Speaker 1: I could elaborate on the dark thought that's running through
Speaker 1: my mind and question why I'm having that thought in
Speaker 1: ways that might really send me down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: Or I can shift my perspective and realize, hey, this
Speaker 1: is part of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates
Speaker 1: worst case scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but you
Speaker 1: know it does that to help us feel better.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: What if I told you that everything you've been taught
Speaker 3: about emotions, how to control them, avoid them, or even
Speaker 3: embrace them might be too simplistic. Today, I sit down
Speaker 3: with doctor Ethan Cross, author of Shift Managing your Emotions
Speaker 3: so they don't manage you, to explore a different way
Speaker 3: of thinking about emotions, not as enemies to conquer or
Speaker 3: burdens to bear, but as tools that, when understood, can
Speaker 3: actually work for us instead of against us. I've spent
Speaker 3: years trying to navigate my own emotional landscape, sometimes avoiding,
Speaker 3: sometimes over analyzing, often caught between the two. And if
Speaker 3: you've ever felt like you're either suppressing emotions or them,
Speaker 3: this conversation will give you a more nuanced, more effective
Speaker 3: way forward. We'll talk about the myth of one size
Speaker 3: fits all emotional solutions, why controlling your emotions isn't as
Speaker 3: simple as we think, and practical tools what Ethan calls
Speaker 3: shifters that help you move from emotional chaos to clarity.
Speaker 3: This is the one you feed. I'm Eric Zimmer, and
Speaker 3: if you've ever wished for a better way to work
Speaker 3: with your emotions, you don't want to miss this one.
Speaker 3: Hi Ethan, welcome back.
Speaker 1: It's great to be back. It's been too long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't remember when it was, but I remember
Speaker 3: your interview very well. And your book Chatter is one
Speaker 3: that I go back to often because there were so
Speaker 3: many really useful ideas in it, and your new book
Speaker 3: lives up to it, right. It's great. It's called shift
Speaker 3: managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And we're
Speaker 3: going to get into the book in a moment, but
Speaker 3: we'll start like we always do, with the parable. In
Speaker 3: the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
Speaker 3: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 3: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 3: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 3: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 3: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 3: think about it for a second. They look up at
Speaker 3: their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And
Speaker 3: the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like
Speaker 3: to start off by asking you what that parable means
Speaker 3: to you in your life and in the work that
Speaker 3: you do.
Speaker 1: You know, the parable is so relevant to the theme
Speaker 1: of Shift that we're going to talk about today. It's
Speaker 1: really remarkable when I hear the word which wolf you feed?
Speaker 1: What it raises in my mind, is the importance of
Speaker 1: being really deliberate about how you engage with those different
Speaker 1: forces in your lives, and not just haphazardly, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of shoving nutrients down either one's throat depending on
Speaker 1: what's available, but being pretty careful about what you shop
Speaker 1: for and how you interact with them. Because one theme
Speaker 1: of Shift, and a general point that I believe very
Speaker 1: strongly in, is that when it comes to our emotional lives,
Speaker 1: the two wolves, they're both valuable companions throughout our lives,
Speaker 1: and we don't want to get rid of one. We
Speaker 1: want to make sure that we are in their presence
Speaker 1: for the right amount of time and in the right circumstances.
Speaker 1: And so I don't actually want one wolf to win.
Speaker 1: I want each wolf to know when they're supposed to
Speaker 1: be there with me, protecting me. And protection I think
Speaker 1: is relevant here too, because I think of emotions, all
Speaker 1: of them as tools we use to navigate the world.
Speaker 1: All of them are useful when they're triggered in the
Speaker 1: right proportions, not too intensely, not too gently, not too long.
Speaker 1: They don't last too long, they don't last too short,
Speaker 1: but in the right proportions, all of our emotions serve
Speaker 1: a vital function, and I think the real challenge we
Speaker 1: all face is to figure out how to keep our
Speaker 1: emotions in that sweet spot zone where they're working for
Speaker 1: us rather than against us. I think that is a big,
Speaker 1: big problem we face on this planet for most of us,
Speaker 1: and I think we've learned a lot about how to
Speaker 1: solve that problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think most people who've thought about this
Speaker 3: very much, and I don't mean scientists like you, I
Speaker 3: mean just average people who've thought about this very much,
Speaker 3: realize that we can go to two extremes, right. We
Speaker 3: can go to one where we're trying to push away
Speaker 3: any emotion we don't want. You know, this is a
Speaker 3: bad emotion, don't have it, avoid it leads to all
Speaker 3: kinds of problems. And the other extreme where we just
Speaker 3: let whatever emotion there is drive our lives. Neither of
Speaker 3: those are ways that are useful, and your book is
Speaker 3: a really good way of walking through what are some
Speaker 3: strategies that allow us to take the best of what
Speaker 3: emotions have to offer without getting the worst of what
Speaker 3: they can offer if we let them completely run the show.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, great characterization. We should have contracted you
Speaker 1: to write the book flap Copy. Yeah. I mean, like
Speaker 1: we have this bias to think in terms of categories,
Speaker 1: in terms of like white and black boxes, right, good
Speaker 1: and bad. It's easy to make sense of the world
Speaker 1: in that way, and we apply that way of thinking
Speaker 1: reflexively to our emotional worlds too. There are good emotions,
Speaker 1: are bad emotions. You should always strive to be positive
Speaker 1: and not negative. Avoidance is always toxic. Be in the
Speaker 1: moment all the time. No, no, no, no. It's a
Speaker 1: whole lot more beautifully complex than that, and I don't
Speaker 1: think that should scare us away. I think we should
Speaker 1: embrace that beauty that is in the complexity. I was
Speaker 1: just talking to someone else about our wonderfully diverse emotional lives.
Speaker 1: I mean, Eric, do you doubt for a second that
Speaker 1: your emotional experiences on this planet are unique from every
Speaker 1: other human being in the sense of the unique combinations
Speaker 1: of emotions you've experienced, when, in how you've experienced them,
Speaker 1: and so forth and so on.
Speaker 3: No, I think it's obvious that there are ways in
Speaker 3: which you have an emotion. I can understand it because
Speaker 3: I've had it, and vice versa, but varying degrees, and
Speaker 3: when we get into talking about that there's more to
Speaker 3: an emotion than just a feeling that there are cognitive
Speaker 3: pieces that go with it, there are behavioral pieces that
Speaker 3: go with it. Once you start introducing that level of complexity,
Speaker 3: you're right. We're all different. And that's one of the
Speaker 3: things that I love about this book, and that you
Speaker 3: say it early and you say it often, which is
Speaker 3: there are no one size fits all solutions to our
Speaker 3: emotional problems. And I think that is really so important
Speaker 3: and something that took me a while to fully really understand.
Speaker 1: I think it is critically important, and I think it
Speaker 1: is liberating. Is liberating for me to know that if
Speaker 1: the tools that are working well for my buddies don't
Speaker 1: work well for me, no problem. There are lots of
Speaker 1: other things that I can do to manage my emotions.
Speaker 1: I think it takes a lot of us some time
Speaker 1: to understand that, because there's a seductive appeal to thinking
Speaker 1: that there are one size fits all solutions, because that
Speaker 1: would make things really easy. I mentioned this in the book,
Speaker 1: but we're governed by this law of least effort whenever possible.
Speaker 1: We're looking for the easy way out in life because
Speaker 1: in terms of being an organism. It's easier for us
Speaker 1: to conserve our resources, so easier is better. But I
Speaker 1: think Einstein said this, we should fact check it, so
Speaker 1: we'll give it to Einstein, but will allow for the
Speaker 1: fact that someone else may have said it. It's this
Speaker 1: wonderful quote. You should make things as simple as possible,
Speaker 1: but no simpler. I mean, that's a deep, deep statement, right.
Speaker 1: We should make it as easy as possible to manage emotions,
Speaker 1: but let's not oversimplify to the point where we're actually
Speaker 1: doing harm. I love using a metaphor of physical fitness
Speaker 1: and exercise to really havem our home. Why this no
Speaker 1: one size fits all solutions idea can be a lot
Speaker 1: more intuitive than we think nowadays. Lots of people exercise.
Speaker 1: It's kind of normative to stay in shape for one's health.
Speaker 1: If I look in my social circle at the different
Speaker 1: ways my close friends exercise, all of us have different routines.
Speaker 1: We're all doing different kinds of things, and even within
Speaker 1: the kinds of exercises that we are engaged in, let's
Speaker 1: say it's weight training, there are lots of different exercise
Speaker 1: that we use us. I don't go to the gym
Speaker 1: eric and curl dumbbells to make my biceps bigger for
Speaker 1: forty five minutes straight. That would not make any sense, right,
Speaker 1: That would be silly. But that's using one exercise to
Speaker 1: achieve the goal of being mentally fit. Why would we
Speaker 1: think that one exercise, meditation, being in the moment, talking
Speaker 1: to other people, whatever it is, choose your favorite, would
Speaker 1: likewise help us be emotionally fit. Given how complex our
Speaker 1: emotional lives are, it doesn't make sense to me. And
Speaker 1: the data demonstrate that there are no one size fits
Speaker 1: all solutions. So I say embrace it, and embracing that
Speaker 1: should be liberating.
Speaker 3: I agree. I've been thinking about this idea recently of
Speaker 3: the sort of testimonial. I'm from a twelve step program, right,
Speaker 3: and you know the testimonial is part of it. Right.
Speaker 3: I got sober, I did this, this is what worked
Speaker 3: for me. Or I had emotional problems and I started meditating,
Speaker 3: and Boyett did all these things for me. There's benefit
Speaker 3: in that. But I've been thinking lately about the people
Speaker 3: who hear that message and that thing didn't work for them, right,
Speaker 3: And what does that do to them? And if you
Speaker 3: don't have the mindset that you're saying, which is simply, oh,
Speaker 3: that thing may not work for me. It may have
Speaker 3: worked for Eric, but it may not work for me.
Speaker 3: But something else will we go searching for it. If
Speaker 3: we don't have that mindset, we can foundly discouraged and
Speaker 3: begin to think there's more wrong with us, because well,
Speaker 3: it worked for these guys, it's not working for me,
Speaker 3: what's wrong with me? And I think our desire to
Speaker 3: share what worked for us comes from a good place
Speaker 3: because it worked for us and we're excited about it.
Speaker 3: But we've got to be careful because it doesn't land
Speaker 3: on everybody in the same way.
Speaker 1: You got it one hundred percent. I mean, you perfectly
Speaker 1: characterized it. I mean, let me give you some data
Speaker 1: that's hot off the presses, so to speak, even though
Speaker 1: I guess it will be published in an actual physical
Speaker 1: journal soon. So we did these studies during COVID. Took
Speaker 1: us a while to finish analyzing them, but what we
Speaker 1: wanted to look at was what are the tools that
Speaker 1: are helping people manage their COVID anxiety from one day
Speaker 1: to the next. What are the tools that are really
Speaker 1: moving the needle on people's anxiety. And what we found was,
Speaker 1: I think phenomenally interesting. Each day we would ask people
Speaker 1: to rate their anxiety and also to indicate which of
Speaker 1: a slew of different healthy and unhealthy tools they use,
Speaker 1: and we covered a very broad space in some ways
Speaker 1: scaffolds onto the tools I talk about and shift. What
Speaker 1: we found was there were tools that help people, but
Speaker 1: there was enormous variability. So number one, most people in
Speaker 1: general didn't do one thing to help them feel better.
Speaker 1: They did like between three and four different tools each day, right,
Speaker 1: so they're not just curling dumbbells for their biceps, are
Speaker 1: also doing chest press and running and sit ups. But
Speaker 1: what we also found was there was a lot of
Speaker 1: variability between the tools that worked for one person and
Speaker 1: the tools that worked for another person, so much so
Speaker 1: that it was like virtually you couldn't predict the unique
Speaker 1: combinations of tools that would work for any one person.
Speaker 1: We also saw variability across days, So the three or
Speaker 1: four things that worked for you on day one were
Speaker 1: different from the four there are five things that you
Speaker 1: did on day two. And so this just makes this
Speaker 1: point that, gee, if we're looking for single shot solutions
Speaker 1: that are working for everyone across the board, we're very
Speaker 1: likely to not be successful.
Speaker 3: I remember this conversation clearly in a twelve step meeting,
Speaker 3: and people will get fundamental or dogmatic about anything, and
Speaker 3: people get fundamental and dogmatic about twelve steps. And somebody
Speaker 3: was saying, like, look, it's like a recipe. You follow
Speaker 3: the twelve steps, you get this. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: cooking brownies, you get the thing you find. I said,
Speaker 3: people are not brownies, for God's sake, Like, I think
Speaker 3: we're a little bit more complex than a brownie, and
Speaker 3: even a brownie. I could give you five variables that
Speaker 3: could play into how that brownie comes out, on the
Speaker 3: hardness of your water and the temperature and the humidity
Speaker 3: and as you're oven calibrated, and even on a brownie.
Speaker 3: So I clearly feel strongly about this.
Speaker 1: Let's pull that threat at step further because I feel
Speaker 1: strongly about it too, And I think this is just
Speaker 1: such a critical important issue because I think if we
Speaker 1: get this part right, learning about the different tools you
Speaker 1: know comes easy. You're motivated to do it. You're talking
Speaker 1: about a brownie, and I think most people who are
Speaker 1: brownie connoisseurs, of which I consider myself to be one,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean I love brownie's and I've
Speaker 1: sampled many There's huge variability and how tasty a brownie is,
Speaker 1: and that variability is determined in part by the ingredients
Speaker 1: that compose the brownie and how skillfully they are assembled,
Speaker 1: as well as the taster and the unique taste buds
Speaker 1: that they have and how they process those, you know,
Speaker 1: brownies that they're trying. You want to tell me that
Speaker 1: an emotion is on the same level as a brownie
Speaker 1: in terms of complexity, right, Like, come on, right, think
Speaker 1: about how unbelievably distinctive our emotional lives are. It's not
Speaker 1: just that we are experiencing the anger and anxiety and sadness.
Speaker 1: Those that we're using capture a whole different slew of
Speaker 1: different emotions, of various gradations that differ from one another
Speaker 1: and in slight ways that may be meaningful. We also
Speaker 1: often experience emotions that are blending together. You know, yesterday
Speaker 1: some good news came in and there was this opportunity
Speaker 1: that I was really excited about came out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: and I was initially elated, and then the elation was there,
Speaker 1: and then I had this recognition of what I had
Speaker 1: to do during this engagement, like oh no, and now
Speaker 1: I'm like overcome with dread, right, and then I go
Speaker 1: back and forth. So now we're having a mixed emotional response.
Speaker 1: There's such complexity here, so yeah, it just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: I think when you break it down that there'd be
Speaker 1: this single solution. So let's embrace it. And once you do,
Speaker 1: it naturally motivates you to try to understand, well, what
Speaker 1: are the different tools and how do they work? And
Speaker 1: let me start trying to figure out what are the
Speaker 1: regimens that work best for me. You go to a gym.
Speaker 1: Step one is you learn about how all of the
Speaker 1: different apparatus work. Right, one of my daughters, my youngest daughter, like,
Speaker 1: first time she comes with me to a gym and
Speaker 1: a hotel on a holiday, it's like, what is this
Speaker 1: you look at? You have no idea. Step one, learn
Speaker 1: how everything works. Step two, now, let's see how you
Speaker 1: can start incorporating these different exercises into your life in
Speaker 1: a way that allows you to achieve the goals that
Speaker 1: you have. That's what this is all about.
Speaker 3: Wonderful. I think that's a good segue for us to
Speaker 3: move on to getting us closer to what those tools
Speaker 3: or as you call them, shifters are but before we
Speaker 3: do that, I do really think we need to talk
Speaker 3: a little bit more about what emotions are. You reference
Speaker 3: in the book that there's no shortage of theories on
Speaker 3: this right, there's well over at least half a dozen
Speaker 3: different theories of what emotions are. But you do go
Speaker 3: on to say, here's some things that we can sort
Speaker 3: of agree on. Walk me through when we're talking about emotion,
Speaker 3: what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So when I'm talking about emotions, first thing to recognize
Speaker 1: is I think that emotions are tools. They are responses
Speaker 1: to things that happen in the world around us or
Speaker 1: in our minds. When we think about the world that
Speaker 1: we think about things that are meaningful, they elicit these
Speaker 1: different responses, and those responses that are elicited, these emotions
Speaker 1: are typically activated to help us manage the situations we
Speaker 1: are in. You can think about emotions like little software
Speaker 1: programs that are getting loaded up to help you deal
Speaker 1: with the situations you're in. And emotions an umbrella term
Speaker 1: because when you experience an emotion, it activates what we
Speaker 1: call a loosely coordinated set of responses. So your body
Speaker 1: starts to react in a certain way. When you're anxious,
Speaker 1: you might experience this fight or flight response. Your attention
Speaker 1: narrows on the threat at hand, so you could zoom
Speaker 1: in on it. You may have a particular kinds of
Speaker 1: motor behavior. So if we stick with anxieties, example, crunching
Speaker 1: is often an example of that, and it's also visible
Speaker 1: to other people. Why might that be Well, we're a
Speaker 1: social species, and it can be useful to learn how
Speaker 1: other people are feeling. That gives them information so that
Speaker 1: they can respond accordingly, maybe to approach or avoid you.
Speaker 1: So if the emotion is calibrated properly, not too intense
Speaker 1: or shallow, and not too long or short, it can
Speaker 1: be very helpful, even the bad ones. And so I
Speaker 1: like to point out how the bad emotions can be useful.
Speaker 1: Anxiety helps you prepare for a threat. But you know,
Speaker 1: when I think about the misses in my life professionally,
Speaker 1: they're usually engagements where I wasn't at all anxious before
Speaker 1: I had nothing motive me to prepare for them. Anger.
Speaker 1: We experience anger when we perceive some violation of our
Speaker 1: understanding of how things should be, and there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to fix the situation that elicits an anger response. So
Speaker 1: if I see my daughters do something dangerous, I'm going
Speaker 1: to get angry, and that's going to motivate me to
Speaker 1: approach this situation and make sure it doesn't happen again. Sadness.
Speaker 1: Sadness is one that some people often struggle to think
Speaker 1: about how it can be adaptive. I think sadness is
Speaker 1: kind of beautiful. We experience sadness when we encounter some
Speaker 1: irrevocable loss in our life. There's some threat to our
Speaker 1: way that we make sense of the world, and we
Speaker 1: can't change this situation. So you lose someone you love,
Speaker 1: you're fired. That has implications for how you think about
Speaker 1: yourself and the world, and you can't fix it. There's
Speaker 1: nothing you could do to get that person back. And
Speaker 1: so what sadness does is it motivates us to turn
Speaker 1: our attention inward, slow down physiological, turn our attention inward,
Speaker 1: to start trying to do the difficult cognitive work of
Speaker 1: now making new meaning given the circumstances at hand. And
Speaker 1: we often withdraw to do that so that we could
Speaker 1: spend time kind of reflecting on the situation. That can
Speaker 1: be a little dangerous though. Right you're in a negative state,
Speaker 1: you're going off alone, and so what evolution has also
Speaker 1: gifted us with this sad response is typically a facial
Speaker 1: display that it acts as a kind of lifeline or
Speaker 1: alarm or signal. Is the word I'm looking for to
Speaker 1: other people to say, hey, you know, check up on
Speaker 1: me and don't kind of leave me hanging here by myself?
Speaker 1: And what does that look like? Whenever I see my
Speaker 1: daughters who strategically display that facial expression when I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, mad at them, it's amazing, Like it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter if I know they're being strategic, I feel bad.
Speaker 1: I want to help them. And that's what that's doing,
Speaker 1: It's drawing other people. And so those are three ways
Speaker 1: that those negative emotions can be helpful. And that's what
Speaker 1: emotions are. One little bit of editorial there. One question
Speaker 1: people often have is what's the difference between a feeling
Speaker 1: and an emotion. A feeling is the subjective component of
Speaker 1: an emotional experience. It's the part of the emotion that
Speaker 1: we are aware of. When you're experiencing an emotion, lots
Speaker 1: of things are happening in your mind and body that
Speaker 1: you have no awareness of. The feeling is what rises
Speaker 1: to conscious awareness. It's akin to when you are physically ill.
Speaker 1: Let's say you've got the flu. There are lots of
Speaker 1: things happening with your immune system and your organs, and
Speaker 1: you have no awareness of that, but you are aware
Speaker 1: of the lethargy and maybe the fever and chills you're experiencing.
Speaker 1: The feeling is the equivalent of the fever in the shills.
Speaker 1: That's how I think about emotion.
Speaker 3: And so really what you're describing is it sounds like
Speaker 3: there's a few things. There's the what's going on in
Speaker 3: my body, There's what's going on in my mind, what
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about right that you bust is despite common thinking,
Speaker 3: emotion and thought are not necessarily separate things. They're intertwined, right,
Speaker 3: They're intertwined, yes, and then there's a behavioral expression. So
Speaker 3: those three things, and it sounds like you almost just
Speaker 3: added a fourth, which is the received sense of what
Speaker 3: all this constellation is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like how it all comes together often is part
Speaker 1: of our awareness.
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, I didn't have as good as terms, but
Speaker 3: I used to teach this idea of what I would
Speaker 3: call sort of an emotional storm, and the point was
Speaker 3: you're going to have physiological feelings, there's going to be
Speaker 3: drive to do a certain thing, you're going to have
Speaker 3: a physiological reaction. And then there's the thing that you
Speaker 3: typically might call the feeling itself, what you call sad.
Speaker 3: What the meta experience of all that together.
Speaker 1: Is yep, yeah, very compatible.
Speaker 3: So let's now move on to control of emotions, because
Speaker 3: that's often where people go. Right. I have negative emotions
Speaker 3: that feel really strong, and either I really don't like
Speaker 3: how they feel, or I'm following their push and I'm
Speaker 3: behaving in ways that are not really good for me.
Speaker 3: So the answer is I got to control my emotions.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about that word control. Is it possible? Why
Speaker 3: or why not? Would that be the goal?
Speaker 1: Critically important topic to address because you've got to think
Speaker 1: it's possible to control your emotions, because if you don't
Speaker 1: think you can, you're not going to take efforts to
Speaker 1: do so. Right, And I don't think that's a controversial
Speaker 1: piece of logic. If you don't think it's possible to
Speaker 1: lose weight by going to the gym, why on earth
Speaker 1: would you pay for a membership fee and do these
Speaker 1: very hard things? Doesn't make sense. This is an issue
Speaker 1: that is particularly relevant to the topic at hand because
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't think you can control emotions.
Speaker 1: I tell a story in the book about how several
Speaker 1: years ago I came across an article that indicated that
Speaker 1: fort of participants sampled when asked if they could control
Speaker 1: their emotions, said they could not in some ways. When
Speaker 1: I first read that, I was taken aback. Like I'm
Speaker 1: the director of a lab called the Emotion and Self
Speaker 1: Control Lab. Like, embedded in the whole enterprise of what
Speaker 1: I do is the idea that you can control your emotions.
Speaker 1: So what's going on? Because I don't dismiss these accounts
Speaker 1: like trying to understand why people might think this way,
Speaker 1: Here's how I make sense of it. We cannot control
Speaker 1: a lot of the emotions that are automatically triggered in
Speaker 1: our lives. Remind me where you're filming.
Speaker 3: Right now, Eric Columbus, Ohio.
Speaker 1: Columbus, Oh boy, I know, I know, I know.
Speaker 3: You're in ann Arbor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, well that's all right. We'll see there is
Speaker 1: an automatically elicited emotion. But I forget that. Tally well,
Speaker 1: you know you are so pleasant to counteract that. But
Speaker 1: I can't predict when you're going to say, Columbus, Ohio
Speaker 1: and what association that is going to automatically elicit. If
Speaker 1: I'm in New York right in the subways and then
Speaker 1: someone comes by and they don't smell too good, like,
Speaker 1: that's going to listen a negative reaction automatically. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: experience some dark thoughts, as all people do, some intrusive thoughts,
Speaker 1: and they elicit negative reactions. I don't have control over
Speaker 1: those experiences. But what I do have control over is
Speaker 1: how I engage with those emotions once they are activated.
Speaker 1: I can impact the trajectory of my emotional experience. I
Speaker 1: can make a decision to lean into the smelly scent
Speaker 1: that's causing me distress and maybe change my behavior. Or
Speaker 1: you know, I could try to distract myself. I could
Speaker 1: elaborate on the dark thought that's running through my mind
Speaker 1: and question why I'm having that thought in ways that
Speaker 1: might really send me down the rabbit hole. Or I
Speaker 1: could shift my perspective and realize, hey, this is part
Speaker 1: of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates worst case
Speaker 1: scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but you know, it
Speaker 1: does that to help us feel better, and so forth
Speaker 1: and so on, and so there's room in this world
Speaker 1: for both those believe that you can't control your emotions
Speaker 1: and those that believe you can. And what I would
Speaker 1: love is if we could both embrace the idea that
Speaker 1: it's not either or. It's that there are parts of
Speaker 1: your experience that you cannot control, but then a whole
Speaker 1: lot that you can't. And the territory of shift is
Speaker 1: in the latter. It is embracing that complexity of our
Speaker 1: emotional lives and saying I want to commit to understanding
Speaker 1: what are the tools to modulate my emotional experience once
Speaker 1: it's activated.
Speaker 3: There's that old famous serenity prayer. We accept the things
Speaker 3: we can't change, we change the things we can. You know,
Speaker 3: Epictetis talked about at the doctrine of control, and he
Speaker 3: made it sound like, well, you can change it or
Speaker 3: you can't change it, And that's not the reality of
Speaker 3: a lot of things in life. A lot of things
Speaker 3: in life. You can have influence on parts of it.
Speaker 3: You may not be able to control the final outcome.
Speaker 3: But if it was just that simple, either you can
Speaker 3: or can't control your emotions, or you can or can't
Speaker 3: control the situation, it'd be easy to figure out what
Speaker 3: to do. But as we've talked about things are not
Speaker 3: that simple.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, you know, and some emotional experiences are
Speaker 1: more difficult to modulate than others. And there's a hefty
Speaker 1: amount of self experimentation and trial and error that we
Speaker 1: have to engage with to become emotional jiu jitsu experts,
Speaker 1: if you will. I think what science has done a
Speaker 1: fairly good job at doing is identifying different individual tools
Speaker 1: that are out there for managing emotions, and I talk
Speaker 1: about a bunch of them in the book. You can
Speaker 1: think about these as specific exercises, specific tactics. What we
Speaker 1: have not yet done is figure out how these tools
Speaker 1: optimally combine to help different people struggling with different situations.
Speaker 1: I wish we had this knowledge base. We do not.
Speaker 1: We're looking at this in my lab and several others,
Speaker 1: and you know, I hope in five or ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen years we've made some progress there. It's a really
Speaker 1: exciting scientific question. But until we get to that point,
Speaker 1: there are things you can do, and what they involve
Speaker 1: doing are familiarizing yourself with the tools and then start
Speaker 1: experimenting with what works uniquely for.
Speaker 3: You, right, And I think that's so important is that
Speaker 3: it can be useful to know what the tools are.
Speaker 3: For example, we're going to get to some of these tools.
Speaker 3: One of the tools is cognitive. You change how you
Speaker 3: think about the situation, and sometimes that's magic. It's a
Speaker 3: classic example was used in Buddhism. You're walking at night
Speaker 3: and it's dark and you see something on the ground.
Speaker 3: You think it's a snake. You're terrified. You shine your
Speaker 3: flash and like, oh, it's a rope. Problem solved, motion gone.
Speaker 3: So cognitive is sometimes it. But we also know, like
Speaker 3: my experience is, if my emotional temperature is really high,
Speaker 3: I'm past cognitive right, Like, I'm a little bit past
Speaker 3: cognitive now, So I need strategies that help me lower
Speaker 3: that temperature enough that maybe I can move back into cognitive.
Speaker 3: And so I think that what you're saying makes a
Speaker 3: lot of sense.
Speaker 1: Well, let me just say, Eric, because you said that
Speaker 1: so beautifully. Those are precisely the kinds of decision rules
Speaker 1: that we want to help people discover for themselves. Like,
Speaker 1: so you know, if my intensity is above a certain level,
Speaker 1: like I'm not going cognitive, I'm going another route because
Speaker 1: there's no point for me. It's not that I don't
Speaker 1: go cognitive, I go to someone else when that happens,
Speaker 1: and that someone else is often capable of helping me
Speaker 1: go cognitive. So we're both similar in that there's a
Speaker 1: tip point where a tried and true tool no longer
Speaker 1: is useful for us temporarily, but then where we go
Speaker 1: from there might differ. And those are the unique profiles
Speaker 1: that we want to help people discover. That should be
Speaker 1: a fun enterprise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I made an attempt years ago and promptly stopped attempting,
Speaker 3: although I think it's what you're talking about. It was
Speaker 3: sort of like a flow chart. It was like, you know,
Speaker 3: try this and if that doesn't work, go here. But
Speaker 3: if this does this, go then Suddenly I was like,
Speaker 3: hang on a second, Like this flow chart is getting
Speaker 3: out of control, you know, And like you said, sometimes
Speaker 3: the flow chart goes a completely different direction. But let's
Speaker 3: make sure we get to tools here. So we've sort
Speaker 3: of set up what work, some of the things that
Speaker 3: don't work, some ways of thinking about it. Let's get
Speaker 3: to offering people some actual tools that allow them to shift.
Speaker 3: So I think the first one maybe, and maybe we
Speaker 3: can make it through each of them if we're quick enough,
Speaker 3: which is not my strong suit, but we will try,
Speaker 3: And the first one is.
Speaker 1: A so attention. Think of attention as our mental spotlight.
Speaker 1: It's what we're focusing on and what we become aware of.
Speaker 1: And things that are in your attention activate emotional responses,
Speaker 1: and once you get things away from your attention, the
Speaker 1: emotional responses tend to turn off. Now, what's interesting about
Speaker 1: attention is it's been extensively studied and there are strong
Speaker 1: beliefs that people have about the role of plays in
Speaker 1: managing our emotional lives. In particular, there's a very strong
Speaker 1: belief that we should not avoid the big problems in
Speaker 1: our lives. We should instead approach them and face them
Speaker 1: head on, because if you avoid them, they're just going
Speaker 1: to linger and metastasize, and when you come back to them,
Speaker 1: they're just going to be just as big, if not bigger,
Speaker 1: and they're going to blow up. This was, interestingly, one
Speaker 1: of the first lessons that I remember my parents teaching
Speaker 1: me about coping. You know, our parents are some of
Speaker 1: the first educating agents about emotion regulation in our lives,
Speaker 1: and it's a message that was then reinforced when I
Speaker 1: got to graduate school and I came across tons of
Speaker 1: research and professors who talked bad nauseum about the perils
Speaker 1: of chronic avoidance. I think we've overgeneralized, though, because avoidance
Speaker 1: at times, research shows can actually be quite helpful. Being
Speaker 1: strategic about when we approach and avoid turns out to
Speaker 1: be a really useful tactic for dealing with big emotional experiences.
Speaker 1: So let me give you a couple of examples. You know,
Speaker 1: for a long time, I used to think that if
Speaker 1: I ever got into an argument with my wife and
Speaker 1: I was to blame, I'm really good at not being
Speaker 1: defensive and taking blame, maybe almost to a fault, but
Speaker 1: you know, I do it, and I remember I would
Speaker 1: screw up in some way and it was really my fault,
Speaker 1: and I would try to think, Okay, well, let's just
Speaker 1: fix the problem and work through it. And my wife,
Speaker 1: who is exceptionally regulated, but at times if I screw
Speaker 1: up bad, gets upset. She wouldn't want to talk to
Speaker 1: me about it for a while. She needed some time
Speaker 1: to recover. But my temptation was always to just immediately
Speaker 1: work through and fix the problem and find a solution.
Speaker 1: Took me a while to realize that actually avoiding the
Speaker 1: problem for a while, sometimes even a few days, and
Speaker 1: then coming back to it at that point. It was
Speaker 1: like a godsend of an intervention for our relationship because
Speaker 1: when we came back to it later on, we were
Speaker 1: able to deal with it more effectively. So that's an
Speaker 1: example of how avoidance in the right dosa just can
Speaker 1: actually be quite helpful. I'm not advocating for chronic avoidance.
Speaker 1: The data showing that that is harmful across the board
Speaker 1: is pretty definitive, but such a seductive allure to wanting
Speaker 1: to just nip that problem in the bud right away.
Speaker 1: I feel this really strongly in my own life. Counteracting
Speaker 1: that by drawing away can be quite useful.
Speaker 3: I'm really good at drawing away. I mean, avoidance just
Speaker 3: comes natural to me. If there's an emotional situation going
Speaker 3: on between me and another person, I'm happy to avoid
Speaker 3: it indefinitely. And this gets to kind of what we've
Speaker 3: talked about, right knowing yourself. I know myself if I'm
Speaker 3: in a situation and I'm not sure should I approach
Speaker 3: or avoid. It's not always this way, but I know
Speaker 3: that my tendency is to avoid, So if I'm in doubt,
Speaker 3: maybe approach is the right thing. But when you were
Speaker 3: telling that story about you and your wife. It made
Speaker 3: me think of that old marriage advice, like never go
Speaker 3: to bed angry. I'm like, that is such bad advice.
Speaker 1: I love the fact that you brought that up, because
Speaker 1: we got that advice at our wedding from a lot
Speaker 1: of people, you know, lots of elder statesmen and stateswomen
Speaker 1: said this to us. And I have thought about that
Speaker 1: on several occasions. I consider myself really, really happily married.
Speaker 1: I'm in a wonderful relationship with a magical woman, and
Speaker 1: we go to a bit angry with each other at times,
Speaker 1: and I've thought about that, and sometimes I feel bad
Speaker 1: about the fact that, well, there are other couples that
Speaker 1: don't do that, and this is the toxicity of the
Speaker 1: ones size fits all solution. Yeah right, it's exactly the
Speaker 1: phenomenon you were talking about earlier. I never put it
Speaker 1: together before, but you know, that just doesn't work for
Speaker 1: my wife and me, and that's totally okay. So what
Speaker 1: I do in this chapter on attention, though, is I
Speaker 1: break down I give some guidelines for how to know
Speaker 1: when to avoid and when to approach and when to
Speaker 1: go back and forth. And there are some general principles
Speaker 1: out there that people can follow, and I won't walk
Speaker 1: you through all of them, but the basic point here
Speaker 1: is that we want to be flexible with the role
Speaker 1: that attention plays in our lives. It is a tool
Speaker 1: that can be strategically deployed. And the mistake that I
Speaker 1: think people often make is to be too rigid in
Speaker 1: how they deploy their attention, either always approaching or always avoiding.
Speaker 1: The sweet spot is often in between.
Speaker 3: Give us an idea or two of some guidelines for
Speaker 3: how to know when to do which.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's say something. You know, something happened, and
Speaker 1: you take some space away, and you find that you
Speaker 1: come back to the problem and it ceases to be
Speaker 1: a problem. Right, nothing more to approach, just keep going
Speaker 1: with your life. Oftentimes, like things happen that feel really
Speaker 1: big in the heat of the moment, and once you
Speaker 1: take some time away and let what we call your
Speaker 1: psychological immune system do its work, let time to pass,
Speaker 1: you come back and you realize this was nothing. It's
Speaker 1: not actually worth your effort. That's one indicator that avoidance
Speaker 1: is working just fine. Let's say you avoid something and
Speaker 1: you find that you just can't avoid it because every
Speaker 1: time you try to take your attention away. Thoughts keep
Speaker 1: bubbling up about this experience and it's pretty disruptive. Well,
Speaker 1: then recognize that avoidance is not the right solution in
Speaker 1: that context, and maybe you need to approach and try
Speaker 1: to work through the experience or use a different kind
Speaker 1: of coping tactic. It goes without saying that unhealthy forms
Speaker 1: of avoidance. I'm not an advocate of so certain kinds
Speaker 1: of substance abuse and risky behavior. Although those are often
Speaker 1: linked with temporary reprieve, they have a lot of other
Speaker 1: negative outcomes linked with them that I think you just
Speaker 1: don't want to get into. Approach can sometimes get you
Speaker 1: into trouble too, though I gave you one example. If
Speaker 1: it's an interpersonal problem and one person isn't ready to
Speaker 1: talk about the issue and you want to, it can
Speaker 1: create huge amounts of friction if you keep trying to
Speaker 1: work through it. You may also be overcome with an
Speaker 1: emotion to the point where approaching and trying to work
Speaker 1: through it cognitively isn't going to serve you well and
Speaker 1: instead lead you to just start spiraling into a chatter episode.
Speaker 1: That a whole book on the perils of chatter. That's
Speaker 1: an indication of approach not working either. So there are
Speaker 1: some Here's when approach is working, here's when avoidance is working,
Speaker 1: and here's when you should go back and forth between
Speaker 1: the two.
Speaker 3: And I love that you point that out that there
Speaker 3: is a place for tactical avoidance. You know, not everything
Speaker 3: has to be faced in the moment. We don't always
Speaker 3: have to be present. There's a time and a place to,
Speaker 3: like just lick your wounds for a few minutes and
Speaker 3: figure out kind of the next steps. All right, let's
Speaker 3: move on to next. Perspective one of my favorite topics.
Speaker 3: Talk to me about the role of perspective in shifting emotion. Well,
Speaker 3: let's try to just make clear to folks who are
Speaker 3: listening how attention and perspective fit together in our worlds.
Speaker 3: If we think of the mind like a camera, attentions
Speaker 3: where we point the lens, But then perspective is how
Speaker 3: we adjust the lens, how we filter the incoming information.
Speaker 3: And we have this remarkable capacity to filter and distort
Speaker 3: it in lots of different directions whatever's incoming. And that's
Speaker 3: a really important skill because although deploying our attention away
Speaker 3: from things can sometimes be really helpful, sometimes we can't.
Speaker 3: We're in a circumstance where we have to face the
Speaker 3: things that are bugging us. What's interesting about perspective, and
Speaker 3: the reason I called this chapter perspective shifting, not cognitive shifting,
Speaker 3: is because of the following. We're all been told to
Speaker 3: change the way that we think, to change the way
Speaker 3: we feel. This is a mantra of the cognitive approach,
Speaker 3: the cognitive movement in psychology. But one of my favorite
Speaker 3: memories of talking about this issue with friends we were
Speaker 3: driving home from dinner one night, my wife and I
Speaker 3: and another couple in.
Speaker 1: The back seat. The husband was experiencing some difficulties at
Speaker 1: work with other people, and he was getting kind of
Speaker 1: negative and down about the situation, and his wife said, frustratingly, well,
Speaker 1: you know, just change the way you think about it,
Speaker 1: just reframe it and be more positive. And you know,
Speaker 1: he looks at her at the pause and this kind
Speaker 1: of snare goes, Yeah, easier effing said than done, which
Speaker 1: I think captures something really powerful for most of us
Speaker 1: that in that heat of the moment, we know we
Speaker 1: have a capacity to reframe something, but it can be
Speaker 1: really hard to do it. And this is where perspective
Speaker 1: comes into play, because what we have found is that
Speaker 1: in those situations, taking a few steps back, getting some
Speaker 1: psychological distance from our problems often makes it a lot
Speaker 1: easier for us to effectively reframe what we are going through.
Speaker 1: So what do I mean by distance? I mean adopting
Speaker 1: a more objective perspective, thinking about yourself like you or
Speaker 1: someone else to some degree. We know that, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a lot easier for us to give advice to
Speaker 1: other people than it is to take that advice ourselves.
Speaker 1: When you have distance from the problem, you can think
Speaker 1: about it more flexibly, more objectively. We can build on
Speaker 1: that insight to figure out how to help ourselves reflect
Speaker 1: on our own problems more effectively, because there are things
Speaker 1: we can do to get some mental space from our
Speaker 1: problems to broaden that perspective. One tool I talk about
Speaker 1: in this book I talked about in Chatter Too. It's
Speaker 1: one of my personal favorite tools, distant self talk. Use
Speaker 1: the word you to coach yourself through a problem. How
Speaker 1: are you going to manage this? What should you do?
Speaker 1: If you think about when we use the word you,
Speaker 1: it's a word we use to think about and refer
Speaker 1: to other people. When you use that part of speech
Speaker 1: to refer to yourself. It's automatically shifting your perspective. It's like,
Speaker 1: now you are talking to someone else, and we have
Speaker 1: these scripts for talking to someone else. We don't put
Speaker 1: them down typically, like we give them good advice, and
Speaker 1: so that can help you reframe things more effectively. Mental
Speaker 1: time travel is another big one for me. I use
Speaker 1: this quite a bit, right. It's so easy to get
Speaker 1: zoomed in on a problem where you just magnify it. Well,
Speaker 1: I've experienced emotional episodes that I've not enjoyed throughout my life,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure has everyone on this who's listening to
Speaker 1: us speak right. Our life is filled with these negative
Speaker 1: experiences that are triggered too intensely and for too long. Well,
Speaker 1: guess what. Virtually all of them, in my case, have
Speaker 1: dwindled with time in their intensity. Time is a way
Speaker 1: of taking the edge off these experiences. Some hang around
Speaker 1: longer than others, and there are some experiences that are
Speaker 1: resistant to the effects of time, but a whole lot
Speaker 1: of them do wane in intensity as time goes on.
Speaker 1: So I jump into my mental time travel machine and
Speaker 1: I'll ask myself how I'm going to feel about something
Speaker 1: a year from now two years from now, and it
Speaker 1: instantly makes accessible this idea that what I'm going through
Speaker 1: is not going to last. That's really anxiolytic that really
Speaker 1: takes the temperature down on my response. I'll also go
Speaker 1: back in time. I'll put my experience in perspective by
Speaker 1: imagining or thinking about how I've dealt with adversity in
Speaker 1: the past, or how other people have dealt with adversity.
Speaker 1: I'll think about my grandmother trying to escape Nazis and surviving,
Speaker 1: and then I'll juxtapose her experience have seeing her family
Speaker 1: slaughtered in World War Two, surviving, and then I'll think
Speaker 1: about how that compares to the reject I may have
Speaker 1: just you know, received from a journal or from a
Speaker 1: periodical like That's a powerful way of putting things in
Speaker 1: perspective to change my emotions. And those are just some
Speaker 1: of the tools. There are many others, but one real
Speaker 1: asset that I think I have. I'm often asked if
Speaker 1: I ever struggle with emotions. Of yeah, of course, at times,
Speaker 1: I'm a human like you know, pinch right, like everyone else.
Speaker 1: I am good though, at raining those responses in when
Speaker 1: they're triggered, because I know what to do I know
Speaker 1: I can strategically travel in time this way or that way,
Speaker 1: or talk to myself this way, or deploy my attention,
Speaker 1: and that is a gift I'm really grateful for and
Speaker 1: it's something that I hope readers take away from this book.
Speaker 3: I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
Speaker 3: This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
Speaker 3: see people making. And that's really that we don't think
Speaker 3: about these new habits that we want to add in
Speaker 3: the context of our entire life.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
Speaker 3: in the life that we have. So when we just
Speaker 3: keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
Speaker 3: I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
Speaker 3: really thought about what we're not going to do in
Speaker 3: order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
Speaker 3: you to think about where is this going to fit
Speaker 3: and what in my life might I need to remove.
Speaker 3: If you want to step by step guide for how
Speaker 3: you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
Speaker 3: go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
Speaker 3: the free masterclass. I think you're right having those tools,
Speaker 3: and the more you use them the more that you
Speaker 3: automatically turn towards them. I seem to have an automatic
Speaker 3: like the time travel one. This question that I heard
Speaker 3: it years ago and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: that's brilliant. Which is is this going to bother me
Speaker 3: in like five hours, five days, five months? And I
Speaker 3: just now think of that question pretty whenever I start
Speaker 3: to get bothered, and the answer is that most of
Speaker 3: the time, the answer is no, it's not going to
Speaker 3: bother me in five hours, probably not five weeks, five months.
Speaker 3: But if it is going to bother me in five months,
Speaker 3: that is a pretty good indicator to me that this
Speaker 3: thing deserves my time and attention. So the answer isn't
Speaker 3: always that you go out to cosmic view and you
Speaker 3: see that everything is a speck of dust. Sometimes I go, oh,
Speaker 3: this still does matter. Okay, good, Yes, then this is
Speaker 3: worth thinking about.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: I could talk about perspective the rest of the day,
Speaker 3: but I'm not going to because we have some other
Speaker 3: things to get to that I think are important. So
Speaker 3: let's move on to shifting your environment.
Speaker 1: So environment I love this work. There are tools for
Speaker 1: manager emotions like sprinkled in the world around us kind
Speaker 1: of like easter eggs, you just got to nowhere to
Speaker 1: find them. There are a couple of ways that I
Speaker 1: zoom in on in the book on how you can
Speaker 1: be more strategic with how you engage with your environment
Speaker 1: to your betterment. One thing I point out is that
Speaker 1: a lot of us, I think, take for granted that
Speaker 1: we attach to certain people in our life, either in
Speaker 1: a secure way or maybe a less positive way. But
Speaker 1: other people can be sources of resilience. They're mere presence,
Speaker 1: These are security figures. Being around them provides us with
Speaker 1: a source of resilience. Well, it turns out we can
Speaker 1: attach to places too, in both the positive add and
Speaker 1: the negative directions I might add, but thinking about places
Speaker 1: in our lives where we find restorative, where we have
Speaker 1: these positive attachments, they can be a source of resilience
Speaker 1: during times of stress. And so if I think about
Speaker 1: the neighborhood I live in, there's the arboretum, there's the
Speaker 1: tea house where I wrote my first book, there's my
Speaker 1: office on campus. Every time I'm in those spaces, they
Speaker 1: fill me with a sense of positivity that is comforting,
Speaker 1: and that can be another kind of regulatory tool. You can,
Speaker 1: of course, you take this even further. I've just pointed
Speaker 1: out ways of navigating ones immediate environment that are accessible
Speaker 1: to most. You can also travel. I think it's not
Speaker 1: surprising that people travel to different destinations. Like travel is
Speaker 1: what a lot of people do on vacation to restore right.
Speaker 1: And so there are certain places you go to to
Speaker 1: have that kind of emotional experience. More locally, within your home,
Speaker 1: there are also ways of interacting with your environment. You
Speaker 1: can either add features to your space or take features away.
Speaker 1: Add features to your spaces to elicit desired responses, or
Speaker 1: remove features to get rid of undesirable responses. So photographs,
Speaker 1: I talk about some research we've done which shows that
Speaker 1: glancing at pictures of loved ones actually, you know, if
Speaker 1: you've had a bad experience, you micro glance at those
Speaker 1: pictures and it speeds up the rate at which you
Speaker 1: recover emotionally. What's happening there is you look at that
Speaker 1: picture and it activates mental representations, thoughts and feelings you
Speaker 1: have of those people, and the positivity that is linked
Speaker 1: with it helps you feel better. So, you know, after
Speaker 1: we did that science, I went on a shopping spree,
Speaker 1: got lots of picture frames, printed out pictures and now
Speaker 1: they're all around my offices. Plants. We know that green
Speaker 1: spaces are a source of restoration. They gently draw your
Speaker 1: attention away. You find them restorative, They capture attention. I
Speaker 1: typically have plants in my offices and windows that face
Speaker 1: green spaces. If I can't get windows, I put up
Speaker 1: pictures of trees. I also have tried to remove triggers
Speaker 1: from my environment that illicit undesirable responses. So for me,
Speaker 1: I tell a story in the book. Some people think
Speaker 1: I'm joking. It's a true story of However, when we
Speaker 1: have parties, like football watching parties, we get pizza. It's
Speaker 1: my favorite food in the world. If I see a
Speaker 1: slice of pizza, I turn into like a.
Speaker 3: Rabbit animal cookie monster.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, hungry mungery. You're familiar with the shel
Speaker 1: Silverstein poem.
Speaker 3: I don't know hungry mungery, but I do know a
Speaker 3: cookie monster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's me. If I see pizza, doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what form it's in, what style. Like, I'm there and
Speaker 1: it becomes paradoxically even more attractive. As the minutes of
Speaker 1: the day pass, so past eight o'clock, when I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be eating anymore, it's like, oh, even better, the colder,
Speaker 1: the better, not good for me. So I get rid
Speaker 1: of it. I try to give it away. I throw
Speaker 1: it out. I'll admit right, I throw it out because
Speaker 1: I don't want to have that. Cue my cell phone
Speaker 1: right here is sitting face down, not face up, because
Speaker 1: I don't want to be tempted if a notification comes
Speaker 1: in to look in my email while we're talking. These
Speaker 1: are microwaves, not microwaves. Little ways of interacting with our
Speaker 1: spaces that can push us. And there are lots of
Speaker 1: other ones like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I said a couple times lately, Like if you
Speaker 3: were to get a group of behavior scientists all in
Speaker 3: one room and ask them to agree on one thing,
Speaker 3: I think they would all agree on the fact of, like,
Speaker 3: you can't do too much in setting up your environment
Speaker 3: in ways that are conducive to you doing or not
Speaker 3: doing the thing you want. Like to miss something that
Speaker 3: basic is very problematic.
Speaker 1: And I think the fact that it is so basic
Speaker 1: though we often overlook it. I mean, oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: have overlooked these things, Like why does cleaning and organizing
Speaker 1: your space make you feel better when you're upset? Like
Speaker 1: it does? The research shows it helps you give you
Speaker 1: a sense of control. There are such basic things that
Speaker 1: we can do. We take them for granted. You know,
Speaker 1: one other shifter we haven't talked about is sensation. Sensory
Speaker 1: shifters right like music, scent, sound like, these are powerful
Speaker 1: modulators of our emotional lives that we've all had so
Speaker 1: many experiences with our emotions being shifted by those sensory experiences.
Speaker 1: But if you look at what people do when they're
Speaker 1: really struggling, they often don't avail themselves of that very
Speaker 1: easy to implement tool. Not to say it's the only
Speaker 1: tool we should use, but it's a tool, and it's there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I somehow skipped right by that, because that's
Speaker 3: a really big one for me. Music And I figured
Speaker 3: this out years ago for myself. I'm glad I did,
Speaker 3: because I use it all the time. I sometimes get
Speaker 3: I don't know what to call it anymore. Is it
Speaker 3: just antedonia, is it a low mood? I don't know,
Speaker 3: but I get it. And one of its characteristics is that,
Speaker 3: unfortunately everything that I'm normally interested in, it doesn't register
Speaker 3: as interest. So my brain will go, oh, music, and
Speaker 3: I'll go to my music and I'll start looking through
Speaker 3: I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. So what I've
Speaker 3: done is I've just built a playlist in advance that
Speaker 3: I know has music that helps me, so I don't
Speaker 3: have to go figure it out. I just go to
Speaker 3: the positive playlist hit shuffle, and I know that what's
Speaker 3: going to come is going to be helpful because I'm
Speaker 3: designing for the fact that, like you said, a lot
Speaker 3: of times, we just don't think of these things, or
Speaker 3: even if I do think of it, I don't think
Speaker 3: it's going to work.
Speaker 1: There you go. And I've done the same with playlists
Speaker 1: to push my mood in whatever direction I want pump
Speaker 1: up or calm down. And the beauty of having the
Speaker 1: playlist is I don't have to stumble on, oh I'm
Speaker 1: feeling good and the music a song just happens come
Speaker 1: on and pushes me out. I can be really strategic
Speaker 1: and deliberate about how to activate it to get me
Speaker 1: to the desired state.
Speaker 3: Okay, now we have covered sensory, we've covered emotional, we've
Speaker 3: covered attention, perspective, environment, you did hit a little bit
Speaker 3: on relationships and connections. So let's go to what I
Speaker 3: think is the last one, which is culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so culture, you know, I think is an often
Speaker 1: overlooked shifter of our emotion, in part because it's invisible.
Speaker 1: It's been compared to the air we breathe. But guess
Speaker 1: what air we breathe is pretty important? And you want
Speaker 1: your culture ideally to be one that is helping you
Speaker 1: when it comes to your emotional life. What does it
Speaker 1: mean when we talk about culture? While cultures are beliefs
Speaker 1: and values. So do you believe, for example, that you
Speaker 1: can manage your emotions? Are you part of a family
Speaker 1: or a friend group or an organization that emphasizes, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can manage your emotions. Do we believe it's important
Speaker 1: to manage our emotions? Right? Beliefs and values? What are
Speaker 1: the tools that we think are important? Culture's given that
Speaker 1: to us. Culture is also giving us norms, norms being
Speaker 1: the rules, the unspoken and spoken rules for how to
Speaker 1: conduct ourselves. Organizations have norms about emotions and emotion regulations.
Speaker 1: In my house, we have a norm where you don't
Speaker 1: actually call each other stupid like I don't know why
Speaker 1: and it just really rubs me the wrong way, and
Speaker 1: no judgment to other families where you know, ah, don't
Speaker 1: be stupid like I don't you know, judge it just
Speaker 1: it doesn't work for me in my family, and you know,
Speaker 1: if my daughter one daughter calls the other one that
Speaker 1: there's an intervention where they apologize and so forth and
Speaker 1: so on. So that's just a belief and a value
Speaker 1: that's shaping the way we relate to each other emotionally.
Speaker 1: Culture also gives us tools, So I model tools for
Speaker 1: my kids. I explicitly teach them about some of these tools.
Speaker 1: I do that and lots of difference. Sometimes I talk
Speaker 1: about research that we're doing at the dinner table. That's
Speaker 1: usually not a very popular conversation, but I try to
Speaker 1: slip it in there.
Speaker 3: But you know, how old are your daughters.
Speaker 1: They're now fifteen and ten.
Speaker 3: Were they more receptive to it when they were, like,
Speaker 3: you know, seven and two? Or is it getting worse?
Speaker 1: It's getting worse. I'm becoming a perpetually embarrassing organism on
Speaker 1: this planet. Here's what I tell people, and here's what
Speaker 1: I do. Indeed, practice, you say things to your kids
Speaker 1: and they roll your eyes and they tell you that
Speaker 1: you know that you're the most annoying human being on
Speaker 1: the planet. Leave me one great Their normal kids keep
Speaker 1: on saying the stuff to them because it does penetrate
Speaker 1: their awareness. And I've seen my daughters, you know, but
Speaker 1: grudgingly they admit it, but they use the tools that
Speaker 1: we give them and they benefit from it. My oldest
Speaker 1: daughter is a diver, and at one point she was
Speaker 1: a little concerned about like elevating up to like this
Speaker 1: what I think of as a death defying height, you know,
Speaker 1: jumping off and doing stuff. And I said, hey, why
Speaker 1: don't we talk about it, you know, like I do
Speaker 1: research on this. Leave me alone. And then a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks later, she succeeded. She fought through the fear
Speaker 1: and she rose to the occasion. I said, oh, what
Speaker 1: did you do? And she just spouted off like a
Speaker 1: bunch of the different tools that we've talked about over
Speaker 1: the time. So that was a major parenting victory that
Speaker 1: I will take with.
Speaker 3: Me absolutely, that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But that's culture, right. Culture beliefs in values, norms,
Speaker 1: and practices tools. Here's the interesting thing about culture. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we find ourselves and cultures that are just humming for us.
Speaker 1: They're resonating with us. They have the same values that
Speaker 1: we as individuals have. When it comes to how we
Speaker 1: think about our emotions and emotionalized are giving us tools
Speaker 1: it's working well. Sometimes we find ourselves in toxic cultures
Speaker 1: that are not leading us to feel the way we want.
Speaker 1: They don't value emotions and emotion regulation. And in some
Speaker 1: cases you might want to leave that toxic culture if
Speaker 1: it's really affecting you very powerfully. But the other thing
Speaker 1: you can often do is you can work to change
Speaker 1: the culture. And once you understand how to break culture
Speaker 1: down believes, values, norms, practices, it becomes I think, more
Speaker 1: manageable to think about how to do that. And so
Speaker 1: culture is a powerful tool for or your day to
Speaker 1: day emotional life, but it's also a really powerful tool
Speaker 1: for how to affect other people that you care about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I thought maybe
Speaker 3: we would end I really wanted to talk about from
Speaker 3: knowing to doing, but we're running out of time. So
Speaker 3: I wondered if you could just walk us through bringing
Speaker 3: some of these tools together. You do it late in
Speaker 3: the book where you talk about your kid's school getting
Speaker 3: canceled because of a threat, and how you sort of
Speaker 3: brought a couple of these different tools together to sort
Speaker 3: of manage your emotions or work with your emotions, and
Speaker 3: maybe as a way of sort of putting everything we've
Speaker 3: talked about disparately into one sort of story with a
Speaker 3: threatening ye yeah, and how you kind of work through that.
Speaker 1: So I tell the story at the end of the
Speaker 1: book about how there was a threat called into one
Speaker 1: of my kids' schools and I was just, you know,
Speaker 1: a terribly frightening experience. And I used a lot of
Speaker 1: the tools that we're talking about to manage my emotions
Speaker 1: in that situation. So I resisted the temptation to co
Speaker 1: ruminate endlessly about what was happening with some of the
Speaker 1: other parents. I diverted my attention by thrusting myself in
Speaker 1: my work. I sought out some comfort by talking to
Speaker 1: a friend who is also an expert in the space
Speaker 1: who could help broad my perspective about the probability of
Speaker 1: a bad thing happening. I also went out for a
Speaker 1: walk in nature to just kind of draw my attention
Speaker 1: away from things as well, and engaging in that blend
Speaker 1: of using those different tools didn't wipe away the concern
Speaker 1: about what might happen, and fortunately nothing did, but it
Speaker 1: did make it a lot more manageable to deal with.
Speaker 1: And I think that is the opportunity that we all face, right,
Speaker 1: is to find practices that don't get rid of the
Speaker 1: negative experiences altogether, because it's not really possible, but find
Speaker 1: tools that just make these negative experiences a lot more
Speaker 1: palatable in our lives so we can swiftly move on
Speaker 1: from them and to have other kinds of emotional experiences.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, I live and breathe this stuff
Speaker 1: every day, and that's why it's easy for me to
Speaker 1: talk about it not just as a scientist, but also
Speaker 1: as a living, breathing, emodeing human being.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I really loved the way that you sort of
Speaker 3: set that up in the book, because you said, this
Speaker 3: doesn't turn school shooting threats into birthday parties, right, And
Speaker 3: I think there's something important there, because we often think
Speaker 3: that what we need is to feel way, way better.
Speaker 3: And a lot of what you were talking about I
Speaker 3: often refer to, and I've jokingly referred to some of
Speaker 3: what I teach sometimes is like, well, you know, what
Speaker 3: I'm teaching you is how to not make it worse.
Speaker 3: And sometimes that's a real accomplishment, right, because the ways
Speaker 3: that we can spin out emotionally, and the ways we
Speaker 3: can deepen our emotional holes, and the way we can
Speaker 3: and lash out to other people or act in ways
Speaker 3: that are helpful. If we can just be with the
Speaker 3: thing that is in some sort of reasonable way by
Speaker 3: using these tools, that's a victory.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly the messaging behind
Speaker 1: this book, right Like, life's going to continue to throw
Speaker 1: curveballs at us. And you know, if we use the
Speaker 1: baseball metaphor, we're not expecting anyone to bat a thousand,
Speaker 1: right like in baseball, you know two eighty and above
Speaker 1: is an amazing almost Hall of Famelike career. Right So
Speaker 1: we're talking about getting better at harnessing these emotions and
Speaker 1: that is something that we all have the ability to do.
Speaker 1: We just need to know how to do it. And
Speaker 1: that's why it's exciting to talk about this stuff. So
Speaker 1: I really appreciate the ability to do it with you.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Ethan. The book is wonderful. We'll have links
Speaker 3: in the show notes to where you can get it.
Speaker 3: It's called shift Managing your Emotions, so the I don't
Speaker 3: manage you, and it's a really good one. Thank you, Ethan.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
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