognize that that's actually adaptive, that response, it's motivating them to study. It's not something they need to worry endlessly about. I'm also giving them a belief about the value of emotion regulation and the importance of being able to manage their emotions. I'm conveying to them that there are no one size fits all solutions, that the things that mommy and daddy benefits from are not the things that you do, and that I'm, you know, there are lots of tools you can use. So right here I'm now giving them this framework for thinking about how to manage their emotional lives. And I'm also giving them those tools. So the other thing that cultures do for their constituents, they give them values and beliefs, but they also give them like a jump start tools to help them live and live those values and beliefs in their lives. So I'm teaching my kids about this stuff in a mostly not obnoxious way. Right? Like, you know, we're not having boot camp every night on here are the seven ways to manage your emotions or 17 but I might at dinner time tell them about a really cool thing that we learned in the lab or an idea that I'm working on in a presentation. And so I'm putting it out there for them to consume. I'm not targeting them with that knowledge. But I really do think we all have the opportunity to shape the cultures that we're a part of. And what is more important to shape than the emotional lives of the people we care about.

[Jenny Yurt]

And there's a lot of teachable moments. Because you wrote emotions are not an infrequent experience. We are in a near constant state of emotionality 90% of the time.

[Ethan Cross]

Isn't that wild?

[Jenny Yurt]

So there's a lot of opportunities. Yeah. To talk about it.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, 90%. So, like, just think about that for a second. Almost 90% of the time, or 90% of the time that we're awake, research shows that we are experiencing some kind of emotion. That's when we're awake. You know, the research didn't get into the emotions we experience when we're sleeping. That's a trickier thing to measure. But if I'm generalizing from my own experience, I could tell you there's a fair amount of time I spent dreaming. And those dreams are filled with emotions, too. So emotions are what it's all about. They're just part of who we are. They make life, you know, both worth living, and sometimes it makes life really hard to deal with. And so I think we need to be spending a heck of a lot more time educating ourselves about how to better manage our own emotional lives and helping those we care about, like our kids and our colleagues, do the same.

[Jenny Yurt]

I really did love what you said about your team, because I think that a lot of people can relate to having different work situations throughout their entire life, you know, starting in teen years, where you're almost always. Well, I guess things are different these days. But, you know, when I was growing up, it's like, you're almost always working in a setting with other people, and there's often a time where you're like, if only that one person, you know, wasn't here.

[Ethan Cross]

One person can sour. Can really make things challenging. And being aware of that, I think. I think we. A lot of us have had this experience.

[Annie F. Downs]

Right.

[Ethan Cross]

But like. But I know that it could sour the. Well within seconds. So it enhances the urgency with which you. You intervene.

[Jenny Yurt]

Yeah. So I like that. I think it shows care. The group as a whole, if you are the one that's in charge, if you are just aware of that. And that would be similar to if you're in a family. Right. If you're the parent and I, well, I would think about it like we have five kids. So, you know, I mean, if one sours the well for everyone else, I mean, those types of things happen. So to me, it gives me the mindset of to be on the lookout for it or if you're at a big family reunion, that type of thing. And if it's, you know, your child is the one that's, you know, causing the emotional contagion, that you can be the one that's ready and willing and able to try and help them and use those emotional levers. So I thought that's super interesting. That's not in the book. So that is a bonus that you're using that with your team.

[Ethan Cross]

Yes.

[Jenny Yurt]

And I think that's a really practical thing when we're in positions of authority or, you know, parents or teachers or whatever. I mean, what, what if you're in a classroom? Oh my goodness. Does that happen a lot? You know, if you're the one that's guiding the class of students, sure.

[Ethan Cross]

It, it can happen in any group context. And, you know, that's another thing that I, I love about these, these tools that I talk about in the book. They are for the most part domain general, meaning they're not restricted to a specific context. You can use them at home, at work, for lots of different kinds of issues.

[Jenny Yurt]

So good.

[Annie F. Downs]

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[Jenny Yurt]

And when you talked about culture, I really liked the part that you talked about aa. I just read a book called the Fix by this man named Ian Kron, and it's all about how aa. He had been a drinker and AA helped him, but he didn't really dive too deep into it. And then like 20 years later, he ended up, like, with substance abuse, like. Like taking different painkillers and things like that. That would be called some substance abuse, right?

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. I mean, if. If abused. Well, I mean, if.

[Jenny Yurt]

Abused. Right.

[Ethan Cross]

If it, you know, if it meets.

[Jenny Yurt]

The criteria, because alcohol is also. Is substance abuse, but also it could.

[Ethan Cross]

Be a form of substance abuse.

[Jenny Yurt]

It could be a form.

[Annie F. Downs]

Yeah.

[Jenny Yurt]

Okay. So that's his situation. It sort of shows up in a different way. And he did a more deeper dive into the AA the second time. And. And then he writes this book. And I've always wondered about it. There's the 12 steps. You know, you hear about the 12 steps, you see people's lives are changed, and a lot of it has to do with emotions. Like what I said that I tend to be addicted to is overeating. So there's a lot of things that you can be addicted to. And what happens is like, you're kind of. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine. What tips you over is an emotional disturbance. Often.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah.

[Jenny Yurt]

And you wrote in this book, people don't go to AA because drinking is their problem. They go because drinking is their solution.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah.

[Jenny Yurt]

Wow. It's so powerful because it's saying it's the emotions often that are tipping you into this behavior that you don't really want to be a participant of.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. You know, several of the people that. That I chatted with about that chapter and addiction are. There are oftentimes emotional disturbances that are driving people to abuse drugs and alcohol. They're looking to escape and distract. And those would be unhealthy forms of avoidance. And. And to be clear, there are unhealthy forms of avoidance I talk about in the book. You know, the emotional eating is a great example of the power of sensation and really the importance of understanding the effects that these tools can have on you and how to wield them. Right. So a lot of people, like we just talked before about how powerful the senses can be for temporarily shifting our emotions. Like the. The joy and blissfulness I experience when I have a refrigerated dark chocolate peanut butter cup after dinner. Mini dark chocolate. I love those. I mean, instantly makes me feel great. And So a lot of people are aware of this, like, experience that comes specifically from dark chocolate peanut butter cups. I'm joking. But, like, you know, we all have our. These foods that just. We love. And it kind of makes sense that if you're feeling not great or you're stressed about something, that you might reach for a very quick jolt in the opposite direction by going to eating. Now that, if taken to an extreme, can be dysfunctional, but in the right proportions could be just fine too. So, again, this is where just knowing how we work when it comes to our emotions, I think can be so incredibly empowering. First, it, like, teaches us about something that is part of who we all are. Like, you know, I. I find it amazing that we've all experienced emotions throughout our lives, and yet when I ask people to just tell me what is an emotion, most of the room gets silent. Like, people just are not confident. That's wild to me. Right? So we can define an emotion. We can identify the tools that exist to help us manage them. And I think simply knowing what those tools are and then starting the process of discovery to understand how do these tools fit in my life best? What are the ones that work best for me? I mean, that can have such enormous value. Like, I so value the fact that I have plans. Like, I know what to do when I get triggered in some way. I know the first line of intervention, and that works 60% of the time, let's say. But if that doesn't work, I know what else to do. And I also know how to help other people when they come to me for the problems that they're grappling with. And that's just knowledge I am so incredibly grateful for and excited to share with others.

[Jenny Yurt]

I love that you include the warning signs because you say most experiences have an emotional peak that will slope down over time, allowing us to gain distance from it. And you distract yourself for long enough to let time do its work. Resentment can be metabolized away. I love that sentence. But then you do give the warning signs. So substance abuse, which I think in my case could include food kind of.

[Annie F. Downs]

Right.

[Jenny Yurt]

Or that's a food as a substance. I don't know why I'm so confused about this. Anyway. Constantly seeking reassurance. Keep. You know, if you keep thinking about it. Yeah, these different warning signs. So you're like, that's totally.

[Ethan Cross]

So. So it's. It's. Here's the best way to. I. I like to use the. Like a carpenter's toolbox as a metaphor. My grandfather was a Carpenter, not the Holocaust one, the other side. Although he was in World War II too, my grandfather would never show up to a work site. Number one, with one tool, he wouldn't have a job. Right. If he just brought a hammer, he would come.

[Jenny Yurt]

They have so many tools.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jenny Yurt]

Analogy, right?

[Ethan Cross]

So you come with a whole toolbox. But number two, my grandfather understood how to use those tools, when to use them and how, like if you. I remember when I was a kid, he gave me a hammer and I was just playing with it. I broke the hammer, I like banged it too hard against the floor and the top came off. I didn't know how to use a hammer and I caused destruction as a result. That metaphor, I think, applies really well to the shifters. These tools we're talking about, you need to have them, number one, but you need to know where to find them and then you need to understand how to use them. And the somewhat tricky thing, but also I think this could be an exciting thing, is that unlike the tools of a carpenter, where you can go to a trade school or apprentice and then just figure out right away when you have a certain kind of nail, you use this screwdriver. That's going to differ for every person, when to use the different tools and how much to use them. But I think that's a, that. I don't think that that should be a bummer or, or surprising to anyone who's listening, because I think most of us would agree that all of our emotional lives are distinct. Right? Like, our emotional lives are like fingerprints, utterly unique. My emotional life is very different, my emotional signature, if you will, than my wife, the person, the adult I'm closest to in this world. Our emotional lives are very, very different. So why would we expect the same solution to work for all of us? The science here is very, very clear. The same solutions don't work for all of us. So we've got to figure out the ones that do.

[Jenny Yurt]

And you have so many ideas in this book Shift, I wanted to throw out too, that I had written this on a different page and I'm not sure why, but when you're talking about the emotional contagion. So you gave the example of sitting in the car with your daughter. That was my example too. Right. Sitting in the car, you got a 20 minute drive. You're like, this person is cramming. Come on, what are we gonna do? But you said that it happens online as well.

[Ethan Cross]

Yeah. So emotional contagion can be a problem online, it can also be a force for good. I'll give you two examples. You know, we're often online and we're. We're going into these different social media applications where people are conveying their emotions, often in a very unfiltered way, Right. Because there's little inhibition online. So we just kind of let it out and so things happen. And then we register other people's emotions and we see it endlessly on our streams. And algorithms tend to select for more triggering kinds of posts. And so this is in part how you have these groundswells of ground souls is putting it too mildly. Tidal waves of emotional contagion sweeping nations and countries in response to social events. Social media is playing a powerful role in causing those emotional upheavals. Now, that can be good or bad, right? Really depends on the context. It can lead to bullying and, you know, just kind of like jumping on the bandwagon and beating up on people. It can also inspire collective action too. So again, it's good to know how this works, because if you know how it works, I think you could be more resistant to it if you want to be, or you can lean in, but at least you have the informed understanding about how to have these social media forces affect you, which I think a lot of us don't have. A lot of the time we just find ourselves being pulled by it back to the subtitle. We have it managing us rather than the other way around. If you ask me. I don't want that to be the case. I want to be in the driver's seat. And sometimes I do want to lean into that, those collective emotional responses. And sometimes I don't. And this knowledge empowers me to have some agency about whether I do or don't.

[Jenny Yurt]

It's so good. Speaking of the good, I want to hit this one last thing because I thought it was really applicable. The reason that I started 1000 hours outside is because I added up at one point. There's a couple factors, but I added up how much time we had spent outside in the last year because we sort of had a little consistent thing that we were doing with some friends. And it at the time is about a little over a decade ago. It equaled the amount of time that kids were on screens in that year. And I just had this thought of how much fuller our life was. We always say we're not against screenshots, but it would have been such a different life experience had all those 1000 hours gone to screen use instead of all of these things that we did outside. And when we go outside, like I have a pretty distinct memory of a ton of the things that we've done. We travel somewhere somewhat close by and we come back again. I remember that time and it was super icy on that trail. And you kind of have these really distinct memories. And so you talked about that the more meaningful an experience is, the longer the emotions associated with it will last. So I'm assuming, I mean, that's obviously for things that are negative, but true also for things that are good, or that's at least what it seems like. The memories we form are stronger and reverberate in our awareness longer when they have an emotional tinge, often due to sensory experience. So my experience is that our time in nature has felt like it has expanded my life and how fulfilling it feels. And I remember so much and so I felt like, oh, this was kind of the explanation of that.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, if they are more infused with emotion, that may well explain it for sure. I would say your experience may not be the rule for everyone though, in the sense that sometimes, for example, screen experiences can be quite emotional for folks. Right. And sensory. Sensory based too, with sound. And in fact, you know, if you follow the evolution of social media applications, like it's the multimedia, multisensory experience of social media that's increasingly being important to people. So I think you're going to see some variability there. But there are also some other factors about nature that I think help that it's also pulling on some other sensory experiences, like even light, you know, vision that we haven't talked about. It also gives us the opportunity to broaden our perspective around things by allowing us to experience awe that can be helpful. So like, I want to be super clear, if you are finding getting outside to be more beneficial than staying on screens, you should, you should keep doing that.

[Jenny Yurt]

And I wouldn't even use the word beneficial, I would use the word memorable and memorable.

[Ethan Cross]

All that good stuff. Absolutely.

[Jenny Yurt]

It would be hard for me to say a year ago I played this video game, Ratchet and Clank, you know, on the PS5. But if I was like, oh, but a year ago, because it's snowing, right? We were like both home with it's snow day. You know, a year ago we were building a fort out of snow with this like thing that we got. And it makes these big blocks. It's memorable. And so when you talked about how the emotions can last longer and the memories can be strong, stronger, that's sort of what my experience has been.

[Ethan Cross]

Well, and I think that's, that's like, for you that was a little. That's. You've done the little self experiment that I encourage folks to do at the end of the book, which is to try out these different tools. And you have compared those kinds of nature experiences to the indoor ones and recognize the value they have for you and your family. And now you're choosing to do more of them. Like, that's great. That is the exact proof of principle. Now imagine you did that or other people did that with all of the different tools that I talk about in the book. Like dozens of tools. Right? So you're self experimenting. You're finding the right combinations that benefit you most. And then guess what? You're actually having a better life. That makes me really happy if that's the outcome, because that was the goal behind the book, to give people the knowledge to lead those better, more emotionally fit lives.

[Jenny Yurt]

Yeah, you hit the goal for sure. The book is shift managing your emotions so they don't manage you. I also highly recommend Cheddar. This book is already for sale now, so you can get your copy wherever books are sold. I want to end it with a sentence from your grandma. She talked about how why is a crooked letter always asking why? Why did this happen? Why did that happen? And you said you sort of interpret. You interpreted that as sometimes there are no answers and searching for them only creates suffering. And sometimes you do search for them. Right? That's what you're talking about. It's unique for people, but sometimes searching for them only creates suffering. Leave it alone. Finish your homework. Ride your bike with your friends. Cherish the life you have. What a book, Ethan.

[Ethan Cross]

Thanks so much, Ginny.

[Jenny Yurt]

I loved it so much. I got so much out of it. You just have been traveling and traveling and traveling. What an honor to get this time with you.

[Ethan Cross]

Thank.

[Jenny Yurt]

Thank you so much for being on the show.

[Ethan Cross]

It's an honor to be here. As always, thanks for having me.

[Jenny Yurt]

What if more important than being right.

[Heather Thompson Day]

Is how we handle being wrong? Holding tightly to ideas that can't adapt with new information is not a virtue, it's a vice. I'm Heather Thompson Day and I'm inviting.

[Jenny Yurt]

You to join me over on my.

[Heather Thompson Day]

Podcast, what if I'm Wrong?

[Jenny Yurt]

Where I'll be your guide through real life questions.

[Ethan Cross]

Okay, today we have a submission story and it is wild.

[Heather Thompson Day]

Subscribe to what if I'm Wrong.

[Jenny Yurt]

Available wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's be real. Talking about intimacy can be awkward even with your spouse. But it doesn't have to be. We are Alanna, Kyle and Tira hosts of the Kingdom Sexuality Podcast, and we're all about keeping it real and helping you add some spice and deeper connection into your marriage. Specifically, when it comes to what happens.

[Ethan Cross]

In the bedroom, we don't shy away from the tough conversations that often get missed in Christian circles. With us, you'll get laughs, tips, fresh ideas and challenges to strengthen your relationship and bring it to the next level.

[Jenny Yurt]

Because, let's face it, navigating intimacy as a Christian can be confusing, and finding safe, wholesome resources can be tough. So subscribe. Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week on the Kingdom Sexuality Podcast.