How to Harness Your Feelings

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some months ago, I brought seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain to live stage performances in San Francisco and Seattle. The evenings were electric. We got so much positive feedback from those two sold out shows that we've decided to launch a tour to more than a dozen cities in the coming months. I'll be coming to Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Clearwater, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, Baltimore, Washington DC., and Los Angeles. To snap up your tickets, please go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. You can also sign up to say hello and get a photo with me. In some places, you can sign up for an intimate chat with me and a handful of other fans. I'd love to see you there. Again, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. Okay, on to today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The 19th century naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin is best known for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. He described the theory in his book, On the Origin of Species, one of the most important publications in the history of science. Less well known, but also scientifically important, was the biologist's research on emotions. Charles Darwin's view, which has since been adopted by contemporary scientists of emotion, is that our feelings are adaptations that help us survive and thrive in a complex world. Fear guides us to avoid things that can do us harm. Anger girds us for battle and conflict. Love pulls us toward mates, family and friends. But if emotions are so useful, why do they so often seem to get us in trouble? Why do we lose our cool and yell at our kids, or mope around for weeks following a professional disappointment? Why do we lie awake at night, worrying about some imagined catastrophe? How is it we get carried away when everyone around us is losing their heads, and lose ours too? Most important of all, when we do get swept away by our emotions, how should we get back on track? Today on the show, we look at the growing and fascinating signs of managing our emotions. What scientists call emotion regulation turns out to be one of the most important life skills we can possess. This skill is essential in dealing with setbacks, in balancing risks and rewards, in maintaining successful relationships. Harnessing our feelings. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Discover. It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one you can set, earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. See terms at discover.com/creditcard. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lenovo. Business owners understand that each stage of growth presents new challenges, especially when it comes to evolving processes. That's where Lenovo Pro comes in. Offering free membership to businesses of all sizes, personalized tech advice, exclusive discounts, customizable PCs, 3% back on most purchases, and much more, everything you need to overcome those growing pains. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Abbott. Let's talk about a small thing that can make a big difference if you have diabetes, the Freestyle Libre 3 Plus Sensor. The sensor gives you real-time glucose readings, so you can see the impact of every meal and activity to make better choices. This is progress. You can try the sensor at freestylelibre.us. Terms and conditions apply, for prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us. All of us can recall moments when we acted in ways that made us feel ashamed afterwards. When we look back at these moments with a clear head, we cannot for the life of us understand why we got so angry or greedy or frightened. At the University of Michigan, psychologist Ethan Kross studies the science of emotions and techniques to help us manage them. Ethan Kross, welcome to Hidden Brain.

ETHAN KROSS: Thanks for having me, it's a delight to be here. Ethan, when you were growing up, your dad was someone who would regularly sit in the lotus position and practice meditation. He was a calm, patient, and sensitive man. But there was one situation that would transform him into someone completely different. What was that situation? The situation was driving on the roads of Brooklyn, New York. He would often transform into, I have a mental image of Mad Max, if you're familiar with those movies. And, you know, he wasn't just a reckless driver right out of the driveway. But if he perceived any quote unquote injustice on the road, that is, another car that was driving recklessly or, you know, cut someone else off, he would take it upon himself to discipline that driver. And what I mean by that is he would get in front of them and then slow, our car down so that the other driver would have to slow down. If I close my eyes right now, I can see us driving on the Belt Parkway, which is this freeway that wrapped around the perimeter of Brooklyn. And I could see him weaving in and out of cars to find the perpetrator.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah, I mean, he was almost playing a cop without wearing a uniform, except he wasn't tailing people and getting them to slow down. He was pulling in front of them and hitting the brakes.

ETHAN KROSS: He did the tailing too, so, you know, the whole nine yards. But yes, that's exactly right. You know, that was one of the first observations I had of this idea that you could be really good at regulating your emotions in some contexts, but really bad in others.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So as you became a teenager, you yourself experienced your own extremes of emotion. You were unflappable on the soccer field, for example, but other situations would tie you up in knots?

ETHAN KROSS: So when I had crushes on girls in high school, it took a while for me to ask them out on dates, and I remember many false starts, you know, starting to dial their numbers when we used to have, believe it or not, rotary phones. And I would turn the die, you know, turn a three number, I'd get three numbers deep and then hang it up. And then I'd go four and then I'd hang it up. And then I'd give it a rest for a day or two. And have to have pep talks with my dad, for example, and some of my best friends in high school would give me pep talks to kind of build my confidence to ultimately dial the damn number and start the conversation, which I eventually did and was grateful for those pep talks. But again, it just goes to show you, I think it's really easy for us to say, oh, that person, they're really good at managing their emotions or they're really bad. But when you get into a person's life, you see that there's always nuance.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you became a researcher who studies emotions and emotion regulation. But even all of that expertise went out the window on one occasion at the airport when you felt someone was behaving out of line. Paint me a picture of what happened, Ethan.

ETHAN KROSS: This was very early in my career, and I was with my family, both my wife and daughter, one daughter at the time, and my extended family as well. We were all going on a vacation for the winter break. I know the airport was jam-packed, and we had dutifully waited our turn to get to the check-in counter, and there was a very pleasant woman working there. And she begins to check us in, and then I begin to hear behind me this kerfuffle, and all of a sudden, this guy just has this outburst, and he starts shouting at the woman who's helping us and doing her very best to deal with these enormous crowds. And this person's saying how he's going to miss his flight, and this is ridiculous, and the woman is trying to calm him down. And then he says something to the effect of, I don't have to calm down. I have, that's why I bought a business class ticket, or that's why I have airline status. I forget which of the two he uttered. And the moment that I heard that, a tripwire was crossed in my brain, and I turned around, and I said things to him, that were very confrontational. The moment the words came out of my mouth, I felt ashamed of saying them. And then, interestingly, I remember turning around, and seeing my wife, and the other members of my family, who were nearby, moving away from me ever so gently. I could see that they were so uncomfortable from my behavior. And it's interesting to think about that incident in light of the early experiences with my dad that I mentioned to you before. In a certain sense, it was a similar dynamic. There was this perception of injustice that automatically led to an emotional hijacking, if you will.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So a few years ago, millions of people were watching the Academy Awards. The host Chris Rock made a joke that upset the actor Will Smith. For the handful of people on the planet who don't know, can you recount what happened next, Ethan?

ETHAN KROSS: Will Smith gets out of his seat, walks relatively patiently right up to Chris Rock, and then winds up and slaps him in the face powerfully in front of everyone there and everyone who's watching.

CLIP: Oh, wow! Wow! Will Smith just smacked the **** out of me.

ETHAN KROSS: And then he turns around and goes and sits back down in his chair.

CLIP: Keep my wife's name out your **** mouth! I'm going to, okay? Greatest night in the history of television.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Okay.

ETHAN KROSS: And in that moment, we witnessed a remarkable takeover of emotion that led this, at the time, esteemed actor, Hollywood royalty to do something that his career still hasn't recovered from many years later.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, Will Smith ended up winning the Oscar for Best Actor, you know, a few minutes after this incident. And it was presumably one of the most important highlights of his life. But what he had done to Chris Rock seconds earlier upstaged this important moment. Powerfully upstaged the moment. For anyone who was watching, it was just unbelievable to see someone do this. In fact, many people, myself included, initially thought that this was something that was rehearsed. He didn't really do this, because who would do such a thing?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Ethan, emotions are supposed to be really valuable to us. They're supposed to provide us with useful signals about how to act in the world. So why do they sometimes cause us to say and do things that we will come to regret?

ETHAN KROSS: Because they're what I call unwieldy tools. All of the emotions we experience, when we experience them in the right proportions, are useful. Anger, when experienced not too intensely or not too long, can be valuable. The problem that we all struggle with, and this is what I call an ancient problem, this has been something that we've been struggling with for likely as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form, is that often these emotions are triggered, and they're not triggered in the right proportions. They are triggered either too intensely or not intensely enough, or they last too long or not long enough. And what I find so fascinating about us, about human beings, is guess what we also evolved? Tools to rein those emotional responses in, so that if and when we are triggered, we can very quickly rein those emotional responses in to help us reach whatever emotion regulatory goals we have.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, when emotions go astray, insights into how to reel them back in. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Abbott. Let's talk about a small thing that can make a big difference if you have diabetes, the Freestyle Libre 3 Plus Sensor. The sensor gives you real-time glucose readings, so you can see the impact of every meal and activity to make better choices. This is progress. You can try the sensor at freestylelibre.us. Terms and conditions apply, for prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us. Support for Hidden Brain comes from BetterHelp. Many people avoid seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment or stigma. And when people hesitate to seek support, it doesn't just affect them. It impacts families, workplaces, and entire communities. This Mental Health Awareness Month lets encourage everyone to take care of their well-being and to help break the stigma. At BetterHelp, we have over 10 years of experience matching you with the right therapist, so you can access support from the privacy of home and on your schedule. We're all better off with help. Visit betterhelp.com/hiddentoday for 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, help.com/hidden. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to moments in your life when your emotions carried you away. Perhaps you lost your temper over a disputed parking spot. Maybe a colleague set you off at work, or a small dispute with a partner ended up with shouting and tears. Often when we look back on these moments, we cannot for the life of us understand how we could have been so short-sighted. Sometimes the consequences of our words and actions stay with us for years, even lifetimes. Psychologist Ethan Kross studies our emotions and how they often get the better of us. He's thought a lot about how we can get a handle on our feelings. Ethan, you tell the remarkable story of an astronaut who had to confront a runaway train of his own emotions in one of the most dangerous situations possible. Set the scene. Tell me his story.

ETHAN KROSS: So this is a story of Jerry Linenger who was working on the Mir space station, and he's doing some data entry when all of a sudden, he begins to hear the space station alarms begin to siren. He stops entering the data and goes to investigate. And as he moves down the portal and turns around the corner, he begins to see fire and smoke. His first instinct is to go find a respirator. So he begins to swim through the air, trying to find a respirator. And as he's swimming through the air, trying to find this respirator, all sorts of random thoughts begin to fire in his mind, some of which are quite irrational, for example. One thought was, open a window. Not something that you either can do or want to do in outer space. Just an example of how the mind is cycling through these different potential solutions to the problems we're in. So he keeps on looking for a respirator. He finds one, and then it begins to malfunction. And at this point, the space station is filling with smoke. He's having trouble breathing. And he's really begin to worry about his survival. He's thinking about his wife and child back on planet Earth. And as he's beginning to search for that respirator, he actually starts talking to himself, like he's giving advice to someone else. He says to himself, Okay, Jerry, you've got to get going. You need oxygen here. You need to start acting. And he just manages to go a tiny bit further and find one more respirator. And he puts it on. It's working. And then he begins to put out the fire. One extinguisher after another after another. Eventually, the fire gets under control. They extinguish it. They put it out. The fire on the space station goes down as one of the worst catastrophes in space travel history. And he lives to tell the story of what happened after.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you've run multiple studies that explore the power of what Jerry did that day on the spacecraft. He talked to himself. He coached himself through the crisis. You've looked at something called distanced self-talk. What is this, Ethan? And what do you find?

ETHAN KROSS: What distant self-talk involves is coaching yourself through a problem, typically silently, using your name or you, to give yourself instruction. You're essentially talking to yourself in your head like you would give advice to someone else. One of the things we know about people is that it is often much easier for us to give advice to others than it is to take our own advice. There's the famous saying, Do as I say, not as I do. And what we see happening across studies is that when you ask people to try to navigate intense negative emotional experiences, it's a lot easier for them to do so effectively when they're using this kind of self-talk. We find that it not only helps people calm down subjectively, it also helps them reason more wisely about their problems. They're able to look at the bigger picture. They're able to recognize the limits of their own knowledge, predict multiple ways that the future might develop.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ethan says that one of his favorite examples of someone using this technique can be heard in a clip of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

ETHAN KROSS: She was doing an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he asked her to tell the audience what was going through her head when she discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her for the advocacy work she was doing for the rights of young girls to receive an education. And she then goes on to narrate her inner monologue. And she starts off by saying, you know, I used to think to myself, what would I do if the Tali would come and kill me?

CLIP: And then she says, but then I said, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? But then I would reply to myself and say, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? So, it seems there's some internal radar that guides some of us to use this tool automatically when we're really struggling with our experiences. And what we've learned from the research is that you don't have to wait to just spontaneously slide into that way of talking to yourself, likely without any conscious awareness of the fact that you're doing that. You can actually be a lot more strategic in using this type of self-talk in your own life to help you deal with your emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand the tennis star Novak Djokovic also knows about this technique. Describe how he used it at Wimbledon in 2022.

ETHAN KROSS: So it was early in the Wimbledon tournament and he's playing a much, much lower ranked opponent and he's getting creamed in the match. He's really doing poorly. And he takes a break in the middle and he goes to the bathroom. And then when he comes out of the bathroom, he's like a different player. He proceeds to dominate the rest of the match and ultimately win. After the match is over, a journalist asks him, what happened in the bathroom? What happened that turned the match around? And he says he went to the bathroom and he gave himself a pep talk. Listen to what he says as a direct quote, what he said to himself in the locker room. You can do it. Believe in yourself. Now is the time. Forget everything that has happened. New match starts now. Let's go, champ. That's the kind of advice you would give to another person. When my friends come to me and they are experiencing self doubt and they confess it to me, looking for support, those are precisely the things that I say to them. And I think the big question for us all to ponder is, why don't we say those kinds of things to ourselves when we're struggling?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: For those of us who speak more than one language, Ethan, you say that being bilingual offers an unusual way to get some distance from our emotions. How so?

ETHAN KROSS: So there's this interesting phenomenon where when you talk about emotional experiences in a second language, they don't seem to have the same impact. For me personally, there are two languages that I've learned later on in life, and with each one, when I've tried cursing in those languages, inevitably you learn about the expletives and at least for me, I try them out. Saying those bad things doesn't seem quite as inappropriate as if I were to say the same expletive in English. This is a documented phenomenon, so our emotions are encoded in our native language, and there's deep resonance between emotions and our native language as a result. When you ask people to try to reason about really thorny emotional dilemmas in a second language, it allows them to do so more objectively.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One idea that's related to the concept of emotional distancing has to do with something that is called expressive writing. We've touched on this previously on the show. What is expressive writing, Ethan, and what do we know about its power to help us with emotion regulation?

ETHAN KROSS: What expressive writing involves is sitting down and writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings about an experience you're struggling with. For 15 to 20 minutes a day, for anywhere between one to three consecutive days. And the research on this tool is pretty compelling. It shows that when you ask people to engage in this form of emotion regulation, when you ask people to use this tool, it helps them feel better about their experiences. Over time, you find that they're less distressed about the experience. They're healthier. They visit the doctors less over the next few months. The thinking here is, when you sit down to write about an experience, you have to write about someone who that experience is happening to. So essentially, you're thrust into this narrator role, and you become a character in the story that you're writing about. And in a set of studies, we find that that has a distancing function, which predicts some of the benefits linked with this tool.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So some time ago, you accidentally stumbled on another powerful emotion regulation strategy. Your daughter was in a bad mood, and you were on your way to a soccer game together. Paint me a picture of what happened that day, Ethan.

ETHAN KROSS: So this was my youngest daughter, Danny, and I was one of the coaches on her soccer team. And the time we got to spend together on that soccer field was just priceless. And so I would wake up, ready to go. And then one morning, Danny comes down the stairs, and she's just not, she's not into it. She's moping along. And I try all my dad tricks to break her out of her funk. None are effective. We pile into the car. I glance in the back seat, and I could see her head drooping down. And I will admit, it was beginning to bring me down. And then a few minutes into the ride to the soccer field, a song starts playing over the speakers in the car. One of my favorites, Journeys Don't Stop Believing. And without really thinking about it, I just start bopping my head and singing the song. I turn the volume up a bit, and I'm feeling good again. And then I look in the rear view window, and I see that Danny's bopping her head too, and mouthing the words along. And before you know it, I'm really leaning into this song in true dad fashion, singing it very loud, banging on the wheel as I'm doing it. And usually she would cringe at the sight of me doing it, but for whatever reason, she was just playing along this time. And we both were just energized by the music. And fast forward a couple of minutes, we pull up to the soccer field, Danny bolts out of the car, she runs around the field, she has a great game. And what really stood out to me about that experience after it happened was just how powerful music was for rerouting both of our emotional experiences on that morning. Now I have of course listened to music my entire life, and I've enjoyed it. But up until that moment, I never really thought about using music strategically as a tool to modulate how I feel. So after this experience, my colleagues and I dug into the literature on music and emotion, and asked people, why do you listen to music? And almost 100% of the participants in the sample, I think the number was 96% of them, reported that they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. In other words, it's having a regulatory effect. But then, when we do studies, and we ask people across a series of studies, think back to the last time you were anxious, or angry, or sad. What did you do to manage your feelings? Only between 10% and 30% of the participants in those studies report availing themselves of this tool. Just like I, before this experience, didn't avail myself of this tool. So what we're talking about here, the light bulb that went off for me in that moment is that our senses are powerful, powerful shifters of our emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So you went on to more broadly study the use of senses in emotion regulation, not just sounds, but also taste and sight and smell?

ETHAN KROSS: All of the major five senses have the potential to activate our emotions relatively effortlessly. Part of the way sensation operates is by triggering emotional responses. Sensation being the way we make sense of the world around us. Well, it makes sense that if you have the equivalent of these satellite dishes mounted all over your body that are tuned to different kinds of information, i.e. your senses, if you come across stimuli or experiences that are positive or negative, you want those senses to trigger those emotional responses to cue you to approach or avoid those kinds of stimuli or experiences. So sensation and emotion are intimately linked. I mean, we could go down the list. We just talked about music. Music can push our emotions around in all sorts of directions. It can amplify our emotions and pump us up. As Journey did, it can calm us down. Sometimes I now will strategically use music. If I find myself too animated before a presentation or important interview, I will listen to calming music. We can also listen to music to push us in the negative direction, as we sometimes do when we're not feeling great. We lean into those emotions even further by listening to ballads, love ballads, if you will. Vision, art, attractiveness, smell. Let's talk about smell for a second. Smell is a really interesting one. Scent elicits emotions. So I remember when my daughters were younger, on vacation, we'd go to a hotel, and inevitably the hotel would smell really wonderful in the lobby. And I remember seeing on their face this expression of blissfulness. And they'd go, Daddy, it smells so good in here. I love this place. And so what was happening there is those hotels were piping sense through their ventilation systems to arouse a kind of positive emotional response among the guests and visitors of the hotel. So these are shifters, these are levers that you can pull, and they're really, really reliable movers of emotion. I will do an exercise when I'm teaching about this topic in my classes, where I will have people rate how they're feeling throughout the class. I'll get a baseline reading of how they're feeling after I've taught for 20 or 30 minutes, and then I'll give the first sensory experience. Unbeknownst to them, I'll have pizza delivered into the class, and I'll ask them to just take a bite of the pizza and taste it, and then I'll have them rate their emotions again. And you see this ginormous improvement in how they're feeling. They're almost at ceiling on the scale. Then I'll put on a scene from a Pixar movie where a character falls in love and then gets old and their wife dies, and then I have them rate their emotions again, and you see the emotions go down. Then I give them one final experience. And I do a little bit more lecturing. Then I play the fight song for the University of Michigan, which is our kind of rallying cry. And this is my favorite moment in the class, because I play this song, and then I look around, and I see students who have never uttered a word in class. Their eyes are closed, they start bopping their head, just like Danny did in the car that day. And then they start getting even more aggressive with the head bopping. Some are singing along, and then they rate their emotions again, their positive emotions, and they're back up to where the pizza was. So, I'm essentially triggering different levels of positive and negative emotion, like a symphony orchestra conductor. Based on my understanding of how the senses impact the way people feel, the opportunity here for everyone is to think about how can you trigger your senses in a healthy way to bring about the emotional outcomes that you desire.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When it comes to emotion regulation, it turns out there is no one way to do it that works for everyone. Different people find different techniques effective. In fact, what works for you one day might not work for you the next day. When we come back, why trying lots of different emotion regulation techniques is a good idea, and a look at some of the more surprising ways to harness our feelings. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from the University of Chicago's podcast, Big Brains. As a fan of Hidden Brain, there's another podcast you'll find equally fascinating. It's called Big Brains. Produced by the University of Chicago, Big Brains gives you a front row seat to the groundbreaking research that is solving societal issues and improving our world. Don't worry, this is not a scholarly lecture. Big Brains helps experts unpack the data and science in a way that's easy to understand and engaging. Discover the new psychology behind living a fulfilling life. Learn how economists are using chaos theory to predict not just the stock market, but the entire economy. Or find out what studying dogs could teach us about reversing human aging. Tune in to Big Brains for insightful conversations with the minds behind these and other world-changing breakthroughs. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liquid IV. Liquid IV's formula, powered by Live Hydro Science, is sugar-free and delicious. Visit liquidiv.com and live more with efficient hydration featuring the new Raspberry Lemonade Hydration Multiplier. Get 20% off your first order with code BRAIN at checkout. Break the mold and own your ritual. Give yourself the power of extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV. Get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquidiv.com and use code BRAIN at checkout. That's 20% off your first order with code BRAIN at liquidiv.com. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There are times when we feel a surge of emotion in the moment, and we have to find ways to regulate our feelings in order to function effectively. But there are other times when we do just fine in the moment, but can't stop intrusive thoughts from entering our heads in the weeks and months afterwards. Grief can do this to people, so can worry. Psychologist Ethan Kross is the author of Shift, Managing Your Emotions, So They Don't Manage You. Ethan, you've written about the experience of a woman you call Luisa who dealt with a very scary situation involving her little daughter. Tell me what happened.

ETHAN KROSS: So the scene is one that you've likely encountered countless times. You're on a plane and you see a mob sitting with their little child, and they're at 30,000 feet, and the kid takes a bite of a granola bar, and then begins to cough. And immediately, the mom named Luisa reaches over to look at the granola bar wrapper, and there it is. She missed it. She sees on the ingredient list peanuts, and the kid has a pretty severe peanut allergy. The first thing she does is she whips out some Benadryl from her bag, and gives her kid a dose of Benadryl, but it doesn't have the intended effect. And so, the daughter starts to writhe in pain, her stomach hurts, she begins to vomit. So, she has to take the more extreme measure of reaching in her bag for the EpiPen, pulls down her daughter's pajamas, and jams the pen into her thigh. Fortunately, the intervention does this time have the intended effect, and the allergic reaction subsides. The emotional reaction that Louisa struggled with after this flight persisted for months. She couldn't stop thinking about what if. On the one hand, going back in time, what if she hadn't had the EpiPen? What if the EpiPen didn't work? Then she'd go into the future, and she would do the same thing. What if another kid at school gives her daughter a taste of his or her snack, and it has peanuts? What if her daughter goes to a birthday party, and another parent unwittingly serves her a piece of cake that was prepared in a kitchen with peanuts? And these thoughts, these intrusive thoughts, begin to metastasize in her mind, and are becoming unbelievably disruptive.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Did she find a way to get a handle on them, Ethan?


SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Now, some people might say that Luisa was distracting herself, Ethan. Is that right? Is that healthy?

ETHAN KROSS: >There's a giant myth that avoidance is always harmful. And I think we need to correct that myth, because the ability to strategically deploy your attention away from things at times can actually be really useful. There's no question that chronically avoiding things is not good. But in Luisa's case, taking time away from the experience often just let that experience fizzle altogether. I've experienced this in my life many times before, and I should say, Shankar, that sometimes I can get triggered by an email, a conversation, a thought, and then if I force myself to take some time away from it, the experience ceases to bother me at all, or sometimes when I come back to the problem after taking some time away, I find that the problem has tempered quite a bit, and it's a lot easier for me to deal with the problem objectively and effectively.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So growing up, Ethan, you were able to observe the strategy of selective avoidance in someone who was very close to you. How did your grandmother handle the devastating experiences she had been through as a younger person?

ETHAN KROSS: So my grandmother was a hero of mine. I spent almost every afternoon at her house growing up after school. While my parents were working, she took care of me, and her backstory was a really interesting one. So she was born and was raised in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and witnessed her family be slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II. And she then basically fled the Nazis, lived in the forest for years as she tried to survive with my grandfather. And growing up, I would always want to hear about the stories that she experienced, but she would never talk to me about them. Except one time a year, there would be this remembrance day that she and other members of her community from Eastern Europe, the survivors, would organize this day. And I would just listen to my grandmother and grandfather and others just wail. They would talk in detail about what they went through. They would say things and tell stories that I would never hear on any other day, except that one day. And then the day was over, and she would go back to being her more stoic self when it came to these experiences. And so what I later realized is what my grandmother was doing is she was being strategic in terms of allowing herself to think about what she went through and her family members who perished. Selectively, though, and on her terms. And that was a solution that worked well for her. And it's a solution that flies in the face of, I think, lots of popular calls to always approach our emotions. We now know from research that some people benefit from not reflexively approaching their emotions. And sometimes this capacity to be strategic in how you deploy your attention can actually be really, really effective.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So it seems like what she was doing was compartmentalizing her emotions. She was saying that now is a time to basically engage in them, soak in them, share them, and there are other times when I'm going to hold it in.

ETHAN KROSS: That's right. And by all accounts, she led a great life. And so this was a tool that worked well for her. It reminds me of some of the data surrounding how people coped following the 9-11 attacks. So I was living in New York. I had just moved to graduate school, actually, a week or two before the plane struck the Twin Towers. And I remember in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, there was a lot of discourse about the need to care for the people in New York City, and in particular, the people living around, living and working around Ground Zero. And there was this assumption that we have to get them to talk about their feelings. We've got to force them to really like just get it all out. Don't keep it bottled up inside. Fast forward several years, there have been studies which have tracked people's tendencies to talk about what they experienced during the 9-11 attacks over time. And what the data show is that in some cases, talking about what people went through actually didn't have any effect on their emotional experience. And in some cases, it actually made them feel worse. And so if there's one big take home that I have learned over the past 25 years of doing research in this space, it is that there are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. Some people benefit enormously from talking to other people about their experiences and processing and working through them. I happen to be someone like that. I do tend to like to work through the experiences when it occurred. Other people don't avail themself of that tool, and they do different things instead. We have access to a vast armamentarium of tools that we can wield. And as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, different strokes for different folks.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Another approach to emotion that psychologists and ordinary people have often assumed is unhealthy is what we might call acting out, letting lose with behavior that's unusual or unconventional. You cite the story of a famous Chicago athlete who went to some lengths to act out, even as his team was on the pinnacle of accomplishing great feats. Tell me that story, Ethan.

ETHAN KROSS: So this is a story about Dennis Rodman when he's playing with the Bulls, and they're vying for another championship, and there's a break between games. And rather than just taking it easy, maybe joining the team for a light practice, he takes off, goes to Detroit, participates in a wrestling match, and then comes back, rejoins his team, and has one of the best games of his career, or that season one of his best games, and they ultimately win the championship yet again. And so, my interpretation of Rodman's behavior there is he's doing something not that different from what my grandmother did, in the sense that he is in this very high-pressure situation, right, like playing for a championship at the highest levels with the most elite athletes in the world. And he's totally diverting his attention by going into a totally different context for a short period, to essentially restore, and then comes back fresh. This is a form of avoiding, that's an avoidance behavior. Now, I want to be really clear. There are some kinds of avoidance behaviors that are harmful across the board. Drug usage, risky sexual behavior, these have been definitively shown to not be helpful for people's lives. That's not what we're talking about. When I talk about strategic avoidance, I mean temporarily diverting your attention, shift your attentional spotlight, let the other problem simmer down, so that when you return to it, if you return to it at all, if you need to return to it, you can do so from a more objective and restore point of view.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Talk about why using a variety of emotion regulation strategies might be better than using only one or two. Why would this be the case, Ethan?

ETHAN KROSS: Research in the space of emotion regulation began with researchers identifying specific tools and then carefully profiling how they work mechanistically, across levels of analysis, and in different groups. And so, we've done that with lots of individual tools and we have identified dozens. What research has yet to do, though, is understand how different tools combine to help people dealing with different situations that they encounter in their lives. What we know is that when you look at how people manage their emotions in their daily lives, they don't restrict themselves to just one tool. On average, we find that people use between three and four strategies each day to manage that experience. And so, we know that people are using multiple tools, and we also know that different combinations of tools are working for different people. It's not just one combination. We don't yet know why certain tools hang together for certain people. The metaphor I like to use here to make sense of this, which really resonates strongly with me, is to look to physical fitness and exercise. When you go to the gym, number one, you don't do one exercise. If you're weight training, for example, I haven't met anyone who only curls biceps as the only thing they do in the gym, right? You do a few different things, and you actually, you switch up the exercises every single day to meet different kinds of physical demands that you have, physical goals. We also know that different people avail themselves of different physical fitness regimens. So I may lift weights and run and do some high intensity interval training. My wife does Pilates and yoga. Pilates and yoga works really well for my wife, and what I do works really well for me. So we use multiple tools and different people use different kinds of tools. I think that actually scaffolds really nicely on to what we're learning about how to be emotionally fit.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering if this is something that you yourself consciously do, Ethan. Do you find yourself reaching for different tools in the toolkits to regulate your own emotions?

ETHAN KROSS: I do. I'm incredibly deliberate about the tools I use, and I have, it's not haphazard for me, so I have different layers of intervention. So my initial intervention is I use distant self-talk and mental time travel. Those are my first two go-tos. Sometimes I'll throw in creating order around me, so we know when emotions are feeling really big and out of control, we don't feel like we have order in our minds. Creating order around us compensates for that experience. So I'll do those two or three things. Sometimes, though, it's not enough. And I have to ratchet it up and go to another layer of intervention. What I'll do in that point is I'll call some of my emotional advisors up. What I mean by emotional advisors, these are not clinically trained individuals. I'm not paying them for support. These are people in my network who do two things for me. Number one, they're really adept at connecting with me emotionally. They empathize, they validate what I'm going through. There's a resonance that I don't have to worry about being created. And then after that kind of emotional connection is achieved, and they learn about what I'm going through, they help me work through the experience. So that'll be the second line of intervention. I'll sometimes often, this is weather permitting in the state in which I live in Michigan, I'll go for a walk in our arboretum or down certain tree-lined streets in our neighborhood. I've been really, really impressed by the data demonstrating how restorative and regulating going for a walk in a safe, natural setting can be. And so I'll layer that in as well. And 90% of the time, that's what I need to do to break out of my funk.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, an emotion regulation strategy to deploy when all the others fail. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from All Modern. Have you met All Modern? All Modern thinks making your space modern with fresh furniture and decor should be easy. That's why All Modern's team of modern obsessed experts hand vets each design for quality. And not to mention, they offer fast and free shipping. Yep, that means you can upgrade your home in days, not weeks. So whether you're updating your living room with a plush new sofa, setting up an alfresco dining area with a modern table and chairs, or designing a cozy fireside retreat, All Modern has everything for your modern outdoor escape, all in one place. That's modern made for real life. Shop now at allmodern.com or visit them in store in Linfield and Dedham, Massachusetts, or in Austin, Texas. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Amazon. The last thing you want to do when you're sick is to go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Because then, you're standing in a long line with a whole bunch of sick people, and everyone is sick of being sick around other people who are sick. Amazon Pharmacy will deliver right to you, fast, so you can get meds without congregating amongst the contagious. Healthcare just got less painful. Amazon Pharmacy. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us dream of fame and success. We imagine that when we have those things, our lives will be happy and fulfilled. Psychologist Ethan Kross tells the story of a person who stumbled into fame and success, and found they didn't have the effects on her emotions that she expected. Ethan, some time ago, we featured the Yale psychologist Laurie Santos on Hidden Brain. She talked about some of her early research on animal behavior. We published an episode about her work. Listeners who are interested can go to hiddenbrain.org and look up the episode titled, The Monkey Marketplace. This was in 2019. What I wasn't aware of, Ethan, is that Laurie's life had recently been upended. What happened?

ETHAN KROSS: Well, Laurie had just taken over duties as the head of one of Yale's colleges, where she effectively acted as a type of den mother to the undergrads. She was there to not just make sure the dorm was kept in order, to also be a type of mentor-like figure for the students. And while acting in that capacity, she noticed about the struggles, the everyday kinds of struggles they were often encountering. And so she very creatively decided to teach a course on the topic of how to have a good life. And what she didn't expect was that once enrollment for the course was open, that a record number of students would sign up for it. I believe the number was over 900.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Wow.

ETHAN KROSS: >She quickly catapulted from a professor with an excellent reputation on campus to a veritable superstar. And it wasn't just being a superstar on campus. Pretty soon, the New York Times and other periodicals caught wind of what she was doing, and they started covering her. And so the next thing you know, she's giving lectures and then flying out to do interviews and give talks elsewhere. At one point, she's so busy that an invitation comes in to literally meet with the pope that she had to turn down. Just to put in perspective, how much her life had changed. And from the outside looking in, it would seem like everything is going so unbelievably well for Lori. That was certainly the impression that I had from afar as a friend of hers, who was just proud of her and relishing her successes. What I didn't realize at the time and what you didn't realize either when you interviewed her was that Lori was really struggling because with this new fame came all of these demands. And Lori is such a helper. She wants to help everyone. And these requests were coming in from all over the place. And she just found herself totally overworked and totally burned out. She had also began to record a podcast, The Happiness Lab, which very quickly ascended the ranks of popularity in the podcast world. And so she had a gazillion things going on. And she was teaching students about the tools, about many tools that they can use to be happier and lead more successful lives. And it goes back to this finding about how we are, we are much better at giving advice to others than sometimes implementing that advice on our own. And I don't think that discounts the advice we give in any way. The advice we give, the counsel we offer to others is sometimes enormously helpful. But there are some impediments that we sometimes experience when we try to apply that advice to ourselves.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: At one point, Laurie was recording a podcast episode. And again, she's like this hamster, you know, juggling different things and trying to keep all the different balls in the air. And during this podcast interview, she finds that she has basically been pronouncing a guest's name wrong throughout the recording. What happens, Ethan?

ETHAN KROSS: She slams her keyboard in frustration and breaks it. And then sheepishly has to go into tech to get it fixed. It's a very human experience. Sometimes we reach our breaking points. And this is true of the experts as well. And she had reached her breaking point.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You also tell the story about a time when she received a relatively benign request from a student who was looking for help in terms of a dental emergency. Can you tell me that story, Ethan?

ETHAN KROSS: >So this was a real turning point for Lori, where she realized she had to do something different. A student emails her with this benign question. He or she is looking for dental resources. They need a dentist. She is by very nature someone who likes to help others. She took this position as being the head of a college because she liked to help others. And this request comes in for some help. And rather than instantly trying to share resources with a student and get them the information that they need, instead she immediately experiences irritation and anger and frustration. Oh, one more thing I have to deal with. I don't have time to deal with this. Those thoughts and the accompanying feelings were elicited automatically. And actually, she was embarrassed that she had even entertained those thoughts. But it was that experience that really signaled to Lori that she had to do something.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So she's a psychologist, she's a researcher, she had tried lots of things, she had talked to people, she was seeing a therapist, she had tried journaling. None of these techniques had worked. So what did she do?

ETHAN KROSS: She left. So she put in for an unpaid leave, and she essentially took a sabbatical. She moved to another college town, and she settled there. And the moment she changed her space, she found that she was overcome with a sense of emotional relief. I find this really interesting because I think it's easy to underestimate the role that our environment, our physical environment, plays in our emotional life. And in fact, our environment contains resources that we can use to manage our emotions, if we understand where to find them. So we often talk about attachment. I'm sure you've had many scholars on this show talking about the attachments we form to other people and the role they play in our emotional lives. People that we are securely attached with, positively attached to, they can provide a real source of resilience during stressful times. Research shows that we also develop attachments to places. So there are places that we are positively connected with. And when we visit those spaces, they elicit a positive emotional response. I used to see this a lot with my daughters when they were little. I remember this was very striking. Whenever they would get really upset about something, either a fight they had with someone at school, or maybe if they got in trouble with me or my wife, they would instantly say, I just want to go home. I want to go to my room. I want to go to my room. Their room was a place that was a safe place for them, a sense of security. And they intuited this, and when feeling down, wanted to visit it, to regain that sense of security. And so I think it's really instructive to stop and think about what are the places in our lives that are the equivalent of safe houses when we are struggling with emotional problems. So I love watching these spy movies where the spy is being chased, or the Jason Bourne character, and there are safe houses embedded among the cities. We all have the equivalent of safe houses around us. For me, it's the Arboretum in Ann Arbor, a couple of blocks from my home. When I'm in that space, it has this very positive soothing effect. It's also the local tea house where I spent a significant amount of time writing my first book. I have very positive associations about that tea house, and simply sitting there fills me with a sense of comfort. And so that's another tool that people can use to manage their emotions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that Laurie, stepping away from the stresses of her life in New Haven, she found this really restorative. She ended up giving up several of the things that she was doing. She surrendered some of her responsibilities, decisions that might have been much harder to make if she was still in New Haven.

ETHAN KROSS: That's right. And so switching spaces both provided her with a sense of comfort and resilience. It also acted as a type of distancing tool. In this case, it was a physical distancing tool, getting the physical space away from the locus, from the location of the epicenter of the problem, allowed her to look at her circumstances from a wider point of view. She could see that bigger picture, and she could see that maybe it's time to make some hard decisions about where to invest and where to divest.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ethan, you recently confronted a situation that called for all the emotion regulation skills you could muster. It began early one morning when your phone buzzed. Paint me a picture of what happened.

ETHAN KROSS: A text message went off on my phone early in the morning, and there was a message that said school for one of my daughters was being canceled that day. And I saw the message. It was very early on in the morning, and then I tried to go back to bed, but I wasn't very successful, because my mind kept on trying to suss out why school was being canceled. Typically, when we get text messages along these lines, the reason is given. Snow, really cold temperatures, et cetera. And so I kept on replaying it, and I ended up realizing that I wasn't getting back to bed, so I went downstairs. And a few minutes later, I find out from a message from another parent that the reason school was being canceled was because a credible threat was made to the school, a threat to do really bad, harmful things. And this is a parent's worst nightmare, to have to entertain these kinds of possibilities. And the e-mails began to fly, or the text messages back and forth between some of the other parents about what was going on. And it was very easy to see tensions beginning to escalate. And the moment I began to notice myself beginning to spiral, I instantly implemented some of the tools that we're talking about. The first thing I did is I brought my perspective. I tried to look at the bigger picture here. I used distant self-talk to help me do it. I said to myself, the school and law enforcement agencies are investigating things. I don't have to worry about this right now. I also leaned into strategic avoidance. I recognized that there was nothing I could possibly do in this situation personally to resolve it, so I leaned hard into my work. I also went for a walk in the Arboretum near my house, and that further helped me rest and restore. And I also tapped into my advisory board. I spoke to someone in my network who had some experience dealing with these kinds of circumstances, and they were really helpful for further helping me look at that bigger picture and recognize the circumstances I was facing. Now, engaging in those different tools did not make this problem go away. Fortunately it did go away. They caught the person who sent the thread, and nothing bad happened. What using those tools allowed me to do was keep my anxiety about this issue at a reasonable level of activation. This was an important situation that I did want to be focused on and keeping eyes on. But what those tools allowed me to do was keep the emotions from metastasizing in ways that prevented me from doing anything else that day, and feeling miserable as well.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ethan Kross is a psychologist at the University of Michigan. He's the author of Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. Ethan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

ETHAN KROSS: Thanks, it was a joy as always, Shankar.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.