Hack Your Emotions

Negative emotions like fear or anger are part of being human. These feelings tell us something - perhaps prompting us to take action or bring about change. However, they're powerful and disruptive - and if they hang around too long or are too intense, they can take a huge toll on our happiness and wellbeing. We need to shift them... but how? Psychologist Ethan Kross knows. He's the author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You https://www.ethankross.com/and founder of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan - and shares his top science-backed tips to rein in feelings like sorrow, disappointment or rage. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Laurie Santos?

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• 1:08Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:17Laurie Santos?

  Negative emotions, feelings like fear, anger, sadness, and overwhelm, are just part of being human. But that doesn't make them any easier to manage. Whether it's the sense of dread we get before a challenging task or the frustration of dealing with unmet expectations, our big feelings can drain our energy, mess up our performance, and make us feel like crap. The good news is that we don't have to be at the mercy of our big feelings. Research shows that with the right strategies, we can not only manage tough emotions effectively, but also use them to our advantage, no matter what life throws our way. So in today's episode of the Happiness Lab's How To Season, we will dive into the science of emotion regulation. And to help us, we have one of my favorite experts on the topic.

• 1:58Laurie Santos?

  Here to teach you how to shift your emotions is my friend, psychologist Ethan Kross.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Great to see you guys. Let me put on some background here.

• 2:05Laurie Santos?

  No, no, you're good.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  What do you think? I'm just gonna blur it here?

• 2:07Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, blur is fine.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:09Laurie Santos?

  Ethan founded the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and his latest book tackles the topic of dealing with big feelings head on. It's called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. We'll get to Ethan's specific tips in a moment, but I wanted to begin with how Ethan got interested in emotion regulation in the first place. Ethan credits a lot of his interest in the topic to his grandmother.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Well, my grandmother had this remarkable story. So she was growing up in Poland around the time of World War II. And when it hit, she basically lost everything. So her family was, for the most part, slaughtered. She ended up living in the forest for quite a while, bouncing around from one ghetto to the next. And she ultimately survived, moved over to the States with nothing. This kind of classic immigrant story. And I remember as a kid, just being totally fascinated about her experience, as I think so many of us are when we're little. We want to just know about where we come from, where the people we love come from. And so I would ask her repeatedly, like, Bubby, what happened back

• 3:13Speaker 03

  then? Like, how did, how did you feel? And how did you survive? And she would not engage with me on those topics. You know, there's this great quote that she once said, which was like, don't ask why, why is a crooked letter? Which is actually a really interesting phrase that makes you think, or it did me, like, what does that mean? Well, what she meant was, you know, asking why is just a source of pain. So just don't go there. And it was interesting that she had mastered that command of, of English language, because if you spoke to her, she spoke terrible English. She had like, you know, very accented and never quite really learned how to speak fluently. But she had mastered that, that little bit.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Of course, I proceeded to not listen to her. And I ended up devoting my career to doing exactly what she told me not to do, which is asking why about our emotional lives? Why do we have the emotions we do? And when we find them getting tweaked in ways that we don't want them to be tweaked, they get activated too intensely or for too long? What can we do to rein them in? And so I do attribute a lot of where I am today to those early experiences with, with my grandmother. Who, for the record, aside from not talking to me about the pain of the war, was an incredibly emotive and warm individual. So just to put that out there, she was capable of experiencing emotion, and she did. Just didn't really like to talk about it too much.

• 4:39Laurie Santos?

  It also seems like she was really not interested in talking about the negative emotions. What are some of the negative emotions you expected she experienced, but you didn't hear her talking about?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Terror, fear, anxiety. You know, I, I, I did discover later on in her life, she did recount her experiences for a, a project at the United States Holocaust Museum, uh, which is where I learned a lot about her story. And, um, I also heard about her stories. Once a year, she would allow herself to go back to what happened. There's like a grassroots organization of survivors from the town and the towns nearby where she grew up. And they'd get together and they'd just talk about what happened. And I remember learning about an experience where several of her immediate family members were killed, but her dad and her had made it.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  And they're in this small ghetto and her dad says, they're coming, they're coming to kill us. Hide, she hid somewhere in the apartment, I can't remember where, and then her dad left. And then he just never came back. So when I think about that, or when I think about her experience, standing on a line, knowing that she would be taken to be killed. And if it wasn't for my grandfather, essentially convincing the police officer to look the other way while she ran away. Like, I think to myself, how would I feel in that situation? And it's terror. It is anxiety, it is dismay, this complex cocktail of negative emotions.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And so the, you know, I, I guess in retrospect, it, it made a lot of sense why she didn't really want to talk to me about that. So these are not pleasant states to be in. But, you know, Lori, the thing is, in my mind, my grandmother was superwoman for not only being able to survive those experiences, but for then arguably by many metrics of success, being able to thrive, moving over here, living the dream, working super hard, eventually buying her own home, restarting her family. And it was really that story that captivated me from a young age.

• 6:47Laurie Santos?

  And in your book, you talk about how we've wanted to figure out ways to regulate our emotions, especially our negative emotions for a long time. And I didn't know the history of some of the kookier ways that people went about this. So share some of these kind of strange, like historic ways that we've tried to regulate our emotions.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  So the best way I can convey my experience reading up on the history of emotions and emotion regulations is to use the phrase blew my mind. It's just remarkable. So we have likely been struggling with our ability to manage our emotions for as long as we have been roaming the planet. Why do I say that? Well, if you look at some of the earliest writings ever discovered, writing on clay tablets, these were writings that talked about the pain of emotion, of being rejected, the pain of a broken heart and how that was managed. The first surgical technique, the first technique that we believed was developed, first surgical technique was drilling holes in people's heads. And there are likely many reasons that it was believed to be used.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  But one of them, according to medical historians, is to help people manage extreme emotions, dysregulated states. And like, you know, if you think back eight to 10,000 years ago, when that first came on the scene, you have this instance of people being consumed with emotion. And what do we got to do? Well, our theory about what may have been driving that was there were some evil spirits in there. So you got to purge yourself of those. And that kind of purging mentality existed for quite some time. Exorcisms, leeches, bloodletting. But then if we fast forward to the 1940s, there's another giant spike on the emotion regulation timeline. A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for what I would describe as an emotion regulation

• 8:33Speaker 03

  intervention. That is right. Someone has won the Nobel Prize for emotion regulation intervention. What was it called? The leukotomy, or in modern terms, the frontal lobotomy. So flip back, the eyelid, poke a few holes in your frontal cortex and turn the volume down on how we are feeling. Nobel Prize. But you know, one other really fun kind of historical fact that I forgot. I could put in there is if you go to the bestselling book of all time by a wide margin. Let's tell everyone, what was, what is the bestselling book of all time?

• 9:07Laurie Santos?

  The Bible? No.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 9:10Laurie Santos?

  I feel like I'm on Jeopardy. I was like, I think it's the Bible, but yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Bible has sold many, many copies. What is one of the most famous stories from the Bible? It is the story of Adam and Eve. This is a story about emotion regulation or the failure to regulate emotions. So we've been struggling with this stuff for a really long time.

• 9:33Laurie Santos?

  And I get it. I mean, there have been times when if I knew it was medically reasonable to drill a hole in my head and I would stop ruminating or being sad or kind of, especially after like breakups and things like that. Like I would have gone for it, you know?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  You know, the, the pain is real. And if you look at the statistics, they're shocking. You know this, Lori, better than, better than most and, and, and folks who are listening to the podcast are no doubt familiar with these statistics too, but the wellness industry by some estimates is a trillion dollar industry. You see increasing amounts of resources being devoted to helping people with mental health, with well being writ large. Culturally, I think we are now at an inflection point where we really recognize the role that our emotions are playing in our lives and understand the need to manage them. So here's the really good news. What fills me with, with hope is that we have learned a lot about how we can manage our emotions

• 10:28Speaker 03

  without having to take these extreme steps of damaging our brains, which to be clear, I think I could speak for you, Lori, of saying we do not endorse that on this podcast.

• 10:39Laurie Santos?

  We're not endorsing brain holes. No.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yes. No brain holes, no, no holes. Like let's just leave the holes out of the equation. Like we've got, we've got a fantastic array of non-invasive tools that we can use if we know what those tools are and how they work. This is not to say we know everything about emotion regulation. We have a lot to learn. That's exciting, but we have learned quite a bit. And what also, to use my favorite phrase, blows my mind is If you ask most people, hey, were you ever taught these tools growing up? By far and away, the majority will say no. If I ask an audience, hey, when is the first time you learned like how to exercise physically? Most people will say, yeah, probably like first or second grade. We have gym class. Yeah, jumping jacks, pushups, you know how to do those.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I like to do it, but we know what to do. Okay, when is the first time you learned how to man, like formally learned how to manage your emotions? Most people will say, never. And that to me is a travesty. And I think it's something that we have the opportunity to address by, you know, that quite frankly, what, what you're doing on this podcast, which is to take science and to share it with folks in ways that can benefit them.

• 11:51Laurie Santos?

  I still find it amazing that we teach physical education and even driver's ed to our young people, but we don't always give them the tools they need to cope with their big feelings. It's time for a short break, but Ethan will soon be back to share the first of his evidence-based how-to tips for regulating big feelings. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

• 12:12Laurie Santos?

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• 12:51Laurie Santos?

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• 13:34Laurie Santos?

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• 14:18Laurie Santos?

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• 15:03Laurie Santos?

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• 15:32Laurie Santos?

  Big emotions often feel pretty out of control. When feelings like fear, overwhelm, and anger kick in, they often feel like they're here to stay. But psychologist Ethan Kross, author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, argues that there are lots of ways to get big feelings under control. And his first tip for doing so is to find the right outside sensory stimulus. A hug from a friend, hearing a kind word, or maybe even sipping a warm drink. Research shows that using our senses can be a great way to break out of big feelings. In fact, Ethan has a particularly good example of his own emotions being altered by a cheesy song. Or, let me rephrase, by a stone-cold rock classic.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  So, Journey, "Don't Stop Believing," I will admit, huge fan. It's one of my go-to feel-good pump-up songs. If we go back in time about five or so years, I was coaching my daughter's soccer team on the weekends. She was around five or six. And I love, love, love coaching kid soccer. Not because I'm particularly good at it. It's also I'm not getting super immersed. It's just a fun contrast to everything else I do. And so I would look forward to these games with her on the weekend, throughout the week. And normally, she was just a ball of excitement and ready to go. But there was this one day that really sticks out in my memory, where she was just really bumming me out. She was super glum.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  It was like I was pulling her to get into the car to go. She did not want to be there. And we start driving, look in the rear-view mirror. Her head's draped over her shoulder, no smile. And then all of a sudden, "Don't Stop Believing" comes on the radio. And I'm instantly getting a little bit more excited. And then I start audibly humming and singing along, and turn the volume up a little bit. And then I look in the backseat, and I notice that she's beginning to jam out also. And she's bopping her head, and she's humming along. Fast-forward about seven minutes, we get to the park. And before I can even park the car, she just opens the door, bolts out of the car, and scores what I remember to be seven.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Seven thousand goals that gave. Not true, but it was really in many ways that experience with my daughter and journey. A light bulb went off. From that point on, when I would look at my dashboard and see the, you know, the, the music console, I no longer just saw an LED dashboard. I now saw an emotion regulation device.

• 18:02Laurie Santos?

  This is such an important idea because I also use music without realizing it to regulate my emotions all the time. But I think this is a spot where I kind of mess up, right? Because unlike you, who had this moment where your daughter is feeling glum and you put on, don't stop believing, which is like the most happy, pump up, get out, dancing and go to your soccer match related song ever. When I'm feeling kind of glum, I don't gravitate towards the journey or I gravitate towards journey, but different journey songs, the kind of sad, you know?

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Chicago, yeah.

• 18:31Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, like it's, it's like the, the, the whiny, you know, love bites kinds of songs, right? And so what am I doing wrong there? Cause I'm using music to kind of move my erosions around, but it seems like it's not shifting.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Well, I wouldn't say you're doing something wrong unless it's counter to your goals. And let me unpack that for a second. So one really important message I hope to convey in this book is that all of our emotions are functional when they're experienced in the right proportions, not too intense or not too long. What do I mean by that? How could anger or sadness or envy ever be useful? Well, if you look at what those emotions are doing, they're often being triggered in particular situations where the way they are motivating you to think, feel and behave can actually be adaptive. So let's take sadness as an example, because you brought up the kind of Chicago Adele genre of songs. We typically experience sadness when we experience some loss that we cannot regain.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  So the loss of a loved one, we don't get a job, we can't ever get it. And in that circumstance, when we feel this emotion, what research shows it motivates us to do it. It slows us down physiologically. It leads us to turn our attention inward, to introspect, to try to make sense of the situation. There is a need for meaning making often when you experience sadness. Well, the world is no longer the way I expected it to be or have experienced it. I gotta like reconfigure how I make sense of this world now. So let me take some time by myself to engage in that reflective process, but. Because going off in the corner by myself may be a little dangerous, right? We don't want to leave people totally alone.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  We have evolved to send warning signs to other folks to let them know that we're experiencing sadness and might need a little help, which is often a sad expression. When you see a sad expression on someone else's face, you mimic that. My kids, by the way, have mastered this. I can be like really appropriately upset for some negative behavior and they do this exaggerated, stick out the lower lip, and it is so powerful. It gets me every time. In any case, I digress. So sadness can be functional, can help us think through some problems. So your intuition to like, listen to Journey, that is a way of you going deeper into that

• 20:50Speaker 03

  potentially sad state to facilitate that introspective meaning-making process. Here's the big but that I want to convey though, and I think it's where you originally were going. If you are feeling sad and you don't want to feel sad, don't listen to sad music. Then what you want to do is you want to resist that urge to listen to the music that is congruent. So we're talking about this emotional congruency effect. And you want to go in the other direction. So this is what I do strategically. If I've got like a high stakes presentation coming up and I have some jitters, right? I'm not going to listen to music that just amplifies that and say, I'm going the Journey route, right? I'm going to other terribly, terribly cheesy bump up music. Living on a Prayer being another great example with a little bit of Metallica,

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Enter the Sandman mixed in, right? Like this is a way in which I'm strategically harnessing my senses to push my emotions on a different trajectory. And the senses should not be underestimated as a tool that could be strategically used to do that. Because we know that the links between sensation and emotional experience, these are very strong links that exist in our brains. And so if you are aware of how your senses could affect you, this opens up the door to all manner of tools that you can recruit to help you out.

• 22:10Laurie Santos?

  And one of the reasons I loved reading your book is that, of course, I've known about the music example, maybe not for shifting in the right direction, but I knew that that was a powerful sensory tool I could use. Your book really reminded me, there are lots of sensory tools you can use, right? I can use touch of like a comfy blanket, right? I could use like just the visuals, like turning the light on more to kind of wake myself up more. There's just so many different kinds of sensory experiences you can use to shift your emotions around. I kind of remembered audition, but I'd kind of forgotten about some of the other ones.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this was my experience too. In fact, one of my graduate students, Michaela Rodriguez, we actually wrote a paper. After I dug into this literature, I'm like, why aren't we talking about our senses more? So we wrote this paper called Sensory Emotion Regulation, in which we looked at each of the major senses, and all of them have this capacity to relatively effortlessly shift our emotions. And I think the effort piece is an important one to put on people's radar. I talk about a ton of different tools in shift for pushing our emotions around. Some of them are quite effortful. They take resources for us to implement these tools, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a time and place for that. But what we know about all of us, human beings, is that in general,

• 23:24Speaker 03

  if we don't have to exert effort, we're not going to do it. We tend to be a lazy species in that regard because we're trying to conserve our resources. Our senses push our emotions around really, really fast. And so touch is another great example that I like to remind folks about. I call this tool affectionate but not creepy touch, because you have to be careful about how you wield that tool. But, you know, like a fist bump at work, that's a tactile exchange that activates an emotional response, right? Like, what is the first tool we use with kids when they are born into this world to soothe them, to regulate them? It is skin to skin contact. Those kinds of tactile experiences, they

• 24:08Speaker 03

  stay with us throughout our lives. The caveat, of course, is research does show that if a tactile experience is not wanted, which would be the creepy form of touch, it not only mitigates positive effects, it actually can elicit a negative reaction. So to be clear to everyone who's listening, Lori and Ethan, and I think I can say this for you, Lori, we are not advocating haphazardly touching people at work and in your lives. In the appropriate context, though, this can't be powerful.

• 24:37Laurie Santos?

  And I think we can just use forms of self-touch that feel really good, right? Reading your book, I was reminded, there's this blanket that just feels really cozy. And when I'm having a bad day, like, I can just kind of go to it, right? I have like slippers that are just really comfortable, right?

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:52Laurie Santos?

  I'm also a huge fan of some of Kristin Neff's suggestions that, you know, if you need that kind of self-touch, but you're not around somebody for whom it would be effectively appropriate to ask them, you can give yourself some self-touch, a little self-hug or a little self-soothing. Because brains are stupid, they don't know who's giving you that self-touch, so.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I had a, I'll share with you and I guess everyone who's listening, a somewhat embarrassing implementation of this tool. And I did it unknowingly, I was giving a presentation the other, the other day. And I was after lunch, so I had an upset stomach and I, I found myself like pacing the room and just rubbing my stomach a little bit.

• 25:30Laurie Santos?

  Rubbing your tummy?

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, rubbing my tummy, like, and then I had the meta, what are you doing? Stop doing this. So I stopped doing the medley. So here's other one fun, fun finding in this space. Organizations are leveraging this tool of sensation as a regulator all the time and often completely out of our awareness. So many organizations, for example, have beautiful artwork on the walls and visual stimuli designed to push us into a different emotional space. That may not be so surprising, but what was surprising to me were the ways in which organizations often pump certain kinds of odors through their ventilation systems to arouse a certain kind of positive response.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  And there are companies that really specialize in constructing the right odors to match the organization's goals. And so this came full circle to me because earlier on in life, I remember my children, whenever we go on vacation, we'd go to a hotel and I remember they'd go, ah, daddy, it's so, so nice in here. This is such a nice place. And that is exactly the goal. And it is a way that we are being regulated by another organization through this path.

• 26:45Laurie Santos?

  But the idea is that we can do exactly. The same thing ourselves.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 26:49Laurie Santos?

  Scented candles or just all the kinds of ways that we can manipulate our sensory environment to feel better.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  That's right. And you know, the, the, the real hope that I have for this book is it lays out all of the tools that exist. Some of these tools may be, you may have like encountered some of these tools, but not realized it. You may not know about some of these tools, but the idea is that when we lay all of this out and explain how this works. Now we give you the opportunity to start wielding these tools strategically to help you match your emotion regulatory goals. My hope is that that is a boon to people in terms of, you know, improving their lives.

• 27:31Laurie Santos?

  And so let's jump to tool number two, which is how we can shift our emotion using our attention. A big one that I know I tend to use a lot when it comes to shifting my emotions with attention is through distraction. Uh, am I alone? Is distraction a kind of go to strategy for lots of folks?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Distraction is a, is a, is a, that's a biggie and it is a go to for lots of folks. And what's interesting is it doesn't always get the props that it deserves. There's a common belief that when you experience big, significant emotional events in your life, you should not avoid them. You should not distract. You should approach them, work through them. This message is often reinforced in popular culture and it turns out if you look at the science, it is not entirely true. So what we have seen is that really the key to wielding your attention effectively is being strategic in how you do so. Approaching certain kinds of experiences to work through them when the conditions are right.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  But also if you can distract in a healthy way. What I mean by that is not by substance abuses or risky behaviors, which some people, some people do. But a positive form of distraction can often be really useful for giving you some space from the experience to then let you re-approach it with a healthier perspective. My grandmother is actually really effective at using. Paying attention strategically. She would not dwell on the experience over and over. She didn't get lost in rumination and chatter about this event. She would focus on things that were under her control, her kids, her job. But when the conversation with other people one time a year, or even if she ran into fellow survivors,

• 29:15Speaker 03

  lend itself to thinking about this experience, she would, she would grapple with it. So she wouldn't avoid it to the point where it was a chronic form of avoidance that we know is really harmful. You know, there, there are various, I think, steps that people can follow to figure out when they should approach and when they should avoid or go back and forth between their experiences. Step one is just, I like recognizing there's no one size fits all solution here, not for wielding your attention or for that matter, for using any of the different shifters and emotion regulation tools I talk about in the book. What we know is that variability is the rule, not the exception.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Different tools work for different people in different situations. I liken it to physical exercise. If I take 10 people in my social network and I ask them what they do to keep physically fit, I'm likely going to get 10 different physical health routines. The data that we and others have collected suggests that emotion regulation is very, very similar. We rely on different tools in different situations. Let's say you encounter an experience that provokes you in some way and you decide to distract. And so what's your favorite distraction, Lori?

• 30:32Laurie Santos?

  The Wordle archive where I kind of go back into old Wordle puzzles that I haven't done before.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  That is a really, really good distractor because it is pleasant, but also it is cognitively demanding. So it captures your attention, which is useful for a distraction. You want a distraction to capture your attention to prevent it from going back right away to the situation that's just provoked you. So, okay, so let's say, you know, you have. Let's say a podcast interview doesn't go the way you want.

• 31:00Laurie Santos?

  That would never happen, Ethan. Come on, no.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  It would never happen. So, you know, so that happens and you distract. And then when you're done distracting, turns out you're done. You're not thinking about that problem, that that interview again. Well, if that's the case and it doesn't resurface into awareness, like fantastic. Keep doing what you do. Move on with your life. Your psychological immune system has done its job behind the scenes. Time has passed, the intensity of the emotions has subsided, and you're off to the next challenge, the next interview. If, on the other hand, you take a break, you distract, and then you find yourself thinking about the experience again when you're done. Well, then that could be a signal to then, okay, let me reengage with it.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  And now with the gift of time, which often moderates the intensity of our emotions. Now let me try to work through this experience a little bit more productively. And maybe I'll even layer another shifter, another tool on to help me do that. So maybe I'll try to figure out, well, why did this happen? Why didn't this interview go very well? I'll think about it from a distance perspective. All right, Lori, why do you think this didn't go so well? So you'll try to process it from from a more objective standpoint. So you're you're layering in other tools there.

• 32:15Laurie Santos?

  And this is a really nice transition to the third shifter that you mentioned in your book. The fact that we can get a little bit of perspective when we need to regulate our emotions. Now, this is something we've talked about on this show before. But explain again why perspective can be so important to shifting our emotions.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Well, the reason perspective is so useful is we all have the capacity to reframe how we think about our circumstances. But it can often feel really hard to do that when we are totally immersed in the situation and the emotions are flooding us. Actually, the name of this chapter, it's named after an anecdote with one of my close friends. I don't know how I could actually say this. You know, I was driving back from dinner one day with another couple. And the other couple was talking about a difficult experience that my friend was was having at work. And his wife said to him, well, why don't you just think differently about it? And his response was. Easier bleeping said than done. To convey, I think, this very common experience we have, which is we know

• 33:14Speaker 03

  that we can think differently and we should think differently. We should reframe how we're thinking about this, be more optimistic. But we just have hard time doing that in the moment. And so what we've learned is that in those situations, taking a step back, thinking about our circumstances from a more distanced perspective, almost like we're giving advice to someone else, can be really helpful for allowing us to do that.

• 33:37Laurie Santos?

  And you've come up with a super easy way we can do that linguistically, just how we use different pronouns, right?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  That's right. So using your own name and you can be a useful tool for allowing us to do this. So we usually use the word you when we give advice to other people. So when you use the word you to refer to your own problem, so Ethan, why are you doing this and what do you think you should do? What that does is it automatically switches your perspective. It puts you in this frame of mind where now you're giving advice to essentially another person. It's another person who happens to be you. So you have full access to everything that's happening inside that person's mind. But it's just easier to do so because you're doing it from that more objective standpoint. So that's one really simple distancing tool that you can use. Another powerful way of broadening our perspective is to do what I call mental time travel. So you jump into this mental time travel, which we all possess.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  You could go into the future and think, so how are you going to feel about this next week, next month, next year? When you ask yourself that question and notice I'm doing that, still maintaining the linguistic distance, right? How are you going to feel about this down the road? What that does is it makes clear to you something you've experienced your entire life. But we often lose sight of it in the moment, which is, as awful as our emotions are, as time stretches on, they typically fade. It's a very common trajectory that characterizes emotional responses. As time moves on, they kind of peter out. And so how am I going to feel about this next year? I'm going to feel better about it. I've lived through that countless times in my life. So mental time travel machine into the future helps you with that.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  You could also go back in time. It's another way of broadening our perspective. It works a little differently. If I'm struggling with a really difficult situation at work or in my, my personal life, I could jump into the mental time travel machine and go to the, the Polish woods in the 1940s with my grandmother. Right? Now I'm thinking about the adversity that she experienced back then. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, if she was able to get through this, I can handle what I'm dealing with now. So that's time travel to the past. Those are some other distancing tools.

• 35:40Laurie Santos?

  Self-talk and mental time travel are great ways to put your emotions in perspective. But if big feelings are still dragging you down, Ethan has a more radical suggestion for getting some distance between you and whatever's bothering you. That radical suggestion is coming up right after the break.

• 35:58Laurie Santos?

  There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie. Specifically, Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear it every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere and organic cotton.

• 36:43Laurie Santos?

  And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more. From leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, ah, that's fair. We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body.

• 37:26Laurie Santos?

  But when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated. The good news, it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics. Fibers and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their Blueberry Almond Granola, for example, starts with whole-grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great.

• 38:11Laurie Santos?

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• 38:57Laurie Santos?

  I tried out Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray after a particularly hard week. It was the perfect ritual to end my day and signaled to my brain that the work week was over and it was time to rest. For wellness you can feel, find Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray online and in your local bath aisle. Dr. Teal's, yep, you needed that.

• 39:18Laurie Santos?

  Of all the tips Ethan Kross outlines in his new book, Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, the one that resonates with me most is the strategy of putting some physical space between you and your problems. What I didn't realize was that his insights about the power of physical distance were partly inspired by me.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  It's funny you bring that up, Lori, because it was you, Lori, who I talked to about this. And so maybe I could turn the tides here and ask you about this. So, you know, as I was researching the book, I was struck by the power of of spaces to push our emotions around. I think spaces like our senses are often a tool for manager emotions that we we see literally every day as long as our eyes are open, but we totally take for granted. And you have a really powerful story about how changing your spaces powerfully modulated your own emotional response. So would you mind telling telling folks what you told me?

• 40:15Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it's in the book now, so I guess everybody's going to read it anyway. Yeah, no, this was around the time that I was experiencing a lot of burnout in my role as a head of college, working on Yale's campus, where it was just after the pandemic, I was feeling incredibly burned out, and I made the tough decision to leave that role. But when I left that role and had some time off, I had to face the question of like, okay, well, where do I want to be? Right? I have a house in my hometown in Connecticut, I could have moved there, but my husband and I weren't tied to anything. And so I said, well, why don't I go to a different place, a place that's really far away from the physical place where I was experiencing burnout, but also a place that had certain memories for me or certain associations?

• 40:56Laurie Santos?

  And so I decided to move back to where I went to grad school in Massachusetts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I moved from my huge head of college house into this smaller apartment. And honestly, I think it was the thing that wound up making me feel much less burned out, right? I was just in a completely different place with totally different sensory experiences than I was in before. It was a nice way to distract myself from some of the things that were tricky during my life at Yale and some of the stresses I was facing. It allowed me to focus my attention more on running this podcast rather than worrying about my lab and some of these other things. And within like weeks, I was feeling completely better. And and I thought that this was just kind of an accident of my little burnout story,

• 41:40Laurie Santos?

  but you wanted to use this story to explain a deep principles about the importance of place for shifting your emotions.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's such a powerful story. And, you know, our spaces, the spaces around us often impact multiple.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Shifters that exist inside us. So like you were talking about, they certainly impact our attention, like what we're exposed to. And by by impacting what we're exposed to, they have implications for our senses. We also form connections to places. And what really stood out to me about your story, when I think about it is when you moved back to Cambridge, Cambridge had these warm associations attached to it. This is where you were a student and you had these formative experiences. And what we've learned in the science that I think doesn't get as much attention as it deserves is we routinely form attachments to places in a way that is similar to the way we form attachment to people, to other people. So

• 42:36Speaker 03

  we talk a lot about attachment to other individuals in our lives, attachment figures who when we're in the presence of those figures, this provides us with a sense of safety and support. Parents, caretakers, partners, friends. Well, we also form attachments to to places. And when you're in a in the presence of a place that you are positively attached to, that likewise gives you this sense of safety and security. I'll bring this back to my kids. I when I, you know, it's it's funny when you learn new material and you filter it through the lens of your own experiences. I remember when my kids were upset, they always used to do this curious thing when they were little and just they just wanted to go home. And when we got home, they'd want to go in their room. And that just provided them with a sense of security. And so it turns out that's not just true of little kids.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  It's true of all of us. And I think the invitation that extends to us is to is to do some thinking ahead of time before the triggers ignite. Like, what are the spaces in our lives that have those restorative properties that make us feel safe and secure? I have I have several of these positive spaces located around Ann Arbor that I've like marked on a map figuratively, and I know where to go. It's like in the movies, you know, where there's a safe house for the CIA agent when they need to escape people who are getting going after them. Like, I've got my my safe spots. There's the law school quadruple here, which is just this magnificently beautiful space. There's the arboretum. There's my home.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Those are places I can go to, and they they are managing my emotions without me having to do anything by just being in that place.

• 44:12Laurie Santos?

  But you've also talked about ways that we can manage our spaces in more local ways, right? Like my situation is a case where I, you know, literally move cities. Not everybody can do that. You're talking about kind of within your town, specific spaces you can go to. You've talked about how we can take our local spaces and make them more emotionally regulatory. How do we do that?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, I think, a really important point because changing your space is a luxury we don't always have the ability to engage in. You could think of that as like a macro way of moving our emotions around via spaces. But then there's a more micro way you could do this. There's a way of harnessing your immediate spaces. And there are lots of things you could do here. There's research that we and others have done where you put pictures of attachment figures in your surroundings. So pictures of loved ones. Research shows that when you glance at a picture of a loved one, after thinking about something negative, it speeds the pace at which you recover from emotional turbulence, right?

• 45:10Speaker 03

  So, you know, after I did that research, I went on a picture frame shopping spree and I put pictures of loved ones all around my offices. So that's putting something new in your environment to push you in a direction where you want to go. Another example of that would be plants. We know that looking at images of green things, so plants and trees, flowers, this also has restorative calming effects. So you can imagine decorating your space in that way. You can also modify your space though by removing things that are pushing your emotions in the wrong direction. Lots of ways you could do this. We're talking right now and I have my cellphone turned over. So I've now modified my space to reduce a distractor, which would get in the way of our conversation.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  I tell a story in the book, true story, this is true, I've done this many times. I tend to overorder pizza whenever we have people over to watch football. And I know that if I don't give every single slice of pizza away before our friends leave the house, I will come down to the kitchen at between 10 and 12 at night and I will eat the cold pizza. And I will have such a positive emotional experience while doing so that will then end the second. I finish consuming it and then I won't be able to sleep at night. So the solution, I'm modifying my space to remove that as a distractor, as a temptation. So you can modify your spaces and and really architect your surroundings to help you achieve

• 46:39Speaker 03

  the emotions that you want to achieve.

• 46:41Laurie Santos?

  And that gets us to the final shifter that we'll talk about in this episode, which is something that exists in our space and definitely something that I tried to do when I physically move spaces, which is I wanted to surround myself with different people. Our relationships can also be big shifters. Explain this idea of emotional contagion and why it could be a powerful tool for changing our emotions around.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  So other people, we are a social species and our emotions are powerfully calibrated against other people and how we think about them and interact with them. And emotional contagion is a great example of this. There's lots of research that shows that when we are not sure of how to respond in a given situation, we reference other people because other people are a rich source of information. Now, that can push us in good or bad directions, right? So, you know, one frowning face in a room can quickly lead to many other frowning faces. Smile and joy can spread as well.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  I do this exercise often with groups when I when I lead workshops to demonstrate the power of emotional contagion, where I break people up into groups. Then I ask each member of the group to volunteer a leader. And so I take the leaders out and then I count off one, two, one, two, one, two. And I say, all right, ones, I'm going to go back into the room with you in a few minutes. I'm going to give you a really hard problem to solve. I want the ones to be an ultra supportive cheerleading leader. And then I turn to the twos, they kind of know what's coming, they're kind of nervously laughing. And as all right, twos, you know who I want you to be. I want you to be the a-holes. I want you to be stoic, disapproving, don't give much positive reinforcement. I assure them that I will debrief everyone the moment the exercise is over.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  And then they go back into the rooms, they work on this problem, and the leaders follow the orders I've given them. It is remarkable, Lori, to see how these different groups respond. Within seconds, the groups of the positive leaders, they're brainstorming out loud, they're giggling, they're laughing, they're having fun. In the other groups, like, no one is talking. They're just looking at the piece of paper, right? Because the emotion of a leader has then spread throughout the rest of the group. We see this, of course, playing out not just in person-to-person contexts. It happens on social media a lot in ways that can have really consequential effects. So this is often how moral outrage spreads. There are

• 49:07Speaker 03

  also instances in which you see positivity spreading within networks, too. So simply being aware of this, I think, can be very important for all of us. Number one, if you are in a leadership point of view, whether it be in an organization, in a friend group, in a family, recognize that the emotional tone that you bring to a situation directly impacts other people, often without any explicit direction. If you're a leader, you might also want to be aware of the fact that if you want this group to be pushing in a particular direction, and there's one voice or one person there that maybe isn't abiding by that, you want to be sensitive to that, too, and nip that reaction in the bud right away. But emotional contagion is a really powerful illustration of how other

• 49:52Speaker 03

  people can affect us.

• 49:53Laurie Santos?

  It also really gives us an opportunity. You know, sometimes we can think about emotional contagion as this terrible thing of like, oh, I'm just at the mercy of everybody's emotions on my team or whatever. But I think you also can recognize that that's an opportunity. You can see the emotions that you really want to see in the group, like, through your own actions. And in some ways, this is what you were doing as the leader of your family with your daughter in the car with Don't Stop Believin', right? You could have kind of caught her glum emotion and felt bad, but you're like, no, if I shift myself, it's going to shift her, too. And I think this is the real opportunity is that we can use ourselves as these pivot points to not just shift our own emotions, but emotionally regulate for the people we care about, too.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Couldn't agree more. And, you know, that's a really profound and eloquent way of summarizing how a lot of these shifters come together because they have implications for not only the way you Manage your own life, but how you affect those around you. And ideally, you're motivated to affect those around you in a positive direction. But you can also mushroom out even further because our understanding of how these principles of emotion regulation work, they also have the opportunity to shape the cultures of the groups that we belong to. So, you know, I belong to a bunch of different groups characterized by different cultures. And I'm constantly trying to be explicit about the values and beliefs I have about emotion and emotion

• 51:14Speaker 03

  regulation. These are states of being that I think are really important. But I think we need to spend more time investing in because doing so is gonna help people think and perform more effectively at work. It's gonna improve the quality of relationships and their health. So I'm being really clear about what my beliefs are for this culture and I'm backing that up. I'm not just saying that, I'm interacting with folks in ways that establish norms that reinforce my values and beliefs. And I'm even giving people some tools to try to hone these these abilities to shift. And so that's the way you go from knowing about something to try and to actually shift a culture around a topic, which I think is a really important challenge we all we all have in front of us.

• 51:59Laurie Santos?

  That's great. We've come a long way from holes in the head, I think. Just good.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  We thankfully have come a very long way from putting holes in our head. And I think, you know, look, there's, there's a lot more we have to learn, but, but we have amassed a pretty compelling set of insights regarding how we manage this wacky, you know, thing called emotions and our emotional life. And I think we'd all be a whole lot better off informing ourselves of what we've learned and, and using it to help us live the emotional lives we want to live.

• 52:31Laurie Santos?

  I'm so grateful that Ethan and so many other scientists have given us practical tools for regulating our big feelings. Between work stress and life stress, not to mention politics and the state of the planet, I experience big feelings like fear, anxiety and overwhelm a lot these days. I'm so happy I've gotten Ethan's tips for helping me find peace. They're much better than having someone drill a hole in my head. Let's quickly recap. First up, prepare a big emotions playlist. If you're scared or sad, dispel that mood by hitting play on some feel-good music. Personally, I think some dad-rock-like Journey is definitely the way to go. Ethan's second tip: divert your attention. There are plenty of quick ways to distract yourself away from big emotions. Try going for a run, or my favorite, solving the world.

• 53:14Laurie Santos?

  Tip three is to take a step back and view your problems as a stranger might see them. Are things actually so bleak? What would a coach or mentor say about what you should do? The fourth way to regulate your emotions is to get some physical distance from what's upsetting you. Get out of your home or workplace. Remember that escaping the environment that's stressing you out can work wonders. And Ethan's final strategy to tame big feelings is to surround yourself with positive people, just like getting away from a location that's upsetting you. We can benefit by taking a break from the friends, coworkers, or loved ones who are spiking our negative emotions. But above all, a meta-tip if you will, is to remember that your emotions are functional. If you're feeling lonely, or if your boss says something that upsets you, or if a politician enacts some policy that gets you red with anger,

• 54:00Laurie Santos?

  that's a signal for you to take action. But once you've figured out what your big feeling is there to teach you, that big feeling has done its job, and it's time for that big feeling to move on. It's also time for our how-to season to move on. Next up, we'll be looking at something that's super useful in small doses but can prove very harmful when it's allowed to rule our lives. We'll be exploring how to fight stress. That's next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 54:31Laurie Santos?

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