THE ED MYLETT SHOW - How to Shift Your Emotions Automatically with Dr. Ethan Kross

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Are Your Thoughts Controlling You, or Are You in Control of Them? In this incredible conversation with Dr. Ethan Kross, we unpack the invisible force that shapes our emotions, actions, and ultimately, our lives—our inner voice. Dr. Kross is not only one of the world’s leading experts on emotional regulation, but his insights on how we talk to ourselves and manage our emotions are absolutely life-changing. We discuss how your thoughts and emotions are deeply intertwined, and how you can use simple, science-backed strategies to shift your emotional state instantly. Whether it’s sensory triggers, the power of perspective, or the way we narrate our experiences, this conversation gives you the tools to regain control of your mind and your life. Dr. Kross shares stories and actionable strategies that demonstrate how small mental shifts can create massive change. From breaking free from emotional loops to finding clarity during life’s toughest moments, this is a masterclass in mental resilience. Here’s what you’ll learn: How to stop your thoughts from spiraling into anxiety and fear. The surprising connection between your senses and emotional state. Why helping someone else in your darkest moments might be the key to your own healing. How simple perspective shifts can change your emotional trajectory. Why your inner voice can be your greatest coach—or your worst enemy. This conversation isn’t just about managing your emotions—it’s about mastering them. Take these lessons, apply them to your life, and start creating a mental space where you thrive. Your thoughts don’t have to control you. You have the power to control them—and that changes everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to the show everybody. I love this week's topic. We're going to talk about your emotions and it's something that I want to talk about more on the show but finding really qualified people to help you is not easy and so when I do find them I chase them down to get them in front of you for an hour and so I have found somebody today that I know is gonna help you. First off, his last book, Chatter, I read in two days and it made a huge impact on me and some of the things you even hear me teach and say guys came from that book. He's a professor at University of Michigan psychology department. He's already had a best-selling book and his new book, Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You and

I know you all want to know how to do that. So Dr. Ethan Cross, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. So have I. Let's talk about shift. What is conceptually first of all because through the book you talk about sensory shifters, attention shifters. So specifically is a shift just a redirection? I know what it means because I read the book, but I wanna set the premise for the audience first. That's right, it's shifting your emotional state. And there are a couple of ways you can do it.

You can turn the volume on your emotions up or down, and you can also lengthen or shorten the amount of time you spend in an emotion. That's another kind of shift. Or you can shift from one emotion to the next. Anxious, happy, sad, elated, right? So each of those processes involves just shifting, moving back and forth.

So it's kind of a, in my house, it's become a bit of a buzzword. I'll tell you what, my kids absolutely love it when they're getting a little emotional. I'm like, guys shift. You said we can go in and out of the book. So I told him off camera guys, I'm gonna ask you stuff for me today too. So do you believe in such a thing as like an emotional home,

meaning that a person has a pre-disp, not predisposition, but a propensity to relive the same emotions over and over again, even if they're not the ones they want. It could be angst, fear, anxiety, and they find themselves moving towards what's familiar to them rather than maybe what they want or what serves them. Absolutely in the sense that we often find ourselves reliving emotional states that we don't want to be experiencing, but we do have those experiences over and over. And they can be really debilitating when that happens

because if we find ourselves consumed with those states, let's say it's anxiety about something that happened in the past or burning rage about some transgression that you've experienced, if you find yourself harping on that over and over again, it consumes your attention, makes it really hard for you to think and perform optimally. It can interfere with your relationships

because through a variety of pathways, one of which is you wanna talk about this stuff to other people all the time, and sometimes that can push away people who care about us, and it can gnaw away at not just our subjective well-being, how good or bad we feel, but our physical health too. Getting stuck in unwanted emotional spin cycles for a while can actually degrade our physical health.

So absolutely, and that's one of the things I hope this book can help teach people to do is get out of those states if they want to. That's the biggest thing everybody. So what we're gonna talk about today is how to change those states when you're in them that may not serve you. How correlated are thoughts and emotions?

I know you talk a lot in the book about inner voice, et cetera, et cetera, but let's start kind of where I kind of start with my work, which is thoughts. And so are they cousins? Are they directly related to one another? How do they relate and connect to one another? Well, this is a question that scientists

have been playing with for like a century now. And I would say thoughts are intimately involved in the experience of emotion, but you get categories where they may not be involved. So let me give you a couple of examples to break this down. You could think your way in, into, or out of different emotional states. If I asked you, if I asked you to think about something

on the horizon that you're really excited about, you have something like that? I sure do. You think about? Yes. And if, like make you feel good to think about that? It does. You're smiling even when you say that, right?

So actually that's part of that emotional response. We've got this expressive display. I can see it as a consumer of your emotions, how you're feeling. So that you just thought your way into an emotion. And we do this all the time when we go in the darker direction too. We think about the what ifs, right?

What if this happens? What if that happens? It's pretty amazing at how incredible your mind is coming up with what if scenarios without ever exhausting them, right? And so that's us thinking our way into experiences. All right. Let's do a few examples of ways that you might experience emotion without necessarily thinking about it. You ever pass someone on the streets of New York City, it's my hometown, maybe you're taking the subway or you just happen to walk by someone who just doesn't smell very nice and you're hit immediately with an emotional response.

Sure. Disgust. Yes. Right? Yes. No thinking involved there. Boom, automatic. When my kids were young, we would go on vacations, we'd go to a hotel and

I got two girls and they'd be like, oh, daddy, I love the way it smells in here. I love this place. They're not thinking their way into emotions. That's the people who run the hotel chains who are piping in scents into the ventilation, desirable scents to make you feel so right. Cologne and perfume. Probably a billion dollar industry, billions, you think? Yes. Right? Yes.

All about moving your emotions around without you thinking. And so thinking can be involved in our emotions, but it also doesn't have to be. And the beauty of the science here is We can open up the hood and show you how to shift your emotions Through all of these different pathways through your senses through thinking through relationships and so forth One of them in the book is sensory shifters and I'll validate a crazy one for you I'm in New York this last weekend with my daughter. We happen to go into the hotel store

It's about 25 degrees in New York this last weekend with my daughter. We happened to go into the hotel store. It's about 25 degrees in New York this weekend when we were there. We went into the hotel store and they actually, believe it or not, at the hotel I was staying at, it had like suntan lotion with this smell to it. And I smelled it and it had like this kind of coconut smell. Anyway, it immediately took me back to like being on the beach and actually a time I was in Hawaii,

it was the same exact stuff. And that sensory emotion literally transported me And actually a time I was in Hawaii, it was the same exact stuff. And that sensory emotion literally transported me from the environment that I was in, literally a 25 degree environment to this beautiful, perfect place. And it's just easier. You know this, when you're in New York, there's a hustle and bustle, it's quick,

you're wound up a little bit, you know? And all of a sudden to this completely relaxed state. So when you say in the book, sensory shifters, I sort of experienced a little flavor of that. Share with us, because we're on that topic, we might as well go there. What is one of the ways someone can shift their emotions? What is a sensory shift? So a sensory shift is when you activate your senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, purposefully to push your emotions in a particular direction. This is one of the quickest ways to push your emotions around.

It's something that all listeners have had experiences with throughout their lives, but it's not something we are often deliberate about activating. So here's what I mean by that. If you ask people, well, let me just ask you, let's just do this study right here. Let's what I mean by that. If you ask people, well let me just ask you. Let's just do this study right here. Let's see how it works out. So Ed, why do you listen to music? I assume you listen to music on occasion? I just, every day. Every day. Okay, why do you do it?

In my case, just because I'm a little bit familiar with your work in mind, I do do it to create a state. So there's certain types of music I will listen to when I'm working out, which is not the same music that I listen to when I wake up in the morning, which is typically worship music, right? So it's to create a state in me. Yes. Okay, so maybe I wasn't, it was a little bit of a planted agent there.

No, it's great. But that's okay. Yep. So if you ask people like why they listen to music, most people will say, I like the way it makes me feel. Yeah. Feel. We listen to music like, cause it pushes our emotions around.

I went to the Taylor Swift concert, a couple of weeks ago. Good for you. And yes, there was a lot of creative negotiations that my kids and wife. I was gonna say that might have something to do with the daughters. I'm not sure, but I'm just a guess. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yes. It had to do with the daughters. But I'm in this arena, 40,000 people or something around that. I'm just looking around. I'm like, all of these people have just paid enormous sums

of money, myself unfortunately included, for an emotion regulation experience. We are having our emotions be collectively shifted through sensation, through music. So we all know this to be true, but here's the rub. If you ask people the last time you were anxious, angry, or sad, what did you do to make yourself feel better? Close to 100% of people will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. But if you look across studies, it's only between 10 and 30% that actually avail themselves of this tool when they're actually struggling. So we are sitting on this tool that is really effective, very reliable. we're not taking advantage of it.

So this was true for me until I started doing some science on this. I tell some stories about just taking this for granted. But when I get into my car every day now, I look at the dashboard, I don't see an LCD display. I see an emotion regulation machine. I love it. And this machine is populated with playlists that can push my emotions wherever I want them to go.

And that is a very valuable resource I possess. So that's just one example of a tool. All of your senses work this way. Touch, you got to be careful with touch. But affectionate, I call it affectionate, but not creepy touch. Like my daughter's had a bad go, I rub their back, I give them a hug, right? Don't necessarily do that at work. But in the right circumstance, powerful tool. Like when your kids were, how many kids do you have? Just one?

I have two, I have a son and a daughter. I'm guessing the same thing happened when both of them were born. Correct. You held them immediately. Amen. Skin to skin contact. The skin is an emotional apparatus, right? You can activate that and we could just keep on going down the list. But the point here is this isn't a tool, it's free. No side effects. Make use of it. You know, overall I would say my audience is an achiever audience and one of the things that I found as I've coached people as well is that most people are very good at focusing on the next goal they want to achieve or goals. I want to make

a certain amount of money or certain body weight and look a certain way or get into this relationship or buy this particular car, give to my church, whatever it might be. And the more and more I've done my work I've realized it's not necessary that you want that car, you want how you think that car would make you feel. You may not even need the body the way that you think you need it to look, but it's how you'd feel if you had it. Even this other person that's not in your life that if you think you'd get them in your life, is it really that or is it how you think that would make you feel? And the reason I make this point as I begin to ask you some different stuff here

is that I just want to challenge everyone listening to you. What if some of your focus, your ambitions, your intention was towards the feeling and not the stuff for the person? And what if as a culture we started to have more tools that delivered to us how we want to feel? Here's my hallucination. If you're in those emotional states more often, you could regulate that. Maybe the stuff would be easier to get. Maybe the money would be easier to accumulate. Maybe that relationship would come your way. Maybe you wouldn't eat the way you eat if you already felt the way you think you're going to feel

because a lot of people eat to feel things. So having said all of that, I want to get some terminology straight because we're going to talk about perspective shifters and space shifters, all these tools. What does emotional congruency mean in your world? Because it's one of the things in the book that I at least want to dive into a little bit. Emotional congruency means what? So this is actually the name for an effect, which is a counterintuitive one,

which is when you are feeling sad. So a lot of us are motivated to be happy, right? Despite the fact that negative emotions are actually good for us when they're experienced in the right proportions. Well, emotional congruency refers to the fact that when we're feeling sad, rather than turn on the radio and listen to,

in my case, Journey or Guns N' Roses, I'm instead listening to Adele or Chicago. I'm essentially being pulled. Something inside of me is saying, I want to have this other sensory experience that matches what I'm feeling inside right now. And to some extent, that may make sense in the following. So if you ask me, Ethan, how the hell can sadness be a good thing? We typically don't think of being sadness as a good thing. Well, we experience, I'd like to think of emotions as like little software programs that get loaded up

to help you deal with the emotions and the situations you're in. So sadness, we experience sadness when we encounter a loss that we can't replace. We've gotten fired, a deal hasn't worked out, we've lost someone we love, we've been rejected. When that happens, this feeling of sadness, what it does is it activates this coordinated response inside you that says, hey, let me pull back a little bit. Let me turn my attention to where let me try to make sense of what's happening now given this new information. My life has changed. I have to reframe, rethink about myself in this world. So I'm going to take some time away to do that. Now taking

time away when you're sad might be a little dangerous. So what does a software program do? It also signals to everyone around us, hey, check up on us at times. And how does it do that? Sad facial expression. You see a sad facial expression, we as other people feel compelled to help. This can be taken advantage of. There's a dark arts of emotion here that my two daughters are exceptionally skilled at

by the way, because they do something bad and I maybe discipline them a little bit and then they do this exaggerated sadist response. And I melt. It's automatic. So here's the deal. So sadness in the right dosage, it's getting us to think carefully about what we're going through. And then we put on this other music and that helps us go deeper into that state, right? The Chicago, the Adele, and there's some comfort in that. But, and this is a really big but, if you don't want to be in that state any longer,

you need to resist this emotional congruency. You wanna go for Journey Whatever your favorite music is every now. I don't I don't presume that everyone likes Journey But I do Steve Perry's the greatest greatest male rock voice of all time. Come on Amazing amazing so by the way Everybody we're doing this day because I want you to be cognizant of your emotions and maybe be a little more intentional with them and Then have some tools you could call these shifts. You could call these shifts, you could call these triggers,

you could call them whatever you want, but in this case, they're shifters in the book. So, hey guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow. And also taking a look at the future. If you want to change your future, you got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented,

you're much more likely to do that yourself. And that's why I love Growth Day. Write this down for a second. growthday.com forward slash ed. My friend Brendal Bruchard has created the most incredible personal development and business app that I've ever seen in my life. Everything from goal setting software to personal accountability, journaling, courses, thousands of dollars worth of courses in there as well. I create content in there on Mondays where I contribute as do a whole bunch of other influences like the Avengers of influencers and business minds in there. It's the Netflix for high achievers or

people that want to be high achievers so go check it out my friend Brennan's made it very affordable very easy to get involved go to growthday.com forward slash ed that's growthday.com forward slash ed this message is sponsored by green light and I gotta tell you I wish green light existed when I was a kid but I'm so grateful it's existed for my kids so you know we all know the old saying give a man a fish he eats for a day teach a man to fish and he eats for life. This isn't just true with fishing, it's true for parents with their kids. And one of the most under-taught skills in life is financial success and responsibility.

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That's greenlight.com slash ed to try Greenlight today at Greenlight.com slash ed. That's Greenlight.com slash ed to try Greenlight today. Greenlight.com slash ed. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. There's something in here that I thought was super unique because I think music to many people, they go, yep, I get that one. That's one I use already.

You know, I'll get my music to get me going in the morning or if I'm a person of faith, I'll listen to worship music. Like before I speak in front of big arenas even, I am very often feeding myself different types of music to put me in that state. And by the way, different music for a different type of message in my case. So it is a huge trigger for me.

But there was something in here, I'm gonna just phrase it like this and then let you go. The inner voice benefits and then thinking versus writing and the difference between those two things. Because I think this is a huge tool that many people aren't aware of and the power impact of it. So we just talked about sensory shifters. Let's go to perspective shifters. How do we change the way we think about our circumstances? This is a powerful tool that is unique to us as humans. We could shift our perspective, look at that bigger picture, tell ourselves a new story that helps us move on with our lives.

There we go. In the words of a very good friend of mine, a distinguished physician, I can't help but smile every time I tell the story. We're coming back from dinner one night. It's my wife and I and this physician and his wife. And he's having some problems at work. And he's pretty negative about the situation. His wife says, well, just think about it more positively. You'll feel better.

And he goes, yeah, easier effing said than done. Right? It would be really exaggerated, which I think taps into something that so many of us feel so often. We know we can and we maybe should think differently about what we're dealing with because the way we're thinking about it is taking us in the wrong direction. Yeah. But we can't seem to do it. And indeed, a lot of this book, Shift, is about how to help

you do it, how to give you tools to do it when you want to. So to go back to your question though about thinking versus writing, we often try to think through our problems. And sometimes it just makes it worse. It takes us down the doom and gloom. Yes. You know, tailspin, thought looping, chatter, rumination, worry, not good. Part of the reason why that happens is we don't have any guard rails when we think. We're just pinballing all over the place, right?

Where thoughts are firing, it's very fragmented, it's very emotional. What we've learned is that if you actually have a person sit down and ask them to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about something for just 10 to 15 minutes, for one day to three days in a row, no, don't worry about grammar. Just let yourself go. What that does, what research finds is that that helps people create a story, a narrative to make sense of what they're going through. And it gives

structure to this very disorganized frame of mind that we're in when we're like, what if this, what if that? The mind goes all over the place. You think things to yourself that you wouldn't dare admit to another human being sometimes. When you're putting those thoughts on paper, guess what? We learn from the time we're little kids how to write sentences. Sentences have a beginning, a middle, and an end, punctuation. So does a paragraph. There's a structure to it. And as we work our way through that story, we wrap that story up. And when we wrap that story up in writing, we wrap it up in our minds, and that allows us to move on. So this is called expressive writing. And it's an effortful tool in the sense that you do need to sit down and take 10 to 15 minutes to do it. But let's be real,

10 to 15 minutes of writing for a few days compared to some much more heavy-handed and destructive interventions that people engage in regularly for their emotions. That's a pretty good trade-off. I gotta tell everybody, I want you to really dial in here. Stay in, okay? This is important because all of you are gonna have, all of you right now have had some point this last week where you'd like to change or regulate your emotions to shift them. You've also or you're going to have them and I got to tell you this idea of expressive writing, this was recommended to me a few years ago. I'm just going to share this with everybody first. Number one, I'm not a great writer. Okay and I don't have the patience to write. By the way, any of you that read my

books, you can validate this. You know, it's not my great skill and I started this process and I have to tell you, number one, there's different shifts in the book. One of them is a perspective shifter. For me, when I write down my feelings or even when I want the story to look like you guys, it changes my perspective because almost like my thoughts and emotions are now outside of me and they're on the paper. I get some separation from them. It's almost like therapy for me when I write. I also start to just think differently like that maybe I have some influence over this story that I'm writing.

That I'm the lead character and the writer of this story and that the pen in my hand indicates to me that I can start to write a new chapter or a new page of the book of this moment or of this time in my life. Don't take this lightly finding 10 or 15 minutes a day where you journal or write your feelings down or the story you're going through is it's the number one perspective shifter for me. Music is an obvious one I think for many of you, but this is a huge one for me.

Also, I wanna kind of merge your work together a little bit because this idea of chatter and the shifting of the chatter, the both kind of works together. I kind of want to merge us together here a little bit if we can. So tell us how chatter is and what it is and then what is a pattern interrupt or a tool you use? Is it the shifts you use to change the chatter in your mind or are they totally two different things? No. So I'll give you the here's the quick origin story of chatter and shift. So when I got to college, I took my first psychology class and halfway through the semester, we got to this topic of introspection, this capacity that is unique to human beings, to be able to turn our attention inward and work through problems. This is what has made you and so many other people so unbelievably

successful. This is what has made the human species so incredibly successful. We can use our minds to solve problems. But a little bit deeper into that class, I learned this very same tool was one of our greatest vulnerabilities. Because when we have emotional issues, we reflexively try to work through them, but we don't come up with clear solutions. Instead, we just get stuck. So we start spinning in ways that lead to such misery and make it hard for people to think and perform misery and make it hard for people to think and perform and just create enormous human suffering. And once I came across that, that those two sets of findings, it was like a light bulb went off. Um, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. I became really passionate about it. So much, so much so that share a funny anecdote. I remember, um, like walking

on the weekends to parties or the bars with my buddies. And it'd be like 11 o'clock in West Philadelphia. And I go, Hey, Dan, did you know that people sometimes end up getting stuck in rumination? I can't get out of it. And he looks at me and he's like, what's wrong with you, Saturday night? What are you talking about? But I couldn't stop thinking about this stuff.

So I went to graduate school to learn how to use the tools of science, neuroscience, psychology, to figure out why does this happen and what can people do when they find themselves going down the rabbit hole. Chatter, my first book, was my attempt to share what I had learned about what are the tools that people can, that that exists that people can use to manage this voice in their head more effectively rather than sometimes having a

take hold. And then I went on book tour for an extended period and something interesting happened on the book tour. After I give talks on chatter to audiences, people would come up to me and they'd say, yeah, this was fascinating. I learned a ton. I'm going to try these tools out. But what do you think about A, B, C, D, E, F, and G when I'm angry or envious or this and that? And I actually tell the story in Shift. It felt like I had just given a talk on how to combat inflammation, really important thing. But people also wanted to know about dealing with diabetes, heart disease, and every form of cancer that was discovered. And so that lit another spark. And so what I did with Shift was I wanted Shift to be a book about your emotional lives. Actually chapter one is called Welcome to Your Emotional Life.

And what the hell are emotions? Why do we have them? Why do we have bad ones? Are bad ones really bad? And most importantly, when you find your emotions taking you in directions you don't want to be What do we know about the tools that exist that you can use right now? without side effects to start getting more control and You know took two and a half years to write that book But that's how they're related and so some of the tools overlap, but there's a lot of new stuff

That's different. I'd say in shift. I am a professional mental time traveler. Oh, I love it Which is great as a business person as like a dreamer and a visionary so it serves me there it's debilitating in terms of worry and fear and So I want to talk about this for a minute. Just before you go further, I just want to, I want to, I want to pause you right there, Ed. And I, you know, I just want to point out what you just said though, because you're an enormously successful individual and you just talked about one

of the secrets to your success, but also the fact that you sometimes, maybe more than sometimes have some worry, right? Like it happens to you. And I think that's such an important message to share with people because so many people think that they are alone when they find themselves experiencing worry or ruminating about things. It is the rule, not the exception as far as I know. Well, I have discovered in my life where it came from. So I believe people are patterns. And so my dad was an alcoholic. He got sober. My audience, most of them know that story. Those of you that are new to the show, you can go hear those stories. But one of the things that happened from my dad's drinking when I was a little boy, it wasn't just what kind of a mood would he would be when he

came home or anything like that. It was that I learned to worry about my dad as a young boy. Is he gonna come home?? Is he going to be hurt? Is he going to hurt somebody else? Or mom and dad going to stay married? And so his drinking wired into me this pattern of worry that has never escaped me. And so, and what worry is to me, and you talk about it in Shatter a little bit, it's like kind of, it's like mental time traveling. You're actually projecting into the future things that have not happened yet and traveling there. And what's worse about it is you do it over and over and over again. And what you think everybody is, if I keep traveling there in my mind and I keep thinking about it, I will solve this problem. The

900th time I've thought about it. There's got to be something, it didn't occur to me about this thing that's not even real. If I think about it enough times, I'm gonna figure it out. And I've just learned in my life that I can keep traveling into the future all I want and I can do it 900 times. And the 900th time, I'm not going to go with a different answer to something that hasn't happened yet than I did the first time. And so because I'm that way, I'm going to ask you a two-part question about it. I say that to lay that out for everybody. I also have found as I've gotten older that for the most part, it happens around the same time of day. So there's actually a pattern to the time.

And in my case it is typically middle of the night or when I wake. And so I'm wondering what you think about what I just said and whether there's some persistent habit in people's life that it actually shows up at a similar time? And what is a shift out of that or a strategy out of that? Yeah, I'm a 2 a.m. chatter kind of guy. Okay. So I'm going to be on that one. Okay, so there's a few things to unpack here.

So first of all, what you just described about mental time travel, I love the way that you talked about both the positives and the negatives. We have a tendency in society right now in our culture to throw the baby out with the bath water, which is to say, well, mental time travel clearly gets a lot of us in trouble a lot of the time. I mean, I'm saying it's a universal. We all worry about the future and ruminate

about the past at times. So you know what we should start doing, Ed? We should stop mental time travel. Just focus on the present. Be in the moment, right? Yeah. I have been meditating. Five years old, my dad, I wanted a bicycle. He took me to get a mantra. It's a true story. I was devastated. I was not a happy kid. But I've had experiences with meditation and mindfulness my whole life. It can be a great tool for some people some of the time. It is impossible to always be in the moment. Our mind evolved to time travel. This is a strength that we possess, that we can do this. This is what makes you so incredibly successful.

So my challenge to you and everyone else who's listening is not to shut down this capacity. It's if you find that mental time travel is sometimes not serving you well, let's learn how to time travel more effectively. Yes, it's true. Sometimes we time travel into the future, the negative future or past, and we get stuck.

It's like back to the future, right? We just get stuck there. When that happens, coming to the present can be effective or doing some other things. So just wanted to get that out there because I hate this notion that you should always be in the moment. Not possible, not desirable. So lots of people have the kind of the worries, the whispers in the middle of the night. This happens to me once every few weeks. I go to bed with a smile on my face. I wake up managing this is I fight that with a new kind of time travel. I ask myself, how am I going to feel about this problem next week, next month, next year? What that does for me is very simple. Your whole life you have experienced the following. An emotion gets triggered and then as time goes on, it eventually subsides.

All of us, all emotions have that trajectory. When we get stuck worrying about things, we zoom in on the peak, on the awfulness of the moment. And when we do that, we lose sight of the bigger picture that as time goes on, things are going to fade. When you jump into the time travel machine and you think about, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning, next month, next week, month, year? We could be flexible here. It automatically activates this understanding that what you're going through, as bad as it is, you will eventually feel better.

That does something incredibly powerful for a mind that is wrapped up in this chatter and these big emotions. It gives you hope that things will get better. And hope is an antidote for those kinds of reactions. So that's time traveling into the future. I will give you one other time travel option. It's equally powerful for me. You could also go into the past. Again, when we get stuck,

we zoom in on the awfulness. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Their families slaughtered, lived in the woods for three years, Eastern Europe, the worst crazy kinds of experiences. Lots of people have them. They hit home for me because I heard their stories growing up. And, um, you know, sometimes the stuff that I cook up in here, it seems terrible. Like, Oh my God, it's all going to go to crap right away. All right. I jumped back 60 years, however long ago, 70 years, 80 years.

I'll tell you what, no matter what I'm dealing with, it pales in comparison to what Bubby and Papa experienced in the frozen woods of Eastern Europe. Yeah. That really puts my experience in perspective. It really does it. So these are ways of shifting your perspective. It really does it. So these are like ways of shifting your perspective, being really flexible. And those are two things that work for me.

But one thing I want to mention to all listeners is there are no one size fits all solutions. We've documented this scientifically. Different tools work for different people in different situations, like exercising and nutrition. If I asked you to gather your 10 closest friends and I had them right down there, nutritional regimens and fitness regimens, my guess is that we would see variability across all of them. Is that a fair assumption? Fair, yes, yes.

Same is true when it comes to manager emotions. The tools that I use are different from the ones my wife uses. They are different from the ones my wife uses. They're different from the ones my best friend uses. And that's the beauty of all of us. Like our emotional lives are different. So why would you expect the same tool to work for everyone? So I just want to give that disclaimer.

There's different shifts in the books, guys. So that one right there would be like considered a perspective shifter. We talked about sensory shifters earlier. be like considered a perspective shifter. We talked about sensory shifters earlier. I want to talk about space shifters. Okay. I know what it means because I'm familiar with the work, but I want to give everybody that's listening enough so they still want to get your book, but at the same time,

they get a bunch of tools out of the hour we're spending together today. So let's talk a little bit about the space shifter. I guess I'll call it a technique, but that shift. Space shifters, we're talking about our environment, our physical environment, which I think it's easy to take for granted, just how powerful it can be for pushing around our emotions. There are tools hidden all around us in our spaces

for pushing us in the right direction or wherever we wanna be. So let me give you two types of space shifters. One has to be with your immediate environment, the room, the spaces you're in. You can modify those environments to either enhance the likelihood that you'll feel a certain way or by so you add things to your environment. So as an example, you can't see it, but to my right, there's a whole set of pictures with my loved ones.

We did this research where we had people think about painful experiences and then we showed them pictures of loved ones. And we found that it instantly helped people repair how well they felt after looking at felt after thinking about those experiences. What happens when you look at a picture of someone you love, it activates this memory, this experience with those people, and that could be kind of soothing. So I have picture frames with them. You could see the plants in the background. We know green spaces are restorative.

Other people, I don't do this, but you could also put sensory shifters in your spaces. So incense, light, that's ways of enhancing the space. Now you can also remove things from your spaces that are pushing your emotions in the wrong direction. So in the book I tell the pizza doggy backstory. I like to try to eat healthy and maintain my physique, but I have some real serious vulnerabilities and cold leftover pizza is one of them. It doesn't even pay for me to try to abstain. The moment I see the image, it's like pizza monster. And so we had a party a couple of years ago where I ordered too much pizza. I insisted that everyone take it home with them, pizza doggy bags. Because I knew that if I left that in my space, it would trigger an undesirable emotional response,

desire to eat it, and then it would lead to a cascading negative response. So you can remove things from your spaces that might trigger you in the wrong directions as well. And that is not cheating. What if it's a person? Someone's listening to this today and they're like, listen, I love this person but this person is constantly triggering me into this space. I know it's not in either one of the

books. This occurred to me like when I'm asking questions I try to ask what I think people are thinking when they hear things. They go, it just seems to me like this person, this relationship over and over and over isn't serving me emotionally. So how much of it is me that this person brings out of me a pattern of emotion or could it simply be that this person isn't healthy for my emotions any more than this pizza wasn't healthy for the emotions

that's gonna take place after you eat all of it? Well, you know, I somewhat talk about this when I get to culture and culture shifters, because you see this experience happening when people work in toxic cultures. So toxic people, toxic cultures. What do you do in those situations? There are two options. Number one, you just cut them out, right? And there are legitimate situations where you will be better off for doing that, right? If someone is consistently eliciting a harmful pattern, emotional response pattern from you,

and it's really interfering with your ability to live life you wanna live, like, there's no rule that says you can't minimize your interactions with that person. The other thing you could do though, it's not always easy to do that. Sometimes DNA makes that very hard if you know what I mean. You're related to those people, right? Then you can try to change the situation, change the circumstance, change the culture. And that's not always an easy thing to do, but figuring out what the triggers are that affect you is where to

start and trying to minimize it. But let me tell you about one more thing and then we can go off from the space stuff. The more counterintuitive, I think, way of using your spaces to shift you emotionally is to find what I call your little emotional oases all around you. So do you have any places in this world on the planet that whenever you go there, you just feel the sense of warmth and security. Absolutely, yes. Right? Yes. So what would be an, want to give us an example so we can-

Well, I can tell you, it's anywhere I've ever been near the ocean. I know what the ocean does to me. If you made me pick a location, it happens to be a home that I own and a place I walk there by the ocean. So we often talk about being attached to other people, with these positive attachments. And other people can be the sources of support just being in their presence because they help us. What we've learned is you can also develop attachments, positive attachments, to places. And simply being in those places activates the sense of security and support.

For me, it's the Arboretum a few blocks from my house. It's also the coffee shop I wrote my first book in and the main diag on Michigan's campus. Every time I'm in those places, I instantly feel my emotions shifted. When my daughters were young and we'd be out and they'd get upset about something, their go-to response was not me or their mom. It was, I just want to go home. I just want to go to my room. Their room was a space, a sense of security. I encourage people to do a space audit.

What are the spaces in your neighborhood, in your city, where when you go there, they have this restorative effect? If you think about that ahead of time, just go there. Go for a walk, go for a break. It's not very effortful, and that helps you regulate. It's another way to help you regulate. I love that. I go there mentally too. If I can't get there, I'll just take myself there mentally and spend some time there. I do that regularly guys, before a high pressure meeting, a high pressure situation. We'll talk about prayer at the end,

whatever someone's faith is at the end, I'm gonna ask you about that. How do you make it automatic? How do you make shifting automatic? Can you? You can, and you gotta whoop. There it is, right? Do you know that song?

Yes, of course I do. There it is, song. Do you know that song? Yes, of course I do. There it is, song. Have you heard that? I'm the right age, brother. Of course, yes. Okay, so whoop is a technique that scientists have developed. It's a framework for making shifting automatic.

And I just love this. I love this work because it breaks this down so simply. So it also happens to be very similar to what high-performance teams like the Navy SEALs do to make their tactics automatic when they are going into these unbelievably high-pressure situations. The big problem that we all face is what we often refer to as the New Year's resolution. We make this commitment to do better, to regulate better, eat better, whatever. And we do it for a day and then we stop doing it. Like we just drop off. So several scientists have spent their

careers trying to understand why does that happen and what can you do to make it not happen? Courier's trying to understand why does that happen and what can you do to make it not happen? And what they have settled on is this idea of whoop, W-O-O-P. Okay, it's a device. So let me break this down for you. First thing you wanna do, specify what's your wish, what is your goal?

Let's be clear. My goal is to regulate my emotions more effectively when I'm triggered. Okay, what's the outcome? That's the first O that you hope to obtain. So what good is going to happen if you learn how to manage your, if you obtain this wish? Well, I'm going to have better relationships. I'm going to be healthier. I'm going to be happier. That's important because now that's like jazzing you up. It's like fueling you up to motivate you to do some hard stuff. Then we get to the second O, obstacle.

What are the personal obstacles that are gonna stand in the way of you achieving this goal? And so I've started with what are the outcomes I hope to achieve, so the good stuff, but now let's be realistic. What might get in the way? Well, let's say if it's regulating my emotions with my kids when they fight,

I grew up and there was like combativeness in the household I grew up in. It automatically triggers me. I have very low tolerance for that. And I got to make sure I don't snap when that occurs. So I've now identified the obstacle, the trigger that can get in the way. And that gets me to the P, the plan, the plan for what I'm going to do when I encounter that obstacle. But it's not just any old plan, it's a specific kind of plan. We call it an implementation intention, an if-then plan.

If I get triggered, then I'm gonna do sensory shifting and mental time travel. If I get triggered by my youngest daughter, then I'm going to go for a walk in nature and write expressively. So you actually write out these if-then plans a few times. And what this does, it takes the thinking out of regulating. So you don't have to think when you're getting triggered, oh, what should I do? It becomes a habit and you just do it automatically. And that's the goal.

We wanna make emotion regulation automatic to the extent that we can. And this is an easy to use framework and I break it down in the book and there's like worksheet, it's super simple. I love it. But I also wanna ask you in the other book book you talked about, well both really, but nature and the cognitive restorative benefits of nature.

Everyone, what I'm trying to give you today is just like a grab bag of tools that he has written that, you know, Ethan's put in both books that you can use to help you emotionally. And some of them may be obvious to you, some of them may be things that you can use to help you emotionally. And some of them may be obvious to you, some of them may be things that you have thought about doing but don't do or you used to do that you should be doing again. So talk a little bit about just nature in general, especially in a world today

where we're on our screens a whole lot. Yeah, this was, you know, it shouldn't have been surprising to me, but it was. So I'm from a place called Brooklyn, New York, where a famous book was written about this place that I grew up in and its vegetation. It was called A Singular, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Okay.

Which was not that inconsistent with my upbringing. Not a lot of green spaces. I've been in the city my whole life. I'm not a camper. And then I came across the science in the space and it is just jaw dropping. There's this wealth of evidence that shows that enhancing your exposure to safe green spaces, so you don't want to be in a threatening spot, but like a park, the woods, the mountains, the beach, it helps not just make people feel better, it does do that, but it also restores your attention. And so here's how this works. When we get consumed by emotion, it soaks up our attention. Our emotions are like a sponge. It just consumes those limited attentional resources that we have. This is why if you've ever tried to read a few pages in a book when you're worried about something, you don't remember anything you've read,

correct? Fair to say. So our emotions consume our attention. When you go for a walk in a safe, natural setting, you're surrounded by interesting things that gently grab your attention back. The sense, the sounds, the trees. And so by the end of the walk, your attention has had this opportunity to restore. So people come out of the walk and when you give them cognitive tests, they actually perform better than before or than people who go on a walk in an urban setting. So nature is just this, you know, you get some physical benefits, no side effects, and it consistently elevates your cognitive and emotional game. Highly recommend it.

How about that everybody? So just anecdotally, I was just in New York with my daughter. She goes to school in the South. She did not grow up in a busy city. And so we were there a couple days and she literally said, she goes, I don't know why daddy, but I'm wound up and almost down. Yet this is a dream trip. You know, we're on this dream trip, just a daddy daughter trip.

It was a great weekend. But she said, I said, well, Billy, it's, it's, you know, you can't see the sky almost. There's all these huge buildings. We're literally in the city. And I said, I'm going to take you somewhere. You'd never been before. And we went to central park and it was packed because it's the Christmas time there, but we just walked in the park and about 10 minutes into the walk, she's like, I feel like myself again. I said, I think it's the trees. I think it's the, again I said I think it's the trees I think it's the the air I think it's the birds I think it's being out in

nature and it did shift both of us you know what it did it kind of energized the rest of the trip we almost went okay now we're back to getting in the hustle and bustle again and so those you that live in those places if you can get near something green get outside get exposure this stuff matters I bet you never been asked and there probably isn't a great answer to, but I'm gonna ask it anyway because you're in the psychology department

and you're a doctor, so we're gonna give it a whirl here. This is not in either one of your books. And so I'm gonna push you really hard here. What would you say to somebody like me, for example, who finds themselves in situations where they should be feeling a particular emotion but they're not feeling it to the extent that they probably should or that others are. I'll give you an example. I can be at a concert like what you described, everyone's having a blast, I mean like

full tilt you know going for it and I'm having a good time, but I'm not having the emotional experience other people are having. And I'm wondering if there's a hack out of that, a tool, or even like an insight. Why don't I fully experience emotionally the ones that people think you should let? There'll be other times where my dog will walk in and sit in my lap and I'm the happiest human being in the world over something that simple because little Rose or Daisy or Lily will jump in my lap. But like there are moments where I feel like I should be feeling more in this than I am and I'm not. I bet you lots of people relate to what I just asked you. What would you say to us that are that way? Is there a hack out of it? And is it, or is that normal? I don't know.

I think there's amazing variability with respect to our emotional lives. Our emotions are like a fingerprint, incredibly unique to each and every one of us. Your example is a funny one because I think I mentioned earlier the Taylor Swift concert. My kids and wife, they were just on a high for six hours. I found it fun for the first two hours, but you know what I did? I'll admit, I'm admitting it to everyone.

At about the two and a half hour mark, I sat down and I read a magazine article for like 20 minutes. I put on my AirPods, I tuned out the music. It was like, I had enough. We won't send this to Taylor, okay. Yes, Taylor, you were wonderful. Yeah, for two and a half hours.

For two and a half hours. But here's the thing, it's only a problem if you think it's a problem, right? Like, clearly there are some objective circumstances where we would get outside of the territory of normalcy, I would say. Right? Like, if you're just totally emotionally flat across the board, that could be the sign that maybe you need to get some more significant intervention support from a clinician. But what you're describing, these kinds of just a different emotional pulse compared

to someone else, like welcome to your emotional life, man. That's true of all of us, I would argue. And you don't actually have access to the internal feeling states of all the other people that are around you. I remember there was this one wonderful HBO show a couple of years ago, and this actress pulls up and she's smiling and she has one of these like, million dollar grins or teeth pearly lines. You see this?

I'm dying inside, right? And there's this, we don't actually know what's happening in everyone else's emotional world. And so if you want to feel a different kind of state in those circumstances, that's what this book is all about. It's giving you the power to push your emotions around in the directions you want, if you want, when you want. That if you want, when you want, I think is a really important thing to emphasize.

No one is saying, I wouldn't dare tell someone, you should feel this way, you should feel that. That's a very, very different set of issues. And I think it's hard to give people those shoulds. What's a relationship shifter? A relationship shifter are the people in our world. We talked about sensory perspective. We didn't talk about attention, but we did a little bit. No, we did a little bit about attention. A little bit about attention, yeah.

Yeah, those are the shifters that are inside of us. We can pull those whenever we want, but then there are people in our world around us and they can help us manage our emotions too. And sometimes they can be really, really powerful agents of change. There are a couple of ways that other people can shift us that I often talk about. So one thing is other people are a resource of ways that other people can shift us that I often talk about. So one thing is other people are a resource to help you work through your problems. We often have trouble doing it on our own. Other people can help give us guardrails for thinking about the big emotional experiences we face.

The issue here is a lot of people, their intuitions about how to talk to other people, send them in the wrong direction. A lot of people think the key to getting good support is to just find someone to vent your emotions to, just get it out. Research shows that venting is helpful for strengthening bonds between people. It's comforting to know I can be honest and authentic, but someone just let it out to them without judgment. They can empathize with me. The problem is if all you do is venture emotions of someone else, you leave the conversation, you feel really great about your relationship with that person, but the problem is still there. You're just as upset. You're even more upset because you just spent an hour just talking about the issue. So the better kind of conversation

is where you do two things. You talk to someone who first takes the time to listen and learn, really engages with you empathically. But then they start working with you to broaden your perspective, to look at that bigger picture, to help perspective shift you. Those are the most productive kinds of conversations

for managing emotions. The other way you can use other people to shift yourself gets at one of my absolute favorite findings and social psychology. We have learned that one of the best ways to make yourself feel better when you're in a jam is to do something good for someone else. Helping other people helps you shift emotionally.

That's just a win-win from my point of view for society. And so knowing how this works, if I'm in a rut, I get rejected, or I seemingly get rejected every day, I don't know about you. Maybe now I'm projecting too much here, right? No, it's accurate. I'll go and I'll try to be even more helpful I don't know about you. Maybe now I'm projecting too much here, right? No, it's accurate. I'll go and I'll try to be even more helpful

to like people on my team or other people. In some ways, this is selfish. In other ways, it's the least selfish thing you can do. So it's just this beautiful way of improving society and you benefit too. Super simple. Thank you for this. This is outstanding. Alright, I want to ask you about prayer because this is an important part of my life and it is for anybody who's got a commitment to their faith and for me it quiets that inner voice and the

inner voice in my case becomes the Holy Spirit, right? And I try to connect to that as best I can. Whatever someone's faith is and that's not what today's show is about, I want to just grab on to two things and just let you run with it the last couple minutes. Inner voice, what that is, how we regulate it, and if there's any correlation you believe between emotional regulation, that voice, prayer, etc. Just kind of like a grab bag of stuff there to finish with. It's a perfect way to finish

because it gets us to the issue of culture and how, you know, culture is like the air we breathe and it gives us beliefs and values. It gives us norms, rules for how to navigate our lives. And it gives us practices like prayer, like rituals that reinforces those beliefs and values. And religion is a form of culture and it is a powerful, powerful tool for managing our emotions. Prayer, I think of prayer as a kind

of cocktail for managing your emotions. I use the word cocktail because a cocktail has multiple ingredients that come together to give rise to it. Prayer does a few different things. It helps you in a few different ways. One thing is prayer tends to be ritualistic. So we say the same words with the same tunes if you're singing them the same way each time. We know that rituals can help people manage their emotions because they give people a sense of order and control when order and control is lacking. This is called compensatory control.

So you're compensating for the lack of control you feel in your head when your emotions are taken over by doing this thing the same way over and over. You could pray the same way every single time. That's under your control. So that's one way that it helps. Prayer also, if you think about the words that are being being conveyed. It often connects us to higher powers, transcendent forces that take care of us. There's an order to things. And that can be really comforting to tap into that idea that in this messy, crazy universe that we live in, there is some order at a higher level. There's some fairness to it all, some principles that if we follow certain kinds of rules, we're probably going to end up okay. So that's another, just from a perspective

point of view, that's shifting your perspective. Then we're often praying too with other people. So there's this communal element to prayer that often occurs that unites us with other people. So prayer is a wonderful thing for helping us manage our emotional. As religion, I would argue more generally, can be very, very helpful for allowing people to manage your emotions. I'm going to geek out for you very quickly. Why don't we just zoom out for a second? I want to put this in perspective for everyone, what we're dealing with, what is at stake. If we go back to 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, major spike on the timeline of humanity, the first surgical technique was invented.

It was called trephination. It involved drilling holes in people's skulls. Why do you think this is one of the reasons why this technique was used? I would imagine for relief, they thought. Relief, including relief of big emotional states. Right. Right?

This is where the expression, keep it up, you're gonna get a hole in your head, comes from, right? So the earliest writing ever discovered, this was discovered in ancient Persia, talked about dealing with a broken heart and depression. Fast forward to the greatest, the bestselling book of all time. You know what that book was?

The Bible. The Bible. One of the most famous stories of that book, story of Adam and Eve. This is a story of emotion dysregulation, right? We've been struggling with this stuff for a long time. Now let's fast forward to the late 1940s. There's another giant spike on the emotion regulation timeline. Another technique is developed to help people manage emotions and it is viewed as such an innovation that it is awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

What's that? It's called the frontal lobotomy. Oh yeah, I thought that you were gonna tell me that was the first procedure by the way. I was gonna guess lobotomy, okay. Well, it's a similar theme, right? Sure. Damaging your brain.

But like think about that for a moment. This of course is barbaric, this technique. No one does it. But our emotions are sometimes so all consuming that we've resorted to drilling holes in our heads and poking holes in our brains, and we've actually thought this was a good idea. Crazy. And now come to the present, we have actual science-based tools that are non-invasive, that can be wielded to strategically push ourselves in different directions.

We have not solved the puzzle of emotion regulation entirely. It's an ongoing quest. But we've got lots of resources now that we can avail ourselves of, but we don't really teach people about it. So that's why I'm thankful for you having me on to help share this stuff with listeners. So am I, Ethan. I got to tell you, by the way, everybody, I got a psychology professor and writer at University of Michigan to admit prayer was good for you. How about that, huh? Let me check that box.

And for me, that prayer gives me comfort, gives me God's comfort, gives me God's strength and God's peace. And oftentimes, that's the fastest and best pathway out of any emotional state that you may be suffering from reminding you of those promises, God's grace. Ethan, today was awesome. I mean, if someone listened to today's show and they didn't pick up something they can use in terms of shifting their emotions, then they didn't listen to the entire show. So everybody please go get Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You by Dr. Ethan Cross. And Ethan, I'm grateful you're here today brother. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for

having me. It was a super fun conversation. I appreciate you and what you do. Yeah, likewise brother. God bless you everybody. Share today's episode. This is The Ed Myron Show.