Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris The Science of Emotion Regulation: How It Impacts Health, Performance, and Relationships. | Ethan Kross About this episode Practical strategies for managing our emotional lives.
Dr. Ethan Kross https://www.ethankross.com/, author of the international bestseller Chatter https://www.amazon.com/Chatter-Voice-Head-Matters-Harness/dp/0525575235, is one of the world's leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan's top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.
In this episode we talk about:
What an emotion actually is The myth that we should only experience positive emotions Why sometimes avoidance is a smart strategy The six emotional "shifters" we can use to regulate our emotions The role of our senses How to use mental time travel to shift perspective And the role of our surroundings, relationships, and culture
Related Episodes:
#365 The Voice in Your Head | Ethan Kross https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/ethan-kross-365 The Neuroscience Of: Emotional Regulation, Relationships, Body Image, And Intuition | Emma Seppälä https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/emma-seppala-764
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Transcript 13,510 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? I am continuously amazed/dismayed by how many crucial life skills are rarely, if ever, taught to us during our formal education. So today, we're going to talk about how to regulate your emotions, which is a great example of something very few of us are ever taught how to do. But there's actually a whole bunch of science around the benefits of emotion regulation. It can improve your health, your performance, and your relationship. And there's science around some simple practices you can incorporate into your life to help you keep your shit together emotionally. Today, I'm talking to one of the leading experts in the field, Ethan Kross, PhD. He's got a new book called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You.
1:02 Dan Harris? Ethan is an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan, where he serves in the psychology department, also in the Ross School of Business, and where he directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. This is his second appearance on the show. Last time, he was here to talk about his book Chatter, which had a huge impact on me personally. That book is all about how to rewire your inner dialogue, or inner monologue, depending on the circumstance. And you'll hear us reference that book in the course of this conversation. We also talk about what an emotion actually is, the myth that we should only experience positive emotions, why sometimes avoidance is a smart strategy, which might be a little discordant to those of you who come out of the mindfulness community. Ethan's concept of emotional shifters,
1:46 Dan Harris? in other words, tools to regulate your emotions. These shifters include using your senses, including the strategic use of music, which I found interesting, using mental time travel, using your surroundings, your relationships, and the culture. And I'll let him explain that one. As you will hear, this conversation is a veritable cornucopia of practical wisdom. Don't forget, paid subscribers at danharris.com get a cheat sheet, which sums up all of Ethan's strategies and also includes a full transcript. Ethan Kross, coming up right after this.
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3:23 Dan Harris? Ethan Kross, welcome back to the show.
3:25 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me. Always great to be here, Dan.
3:28 Dan Harris? Thanks. I'm excited to talk to you. So you got this new book, and it seems like one of the foundational observations of the book is that emotions are real, whether you like it or not, especially for dudes who don't like to talk about emotions. They are powerful forces of our inner lives, and very few of us are taught how to deal with them, and as a consequence, we're just fucking owned by them.
3:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, we're often stumbling around, looking for solutions, and sometimes we find tools that work, but oftentimes we don't, or we find tools that can be harmful. And I think there's a giant opportunity to translate what we know from the science side to help folks out. So yeah, you've got it right. You can attest to this observation, I assume. Fair assumption to make.
4:14 Dan Harris? I'm offended by that assumption. I'm highly regulated. Well, so this leads to a million other questions. One is, what is an emotion?
4:23 Speaker 03 Great question, and it's one in which there's heavy debate among scientists. It's kind of remarkable that we all experience emotions. We have ample experiences with these kinds of states. And yet scientists are still debating what exactly an emotion is and isn't. And so the, the way I like to answer this question is by focusing on what scientists agree on when it comes to this question of what is an emotion? And what we agree on is that an emotion is a coordinated response to a situation that is designed to give us the best chance of succeeding in that particular circumstance. And so by coordinated response, I mean, when you experience an emotion,
5:08 Speaker 03 there are typically certain patterns of thinking that are activated. Your body is responding in a particular way. Your face is often contorting in a particular way to broadcast to others what you're feeling. And all of those moving parts are moving together to help you respond. And now, what I love about that definition is it reframes how we think about negative emotions, which so many of us spend a lot of time thinking about. I think it's really easy to think about negative emotions as these states that we want to avoid at all costs. But if you ask most emotion scientists, is that actually the case? The answer that you get is, no, it's not.
5:51 Speaker 03 Our negative emotions are functional. They are tools that can help us navigate our worlds if they're experienced in the right proportions, not too intense and not too long. So I'll give you a couple of examples to just kind of make this really clear. So let's talk about anger. I have a book on my bookshelf that talks about like toxic emotions. So anger is often synonymous with toxicity. When do we experience anger? We experience anger in situations where Our view of the world has been violated in some way. And the opportunity to fix the situation exists. And so when we register that set of circumstances, we experience this anger response. What might that look like?
6:35 Speaker 03 Let's say my youngest daughter does something really naughty. She rides her bike without her helmet. That is violating my view of the world. And that view is my daughter does safe things and she listens to what her mom and dad say she should do. So she has violated that. I experience this approach oriented response. I become animated. I'm displaying to her that I'm distressed. And that is designed to fix this situation. So that she puts on her helmet and she doesn't do this again. Take one other example, sadness. Who wants to experience sadness? Most of us don't. And yet, when do we experience that emotion?
7:17 Speaker 03 When we've registered some, some loss, some change in the way we are thinking about ourself and the world around us that we can't actually fix. We've been rejected. Someone has passed away. A business transaction can't be resuscitated. And so when that happens, this sadness emotion, it motivates us to turn inward, to try to do the difficult cognitive work of, all right, now that I've experienced this loss, how can I make new sense, new meaning about myself and the world that I'm in? Let me go away and try to spend some time doing that cognitive work. Let me slow down to really take the time to deliberate. But you know what? That could be a little dangerous.
7:58 Speaker 03 So let me also throw a lifeline out to other people to tell them to check up on me when I'm in this contemplative state. And that's a sad facial expression. So the point here is that when you are experiencing negative emotions in the right proportions, that is your body and mind doing what it evolved to do. And in my experience, conveying that to people is liberating. Because it takes us away from this quest to maximize positivity at all times, which I think from a scientific point of view is a It's just not possible or desirable.
8:34 Dan Harris? Right. You talk about the drawbacks and detriments of what you call the good vibes only mindset that we we should only be experiencing positive emotions. But that, first of all, it's unrealistic. And second, it devalues the benefits and functionality of so-called negative emotion.
8:54 Speaker 03 That's exactly right. So I'll ask you a question. You do a ton of public speaking. Have you ever not felt any butterflies, any anxiety before an event and found that said events maybe didn't turn out as good as when you had a moderate level of anxiety or arousal?
9:14 Dan Harris? It's funny. I was literally talking about this this morning. I was at a school performance. My son, his school had a performance and I was talking about this with some of the other parents, that the biggest mistakes I've made in my life, many of the biggest mistakes, because I've made so many mistakes, I want to be careful not to limit their points of origination. Many of the biggest mistakes I've made are when I'm cocky, when I'm not, when I don't have the anxiety. You're raising your hand and pointing to yourself. Yeah.
9:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean, when I think back, I've given, you know, hundreds, maybe more talks in my career, I can specifically think of the worst one. And it was a talk where I just felt no, no anxiety beforehand, no anxious arousal. That's a cue. Anxiety is a cue that focuses us on something that we perceive to be important, tells us to pay attention, right? To devote resources to preparing. So I think the example that really often resonates with people is actually physical pain, which is of course a negative emotional state. You can ask the question, like, would you want to live a life without physical pain? I think many people might reflexively say, yeah, who likes
10:23 Speaker 03 pain? I mean, I'm the biggest crybaby there is when it comes to medical procedures. I hate pain, right?
10:31 Speaker 03 That's what makes pain really, really useful. And in fact, there are people who are born with the inability to experience physical pain due to a genetic anomaly. Their pain receptors don't encode physically painful sensations. If you look at those people and the lives they live, these are not people who live long, wonderful lives. These are people who actually die early because they've got a mosquito bite and they start scratching it and they keep scratching it and it becomes infected. There's no feedback saying, hey, stop. Or they get their hand caught in the stove and nothing's telling them to pull it away. So negative emotions, like all emotions, in the right proportions,
11:14 Speaker 03 are gifts that we should cherish. The problem is, as I think every human being who is listening knows, we often don't experience them in the right proportions. And when that happens, it can really lead us astray. And that's where the real excitement comes. That's what I've been spending my time researching for the past 25 years.
11:37 Dan Harris? The concept of shifting, the concept of controlling, maybe that's too powerful a word, too aggressive a word, but having some agility, dexterity, suppleness with your emotions rather than just being yanked around by them all the time.
11:53 Speaker 03 That's right. Learning how to be a jujitsu expert, if you will, in your ability to increase or decrease the volume on different emotions, shorten or lengthen their duration, and even in some cases, switch from experiencing one kind of emotional state to another, all depending on your goals. Like, this is a really important point. What I just described is the process of regulating your emotion, or shifting for short. You want to shift according to your goals. Sometimes I'm very happy to bathe in a particular kind of emotional response. Other times I might want to move in a different direction. So it's all goal driven.
12:34 Dan Harris? When would you want to bathe in anger?
12:37 Speaker 03 Well, anger is not an emotion I would want to bathe in.
12:40 Dan Harris? Okay.
12:40 Speaker 03 The kinds of emotions I'd like to bathe in tend to be the more positive contemptment joy. I like those. I am a fan of maximizing those. But I might add, like, sometimes I've got a, I've got a home in, right? I can be really excited about this potential opportunity, but that can be distracting, actually, and not allow me to focus on a hard task. So you do want some dexterity there, too.
13:05 Dan Harris? Would it be safe to say that your research suggests that not only is it possible to shift emotions, to work with emotions, to manage them, but that there are serious benefits to having that ability?
13:20 Speaker 03 Without question. And I don't say that lightly as an academic, because we question everything. But if you look at the consequences of not managing your emotions well, or on the flip side, what happens when you do, you see that this capacity impacts, I would argue, many of the things in life that we value most. So your ability to manage emotions has implications for your ability to think and perform effectively. How does this work? Couple of pathways, but one prominent one is when we experience big, intense, let's say, negative emotions, this consumes our attention. Our attention is limited. We only have so much of it to dole out on at any given moment in time.
14:04 Speaker 03 If all of your attention is consumed by this experience that's frustrating you or making you anxious, you don't have a lot left over to do the things that you often want and need to do, like doing something as simple as just reading an article. I mean, have you ever tried to read an article when you were ruminating about something and found that you've read the material, but don't remember anything you've read?
14:29 Dan Harris? Yes, and isn't there some brain science here that like if the amygdala, the stress center of the brain is firing like the prefrontal cortex, the more rational part of the brain just doesn't come online and is powerful away?
14:42 Speaker 03 Well, there's absolutely neuroscience here. Part of the complexity here is that that prefrontal cortex that you just described, it's not that it always shuts off. It's that its resources are being directed at things that you don't want it to be directed towards. So like the attention is being captured by this other information. You can't move it over to things that you want. You're no longer in control, essentially. So that's a very common experience that people have. It has implications for our relationships. We tend to displace our negative emotions on other people. We take them out on others. If you're consumed with a problem, we tend to not be great listeners. Sometimes we talk ad nauseam about our problems to people who want to care for us,
15:26 Speaker 03 but there's only so much they can listen to before we bring them down. And we get into our health. When you're stuck in negative emotional states that you can't shift out of, this doesn't feel good subjectively, but it also has implications for our physical health, from our ability to get a good night's sleep and fall asleep and stay asleep, to inflammation, cardiovascular disease, certain forms of cancer. So if we just back up for a second, and I hate to be Mr. Dr. Doom and Gloom. Dr. Doom, I'm sorry, I just had a reference to a childhood villain that I liked. Thinking and performance, relationships, health, like that's the big three, right? And our negative emotions have implications for all of those territories.
16:09 Speaker 03 So I think the ability to manage your emotions well, figuring out how to do that, it's a big challenge we face as a species. And you know, what I found really surprising when I was writing my book and researching it was just how long we have been struggling with this very issue. This is an incredibly timely issue, but it's an ancient problem. You know, you've talked about this at length with diving into Eastern philosophy and the meditative traditions, of course, as one solution. But if you look at some of the earliest writing samples ever discovered, they are talking about problems of emotion regulation, ailments of the heart.
16:52 Speaker 03 These are Persian writing samples, thousands and thousands of years ago. And if you look at, here are the two factoids that every time I think about them, they blow my mind. First surgical technique ever discovered, trephination, drilling holes in people's heads. This was invented eight to 10,000 years ago. Part of the reason it is believed to be used? Let those evil spirits out when you are becoming irrational. Right? Like, makes sense. If our ancient ancestors had this philosophy, this theory, that the reason why you experience these abnormal states are you're being possessed, let them out. Like, that's what we did eight to 10,000 years ago.
17:33 Speaker 03 And that may sound unbelievably extreme, but if you then fast forward to the late 1940s, there's a giant spike on the emotion regulation innovation timeline. A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for an emotion regulation intervention that is called the frontal lobotomy. You're having these big emotions? That's not exactly what it sounded like, but I'm animating here. Poke some holes in people's brains. We have come a long way from that, and that is a good thing. But I think it just puts in perspective the significance of what we are talking about.
18:14 Speaker 03 And I think what you're trying to do when you try to help people by giving them tools.
18:21 Dan Harris? When my son is having a temper tantrum, is there evidence to suggest that trephination is a successful intervention in an acute situation?
18:29 Speaker 03 I cannot give that kind of endorsement in public. But it is interesting to think about, the little ones sometimes do seem like they are possessed, huh? Particularly when you take their screens away. But it gives new meaning, this story to the expression of, you know, if you keep it up, you're gonna get a hole in the head, right?
18:45 Dan Harris? Yeah, right, exactly.
18:46 Speaker 03 Comes full circle.
18:48 Dan Harris? This is, hopefully not a stupid digression here, but. Yeah, when you were talking about Persian literature, you talked about something about problems of the heart or something, elements of the heart or whatever. This term, the heart,
19:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:01 Dan Harris? gets used a lot when talking about emotions. And I, probably because of my, you know, cultural conditioning around being a male, made worse by the fact that I'm a short, scrawny male who needs to compensate in all sorts of ways. I don't like that word. I find it annoying. And yet, like, it gets used a lot and by serious people. And so what's your take on it?
19:23 Speaker 03 This is really interesting. One of the first studies I did was actually a study. It was a neuroimaging study where we wanted to see if this idea, this observation that you're having right now. So we use the language of the heart to describe emotional experiences. So when you're rejected, you might say, I'm in pain, my heart hurts, heartbreak. Is that more than a metaphor? Is there something that goes beyond just using that language metaphorically? And so what we did in this study, this was back when I was a grad student at Columbia, New York City. We posted flyers. This was in the ancient days where you had to advertise for subjects with flyers posted around the city. We recruited people who had just been dumped in a romantic relationship.
20:05 Speaker 03 And we had them come up to the hospital at Columbia. And we did this study where we would do two things. In one task, we would show them a picture of the person who had just dumped them. And we'd ask them to look at the picture and think about how you felt in the moment that you were rejected. And if you've ever had the experience of being rejected and looking at a photo of the person who did that deed, like, the feelings come back pretty quick, right? Like, it's a pretty intense experience. So we did that to induce this feeling of social pain. And then on other trials, we hooked up a device called a thermode to participants' forearms, which, yeah, you're looking at me with very suspicious facial expression. Just bear with me here for a second. I promise you, this passed all ethics review.
20:50 Speaker 03 So this thermode Dr. Doom is describing, this thermode heated up to a hot temperature that was painful. But it wasn't, we left no lasting marks. It was painful in the same way that if you, if you got a hot cup of coffee from Starbucks without the protective sleeve, like, it would hurt. But you put it down and the pain goes away. That's essentially the temperature that this thermode heated up to. And then our analytic question is very simple. When you're experiencing this sense of social pain, do you see coactivation of parts of the brain that are involved in physical painful sensation? So the pain centers, physical pain centers,
21:35 Speaker 03 light up when you're experiencing social pain. Those pain centers tend to not light up when you experience other kinds of negative emotions. And the take home was, in fact, you do see that overlap, which suggests that there might be some bodily component to experiencing social rejection. So you know, this notion that you're in physical duress may actually be more than a metaphor. I don't know if that will help with your disdain for that language, but there is some basis for talking about it in those terms.
22:06 Dan Harris? Yeah, well, I mean, I've I've found that the more I've gotten into meditation, which I think does, I believe there is some evidence to suggest it. It boosts interception, the ability to kind of sense what's happening in your own body. Like, it's very clear to me over time that different, especially difficult emotions come with a constellation of physical sensations. Often for me, like in the chest area, it can be directly where the heart is, but sometimes it's right north of the solar plexus. And you know, it's kind of like E T. And the movie E T like has a little light in his chest and it has different colors or burns at different intensity based on what he's feeling. I think we have a version of that.
22:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's certainly a tightness linked with certain kinds of emotional responses. For me, it's like three or four inches lower in my abdomen. So that's where I experience. You know, if I'm experiencing real anxiety because I'm leaving the room, right? And that's a very common response, that kind of gastric response, that fight or flight. So the body is involved in our experience of emotions in really important and powerful ways, which is also, I think, how it becomes easier to wrap your head around, how on earth is this fuzzy thing called an emotion? How is it impacting our physical health? Well, here's a cartoon model of how that works.
23:32 Speaker 03 If certain kinds of emotional responses, like an anxious response or an anger response, are triggering this defensive, let's say, reaction, this fight or flight response, there's nothing wrong with that kind of response being triggered momentarily. But if that response remains chronically activated over time, that's exerting a wear and tear on your body that is consuming resources, that can lead to all sorts of physical realities. And so it becomes easier to start connecting the dots if you understand how emotions work in those ways.
24:08 Dan Harris? It's really interesting. Okay, so let's talk about the core thesis of the book, which is that it's possible to shift when you're in the throes of a powerful emotion. And you have, by my count, and I've never been good at math, at least six categories of shifters.
24:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:24 Dan Harris? So I was thinking to dive right into the first category, which is sensory shifters. But is there anything more you want to say on the notion of shifters before we dive in?
24:34 Speaker 03 Maybe one quick sidebar, which is before we dive into the actual shifters that exist, the actual tools that you can wield to push your emotions around where you want them to go, it's critically important to address the question of, do you believe you can actually shift? That is, like, do you think you can control your emotions? That question's been asked to lots and lots of people across many different studies. And it turns out there's huge variability in how people answer that question. So I'd love to set the record straight from my point of view, which is, we cannot control the emotions that are automatically activated as we rummage through life.
25:20 Speaker 03 We will experience thoughts that are seemingly random, a pop into our head that elicit reactions. I tell a story in the book where I've had this experience in many occasions when I'm exercising in the gym. When I'm carrying a dumbbell from one side of the gym to another, if there's someone in my path, I will imagine dropping the dumbbell on their face. And, you know, that's a terribly dark thought, right? Like, you, one might think without more context that I'm out of my mind. But what's probably happening? It's my mind preparing me, like, I don't want to have that outcome occur. So I have that thought, I experience a negative reaction, I squeeze it tighter. Right? And that's, there's an adaptiveness to that.
26:03 Speaker 03 If I see someone attractive walking down the street, I may have an emotional reaction. If I'm in New York City on the subway and I happen to smell a scent that is not pleasant, that's going to trigger a reaction. I cannot control that. Good luck trying to control what emotional reactions are going to be triggered. What we can control, however, is the trajectory of those responses once they are activated. Once those thoughts become activated, once we have those feelings in our body that are, maybe we're interpreting in particular ways, that's our playground. So there are facets of our emotional lives that are out of our control. And I think recognizing that should also be liberating.
26:47 Speaker 03 We know that universally, people experience dark thoughts. Really bad things, like perfectly normal, healthy people experience dark thoughts all the time. There's nothing wrong with you if that happens. That is a part of how our brains work. And we're trying to figure out why exactly that happens, but that's normal. So don't worry about that. But do think about how you engage with those thoughts and feelings once they are triggered. That's where the real opportunity zone is. So I say all of this because...
27:22 Speaker 03 If you don't think it's possible to lose weight, are you ever going to go to the gym and put the effort into trying to lose weight? Probably not. And so if you don't think you can control your emotions, research suggests you're not going to take the steps to do it. So I think just understanding that you do have some agency here, really important. All right, that's my little diatribe on control.
27:48 Dan Harris? Heard, registered, appreciated, plus one. Coming up, Ethan talks about the six emotional shifters we can use to reroute our emotional experiences, the role of our senses, and how to use mental time travel to shift your perspective.
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28:46 Dan Harris? All right, so let's dive into the six shifters. The first category is sensory shifters. Can you unpack that?
28:53 Speaker 03 So sensory shifters are one of the easiest tools we possess to quickly reroute our emotional experiences. And in my view, they are a completely underutilized tool. So Dan, let me ask a question. Do you ever listen to music?
29:10 Dan Harris? All the time.
29:12 Speaker 03 Why do you listen to it?
29:14 Dan Harris? Now that I'm thinking of it for for the very reasons you're suggesting, because I want to feel a certain way. I listen a lot to get amped up for exercise, but also while I'm driving, if I want to, you know, calm down or feel good in some way. And given that I don't enjoy driving, music can be very helpful. So yeah, background for a party, lots of use cases.
29:37 Speaker 03 So if you ask most people that question, they'll respond very similarly to the way you did. Close to 100% of participants will and have said, I listen to music because I like the way it makes me feel. You know, listening, sound, of course, is one of our senses and hearing. And part of the way sensation works is there are automatic connections between your sensory apparatus, sight, sound, touch, smell, and emotional networks in the brain. And that makes sense because as you're navigating your environment, you want to be alert to things that are out there that may have implications for you. So you register something via the senses.
30:19 Speaker 03 And then the senses can connect your emotional networks to tell you to approach or avoid those things in your environment. So a nasty smell, stay away. A pleasant smell, approach. All of these senses have this potential to activate these emotional responses. What's fascinating to me about the senses as a shifter is I think we all recognize that these sensory experiences can impact our emotional lives, but we aren't necessarily strategic about utilizing these senses as a tool when we are struggling. We've done research on this. So close to 100% of people will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. It quickly pushes their emotions around.
31:01 Speaker 03 But then you ask people, all right, the last time you were anxious, angry, or sad. What did you do to manage your emotions? The percentage of people who report using music ranges from 10 to 30%. So there's this tool. It's very effective at temporarily pushing you around, but it's not being activated. Once you have this insight, I'll speak from personal experience. It really changes the way you think about your emotional life. So when I get into the car, I look at, it's no longer a radio. I don't know what we would call it. It's a screen that can connect to my iPhone. But I see an emotion regulation device that has implications to affect me
31:44 Speaker 03 and anyone else who is in the car. And I can actually use this device in a pretty sophisticated way to push people's or my own emotions around. I was at the Taylor Swift concert some time ago. I got, maybe we don't need to go into the circumstances surrounding what propelled me to attend the concert, but I was there and it was wonderful. And I was looking around and I'm looking at tens of thousands of people who have just paid a reasonable amount of money to have an emotion regulation experience. That is exactly what was happening, a sensory mediated emotional experience. Hotels leverage this to their benefits.
32:27 Speaker 03 So like when my kids were young, we'd enter a nice hotel. And I remember like I have two daughters. They, "Ah daddy, it smells so good in here. I love this smell." Like that doesn't just happen. They are literally piping scents through the ventilation system. Pleasant smelling, there's a whole industry where, forget the technical name for these people who are experts in scent and creating these perfumes essentially. They're pumping them through the ventilation to arouse a particular kind of response. So these sensory tools are all around us. Music, sound, scents, touch, affectionate, but not creepy touch? That's another powerful one.
33:12 Dan Harris? So if I'm in a bad mood, I'm anxious or I'm angry or whatever. I think I get the music example. Say a little bit more about how I could use my senses to shift.
33:23 Speaker 03 So music is one example of how you could do it. Let's talk about touch because that's another powerful tool. So touch is actually the first sense to develop. It develops when we're in the womb and It is a potent activator of positive emotions when it is acceptable and desired. That is, when it's not like someone random touching you in a bar. Like, that does not generate the effects I'm about to describe. But think about when your child was born. Like, what was the first thing that happened when your child was born? Your son, you said?
33:55 Dan Harris? Yeah.
33:55 Speaker 03 Right after your son left the womb, what did the doctors do with the baby? After weighing the baby?
34:01 Dan Harris? Swaddled.
34:02 Speaker 03 Well, probably even before the swaddling gave the baby to you? Or maybe in the swaddle? Like, gave it to you or your partner? Like, little chest-to-chest contact?
34:12 Dan Harris? I can't remember the order of operations, but those were both in there.
34:16 Speaker 03 It happens, right? And that kind of skin-to-skin contact is incredibly soothing from an emotional standpoint. And it's not like we just grow out of that. We do grow out of the swaddling. But we have receptors on our skin that encode affectionate embraces. So what do I do? How do I leverage that? When my kids, for example, are maybe a little stressed out? I'll go over and just kind of rub their back or give them a hug. That's a sensory modality. You can also use your eyeballs, right? Look at pleasant things, artwork. I'm staring out at nature right here. So these are soothing sensory images.
35:01 Speaker 03 We talk a lot about how nature can be a very, very powerful regulatory tool. Nature pulls on several different levers, but one of them is the sensory lever, right? If you go into nature, you go for a walk in a safe, green setting, you've got pleasant smells, you've got soothing sounds, rustling streams, crinkly crunchy leaves, et cetera, et cetera. So those are a couple of examples of what you might do.
35:30 Dan Harris? Yeah, and just to say more specifically, you talked about giving your daughters a hug. But if you, Ethan, are in a bad mood, I imagine going to your spouse or your daughters or somebody where it's kosher to do this and requesting a hug might also have a salutary effect.
35:46 Speaker 03 Absolutely, without question. Probably more beneficial than like a kind of self, a self-soothing, although there is some research which shows that almost like a, you know, just kind of like rubbing yourself in a totally acceptable way can be, sorry, I had to give the caveat here, you know? Maybe we'll strike that from the record.
36:05 Dan Harris? No, don't strike it. I, because I bet there's a absolute, I bet.
36:08 Speaker 03 Self-soothing, self, yeah.
36:11 Dan Harris? I was just gonna say, I, I think there's probably also science to show that masturbation or what the priest used to call self-abuse is, is also good for you. But let's set that aside, because I don't want to make you even more uncomfortable.
36:21 Speaker 03 No, no, you know, I think, I think you should save that for just for another guest with more expertise in that.
36:25 Dan Harris? I've had guests talk about how it can help for sleep. Anyway, on the sort of cleaner end of the spectrum when it comes to compassionate self-touch, and this may be inappropriate on my part, and this is a, a less naughty version of inappropriate, maybe unfair in some way, but I, in my mind, lump you in some ways together with the work of Kristin Neff, the godmother of self-compassion, and she talks a lot about compassionate self-touch and compassionate self-talk. And you wrote a whole book called Chatter, which has been very influential for me, talking about how we can learn to rewire our inner dialogue. And so, I don't know, this may be taking us down a primrose path here, but self-touch
37:10 Dan Harris? and self-talk can be, from what I understand from your work and Kristin's work, very helpful as shifters.
37:18 Speaker 03 So that, you know, self-touch, I'm less aware of the research speaking to the widespread benefits of, which is not to say it doesn't exist, I'm just, you know, giving it to you straight like I would about any set of scientific findings. It's so funny you bring this up. There were, a couple of weeks ago, I was actually giving a presentation and I found myself, I said like a stomach ache, and I found myself just kind of. Rubbing, soothing my stomach for a second. I caught myself after a few seconds and like, you better stop this self-talk because this was in public. But I think we do that all the time. We try to simulate that experience ourselves. So it makes a great deal of sense. Certainly how we talk to ourselves can have really important
38:00 Speaker 03 implications for our emotional lives. You know, Kristin's work here is great. I think it can be summed up. We say the things to ourselves that we would never dare say to another human being, let alone someone that we actually care about. And so altering the way we talk to ourself can be really important for rerouting how we feel in difficult situations. Some of the time, that involves being more compassionate with ourselves, like giving ourselves some grace. We could be really hard on ourselves. At other times, sometimes being really tough with yourself can be effective too. You know, activating that kind of respectable, disciplined coach, like,
38:44 Speaker 03 get your act together. You got this. And actually using those kinds of terms to refer to yourself, the second person pronoun, you actually trying to talk to yourself like you would someone else, that can be really useful as well. So yes, that's another shifter.
39:01 Dan Harris? I, just for the record, would view both of the flavors of self-talk that you just described as compassionate. I think that compassionate isn't always ooey gooey. Sometimes compassion is, as Kristin says, fierce. And so you got this, get up off the couch, you can do this. That coaching is compassionate. It's just not the hallmark version of it.
39:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's not the, you know, tea and scones in the afternoon. Both of those absolutely can be game changers for how we, how we respond. And you know, what's so striking to me is we so rarely talk about this issue. You know, talking to ourselves, that is, when I do talks or workshops on this. People are initially quite reluctant to, they're not sure what to expect when they attend to talk on talking to yourself because the stereotypes surrounding this are people who are mentally ill are the ones who talk to themselves. But in fact, we know that this is, this is part of how we operate as human beings and, and there are ways of steering it. So what I love about
40:07 Speaker 03 this, I'll just say, what I love about the self-talk work is that is one kind of tool that we can use to change our perspective, to shift our perspective on problems. I call it a perspective shifter. It's invaluable because I think so many of us have this intuition that, well, if we change the way we think, we could change the way we feel. This was the, the mantra of the cognitive revolution in psychology several decades ago. That makes a lot of sense, but there's just one anecdote I always refer to. We're coming home from dinner in Detroit one night with, my wife and I were coming home with this other couple, really
40:50 Speaker 03 good friends. And the guy was experiencing some real difficulty at work that was stressing him out. And his partner said to him, why don't you just reframe how you're thinking about it? Just think differently about it. And he pauses, looks at her and goes, yeah, easier effing said than done. And so it's hard to do that in the moment, but if you can step back and look at it from a more detached perspective, that kind of cognitive shifting becomes a lot easier.
41:22 Dan Harris? All right. Well, let's say more about this. So we've moved, we've talked about sensory shifters.
41:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:25 Dan Harris? Just to reset the conversation here, we're talking about six kinds of shifters. We talked about sensory shifters. Now we've moved into perspective shifters. And within that, self-talk, supportive self-talk is part of it. But what else should we know about how to shift our perspective, given that it's easier said than done?
41:44 Speaker 03 So, so let me give you 2.5 more tools. So, so it's 2.5 because one of them has two varieties. So let's talk about mental time travel, which is one of my most utilized tools.
41:57 Speaker 03 We possess the ability to travel in time in our minds, and this often gets us into a lot of trouble. Because we project ourselves into the future, we worry, we get stuck in the negative future, or we ruminate about the past, we get stuck there. And many interventions actually focus on when that happens, re-ground yourself in the present, focus on the now. You are very familiar with a lot of these modalities. There's a lot of research showing that that can be a very beneficial intervention. There are, however, other ways of intervening when we find ourselves stuck in the negative past or present. You can use mental time travel to your benefit.
42:42 Speaker 03 And there are two ways this works. One way is to, when you are struggling with a big negative emotional response, anger, anxiety, sadness, you fill in the blanks, ask yourself how you're going to feel about this sometime down the road. So if it's 2:00 AM, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning? Next week, next year, 10 years from now? That sounds so simple, yet it is one of my go-to tools. And this is all science-based. Here's how this works. You, myself, everyone who is listening, we have lived through millions of emotional episodes over the course of our lives. And all of those episodes, they come in different flavors and varieties, but they share the same basic form.
43:27 Speaker 03 Something happens in the world or in our minds, an emotion is triggered. And then as time goes on, that emotion gradually subsides. Different emotions peak at different intensities, some fade more quickly, others last longer. But all of them subside as time goes on. We lose sight of that when we are struggling with our emotions. We zoom in on the awfulness. When you jump into your mental time travel machine and you ask, how am I going to feel tomorrow, next week, next month, next year? You are automatically activating this experience that you know to be true, which is, this is an impermanent experience. It will eventually change. That gives you hope that things will get better.
44:11 Speaker 03 And that turns the volume down on our emotional responses. So that's time travel into the future as a tool.
44:19 Dan Harris? Can I jump on that for a second?
44:20 Speaker 03 Please, please jump in, yeah.
44:21 Dan Harris? I'm sorry, I know, we will get to all 2.5. And I like that the fact that you're making a point that in some meditative circles might be controversial, which is the supremacy of now, it can be overstated because sometimes the mental time travel capacity that we evolved to have is really helpful and it can be really helpful for your mental health. So I buy that completely. And I can think of problems where this might not help.
44:47 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
44:48 Dan Harris? I've had shit happen to me that I'm still not over.
44:51 Speaker 03 Well, my answer to that is first, I completely agree. So I was once talking, for example, to a group of homeless people about how to improve their wellbeing. And it was a discussion about the tools that exist and we started talking about this tool. Their situation there is not improving anytime soon. There are other instances like that where if you are, for example, in a toxic work environment,
45:21 Speaker 03 it may not get better immediately. My advice in that situation is to not use mental time travel into the future. And that is not me backpedaling in any way.
45:32 Dan Harris? No, I know.
45:33 Speaker 03 Because a theme of shift, and I genuinely believe this to be true, is there are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. We have dozens of tools available to us for a reason. There are fits between certain contexts and certain tools. And so the more we can actually embrace that understanding, the better. It's kind of like if you are a carpenter and you show up in a work job, you don't show up with a hammer and a screwdriver. You have 30 other tools that you could flexibly draw from. So if that's not working, that tool for certain instances, don't use it. Use something else.
46:12 Dan Harris? I fully buy that. Okay, so that's, I believe, one of the 2.5 perspective shifting tools?
46:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, so let's wrap up mental time travel by talking about how you could time travel into the past to help you. And that works a little bit differently. So when we time travel into the past, one way to use that to your benefit is to broaden your perspective. You might think about instances in which you've dealt with similar kinds of situations and prevailed. We often don't think about that when we're struggling in the moment. You might also think about people you know about, or even historically instances that have been challenging, that people have managed to work through. So I often tell the story of like, one of my, I always get this phrase wrong, Daniel, tell me, is it ace, ace in the hole? Is that the expression?
47:04 Dan Harris? Yeah.
47:05 Speaker 03 Ace in the hole, one of my ace in all for coping is my grandparents' story of persevering through the Holocaust. So they had their family slaughtered. They lived in the woods in Eastern Europe for a really long time. Whenever I've thought about their situation, I've thought, I do not understand how they were able to make it. Nothing I have ever experienced comes close to what they endured in those moments. And so when I'm struggling with stuff and I encounter curveballs in life like everyone else does, if I find myself getting wrapped up in it, I go back in time. I stop in the, you know, early 40s, late 30s, and I think about Bubby and Papa and what they were doing there.
47:50 Speaker 03 And wow, that just broadens the perspective in a really powerful way. So that's time travel into the past. And you can do it with your own experiences. You could do it with other people's experiences. It's a pretty flexible tool.
48:03 Dan Harris? Nice.
48:04 Speaker 03 Okay, so let me give you the last one. The last one's fun. It's less generalizable, but it's interesting nonetheless. So do you speak any second languages?
48:14 Dan Harris? I speak some French.
48:16 Speaker 03 Some French. When did you learn how to speak French?
48:19 Dan Harris? Started in seventh grade and I actually minored in it in college.
48:22 Speaker 03 Oh, okay, great. So I'm guessing that you've probably had the experience of experimenting with some naughty language in French, maybe uttering some curses.
48:33 Dan Harris? I think that was, I believe, the first thing I did when I started learning French. Yeah.
48:37 Speaker 03 And did you find that it didn't quite feel?
48:42 Speaker 03 As emotionally intense when you cursed in French as you did in English?
48:45 Dan Harris? Yes, that, yes, that's true.
48:47 Speaker 03 Right? So it's this funny thing where we, if we curse in a foreign language or say taboo things, it doesn't quite have the same emotional sting. This is a pretty pervasive effect where you find that thinking in a foreign language, let me back up a second. Language is wrapped up in our experience of emotions and the emotional experiences we have growing up are in our native language. So when you think about emotional experiences in a second language, research shows that their intensity is stripped away. In the same way that you don't find that it is as naughty to curse in a second language as you do your native. Thinking about emotional experiences is a little bit easier
49:33 Speaker 03 when you're in a second language. And so there's some, some wonderful research which shows that we make more rational decisions when we think about the problem in a second language as compared to the first. So if you have that tool at your disposal, I no longer do. I have, you know, two languages, I speak them pretty broken and Spanish and Hebrew. And I only know the curses at this point, so it doesn't really do me a whole lot of good. But, but that's another way of, of shifting perspectives by switching languages, which I think is kind of neat. Those are some of the big perspective shifting tools.
50:08 Dan Harris? I love it. And just to say, my French is, is now totally broken as well. Okay, so we've, we've talked about sensory shifters, perspective shifters. Let's talk about attention shifters.
50:17 Speaker 03 Okay, and this will round out, by the way, the shifters that you have inside you, what I would call our internal shifters. These are tools that we, we take with us wherever we go. So attention is the spotlight, the mental spotlight we possess that we use to focus on things. And what's interesting about attention is I think a lot of us learn early on, I certainly did, that you don't want to avoid the hard things in life. You want to approach them, you want to work through them. Avoidance doesn't solve problems. It only makes them worse because the problems just stay there. When you come back to them, they're even worse. This was an idea I was exposed to throughout my childhood. And when I got to graduate school, it was just reinforced.
51:02 Speaker 03 What we have learned is it is not that simple. There can be a time and place for avoiding things that are bothering you. Sometimes we find that it can be quite helpful. And I'll give you a couple of examples. Sometimes, you know, you experience some kind of emotional reaction and you step away from it for a while and you come back to it and you find time has passed and it's taken the sting entirely out of that experience. And it's actually not a big deal, right? It doesn't resurface anymore. Your, what we call your psychological immune system is working to temper your reaction. Time is a pretty powerful tonic for lots of emotional responses, as we talked about before.
51:46 Speaker 03 This is also relevant, by the way, interpersonally. Sometimes, you know, you might have this intuition that you need to approach a problem with someone else when you're really activated. But sometimes letting them cool down and then coming back to the situation can be really, really useful. Another example of how avoidance can be helpful is obscuring cues in your environment that are eliciting reactions that you don't want to have. So an example for me would be like certain tempting foods that I don't want to eat too much of, right?
52:26 Speaker 03 Like keeping leftovers in the house is not a good formula for me and my fitness goals. Like if we have pizza, it goes to guests who've come to visit or it goes in the garbage leftovers. And I know that might sound wasteful, but it's in the best interest of my cardiovascular health. Because my, one of my triggers goes back to childhood is, is cold pizza. I love it, right? Late at night. So that's avoidance. That's getting rid of a trigger, not putting it in your actual environment. The short of this is that there are times and places where approaching a problem to work through it is incredibly valuable.
53:09 Speaker 03 And we also know on the flip side that chronically avoiding things as a rule of thumb, I'm just going to avoid, and maybe I'll even do it by, you know, engaging in risky behaviors or illicit substances. Not good. Being flexible, however, seems to be, according to the science, the rule of the game. We've got this ability to be strategic in how we deploy our attention for a reason. And so one of the things I do in the book is I lay out, what are the circumstances in which avoidance is okay? What are the circumstances in which you want to toggle back and forth between avoidance and approach? Science does provide us with a guide for steering our spotlight in that matter.
53:49 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I've heard meditation teachers talk about this kind of titration between doing the classic meditative move of being mindful, you know, kind of running into the fire, as it were, just opening yourself up to whatever powerful emotion is there. But then noticing when you're overwhelming the system and switching to something else and then going back. And there's, there's a real art to this.
54:14 Speaker 03 There's a real art to this, and it's a difficult art. And it is made even more difficult when we promote these overly simplistic ideas for how to steer this attentional spotlight. So we have a tendency as a species to oversimplify. So, you know, you should never avoid. You should only be in the moment. Life is more complex than that, and I think we all have that understanding, that recognition. But we do like to have simple rules. So I think the art here is embracing the fact that there's a time and place for approach and avoid. But also, let's try to identify a few simple rules we can follow
54:54 Speaker 03 to make it easy to figure out when to engage in those different paths.
55:00 Dan Harris? Yeah.
55:00 Speaker 03 And those rules are, they're simple. They're not that hard.
55:03 Dan Harris? Yeah, I understand why people like simple rules. And what you're saying is actually quite empowering. It does put some responsibility on us to run some experiments. But it's empowering in that we know that there's more than just one move to make.
55:18 Speaker 03 I think that empowering is a great word. Liberating is a way that I think about it. They're just these no one size fits all solutions. We just published this paper. We had two different studies where we tracked folks over the course of COVID. And we looked at them over time. What are the tools you use on a daily basis to manage your COVID anxiety? And what we wanted to see is what are the tools that are promoting positive shifts over time in your anxiety level, which is a pretty conservative test, right? So if I do these two things on Monday, does my anxiety level drop from Monday to Tuesday? And you can look for that. Is there a systematic pattern that carries forth over time?
56:00 Speaker 03 What we found in that study was there was remarkable variability in the profile of tools that worked for different people. So the three or four things you did, and by the way, most people used several tools, not just one, it was like between three and four, but the three or four things you did were entirely different from the four or five that I did. And there was even variability within people over time. So I think the real challenge here and what I try to do in this book, you know, and in any kind of application work I do is I want to give people the tools that are out there and let them familiarize themselves with these tools.
56:44 Speaker 03 And then I think the challenge that everyone faces, I face it, you do, we all do, is we need to start self experimenting to find what are the particular tools that work best for me in the unique moments that I encounter. That, I think, is the process of becoming a sophisticated shifter.
57:05 Dan Harris? Coming up, Ethan talks about the role of your surroundings, your relationships, and the culture in terms of shifting your emotions.
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57:57 Dan Harris? Well, let's keep going down the menu of shifting options. Okay, so we talked about the three inner options for shifting: sensory shifting, attention shifting, perspective shifting. Let's move into the sort of more external options, the first of which is space shifters.
58:17 Speaker 03 So I will say, this was another one for me that, on the one hand, seems so intuitive, but prior to really getting involved in this work, I did not avail myself of enough, and it has made a big difference. And so, we're constantly in spaces wherever we go. And what we have learned is that those spaces can powerfully impact our emotional lives. And so, the prospect here is to be really deliberate about both how we design the spaces that we are in, how we surround ourselves by things that push our emotions in the directions we want to be, but also to be deliberate about the spaces we choose to visit, particularly when we are struggling. So, I don't actually know this about you, Dan,
59:01 Speaker 03 but where did you, where did you grow up?
59:04 Dan Harris? Outside of Boston, in Newton, Massachusetts.
59:06 Speaker 03 Okay, familiar with Newton. When you go back there, or anywhere else from your childhood, is there a kind of special place that really resonates with you emotionally? That when you go back, you experience a sense of nostalgia? Any place like that from your childhood, Newton or otherwise?
59:23 Dan Harris? Newton doesn't have much power over me emotionally. It makes me maybe a little sad, not because I had an unhappy childhood, but there's not much left there for me now. But we moved to the suburbs in the pandemic, and anytime I go back to the city, I do get a real nostalgia there.
59:39 Speaker 03 Okay, that'll do. And that does it for me, too. I'm from New York, and I went to grad school there. And we were just back there a couple of weeks ago. I just felt at home walking down the streets of of New York. Turns out, people form attachments to particular places. And in the same way that we can form positive or negative attachments to other people in our lives. And when they're positive attachments, they can provide us with a sense of safety and security that is restorative and pushes our emotions often in the desired direction. The same is true about spaces. So there are spaces that most people can think of that have this kind of positive restorative quality. So I'm based in Ann Arbor now.
1:00:24 Speaker 03 The Arboretum is one of those spaces for me. The coffee shop that I wrote my first book is another one. And I have a few more. And in some ways, these are little oases that exist that simply being in the presence of those spaces impacts my emotional temperature. I'm always struck when I think back to my kids growing up. Whenever they were upset about something, they would say, I just want to go home. I just want to go to my room. Their rooms, to I guess my wife's credit, not me. Were these wonderful, warm, secure spaces that they have that provided them with a sense of of regulation.
1:01:07 Speaker 03 And so just being open to that, like thinking deliberately, what are the spaces around you that have these restorative qualities? That's one way that you can manipulate your spaces to impact your emotional life. The other thing you can do is be deliberate about how you modify your spaces. So you can remove triggers from your environment that might steer you in an unwanted emotional direction. These are simple things you could do. But when I am attending a presentation or at a dinner, I don't just turn my phone over. I remove it completely from my visual field. I will put it in my bag, right? Because the mere sight of the phone is eliciting this approach response,
1:01:52 Speaker 03 this emotionally driven approach response that I don't want to be driven in that context. If you were to look to the right of me right now, I've got this massive bank of photos of my family and my friends. I didn't always have those there. We did research, which what we did in the study was we had people think of these really negative memories and we exposed them to images of people they cared about before, on some trials, thinking about the memories and after, thinking about them on other trials. And what we found was if you activate a really aversive response, a negative memory,
1:02:32 Speaker 03 and then you show a picture of someone you love, that that hastens the pace at which people recover from thinking about those experiences. How does that work? You're activating thoughts of people who care about you and that has positive implications for you. So I've put photos around me. I have plants around me because I know that has restorative qualities too. So there are ways of being super strategic about where we go and how we design our spaces that if you think about how to make those decisions with your emotional goals in mind, can also make a difference. And, and these are, these are working then in the background. Like you don't have to exert much effort. They're just impacting you passively.
1:03:15 Dan Harris? It reminds me a little bit of the work of Ivy Ross and Susan Meggs-Hammon, who wrote a book called Your Brain on Art, which is bigger than just art. And I'll drop a link in the show notes to my conversation with them. It was really about aesthetic experiences. And if I'm hearing you correctly, there are at least two options here. There's if you're in a tough mood, you can go take a walk outside or go visit a place that for you feels like an oasis. And you can get very intentional about designing the spaces that you're in regularly to be an oasis.
1:03:44 Speaker 03 That's exactly right. You've got exactly right. And I'm looking right behind you right now. I see a picture of your son right there.
1:03:49 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:03:49 Speaker 03 Like you're, you're doing it. Be deliberate about this. I think science is, we've made great strides over the past couple of decades in this area, but one thing we have not done well enough is actually merge the arts, music, architecture, with a study of our emotional lives to understand how those pieces fit together. I think there's a real opportunity there and the science I'm conveying to you here is at the very forefront of some of that.
1:04:19 Dan Harris? So interesting. Okay, so the next category is relationship shifters.
1:04:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, this, this, I mean, our relationships don't have much impact on our emotional lives. I think most people would agree.
1:04:33 Speaker 03 So, you know, relationships are powerful shifters of our emotion. I'll give you a couple of examples of how they can impact us. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but just, just a few of the biggies. Number one, who do you talk to about the experiences you're struggling with? Is a really important question to think about. So I will often ask people to do a kind of emotional advisor audit. When I'm doing workshops on this topic, and I think it's one of the most informative exercises I have people do. So, you know, just, just if you're listening right now, when you experience emotions that you're struggling with, write down the names of the people you go to, to talk about those experiences.
1:05:16 Speaker 03 Cause when we experience emotions, not always, but we often want to get them out. We're never though taught explicitly, if we're the support providers, how do you actually talk to someone else about their emotions? If you haven't gone to get a degree in, in social work or clinical psychology, I mean, like, do you actually know? Many people think that the way to be a good provider to someone else is to listen. Show you care, not affectionately. Let them vent their emotions and express them. Lots of research on this and what we have learned is venting your emotions to someone else can be really useful for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people.
1:05:58 Speaker 03 It's good to know that someone is willing to take the time to listen to me and show they care. But if all you do is vent about a problem, that leads to what we call co-rumination. You're just kind of bathing in the negative zone. You leave that conversation, you feel tight about your relationship with the person who listened. But the problem is still, it's not just still there, it's sometimes even more active. Cause all you've done is rehearse the negative feature. So the scientific blueprint for a productive conversation is you talk to someone who initially takes the time to listen, empathize, validate, all really good things.
1:06:39 Dan Harris? But at a certain point in the conversation, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. They become your perspective shifter. They are in an ideal position to do that often because the problem isn't happening to them. Now, there is of course, an art to doing this well. Depending on the person and what they're struggling with, sometimes people need to spend more time just sharing their emotions before they're they're ready to have their perspective be broadened. So it's something you want to you want to feel out. But being really deliberate, thinking to yourself, who are the people in my life that do both of those things for me? That is a really important skill to possess. It's an opportunity.
1:07:22 Dan Harris? So I have a wonderful board of emotional advisors and they are one of my go to tools. These are not clinically trained individuals. They're people who know how to do this and they are often a lifeline when it comes to what feels like the big stuff in life. So I'll give you an example from this morning, and I think part of this will land exactly in what you're talking about. And part of it, I think, is maybe a little bit of a leap, but we'll see what your response is to it. I woke up in a foul mood, just some work shit that's happening. That's kind of jabbing at some of my vulnerabilities. And I was really kind of in my head about it all morning because I was by myself and I worked out, which helped a little bit. But then I was in the car, which I never like.
1:08:05 Dan Harris? And I showed up at the aforementioned school performance that I was talking about before. And I sat next to my wife and we had a second and I unloaded it on her. And just the act of doing that was really helpful. I would say she only did the first part where she listened empathetically and said, that sucks. We didn't have time to get to the perspective shifting. I think that will happen, but I still felt the benefit. And then, and this is the part that may be a leap. We were sitting next to a couple that we're friends with, shout out to Laura and Ingo. And Laura is just a, they're both amazing, but Laura is particularly sort of effervescent and delightful human. She just started talking about.
1:08:45 Dan Harris? It doesn't matter what she was talking about, but she was very interesting and light and funny, and she's funny, and that conversation completely took my mind off what was pissing me off, and also kind of just reminded me that there were some positive things in the universe that were unrelated to this bugaboo.
1:09:04 Speaker 03 That is so directly relevant because what I described before is a way in which you can connect with a person, let them get it out. One thing you could do once you do that is broaden their perspective. But other people, they have the capacity to activate those shifters inside us that we talked about earlier. So what your effervescent friend did there is she steered your attention. She steered to something else, which you, in that moment, would have probably had a lot of difficulty doing on your own, because the work problem was so sticky. But other people are really skilled at doing that. You can also do it with sensation. So I do this with my kids. I will often put on specific kinds of music when they are in foul moods
1:09:47 Speaker 03 to break them out of that funk, right? Like, that's me using sensation to impact someone else. When I teach about sensory shifters in my classes, one of my favorite classes to teach, I'll start off by putting a sad song on. And I'll have people, I'll have the students like rate their emotions throughout the class. So I'll get a bassline reading, then I'll play a sad song. I'll see their emotions, their negative emotions go down. Then I'll wait a little while. I'll actually like bring in pizza and have them surprise eat pizza. So it's a sensory, you know, it's a taste. Emotions go way up. There's no combating pizza. Then, you know, as I lecture, that has the function of having their negative emotions increase a little bit more.
1:10:31 Dan Harris? Plus the carbs, making them sleepy.
1:10:32 Speaker 03 There you go. But then I, then I pull out the secret weapon, which is the Michigan fight song. So I'm teaching Michigan undergrads. And what, what happens next, and this is reliable. I mean, you, you literally see the smiles and the most straight-faced kids, they start shaking sometimes from the energy, the emotional energy, and their ratings show. So that's me as in someone else.
1:11:00 Speaker 03 Using my knowledge of these internal shifters to shift you. So that's what Miss or Mrs. Effervescence did for you in that case. Bravo to her.
1:11:09 Dan Harris? Yes. Okay, final category here is culture shifters.
1:11:14 Speaker 03 So this is another one of those categories I think doesn't get enough attention. And I think that's a big problem because culture is the, it's the air we breathe. It is all around us and it impacts us in pretty profound ways. So what do I mean by culture? You can break down culture into a couple of sets of concepts. Culture is about what do we value? What are our beliefs and values about emotions as an example? Do we think they're good or bad? Do we think we should only have positive emotions and not experience negative emotions? We talked about how that could be misguided earlier today. Our culture gives us those beliefs and values. Culture happens, by the way, in the home.
1:11:59 Speaker 03 Your home is a kind of microculture. It's not just where you live in the world. Culture also gives us norms, these rules that govern how we behave. So, you know, are you polite and respectful when people say things that you don't agree with? Or are you more combative? Culture also gives us practices. So, you know, a lot of the culture that you spend a lot of time talking about and studying, certain eastern philosophical cultures, like a wonderful regulatory practice that it provides is meditation and mindfulness and various other kinds of companion practices.
1:12:42 Speaker 03 If you think of religion as a type of culture, you know, Catholicism, Judaism, you name the religion, they're all prayer, right? Prayer is a practice that has been linked with emotion regulatory benefits. It's kind of ritual. Confession is another kind of emotion regulatory practice. So I think it's really important to think about what are the cultures that you are a part of? And are they serving your emotion regulatory goals or not? That's one really important question. And number two is if you are in a, in a position to influence the culture that you are a part of at work or at home, can you tweak it?
1:13:26 Speaker 03 Can you emphasize certain kinds of beliefs and values, certain norms, certain practices, to push the people who are a part of that culture into the emotional direction that you want them to go in? That's a real opportunity that leaders possess, and I don't know that it's always top of mind.
1:13:47 Dan Harris? So this seems very linked to relationship shifters, but it's about a kind of more group-oriented systematization version of relationship shifters. Am I thinking about this roughly in the right way?
1:14:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, I use the example of like Russian nesting dolls in the book. How these like, you know, you start off with a small doll and then there's a bigger one and a bigger one. And I put culture as the final layer. It is the final layer that has implications for the ones that fall within it. So the beliefs and values that your culture conveys are going to impact how you relate to other people in that culture, right? And how you relate to other people in a particular culture is going to have implications for your emotional lives. Give a, I'll give you an example that strikes close to home.
1:14:40 Speaker 03 So there was this, this wonderful anthropologist who went to study up in like the Canadian tundra and she lived with a group of, you know, natives to that part of the world. And these were people who lived in incredibly close quarters at all times, right? It was freezing, they didn't have a lot of resources. And one of their cultural beliefs that they developed was you didn't express disdain or frustration because it's so important to maintain the bonds between people. Even if you got upset, you didn't lash out at anyone else. Their culture transmitted that value.
1:15:21 Speaker 03 Which then permeated to the way the group operated. If you juxtapose that culture against the one that I grew up with in Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s, it couldn't have been more different. When someone transgressed against me and I came home crying and told my parents that, you know, someone punched me in the face, their first response was, you go punch him back tomorrow. That was the culture. You stand up for yourself. So the beliefs and values that we emphasize, that we give to the people who are part of our communities, they're shaping our emotional worlds. Some cultures don't value emotional expression. Others do.
1:16:04 Speaker 03 That's going to impact whether you choose to suppress or express your feelings. So thinking about this, being really deliberate about what are the beliefs and values that you have in your family, in your organization? And what are the practices that you then provide people to support those values? Really, really important if we care about emotion regulation.
1:16:25 Dan Harris? Just to state the obvious, many of us are in organizations where we don't have the agency to affect the culture, at least not from the top down.
1:16:32 Speaker 03 Correct. Which is why I think it's number one important to recognize that we're parts of many different cultures. So you may not be able to consequentially move the, you know, billion dollar organization that you're a part of, that organization's culture. You might be able to make a difference, however, on the specific team you operate within, right? The small cadre of people that you interact with closely, that's something that might be more malleable. And then when you shift to another cultural group that you're a part of, your friend group, your family group, there are often opportunities that exist there as well. And one more important thing to state is that if your culture is toxic in terms of
1:17:17 Speaker 03 how it impacts your emotional life, and you don't have real control over that culture, you can always leave that culture.
1:17:24 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:17:24 Speaker 03 You can leave that group. And that's sometimes an appropriate thing to do.
1:17:29 Dan Harris? Well, this has been a great conversation. You have left us with so many options for just making ourselves feel better moment to moment throughout the day. It's just been a superabundance, a bevy, a cornucopia of practical, easily operationalizable wisdom. So I appreciate it. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the new book, the book before it, anything else you want us to know about, can you just shamelessly plug, please?
1:17:57 Speaker 03 I was gonna say happy to do it. I'm not happy to do it, but I will. So the new book is called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. I go over all these different tools and many more in that book. And then my first book was called Chatter: The Voice in Your Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. And you can find info about those books, about me, about my lab, on my website, www.ethancross with a K, K-R-O-S-S dot com.
1:18:28 Dan Harris? And we'll put links to everything in the show notes. If you don't have a pen, or you're driving or whatever, you can just check the show notes later. And I'll put up a full summary on danharris.com as well. Ethan, always a pleasure. Thanks for the excellent work you're putting out into the world, and thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
1:18:45 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me back. I hope to come again.
1:18:48 Dan Harris? I don't think that will be hard to arrange.
1:18:54 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Ethan. As I said at the top of the show, and as you just heard, he is a font of practical strategies for managing your emotions. So if you want a full summary of everything we discussed, if you sign up at danharris.com as a paid subscriber, you will get a cheat sheet for this and every other episode, which includes key takeaways and also a full transcript. I'll also drop a link in the show notes to his previous appearance on this show, where we talk about his first book, Chatter. Before I go, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager.
1:19:36 Dan Harris? Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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