Pod Insights Something You Should Know Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions About this episode How many times have you wanted to ask for a raise but didn’t bother because you knew the answer would be no? Well, you probably should’ve asked anyway. This episode begins with some surprising statistics about the power of asking for a raise. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/getting-a-raise_n_6429324
The animal kingdom can teach us a lot about improving human health. For example, elephants almost never get cancer – yet humans do. Why is that? Pigs can teach us how to control pain. Dogs can teach us to manage stress and there are a lot more examples as you are about to hear from my guest Dr. David Agus. He is a medical oncologist, and one of the world's pioneering biomedical researchers. David is the Founding CEO of the Ellison Medical Institute and a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life (https://amzn.to/4ghXL5b)
We’ve all had moments when our emotions got the best of us. Whether we get so angry, or anxious or sad that it gets in the way of daily living, damages relationships or gets us into serious trouble. While some people seem good at keeping their emotions under control, many of us could use some help. And here to share his insight into this is Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. Ethan is an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author of a book called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You (https://amzn.to/3CAxQYU).
“Tech neck” is a real condition that results from always looking down at your phone. Listen as I explain how that little tilt in your neck can mess up your posture and cause real problems. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/effect-of-technology-on-your-neck
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:28 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, what are the chances you'd get a raise just by asking? Higher than you think. Then, amazing medical discoveries we've learned from other animals and AI.
1:42 Speaker 01 What we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. Pretty powerful observation.
1:56 Mike Carruthers? Also, are you suffering from tech neck? It comes from looking down at your phone. And proven ways to manage your emotions when they're starting to get out of hand. Music's a really easy way to shift your emotions in a particular direction. The shifts aren't always long-lasting. But if you need a kick in the butt, so to speak, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention. All this today on Something You Should Know.
2:26 Mike Carruthers? I imagine most of us shop for clothes online at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures. But when they arrived, eh, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.
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3:52 Mike Carruthers? Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show.
4:09 Speaker 02 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.
4:22 Mike Carruthers? You know, when I think about all the times during my career that I wanted to ask for a raise and didn't because I figured the answer was going to be no. Boy, am I sorry I didn't ask. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. We start today with a survey that was conducted by a compensation research company called PayScale. And they found that 75% of workers who asked for a raise in their current field got one. The survey found that 44% of the workers who asked for a raise got the raise they wanted. And 31% got something, even if it wasn't for the total amount they asked for.
5:05 Mike Carruthers? Only one in four workers who asked for a raise got nothing in return. The big lesson here is that you should ask. Only 43% of the 31,000 workers that PayScale surveyed had even asked for a raise in their current field. And the lowest-paid workers are often the least likely to ask for a raise. Generally speaking, the more money you make, the better the chance that you will get the raise. Still, it doesn't hurt to ask. You may be surprised by the answer. And that is something you should know. You are about to be amazed at what science is learning from other animal species that
5:49 Mike Carruthers? can help human health and longevity. Things like why elephants almost never get cancer, but humans get it a lot. Or how pigs cope with pain. There's a whole list of these things that I'm about to discuss with my guest, Dr. David Agus. He is a medical oncologist and one of the world's leading doctors and pioneering biomedical researchers. He's the founding CEO of the Ellison Medical Institute and a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California. He is author of The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life. Hey doctor, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:30 Speaker 01 Thank you so much, excited to be here.
6:32 Mike Carruthers? So I get the fact that it's interesting and curious the way other animals deal with and somehow avoid certain illnesses and conditions. But besides the fact that it's interesting and curious and may be helpful to humans one day, why is this important for us to be talking about?
6:52 Speaker 01 You know, very simply is that our goal today, every single person on this planet wants to live better, longer, healthier. The way we could take shortcuts is learning from other species. We've all been on the earth a million years, us and the other species. There are things they've adapted to and ways they've done it to hack their own system that we can learn from and benefit to ours.
7:15 Mike Carruthers? And a really clear example that illustrates what you're talking about would be what?
7:22 Speaker 01 So I'm walking with my family on a safari in Africa, coolest trip ever. And an elephant walks by and I say to the guide, "Hey, they must get lots of cancer. They're 40 to 50 times bigger than us, 40 to 50 times more cells. They're in the sun all day." And he looks at me and say, "Elephants don't get cancer." And when you look, elephants have 20 copies of a gene called P53, the guardian of the genome. We have one copy. And what that gene does is it corrects error in DNA from inflammation. So here's a remarkable clue for us. First of all, we can recapitulate that, we can prevent all cancer. But in the short run, we have to take ways to down-regulate inflammation.
8:03 Mike Carruthers? Elephants never get cancer?
8:05 Speaker 01 Elephants rarely get cancer. So you would think that with so many cells and so many divisions, they have much more cancer than us, and they don't. And it's really interesting. Part of the reason is, is that, you know, we have children until our 20s and 30s. And then actually, evolution said, "I don't care about you because I care about who has good kids. In fact, if you die of cancer, heart disease, et cetera, it brings more food and housing to the next generation." Well, elephant females give birth until their sixth decade. Dominant males protect the herd until the day they die. And so they couldn't afford to get cancer. And we can, right? Cancer rarely happens in kids, but it happens as we enter our later years. And here's a way that we could potentially prevent it.
8:51 Mike Carruthers? But how do you take the, what you just said about elephants and put it in people?
8:57 Speaker 01 Well, first is you do all the research about P523 and that's ongoing. But today, we say, hey, listen, what it's doing is correcting errors in DNA that came about from inflammation. So how can we down-regulate inflammation in our lives today? Well, there's a simple way. The class of drugs called statins, that's the Lipitor, the Crestor's of the world. While they do lower cholesterol, the real mechanism is down-modulating inflammation. And if you look at the studies, it actually reduces cancer. And then you look for sources of inflammation in your life and you want to avoid them. And so it's, it sounds simple. It's actually more complex, but it's doable today. You know, take another crazy examples. Do you have a dog?
9:39 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, I do.
9:40 Speaker 01 Your dog sleeps all day. And the reason is your dog doesn't get deep sleep. If it got deep sleep, you could walk right by it and do something to the herd or whatever they were bred to protect. Your first night in a hotel, you sleep like a dog because you don't recognize the surroundings. And you go, oh my gosh. Your body says, hey, I don't want to have deep sleep because I don't recognize the surroundings and it's dangerous, something could happen to me. So when I travel, I bring my pillowcase from home. So I have my sensory, my smell and my feel from home. I use my iPhone as my clock from home. So I have a visual cue also, and I get more deep sleep. So I've kind of learned from the dog, how to do the opposite in a sense when I travel because I don't want to sleep like a dog when I go to a hotel.
10:25 Mike Carruthers? Well, going back to the elephant, if what you said is true, then why doesn't everybody take a statin like Lipitor every day?
10:33 Speaker 01 Well, there was an amazing study in Europe, in the UK, where they actually took a town and they took everybody, they divided them in half, they did no blood draws, and they put them on a baby aspirin and a statin, two ways to down-regulate inflammation. And what they showed is the people on placebo who got a pill that didn't know what it was, lived shorter than the people on the statin and the aspirin who lived much longer. So all of a sudden, there's real data there. You know, we're in health. If I tell you to go on a pill where you're not going to feel differently, and it's going to help you in 10 or 20 years, you roll your eyes at me. We don't have a near-term readout. And so it's been very difficult to get compliance and to get people to do them. You know, there's a new generation of statin equivalents,
11:17 Speaker 01 drugs that lower inflammation of cholesterol that came out, that literally are a shot once a year. It's a technology called Sirna. They're FDA-approved, and they could down-regulate the pathways to lower cholesterol a year at a time. Obviously dramatically helps with the compliance. But that's been part of the problem.
11:38 Mike Carruthers? But, but does aspirin work? The daily low-dose aspirin?
11:42 Speaker 01 Well, listen, aspirin's 2,000 years old. In three large randomized studies with over 100,000 people, what it did was reduce the overall death rate, not the incidence, the death rate of cancer by 30%, heart disease by 22%, and stroke by 17%. And obviously, there was a benefit there. There's been newer data out showing that if you take aspirin for four years, starting at a later age, that there was no benefit and increased bleeds. And there's no question there's increased bleeds, but you need to take it for six years to see the benefit on cancer. And people who don't start aspirin till really late, there's normally a reason for that. And so if you look at the ground data, it's very powerful. Not everybody should be on it, but it's discussion to have with your doctor.
12:27 Speaker 01 Hey, listen, if you have a family history of pancreatic cancer or colon cancer, you get about a 50% reduction in those cancers by taking a baby aspirin every day.
12:36 Mike Carruthers? But you got to take it earlier in life. You can't wait till you're 80.
12:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, you got to start earlier. And that's where the real benefit is. And the risk of bleeding is much slower. Listen, an 89-year-old, they fall a lot. So risk of bleeding is high. A 40, 50, 60-year-old don't, and it's different. That being said, if aspirin is 2,000 years old, why don't we have a Gen 2.0 of aspirin that has the anti-inflammatory parts, but doesn't have the bleeding parts? You know, unfortunately, there's no patent on aspirin, so there's been no pharma working on this. I wish they would.
13:10 Mike Carruthers? You mentioned dogs, and I never knew that about sleeping. But I imagine there are other things we learn from dogs. And since people have them in their home, I'd love to hear that.
13:20 Speaker 01 You know, there's a hormone called oxytocin. It's the love hormone. When you look in your dog's eye, your oxytocin goes up and so does theirs. And when oxytocin goes up, your blood pressure goes down. You feel more relaxed. You get a sense of calm. Anxiety goes away. And so we all need these bursts of oxytocin in our life and dogs can provide it. And then there are the little things they do to our schedule, right? Dogs like to eat the same time every day, which by the way, is what we as humans were made to do and is much healthier for us. So you get up in the morning, you walk the dog. Walking is good. The regular times a day, hopefully that tends to your own meal time. And you have companionship.
14:01 Speaker 01 What you look at in every study of health outcomes, longevity, is people with companionship do better. Dogs with their oxytocin bursts are an amazing form of companionship.
14:14 Mike Carruthers? So let's pick an animal that people don't have much connection with, like a rhinoceros or something like that. What can we learn from him or her?
14:24 Speaker 01 Oh, first of all, that was a big assumption. Some people have connections to rhinoceri or rhinoceruses. I'm not even sure which one it is. But you know, the rhinoceruses were unfortunately captured much for their horns because there was this notion that it can affect sexual potency and other things, even though that's not true. And so they were endangered. So several zoos tried to breed rhinocerous in captivity and it didn't work. And everyone was getting very nervous that this species, which literally looks and acts like a dinosaur, would be extinct. Then they noticed that, you know, rhinocerous are big. They eat a lot of food, so zoos don't have a lot of resources. They were feeding them basically soy protein.
15:08 Speaker 01 And soy has estrogenic components. It acts like the hormone estrogen is what we call a phytoestrogen, a plant source of estrogen. So when they changed the source of protein to a different source of protein that didn't have the estrogenic parts, all of a sudden, they were able to breed rhinos in captivity. And what we clearly see is that, you know, eating natural food is tremendously important, but too much of anything can have unintended consequences. And in this case, phytoestrogens, if you feed a child soy milk, they will develop breast buds. The breasts will be slightly enlarged compared to a child who's not because of the estrogenic components. So it really begs
15:49 Speaker 01 to look at what we eat. And we were made to eat a very diet. We're made to eat real foods, so not processed food. And we're made to eat, you know, either two or three meals a day, you choose, with nothing at all in between.
16:02 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about what animals, other creatures can teach us about the science and medicine of human health and longevity. And my guest is Dr. David Agus. He's author of the book, The Book of Animal Secrets, Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life.
16:19 Mike Carruthers? Well, here's something you should know about your bones. We all hear about calcium and vitamin D, and they're important. But there's another ingredient in healthy bones that hardly anybody talks about, collagen. Think of your bones like a building, right? Collagen provides the framework, while minerals like calcium help give it strength. Here's the problem, though. As we get older, our bodies naturally produce less collagen. That's why I was interested in Native Path Bone Health Collagen. It's not just ordinary collagen. It contains a specialized form called Fortabone. And there's some interesting research behind
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19:38 Mike Carruthers? So doctor, people talk a lot about dolphins, that they're very smart, that they have human-like qualities. What medically, what can we learn from dolphins?
19:49 Speaker 01 Dolphins are pretty interesting because they're the only creature that we know of that has what is an equivalent to human Alzheimer's disease. And what we see in the dolphins is it correlates to insulin signaling. And we know that's also true in adults and humans, is that when insulin signaling is off, type 2 diabetes happens, it's very hard to modulate sugar. And when your sugar goes up in your blood, you have to maintain what we call the same osmolality. So fluid goes in to dilute out the sugar, and your blood vessels get stressed, and it affects your brain and other parts of your body. Dolphins can actually modulate their insulin signaling, and they do so through connectivity
20:31 Speaker 01 with others, and they do through as part of their daily life. They do it with exercise, they do it with social connections, and we certainly have to learn with that, right? You see, when people have very few social connections, they actually tend to be higher body mass index, they tend to eat more, they don't have the controls that they do when they're with other people. They actually normally exercise less and do less. And obviously, these are generalizations, but it's something we concern. Get a load of this. Totally an aside with Alzheimer's, what we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. So we knew Alzheimer's was plaques
21:15 Speaker 01 in the brain. Now we're learning that it's an infection of a neuron, in this case caused by the virus shingles, the chickenpox virus, that can lead to the plaques. Pretty powerful observation.
21:27 Mike Carruthers? Well, that's a rather amazing statistic. And what I find even more amazing is that I've never heard of this before, that the shingles vaccine has that much effect on Alzheimer's disease. Like, why isn't this being screamed from the mountaintops?
21:45 Speaker 01 So the way these studies are done is, you know, your electronic health records are, you know, bags of words. And with AI now and these large language models, we can convert that to structured data and do analysis. So in three separate studies, this was observed. So nobody could ever do a randomized trial over 30 years and say, you get Shingal's vaccine, I'll give you placebo, see what happens. We had to pull data and say, who got the Shingal's vaccine? Who didn't? Let's make sure they're equal in terms of their weight, where they live, how old they are, et cetera, and see the observations. And it certainly was a very important observation. It didn't necessarily prove causality, but it was a hell of an association from something that's already on the market, already recommended for everybody over the age of 50.
22:30 Speaker 01 And it's certainly something that I acted on, and I hope others do also.
22:33 Mike Carruthers? So you pick, you pick an animal that, that maybe I wouldn't think of, or people wouldn't think of, or one that really kind of floored you when you, when you did the research on this that would surprise me?
22:44 Speaker 01 All right, so the pig. You know, the pig is something, obviously, we make fun of all the time. You live in a pigpen, et cetera. So they studied the pig, and what was really interesting is they studied their pain response. And so when pigs had pain, they would squeal and they would run, run away from it. But what they showed is when a pig had altruism, when it was able to share its food with others, the pain threshold went up dramatically. And it was, it was a staggering observation that altruism, sharing things, being kind to others, actually changed our pain threshold and how we responded to pain. Pretty wild, if you think about it. And then get a load of this.
23:27 Speaker 01 You know, the queen ant, which is, you know, the same genetics, she gives birth to all the worker ants. Well, she lives 42 years. The worker ant lives six months. Same genetics, dramatically different lifestyle. That queen ant doesn't go out into the wild, doesn't get exposed to bacteria, viruses, doesn't do manual labor to get inflammation, harm things, and she lives much longer. The ants, if you get sick and you're an ant, you stay outside the colony for three days. And if you get better, you go back. If you don't, you die outside the colony and you don't spread that virus or that bacteria to others. Well, look what happened during the pandemic, right? Your behavior, if you had a virus, if you had COVID-19 and you came home and hugged
24:12 Speaker 01 your kids, you could spread it to them. If you stayed away from them, you didn't. So the notion that the behavior of one affects all is really something that we should have and could have observed in the ants and learned from very strongly.
24:26 Mike Carruthers? Well, one of the things that's different between most species and humans is our mental capacity. We have the ability to contemplate our own death. We worry about the future. We lament about the past. How does that play into this?
24:43 Speaker 01 You know, what was amazing to me of sitting there in Africa on safari, which, you know, was a privilege to be there, is that every creature is looking over its shoulder and worried, right? That lion is worried that somebody will eat its cub. The elephant, you know, is worried that its baby will be, you know, taken by somebody else. That antelope is worried about the lion. They're all worried about something. You know, we as humans have basically built ourselves a zoo, right? We live in our house, we have our security system. We've tried to take away that worry, that stress from our life by living in a zoo. And it's a really amazing observation. Never used to be like that, but we've evolved as humans to create our own zoo in a sense.
25:26 Mike Carruthers? And that's a good thing?
25:27 Speaker 01 It's hard to tell, right? I mean, when you look at one of the correlates to living long with your brain intact, so slowing cognitive decline, it's getting uncomfortable. Every year you delay retirement, you reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by 3%. And over several decades, that's an enormous percentage reduction. You don't use it, you lose it. So you need to be uncomfortable, but you need to control it, right? We worry about things. If your dog, you know, something happened to it, it doesn't worry. Animals don't necessarily carry that worry forward and stress them. They worry in the moment, but they don't carry it forward like we do. We don't have the ability of disconnecting like they do. And so our worry can cause stress. You're worried all the time. Basically, you lose that stress response.
26:11 Speaker 01 You know, Michael Jordan played well in practice. In the game, he was amazing and very different because he had an adrenaline response that he can respond to. That lion has a basal level of fear, but when something happens, it goes up and they perform. Like you hear about the people lifting the car off the baby when their adrenaline went. Well, if you're always stressed at a very high level, you don't have that adrenaline push. Many of the new devices, the Apple Watch, the Oura Rings and others, measure something like heart rate variability, which is actually a surrogate for that. You can measure, do you have that adrenaline response or not? Very important for athletes or anybody who wants to perform.
26:46 Mike Carruthers? What about the animals that are somewhat similar to us? Chimps, gorillas, what do we learn from them?
26:53 Speaker 01 So, you know, talking to, you know, somebody experts in those, they talked to me about child rearing. There are three types of gorillas, right? There's one who says to their kid, hey, do whatever you want, fall out of the tree, get beaten up, I'm just gonna go about my daily life. Those kids have a relatively short life expectancy. Then there are the parents who don't let the kids, you know, get into any fights. When they start to climb the tree, they pull them down. Those kids are always followers and never leaders. Then there's the kids who the mother looks at them, you know, with the corner of their eye, and once they get to a certain level in the tree, they bring them down. They let them start to get in the fight, but when it gets too aggressive, then they intervene.
27:35 Speaker 01 Those are the kids who know how to deal with conflict, know how to take some risk and become the leaders. So what's amazing is, is that Jane Goodall can look at a pack and identify who will be the next leader by their parenting behaviors.
27:51 Mike Carruthers? Well, doesn't it seem overall, though, that one of the reasons that we're having so many of the health problems that we have is we're living a lot longer than we did 300, 400, 500 years ago, and the longer you live, the more things can go wrong?
28:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, but if you look at the mummies in the Egyptian time, most of them died of cancer, or they died of heart disease. And so they're dying of the same things, and they died at a much earlier timeframe. We're living longer. We're still dying of heart disease and cancer. But you're right, we portend for longer. But the key is, right? I really think we can stop most disease at an early age. So all of us can go till our 9th or 10th decade and die of something. Until the 1950s, you could die of, but it was made illegal after that, something called old age. Ever since the mid 1950s, a death certificate needs a cause of death, and old age isn't a cause of death anymore. I want
28:45 Speaker 01 to go back to dying of old age, right? You don't want to die at age 50 of pancreatic cancer. You don't want to have a heart attack at age 53. What you want to do is live till there's general engineering failure, until your quality of life at that point starts to go down, which is normally the end of the 9th or 10th decade, and live quality until you get there. And I believe you can, if you do the preventive strategies, many of which we can learn from the animal kingdom.
29:10 Mike Carruthers? Well, I can't imagine anyone listening for the last 20 minutes who hasn't heard something rather remarkable that they never knew before about the medicine and science of human health. I appreciate you sharing that. My guest has been Dr. David Agas. He is a medical oncologist. And the name of his book, well, he's written several books, but the one that we've been talking about today is The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Doctor, thank you. Appreciate you being on today.
29:44 Speaker 01 Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.
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31:14 Speaker 03 Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.
31:47 Mike Carruthers? How many times have you heard the phrase "manage your emotions"? And we've all seen people who are amazingly good at managing their emotions in difficult situations. And we've all seen people completely lose it. Like the guy who screams at the store clerk or gets in a road rage incident. Those would be examples of not managing your emotions very well. But certainly, the ability, the skill to manage your emotions better is one we could probably all sharpen up a bit. Here to help is Ethan Kross. He is one of the world's leading experts on emotion regulation. He's an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan.
32:29 Mike Carruthers? His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He's author of a book called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. Hi Ethan, welcome to Something You Should Know.
32:45 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me. It's a delight to be here.
32:48 Mike Carruthers? You know, maybe it's partly because everybody's got their phone camera going and there's cameras everywhere that we see more incidents of people not handling their emotions very well. And I don't know if the problem is getting worse or not, or what is your sense? Where are we with the world's population managing their emotions?
33:12 Speaker 04 I think we all have something to learn about this topic. I think it's one of the big problems we face as a species. It's something that we struggle with. When I'm talking about not managing our emotions effectively, I'm talking about our emotions getting triggered either too intensely or for too long. And how do you know what that means? We have goals for how we want to live our lives. And if our goal is to not feel a particular way, and we find that our emotional experiences are lasting outside of that bandwidth, so to speak, too intense or too long, or maybe even too short or too little, those are typically cues that we want to manage or shift those emotions.
33:57 Mike Carruthers? So can you give me an example of that?
34:01 Speaker 04 Sure, I have a very important presentation coming up. I feel a little bit of anxiety about it, which is adaptive because the anxiety that I feel is motivating me to focus on the task at hand, to prepare for it, to make sure I do a good job. But, over time, as the minutes go on and the hours, the anxiety begins to metastasize. It gets bigger. I start going into worst-case scenarios and it lasts longer than is actually useful. That would be a context in which I would want to manage that emotional response. Let me give you one other example in the opposite direction. Something really great happens.
34:44 Speaker 04 My kid has a real success in their life and I hear about it, I experience some happiness, but then the happiness quickly fades. And maybe I want to savor that emotional experience because it makes me feel good and I want to feel good more than I'm currently feeling. That would also be a context in which I would want to shift my emotions.
35:06 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, people, I think, don't think much about managing positive emotions. It's the negative ones that seem to get in the way. And your example just then of the anxiety of having to give a presentation is a pretty common one, whether it's, you know, in school or at work or whatever. And so what do you do to manage it?
35:27 Speaker 04 Well, I do a few different things and I want to preface, before I tell you what I do, which I happily will, I want to share with you and everyone who's listening, different tools work for different people in different situations. In the same way that we have, likely have different exercise routines for maintaining our fitness and there are multiple routes to becoming physically fit, we're increasingly learning that that is also true for our emotional lives when it comes to being emotionally fit. So with that little bit of a disclaimer out of the way, what I do to manage my anxiety, typically I'll first engage one of my senses. I've got a music playlist that...
36:10 Speaker 04 is very effective for calming me down or sometimes even pumping me up and getting excited. And both of those emotional shifts work against the anxiety. I will often reframe what I'm experiencing. I will remind myself of the fact that I've done hundreds, if not thousands of presentations, and they've all gone well. So I'm broadening my perspective there and I'm getting out of this, what if this happens? What if? And instead, I'm reminding myself, well, the what if virtually never happens. If the anxiety is really intense, I will often call up one of my emotional advisors. These are people who are really skilled at not just hearing me out,
36:55 Speaker 04 listening and learning to what I'm going through and empathizing with me, connecting with me emotionally in a way that communicates to me that they really care about me. But they're also really useful for helping me look at that bigger picture. And that's an invaluable resource I possess. So those are a couple of the things that I would typically do. I might sprinkle in a walk outside in a safe, natural setting at times. And at other times, I might also distract myself for a circumscribed period of time. Immerse myself in something else that has nothing to do with the thing I'm worried about to allow myself to come back to the task at hand with a little bit of freshness.
37:37 Mike Carruthers? Well, isn't that what all of those things you just suggested do? They take you out of your head, overthinking about your presentation, and get you to focus on something else?
37:47 Speaker 04 Not exactly. First of all, they take different routes to doing that, number one. But just to give you some counterexamples there, when I'm listening to music, I'm still, I often will listen to music in the background when I'm working on something. So I'm still focusing there on the task at hand, but I have this sensory experience that is shifting my emotions, really outside of my awareness and doing it relatively effortlessly. Distracting myself by focusing on something else entirely, that's a real attentional shift. Now I'm, I'm just not thinking about the issue at hand. And that's giving me some mental space.
38:28 Speaker 04 But when I'm looking at the bigger picture, once again, I still have the experience I'm concerned about in full view. It is in the focus of my attention, but I am reframing, I'm changing the way I think about it. Now, when I go to speak to another person, they are certainly helping me reframe it. So there's overlap there. But the added benefit I get when I talk to someone else is that it's sometimes a lot easier for us to reframe when other people guide us through it than when we try to do it ourselves.
39:02 Mike Carruthers? Since emotions are such a big deal and such a big part of our life and drive a lot of our behavior and thinking, maybe we should describe or have you explain what emotions are?
39:14 Speaker 04 It's a great question. It's something that scientists actively study. I like to think of emotions as tools. So these are tools that we evolved to help us navigate the world. You can think about emotions as like these little software programs that get loaded up in particular situations. And these are programs that activate what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. What I mean by that is when you experience an emotion, your physiology may start to shift. So if we stick with anxiety, you might start to experience a kind of fight or flight response. You have to go to the bathroom, your palms start to sweat.
39:58 Speaker 04 Emotions capture our cognition or how we think as well. So when I experience anxiety, it zooms me in, it focuses me in on the problem at hand. So I'm focusing really intently on it. Emotions also can influence our motor behavior or our facial displays. So Mike, can you often tell when someone is sad, for example, by the look on their face?
40:24 Mike Carruthers? Sure, of course.
40:25 Speaker 04 Right, so, so these are, this is a loosely coordinated set of responses. I say loosely because it's not the case that all three of those things always get triggered every time you experience an emotion, but they tend to hang together. And the whole idea here is that we evolve the capacity to experience these emotions because they help us. So anxiety focuses us in on potential threats, allowing us to prepare for them. Anger is another example. Anger is something we experience when we perceive that our view of how things should work is violated and there is the opportunity to fix the situation. We experience anger. What about sadness? How on earth could sadness be useful?
41:08 Speaker 04 Well, we tend to experience sadness when, when we experience some change in, in our, our, our way of understanding ourself or the world. Something happens that challenges that worldview. And there's nothing you can do, or nothing you think you can do, to actually fix it. So the loss of a loved one, getting fired, right? Now your view of yourself and, and the world is, is, is forever changed. You can't bring that person back. You can't get that new job. So we experience this emotion that motivates us to introspect, to turn inward, to start doing that important thinking work that we need to do to start reframing our lives
41:53 Speaker 04 and our place in this world. This sadness experience also motivates us to slow down physiologically, like just kind of pull back and withdraw. But it also does something quite beautiful, if you ask me, which is it leaves this, it, it gives off this kind of alarm signal to everyone in our network in the form of a sad facial display that communicates to other people that, hey, don't, don't leave me alone for so, for too long because I am social and I need some connection. So check up on me at times. Which is why when you see someone with a sad facial expression, you often want to help them. So that's what emotions are. They're, they're different. People often wonder what's the difference between emotion and a feeling. Um, I like to point out that
42:39 Speaker 04 Feelings are the subjective part of an emotional experience. If you think about what happens when you are physically ill, there are lots of things happening in your body that you have no awareness of. But what you typically are aware of is your fever, right? The feelings of chills and the sweats, that's a component of physical illness that you become aware. Feelings are that subjective component of an emotional response. It's like the temperature you experience when you're physically ill. Is that helpful for emotions?
43:14 Mike Carruthers? Yeah. And you know, what I'd like to do now is get into some of your tools that you talk about to help people manage their emotions.
43:22 Speaker 04 I like to divide the world of tools into six buckets, three of which exist inside you. These are tools that you can use wherever you are, really. These are what I call internal shifters. And then there are some shifters, shifter being shorthand for a tool you use to shift your emotion. There are some external shifters that exist outside of us. What are the three internal shifters? The first one is sensation, our sensory experiences. I think this is a shifter that we all have lots of intimate experiences with, but don't avail ourselves of in the heat of the moment.
44:05 Speaker 04 So when I'm talking about sensory experiences, I'm talking about things like sight, sound, touch, smell. You know, if you walk through an airport, the international duty-free section, you know, I think of that as an emotion regulation store because there's so many perfumes and colognes that are smelled. I think about, why do we put those on? We put those on to manage the way other people feel about us, right? A pleasant sounding, a pleasant scent instantly elicits a type of emotional reaction, so much so that many hotels actually work with scentologists, I'm making up that name, there is a technical name that is alluding me at right now, but they work with folks to create
44:50 Speaker 04 these bespoke smells that they then pipe through the ventilation of the hotels to provide people with this positive emotional experience when they're in their facility. That's one way you could shift your emotion. Another thing you could do is music. If you ask people, as experimenters have, "Hey, why do you listen to music?" Approximately 100% of participants will tell you, "I listen to music because I like the way it makes me feel." But if you then ask people, "Hey, the last time you were angry, anxious, or sad, what did you do to manage your emotions?" Only between 10% and 30% of participants report listening to music. Music's a really easy way to nudge your emotions, to shift your emotions in a particular direction.
45:35 Speaker 04 The shifts aren't always long-lasting, but if you need a kick in the butt, so to speak, to shift out of a particular emotional response, music can be a pretty neat and tidy mechanism of intervention. Another kind of internal shifter is attention. So where are you pointing your attentional spotlight? Are you thinking about the thing that is driving the emotional response? Or are you looking away from it? It's not as simple as on or away. Sometimes the best ways of managing your emotions is to be flexible. And we don't often talk about this. We often talk about avoidance, not thinking about stuff as toxic, when in fact, what we see in lots of research
46:19 Speaker 04 is that people who are flexible actually end up doing pretty good. So if I get into an argument with my partner, rather than trying to fix the situation in the heat of the moment, right after the emotions are triggered, I might take a day or two off from thinking about it and then come back to it later on when temperatures have diminished and it's a lot easier for us to think reasonably about this experience. The third internal shifter is perspective. I think we hear a lot that you should change the way you think to change the way you feel, but it's not always so easy to do that. And the good news here is that we possess tools to...
47:01 Speaker 04 Make it easier for us to reframe our circumstances. Those tools often involve taking a step back and thinking about what we're dealing with from a more distant, objective perspective. You can use language to help you do this. Use your name in the second person pronoun "you" to try to coach yourself through a problem. "All right, Ethan, how are you gonna deal with this?" We usually use the word "you" when we're thinking about and referring to "other people." It's a lot easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to ourselves. So when you use the word "you" to refer to yourself, that automatically shifts your perspective, putting you into this more adaptive advice-giving mode. We can also jump into our mental time travel machines to think about how we're gonna feel
47:45 Speaker 04 about something down the road. We've experienced all sorts of really tough things in our lives, most of which have come but eventually gone, and we lose sight of that in the heat of the moment. So thinking about how you're gonna feel about what you're currently grappling with down the road can also be useful.
48:03 Mike Carruthers? So let me ask you this, though. You had mentioned, you know, take a step back, get perspective. A lot of times, I think people get pulled in by their emotions quickly in kind of a knee-jerk way. Road rage would be a good example of that. Those people don't seem like they're in a really good place to take a step back, get some perspective, because they're so angry.
48:29 Speaker 04 Well, that's a great observation. So step one, you gotta learn about what these different tools are. And once you do, then what you can do is you can start using frameworks, simple frameworks, for enhancing the likelihood that you will use these tools when you most need to use them, and that you'll activate them automatically without thinking. You know, the situation that you just described is not a trivial one. We often get dealt curveballs that we're not prepared for. And in the moment, it can be really hard to figure out what to do because our emotions are striking and are triggered so intensely.
49:13 Speaker 04 It's precisely in those situations that we wanna have plans that prepare us for what to do.
49:19 Mike Carruthers? I want to spend just a few moments on positive emotions and you had used an example of what if you were feeling really good about something and you'd want to maybe keep that going for a while. Because I don't think people think you can do that, that positive emotions aren't really a problem and they come when they come and they feel great and then you move on. But talk a little bit more about that because I find that really interesting.
49:45 Speaker 04 One of the most impactful findings I've come across in psychology is the idea that bad is stronger than good. Losses loom larger than gains. The bad stuff in life just kind of sticks out a whole lot more strongly than the good stuff. Draws our attention and I think it's why we often think about it more when it comes to managing our emotions. Because the bad stuff, part of the reason it's so useful for us is it doesn't feel good. We want to minimize it as much as possible. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the positive side of our lives or that we need to be passive in terms of our positive experiences. You can absolutely cultivate positive experiences. So I gave you a couple of examples before.
50:30 Speaker 04 Well, actually, before I give you more examples, let me further say, you should try to cultivate positive experiences if that's something you want to do. Some people have the goal of being kind of even keeled and just Buddha-like, if you will, and homeostatic. They don't want to get too high or too low. And if that's your goal, great, follow through with that goal. Other people want to experience positive emotions more frequently. And if that's your goal, then the cool thing is you've got tools to help you achieve that goal. So certainly savoring, immersing yourself in positive past experiences or fantasizing about potential
51:14 Speaker 04 future eventualities, that's one thing you could do to amplify positivity. Another thing you could do to make yourself feel better about stuff is to help other people. This is my actual favorite finding right now in psychology. So a lot of research which shows that one of the best ways to make yourself feel better, to make yourself feel good about things, do something good for someone else. I think there's just something really wonderful about that, how it's win-win for everyone involved. And maybe the last one I'll slip in there is... Awe is an emotion, a positive emotion that has a lot of value because when you experience this emotion of awe, it's an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast
51:58 Speaker 04 and seemingly indescribable, like a beautiful mountain view, or sometimes you experience awe when you're in a, you have a social experience, like being, you know, singing in unison at a, at a sporting event, or a lot of people who are religious experience awe when they pray. This is a very positive experience. It helps broaden our perspective. It makes us realize that there's, there's more to the world than just us. That feels good and it can also help you manage your negative emotions as well.
52:32 Mike Carruthers? Well, you've certainly put some intel and some, some strategy behind the idea of managing your emotions, and I really appreciate you sharing that. I've been speaking with Ethan Kross. He's one of the world's leading experts on emotion regulation, and he's author of a book called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Ethan, great, great conversation. Thanks for coming on.
52:58 Speaker 04 All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on.
53:05 Mike Carruthers? There is a condition, it's a real condition called tech neck, and it is the result of tilting your neck to look down at your phone, or your tablet, or your laptop when you text, read, or surf the web. Tilting your neck like that puts an unnecessary strain on your spine, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine. When you stand upright, the average head, your head, places about 10 to 12 pounds of force on the cervical spine. But with just a 15 degree tilt in your neck, that weight increases to 27 pounds, and a 60
53:44 Mike Carruthers? degree tilt turns into 60 pounds. That extra spine stress can lead to early wear and tear on your spine, and might even cause you to have to have surgery down the road. The other thing, and we've talked about this a million times before, is if you carry your phone around everywhere and put it down on all kinds of surfaces, it's getting covered in germs, which then transfers to your hand when you pick it up, and there on your hand is... Who knows what? Which is just a reminder to keep your phone clean and wash your hands regularly. And that is something you should know. If you enjoyed this episode of Something You Should Know, it would be great if you would
54:24 Mike Carruthers? share that opinion with a rating and review on whatever podcast app you listen on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. They pretty much all have a very easy way to leave a rating and review. It only takes a minute and we'd appreciate it. I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
54:43 Speaker 03 Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.
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